Joker Game

Episode 9

Last time on Joker Game: double jokers! We now have two spy agencies competing for Japan's future in these troubled times. Their targets are the anti-war ex-diplomat Shirahata and his contact, the British consul Graham, who may possess knowledge of Japan's Grand Strategy. Whoever eliminates their threat to national security will be allowed to continue operating. Which side will reign victorious? Have Yuuki's boys finally met their match?

Ha ha, just kidding, of course the D-Agency completely buries the Wind Agency. It was never even a contest. I'd almost feel sorry for them if they weren't proto-Nazis. Anyway, if you were hoping to see much more of Gamou, his time in the story unfortunately seems to have come to an end. (It's okay. He probably wasn't a very nice man.) Wind Agency leader Kazato Akimasa probably could have found something for Gamou (and his six or seven other men) to do, but he decided they should all celebrate their job well-done from last episode and took them all to party down at a geisha house instead. You fool! Don't you know this is a two-parter? It's not over until it's over, Akimasa!

If this fatal mistake seems familiar, it's because the dunderheaded Colonel Mutou did the exact same thing way back in episode 2. The Imperial Army apparently raises its boys on a steady diet of conservatively rewarded entitlement. Serve your country to your commander's satisfaction, and you get to drink and whore it up at your local inn without consequence on a regular basis. Life will just be a series of conquests and parties for all good Japanese soldiers, so long as they do what they're told. This pattern of indoctrination is almost religious in nature, which helps contextualize why Yuuki called nationalism the new state religion that always leaves Japan holding the joker at international summits. Still, if the Wind Agency is out celebrating instead of doing their jobs, who's doing their dirty work for them?

Well, Gamou's intimidation and elimination of Graham's butler was a pretty good sign of Wind Agency's tactics at large. Akimasa verifies the exchange of state secrets between Graham and Shirahata by coercing a young boy named Morishima into doing it for him. He's not just Shirahata's houseboy, he's also a draft dodger, which means it's extremely easy to intimidate him into spying on his master. Of course, that also means we know Morishima is not going to survive the Wind Agency's employ, and no sooner does Akimasa have what he needs from the kid than he drugs him and sends Gamou to drop his body into the ocean. Oh hey, I guess that big jerk does get something to do after all. (Side note: if Joker Game's entourage is designed to appeal to the ladies like any reverse harem cast, does that make Gamou the hot villain option?)

Since Akimasa and his crew are only interested in the glamorous parts of spydom, they head to Shirahata's villa slightly ahead of the reported rendezvous time to gun him and Graham down, so they can gloat their victory over Yuuki as quickly as possible. Akimasa even chuckles to himself that Yuuki probably couldn't find the location on time, before a gruff whisper of "you're late" freezes him in his tracks. Yuuki is waiting patiently in Shirahata's office. Their targets have already fled to Shanghai, leaving their supposed intel behind. Yuuki informs Akimasa that he's destroyed the information, but it was little more than ambiguous high-fallutin' dogma about conquering the world anyway, nothing specific enough to be exploited by the enemy, but just embarrassing enough to make it clear they were relying completely on the German army for support in their ambitions. But how did D-Agency get there before Wind Agency?

Cut back to the ocean where Morishima is about to meet his watery doom. Right when Gamou is about to dash the little guy on the rocks below, Morishima pulls off some crazy acrobatics to reveal himself as a D-Agency spy, knocking Gamou out with a choke hold and rushing to the estate to back up Yuuki. (And it's a good thing too, because Akimasa is furious enough to try and end things by just shooting Yuuki in the face!) After being disarmed, Akimasa screams at Yuuki and Morishima that even if they did keep the intel from leaving Japan, they'll surely be court-martialed for tipping off the enemy.

He's not wrong, but Yuuki's also not stupid. Shirahata wasn't tipped off by a D-Agency spy, at least not directly. The Wind Agency actually dug their own grave both by blackmailing Morishima and trying to have him killed, because a waitress at that very inn was apparently smitten with the cute bespectacled boy, so she became concerned when she saw him stumbling off drunk with a stranger. She only needed the slightest encouragement from her client, a disguised Yuuki, to call ahead to Shirahata's villa and make sure he'd made it home safely. When Shirahata got a call saying his houseboy had spent the evening with a large group of men he didn't know, it was child's play for him to put two and two together. In fact, everyone at the inn knew Akimasa and his boys were military men. In these times of hardship, there's no group of eight businessmen with the money and leisure time to hit up an inn and party all night, unless they were army boys.

"You're all emperors with no clothes, running around playing spy," Yuuki says, with his cane planted against Akimasa's chest. He follows this up with a fascinating bit of history on the dual perceptions of Japan's War College emblem. This proud imperial insignia is actually modeled after a large and gaudy coin from the Edo period. The symbol's intent is to hearken back to Japan's glory days, but when you stop to think about it, they're basically worshipping an ancient half-penny. The coin may look impressive, but it's not even worth 1/100th of a yen in the times they live in now. (To be precise, it's worth 8/1000s of one yen. Now that's cheap!) As Yuuki drives away to focus on more pressing missions, Akimasa rips off this emblem and throws it on the ground, perhaps seeing it in a new light for the first time. The episode ends with a gunshot, probably implying that Akimasa was unable to let go of his old ways and killed himself for his failure. Much like Japan's dreams of inter-continental domination, the Wind Agency died out before it even got started.

As always, Joker Game eschews subtlety in favor of blunt force spy action, and this week was one of its finest moments. Decades of perspective on WWII have made it extremely clear that the Axis powers' beliefs and methods were wrong because they were immoral, but it's not often we get an exploration of how they were just plain not smart either. Joker Game's creator has an undeniable passion for his Japanese culture and history, but he also believes that having pride in Japan doesn't have to mean embracing the worst kind of nationalist revisionism. I'm glad that part 2 of Double Joker was able to pay off the rivalry established in part 1 with so much bite.

Rating: A

Joker Game is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Jake has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.