‘Love Hina’ Mangaka Says Japanese Lawmakers Getting Good At Video Games Could Help Promote Culture, Boost Economy: “I’d Like To See Cabinet-Level Officials Mastering At Least A Hadoken”
At a time of stark cultural and economic uncertainty, Love Hina mangaka-turned-elected Japanese lawmaker Ken Akamatsu says that one of the easiest and most basic steps that the government can take to help support the country through this current point in time is, simply enough, learning how to play video games.
Akamatsu, who was elected to the country’s House of Councillors in 2021 as a member of the country’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), put forth his proposed ‘unofficial initiative’ during a recent interview given to Japanese video game news outlet Famitsu regarding the current (and admittedly poor) state of video game preservation.
Met at the top of their time discussion with the observation that he had “always been involved with games, both during your time as a manga artist and since becoming a lawmaker,” Akamatsu offered a brief recollection of his own history with the medium as well as the admission that, unfortunately, his familiarity with it was a rarity among his fellow Diet members.
“I especially love fighting games, and for example, in the Vampire series [better known in the West as Darkstalkers], I can perform Demitri’s Dash Demon Cradle. I can also execute super moves from a dash, but even at this level, there are probably no other lawmakers who can do it. In fact, there may be surprisingly few lawmakers who can even perform the Shoryuken command [quarter-circle + forward]. I do think there are more lawmakers playing games these days, though.
The problem with this lack of video game literacy among his peers, he then explained, was that it meant that they could not properly promote – and thus bolster – one of Japan’s premier economic and cultural spearheads.
![Demitri (Nobuyuki Hiyama) hits Morrigan (Yayoi Jinguji) with the dash cancel variant of his Demon Cradle attack in Vampire: The Night Warriors [Eng. Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors] (1994), Capcom](https://boundingintocomics.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=788,height=591,fit=crop,quality=90,gravity=auto,sharpen=1,metadata=none,format=auto,onerror=redirect/wp-content/uploads/morr.jpg)
“Japan’s content exports now amount to trillions of yen, and games are a key product within that. So I hope that cabinet-level officials will practice fighting games and e-sports disciplines, at least to the point where they can perform a Hadoken, and then promote Japanese games. If they could even compete against foreign dignitaries, it would be a great way to showcase Japanese games on the global stage.”
“It’s difficult to promote something you know nothing about, so I think members of parliament should at least be able to play games to some extent from now on.”
Amidst a later discussion on how the “sense of enthusiasm to preserve games” is stronger in other countries, particularly the US and France, than it is in Japan, Akamatsu would note that another roadblock to his fellow lawmakers’ video game education was his home country’s dismissive attitude towards the entire medium – an attitude which he says is thankfully in the process of shifting thanks to the passage of time:
“In that sense, games are still considered a form of entertainment in Japan, but now there are more and more members of the Diet who grew up playing games and reading Weekly Shonen Jump as children. At the same time, the number of lawmakers who say, ‘Games are meaningless,’ has decreased significantly, so I am hopeful that Japan’s approach to games will change in the future.”
