When Kami Met Kuma Feminist Popular Geopolitical Perspectives on Japanese Nationhood and Settler Colonization of the Ainu in Persona 4 Golden

Abstract

When the player-protagonist1 ambushes an enemy and enters a battle with an advantage, that is moving first, in the Japanese Role-Playing Video Game (JRPG), Persona 4 Golden (P4G), an upbeat tune titled: Reach Out To The Truth parachutes one into the scene (Epigraph 1) (Meguro 2008). As the situation in the battle develops, the rap in the background sets out to inform the player-protagonist on the importance of their battles as a part of a “greater cause” through telling one that “the stake is high” while also, creating an environment of urgency by telling one to “not waste” their “time” on frivolous ventures. These rap lyrics also intends to convey the moral values that a player-protagonist should hold in order to succeed in their “greater cause” – an unyielding sharpness in temperament that chops away falsehoods to reveal the “naked truth”. Thus, the song posits that it is the rendering of a truth that is supposedly opaque which allows the player-protagonist to succeed in the “greater cause” of the game’s world. Along this vein, the player-protagonist is reminded repeatedly during the many trials and tribulations that they encounter in the game of the primacy of Truth that will deliver “justice to them all” – a collective if you will. If, as the song suggests, the stakes of P4G is framed as ‘justice’ to a ‘collective’ through finding and articulating Truth – what is the Truth, who is the ‘collective’, and what does ‘justice’ entail (the third of these questions I will not be addressing directly in this thesis) become the key initial questions to understand.