Nostalgia For The Taisho Dream
Sakura Taisen in Historical Context
Note: All translations are my own.
In recent years, I have noticed a growing popularity with historical games. From Assassin’s Creed to Civilization V, Valiant Hearts to Europa Universalis IV, we’ve seen more video games sparking interest in our past. Yet with this approach comes a set of responsibilities. Developers must take care to render these epochs accurately. The obvious risk for not doing so is just misrepresenting the era. But the more troubling danger is that developers could use historical settings to conceal a politically inconvenient past. This would allow them to avoid responsibility for the beliefs (and resultant actions) associated with that past. We can see some this already in the glut of pro-war, pro-military first person shooters on the market, which game writers have often criticized for that very reason.
Fortunately, audiences are often smart enough to spot a game with an explicit (or at least strongly stated) political message. What about Sakura Taisen, though? Unlike Call of Duty: Black Ops or Battlefield: Hardline, it doesn’t espouse any immediate political messages. It’s just a dating sim/strategy game set in the Japanese Jazz Age: the Taisho Era. However, by understanding this game in a historical context (both the period it covers and the period in which it was made), we can see that Sakura Taisen serves a very clear political purpose. It responds to an ambivalent time by looking back on an era that audiences would have held in fond nostalgia. Regrettably, understanding this game in the historical context it covers illustrates the dangers inherent to nostalgically including historical settings in video games. In doing so, the game must, by necessity, rewrite the more controversial elements lurking about its historical premise.
Sakura Taisen in context
However, before we look at the Taisho Era that Sakura Taisen covers, it’s best that we understand the historical context in which the game was made. Although America tends to look on the 1990s through rose-colored glasses, the same decade was one of ambivalence for Japan. In fact, it’s colloquially known as the Lost Decade because of the slowed economic growth at the time. While still following an upward trend, that growth also came with a series of recessions. And because Japan had always defined itself against a greater world power (China for most of its history, America throughout modern history), the country didn’t know how to react to becoming a world power in its own right. This might explain how the country had six prime ministers between 1989 and 1996.
Even the popular entertainment of the day reflected the national uncertainty. While the optimistic Sailor Moon popularized the magical girl genre, the despondent Neon Genesis Evangelion simultaneously ushered in a much darker outlook for the mech genre. Audiences were eager for uplifting messages, even when the frays were beginning to show. Where could they turn to?
In enters Sakura Taisen on September 27, 1996, just six months after Evangelion ended. Sakura Taisen is a dating sim/strategy game where teenage girls alternate between acting in a Tokyo theater, piloting giant robots to defeat monsters, and getting into all sorts of wacky antics in between. Yet the strategy element is mostly irrelevant to the game’s success. Instead, it drew acclaim from two other sources. The first was the dating sim/anime part. You play as Ichiro Ogami, captain of the Imperial Assault Force, socially interacting with all kinds of colorful personalities. Some of them include tsundere Sumire Kanzaki, country bumpkin Kohran Li, and default girl Sakura Shinguji.
Taisen’s second, more notable aspect was its setting. The Taisho Era ran from 1912 to 1926, coinciding with the eponymous Emperor Taisho’s rule. Yet because the Emperor was too eccentric to be a viable public figure, power shifted to the Diet (Japan’s parliamentary body), setting the stage for the trends this era is best known for. Both contemporary and historical views of this time see it as a cultural boom. The American flapper saw a Japanese equivalent in the moga: young girls who wore their hair shirt, their clothes Western, and took control of their own sexuality. A new intellectual crowd read voraciously from European philosophy, and espoused new (often left-leaning) political philosophies. The modernization seen in the preceding Meiji continued through Taisho. In fact, Tokyo at the time looked almost like Paris or New York, but with a splash of East Asian culture.
Tokyo as seen in Sakura Taisen’s first moments.
Contemporary photo of Tokyo.
In this regard, Sakura Taisen gets a lot right. Although an all-girl theater troupe sounds like something the writers would have made up for the game, history says otherwise. And like the Takarazuka Revue, the girls in this game run a variety of shows, ranging from Cinderella to Journey to the West. Likewise, the game also faithfully depicts its setting. For example, when Ichiro decides to take Iris Châteaubriand (French girl, official member of the Imperial Assault Force) out for her tenth birthday in Episode 4, he chooses to take her to Asakusa, a popular shopping district at the time. In addition, the silent movie they see at the end of the day has a narrator, a film tradition only known in Japan. Even the game’s writing is accurate, by which I mean the literal writing. Even though most of the game is spoken, the writing occasionally uses outdated kanji that the 1920s Japanese military would use. All of these signs give the impression that the writers put a great deal of research into Taisho history.
Where Problems Start to Arise
Yet these are minor details, at best. More telling is what Sakura Taisen gets wrong. For example, late in the game, Kanna Kirishima (another of the pilots) offhandedly mentions her own birthday. Although this action would make sense for Iris (just as it would make sense for Ichiro and company to indulge her), Kanna is another case altogether. Historically speaking, birthdays in Japan are a relatively modern development borrowed from Western culture. Kanna’s distinctive Okinawan heritage would not change this, either. Okinawa was (and is) considered part of Japan.
Admittedly, this is also a very minor detail. However, it provides an important hint as to how the writers chose to handle this game. Whether it was because they simply did not know otherwise, or because they were capitulating to generic conventions, Kanna’s birthday comment suggests that rather than fully embrace a historically accurate Taisho, the writers instead mapped the era’s more preferable, nostalgic elements onto a more modern Japan. The setting becomes a stand-in for what the Japanese populace would have wanted at the time: an escape from the uncertain present, to a reassuring time when Japan had the power to face the kinds of problems it was facing in the 1990s.
It’s an admirable goal, but not without consequence. In offering such a rosy depiction of the past, Sakura Taisen conveniently overlooks how Taisho Japan chose to exercise its power. Despite Taisho being remembered as a politically and culturally open era, this is not entirely representative of that time in history. While the people were generally liberal, the government was anything but. Universal (male) suffrage did not exist in Japan until 1925 — very late in the Taisho Era. This was also the same year that the government passed the Peace Preservation Law, cracking down on the budding communist parties that criticized their government.
And in the middle of all this was the Japanese military. Although they were also critical of the Japanese government, it was not because the latter overstepped their power. Far from it; they believed that the Japanese government was not exercising its power properly. Japan’s military believed that Westernization was going too far, and that it was risking the nation’s integrity. The military played on nationalistic nostalgia by calling for a restoration of Meiji ideals. (These ideals included the slogan, “Rich country, strong army” tellingly enough.) By World War II, this rhetoric had molded Japan into a highly nationalistic military power.
Yet this is not the military as seen in Sakura Taisen. If anything, the Imperial Assault Force (which, rather than being a separate entity from the Japanese military, is the Japanese military) is more in line with how Japan views its military today. Like the Japan Self-Defense Force, the Imperial Assault Force only acts as a defensive force. They only attack when monsters tear apart Japan, and respond with no more force than their enemies. However, in depicting the the Imperial Assault Force this way, the game risks covering up the historical context that gave rise to the Japan Self-Defense Force, I.E. Japan’s growing militarism during/following the Taisho Era. We can already see this in the Assault Force’s motivations. They don’t fight for national pride or anything like that. They only fight for the vague concept of justice, as the game’s opening theme demonstrates.
Kohran and Maria’s presence also seems peculiar in this context, as they are the Imperial Assault Force’s few non-Japanese members. (Iris is also non-Japanese, but her presence does not raise the same issues as her counterparts’.) Kohran Li was born in China and fled following the events of the Xinhai Revolution. Likewise, Maria joined the team after fleeing the Russian Revolution. Yet unlike Kohran, Maria fought in this Revolution — on the revolutionary side, specifically. (This much is historically accurate.) And the top brass know about Maria’s past. This in mind, why would the Japanese military enlist these women specifically? Barring their treatment of communists at home, Japan had poor relations with Russia. They did not formally recognize the Soviet Union until 1925, and Japan had stationed troops in Siberia well before this event. Why would they accept somebody who fought for their enemy? Kohran’s presence is also troubling, given how Japan viewed China at the time.
How Sakura Taisen Responds
This is not to say that Sakura Taisen completely fails to acknowledge the Taisho’s controversial aspects. In fact, how it chooses to address them says a lot about how it views that history. While Japanese nationalism has a place in the game, that place is not with the heroes. Predictably, it lies with the game’s villains: the Kuronosukai. For Sakura Taisen, they symbolize the past. All its members stepped out of feudal Japan, and they look and act the part constantly. While they antagonize the heroes with robots similar to the ones the heroes use (though it’s never made explicitly clear if the villains use mechs, or if they’re monsters wearing armor), their modus operandi is more magic than anything else. They plant special needles in the earth as part of their goal to “wash the European blood clean from this polluted capital” and “[revive] the former Tokugawa Shogunate.”
Translation: “When we finally obtain that power, we will wash the European blood clean from this polluted capital…”
Translation: “…and there will be nothing stopping us from reviving the former Tokugawa Shogunate!”
The implications of the Kuronosukai are twofold. First, they show what Sakura Taisen draws from the past, and how that would apply to the problems that the Japan of the 1990s was facing. The phrase “European blood” is especially telling: it reflects the ambiguous outlook that defined the Lost Decade. While we can’t say that the game agrees with the villains’ motivations to wipe away all European influence (they’re the villains, after all), that the Kuronosukai cites this in their reasoning shows that they are responding to very real concerns that were appropriate at the time. Understood in the context of Sakura Taisen’s nostalgia, this narrative strategy represents a wish to return to when Japan was a growing power, yet still in the shadow of the much greater Western powers.
However, the game can’t have its cake and eat it, too. It must also acknowledge how the Japan of that time dealt with these situations. Admittedly, it does so, but only by foisting Japan’s nationalistic attitudes onto the antagonists. In fact, their use of the term Shinkoku (神国) (Japan, but with a distinctly religious connotation) mirrors the nostalgic nationalism found in the Showa Restoration that the Taisho military espoused. Moreover, the game extends its outlook to Japan’s feudal past to align its narrative with the successful cultural progress that epitomizes the Taisho (and that the Lost Decade wished for itself). Yet in doing so, it risks writing away the dark chapters in Japan’s past as cartoonish villainy rather than as very real developments arising from historical circumstances. Worse still, it writes them away where they would be most prominent.
Even late game plot developments do not change this. After Kuronosukai’s defeat, a new set of villains emerges. (Although they do not have an official name, I will call them the Kouma, for the demons that they command.) Rather than espousing anything resembling a political message, they simply wish to do evil for evil’s sake. And like the Kuronosukai, this new group of villains is still rooted in Japanese culture. The only difference is that these new villains are mythical, rather than historical. Their leader is a samurai, and among their ranks include a pig man, a deer man, and a bug woman. All the game has accomplished is recontextualizing itself from reproaching both feudal and World War II Japan to simply reproaching the feudal.
The only counter-argument I could find was in how our heroes stop this new threat. Their robots are useless against the Kouma. The only weapons capable of stopping them are the three Holy Armaments: a sword, mirror, and jewel. Not only are these relics from Japan’s far past, but they are also very clear references to the Imperial Regalia of Japan. As it is, Sakura Taisen appears to have solved the previous problems it has created. While it acknowledges that Japan’s past holds dark chapters, we cannot ignore that past entirely. To do so would risk losing those things that are vital to our modern survival.
Sadly, this lesson is not to last, for two reasons. First, the Armaments fall into enemy hands soon after their introduction. They are rendered useless. Second, although the Force is not initially capable of fighting the Kouma (their first encounter ends with the Force retreating), they are not permanently incapable. After a few adjustments, their robots are better than ever, equipped with newer, more powerful attacks to handle the Kouma.
So rather than negating previous issues, the Holy Armaments only solidify them. The Armaments become a liability because they cannot adapt to face new threats (or even old ones). They only threaten the Force with the possibility that they could fall into enemy hands. Meanwhile, the robots are clearly more reliable, as they can adapt to new threats. The symbol of Western modernity (Taisho Japan viewed its technological progress as a Western import) becomes more dependable than something borrowed from Japan’s heritage, even when faced against a threat from that very same heritage.
Conclusion
None of the preceding arguments should be taken to discredit the idea of exploring history through an interactive medium. In fact, Extra Credits defended video games as one of the best mediums for letting us live out and learn from specific historical situations. And we must remember that Sakura Taisen’s initial purpose demonstrates real value in looking back to the past through video games. But as Extra Credits points out, we can only fully reap this value by embracing our history entirely, and on that front, Sakura Taisen fails. At best, it significantly overlooks how the Taisho responded to the problems it was facing (and the problems it created as a result). At worst, it capitulates to contemporary nostalgia and writes away that very history in favor of a more preferable one.
We cannot ignore these problems in the game’s narrative, either, given the prominent role the Imperial Assault Force plays in that narrative. Each chapter has at least one monster fight to remind you that this is more than a dating sim, and the Imperial Assault Force is the only reason the cast associates with each other at all. If anything, the game’s military analog contextualizes the entire plot, and how the plot portrays the military is of the utmost concern. In this sense, it might warrant greater scrutiny than the more strongly political titles gaming audiences have grown accustomed to.
