Games: Preservation Of Otaku Culture With Ken Akamatsu
Japan’s policies indirectly impact the life of otaku culture and those building their lives around it, and that also holds true overseas. For example, not everyone will know that the failsafe mechanic in gacha games comes from a regulation on what was perceived as online gambling — forcing the hands of game studios around the country.
Which is why the recent elections of the House of Councillors might change a lot of things. The National Diet is the parliamentary system composed of two legislative chambers (we call this bicameral) — in such a system, the lower house has more popular representation, and the upper house judges whether bills can pass or be vetoed. The House of Councillors thus has a greater importance.
For the very first time, a mangaka was elected as a Councillor. Ken Akamatsu is a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, but you might know him more as the mangaka behind Love Hina (1998), Mahou Sensei Negima! (2003), and UQ Holder! (2013). In 2011, he founded J-Comi, “a Japanese website that distributes out of print manga and doujinshi as DRM-free ebooks”.
We can see that in the past, Ken Akamatsu has advocated for the preservation of manga culture — since “J-Comi is limited to out of print titles so that […] J-Comi does not compete with publishers[,]” it can coincide with him being a member of the LDP, liberalism being as much about favorizing eutrepreneurship as the freedom of consumers. One has to mention the two concur with his work as a craftsman in favor of freedom of speech.
Because he is a craftsman and an entrepreneur, his involvement in the regulation can be biased due to vested interests, but one may also see in a stakeholding politician some degree of accountability, seeing as both are two sides of the same coin.
The title of this article mentioned games for a reason. Games are a core part of Japan’s culture, and its preservation directly conflicts with big corporations and their intellectual properties, namely Nintendo. Indeed, Nintendo is the type of company to send cease-and-desist letters to fan games, and to delete the ability to add funds to the Nintendo 3DS’s eShop this year on August 29, meaning that games only present over there might vanish without consumers being able to buy them.
Surfing on the momentum of his election this week, Ken Akamatsu announced on July 13 “the creation of a new taskforce to investigate and support the preservation of classic video games in a playable state”. According to Niche Gamer, “It would make sense that Ken Akamatsu would take up the mantle of supporting game preservation, especially as a growing number of gamers and collectors alike are attempting to take up the mantle themselves”.
The question of the preservation of games is a troublesome one, and not only because of economical conflicts with huge corporations. There are many games whose creators or rightholders died, or even whose game studios simply went backrupt. Because intellectual property grew exponentially with the development of new technologies, having a work be in the public domain a long time after the death of authors might be a loss for the potential of innovation — all in the name of virtual rightholders that might never do anything with the software or intellectual property, ending up in a net loss for mankind (here one can think about “human capital” born out of the cultural capital of a society, not only as a motor of innovation but also as growth).
We fall right into the abandonware grey area, because “[the] term “abandonware” is broad, and encompasses many types of old software. Definitions of “abandoned” vary, but in general it is like any item that is abandoned — it is ignored by the owner, and as such product support and possibly copyright enforcement are also “abandoned”.”. A grey area within the law simply means that there are different possible interpretations of how regulation should function. For such cases, case law might be applied based on legal precedents.
The French political concept that can roughly be translated as “cultural exception” was introduced in 1993 through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negociations — meant to “promote international trade by reducing or eliminating trade barriers such as tariffs or quotas”. The idea is to “consider cultural goods and services as exceptions in international treaties and agreements”, and it can be summoned to exemplify a liberal law system regulating economics all the while guaranteeing sovereignty on the topic of culture to a government.
It matters, because Japan is a liberal democracy where liberalism is the current economical paradigm, therefore dominating how the business of gaming works and how games — both as goods and services — circulate. But games are cultural goods as well, and the preservation of games that Ken Akamatsu advocates for will bring about the Japanese equivalent of cultural exception.
Since the basis for this exception was born in international trade as a measure to fend off the uniformity of culture that globalization might establish, it also concurs with how Ken Akamatsu is described by Niche Gamer as a “staunch defender of Japanese artwork, and critic of foreign elements attempting to dictate how Japan should be run”.
In any case, it will be interesting to witness this dynamism from Ken Akamatsu unfolds during potentially six years. Advocating for gaming archivism may change for the better otaku culture throughout the future decades, if this paradigm shift comes to gain popularity and more policies are sought to preserve Japan’s many subcultures.
