Let Yourself Be Huge: A Reflection on Yakuza’s Spirit of Personal Liberation
Note: The following article contains spoilers for the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series up to and include Yakuza 6: The Song of Life .
I’d love to live in Japan one day. There’s something about Japan that makes the country and its unique culture seem like such an alluring place. Or, at least, my specific idea of what life in the country must be like based on decades long consumption of film, anime, music, and video games.
Over the years, I’ve sometimes allowed myself to be spirited away by this infatuation with Japan. Having spent most of my life in a very nice, but boring, suburb, I saw an ideal of Tokyo as something I wanted for myself. I dreamed of life in a big city after seeing glimpses of what life might look like for a teenager in Tokyo, from taking a sleek public transportation to being surrounded by fashionable friends with unique personalities.
I got to sample part of this dream when I went to college, right outside of Manhattan, and even further later, when I received the opportunity to study Chinese literature abroad in Hong Kong, where I spent the next two years of my life. I felt like nothing could rival life in either of these places. Still, all dreams come to an end. Eventually, I finished up my studies in Hong Kong, and came back home to life in a suburban town not far from the place I was born.
While family life and work became my main pursuits, I never lost interest in the idea of life in the East Asia. Somewhere around 2015, between online language lessons and attending dozens of language meetups, I came across the term “digital tourism.” At that time, Persona 5 was taking the gaming world by storm. It represented a niche series making its way fully into the mainstream, and western audiences were hungry for more slice-of-life experiences. At this time, Yakuza 0 was also released in the west, and I noticed that a lot of Persona fans were liking it.
I didn’t play Yakuza 0 right away. I was busy, and the series just seemed like “a lot.” I’d also gotten the idea that Yakuza was a fighting game and didn’t feel particularly interested in playing that kind of game. It wasn’t until the release of Yakuza: Like. Dragon in 2020 that I started to reconsider the series again. Unlike its predecessors, Like a Dragon was a turn-based RPG, and I’d started to encounter ideas like, “Well, Yakuza has always been a JRPG” on the internet. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the birth of my first child, the fantasy of travel to Asia was feeling more fleeting than ever. I told myself that maybe it was time to try out the digital tourism offered by the Yakuza series.
I played the prequel, Yakuza 0, and fell in love. Then, I played the Kiwami remakes of the first entries in the series, followed by the third, fourth, fifth, and ultimately sixth installments. Over the last half of a decade, I’ve gone through a variety of personal and professional changes in my life and experienced many highs of inspiration and confidence as well as many more moments of struggle and intense self-doubt. I’ve felt my own identity shift, evolve, and refine itself in ways that provoke reflection. And through it all, I’ve drawn inspiration from the unlikely figures such as Kazuma Kiryu and Shun Akiyama.
Most of my friends have not played the Yakuza games and do not really understand what they are about. Thanks to this, I’ve resorted to a simple, and commonly used elevator pitch when explaining what they are: “Japanese Grand Theft Auto. ” This description works to an extent. The streets of Kamurocho -- Yakuza’s video-game recreation of Tokyo’s red-light district -- is an overflowing buffet of night-life activities, all of which are fun, and only some of which are actively based around human vices.
When I’m playing Yakuza, I can stroll my character in any number of dozens of restaurants or bars, have a drink, and then stumble out into the streets, itching for my next Streets of Rage style encounter with the city’s random goons and thugs. Or I can take my character down to the batting cages or top golf or even to the bowling alley. In one of the games, my character could double as a taxi driver to earn some extra money -- though that feature has not appeared again in the two most recent games. I can also work a hostess club -- sometimes as a manager, and sometimes even as a host. Yakuza often flirts with the edgier content of a Grand Theft Auto , but never gets quite there. While “Japanese Grand Theft Auto” is a good way of describing the series at a superficial level, it mistakes the tone with which this buffet of activities is offered to the player, and the mood that it inspires the player to embrace.
Yakuza and Grand Theft Auto are totally different moods. Grand Theft Auto often leaves the player with a taste of sarcasm. Its characters, and the activities they can participate in, are often offered in a way that communicates irony; of course the player isn’t going to partake in the vices that its video game world offers in real life. That’s not something the player would do, right? GTA rationalizes the fun it has at the expense of its characters in the reality TV way: it invites the player constantly remind themselves how much better they are than the characters on their screen with their ugly vices. In this way, Grand Theft Auto is not a series that makes it a priority to humanize its characters or the realistic locations they inhabit. Instead, its meticulously crafted worlds and complex characters exist to be scrutinized, often cruelly, and laughed at.
Yakuza does the opposite. Set in a similarly, overly-realized “real world” setting, its characters and their stories often seem cut straight from cartoons or bad action movies. But when Kiryu stops by to eat fast food, he lets out a sigh of contentment. When the player opts to visit a cabaret and talk with an attractive hostess, the scenario is treated like one that anyone would find pleasurable. There’s no ridiculing, sarcasm, or judgement delivered alongside the game’s activities. The world -- a recreation of one that we inhabit -- is meant to be a place of joy, and there is no shame involved in the partaking of its pleasures.
Full disclaimer: I’ve yet to play an Ichiban game, or any Yakuza entry post Kiryu’s intended exit as the series' main protagonist in Yakuza 6 . I’ve been following the Dragon of Dojima’s story from the beginning, and have seen him go from being a disenfranchised youth, to an unwilling leader, to ultimately a teacher and defender of other people’s dreams. Kiryu is a compelling character not just because he’s a badass with ornate irezumi , but because of how thoughtfully his own character arc reflects a generalized human experience. Fundamentally, Kazuma Kiryu is a man who internalizes the ambitions of others and accumulates responsibility for their dreams while never realizing a path of his own.
This is most fully realized by Kiryu’s ongoing rejection of the Chairman position of the Tojo Clan, the frequent offering and deferral of which is a major throughline of the Yakuza series. In fact, Kiryu, who works as a mere debt collector when we meet him in 0 , barely has a career in the Yakuza before he attempts to leave organized crime forever. Having been unfairly implicated -- and targeted -- in the clan’s internal politics, Kiryu’s attempts to step away are continually met with resistance. In typical action movie style, Kiryu tries to give up the hard life, but the hard life refuses to give up him. In the first Yakuza game, Kiryu battles his way to the position of Tojo Clan Chairman after innocent lives are threatened but resigns the title after only one day. And so it goes. As the series progresses, Kiryu’s talents, personal relationships, and unyielding integrity continually lift him to the flashpoint of a variety of crises. He does not choose to be party to these conflicts any more than rushing water chooses to fill every void of every space that it may inhabit.
Despite the irezumi on his back, Kiryu rejects the dream of leading the Tojo Clan, and consistently insists that the responsibility for leading the crime family falls on the shoulders of Daigo Dojima, his capable, though often confidence-lacking, friend. Rather than the Clan, Kiryu’s dreams lie instead within the walls of the Morning Glory orphanage, established prior to Yakuza 3 , where he focuses on caring for the at-risk youth and enabling them to live worthy lives following their own dreams. Of all the orphans that Kiryu helps, there is no better example of this relationship than Haruka Sawamura, a child born to Kiryu’s former almost-girlfriend by another man.
Kiryu’s relationship with Haruka is most akin to that of a parent and child, and there is a strong suggestion that Kiryu would have wanted a deeper relationship with Haruka’ mother had she survived the events of the first Yakuza game. By the series’ fifth installment, Haruka has decided to leave the orphanage to train to become an idol. Afraid of the scrutiny that he may bring to Haruka and the other orphans, Kiryu also elects to leave the orphanage, and live under a pseudonym in another city. Kiryu’s natural affinity for helping others and enabling their dreams has led him to start the orphanage, but tragically, he has discovered that his own past and the baggage he carries with him as a former high-ranking yakuza haunts nearly every forward moving action, and jeopardizes the futures of those he cares for in a Japanese society where appearances and decorum are held above all. Throughout the series to this point, Kiryu has tried continuously to reinvent himself, or at least enable others to do so. Sadly, he falls short of his own compromises, with Haruka electing to abandon her own dream so that she can remain close to her surrogate father.
I won’t pretend that all of the writing in the Yakuza games is above the level of a daytime TV serial, but there’s something that is compelling about what the series accomplishes in whole. There’s the life-like recreation of Tokyo’s Kabukicho district, filled over the brim with activities, restaurants, convenience stores, and side-stories that exist beyond any reasonable service to the games they inhabit. This makes for as compelling an escape as any for a 38-year-old otaku looking for a break from the pressures of daily life. But the true genius of the series is how it offers something that runs completely contrary to the cynicism and sardony of its western open world counterparts. Over time, Yakuza and its characters continuously endear themselves to the player, not out of parody or a Rockstar Games-like mockery, but simply out of a place that seems to deliver a message to the player. Dreams, Yakuza tells us, are worth pursuing and life, when lifted from the myriad of bizarre values and motivations that often enshroud it, is valuable.
As a husband, father, friend to many, and teacher, I am constantly finding myself concerned about others -- their ambitions, dreams, and, perhaps most importantly, their hopes and belief in a future. To some, spending dozens of hours per year wandering the streets of Kamurocho, taking swings at the batting cages or managing hostess clubs might seem like a colossal waste of time. But, in the time I’ve spent digitally touring its streets, I’ve been continuously reminded to look on the bright side of life and find value in unexpected places. More importantly, I’ve been endeared by the game’s melodrama to keep my head up, and actively push back against negative thought patterns. Having Kazuma Kiryu in my corner has been enriching. But more importantly, it’s been inspirational. At its foundation, the world of Yakuza offers something that seems refreshing in today’s atmosphere of overly-mature videogames and other cynical entertainment offerings: Yakuza , at its core, provides us with a limitless sandbox like environment where every human emotion can be explored and inclination of human compulsion is allowed to exist, just by itself, free from condescension and snarky judgements, and tilted toward a worldview that assumes people to be generally good. And that can feel a lot like liberation.
The post Let Yourself Be Huge: A Reflection on Yakuza’s Spirit of Personal Liberation appeared first on RPGamer .
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