Pokemon GO, one of the big waves in summer 2016 media-mix pop culture, was released July 20, 2016 in Japan, immediately triggering warnings about personal safety and public manners. I downloaded it and embarked on participant observation ethnography for the next three weeks in Tokyo, and have played it in various parts of Kyushu since then. From the start, news from various countries of the changes wrought by Pokemon GO framed it as both a new source of social mayhem and conversely, a boon to the sedentary, depressed gamer. Yet here in its birthplace, Pokemon GO is just one of the summer events centered around this franchise. In the late 1990s Pokemon had entertained my kids while we were living in Sendai during my dissertation fieldwork. Back then the original media consisted of the card-based game, Game Boy games, and the summer’s movie, all based on the anime. I was downtown teaching English conversation when that notorious episode triggered epilepsy in some viewers; fortunately my kids were safe at the neighbor’s. From then on, all anime contain warnings at the start of each show to viewers to maintain distance from the screen and watch with lights on. While Pokemon has been misinterpreted as the devil’s temptation by some in the USA, it seems to me that in its home country Pokemon has continued to inspire personal safety instructions, and public manners training as well.

These messages are inherent to the JR Pokemon stamp rally, a promotion luring children and their parents yearly since 1997 out into the heat during summer holiday to get the pamphlet, buy a day pass and ride the trains collecting character stamps at stations in greater Tokyo (and other JR regions). The rally combines various threads of Japanese cultural practice beyond the pursuit of Pikachu. “The urge to collect fantastic specimens and their stories has deep roots (Foster 2009) in Japanese culture, dating back to the Tokugawa period when people would collect folklore on yokai goblins.” The collecting of stamps – which one can do with or without rallies in various public venues — derives from shrine pilgrimages and also appears in bureaucratic paper trails. As for manners, the JR Pokemon stamp rally supports the concept of ‘friendly authoritarianism’ coined by Sugimoto (2014). This socialization technique in Japanese civil society includes the use of positive encouragements to conform, portrayal of the powerful as benevolent, promulgation of an egalitarian ideology, and the strategic use of fun to painlessly pervade authority. As any Tokyo train rider knows, stations and trains are full of manners posters (see Miller 2011), often depicting amusing caricatures of misbehavior while appealing to one’s needs for personal safety and desires not to cause problems for others. The Pokemon stamp rally provides multiple exposures to these posters as well as more directive aural messages (e.g., stand behind the yellow line), not to mention familiarity with JR staff and stations, over the course of play. Anyone who has ever seen a child in Tokyo calmly commuting to school alone could consider them as possibly having been trained with Pokemon’s help.

Since 2004 I’ve collected the brochures to use as examples of friendly authoritarianism while teaching with Sugimoto’s text in a summer course. The number of train stations involved in the Tokyo rally varied between 91 and 100, with prizes for successful collectors, up to 2011. In 2011 and 2012, following the national edict to save electricity in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and nuclear disaster, the number of stations/stamps decreased to 12 divided into two sets of six stations along the Yamanote circle line, and a song was added. Since then, however, the number has gradually increased to 38 in 2015, though this year a riddle was included dividing the JR rally into two phases of seven stations each. Meanwhile, a Kamen Rider (masked rider) stamp rally was undertaken by the Tokyo Metro subway, on a much larger scale. When I praised a boy in the subway for his nearly complete collection, his father showed me the detailed schedule he concocted to maximize their efforts on a day pass.

During the summer I was traversing the central areas of Nagatacho and Yotsuya daily on foot, and in playing Pokemon GO learned about the area’s historical monuments, since they were Pokestops dispensing free Pokeballs and other game goods. A stroll to nearby Akasaka reminded me of its history as a postwar playground, since Pokestops there are associated with restaurants rather than relics. In Shibuya, I caught a human Pikachu named Kohachu, who strolled around dressed in a full body suit with a yellow randoseru knapsack.

Over the three-week span since the release of Pokemon GO a substantial increase in manners warnings and posters emerged. Some of these were multilingual, reflecting the recent increase in foreign tourism. Most were general warnings about the entrenched practice of sumaho aruki ‘smartphoning while walking’, which refers specifically to reading and writing rather than speaking on the phone. Pokemon GO play, in my experience, makes fewer attentional demands than interacting with text while walking; perhaps this is why the manners messages took the general behavior to task. Still, Yotsuya station gave specific recorded warnings reminding smartphone game players to avoid causing nuisance to commuters through inattention or by blocking passageways.

Another Pokemon event in Tokyo’s Kanto region this summer was the third Pikachu parade held in Yokohama’s Minato Mirai area, near the mall where a large Pokemon goods shop is located. Exiting the station along with the crowds, I came to face a worker in the adjacent building who held a sign reminding Pokemon GO players that their phone will buzz when a Pokemon is near, so they may continue to play without constantly looking at their screen, and that before doing so, players should check for safety. The sign also said that there were no special tie-in events with the Pikachu parade program, and ended with the phrase manaa o mamotte tanoshiku pokemon ‘minding your manners, enjoy Pokemon’.

It may seem I am building up an argument for the oft-said notion that “the Japanese are so polite”; yet if that were the case, would the posters and warnings be necessary? Recent news emerged that a Japanese man in Shikoku hit two women (killing one and heavily injuring the other) by playing Pokemon GO while driving. Ongoing efforts at politeness training suggest a gap between actual behavior and Japanese expectations for social behavior. These efforts may use language that is direct ‘don’t litter’ or indirect ‘is your river crying’, or images of what one should or more likely, shouldn’t do. Like the zoomorphic creatures Miller found in the manners posters she studied, Pokemon are recruited in these efforts to promote civil society. Recent Facebook posts include various manners posters aimed at players, telling visitors to temples that the Pokemon are there to worship and shouldn’t be caught, or are gifts from the Buddha, and that visitors should pay respects to the deities while there.

Potential players in a hospital were told the Pokemon there are sick and should be left in peace to recuperate. Rather than brusquely saying ‘don’t play your game in here’ players’ fandom may be encouraged to include empathy for the Pokemon they may seek to catch in inappropriate locales. Inquiring at two local shrines which had Pokestops and gyms on their premises, I got conflicting responses about their tolerance of visitor behavior. A worker I spoke with at one shrine in a busy tourist spot has witnessed players who approach the shrine gates/Pokestops smoking cigarettes, or sit down within the shrine to play where there are no facilities to sit. They already have an instructional sign at their font showing how to cleanse one’s hands and mouth before entering the shrine to worship, and they eventually posted a warning sign and barrier blocking night access to the shrine area a few weeks after this. (Nelson 1996 observed day vs. night uses of shrine grounds). However, at another seaside shrine in a less popular location a worker reported Pokemon go players among recent visitors but no such problems, and even mentioned that surfers who may use their parking lot and stroll through the shrine to the beach are tolerated. It is an ongoing challenge to the managers of such spaces to regulate the multiple layers of use for any landscape, whether real or virtual, and there seems to be no universal solution.

Pokemon GO brought to Japan a different set of requirements for safe and mannerly play during passage over the landscape than those of the JR Pokemon rally that teaches kids train manners. Even though Japan already has AR-related games including girlfriend SIMS and contents tourism promotions, Pokemon GO seems to have caused the greatest sense of danger and moral panic so far. It appears that, like the now-obligatory warnings that emerged after the epilepsy-triggering anime episode, Pokemon once again provides the ruse for another crackdown on media related behavior, this time about the already common use of smartphones in Japanese public space.

Bibliography

Foster, Michael Dylan. 2009. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Miller, Laura. 2011. Behavior that Offends: Comics and Other Images of Incivility, pp. 219-250 in Manners & Mischief: Gender, Power, and Etiquette in Japan, edited by Jan Bardsley and Laura Miller. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nelson, John K. 1996. A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press.

Sugimoto, Yoshio. 2014. Introduction to Japanese Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

But beyond scaremongering, what does screen time and immersion in digital worlds actually mean in terms of child rearing? I ask this question not just because it is anthropologically interesting, but as the parent of two small children who are growing up in a digitally transforming world. In keeping with my last two posts in this series, I turn to the work of Margaret Mead for ways to think about technology and child rearing. Perhaps Mead’s most interesting insights are about the decline of respect for elders’ knowledge—and thus, a loss of knowledge about traditions and life wisdom—in situations of rapid cultural and generational change. She felt that American children had markedly different lives from their (often immigrant) parents, with access to more resources and technologies, and the potential for upward mobility. This, she argued, meant that:

“In a country where the most favoured are the ones to take up the newest invention, and old things are in such disrepute…the world belongs to the new generation…. In the past there have been societies in which the elders have been craftsmen in life, wise in its requirements, loving in their use of precious materials…. But in…America, life is not viewed as an art which is learned, but in terms of things which can be acquired” (Mead 1930: 214-16).

Here, Mead argues that in societies that value facility with new technology over life experience, children lack humility or appreciation for skills learned over a lifetime. This is a comment less on how virtual game play affects children, and more on how the privileged place of these digital creations in our society affects kinship structures.

However, I do not think that Mead would consider television or video games inherently bad for children. Mead studied childhood in many places—perhaps most famously among different groups in the South Pacific—and compared their practices to American child rearing. Later, she was considered one of the first “experts” on parenting, along with her friend and family pediatrician Benjamin Spock. As an early contributor to the “nature-nurture” debates, she believed that certain cultures create specific personalities and that this happens early with children. Mead’s work reminds us that parenting is infinitely varied, and thus one should keep an open mind to new variations.

I will come clean now, and admit that I am not a gamer. My parents never allowed video games, although I watched my male friends play some of the games of that era. I didn’t join in much partly because of perceived gender divides, and because I was terrible at these games, having no experience. I was intrigued by the world of the Legend of Zelda, although I always felt I had more in common with Link, the industrious (male) protagonist, than with Princess Zelda who must be rescued. As for Mortal Kombat, I remember asking, “What good is it to know how to knock out a monster with a double kick in this game if you can’t do it in real life?” (My friends would say, “That’s not the point.”) However, thinking about virtual worlds anthropologically—and the variation in these worlds now as compared to when I was a kid—I realize the moral judgment in a wholesale rejection of the play, exploration, and socializing possible in digital spaces.

I think Mead would understand virtual worlds as “real,” and make distinctions about different kinds of virtual experience. For example, in a typical video game, there is some room for flexibility and agency (and increasingly so, from what I understand), but the visuals and rules have been pre-programmed, thus lacking the chaos and surprise of the physical world. A computer program has yet to simulate the world, but there are digital spaces that allow more creativity. Tom Boellstorff argues convincingly that places and social relationships in Second Life are “real” and provide a space for people with certain interests or medical conditions to meet.

Minecraft, which appeals enormously to children, allows players to build structures with other players in a virtual space that does not include an overall goal with challenges to overcome. Some argue that Minecraft encourages children to think like computer programmers and engineers. Minecraft has provided a platform for children with autism to meet and socialize and, as Mimi Ito demonstrates, can be a creative route to education. Gaming communities lead to relationships between people, who may meet face-to-face or not, while Casey O’Donnell shows that game developers have their own cultures. And of course, Pokémon Go is the most audacious attempt yet at creating an “overlay” between real and virtual worlds.

Mead would probably argue that virtual worlds are part of the “real” world for our children in the same way they are real for adults. Let’s be honest: I spend the majority of my weekdays staring at screens. Yet the activities I do on screens vary—I email mainly for work, I use my phone for texting with friends and family or to scan social media, I use the Internet for research, I write on a computer, and increasingly I read articles and books online. At night I might watch a “brain candy” TV show. As I’ve said, I’m not a gamer, so I do not have immersive experience in this kind of virtual world, although I enjoy a good science fiction novel or TV show here and there. I can understand the appeal. However, I limit my two-year-old’s screen time to a weekly Friday family movie night, when we all watch a half hour of a cartoon movie. He asks for movie night during the week now. He also talks to his grandparents using Facetime on my phone, and sometimes I let him look at photos of himself and family on the phone. He already knows how to swipe the screen and sometimes cries when I take the phone away. It’s a slippery slope, but is it a bad one? This will become ever more complicated as my kids get older and want to play virtual games. I do think it is important to spend time in the physical world, in face-to-face social situations. I also realize this is a moral argument in many ways.

I think Mead would say it is important for children to explore their worlds including virtual spaces, but not at the expense of exploration of the rest of their worlds. She would probably be the first to argue that more ethnographic research is needed. What do these games mean for how children learn roles, rules, norms, socializing, and trusting themselves? How does this compare with learning from physical play that teaches them rules of the physical world—such as climbing and falling from a play structure—and face-to-face social interactions? Of course, as noted above, some anthropologists are doing this work already. Certainly, games can help children develop empathy; Mead herself, with Gregory Bateson, invented a card game that sought to teach how democratic leaders and dictators think differently. The nonprofit Games for Change specializes in video games with “social impact.” Further, learning depends on the virtual space. Can we make these spaces even more flexible and inclusive, especially in terms of gender or parameters of the game?

Finally, Mead would likely turn the lens back on American society. What does it say about us that we judge parents based on their screen time policies? This is a moral and gendered stance that judges parents and especially mothers. However, I think there is more to it than mommy shaming. In a world that feels increasingly uncertain, the debates over screen time seem to reflect broader cultural anxieties about preparing children—and adults, by extension—for an unknown and unknowable future. Giving our children varied experience in the world, including but not limited to virtual worlds, may be the best we can do.

Mead, Margaret. 1930. Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education. New York: William Morrow and Company.