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lethesomething · 1 year

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Yakuza and coping mechanisms

Yakuza has been my on and off hyperfocus for years now but also in particular the past month, so let's talk about it. And particularly, how many friggin coping mechanisms are in this game.

Disclaimer: I do literary analysis, not psycho analysis, don't come for me.

For all its silliness about fighting roomba's and disco minigames, the world that the Yakuza games is set in, is fucking brutal. They are, at their very core, crime drama's. People get murdered a lot, lives are ruined in various ways, a good third of protags spend large amounts of time in jail, usually for a crime they didn't commit. Most politicians and police are corrupt, racism is blatant and if you don't have a place in the very strict hierarchy of society, it's hard to get back on your feet (hence all the crime). I tend to read a lot of indictments of Japanese society in these games, partly because they are so clearly based on old school yakuza crime drama's.

This means that the characters go through some shit. And what's fascinating, is how they deal with this.

Spoiler warning for, uhh, almost all yakuza games except Song Of Life (since i never played that)

Pretending it's not real

Kasuga Ichiban

The direct reason I'm even making this blog post because he's the most blatant about it. Kasuga is Peak Himbo in that he's not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he manages to take being beaten down Repeatedly and overcomes that with a sense of genuine good nature and optimism that is… honestly kind of hard to believe. The way he deals with any of this, is that he's a nerd who pretends to be in a video game. It's the whole premise of Yakuza Like a Dragon.

And to be fair, Kasuga suffers from an amount of mistreatment that makes me Very Angry in his stead. He has every right to be upset! He is literally homeless in the beginning of the game. If he requires the escapism of going around pretending to be in a jrpg to survive, more power to him. Especially since it works. Dude goes around helping people and making friends. Which is a good thing, because there's no way he'd make it out of Yokohama alive if he didn't have some back-up.

Side note: something similar happens to at the very least Majima, i think, in the admittedly non-canonical events of Yakuza Dead Souls. (yes i played it solely for Majima, no i do not recommend it, the game is garbage and you get more Majima in Zero anyway). In Dead Souls, Kamurocho is overrun by zombies. As a lover of all things Horror, Majima decides he may as well have a good time mowing them down like he's in an FPS while he trudges through the wreckage of society.

Self sacrifice

Mostly Kazuma Kiryu and Saejima Taiga

If you hate yourself, at least try to be of use to someone. Let's be honest, a lot of the plot of Yakuza games is driven by self sacrifice or at least following some code of honor to its ludicrous ends.

Kiryu is the main example here. The game kinda glosses over this a lot, but he is, at least in Zero, a criminal. He goes around extorting money from businesses. He consistently solves problems through violence. It's kinda the point of the games. But he's also borderline a saint and 80% of the shit he gets into is because of his need to throw himself to the wolves for any person he cares about. He voluntarily does hard time for Nishikiyama, for one. He picks up a stray kid that he will now protect with his life. And it just goes on from there. See, Kiryu may be the famous Dragon of Dojima and the Fifth Chairman of the Tojo Clan and all that, but he would very much prefer not to be? Dude wants to live a quiet life and raise some kids, it's just that he's the protag of a game series about how hard it is to say goodbye to the yakuza life. So the plot keeps finding ways to bring him back, usually as a reluctant warrior to save the Tojo clan or Haruka or whatever. If he was a little less honorable, he could still be chilling as a taxi driver with an unreasonably hot girlfriend, I'm just saying.

Saejima is very similar, but somehow even worse? Much as I love the guy, he's an idiot. He suffers from the same loyalty and selflessness as Kiryu, but he doesn't even get a cute daughter out of it. He spends Twenty Five years in prison for a crime he (we later find out) didn't commit. He escapes months before his parole to solve the convoluted plot of Y4. Then Goes Back to Jail to atone for (again) a crime he only thought he'd committed, only to escape (again) when he thinks Majima, his sworn brother, got murdered in Y5. As far as i can tell he goes back to jail one last time to finish his actual sentence, and to like, protect the name of the Tojo clan or some shit. My dude. My friend. Come on.

As a side note, acts of selflessness are kind of a big deal in the Yakuza games and one of the main ways to tell if someone is a good criminal or a villain. Kasuga and his crew are pretty big on the whole 'acts of selfless kindness' thing. It also seems to be one of the traits of Daigo Dojima, whose whole being screams 'I don't want to be here but who else is gonna fucking do it'. But in the case of Kiryu and Saejima it's very much verging on reckless self-endangerment.

Fabricated identities

Majima Goro, baby!

The Yakuza games really love this one, but I'll start with the big guy, everyone's favourite character: Majima. This dude has seen some shit. We see him throughout several flashbacks and the span of the games, but most tellingly we see him in Zero, at his rock bottom hero stage. And he's intriguingly unlike the other times he shows up. This is a Majima that's recovering from torture and backstabbing, and forced to do some dude's bidding for scraps. He's a chained dog (pun very much intended) and he's about to lose it.

What's fun about Majima is that he has So Many of the traits in this list. He has a lot of the reckless endangerment and self sacrifice that his buddies Kiryu and Saejima have. He gave himself up a few times for Haruka, he keeps trundling back to save Tojo and Dojima, but there's also a whole other layer of … Flamboyance to him.

And while Majima probably started out as comic relief, the games make clear that it's not all he is, and we get several glimpses of 'old Majima' throughout the series. He'll be in the middle of a self inflicted fight and drop some wisdom, for instance. He acts erratically, he is blunt, violent, exuberant in his dressing up. When given a task his first thought seems to be 'how can i make this Extra', but that doesn't mean the guy is unstable. You don't become a successful businessman with a building company, or a patriarch of your own family, without being smart and strategic. A lot of classic Majima behaviour, i feel, is a case of a mask he constructed to hide the severe depression, that became more of a second nature to him. Majima is one of the clearest examples of 'do what you need to do'. He's a survivor, through and through. Somewhere in there is a decent human being, but Majima will kill people to survive in a harsh world. It just seems like he constructed an extra layer to shield himself from all that.

Joon-gi Han (Like a Dragon): This is more a case of stolen (inherited??) identity, but again, if you don't want to be you, just be someone else. In this case someone he admires. Again: super tragic backstory, questionable life choices. As an aside, Joon-gi is fun because he is both a deadly assassin with someone else's name and face, but also a Knight stereotype who would do everything for his queen and I think that's neat.

Zhao Tianyou (Like a Dragon): Somewhat more subtle, but Zhao is also a dude that was at one point confronted with a Situation, namely 'oh shit my dad died and now I'm in charge of a violent gang'. And to deal with that he decided to construct a persona that gives exactly zero fucks. He is very joking and very avoidant but we do learn that a fair amount of his laid back attitude is just veneer. Dude in fact gives several fucks. You don't decide to give up the throne and become a homeless sidekick to Himbo Supreme because you don't care. You do it to stop him from getting ultra-murdered by the parade of heavily armored gangsters he keeps storming into.

Akiyama Shun (Yakuza 4-5): I debated putting him here, because part of me believes Akiyama is just kind of a dick. A dick I love as a character, but still, ya know. At least some of the dickish persona is a front, though. Akiyama is another one that just saw his life's work destroyed at some point, and decided that emotional detachment was the way to go. Akiyama is different because he was never actually a proper criminal. He was homeless for a bit, and then came into some money (through Extremely Convoluted Plot Means) and now he's a moneylender. And like Zhao, he mostly pretends to be completely devoid of feelings, while having a fair amount of feelings. Enough to get into like… fist fights. With actual gangsters. Who have guns.

Vice

Sex, drugs and everything in between

The preferred way for noir drama's to show someone is Going Through It, is by giving them a classic addiction and Yakuza isn't any different. It's why several characters are shown mournfully smoking, in particular Kiryu and Majima. Yes I know it's because it looks cool and harks back to old crime movie atmosphere. That doesn't make it a healthy coping mechanism.

Another obvious one, considering the setting of the games in several red lights districts, is erotica. Both Adachi, the ex-cop from Like a Dragon and Shinada, the ex-baseball player from Y5 and also my least fave protag ever, are both in various stages of obsession about porn, sex work and the likes.

Tanimura, the cop from Y4 has a pretty severe gambling problem in the actual canon, though gambling games and casino's are a general mainstay of the Yakuza series. It's just that when Kiryu interrupts his busy day of solving the convoluted intrigue du jour to gamble in an illegal underground casino, it's not a character flaw.

Also: almost everyone drinks ludicrous amounts of heavy alcohol in these games. Both in canon and as part of the gameplay. 100% ing the games usually involves drinking tons of whiskey, but the whole Ichiban crew, sans I think Eri, is shown drowning their troubles at various times.

Violence: I mean, that's kind of the game, but an unhealthy amount of characters consider fist fights to be a good way to resolve conflict, bond with people and generally reinvigorate themselves. Particularly Majima is shown to get a real kick out of doing damage and being beaten up. There's just a lot of reckless behaviour, which is what makes the games good.

Karaoke: fake it till you make it, man.

Extra note:

You'll notice there's no women on this list, and that's because honestly the game is kinda sexist. So while there's already Very Few women in the game, the ones that are present don't exactly have super complex characters.

Mukoda Saeko, the hostess from Like a Dragon, drinks like a fish but that's about her main flaw.

Other notable female characters are Kiryu's kid Haruka, Kiryu's love interest Sawamura Yumi (Kiwami) and Kamataki Eri, the business lady from Like a Dragon. They're all stereotypical Good Girls who have no flaws apart from indecisiveness and an unhealthy tendency for selflessness.

Saejima Yasuko is ever so slightly more complex: her main trait is self sacrifice. The story promptly fridges her for it.

#yakuza #yakuza like a dragon #yakuza spoilers #kiryu kazuma #majima goro #every other main character #literary analysis #game analysis #omg lethey does a write

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