Why I Personally Don't Feel I Need to Review Ghost of Tsushima As Much As I Would Have In The Past

Twitter is a nice website where you can go and listen directly to the opinions of marginalized people to understand how certain issues are a problem, rather of having to wait for white-owned newspapers and other popular white-owned media outlets that are often filled with the opinions of cishet white people to address the issues marginalized people face.

Also, if you feel that nobody is talking about a certain issue, and if nobody qualified is there, you can tweet about it yourself to bring awareness to that issue you feel is very important, until you no longer feel the need to tweet about it personally because you either found someone who is more qualified than you, or because the issue is no longer important.

This was a perfect situation for me to lose all of my energy daily to Twitter as a marginalized person in the US.

If I recall correctly, my first step into tweeting to bring awareness to a thing was with the white remake of the Ghost in the Shell movie, which released in 2017 but was a topic of discussion mostly in 2016. After or around that time, #OscarsSoWhite, a hashtag started by April Reign to highlight the lack of diversity in the Oscars Awards Ceremony, was trending too, which then lead me into paying a lot more attention to US movies than I naturally would have as somebody who doesn’t live in LA nor cared about going to the cinema.

I cared about making comics as an Asian immigrant.

From here on, I'll be referring to all the people who review movies, make movies, work for movies, critique movies, and people who are fans of movies as Movie Twitter.

The lure of Movie Twitter and diversity was that it felt like they were close to achieving their goal, because I was definitely unaware of how long the issues with diversity had been going on. Every issue in Movie Twitter felt like it could be resolved in a month or so, which then turned into months, then years, and now 4 years later, I'm well aware that the issues that movies in the US face in terms of diversity aren't going to be resolved for many many many years, but I wasn't so sure I'd like to stay this devoted into making sure movies are more diverse for that long, because that wasn't who I was.

In the back of my head, at all times, I know who I really am: I know what things I genuinely got interested in because I enjoyed it, versus stuff I had no choice but to spend time on in order to live in the US with my sanity as a person who wasn't white. To touch on that one Toni Morrison quote that asks "Who are you without racism?": I know who I would be without all the racism, and I try to be that person every day in spite of all the racism with varying degrees of success. I’ve wanted to make comics since the 7th grade, and I’ve never looked back or decided to do anything else since.

I also think about this other Toni Morrison quote:

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

"Racism is distraction… there will always be one more thing."

I had been made to read a couple books by Toni Morrison 17 years ago in college, but back then I wasn't even a US citizen yet, and I didn't understand why we had to study racism. According to my white classmates from high school, racism wasn't a big deal because white people wern't as racist as they used to be. It probably did not help that it was mostly white students in the class that made me read Toni Morrison who did not understand what she meant either. Anyway, I had finally experienced the US enough to actually appreciate what Toni Morrison was saying:

"Racism is [a] distraction."

Something I avoided dwelling too much on in the last four years while spending a lot of time with Movie Twitter was that I was losing my productivity in making comics. In that I wasn't producing any comic books. I made a webcomic, which was successful for a while, but I stopped producing that after about a year too. Something was wrong. I was constantly distracted: I knew making comics was who I was, am, and will always be. But I'd go refresh the timeline instead.

I knew I wasn’t spending enough time being myself, but diversity felt important. But also, Toni Morrison is right! Racism is a distraction to keep me from doing what I intended to do with my life. I don’t want to spend my entire life calling white people out on their shit. I want to spend my entire life making comics.

That and I wasn't even into movies until I got involved with Movie Twitter. It's probably fine to let the people of color who are into movies speak on it. I don't need to say anything.. I can retweet the people who are genuinely interested in movies.

Ghost of Tsushima showed up on the timeline around the time I was starting to think this.

Back in 2016 when I first started to really use twitter to tweet about what was important to me, I didn't see a lot of people touching on how wacky Orientalism is, so I spoke on it, got a lot of positive feedback, and then spoke on it again, and again, and again. I spoke out on the Ghost in the Shell movie, and Death Note movie, the Dr. Strange movie, the Kubo and the Two Strings movie, the Isle of Dogs movie; like if it was a movie written by white people about Asia, I was there.

Before twitter, I had experienced from Mulan and Memoirs of a Geisha that white people are full of shit when it comes to Asian things, and I felt it was important to point out that these movies were not stories that represent Asians but are actually stories that represent how little monolingual white people know about Asia.

Pointing out white people’s bullshit became almost like an anti-hobby. I call it an "anti-hobby" because it was never fun nor satisfying the way making comics are as a hobby. Rather, it felt validating while simultaneously extremely exhausting. I was fascinated by how surprised white people were on how easy it was for me to spot the stuff they made up about Asia that wasn’t true. I didn’t need to be a museum employee to know a lot of it was not actually Asian but stuff white people made up -- They really believed stuff Like Mulan and Memoirs of a Geisha were authentic genuine Asian stories that represent real Asian cultures, when in reality they were fictional stories white people wrote to appeal to other white people that have a misunderstanding or non-understanding about what Asia is about.

I wasn't the kind of Asian Mulan is nor the kind of Asian Sayuri is, yet I still felt like it was right for me to point out the Orientalism in those movies for the time being, at least until someone better equipped came along, because most white people assumed I must be from the same country as Mulan or Sayuri, and their perceptions and understanding of those countries (which they assumed were authentic and correct) was incorrect. It was so wildly incorrect that even as a Korean I could tell it was off, and possibly dangerous since some of it was basically updated propaganda related to Pearl Harbor or the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Anyway, Ghost of Tsushima.

After some debate, and thanks to a really generous money gift from Twitter, I got the game, with the intent to play it on twitch while pointing out how white coded it is. But also I was thinking a lot about Toni Morrison's question on "who would you be without racism?" and I was thinking "isn't there someone better equipped to handle this?": There was a Japanese American videogame reviewer I wanted to retweet instead. The rest of us non-Japanese-American folks saying anything would merely add to the noise that makes it harder to hear the precise opinions of Japanese Americans.

I started playing the game. The article in English by the Japanese American videogame reviewer came out and I retweeted them. I finished my first playthrough with the game.

And I didn't play the second time around, which I was going to do on twitch.

There was some practical reasons why I didn't play again: I had given birth to a baby a month early from his due date, I was dealing with my car being totaled during a pandemic, I was dealing with most of my usual source of income being cut off due to a pandemic, and there was now a baby sleeping in the house 20 hours a day.

But assuming the car accident never happened, and if I had carried my pregnancy for another 4-5 weeks, I still did not feel that it was needed for me to say anything about Ghost of Tsushima.

I wanted to draw comics. I didn't want this distraction of pointing out Orientalism in stuff white people make. I wasn't equipped to do this. There was lawyers and sociologists and people with Ph.Ds talking about these topics I could retweet instead. Me and my Bachelor of Science in Art Education didn't need to say anything.

Plus I felt the article in English by the Japanese American video game reviewer's focus on how the game's aesthetic and its relation to politics in Japan might be more important than Orientalism in the US.

That being said, and though I have big doubts on if I should be the person writing any review on this game since I'm not Japanese American, and though I've still not made any new comics:

Ghost of Tsushima is definitely a game made in the white lens. It is a game that I might have been a big deal about if it had been produced by a Japanese American team, but the director, writers, the motion actors for the game, and one half of the music composers are white. They did attempt to do diversity by modeling the appearance of the main character Jin Sakai to an actual Japanese American actor, and by casting East Asians to many of the voice acting roles, but without giving writers who are Asian the control of the narrative, the gesture felt like a bare minimum move to appease the scrutiny for diversity.

There was quite a few things that made me think "ah.. Nobody Asian was paid to make this part" such as:

1. The parts of the map where cherry blossoms and magnolia (spring) appear on the landscape at the same time as red folliage, or silvergrass (summer) and snow. I know the Japanese tourism commercials brag about Japan having four seasons, but… it’s not that they’re having all four seasons at the same time.
2. The characters would look each other in the eye when I expected them to avert their eyes and look at the ground. The character mannerisms were white and not what I expect from people in Asia.
3. The ineffective use of the word "亡霊": I thought there would be a scene where Khotun Khan goes "No… no! I killed you! You should be dead! I'm seeing a ghost. You're definitely dead. I killed you for sure!" but he never once felt haunted by Sakai Jin nor seemed worried that he was a ghost out to haunt him. Rather, he treated Jin as a nuisance.
4. The "Mongolian" forces should have been a mix of Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian troops, but everybody is Mongolian.
5. The boats should be Korean, but honestly I'm not sure if the boats were right or not lol. I'm not into 12th century Asian boats. But as a Korean person I did spend a while looking at those boats wondering if an ancestor made them.
6. The concept of the game itself: What is the purpose or effect of portraying a battle that was over in a day as being a drawn-out battle that took four seasons to be over?
7. The mongolian forces shouting "samurai!" in Japanese instead of calling him an "enemy soldier" in the Mongolian they're presumably speaking in most of the time. There was no subtitles for what the enemy forces were saying.
8. The disjointed nonsensical "feels translated" script of the Japanese dub job. Since the game takes place on Tsushima Island, it's a good opportunity to showcase some Tsushima dialect words or have a char speaking in a Kyushu dialect. Everyone speaks standard Tokyo Japanese instead.
9. Sad flute music. They shouldn’t have hired any white people to write music for this game lol lol
10. The terrible depressing poems.
11. Too many outdoor scenes and not enough impressive (indoor) architecture.
12. Swords don’t go kaching! flash! COMBO MOVES etc.

I went into this game hoping for maybe half of what Assassin Creed: Origins did for Egyptian culture. Or maybe how Fallout 4 handled Boston city. Ghost of Tsushima did feature Kaneda castle, but there was no indication in-game nor out of it that its design was based on facts and historical findings in museums, or if it was a made up fantasy.

Anyway, by this point, I had already had my baby, and I didn't have the time nor energy to really study what sort of historic buildings are on Tsushima island.

That, and fortunately, the game was not particularly popular as far as I could tell. It was not reaching Memoirs of a Geisha levels of acclaim from white people, so whatever Orientalism it may be spreading felt less of consequence compared to the concern of samurai as an alt-right symbol.

What I thought about instead, was what kinds of games a game development company in the US would produce if it was owned by a Japanese American person that hired a team of Japanese Americans to make a samurai themed video game. Unlike a white-owned company paying white people to direct and write a samurai movie, an Asian-owned company choosing to do so would be genuine diversity.

First off, I think such a company would have tried their best to ask George Takei, Devon Aoki, and Hayley Kiyoko to voice something, anything, in their game for star power. I think they could have reached out to Hikaru Utada for an ending or opening song and for star power.

Second off, I think they would have reached out to Stan Sakai to make the game be about Usagi Yojimbo, a famous comic book series which is slated to finally get an animated series with Netflix.

Third off, because of Usagi Yojimbo's audience, I think they would have made the game for kids/teens like the target age of Pokemon's audience.

The resulting game would be something that Japanese Americans would be excited for, even if they don't care about games or comics or kids media.

That was what was off for me with Ghost of Tsushima, besides it obviously being a game white people were making to show off how good they can be at doing something Japanese: There wasn't a bunch of Japanese Americans excited that a game development company in America was producing this very Japanese-feeling game which featured a lot of Japanese stuff, in the same manner that there was a lot of Black people excited to see Black Panther or to play Assassin Creed: Origins.

I feel that being able to connect to the people and community that a certain culture is associated with is more meaningful than forming yet another connection to white people who happen to be interested in non-white things, while not actually being in those communities.

Marginalized people being able to choose to do cool things will always hold more meaning to me than white people being able to choose to do things that marginalized people should be able to choose to do if they wern't marginalized.

But in any case, I'm not Japanese American, and while I've played a ton of open world games, I already spent so much time livetweeting movies that I wouldn't have seen if there was no racism, and I really should not expand my existing anti-hobby to write about video games unless there is nobody else doing so. I’m glad there's somebody better suited for this out there, so that I can spend my time going back to being the person I actually am who likes to enjoy comics and make comics to be enjoyed.

All I have to do is retweet!