Extra Chapter: Fighting Gotou and Neutral Dialogue

Before getting into the next arc there's another point to address; alternate scenes. Law and Neutral-aligned players have different objectives at this point in the game, getting a different boss fight and dialogue that we wouldn't see by siding with Gotou. We're still at the point where it's not too much of a pain for me to load my previous save and see these, so I decided to show off how things play out from a Neutral perspective.

Gotou's sitting pose seems to be based on a wax figure of Mishima that once occupied the Tokyo Tower Wax Museum. I say "seems to" because the museum was established in 1970 but some of its collection (particularly the 20th century figures) is as recent as 2001, so the figure may not have been installed until after SMT was produced.

By Tamotsu Yato in Young Samurai: Bodybuilders of Japan

There are some similar photographs of Mishima from his lifetime, like the one displayed above, that could also have conceivably been the basis for Gotou's pose. The Mishima figure itself was taken out sometime around March 2008, and I don't know if it's been reinstalled or not.

Like at the Government Office, Gotou's gimmick is that we have to make it through several waves of demons before we can fight the core boss, which wears us down over time to make the last battle more difficult. Rusalka uses Marin Karin to Charm the Nue here, which takes it completely out of commission while we focus on the Pisaca. As the Pisaca and Nue are technically in separate parties, the Nue can only attack itself while Charmed and eventually kills itself before we can. In its own way the whole idea of a spell that intoxicates you so much you'd rather die than fight the enemy is morbidly humorous.

And Rusalka doesn't even get a chance to Marin Karin as Cyak oneshots Baykok with Hama and Nekomata takes out Shade with her Extra skill.

Gotou: It seems demons are not enough to kill you. Very well, I will use my own hand.

Like Thor, Gotou has been upgraded for iOS to be immune to Charm tactics. His moveset has Shibaboo and a Diarama self-heal, but his most dangerous play is a critical hit ("uses all of his might") which deals around ~50 damage. This oneshots Cyak but not before we get off a couple Ziongas. The main problem is that he only gets one turn to our five, and even after Cyak goes down we can summon demons in its place. On-defeat he yields ¥1344, 560 MAG, -32 (Law) points and the Kotetsu. The last of these is a sword that was called the Meitou Kotetsu in Aeon's translation; it's named after Nagasone Kotetsu, a famous Edo-period swordsmith whose work was so well renowned that many forgeries submerged attempts at reliably determining the number of real Kotetsus in existence. A Meitou is a sword bearing the signature of its smith, so this would be a signed Kotetsu work, fitting for the personal weapon of a pseudo-Samurai.

While he was featured prominently in several photoshoots and videos depicting his swordsmanship, he wasn't a collector and I haven't read of Mishima owning a Kotetsu. In life his actual personal sword had a false reputation for being forged by the second Seki no Magoroku (関の孫六), also called Kanemoto II, a sixteenth century swordsmith whose line of smiths survives into the present. According to the swordmaster that sold the sword to Hiroshi Funasaka (who then gifted it to Mishima in August 1966), the sword actually originated from a shop in Yokohama, bought in the early 1960s. (Ross 220) The sword was unsigned and so not a Meitou, but its papers attributed it to a later-generation Kanemoto. Mishima's sword was thus either an unsigned Magoroku from a later generation than Kanemoto II, or it was a convincing forgery using Kanemoto's name on its paperwork. Mishima's Magoroku is said to have gone missing after it was used to decapitate him. It was also instrumental in his real coup at Camp Ichigaya--pretending to present it to the SDF commandant was the signal for his accomplices to accost and tie him up, but it was also the weapon he arranged to be used to finish himself off during his suicide. In effect, what he saw as a historical weapon would be used either to initiate the coup d'état that would reinstate the emperor, or it would be used to kill the man that tried to create that coup, giving it a lot of symbolic weight in addition to being a historical artifact. These days the whereabouts of it are unknown. The last person to handle it (in its bloody and rusted state) may have been the journalist Christopher Ross, who investigated it extensively in 2005 and was finally able to see it under certain terms of secrecy. By his own admission, what he saw may not have been the genuine article. He published comprehensive book on his investigation in 2006, Mishima's Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend, which also included a useful bibliography linking to other works on Mishima. I'd recommend it if you're interested in the novelist, as it provides a useful frame around which his beliefs and goals can be studied and makes links to a lot of the important figures in his history.

If we were on a second cycle, Gotou would drop a vision item. One of the obstacles with the whole vision system is that to really get all of the items, you have to do a minimum of four playthroughs; there are 15 items that can be acquired on a first playthrough regardless of alignment, six that can only be acquired on a second or greater cycle, two that can be gotten on a first playthrough by being Neutral-aligned, one which requires the Neutral ending, one which requires a second cycle and a (current) Neutral alignment to obtain, three which require the Chaos ending, one that requires a Chaos alignment, one that requires a second cycle and Chaos alignment with no ending requirement, three items for being Law aligned on a first playthrough, and two for having the Law ending. Since Chaos has the most items unlocked by doing the Chaos ending and Law has the most items unlocked by having the right alignment, to get all 35 vision items it's best to do the first playthrough as Chaos, the second playthrough as Law and the third as Neutral, adjusting alignment as needed to pick up the one Chaos-aligned second playthrough item. The fourth playthrough to pick up the Neutral ending item doesn't even have to be completed all the way, as that vision item shows up early on in Shinjuku. More simply organized, you can do your first playthrough according to whichever extreme sways you, do your second as the opposite alignment, and your third as the secret Neutral ending; which is appropriate, as by your third playthrough you're much more well versed in how to balance alignment and which options trigger which flags.

That's all for Gotou. My umbrage with how they handle his character in all of the routes is that unlike with Thor there's no real resolution to him. Anticlimactically he either dies a low-key death or walks out of the room, and that's that. The idea behind his character is interesting and provides a charismatic figure to lead the Ring of Gaea and the coup d'état forces, but it doesn't go anywhere in the end. Of course, Gotou is very different from the person he's based on and those differences are an interesting topic of their own. Mishima's role in assembling the Shield Society was taking what were essentially an outcast group of university students--isolated individuals whose political views did not align with the majority of the student body--and giving them an organization where their views were encouraged and accepted as a majority viewpoint. That's very different from Gotou, an SDF general who spurs people on without a specific audience to preach to. Mishima did not just create the Shield Society, but was also created by it.

As with any other dead author, studying Mishima is an all-consuming vortex, but I am not studying him for his own sake. It is not my desire to be a Mishima biographer, but to approximate why Gotou, a caricature of Mishima, is used to represent for the Chaos alignment. My belief is that the effect is to repel, rather than to attract, Japanese players. Since his suicide Mishima has been something studied in the dark, behind closed doors. He's not a part of polite conversation, or at least he wasn't during the last surge of interest around '05. His books still sell surprisingly well for a literary author, but the initial reaction in the 70s was to call him "crazy" (気違い Kichigai) and since that time his suicide has deeply overshadowed his literary achievements. (Ross 240)

I believe that part of the reasoning behind Gotou's design is because of the beliefs Mishima expressed in his fiction. In his first and most famous work, Confessions of a Mask, the protagonist Kimi-chan quotes the novelist Stefan Zweig in rejecting orthodox morality. "What we call evil is the instability inherent in all mankind which drives man [...] toward an unfathomable something, exactly as though Nature had bequeathed to our souls [...] instability from her store of ancient chaos." (Mishima 104-105) Nature's "legacy of unrest" resolves itself into "super-human and super-sensory elements," and it is this quotation leafed from Confessions to which I ascribe the namesake for Gotou's super-human Meta race. Mishima's Confessions were a fictionalized autobiography that effectively served as his coming out story, although this description fails to encompass the dark perversity of the novel and its preoccupation with homoerotic sadism, blood and cannibalism. The point is that with few limits Kimi-chan's views are Mishima's views, and that likely influenced Kaneko and Okada in choosing the basis for Gotou's character. Paraphrased Kimi-chan (and by my interpretation, Mishima) believes that "what we call evil is just a portion of the original chaos out of which man was born." (Ross 208) To live is to be in chaos, and to retreat from chaos is to be dead.

In like, Mishima was preoccupied with individuality, cultivating uniqueness and an identity separate from the masses. The character of Kimi-chan was terrified of peace, because Japan's surrender in '45 erased the certainty of death as a solution to the banality of everyday life. Suicide was only impossible during the war because the war would kill him. Confessions also provides an interesting contrast to a normalized response to art, with a scene involving Guido Reni's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Where the default view of the Martyrdom would be to admire it for its spiritual qualities or impressive technique, Kimi-chan's first impulse in the novel is to masturbate. He treats a sacred work much as any other child in their first encounter with their parents' hidden pornography, in effect broaching holy iconography with homoerotic fascination, treading against a subject protected by God, and while I can only guess at this idea I believe this scene had a special influence on how Mishima was fictionalized into Gotou.

I think thus far I've given an overdramatized view of Mishima. While he had some skill in the martial arts, earnestly trained with the SDF and tried to embrace a warrior's lifestyle after the war, he never saw real combat and like his character Kimi-chan lucked out of the battlefield by coming down ill. Despite serious dedication to the craft, every witness to his actual martial ability testified to stiff wrists and a lack of mastery in kendo. He was an effete, awkward man who became a great author by essentially having nothing to live for after childhood and putting his death on hold for thirty years. Being able to do anything, he sought to do everything. And while his prose is truly important to the 20th century and he had a prescient understanding of how Japan was changing in its modernization, his real talent is often said to have been in the theater, in the realm of Kabuki and Noh drama. His first book was also his best, no matter how much he wanted the Sea of Fertility to be his greatest work. I think that in my research of him, the one thing I came to truly respect was his understanding of the nature of aging as a slow erasure of the senses, and his decision on when, where and how he would die. In the minds of everyone that knew him and in every article to be written about him, by dying at forty-five Mishima remained forty-five forever.

Gaean Priest: Although...If you give a large enough offering, I amy think about admitting you. Do you wish to offer 01000 yen to the Gaean Ashram?
At this point I need to exploit the specific feature of these healing areas, getting either +1 or -1 alignment points depending on which one you use. I have to pay the alignment fees seventeen times in total in order to shift my alignment back to Neutral after killing Gotou, which is pretty crucial seeing as I'm so Lawfully aligned at this point that it's impossible to summon Chaos demons like Cyak.

Ambassador Thorman: You have already beaten Gotou!? That...

Thor: Very good work. You have Deity Thor's praise, in the place of our Lord. Will you continue to do the Lord's work?
>NO
You will not listen to what I have to say!? Very well. I, Deity Thor, shall end your lives here!
I think that a lot of players find it confusing that a Norse deity like Thor would support the Judeo-Christian god, but there is a (possibly apocryphal) mythological basis for this. Over the course of Scandinavia's conversion to Christianity, the native Norse myths were gradually Christianized to make the invading religion more palatable to natives, with parallels being drawn between the Norse gods and figures in Christian iconography. This can be compared to the Romans equating the Greek gods with their own; Odin is treated as Yehowah, Loki is demonized into a Lucifer figure, Baldr compared with Jesus etc. So Thor was transformed gradually from one whose hammer could be used as a ward against the cross, into a figure of the newly Christianized mythology. His hammer would follow by being conflated with the cross. This irony was supplanted by the fact that participation in the Christianized myths would be his doom, as the Norse gods were eventually erased entirely along with the native paganism--Thor is reenacting his self-destruction by trying to create the Millennium Kingdom. There is a certain poetic statement to be found in the conflation of the cross/hammer iconography, as when Thor invokes his own hammer as the ICBMs this can also be read as the cross being called upon to destroy Tokyo. I would file this under Internet Knowledge though because I can't find a positive source for where the Scandinavia story originates from. You'd think it would come up in a survey of medieval art, but nope!

On a more easily overlooked note, Japanese fans have pointed out that Thor's disguise as Ambassador Thorman (トールマン Tooruman) is probably derived from President Harry S. Truman (トルーマン Toruuman) wrapping up the Shinjuku arc's World War II-centric themes. The names are one vowel mark apart in Japanese.

(This fight is unchanged except that I don't try to Charm him and instead set everyone to use guns, Zionga/Mazio and physicals and then go straight to Autobattle.)

Thor: But my hammer has been swung already. Tokyo's annihilation by ICBM is imminent. This city will perish, together with all its demons! Glory to the Millennium Kingdom!
This is the kind of dialogue that I could see lending itself to a remake. Imagine this line being read by Jamieson Price.

To close this off I'm going to address a vision item that weren't covered in the previous chapters; the Gnawed Ball from all the way back in Pascal's room in Kichijoji. You can pick it up as soon as he joins you, but this skipped my mind.

>Touya back in fifth grade...

......
Mother: I got him from Mr. Nakajima's place.
......
Mother: Oh good...It makes me glad to see you so excited over something. Remember how you were saying you wanted a pet? His name...? He said it was Pascal. That's certainly a funny name, don't you think? Try calling to him.
......
"Mr. Nakajima" is a covert reference to Akemi Nakajima, the protagonist of the Digital Devil Story novels from which the franchise was generated. It's not an actual connection though, only a tacit acknowledgement of the Megami Tensei games that preceded SMT. Nakajima's world has a completely different cosmology from most of the franchise, introduced demons to the world around 1986 and the tone of DDS was along the same lines as trashy airport novels. Having read the first novel I'm not particularly impressed with Digital Devil Story, I would compare it to the Twilight saga in quality. The novelty of intersecting magic with computer science has been put to better use elsewhere in the years since, while the actual content of the book skews towards gore matched with cheap pornography.

It's possible that the real purpose of referencing Nakajima is to cue players familiar with the novels to fuse Pascal into Cerberus, recalling Nakajima's own personal Cerberus.

Mother: (Touya was so down before, but he seems so happy now...I'm glad that I decided to go adopt that dog.)
Pascal: Arf! Woof!
Series scenario writer Ryutaro Ito once mentioned in an interview that to him, the reason we never see the protagonist's father is because his parents are split up. Pascal thus fills an important emotional void for the player character. It's a little corny, but now knowing where Pascal's fate will take him, the image of the gnawed ball is enough to evoke a sentimental feeling. Unsurprisingly, one of the driving motivations for the player up until they choose a side is to find Pascal, whose whereabouts are still up in the air. And for some players, the fact that the protagonist's dog is also a demon and an enemy of god can be sufficient reason enough to side against Thor. Would you really side with someone who wants to wipe out all of the demons when that includes one of your close friends? The Japanese transcript of this interview originates from Daisan Hinanjo "Shelter No. 3" a Japanese Megaten fansite generally held to be reputable. This is the same source which transcribed the Mega CD script, and its namesake is the protagonist's home in Megami Tensei II.

Closing thoughts; it's unfortunately rare to have genuinely learned something from a video game, but I can say for certain that I would never have read Mishima's Sword if not for SMT, nor had my interest piqued beyond a surface level on Mishima. So if nothing else, the game got me to pick up a book. On the other hand I can't say that anyone's read A Brief History of Time because of this game, but perhaps that should be next on my list.

References

Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask. Trans. Meredith Weatherby. New York: New Directions, 1958. Web. 16 July 2014.
Ross, Christopher. Mishima's Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend. Cambridge: De Capo Press, 2006.