On Animal Crossing and the Ghosts of Empire

I am definitely not a gamer. In fact, I’m terrible at video games of all kinds. When I was a senior in college, my roommates acquired a Nintendo 64 and became obsessed with the first-person shooter game Goldeneye. The entire time I was writing my senior thesis, they were trying to convince me to play Goldeneye, and they couldn’t believe it when I said I’d rather work on my footnotes.

That year, the only thing I was willing to make time for was a boy I met in the elevator of our dorm. He started coming to visit me, or so I thought, until he discovered that my roommates had the N64. After that, he, too, spent most of his time playing Goldeneye, and I went back to my senior thesis. Like many Harvard men who spent their college years getting stoned and gaming, he later became a sucessful venture capitalist. 

Maybe it was the bad memory of the Goldeneye fiasco, but twenty years later, my roommates were still playing Nintendo games, and I was still refusing to join them. I managed to ignore Zelda and all things Mario, cart or otherwise. But when they started playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, our group chat shifted to Japanese language questions. “Amy, what is a kotatsu?” they wrote. “What is a suteteko? What is a jinbei?”  

Finally, after months of this, they convinced me that I should play Animal Crossing. “It’s relaxing!” they said. “You don’t have to shoot anyone. You don’t even need to talk to anyone if you don’t want to.” And I thought they had a point – anything would be better than endlessly doom scrolling Twitter. Meanwhile, I was stuck at home in a pandemic with two Nintendo Switch-obsessed children. I couldn’t summon the concentration to do scholarship, but I could certainly move to an imaginary island and harvest oranges.

But unfortunately, twenty years later, even in the middle of a pandemic, I’m still myself. While playing what should have been a completely relaxing game, I found myself considering . . . the robust English-language scholarship on the Japanese empire.

In my defense, this isn’t an entirely ridiculous thing to think about while playing Animal Crossing. As most gamers know, Nintendo is a Japanese company that has its roots in the Meiji Period. It began in 1889 as a Kyoto firm that manufactured the playing cards used in Japanese games such as karuta, where players matched the verses of famous poems. The cards seemed “traditional,” but in fact they were global artifacts: playing cards were introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, at which point much older games were adapted to fit the new form. Nintendo extended this legacy of adaptation, moving into electronic toys in the 1970s, and ultimately becoming a world-dominating video game company. The story of the company itself is, in essence, a story about Japan’s changing relationship with the rest of the world, mediated through the constant recasting of “traditional” culture. 

Nintendo’s prewar “flower cards”

This brings us to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It goes like this: Your avatar is sent to a deserted island with a unique layout and a certain kind of indigenous fruit tree (mine is an orange) and a certain kind of indigenous flower (mine is a lily). An enthusiastic but dimwitted capitalist named Nook has sponsored the journey, and he expects to be paid back, but – as will be the case throughout the game – he charges no interest. You arrive along with other newcomers, your “villagers,” and your task is to develop the island by creating habitations and infrastructure. The best way to earn money is to harvest the natural resources of the island and sell them to a petty shopkeeper; you can also use these resources to construct tools that will aid you in development. Eventually, you meet a naturalist who wants to build a museum on your island, so you donate materials for his collections. You can do all this while dressed in an increasingly varied and ridiculous series of outfits. That, more or less, is the game.

All of this – including the construction of new infrastructure, the intense interest in natural phenomena, and the ridiculous outfits – sounds a lot like an early twentieth-century colonial enterprise. In fact, it is distressingly reminiscent of the Japanese empire itself.

I’m sure that this is not at all what Nintendo intended, especially given the fraught and controversial legacy of the Japanese empire in important East Asian markets. In fact, the game goes to great lengths to emphasize that the island is completely uninhabited: the “villagers” are fellow migrants. This makes the Animal Crossing world completely different from the actual Japanese colonial enterprise, which variously exploited, suppressed, negotiated with, and collaborated with the Chinese, Korean, Ainu, Pacific Islander, Taiwanese, Okinawan and other indigenous people inhabiting the empire. But the ghost of the imperial subject haunts the game, literally. Soon after you arrive on the island, you encounter a drifting ghost, who is shocked at your intrusion on his territory. He seems to predate your settlement by many years. When he sees you, he falls to pieces; throughout the game, he demands to be remembered and reconstructed. 

Many of the game’s most charming features can also be read as ghostly reminders of the Japanese empire. So in the rest of this essay, with my tongue only very slightly in cheek, I am going to offer a very brief introduction to the historiography of Japanese empire, as you might encounter it in its far more pleasant and relaxing Animal Crossing form. (One caveat: I am not a historian of Japanese empire. In fact, I tend to avoid the twentieth century as assiduously as I once avoided video games. So please understand this as a beginner’s perspective on the scholarship of empire, just as it is a beginner’s perspective on the game.)

One of the main tasks of Animal Crossing is cultivation: the player is invited to plant trees, bushes, and flowers. The trees are not only decorative; they are also harvested for hardwood, softwood, and branches, which the player can sell or use in construction. In fact, it is impossible to play this game without planting and harvesting trees. The same was true of the real-world Japanese empire. David Fedman’s work explains how the Japanese pursued a “greenification” policy in colonial Korea. They replanted denuded forests, which they then consumed in an orgy of resource extraction. At the same time, they restricted the consumption of wood by their Korean subjects, trying to turn them from their traditional wood-burning practices to more fuel-efficient means of heating (and, in wartime, to much less nearing overall). The Japanese aimed much of their ire at the ondol, a combination stove and floor heater. As far as I know, you cannot buy an ondol in Animal Crossing, but you can certainly buy a Japanese kotatsu table heater (which sparked my roommates’ curiosity). 

An Animal Crossing cedar tree

Ultimately, resource extraction on one’s own island is limited – to succeed in the game, the player has to find outlying islands from which to harvest iron ore, wood, and different kinds of fruits. The game encourages the player to find these small islands, gather as much as possible (including, sometimes, people!) and bring them back to the main island. Recruiting “desirable” settlers is, of course, the defining characteristic of actual settler colonialism. Kidnapping was also a real strategy of Pacific empires – in fact, as Viktor Shmagin mentions in his dissertation, in the nineteenth century the Russians briefly contemplated expropriating the Japanese inhabitants of Karafuto in order to resettle them in Alaska.

Island resource extraction, too, was a common strategy of Pacific empires. Paul Kreitman’s dissertation explores the “guano islands” where Japanese and Americans competed to harvest albatross excrement (which was useful as fertilizer). He argues that both American and Japanese imperial actors used the discourse of “conservation” even as they scrambled to gather feathers and guano. Meanwhile, both sides used the islands to make territorial claims. This process involved deliberately occluding or ignoring the inhabitants of these islands and their work. In contrast, the Animal Crossing player is never called upon to annex new territory, but she is encouraged to concentrate on extraction to an almost unsettling degree – once these islands are abandoned, full of holes, stumps, and shattered rocks, the player never encounters them again. 

While the player has to engage in resource extraction in order to make progress, most of the travel in the game is coded as tourism. The player is issued a passport, which receives stamps, and is encouraged to take pictures with her “phone.” In fact, leisure travel is marketed as a feature of island life, encouraged by the cheerful pilot who mans the island’s makeshift airport. This, too, was a feature of Japanese empire. Louise Young writes about how Manchukuo was marketed as a tourist destination – the “dark valley” of the Pacific War, she argues, was considerably brightened for middle-class Japanese by the prospect of imperial recreation. Kate MacDonald, focusing on a longer period, contends that the conditions of travel were uneven; leisure mobility for middle-class Japanese subjects was undergirded by the coerced travel and difficult circumstances of lower-class Japanese laborers and colonial subjects who occupied lower berths and third-class cars. Meanwhile, the central place of travel photography in making empire (the “visual economy of race-making”) is discussed in Paul Barclay’s work on Taiwan. 

But let’s get back to the more enjoyable circumstances of Animal Crossing. On the main island, the player is encouraged to clear land and bring it under cultivation. Right now, I’m growing peach trees on my island, Stanlandia. Of course, this changes the ecology of the island, and the non-native species (non-indigenous fruit trees) bring higher prices in the island markets than the ubiquitous native fruits. The transformation of native ecologies – and the encouragement of settled agriculture – were, of course, prominent features of empire. But unlike in Animal Crossing, these real-world strategies had human and environmental costs. Wendy Matsumura discusses how the Japanese imposed a capitalist regime of resource-intensive sugar cultivation in Okinawa, transforming relations between elites and peasants and inspiring vigorous resistance. In Manchuria, the Japanese (extending similar efforts by Qing and Republican Chinese governments) transformed the pastoral territory of nomadic Mongols into soybean farms. Sakura Christmas describes how this initiative drained selenium from the soil and caused endemic disease among cultivators. Needless to say, horrific episodes of yellow diarrhea never appear in Animal Crossing (at least, they haven’t so far). 

As the player persists in the game, she meets more and more characters, many of whom seem reminiscent of real world settler colonialists. Even the more-or-less benevolent and harmless characters in Animal Crossing have their imperial equivalents. Nook – the hapless capitalist – is a benign version of the actual labor brokers who kept Japanese migrants in debt until they could reimburse their travel costs. The small shopkeepers and traveling merchants who appear to offer plants and strange assortments of clothes have their counterparts in the Omi merchants discussed in Jun Uchida’s work on Korea. She makes the argument that petty shopkeepers and enterprising small-time merchants were the backbone of Japan’s colonial enterprise on the peninsula. Similar, less family-friendly characters appear in David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds. This assortment of grifters, pirates, and prostitutes more closely resembles the character of Redd, a fox who appears on a boat and offers the player stolen artwork before drifting away to parts unknown. 

Finally, one of the most intriguing characters in the Animal Crossing world is the curator of the island museum, a pedantic owl named Blathers. Unlike the other characters, who don’t seem to have any ethnicity (at least in my reading), Blathers, who wears a tweed suit and speaks in the pompous cadences of Owl from A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, seems unmistakably British. This is interesting, because the British Museum is probably the most famous example of imperial collection and display. In Japan, too, the construction of museums, zoos, and botanical gardens was a feature of what Robert Eskildsen calls (in a different context) “mimetic imperialism,” in which the Japanese copied the strategies of other empires. As Annika Culver has argued, Japanese and British and American ornithologists formed enduring scientific networks in the pre-war era, sharing a upper-class culture of birding, which Japanese elites found extremely attractive. (This is where the ridiculous outfits come in.) Meanwhile, Ian Miller points out that the Japanese were inspired by British and other European models when they constructed Ueno Zoo, which then served as a place to exhibit the fauna of empire. Alice Tseng describes how art museums, too, served the aims of state-building, and, later, empire – they were spaces where national identity was constructed and displayed. The design of Blathers’ museum looks modern, but it’s patterned on the Meiji-era institutions that Tseng describes.

There are many additional avenues of exploration here. There’s the history of Meiji-era mountaineering (hello, Kären Wigen!) and the construction of colonial transportation infrastructure (hello to my student Youjia Li!). If you’re an actual expert on this era, and the game, you can probably think of much more to say.

But for now, it’s after my kids’ bedtime, the Nintendo Switch is finally free, and I have some azaleas to plant in Stanlandia. 

(This essay is dedicated to Jennie Connery, Liz Marsham, and Jessica Jackson, in gratitude for iron ore, a marimba, a muscle suit, several bags of hyacinths, and 25 years of friendship)