Looking Up From Rock Bottom - Harry Schofield On How Yakuza: Like A Dragon Finds Hope In Darkness | Winter Spectacular 2023
Yakuza: Like A Dragon is a lot of things. A drastic change for a series often jokingly criticised for its reliance on familiarity. A daring risk that paid off to an incredible degree and sold incredibly well. The final part of the series long-deserved breakthrough into international markets and mainstream appeal that started with Yakuza 0. A black sheep to some. And a refreshing entry point for others. I’m far from the first to say it, but the game does deserve all of these descriptions, alongside the many accolades it’s received, and the fervent fandom it’s developed. Yet, one thing that I don’t see discussed often is the game’s themes and narrative; specifically, its portrayal of those at rock bottom, and how hitting the lowest possible low is never the end.
Physically, mentally and emotionally (sometimes all at once), being at rock bottom is not an uncommon state for the heroes of Yokohama. Within around twenty minutes of the opening titles, Ichiban finds himself thrown from being a lowly but content yakuza within the Arakawa Family, to suffering through the gruelling reality of prison for eighteen years for a crime he didn’t commit, to finally being shot in the chest and left in a watery grave by his surrogate father figure and family patriarch Masumi Arakawa. Not exactly an upbeat start to his hero’s journey, especially considering Ichiban is middle-aged by the time he can walk out of his cell a free man. These dramatic events come after Ichiban has already found himself living on the fringes of society after being born to a sex worker, abandoned as a child and brought up in a soapland, making him no stranger to the hardships of life even before he gets himself involved with the yakuza. Despite all this, Ichiban manages to maintain a relentlessly optimistic outlook on life, almost to a fault. His signature karaoke track, The Future I Dreamed Of, is written from his perspective to proudly state that he’ll live through the days where he just wants to run away or die, and instead, he’ll focus on looking towards his dreams, even when at rock bottom. If anything, the path of his life has served to make him as empathetic as possible, especially towards those in less fortunate positions, as he knows exactly where they’ve been and judges them no differently to anyone else. Ichiban’s explicitly Dragon Quest-inspired dream to become a ‘hero’ is often ridiculed by those around him for its seeming naivete, yet his glowing outlook manages to spread to these people, pushing against the relentless cynicism that the endless weight of reality has forced upon them.
This is most clearly seen in the relationship between Ichiban and Nanba, the unhoused nurse who fell from grace. After Ichiban was left for dead in the Sakura River, Nanba saved his life for little personal benefit. While Ichi was obviously grateful, his naïve optimism led him to tell those in the unhoused camp to ‘just get a job’, parroting an oft-repeated idea towards those in less fortunate conditions and essentially advising them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Nanba calls him out not only for his ignorance but also for his attitude – “You can’t force people to be like you. So knock it off.” Yet, when luck does come their way and they find themselves with both jobs and a literal roof over their heads – having climbed just a little up from rock bottom, so to speak - Nanba begins to see Ichiban’s perspective a little more clearly. He’s overjoyed at the reality of finally being housed, excitedly referring to their single room as a ‘castle’ and pressing himself against a well-loved tatami mat as if it were the bed of a king.
While Nanba initially passes off Ichiban’s goal of becoming a fantastical hero as childish, he soon retorts Ichiban’s rare moment of cynical musings that “I’m over forty, you know” and “Being a hero doesn’t pay the bills” with “If the hero fights enough slimes, he eventually levels up, right?”. Ichiban’s optimism is so infectious, to both the player and the characters around him, because it represents the core of what makes human interpersonal relationships work: mutual belief and love, no matter what. After all, sometimes all you need is a supportive party member to give you a hand and pull you up from the depths.
This central theme of love and care found within hardship is not limited just to Ichiban’s character and his interactions with his party, however. It is the heart of almost every story the game wishes to tell, beating within the primary narrative but also across the variety of side content and substories Ichiban can explore throughout Yokohama. Being the one to grant Ichiban and Nanba a room in return for their service as bodyguards, the assertive Hamako is a prime example of this. As the owner of Shichifuku, a shelter for foreign sex workers, she works tirelessly to ensure the women she protects are safe from anti-prostitution laws and the risk of deportation; these women are foreign citizens, often the children of illegal immigrants, simply trying to make a living after starting from scratch in a new country. Shichifuku itself is even legally registered as a restaurant to circumvent these societal threats. The physical manifestation of these threats, the right-wing group Bleach Japan, soon arrives to oppose Shichifuku, claiming the sex workers fall under a legal grey area that must be ‘bleached’ for the betterment of law and society; a paper-thin supposedly liberal agenda that barely hides their puritanical, xenophobic reality. Their figurehead Kume even calls the sex workers “brainwashed” by Hamako, a common strawman used by right-wing groups to justify their actions to themselves and the public as ‘freeing victims’, even adding the false narrative of hypothetical children being ashamed of their mothers into the equation.
Alongside Hamako’s defence that these women are obviously risking their bodies for a reason, Ichiban cuts in to state that he “never minded [having a sex worker as a mother]”, eventually intimidating Bleach Japan away from Shichifuku for another day. Despite being in less than stellar positions, Hamako, the sex workers, and Ichiban by extension, are not at all ashamed of their past or present, and actively fight together to push back against society’s disregard for their existence due to being unjustly labelled as ‘dirty’ and in need of ‘bleaching clean’. Just like the unhoused, sex workers are treated by Yakuza: Like A Dragon as valid members of society, who have reasons to be in the position they are in, often out of their control, and should not be vilified just for the current state of their existence. The game’s stance is clear: unhoused people and sex workers are people before, during, and after these parts of their lives, and the only way to live alongside them is to treat them as such, with respect, protection and care [and societal and institutional change to the system that would oppress them, of course].
Alongside the main story, substories are rife with tales of people trapped at the bottom of the pile being brought back from the brink through tenderness. In ‘It’s The Thought That Counts’, Ichiban witnesses a friendship between an unhoused man, Jinnai and a young boy, Shota, in which the man feels guilty and ashamed for being financially unable to give the boy a birthday present, especially as he struggled to provide for his own son before he lost his home. After a few heads are cracked during Ichiban’s sidequest to acquire materials for a bookshelf for Shota, Jinnai presents him with the thoughtful gift, which was chosen due to Jinnai remembering that Shota loves to read. Not only does this substory once again humanize unhoused people, but it also presents a noteworthy aspect of the societal view of them; children are often unaffected by the prejudice held by many people, as they haven’t yet been tainted by the sociological prejudgment that they ‘should’ look down upon those are less well off. Instead, like Shota, they see the unhoused exactly as they are: as people. For that matter, Shota’s father is shown to have thrown the bookshelf onto a trash heap outside, eventually going on to call Jinnai a “cockroach” and fight Ichiban under the pretence of protecting his son from the ‘dirty.’ Despite this, the substory ends on a positive note with Shota’s father seeing the ignorance of his actions and accepting both Jinnai and the bookshelf as important to Shota, proposing that love is valid no matter the societal or financial position of those it is given by.
Over on Nosaki Street, in ‘One Man’s Trash’, a huge pile of random objects, seemingly trash, is shown to be suffocating the front of an old pawn shop. The owner, Gomi, defends his apparent large-scale littering with the claim that it’s all merchandise for sale, and he’s within his legal rights to put it on display. After fighting Ichiban – this is a Like a Dragon game, after all – Gomi tearfully reveals why the trash remains ever-present: they’re all objects that serve as memories of his recently passed wife, and Gomi feels that if he loses these physical representations of her memory, then he’ll lose her entirely. While Ichiban understands his plight, seeing that grief is simply love persevering, Ichiban points out that she’d likely prefer for Gomi to honour her memory by continuing to maintain the shop and let the business they built together thrive. The crushing weight of grief can lead anyone to rock bottom, but it’s never permanent; grief’s existence as a form of love means that it can always not only lift up those surviving with the wishes to respect their memory but also allow those lost to live on through them.
In November of 2020, when Yakuza: Like A Dragon was released in the West, I was not doing well - much like the vast majority of the global population, the rampant pandemic had *slightly* affected my life. Specifically, I was in my first year of university; what was supposed to be my big break in which I finally experienced city life, higher education and an actual social life after years of isolation and bullying throughout my adolescence, unfortunately didn't quite pan out that way. I remained in my overpriced halls apartment, alone, wishing the days away, watching Zoom call lectures from my room on occasion and falling further into a hole with each passing week. I was, if you can forgive the title drop, at rock bottom. Then Yakuza: Like a Dragon came out. Having gotten into the series earlier in the year, I quickly attached myself to it, I did almost nothing but play the game for around a week after release. And through doing so, I was surprised to find a shift in my perspective brought about by Ichiban, the characters surrounding him, and the stories told by the game.
As the narrative progressed, I was repeatedly faced with one message: life sucks, and shit happens out of our control, but we have to keep going regardless. This is certainly not a groundbreaking philosophical statement, but it was exactly what I needed to hear at the time. It helped me realise that, like Ichiban, I was not my past, nor my present circumstances; I was the person I had worked to become up until that point, and I had always persevered through everything life threw at me. I’ve carried this perspective with me since, contextualising each painful new experience, and simultaneously, each positive new experience, as temporary descents and ascents from rock bottom, none of which would remain permanent. In all cases, these things shall pass, and it’s up to you and those around you to find your way out of the darkness. Yakuza: Like a Dragon practically beats the player over the head with its central message, but it’s most effectively presented in some of Ichiban’s final words before the credits roll:
“Once you're at rock bottom, the only way forward is up. But the bottom doesn't have to be all dark and gloomy.”
