Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Thank you for your insightful and focused essay. I think the concept of internalized Orientalism is a powerful and personally upsetting consequence of Western hegemony, and its disturbing to find such stowed away in one of my favorite media forms. My only critique is that your unpacking of The Three Kingdoms was a bit brief and didn't go as far as I would have liked. "This therefore seeks to assert Japanese cultural superiority by telling the Japanese version of the story, elevating Japan to a higher status than China via retelling of their own stories." Yes, true, but specifically maybe there's something you can bring out here...more than elevate Japan, does it also cast Japan as the sole legitimate voice for East Asia? In what ways does naming and narrating function in creating an Imperial topography?

Rereading your essay, I would also question your claim that Japanese self-orientalism is what primarily perpetuates orientalist views of Japanese and Asians, rather than dominant images of Asians and the exotic other which I think would proliferate American cultural landscape regardless(as they do with other cultures). Also, to me, and maybe you were getting at this implicitly, but this is a result of late capitalism. In the wake of Western military dominance, Japan submitted to a self-exocitfying image in order to gain power in other way, through the sale of cultural products which would have more market power via their own tokenization. So, I guess what I'm saying is, in addition to the West developing and perpetuating the school of Orientalism, the West is quite responsible for this trend in that they are also responsible for imposing a capitalist system into Japan's postwar institutions, which would then make Japan dependent on American and European markets for survival.

Good essay, thank you for thinking critically about this media form which we too often absorb at face value.