The game itself is collection game where you roll a ever growing ball of things that you might see in a typical Japanese house. The balls will allow a prince to rebuild the stars accidentally destroyed by his father, King of All Cosmos. (The image above is of Takahashi as the King.) Rachael Hutchinson has a chapter in her book Japanese Culture Through Videogames about the game and Japan.
Yesterday I was part of a signing ceremony for a Memorandum of Agreement between Ritsumeikan University and the University of Alberta. I and the President of the University of Alberta (Bill Flanagan) signed on behalf of U of A. The MOU described our desire to build on our collaborations around Replaying Japan. We hope to build collaborations around artificial intelligence, games, learning, and digital humanities. KIAS and the AI4Society signature area have been supporting this research collaboration.
Today (March 2nd, 2023) we are having a short conference at Ritsumeikan that included a panel about our collaboration, at which I talked, and a showcase of research in game studies at Ritsumeikan.
As it has been announced in various media, we regretfully announce the passing of our beloved former Director and founder of Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies, and a father of NES and SNES- Professor Masayuki Uemura.We were caught by surprise at the sudden and unfortunate news .
Even after he retired as the director of RCGS and became an advisor, he was always concerned about each researcher and the future of game research.
We would like to extend the deepest condolences to his families and relatives, and May God bless his soul.
As a scholar in video game studies and history, we would like to follow his example and continue to excel in our endeavors.
(from Akinori Nakamura, Director, Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies)
At the conference I organized a roundtable about the Replaying Japan conference itself titled “Ten Years of Dialogue: Reflecting on Replaying Japan.” I moderated the discussion and started with a brief history that I quote from here:
The Replaying Japan conference will have been going now for ten years if you include its predecessor symposium that was held in 2012 in Edmonton, Canada.
The encounter around Japanese Game Culture came out of the willingness of Ritsumeikan University to host Geoffrey Rockwell as a Japan Foundation Japan Studies Fellow in Kyoto in 2011. While Rockwell worked closely with researchers like Prof. INABA at the Ritsumeikan Digital Humanities Centre for Japanese Arts and Culture, he also got to meet Professors Nakamura and Koichi at the Ritsumeikan Centre for Game Studies. Out of these conversations it became clear that game studies in the West and game studies in Japan were not in conversation. The research communities were siloes working in their own languages that didn’t intermingle much. We agreed that we needed to try to bridge the communities and organized a first small symposium in 2012 in Edmonton with support from the Prince Takamado Japan Centre at the University of Alberta. At a meeting right after the symposium we developed the idea for a conference that could go back and forth between Japan and the West called Replaying Japan. Initially the conference just went back and forth between Kyoto and Edmonton, but we soon started going to Europe and the USA which expanded the network.
(From the abstract for the roundtable)
At the conference I was also part two papers that were presented others:
Keiji Amano presented on “The Rise and Fall of Popular Amusement: Operation Invader Shoot Down.” This paper looked at Nagoya tabloids and how they described the explosion of Space Invaders as a threat to the pachinko industry.
Mimi Okabe presented on “Moral Management in Japanese Game Companies” which discussed how certain Japanese game companies manager their ethical reputation. We looked as specific issues like forced labour in the supply chain, gender issues, and work-life balance.
Meet the men and women responsible for creating the most iconic tunes in video game history.
We finished up the Replaying Japan 2021 conference today. The conference was online using Zoom and Gather Town where there was a hidden easter egg with a link to Diggin’ in the Carts: Japanese video game music history, a 5 part documentary from Red Bull that is quite good. The 5 15 minute episodes are part of the first season. Not sure if there will be other seasons, but there is a related radio show with multiple seasons. The documentary episodes nicely feature the composers and experts talking about the Japanese history along with other musicians commenting on the influence of the early music which would have been heard over and over in houses with Japanese consoles.
The creator of the show is Nick Dwyer who is interviewed here about the documentary and associated radio show..
It’s relatively easy for those involved in the entertainment industry in Asia to get caught up in geopolitical scuffles, with with social media accelerating and magnifying any faux pas.
From the Japan Times I learned about how some hololive vTubers or Virtual YouTubers g[o]t caught in the middle of a diplomatic spat. The vTuber Kiryu Coco, who is apparently a young (3,500 years young) dragon, showed a visualization that mentioned Taiwan as different from China and therefore ticked off Chinese fans which led to hololive releasing apologies. Young dragons don’t yet know about the One-China policy. To make matters worse the apologies/explanations published in different countries were different which was noticed and that needed further explanation. Such are the dangers of trying to appeal to both the Chinese, Japanese and US markets.
Not knowing much about vTubers I poked around the hololive site. An interesting aspect of the English site is the information in the FAQ about what you can send or not send your favorite talent. Here is their list of things hololive will not accept from fans:
– ALL second hand/used/opened up items that do NOT directly deliver from e-commerce sites such as Amazon (excluding fan letters and message cards)
– Luxury items (individual items which cost more than 30,000 yen)
– Living beings or raw items (including fresh flowers, except flower stands for specified venues and events)
– Items requiring refrigeration
– Handmade items (excluding fan letters and message cards)
– All sorts of stuffed toys, dolls, cushions (no exceptions)
– Currencies (cash, gift cards, coupons, tickets, etc.)
– Cosmetics, perfumes, soap, medicines, etc.
– Dangerous goods (explosives, knives/weapons, drugs, imitation swords, model guns, etc.)
– Clothes, underwear (Scarves, gloves, socks, and blankets are OK)
– Amulets, talismans, charms (items related to religion, politics, or ideological expressions)
– Large items (sizes where the talents would find it impossible to carry home alone)
– Pet supplies
– Items that may violate public order and moral
– Items that may violate laws and regulations
– Additional items (the authorities will perform final confirmation and judgment)
I feel this list is a distant relative of Borges’ taxonomy of animals taken from the fictional Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge which includes such self-referential animals as “those included in this classification” and “et cetera.”
On a serious note, it is impressive how much these live vTubers can bring in. By some estimates Coco made USD $140,000 in July. The mix of anime characters and live streaming of game playing (see above) and other fun seems to be popular. While this phenomena may look like one of those weird Japan things, I suspect we are going to see more virtual characters especially if face and body tracking tools become easy to use. How could I teach online as a virtual character?
Replaying Japan is an international conference dedicated to the study of Japanese video games. For the first time this year, the conference is held online and will combine various types of research contents (videos, texts, livestreams) on the theme of esport and competitive gaming in Japan.
This year the Replaying Japan conference was held online. The conference was originally going to be in Liège, Belgium at the Liège Game Lab. We were going to get to try Belgian fries and beer and learn more about the Game Lab. Alas, with the pandemic, the organizers had to pivot and organize an online conference. They did a great job using technologies like Twitch and Minecraft.
Keiji Amano, Tsugumi (Mimi) Okabe, and I had a paper on Ethics and Gaming: A Content Analysis of Annual Reports of the Japanese Game Industry presented by Prof. Amano. (To read the longer conferencer paper you need to have access to the conference materials, but they will be opening that up.) We looked at how major Japanese game companies frame ethical or CSR (corporate social responsibility) issues which is not how ethics is being discussed in the academy.
The two keynotes were both excellent in different ways. Florent Georges talked about First Steps of Japanese ESports. His talk introduced a number of important early video game competitions.
Susana Tosca gave the closing keynote. She presented a nuanced and fascinating talk on Mediating the Promised Gameland (see video). She looked at how game tourists visit Japan and interviewed people about this phenomenon of content tourism. This was wrapped in reflections on methodology and tourism. Very interesting, though it raised some ethical issues about how we watch tourists. She was sensitive to the way that ethnographers are tourists of a sort and we need to be careful not to mock our subjects as we watch them. As someone who loves to travel and is therefore often a tourist, I’m probably sensitive on this issue.
In honour of Drawn & Quarterly‘s publication of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s The Swamp, Boing Boing has published an essay on Tsuge by Mitsuhiro Asakawa, titled Gekiga’s new frontier: the uneasy rise of Yoshiharu Tsuge. The essay sketches Tsuge’s rise as an early original manga artist and it explains his importance. Now Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly is publishing a series of seven translations by Ryan Holmberg of Tsuge’s work. (Holmberg also translated the essay by Asakawa.) Asakawa is also apparently important to the series being published.
Mitsuhiro Asakawa finally convinced Tsuge and his son to let the work be translated into English. Mitsuhiro is the unsung hero of Japanese comics translation. He’s the guy who has written the most about the Garo era, he’s the go-to guy to connect with these great authors and their families. Most of the collections D+Q have done wouldn’t exist without his help.
One of the things I discovered reading Asakawa is that Tsuge worked with/for Shigeru Mizuki, my favourite manga artist, when he was going through a rough patch.
The Replaying Japan Journal has issued a call for papers for Issue 3 with a deadline of September 30th, 2020. See the Current Call for Papers – Replaying Japan. The RJJ publishes original research papers on Japanese videogames, game culture and related media. We also publish translations, research notes, and reviews.
The RJJ is available online and in print, published by the Ritsumeikan (University) Center for Game Studies (See the RCGS English Pamphlet too). Inaba, Mitsuyuki is the Editor in Chief and Fukuda, Kazafumi is the Associate Editor. I and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon are the English Editors.
Tokyo Idols (2017) is a fascinating look at the idol culture in Japan. Directed by Kyoko Miyake it mostly follows an older (19) idol called Rio and her fans. The documentary confronts the creepiness of older men who find it too much work to have real relationships with women, but also shows their vulnerable side. These men spend all their savings on following idols and it gives them a sense of belonging. Miyake shows how the men (and some women) form fan clubs and follow their idol. It shows the constrained hand-shake meetings and photo opportunities that they pay for. It makes the connection to otaku culture and Akihabara.
The documentary nicely shows what it is like for the hard-working idols. For Rio it is a full time job, she has to practice, she has daily live sessions on the internet and she even packages up the schwag she sells. She even goes cycling around Japan (with live internet connection?) in order to connect to fans outside of Tokyo and to try to boost her popularity. As this TOKYO IDOLS review points out, you can’t help rooting for her.
What the documentary doesn’t cover much is the big idol stables like AKB48. Rio manages herself, but most idols are managed by professionals. I would have liked to learn more about that side of the business.
