Via Tricycle, via RocketNews, comes the following video demonstration of a Japanese video game released earlier this year titled “Sutra Master.”
The game is simple enough. Your character must beat a wooden fish drum and singing bowl to the high-speed, J-pop techno music while swatting away the occasional ghost fire balls and human-animal hybrid gods. The purpose of all this mayhem seems to be to help send the recently departed off to better rebirths. You’ll see little sutra scrolls and nameplates pop up here and there. Oh, and of course, since it’s a game, you earn points and, I’m assuming, there’s a way to win the game.
A lot of my recent research has been focused on how Buddhist ideas, imagery, and persons are represented in various media. I’m interested, primarily, in North American media because that’s my general area of speciality. But, of course, in this increasingly interconnected world, it’s all too easy to come across media from other cultures. Tricycle’s only comment on this video was “weird”; and the original article from RocketNews, while betraying a serious lack of knowledge about Buddhist practice more generally, was a least sensitive to the fact that this game is a game (i.e., not the most important thing in the universe) while reporting on how different audiences (namely both Japanese and Chinese audiences) reacted to it.
A couple of quick thoughts came to me when I found this earlier today. First, I think it’s important to resist the urge to read media in a vacuum. That is, media rarely exists without an audience, and yet many media critics restrict themselves to merely reading media as a kind of text without also considering how that media is received by different audiences. (Edward Schiappa has some interesting things to say about this.) The makers of this particular video game had a very specific audience in mind when they created it, so it’s important to think about that audience and question the producers’ motivations. Was this game intended for Japanese audiences only? Or a more global market? Was it intended to be nothing more than a diversion? Or was it produced explicitly as a way to help people engage with Buddhism, if even in an extremely non-traditional way?
Secondly, I’m reminded of conversations I have with my students about Buddhism, media, pop-culture, and the attendant changes to Buddhism as it interacts with modernity and moves across cultures. It is easy to look at Buddhism in media and dismiss it as little more than Buddhism’s way of adapting to modernity or as a consequence of moving from one cultural location to another and then say, “Well, Buddhism always changes and adapts to new cultures.” To me, this attitude often stops conversation. Yes, Buddhism always changes, so let’s look at how and why it’s changing in this particular culture, at this particular time. Let’s think about the particular cultural context in which this game was developed (rather than simply dismissing it as some “weird” by-product of a foreign culture). What are the specific issues facing Buddhism in contemporary Japan that have allowed for this game to come into being? Do the varied reactions of Japanese audiences reflect different opinions about the “sanctity” (for lack of a better word) of Buddhism in an increasingly secular Japanese society? As this game moves across geo-political and cultural boundaries, how are different audiences reacting to it from their own particular cultural contexts?
By taking seriously these questions I believe we can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which Buddhism is affected by contemporary issues. Moreover, we can be attentive to the specific strategies and logics that Buddhists employ to maneuver shifting cultures while remaining relevant to an increasingly secularized, modern, and globalized world.
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