Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Joker Game
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Valhern
 Posts: 916 |
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I was pleasantly surprised. I really thought that Joker Game would have been a "cool spies outsmarting the unoutsmartable, facing hell and walking back" show, things like that. So far, it was, although many not agree, more subtle than it seems.
The thing with the corrupt guy was not the strongest message here, we can have that everywhere, he was just the click Sakuma needed to open his eyes a little (and show how badass Yuuki is). However, obviously was the imagery and the idealism of Sakuma that gets broken, we see him remembering the teaching of old days, the days in which the Emperor's picture was sacred, in which everything was so simple and his duty was clear. But now, when he thinks himself marching with all the other soldiers (I thought that was in his himagination, though), he can't help but think that everyone there are putting their lives on the line for someone who doesn't care, he questions himself "If this isn't serving my nation, then what is?" It's a huge breaking point for him, when you realize that your duty is ultimately, meaningless and harmful for yourself and your country itself; remember? He looked terrified at the thought of "Losing the war". At the end of the episode, I think there was also a semi-answer of "We can lose the war." Now, this is just one thing for a character, I hope the show gets actually vocal on this, although I won't get mad if it doesn't, but I'd rather have that. Probably my only nitpick was how "short" the episode was, with at least 3 to 4 minutes of recap and flashbacks, a 40/45 minutes premiere would've been better. |
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stilldemented
 Posts: 232 |
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Joker Game has me struggling to put pen to paper. I like it well enough, and am interested to see what sort of shenanigans will unfold in this tale of espionage. I think it will be interesting to see how the show handles its content.
This tale of espionage has hammered home that our cast of characters are in training to become nobody. This is reflected in how impersonal and detached we are from the cast. The main character is our entry point and seems reasonable enough, but he is also somewhat distant (and looking to go further down that rabbit hole). As an afterthought, the show also uses various cold palettes throughout to make everything less distinguishable. (I'm not artistically savvy, but hopefully that conveys the general thought I have for the look of the show.) I'm curious to see how the show will go about keeping its audience engaged. This first game was a nice little appetizer. I'm ready to see how intellectually stimulating the Joker Games can become. Hopefully, the intrigue will not require specific knowledge of the times. I missed all my Japanese 1930s lectures, unfortunately. 
I'm entertained at present. Got a nice bag of popcorn and went to munching. I probably won't watch it every week, but it seems to be doing alright. It's not really my kind of entertainment, but it's nice to switch things up from time to time. 
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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Was good but not amazing. I'd like it to be more subtle (never like message show) and I think the resolution was too easy (sorta related). I mean, nobody looked behind the portrait? They destroy the house but don't even bother looking behind the portrait, I get reverence but they do know that portrait don't spawn into existence. The portrait has to be put there and so at some point someone had to move it, so what's the big deal with looking behind it. So they ultimately didn't come off as having a wrong ideology, they just came off as moron.
Also the show really has to address how exactly are the character going to act as spy, japan didn't have much of a diaspora and spying when you're obviously foreign is super hard. At most they could maybe try to pass of as chinese, but they the first real chinese they'll see will know right away there japanesse. |
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zrnzle500
 Posts: 3767 |
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Even if they knew someone could put stuff behind the portrait of the Emperor, they couldn't disturb the portait. As Mutou's question to Sakuma after he brought it up implied, it would have been blasphemous to do so. This is in line with how people have treated sacred objects, and may well be in line with official policy on the matter. Whether one finds such behavior stupid is immaterial to the question of whether it is believable that people would act that way. Furthermore, the author seems to be saying, as Jake pointed out, that not only were they wrong but also stupid. So saying they seem stupid may actually the point. I can't speak to other country's Japanese diaspora, but the hundred some thousand Japanese Americans (62 percent of which were citizens) interned during WWII seems to belie your point. A terrible thing they didn't deserve, especially as 20,000 fought in WWII for the US, at least as loyally as anyone else. Regardless there were quite a few Japanese people in the US at least, though as far as I know none were spies for Japan, despite the US government's belief at the time. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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A delightfully insightful review as always, Jacob! It is a relief to learn that this show's political stance is likely to afford a wider significance—coerced though it may be—to its inevitably cold twists and deceptions.
All I can regret at this stage is that the various players, representative though they are of either old ideologies or their equally impersonal antitheses, are all quite rotten. So far Sakuma is the only one on the screen who shows any of the traits that earn a character his right to our continued attention, and that is mainly through him being an excusable naif showing discomfort within his mould. The other agents, as you seem to notice, are comfortably nihilistic despite their collectedness. It would be much of a shame if they never suffer their own conflicts, if only to let their coolness crumble a little. That way we may get a glimpse of a few more people and a few less spies. |
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Dian Z
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The manga adaptation of the same source (novel) is pretty much episodic. With different spy being the focus character of different spying story. We have Miyoshi in the first story (though Sakuma being the pov character to introduce the concept and background). Then the next story with different spy and different setting follows (Sakuma might still appear in small role, though may completely gone in later stories). The manga didn't introduce that much spies, though, ended only after 3 or 4 stories probably because of lack of readers' interests, idk. I honestly hope that the anime adaptation would show a more united stories, since episodic stories are just not my cup of coffee, personally. But if it intends to give commentaries on the Japanese issues at the time, the episodic nature I think is just sufficient to show the varied commentaries. |
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MarshalBanana
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#844391
Posts: 517 |
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enjoying this series quite a bit, as its one of the few series this season with actual intelligent dialogue. I enjoy a good harem or magical school anime every now and then but its really good to see a smart season like this. Definitely going to keep watching this
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zrnzle500
Posts: 3767 |
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It is possible (and I am familiar with the the Bond work) that spies were sent at some point. I was mainly referring specifically to those interned. That particular line of argument I was advancing could be construed as questioning the loyalty of Japanese Americans during WWII and I wanted to nip that line of criticism in the bud. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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It really support my point, because the number of Japanese citizen in america were low enough they could easily put them in internment camp. How's a spy going to spy from inside one of these? |
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zrnzle500
Posts: 3767 |
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Certainly it would be difficult to spy there. However I would say that the population was large enough that they had to build camps to intern them in. And regardless of the matter of qualifying the size of the population, the government certainly believed that they may have been spies, so saying they didn't have enough population in the US for spies seems off base. Plus they couldn't have known in 1937 that practically all Japanese Americans would be interned. They weren't even at war with America at the time, and as far as I am aware, had not planned on doing so yet. |
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2251 |
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Just as an aside, in the biography Unbroken, there is a Japanese student attending UCLA named "Jimmie" Sasaki who the main character meets at college who was most likely a Japanese spy. He later re-appears as some kind of official in one of the workers camps the main character ends up in after being stranded at sea for a long time, as he was well above student age and was probably chosen primarily for his fluency in English and his youthful looks.
Of course, Sasaki was born-and-bred Japanese, and not a Japanese-American. Just wanted to point out that the idea of Japanese spies on America soil has historical context, and posing as a Japanese person wasn't all that difficult, given that Sasaki was able to use the idea of fundraising to help the poor back home in Japan as his official cover story to actually gather funds for the Japanese war effort, since Pearl Harbor had yet to happen, and the US as a whole wasn't predisposed to anti-Japanese sentiment yet. EDIT: Fixed the names. |
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Pidgeot18
 Posts: 101 |
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The Japanese on Hawaii were never interned, in large part because they made up way too large a fraction of the population. According to Wikipedia, you have ~130K Japanese-Americans on the mainland (almost all interned) and ~150K Japanese-Americans on Hawaii (almost none interned). Which is ironic because Hawaii was the most critical base for the US in the Pacific (it allows the US to project its naval power all the way to the shores of China, and its loss would have allowed to Japan to threaten the west coast from Anchorage to Panama), and it was the Niihau Incident (some Japanese sheltering a Japanese pilot who crashed on the island) that really fueled much of the fears. Japan certainly did have spies, but its espionage was weakened by the fact that the US had thoroughly broken the Japanese codes. See, for example, the Battle of Midway, which is arguably one of the best showcases of history on what you can do when you have intelligence superiority. The Japanese thought they were going to be ambushing a naval station... instead, the US knew both where and when the Japanese would attack, and also knew that it could reach parity with the attack force if it scrambled every available nearby asset (e.g., the USS Yorktown, which spent just 48 hours in drydock for repairs and was ultimately reported sunk three times in the battle by the Japanese). |
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Hameyadea
 Posts: 3679 |
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I liked the pragmatic view of the characters, on how one can hide material in plain sight (behind the Emperor's portrait, in this case), as well as the lead's strong-willed (but somewhat naïve) attitude.
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Meygaera
 Posts: 324 Location: Maryland |
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Some interesting wikipedia articles about the events that lead up to this:
Russo-Japanese War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War Washington Naval Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty (I think that this is the treaty Yuuki was referring to about international politics being a Joker Game) Second Sino-Japanese War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War |
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