Remediations of Japanese Cinema and History in Ghost of Yōtei

Abstract

This paper offers an early exploration into how Ghost of Yōtei represents Japanese cinematic history and indigenous Ainu history. Building on the established scholarship of remediation, the paper deploys close reading and paratexts to understand how the game's mechanics, aesthetics, narrative, and advertising convey reflections of Japan's feudal past as recontextualized and remediated from film and history. The analysis examines the influence of twentieth century Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa to the game, situating the developer's reverence to the director through the dual inclusion of Kurosawa Mode as a prestige summation of his distinct filmic style, and frequent reference to Kurosawa themes of morality and nature. In contrast, the game's depiction of the Ainu indigenous people, native to Hokkaido, is parsed through their own history and customs, but also simultaneously through a remediated understanding of native American peoples and western expansionist frontier history.