So Koichi Sugiyama died last month.
It is likely that you have heard of this man and his notoriety many times before, but if you haven’t, I will try to offer a concise summary. Mr. Sugiyama was best known for two things: his work as composer for all the mainline Dragon Quest games since the series’ Famicom debut in 1986, and his vocal and belligerent denial of crimes against humanity committed by Japan during the Second World War. These crimes include but are not limited to the Nanjing Massacre, an act of genocide in which Japanese troops systematically raped and murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, as well as Imperial Japan’s broader colonial/genocidal project of forcing hundreds of thousands of women across Asia and the Pacific into sexual slavery. So well-known were Sugiyama’s political views and advocacy that in the western games press at least, he is one of the few industry figures ideologically toxic enough to be described often in hyphenated terms: if we are softpedaling it, we might say “controversial composer,” but if we are being more direct and honest we may opt for something more descriptive like “composer/ultranationalist,” “composer/historical revisionist,” or “composer/war crimes-denialist.”
Sugiyama’s death gives me pause, not because I will mourn his passing, but because the news has circulated in the western games press with a now-familiar hesitancy–one I have often shared–when it comes to western reporting on Japanese public figures and media. Sites like IGN have sought to straddle a balance between acknowledging his “controversial views” while also lauding his compositional legacy.
While for my part I have never been a superfan of Dragon Quest or its music, like many who grew up in the gilded heart of western Empire, I developed in my teenage years an uncritical enthusiasm for imported Japanese media–anime, manga, and of course, video games. The cultural moment in which I grew up–North America in the 90s and 2000s–was marked not only by a media climate increasingly eager to consume all things Japan to the point of fetishization, but also a critical tradition that, for the most part, has never really known how to speak critically about Japanese media. Even today, as Ashley notes writing for Timber Owls, Japanese media is compressed and bifurcated by white western media discourse into two poles: a “handwavey scapegoat as a result of a background culture of ‘wacky Japan’ jokes” and “a catch-all marker of reactionary sentiment partially in reaction to the supposed popularity of anime amongst the resurgent online right wing.” We treat Japanese media, then, both as the product of an exotic and inscrutable cultural Other and an ideological punching bag that would-be progressives in the west can invoke in a tired pantomime that rehashes the colonial project of asserting western ideological superiority.
I find a mirror for this uncomfortable critical bifurcation in my own cultural hybridity. I am one-quarter Japanese by ancestry; I occupy a peculiar position of being entirely white-passing with all the associated privilege therein while also having living relatives with firsthand memories of the internment camps the Canadian government established to forcibly relocate and dispossess its own Japanese-Canadian citizens. My engagement with Japanese media has thus always been both marked by a desire to explore and express this invisible part of myself that is nonetheless framed by the west as Other, as well as shadowed by the hanging albatross of the crimes against humanity my own government committed against my family.
For my part, though my teenage passion for Japanese media has mellowed in adulthood into a calmer, more critical relationship, I find that I have always shared in the collective white western inability to talk critically about Japanese media. This hesitation has long been rooted in my own uncertain positionality when it comes to Japanese media: who am I in this context? Does my cultural hybridity matter here? Is my perspective legitimate? Through it all, however, I have also felt that I have something I do need to say, waiting, nascent, just out of focus. Last year, I even started, stopped, and restarted an article about the western-produced Ghost of Tsushima several times before ultimately setting it down, unable to reconcile the question of my ethos.
The internal work, however–of critically deepening my relationship not only with Japanese media, but my own identity–has never really stopped. I’ve continued to read along the way, too–Kazuma Hashimoto and David Shimomura, for instance, are two outstanding critics among a multitude who put words to critical tensions in the aforementioned Ghost of Tsushima where I could not. Maybe one day I’ll feel like I am finally ready to put my own work out into the world that engages directly with a game through the lens of my own cultural hybridity, but for today, fragments of my notes on Tsushima live on in this article.
As strange as it feels to say out loud, however, I can’t help but feel that I also owe a debt for my continuing education to a person I hold in far less esteem: Koichi Sugiyama.
The truth is, Mr. Sugiyama, your repugnant ultranationalism, sinophobia, misogyny, and queerphobia, which so reliably generated attention-grabbing headlines in western games press, are what educated me in the first place about the very historical atrocities you tried so hard to renovate. By publicly dismissing the need for LGBTQ education or support for queer Japanese students, you inadvertently helped to destabilize western portrayals of Japanese cultural homogeneity which flatten and erase queer Japanese identities and cultures when western outlets reported on your monumentally bad takes. You were the figure who made it so starkly clear to me that in order to understand my own hybridity, I needed to understand that, to quote Ashley once more, “Japan is a place on Earth,” home not only to nationalists and revisionists but also queer and trans players, artists, creators, and people who cannot be flattened into a monocultural monomyth. You, more than anyone, in your relentless refusal to accept Japan’s monstrous war crimes, are the principal architect of my own growth as an invisible cultural hybrid as I have learned to reconcile my familial upbringing, which is marked by the war crimes my own country committed, with my white-passing privilege, which continues to benefit from the supremacist ideology that justified those war crimes in the first place.
This, for me, will be your legacy, Mr Sugiyama, one which will outlive your accolades as a composer: every hateful bit of advocacy you fought for in life will be undone in the years after your death by a world that has long since grown wise to your pitiful bullshit.
For this then, as I reflect on your passing, I realize that I finally have something to say: Thank you, Koichi Sugiyama.
And fuck you.
