![]() One facet of Japan’s strange economic policies was the concept of “ lifetime employment” - a series of government subsidies that rewards companies for hiring kids directly out of college and then employing them forever. ![]() The group consisted mainly of disaffected teenagers with poor career prospects who broke petty laws as a sort of initiation process for joining the Yakuza. “Bōsōzoku” literally means “to rocket out of control.” But Team Rocket much more closely resembles the bōsōzoku, a motorcycle subculture that rose to prominence in the 1960s. In some ways the Pokemon world is talking out of two sides of its mouth by showing us a utopia and then also showing us people who are somehow dissatisfied with the current state of things.Įven as a young American child I was able to see Team Rocket’s connection to the Yakuza, and I imagine most of us did too. And while the world of Pokemon was spared from the "economic miracle" of the 1960s it still, apparently, suffered the social fallout of that period, namely the increase in organized crime. Trainers live in harmony with Pokemon, and thus nature, because pollution is bad! But there are more downsides to urbanization than the destruction of the natural world: Japan’s rapid economic growth also resulted in further economic stratification. Pokemon has always had a strong and obvious environmentalist message. This world is in a state of tranquility while its real-life counterpart was in a state of upheaval. The fantasy of this world is not just that humans and Pokemon live side by side, but that the golden age of Japan never ended. The towns that are connected by forests and rivers in the Pokemon world are connected by concrete and bullet trains in our world. Pokemon Red’s map isn’t based on present-day Tokyo, it’s based on the pre-sprawl Tokyo of the 1960s. In fact, every Pokemon game is based on a real-world location.īut if you look a little closer, you’ll see that they aren’t identical. If you compare the world map from Pokemon Red to a map of Tokyo, the two look pretty similar. This is all reflected, strangely enough, in Pokemon. And the United States was concerned that if Japan got too poor it would resort to communism, so it justified foreign aid with domino theory. Japan’s government accelerated economic growth with "too big to fail" economic practices that could be compared to America’s own housing bubble. Taijri says that several of his favorite bug catching spots were completely paved over and replaced with suburban arcade centers. The rural hometown from Taijri’s childhood was completely engulfed by Tokyo’s urban sprawl as the economy exploded. This period is known as the " economic miracle" - a time when Japan’s economy was unnaturally bolstered by both aid from the United States and corporate bailouts from the Japanese government. The “cram school industry” started when Taijri was a kid and he wanted to make a game that could help kids relax for just a few minutes a day.īut there’s an important part of this story that can easily be overlooked: a lot of stuff happened in Japan between the 1960s and the 1990s. He discussed how these simple creative choices affect kids and their perception of the world. In the same interview, Taijri also says it’s important to him that Pokemon “faint” instead of “die” and he thinks death is treated too flippantly in video games. Series creator Satoshi Taijri said in a Time Magazine interview that Pokemon is based on his childhood hobby of catching bugs in the rural outskirts of Tokyo in the 1960s. You aren’t seeing a world that was or is about to be shattered by a giant space meteor the Pokemon world is almost always at peace. ![]() Traveling the towns for the sake of collecting badges makes each town feel like a tourism destination rather than a checkpoint between action sequences.Ĭriminal organizations like Team Rocket give the game developers a mouthpiece that can wax philosophical about systemic problems with the world, without actually showing any of those problems. The lack of drama in Pokemon allows you to explore a relatively stable world in a state of equilibrium. This plot structure sits in stark contrast with typically melodramatic JRPG storylines. ![]() (Warning: This article features spoilers for every main-series Pokemon game.) The Pokemon franchise is famous for many things, but story isn’t one of them. Your character is almost never in danger, the world is almost never at the brink of collapse and most of the game’s conflict takes the form of friendly sparring matches. ![]() Pokemon games offer straightforward narratives in a consistent structure: You are a boy or girl that hikes from town to town competing to win badges and you somehow always end up taking down a criminal organization. This article was originally published in April 2015. ![]()
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