Several departments of the Japanese government have responded to requests for comment regarding the apparent historical inaccuracies of Assassin’s Creed: Shadow. Basically, their responses don’t form part of a larger debate or heated debate, and all they seem to be doing is refusing to comment or offering a general response when it comes to video games.
If you’re not well-informed, there’s been a lot of discussion about possible historical inaccuracies in the game, with any legitimate concerns from the Japanese being drowned out by some Western players’ outrage over diversity in video games. The latter are mostly just yelling about whether the game’s black protagonist, Yasuke, is actually a samurai in real life, but that doesn’t really matter in the context of Shadows, which is, you know, a work explicitly marked as fiction, as Ubisoft mentioned in its announcement yesterday.
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Now, the whole thing has been brought to the attention of several Japanese government departments, as reported by Sankei Shimbun (with good coverage by GamesRadar
How did they respond? The Ministry of Foreign Affairs simply said it was not a concern of theirs, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said it would not comment on individual games. The only other response came from the Ministry of Education, which responded that when it comes to video games and their potential effects on children: “In general, when content is suspected of violating public order and morals, caution needs to be exercised.”
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As Jeffrey J. Hall, a lecturer at Kanda International University who “specializes in Japanese politics/nationalist activities/historical controversies/popular culture,” points out, these responses are a bit of a formality, especially since the Japanese government doesn’t censor historical fiction for being inconsistent with historical facts. Hall points out that “nudity or extreme violence” are the only things that could be censored, so that’s likely what the Ministry of Education is alluding to when it acknowledges that the game is considered “against public order and morality.”
Another factor worth considering is that the Japanese politician who asked these departments for their opinions on the game (or rather the discussion around the game) was Satoshi Hamada of the NHK Party, a right-wing organization founded on opposition to the TV license fee issue. Hall called the NHK Party a “small party with almost no real political influence in Japan” that lost its national party status earlier this year and the Tokyo District Court opened bankruptcy proceedings against it in March.
Yeah, it really isn’t a big deal.
