Your Naoto

This semester there’s this practice that’s been hovering on my horizon for about a year now, the idea of autoethnography. It’s the – super simplifying here – process whereby you subjectively write about the experience of partaking in another culture. Our final project, our digial artifact, is meant to be a piece examining part of this media, in this personal way.

The idea I have is basically untenable. I’ve looked at it, I’ve circled it and I think I have to admit, wholeheartedly, it’s beyond me to do, certainly in the constraints I have I can’t, seriously, write about the experience of playing Persona 4, then talk about the reviews and conversation around it in the west and then move on to talk about the nature of fundamental untranslateable elements of language.

But I can talk a little bit here, little unacademically, about Naoto Shiragane.

The conversation I see surrounding Naoto is kinda fundamentally ethnocentric. I see plenty of people talk about Naoto in light of a western queer experience, about how Naoto is definitely this or definitely that, and how the story is evil or cruel to Naoto because subjecting a person like Naoto to that experience is fundamentally terrible.

One of the things that lurks in my mind about this is how Naoto is so important. People see Naoto, and assert that there’s something there they identify with, and then it becomes as true as true can be. Then suddenly, the work itself, the character’s own words, aren’t trusted. Interpretations about what this must be become layered over and over Naoto.

One of the things about this that gets wonky is pronouns, too. Pronouns in English are an ugly pile of messy garbage, where we have this half-assed gendering of some things (like blonde and him and her) but mostly don’t use gendering in language, except when we do and it becomes super important. In Japanese, there’s a different structure to both pronouns and honorifics, many of which are filed under the general sense of ‘untranslateables.’ We don’t have a translation for many of these things in English – just not at all. We put a lot of stock in these things, which are explicitly impossible to properly transfer across cultural boundaries.

Naoto’s relationship to pronouns is therefore, at best, a sort of semi-official fanon? The pronouns used in Japanese to refer to the character aren’t even the ones we translate to. And when we say ‘they’re more or less okay’ that’s actually part of the problem. Because in English when you address a person with ambiguous pronouns, you are being deliberately ambiguous. The singular they is not a habit yet; it’s a statement in and of itself. In Japanese, you can use un-gendered pronouns to discuss a person and it isn’t making the same kind of statement. Which means that there are people strongly attached to their perception of Naoto, and from that perception, assert that the game (and even its creator) is awful and has awful values, or that the game is really great and progressive and thoughtful.

Now the good news is, you’re all kinda right. The Naoto in your head is your Naoto. You’re going to bring your own context to the story, and just like Nostalgia, you’re going to contextualise the characters you perceive. If you see in Naoto something that means something to you that’s okay. Your Naoto is your Naoto.

Part of the problem that flows from this then is the dogged assertation of what is and isn’t true, and that can make talking about Naoto a fraught minefield. It can be seen as an act of erasure when talking about what is an actual ambiguity – an ambiguity that some erase thanks to a well-intentioned ethnocentric viewpoint. This is also another part of why it’s important for media to wholeheartedly and clearly feature characters from marginalised groups. Don’t just offer subtext. Subtext, we can find in so many sources, even when it’s not intended. Give people text, they deserve it.