One of Japan's national RPGs, the Persona series (hereinafter referred to as P), exploded after the release of the fifth work in 2016, breaking through the Japanese domestic market and becoming a topic of discussion among game lovers around the world, and in the United Kingdom, the physical version was sold out of stock because of too hot sales. P5's unprecedented success in the international market is due both to its ultra-high degree of completion and from the social problems behind the stories it tells. Atlus game designer Katsura Hashino, a producer who is happy to prescribe for the symptoms of the times, has served as the series supervisor and main screenwriter since Persona 3, and the three works (P3, P4 and P5) centered on him have internal consistency in theme, all of which aim to criticize the ills of Japan's postmodern society. Before entering the text of The Book of Persona, we must first briefly understand the historical context of Japan's development into postmodern society, and then we can think about why "postmodern" has become the object of the "Persona" and its transnational influence beyond Japan.
First, the end of the grand narrative and the transformation of postmodern society
Sociologist Sosuke Mida divides postwar Japanese history into "ideal times", "dream times", and "imaginary times", referring to people at different times who "live in ideals", "live in dreams", and "live in fiction". The "Age of Ideals" and the "Age of Dreams" encompassed the decades of Japan from the post-war period to the early 1970s, a period in which Japan's left-wing ideology grew to cool, and when grand narratives were still working. Both adherents of Marxism and advocates of the capitalist free market have constructed an ideal township based on the theoretical doctrines they have embraced, and are convinced that this ideal township will one day become a reality. In Sosuke Mita's view, the so-called "ideal era" is actually a realistic era, and people are eager to turn the unbearable reality into an "ideal" reality by taking a certain correct path. The ideal of yearning for a better life supported the people at that time to overcome the poverty after the war and work hard to obtain material materials. Not directly giving abundance, but a commitment to abundance, which created the spirit of a generation of people who worked to the death. Suffering becomes a sacred martyrdom because of the ideal place that will one day come, and the ordeal does not shake faith in grand narratives, but strengthens them.
Seeing that The doctrine of Sosuke Tada has been transformed by many scholars and has been developed into a variety of theories that stage important social events as nodes, of which "1972" and "1995" are two topics that cannot be escaped. In 1972, the Asama-san Incident, which broke out in Japan and the government, and the marathon live broadcast of it by the television media, put the violent conflict between different ideologies on the mass media and widely disseminated it. The multi-ideological game ended with an ugly end in civilian casualties, and the oil crisis caused setbacks to the high-speed economy. Under the influence of various factors, the grand narrative of reality gradually withdrew from the mainstream, and the fictional grand narrative took its place. In the second half of the 1970s, when the "imaginary era" arrived, Japan had leapt to become a world economic power with "100 million total middle class". Although it is already in the midst of prosperity, but this prosperity is not an ideal place, Japanese society has entered a kind of consumption of fictional stories, "Mobile Suit Gundam" is typical of this era, people through the consumption of fictional grand narratives to make up for the lack of pressure it shares in reality. Higashi commented: "The imbalance of the grand narrative in postmodern China has led to the fabrication of 'gods' and 'societies' from subcultures. Before the "imaginary era," student movement participants may have envisioned the communist society described by Marx, and presidents may have genuinely believed that an economically prosperous capitalist society was the "end of history," while Gundam fans may not have expected interstellar wars—grand narratives are still needed, but whether they need to intervene in reality is of little concern. Further, there is a problem with people who try to bring fiction into reality. The "imaginary era" was also the golden age of the bubble economy in which Japanese consumerism prevailed, and shibuya replaced Shinjuku and Ginza as Japan's most prestigious landmarks, and the crowded Shibuya Cross Street showed the wonders of the Japanese economy in delayed photography.
The famous Tokyo landmark Shibuya Cross Street, the same street scene was also adapted from "Persona 5" and incorporated into the game, which is a scene with a very high appearance rate during the game.
The 1995 subway sarin incident and the Great Hanshin earthquake devastated Japanese society once again, and the young people who were active in the 1990s were born after the economic boom, and they did not experience the poor but determined early post-war period. The side effect of the "new humanity" brought about by the rich and stable consumer society is the "uneasiness" that pervades the group—they cannot find the meaning of the existence of the country, history, and the world. The year 1995 marked the beginning of Japan's post-fiction era, the "end of the imaginary era, as Masayuki Osawa calls it, and this period of unfinished business is named after many "the age of impossibility," the "age of animals," and the "age of expanding reality." After the "end of fiction", Japan's consumption of fictional grand narratives was further broken down into consumption of databases, which is often seen as a sign of Japan's transition to postmodern society. Postmodern society, the society of nihilistic values and meanings, whether realistic or fictional, has lost its utility in uniting the masses.
Three questions from Persona: Meaning, Truth, and Responsibility
The protagonists of "Persona" are a group that grew up in the postmodern era. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist comes to a strange city for different reasons (transfer, foster care, supervision) and inserts himself into a world of calm on the surface but full of chaos and intrigue in the form of the protagonist of the Western (this article follows the official names of the protagonists in the anime version, namely Yuki Ri of P3, Yu of Narumi of P4, and Yunu of P5). Each of The Persona has a different theme: the life and death of P3, the reality and imagery of P4, the loss of P5's subjectivity, and the reflection on postmodern society is the foreshadowing of the series of grass snake gray lines.
Persona 3: How should people live their lives?
The theme of P3 is the meaning of life, and it is also a concentrated expression of the "postmodern consciousness" of Japanese society. From time to time, Yuki must face the inner doubts: If a person dies, all pleasures will eventually dissipate, and relatives and friends will be separated, should we refuse the formation of bondage from the beginning in order to avoid the pain of parting? The writing of doom and destruction runs through the creation of Japanese two-dimensional culture, and the bitterness of economic stagnation, the loss of hope, and the threat of natural disasters and terrorist attacks give birth to this pessimistic perspective, and after the Aum Shinrikyo incident, the post-apocalyptic fantasy shifts to the "campus" world system model (the sacrifice of boys and girls to save the world). The threat of death is everywhere, and it can come from uncontrollable natural phenomena or from seemingly safe public living spaces. Cult leader Shen Guilong also revealed an existential thinking about the protagonist's questioning: "Only by understanding the meaning of survival can people face death", but the reality is that people in the world only think about the meaning of survival at the moment of death, if life itself is meaningless, life and death become worthless.
The setting of the other world in P3 contains a strong "post-1995" complex, the story sets the time of each day is not smoothly connected, at the 0 point of the handover of the day and the day, there is a "shadow time" that cannot be perceived by the real world, and the "shadow" active in it attacks the human being who mistakenly enters the shadow time, causing the victim to suffer from "anaphylaxis" in the real world. Except for a few people with adaptability, ordinary people will be "symbolized" in shadow time, and the external form symbolized in P3 is a standing coffin. The coffin is used to protect those who are in it from being attacked by shadows, and also to force people to be separated from each other, each alone in a cramped space. The mentality of "preferring to be separated alone to seek protection" shows the collective anxiety of the Japanese people in the post-1995 era, the uncontrollable catastrophe that fell from the sky (Nix's descent/The Great Hanshin earthquake) and the potential threats in the space of daily life (Shadow/Aum Shinrikyo) deprived them of their sense of security, especially the latter shaping a narrative of "the enemy is hidden among us" that hindered human-to-human connection.
After the arrival of the film time in "Persona 3", people in the real world are "symbolized" into coffins in the original place of the other world.
From a macrosocial perspective, the spread of postmodern consciousness has given birth to a low-desire society with stagnant economic growth; in microscopic individuals, the experience of meaningless life leads to depression. In the game, Chidori exhibits depressive symptoms – perceiving life through self-harm. Chidori's self-harm stems from thinking and recognizing "death". Her words and deeds are full of contradictions, saying in an understated tone, "There is nothing to be afraid of death," and at the same time, she is so terrified of the potential end and separation that she rejects life and emotions.
In P3, Chidori asks what Shunping is "alive", and Shunping cannot give a direct answer.
Later in the game, Nix is about to descend on Earth to destroy all life, and the screenwriter's portrayal of the protagonists and NPCs shows a picture of beings facing the inevitable end of the world. Because death will come as scheduled with the end of the countdown anyway, the daily routine that should be repeated in the ordinary day loses its legitimacy. The "survival and destruction" of not thinking about, or deliberately avoiding thinking, in the ordinary life of going to school, school, work, and leaving work every day has become a problem that must be faced. The cult of Nix, the god of death, in the game is a variation of the Orm-style cult in fictional works, and they also believe that the end will come, and that the idea that "human society that has gone the wrong way will inevitably decline" breeds systemic anxiety among the people. Katsura Hashino's treatment of the P3 ending is romanticized, he uses emotion as a weapon to resist the emptiness of "life is meaningless", chidori through love, Yuki Ritsura through friendship to get salvation from the depression of the quagmire. Yukiri, who experienced adventure and parting from life and death during the year with his companions, denied his past views on death, and the horror of death and separation was because of the happiness when they were together, which became the courage and strength of his self-sacrifice, pushing him to the path of the protagonist of the world system.
Persona 4: The Collapse of Truth and the Domination of The Imagery
After the extremely heavy atmosphere of P3, P4 unfolds the story in a more relaxed tone. Its theme is bondage and truth, and the protagonist group needs to fight against the repressed self in the subconscious while organizing a detective team to investigate murders in the tv world. The motivation for Naruto's action was to seek the truth, and the word "truth" seems out of place with postmodernity. For those who believe in postmodernism or are accustomed to postmodern consciousness, the truth disappears at the moment of the event, and all subsequent attempts to describe the "truth" are merely narratives and opinions. In a way, P4's vision of a crisis is very forward-looking. In P4, where smart devices are far less developed than they are today, and characters are still using clamshell machines, Katsura Hashino is already talking about his thinking about reality and mimicry. The monster that the protagonist group wants to defeat is transformed into a Tadatatsu, the monster is in the form of a mechanical eyeball, and through the more elaborate painting in the animated version, it can be seen that it is an eyeball-like photographic lens - the two worlds separated by the lens are merging into one, and the real human beings are alienated into shadows.
P4 predicts people who are tormented by social media today: platforms such as Instagram, Circle of Friends, and Little Red Book obscure real individuals, and people prefer to gaze at themselves framed by lenses and frames, and reshaped by digital technology. This has spawned the anxiety of modern society that "people can only define themselves by comparison with others". P4's treatment of the other world is subtlely different from the previous game, if P3's shadow time involuntarily falls from the sky, P4's TV world needs to actively enter and invade reality due to human activities. As Ernst Cassirer puts it: "As people's symbolic activities progress, the material world seems to shrink in proportion to each other." People don't face the things around them, but they are constantly talking to themselves. ...... So much so that without the help of artificial media, they cannot see or understand anything. "The simulated world generated by the lens becomes an oppressive force, gradually replacing the weight of the real world, and gradually the imitation transcends reality and dissolves the truth. The other world accessed by television has always been filled with thick fog, obscuring people's vision, metaphorically replacing "facts" with "opinions" in the noisy mass media. The protagonists wear special glasses and seek the truth from the fog until they discover the man behind the manipulation of the other world, whose avatar is just an ordinary passerby.
Persona 5: The Evil of Mediocrity
P5 is the finale of Keimoto Hashino's series and the most completed work in the entire series. Soundtrack, art, UI design, battle mode, plot... Each part forms a Gestalt of 1+1>2, which together constitute the unique charm of P5. It can be said that the whole work of P5 is an organism, it is not a simple addition of the above elements, and stripping away any part of it will make the work lose its color. Katsura Hashino felt "really unexpected" that the P5 had achieved such excellent results in the international market outside of Japan, P5 was mixed with a lot of socio-political issues, and Katsura Hashino was surprised that his worries about Japanese society resonated throughout East Asia and even North America and Europe - the problem discussed by P5 was no longer a simple "Japanese problem", it was already a "world problem".
P5 protagonist Yunomiya Lian was framed for seeing the righteous courage and came to Tokyo to accept the supervision of the foster family. Yu Gonglian's background laid the foundation for his passive and positive mode of action - he was originally a hero and a righteous person who actively joined the world, but he had to be cautious in his words and deeds because of the setback of justice. Yunomiya And her companion Ryuji accidentally discover a way to enter the other world through a mobile app. Like the setting of all previous games, the other world of P5 is also the embodiment of the human spirit, and people with powerful attachments and desires will distort the designated real space in the spiritual world into a "temple" (パレス, Palace). The strange thief group steals the "secret treasure" (the object of the embodiment of desire and obsession), disintegrates the temple, and makes people distorted by desire "change their hearts".
After going through most of the process on the extended line of psychoanalytic theory, the end of P5 suddenly incorporates the philosophical and political ideas of Bentham, Foucault, and Han Bingzhe. The status of the "Impression Space" (メメメントス, Mementos) provided to players to brush experience and personality masks in the early and mid-period periods has been flipped into a "real main line". Impression space is an alienated and ruined real world, and when it first enters impression space, its role is to carry branch lines and wander outside the main line raider hall. The protagonist wanders in it, and the spatial blur and chaos are constantly changing. Chaos, ruin, no end, no end, this is the reality reflected in the deep collective psychology of the people — the postmodern world. The entrance to the Impression Space Shibuya subway station is also a powerful cultural symbol in itself. Shibuya's cultural significance is the prevalence of consumerism, and its prosperity marked a turning point in Japan's economic development. The goal of man's labor is no longer a paradise that will one day come, but a decent consumption. The impression space centered on Shibuya Subway Station and piped by the Tokyo Underground Railway continues to deepen to the subconscious buried deep in the hearts of the people, its terminal ring prison and holy grail, symbolizing the desire of the people who have lost hope for the future to follow a "big narrative" representing justice. Freedom means making choices and bearing the consequences that come with it, so freedom is heavy. As long as there is a "holy grail" guide, everyone can give up thinking, follow orders, and alleviate maladaptations for postmodern society. So in the depths of the impression space, the shadow of the people took the initiative to board the train to the prison, and voluntarily imprisoned in the circular prison to transfuse blood for the holy grail.
The ending of P5 seems similar to Ultraman (the help of the crowd converges into strength), but the core is completely different. The latter is the group's worship of grand narratives—the triumph of alien messengers representing light (science and justice) over evil— and the former is precisely against this idea of "pinning hopes on the powerful other." The power given to Yu Gonglian in P5 is the individual who is bound to him, which is the power of emotion. After ultraman gathers human blessings, he confronts the alien monster based on the Cold War mentality, and P5 uses the power of bondage to fight against oblivion, which comes from the forgetting of the citizens that the monster group wants to protect, that is, the "enemy" is inherent in itself. Katsura Hashino wants to encourage every individual to take the initiative to assume social responsibility, rather than being like a prisoner in the impression space, when the treasurer entrusts the future to the strong. At first, the public thought that Lion Boy Justice was a hero who could represent everyone back on the right track, and after the Lion Boy failed, he simply hoped for the abstract "Holy Grail".
In the collective prison deep in the impression space, the strange gang reunites with the shadow of the villain who has been changed. At this time, the strange bandit group completely understood that the real horror was not those who had the temple, but the people who were content with the status quo and did not seek progress -- the impression space is the most tight prison. Every change of mind of the Strange Bandits is to disintegrate the individual's hall and send them back to the impression space. In other words, the person who owns the temple is the one who is close to "Superman." The fault of their misguided and hurting others lies in the uncontrollable overexpansion of desire, not in possessing desire itself. Nietzsche believed that morality was a bondage to the superman, but in reality morality was necessary because the powerful creativity of the superman could be distorted into destructive force at any time. Dreams and desires are so similar that Superman will degenerate into a tyrant if he is not careful. The strange bandits simply and rudely steal the "heart" but turn Superman back into ordinary people, and the cases of Sakura Futaba and Niishima show that people should reconcile with their own shadows in order to get closer to Superman.
In the depths of the impression space, the strange bandit group reunites with the shadow lion boy who has been changed. He told the strange bandit group: "everyone" jointly created the prison, and once he was a "prison breaker", he actively escaped from this "stable world" to create only his own "temple". After being sent back to the impression space, the "jailbreakers" continue to enjoy the controlled "freedom not to choose." Prisoners in prisons spy on each other, "we ourselves are watching all of us"
3. Return to Maruyama Maruo: Two sides of reality in "The Tale of a Girl's Tale"
The 3-5 works of "The Tale of the Goddess" jointly speak of Hashino Katsura's political philosophy: calling on everyone to become positive people. Life is limited, human beings are social beings, and each individual should bear the responsibility of being a member of the group. Contemporary youth have no vision for their future, no interest in social participation, and voter turnout in election campaigns is falling all the way. The cosmology of the island separates everyone from each other, and common visions and ideals become impossible. The other world of the three works and the final BOSS - Shadow Time / Death, Tv World / Izanami, Impression Space / Holy Grail, correspond to the author's thinking on the symptoms of the post-modern Japanese era: not understanding the meaning of living, hiding in fiction to escape realistic setbacks, giving up thinking and going with the flow... "The representative scholar of the progressive school, Maruyama Masamune, advocates that "reality" has two sides - the side of reality restricting human beings VS the side of human adaptation of reality. Katsura Hashino often exudes this progressive mentality in the P series, borrowing from Moorgana (the character is set to be the embodiment of the remaining hope of mankind): "No matter how painful reality is, if you even give up changing it, it's all over!" ...... Human beings have the power to change the world, but everyone accidentally forgets this. Human beings "accidentally forgot [the power that changed the world]" lead to the atrophy of the side of the rewritten reality, which in turn makes the side of reality restricting human beings expand indefinitely. If "despair" itself becomes an anti-ideological ideology, it will serve a similar role to the belief in capitalist values in the ideal age—the narrative of "decline" exacerbates the reality of decline.
In the face of postmodern society, Katsura Hashino's narrative in "The Tale of the Goddess" presents a contradictory mentality: it is impossible to be alienated, and it is not willing to retreat back to the embrace of the big narrative. For in his view, regression and alienation are two sides of the same coin, just as both the Cocoon dweller and the right wing respond in extreme ways to the predicament of the postmodern society. In 2012, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe released a 30-second propaganda film with the theme of "Retrieval" (取り戻す) to build momentum for Abenomics. Abe repeatedly stressed that he wanted to "get back the economy, get back education, get back peace of mind" and eventually "get back to Japan" (日本を, 取り戻す). This series of bloody slogans obscures a central question: Where to get it back? Has Japan's economic development, education security, and security been stolen by whom? At least in the eyes of game creators such as Katsura Hashino, Hidetaka Miyazaki, and Hideo Kojima, it was all the citizens themselves who stole Japan – stealing their future with alienation, numbness, and indifference to the outside world. Can you get back what belongs to you from your own hands?
Japan, a country that has not yet had time to realize the comprehensive modernization of people and has been wrapped up in the postmodern wave, has chosen to actively embrace the postmodern trend of thought, and has also taken the lead in tasting its bitter fruit, and the "lost decade" has become "lost twenty years", and then has become "lost thirty years". The ills experienced by Japan have also spread into a global syndrome in recent years: the populist right rises in North America and Europe due to slowing economic growth, the fatigue of the old capitalist countries is doubled, and the youth of East Asia are trapped in endless internal troubles... This is why Katsura Hashino's "Persona 5" originally targeted Japanese society, but inadvertently touched the hearts of players around the world - we live together in an era of lost subjectivity, and how to rebuild it seems to have no answer.
In the face of grand and insoluble social issues, all discussions must eventually return to the microscopic individual. In every "Persona" led by Katsura Hashino, the connection with friends becomes the magic weapon for the protagonist to finally defeat the enemy. Around the point of view, emotions and bondage are our last weapon against alienation, in P5 Morgana's own words, "there is no 'real world'." The world is formed by each person's feelings, and this is the truth of the world. So, the world is 'infinite', even if your eyes are dark, but as long as you hold someone's hand and connect it with bonds, the world will not end. ”