Content area
Full Text
Japanese Culture through Videogames. By Rachael Hutchinson. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. 294 pp. ISBN: 9780367111380 (cloth).
As opposed to pop culture forms such as anime and manga—which are firmly associated with Japan in the popular imaginary and have been the subject of high-quality scholarship in Japan studies—Japanese video games are in an unusual position. These games dominated the medium for decades—with series such as Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders—to the extent that, to give just one example, only three of the top twenty best-selling games of the 1990s were not developed in Japan. Despite this, video games have received little scholarly attention in Japan studies. While Japanese games are often analyzed in the quickly growing field of game studies, it is usually with little or no mention of their provenance, let alone any substantial analysis of the specific contexts in which they were developed. Fortunately, this situation is rapidly changing, thanks in large part to Rachael Hutchinson. Japanese Culture through Videogames promises to serve as the foundation of Japanese game studies moving forward, in terms of both the conversations it begins and its enormous potential for use in teaching.
The book is divided into three parts, each with its own approach, and each containing three chapters. In part one, “Japanese Culture as Playable Object,” Hutchinson centers how the idea of “Japan” is constructed within games. Chapter 1 takes on Katamari Damacy—a surreal game about rolling a sticky ball to collect bigger and bigger objects, from thumbtacks to planets—and its “twin constructive processes” of a kind of “Japanese” national identity for both a domestic and international audiences (p. 22). These are, in turn, complicated by the abstract...