“Sadie,” Sam said gently. “You can take the art, you know? Marx won’t mind if you hang it.”
Sadie continued to stare at the Hokusai wave.
“Sadie,” Sam repeated.
“Sam, look at this.” She pushed him a little so that he had the same vantage point she did. “This is what the game should look like.”
The Hokusai print on Sadie’s wall was an exhibition poster from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was identified as The Great Wave at Kanagawa. （In Japanese, the title is far more ominous, something like, Under the Wave off Kanagawa.） The Great Wave is arguably the most famous Japanese artwork in the world, and in the 1990s, it was absolutely an MIT student housing staple, only slightly less ubiquitous than those Magic Eye prints that always left Sam so cold. The Great Wave depicts an enormous wave that dwarfs the other elements in the frame, three fishing boats and a mountain. The style is clean and graphic, befitting the fact that it was designed to be carved into a cherrywood block and infinitely reproduced.
Sadie knew that the key to making a video game on limited resources was to make the limitations part of the style. （That was why she had made Solution black-and-white.） For the same reason that the print would have been reproducible in the 1830s （its limited palette and the deceptive simplicity of its form language）， Sadie knew she would be able to re-create this look in computer graphics as well.
Sam considered the Hokusai wave. He backed up, cleaned his glasses, and then considered it some more. “I see it,” he said. They were at that rare moment in a collaboration where they were consistently grokking, where consensus was reached quickly on almost everything. “Is the child Japanese like Marx’s father?”
“No,” Sadie said. “Not explicitly. Or maybe that’s not the right word. Not obviously. Not like we’re making a point of it. But, in a way, it doesn’t matter where the child is from—they aren’t verbal, right? They can’t speak much or read. Their own language is a foreign language. So, the gamer won’t know anyway.”
The decision to style the world after the Hokusai pushed everything in a Japanese direction, though. And as they were coming up with the character design for their “child,” they found themselves drawn to Japanese references over and over: the deceptively innocent paintings of Yoshitomo Nara; Miyazaki anime like Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke; other, more adult anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, both of which Sam had loved; and of course, Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, the first of which is The Great Wave.
It was 1996, and the word “appropriation” never occurred to either of them. They were drawn to these references because they loved them, and they found them inspiring. They weren’t trying to steal from another culture, though that is probably what they did.
Consider Mazer in a 2017 interview with Kotaku, celebrating the twentieth-anniversary Nintendo Switch port of the original Ichigo:
kotaku: It is said that the original Ichigo is one of the most graphically beautiful low-budget games ever made, but its critics also accuse it of appropriation. How do you respond to that?
mazer: I do not respond to that.
kotaku: Okay…But would you make the same game if you were making it now?
mazer: No, because I am a different person than I was then.
kotaku: In terms of its obvious Japanese references, I mean. Ichigo looks like a character Yoshitomo Nara could have painted. The world design looks like Hokusai, except for the Undead level, which looks like Murakami. The soundtrack sounds like Toshiro Mayuzumi…
mazer: I won’t apologize for the game Sadie and I made. [Long pause.] We had many references—Dickens, Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, Philip Glass, Chuck Close, Escher. [Another long pause.] And what is the alternative to appropriation?
kotaku: I don’t know.
mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.
kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue.
mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don’t own or have a particularly rich understanding of the references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn’t be a problem for you, I guess?
* * *
—
Sam and his mother, Anna Lee, arrived in Los Angeles in July of 1984. It was the summer of the Olympics, the first Summer Olympics to be held in the United States in fifty years. The mood was hopeful and manic. Los Angeles, especially when taken from a distance, was not a beautiful city, but she could will herself to be beautiful, if only for two weeks. Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve. Urban renewal projects were accomplished so frantically it seemed like time-lapse photography. Stadiums built, hotels refurbished, decrepit buildings detonated, flora planted, less appealing native flora removed, roads paved, bus routes added, uniforms created, musicians recruited, dancers hired, corporate sponsors slapped on any surface that would receive a logo, graffiti painted over, homeless discreetly relocated, coyotes euthanized, bribes paid; deeper schisms around race and class momentarily tabled because company was coming! L.A. reinvented herself as a bright, modern city of the future who knew how to throw a party. With the narcissism of childhood, Sam would feel as if the “improvements” were being enacted for his and Anna’s benefit, and he would always feel a tenderness when he thought of those first months in Los Angeles and the way the city had rolled out its red carpet just for him.
They stayed with Anna’s parents, Dong Hyun and Bong Cha Lee, in their yellow Craftsman-style house in sleepy Echo Park, which was still twenty years away from being a hipster enclave. Dong Hyun and Bong Cha spent most of their waking hours at their eponymous pizzeria in nearby Koreatown, and that was where Sam would pass most of that summer. Anna had told Sam about K-town, but he had no sense of how large K-town would actually be. He thought it would be like Chinatown in New York, a couple of blocks of apothecaries, gift shops, and restaurants, or like Thirty-Second Street, Manhattan’s Korean restaurant row, where he and his mom would sometimes go after a show for bulgogi and banchan. K-town in Los Angeles was massive. It was miles and miles of Korean people and things, right in the center of town. There were Korean faces on the billboards, and these Korean faces were celebrities, and even if Sam didn’t know who these celebrities were, he hadn’t known that there could be Korean celebrities. There was bubbly Korean writing on all the storefronts, more Korean writing than English. If you didn’t read hangul, you were basically a K-town illiterate. There were Korean bookstores and bridal salons and grocery stores as big as white-people grocery stores that sold enormous, individually wrapped Asian pears and family-sized jars of kimchi and thousands of Korean beauty products promising textureless skin, and thick paperback volumes of fluorescent and pastel-colored manhwa. There were enough Korean barbecues to eat at a different one every day for year. There were even two Korean television channels that came in on Bong Cha’s antenna. And yes, there were people. Sam had never seen so many Asian people in one place before. And seeing them made him wonder if he had completely misunderstood the world and who the people in it were. Maybe the whole world was Asian?