Musings on After the Quake

In one of my favorite books, Shogun by James Clavell, there is a passage where one of the characters goes on a soliloquy about how Japan is an “island of death.” Granted, this is coming from a character that in the story wants to commit suicide pretty much the entire story, but there is a little bit of truth in her speech. Japan’s history is filled with war, massacres, and suicide. Read a little more into her speech though, and you’ll find that she isn’t really talking about wars and killing, but the battles that the people have to face, the biggest and most imposing being the natural disasters that can face Japan on a daily basis.

Though, Shogun being a historical novel, the biggest thing about natural disasters back in the 17^th and 18^th century is that when an earthquake and or tsunami hit, it could swallow entire towns. It is not just that it could erase entire homes and families, but also any trace that the people there even existed. It is the sort of existential terror that has been in Japanese culture for ages. Throughout history, Japan has had many different ways in dealing with this both practically and culturally. There is a reason why classical Japanese furnishings usually imply movable, put away-able furniture with paper doors and walls; it’s because those things are easily replaceable. With all the typhoons, winds, and disaster waiting at every turn, the traditional Japanese life is full of evidence of trying to deal with the elements. Japanese concepts like Wabi Sabi (the art of making new objects look old) and Mono no Aware (the transience of things) are rooted in the idea that in Japan, you can’t really rely that something one day will be there the next.

While I was reading Lafcadio Hearn’s Kororo: Japanese Inner Life Hints, which is primarily about 19^th century Japan, it surprised me to hear him describe Japan much like more modern scholars described Japan in the 1980’s. Japan being an “economic miracle” is not nearly the modern idea as many people thought it was. Hearn ascribed the Japanese market doing very well to how mobile the average Japanese person was. If resources and/or money dried up in one place, a Japanese worker could pack up and move to another place without a second thought. It was the flexibility of the average Japanese worker that Hearn attributed the Japanese economic success both at home and internationally. He also remarks that the Japanese worker’s ability to easily react and move at a moments notice is also why Japanese people have been able to adapt and take on foreign cultures as their own. One could then argue that it is state of always being prepared for the worst as far as natural calamities and disasters go could have been what has made the Japanese who they are to themselves, and to the outside world.

While Japanese history and culture is filled with natural disaster, that doesn’t make the latest quake and tsunami that hit the north of Japan any less terrifying. In the past, these natural occurrences could be accepted as a part of life in Japan, but now that people have settled and built more and more modern structures on land, the damage and loss of life is much more pronounced than it was. It is honestly hard for me to watch whole structures get washed away, and impossible to watch if I think that there may be people involved. That being said, I find it a little surprising that various journalists and other professionals find the Japanese reaction to this to be as calm and collected as it is. I have read many people attributing this to almost formless ideals of the “Japanese spirit” but I am not so sure that the idea that Japanese people did not loot and cause violence in the wake of the disaster to be such a mysterious ideal that outside people can’t relate too.

The fact is, even Japanese pop culture is filled with disaster and people surviving the aftermath. Even one of the latest, and most popular children’s film from Hayao Miyazaki, Gake no Ue no Ponyo, dealt directly with people surviving a tsunami (though because it is a children’s movie, it did not really deal with the more violent aspects). One of the most popular shows in the last 20 years Evangelion is about a Japan surviving one disaster and preparing for another one (though both are rather extra-ordinary in nature). Even on a surface level, there are many examples of Japanese culture trying to deal with the specter that is dealing with the idea that everything could change in an instant.

Even myself, though I am miles and miles away from being physically affected and no one I knew personally was physically hurt, I found myself having to deal with the emotional repercussions of what hit Japan. It wasn’t until I read Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake that I began to understand why I felt this way.

I actually ran into After the Quake while I was writing my thesis for my college degree. I only skimmed the first story and used it as an example, and did not really give it much thought after that. After the quake and tsunami hit, I decided that I should read this book to see if I could relate to it in some way. After the Quake is a collection of short stories Murakami wrote after he heard about the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and moved back to Japan. It is mainly about people outside the physical range of the quake (in some cases, even in different countries like Murakami was) and how they deal with the quake.

In that way, After the Quake became an absolute revelation to me, and I would recommend it to anyone trying to emotionally sort out their own feelings or trying to understand the feelings of others. It is about people trying to piece their lives back together when they begin to realize that perhaps the ground underneath their feet is not nearly as stable as they are lead to believe. It is about waking up to something that is utterly terrifying and realizing how much people kind of “fall asleep” to most of the real troubles of the world. To be completely honest, it would be rather challenging to try and give a real critical review of these pieces for me because it is a book that takes a nebulous feeling I had and gives it shape. Even at its weirdest, After the Quake manages to provide insight into dealing with people’s emotions during this recovery period.

In one story, a giant frog quotes Joseph Conrad by saying that true terror is the kind that men feel toward their imagination. It is a great quote because while it mainly is about how people manage to whip themselves into frenzy because of their own worries and thoughts, but it has a subtext that the giant frog is sort of talking about himself. The idea that a 6 foot frog exists and can talk is real is a sort of terror that speaks to how people define reality can be based on something that is completely false. I think for a lot of people, having what they thought as unfounded terrors and fears come to life is too much to handle. While it is very troublesome that after effects such as the current crisis with the nuclear plant in Fukushima were partially due to the nuclear workers relying on their own predictions rather than internationally accepted way of predicting disasters, it speaks to the very human folly of not excepting that the very depths and fears of your imagination have a root in a very real place. It is something that makes the foreigners returning back to their native lands make a lot of sense. Much like Murakami returning to his home after the Kobe quake, realizing a person’s fear makes them want to hold on to those things most precious to them, which for many people is friends and family at home.

For me, I am not sure if it is due to my education or my naivety that I stay in Japan. Though I also recognize for me it is the path of least resistance. No one in Southern Kyushu as far as I can tell is panicking about the north, and the only real physical effect is that at every store now you can donate to the relief effort. I remember even before coming to Japan joking about my friends about a documentary called “Japan Sinks!’ (translated title) about how, with the rising sea level, that Japan may not even exist in the future. The joke being that I am pretty much devoting a lot of time and energy into a country that may not even exist one day. That joke was my way of dealing with the fear that my dream is to live and work in a country that is not the most stable in the world, and in turn, was my way of dealing with that uncertainty. I am not sure how many other people working here from other countries were aware of Japan’s balancing act of dealing with the natural occurrences that are always on the doorstep, but it is something I do not blame people about leaving when they realize it. I am not sure if I lost my home or someone I was close to the tsunami how I would even react, but that is why Japan is filled with literature and media to deal with those emotions. There is a reason that Japanese culture mainstays such as Mono no Aware, the idea that things are truly beautiful because they are transient and cannot last forever, remain the important concepts that they are today.

I think my realization of why I want to stay in Japan came to a head when I was talking a walk and decided to stop at a local convenience shop. As the lady was ringing up my items she remarked how happy everyone is because they are at peace. She used the word “heiwa”(平和), which made me realize she was talking more about a more serious type of peace, and not just frivolous happiness. It then made me think that instead of being afraid of what could happen, I should be happy for what I do have. It is a tough pill to swallow sometimes, mostly because I don’t want to seem insensitive to those who are suffering, but the only thing I can do is try the best I can to help those in need and keep on living. Maybe in the end, that is the only thing any of us can do.

Musings on Final Fantasy 7 and Crisis Core

It is funny to look back at Final Fantasy 7, and wonder how this game managed to gain so much popularity. It seemed to be such a cultural event. I still remember going over to a classmate`s house just to see how far into the “Shinra Mansion” he got and how to unlock one of the secret characters. For the most part, I imagine the big reason it gained so much traction is mostly do to its, at the time, amazing graphics, and the many television advertisements. But at the same time, I wonder if a lot of the lasting appeal of Final Fantasy VII is just the hugeness of it. It spanned 3 discs with over 60 hours of potential game play. The amount of things to do, people to see, and secrets to uncover was perfect for those school ground discussions. Where to find things, who to use, what tools to equip, it was a phenomenon that took my middle school by storm.

Which is also the first time I realised some of the biggest problems about discussing games with people. For one, trying to have a discussion without spoiling the story for the other person, and then trying to relate and compare your experience with someone who might of played it completely different than you. FFVII seemed to be built on the idea that a person who starts the game should have a complete different idea of the story and characters by the end of the game. While that is normal for any sort of story with character arcs, FFVII seemed to relish in completely turning the table on the player. The magical cat who can tell fortunes? Its actually a robot controlled by a triple turncoat. Main character who is supposed to be a cool, bad-ass mercenary? Nope, not really. My favorite character switch up is how they flipped the “nice, naive girl who is a white mage and lives in a church” and the “tough tomboy childhood friend who you never got with because she was ‘one of the guys’” cliche by making the white mage very forward and a bit of a brown noser and then making the tomboy childhood friend who fights with her fists much more quiet and demure (which doesn`t make a ton of sense seeing that if a person can go toe to toe with huge behemoths, they probably have enough self-confidence to speak up that maybe her love interest might be an insane puppet that is doing the main bad guy`s bidding against his will, but I digress). So anyone beginning the game will either try and avoid talking to people who beat the game or just deal with the fact that they are just going to spoil the story for themselves.

Well, it has been over 10 years, so anyone spoiled by the game by now, at least you have the comfort knowing that FFVII allows a whole lot of choice for such a linear adventure. Depending on what characters you bring with you on your quest to save the world, the context for the events are almost completely different and can give such a different interpretation of the story. For example, when I played the game, I wanted to get the two secret characters in the game and have them on my team (it helped that the secret ninja girl was the only girl around my age I could have on my team and I totally thought she was the bee`s knees, and the other was a secret vampire, and I could not say no to a secret vampire). As it turns out, the makers of the game did not really plan for many people to actually pick those people on their team, so most of the big events in the story don`t really involve them too much. In fact, the ending doesn`t even include them. It honestly gave me a weird context of aloofness to the game. Whenever something tragic or important happened to one of the characters, because I never spent any time with those characters, I just didn`t care as much. Later when I played the game a second time with characters more central to the story, I just felt more involved. Maybe it was just because in the end, people feel something for characters they have invested time into, whether or not the characters are actually really sympathetic in themselves.

But that is one of those things that make video games the medium they are. Unless you invest yourself in the story in the characters, you may not even be able to progress, not to mention actually caring sincerely about them. FFVII is also a world that does a good job of providing a plethora of activities that rewards players investments, and that I think is a good reason why such characters as Cloud and the gang have managed to still be iconic ten plus years later. People have invested so much of themselves into the game that they want those characters and that world again. Fans all over the world have asked for more FFVII but for a while there was nothing.

Though, it is actually not hard to see why. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the producer of the game, has been quoted as saying that when he made the game, he was in a dark place due to his mother dying. A lot of the game`s themes, about dealing with death, dealing with yourself, and the nature of the planet probably influenced by his own struggle with the grief of dealing with his mom`s death, so not wanting to necessarily leap to the opportunity to reiterate on the game is understandable. It probably wasn`t until he made the Spirits Within movie, almost bankrupted Squaresoft, and was bought out by a rival company Enix and Mr. Sakaguchi was, for all intents and purposes, ousted from the company before FFVII was revisited again.

The “Compilation of Final Fantasy VII” (also known as the marketing blitz that Square-Enix attempted to exploit the popularity of the FFVII) includes 4 products, Advent Children (a feature length movie), Before Crisis (a cell phone game), Crisis Core (the PSP that I`ll talk about eventually), and Dirge of Cerebrus (a 3rd person shooter). The problem with most of the “compilation” is that it completely missed out on the point of FFVII. The compilation wasn`t about dealing with death, or the conservation of the planet, or how memory can define you (aka what the subtext of FFVII was), the compilation became mostly about focusing on the characters that people fell in love with. While character studies are not necessarily a bad thing, this wasn’t so much “character studies” as much as they were character exploitation. The problem I felt that plagued most of the compilation is that Square-Enix felt like they were focusing on much more trying to fulfill what the fans wanted the games to be instead of being something worthwhile on their own merits. Having at least checked out the entire compilation there is one of the titles that actually manages to break out of its chains of marketing and becomes something I think is actually worth playing on its own. Crisis Core takes one of the most interesting aspects of FFVII, the role of how memory can define you, and gives it a new spin.

But first, an explanation of the role of memory in FFVII. In FFVII, the player is lead to believe that Cloud, the main character, was an part of an elite private military force SOLDIER owned by the Shinra Coporation. When the game starts, he claims that he has quit and now is a mercenary for hire. As it turns out, not only was never part of SOLDIER, but he could not even qualify and therefore became just a lowly infantry man. Then, partly due to experiments preformed on him when he was captured, and partly due to his own trauma, he took on the life of his elite Soldier friend Zack. This is not revealed until late in the game, so while it is not really covered about what type of person Zack was, one could extrapolate Zack`s personality through Cloud`s fake memories. Cloud`s story and character development takes on the theme of how memory and the narrative people create can make a person, even if that narrative is actually completely false.

And what better way to continue making a commentary on memory than to make a prequel? Crisis Core (for the PSP) is the prequel to FFVII that allows the player to take control of Zack. So instead of relying on Cloud`s memory and self deception to try and figure out who exactly this Zack character was, the player is shown exactly what the deal with Zack was. The game takes this as an opportunity to “flip the script” in a way, and instead of the main character being a brooding young man, unsure of who he really is (ie Cloud), Zack is rather cheerful and social. While the flip on character types may seem like maybe a bit of a obvious choice, it allows Zack to interact with series mainstays such as Sephiroth (the main villian, also I am rather surprised I managed to write so much about FFVII without mentioning him) and the Turks and get different sides of their personalities. While that is not really a great driving force for people not familiar with FFVII it does add to what made FFVII fun in the first place: it was an adventure. Crisis Core was really the first (and only really) game in this continuum that was about trying to show different sides of things instead of just showing the one side that fans fell in love with.

If Square Enix has any real leftovers from all their years of publishing, it is the fact that they love polish, and Crisis Core is dripping in it. The only real problem is despite the rather good voice acting and localization, boy is it melodramatic. There is humor here and there (Zack sure is a wacky guy) but for the most part the story beats involve fake Shakespeare-esque quotes taken from a fake play, asking out loud what it means to be a hero, and enough angel feathers to stuff a whole warehouse full of stuffed pillows. For me, that is also part of the nostalgia. I am not sure why, but I enjoy melodrama. Maybe its because my right brained, left-handed self is just wired that way, but it adds a certain amount of transparency and vulnerability that just doesn’t happen in real life. It also serves as a helpful tool to giving voice to characters that were previously voiceless, both literally and figuratively. It made the motivations of all the characters, old and new, have a weight that just wasn’t there in the original game. Sephiroth’s change from a heroic soldier, to a cold blooded killer makes much more sense in the context that Crisis Core provides. It takes advantage the memories the player has about FFVII, and instead of having Cloud having to change his assumptions about the past, the player is forced to change their perception of the world that they have invested themselves in. That, in the end, makes it a valuable experience playing after and before FFVII (though I would not recommend playing either of these without the other, they either way they lead rather well into each other, though playing from Crisis core to FFVII may be a little hard do to the graphic and localization downgrade). Crisis Core does what FFVII fans wanted for years, which is just another game that compliments their experiences and expands on them.

Say what you will about Final Fantasy 7, it has been praised to high heaven and sent to low hell by various critics and people around the world, but it still does hold up in a weird way. Maybe it is because a whole lot of the game is about memory (who could forget a game about memory?) or because maybe for kids like me it was the first time something that really spoke to them about saving the earth and dealing with death in a way we could understand. Either way, it is hard to just scoff at all the time and work it took to create the world of FFVII. It probably has had more missteps than hits at this point, but in the end, it provided me hours of entertainment and something I could invest myself into, and that is all I really ask from my entertainment. Good job Final Fantasy VII, even if they never do that remake that fans have been clamoring for, it was a fun ride on that Golden Saucer coaster.