[1989: p. 87]
[2003: p. 91]
DIMENSIONAL SLIP 4
MOTHER, the Game, Rescues Children from a Confrontation with the Imaginative Mother and the Societal Father
Shin'ichi Nakazawa
中沢新一
Assistant, Religious Studies,
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Video games are a mirror of what we're doing in the realm of human imagination. The father, the mother and friends appear in said realm and build those relationships. That's why games aren't a projection of the real human world, but a projection of what's going on inside the human mind.
In there, the mother is the one who takes on the most important role. This is evident even if you see the histories of religion and psychoanalysis as a manifestation of what goes on in the realm of imagination.
The mother is a being who tolerates the self, and is also a nourishment-giving energy source. At the same time she is a destination that gives goals and morals to the world the self lives in. In other words, this mother of the imaginative world also does the father's job.
However, it isn't an imaginary relationship that the child playing the game and this mother of the imaginary realm within the game spring from, so it's narcissism. If narcissism thrives, the game will persist. In Japan's case, you might ask why our video game industry is growing so much. It comes from that side of us where the way we fundamentally build a real-life mother-child relationship is imaginative. That has both weak points and strong points to it. Not that I'll simply end up denying that fact, but I think Shigesato Itoi is heading in the sort of direction where it just might be possible to draw good things from therein.
In the case of Europe and America, this method is not put into practice. Getting over this relationship to narcissism is a must. Enter the father in place of that thing we call society. Society begins to play the symbolic father role. His way of doing things is to put a stop to the narcissism of the child who is trying to shut himself up inside the realm of imagination, then drag him outside and make him build society. In fact our modern society was built that way. Therefore he continues to do things that keep the relationship with the narcissistic, imaginative mother in check. Modern artists oppose that check and, in their works, commit patricide against the societal symbol. Because the power of the father is incredibly strong in Europe in particular, the dialectical relationship known as opposition has a basis in reality. However, in Japan's case, the father's function as a symbolic being is weak. That's why there's no clear distinction between the imaginative world and the symbolic world. The sense that maybe it's the mother who holds up the entirety of the world is found within the whole of society.
The very Japanese modernism has, up until now, only been able to present the rallying cry: "Let's head toward the father!" without being able to reach the mentality of our Japanese society. And yet you could say the brilliant literary scholars from the Taisho era to early Showa¹ were producing fantasy that came directly from within the imaginative mother.
This is precisely what Kenji Miyazawa's² dream was. Japan's current technological developments are making possible a direct dialogue between machine and the imaginary realm. The power of the imaginative mother is being laid bare in a computer-society. Shigesato Itoi's game, MOTHER, is doing a marvelous job of unleashing the high-quality tradition of Miyazawa-tied Japanese literature in that computer-society.
And it's through this that Itoi will save children who are finding themselves in a quandary, both cultural and societal, of having to confront the father and the mother.
¹ Taisho era to early Showa: The former period spanned 1912–1926 and the latter picked up from there and lasted clear until 1989.
² Kenji Miyazawa: Writer and poet active during the time period mentioned in the previous paragraph. Miyazawa created a particularly large bibliography of children's fairy tales. His fame mostly came posthumously.