Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough (14 page)

“Inside our bodies,” says Vincent Valentine in
AC
, “we all have a current like the Lifestream. When alien matter infests the body, this current is what fights it off. Geostigma is what happens when the body overcompensates for its unwelcome guest.” Just as in the game, the conflict arises when something alien disrupts the natural processes of a body. When the body is tainted by this defilement, it behaves in ways that challenge the planet’s Lifestream (
kami
). Kadaj says,

Mother gave me a very special gift: the power to fight against a planet that torments its people. She gave this gift to all her children. . . . You and I are brethren. Brothers and sisters chosen when we inherited Mother’s memetic legacy through the Lifestream. But the planet doesn’t like that. It’s trying to hold us back. That’s why it has been racking our bodies with pain, filling our hearts with doubt! I will heal you. Then we will go to Mother. We will join as a family and strike back at the planet!

Kadaj proceeds to visually demonstrate this process of defilement by stepping into a pool of water, causing it to turn black. He then instructs the children to drink the water, transmitting the defilement to them and exacerbating their Geostigma.

As previously mentioned, the way one recovers from
tsumi
is by undergoing a purification ritual. Although there are lots of different kinds of rituals, the one most often practiced is purification by water. It can be as simple as washing one’s mouth out at a special well or as complicated as
misogi
—walking into a pool of water under a sacred waterfall. In
AC
, the characters purify themselves of Geostigma by performing such a water ritual. As they come in contact with the Lifestream water, their scarring instantly disappears. By linking Lifestream to the purification of Jenova’s influence, the mythology of
FFVII
advocates an ecologically Shinto conscientiousness as a solution for overtechnologization.

Tsumi
as Cultural Invasion

The Expulsion Edict of 1825, issued by Japan’s government, commanded that any foreign ship approaching land should be fired upon, no questions asked. Prior to this, Japanese thinkers defended national traditions such as the imperial line, but concepts such as
sonno joi
(“revere the emperor; expel the barbarian”) evolved from being merely symbolic into being ideologically axiomatic. The state began to define being Japanese with this xenophobic ideology. Although the causes for this kind of thinking are complex, it is clear that they developed out of an increasing exposure to Western influences.

Western philosophical constructs such as capitalism and expansionism began to spread in Japan, upsetting the existing feudal system, but it was Christianity that many Japanese feared most. The Mito scholar Aizawa Seishisai, who pioneered the concept of
sonno joi
, asked in his
New Theses
, “Why are [Western barbarians] able to enlarge their territories and fulfill their every desire? Does their wisdom and courage exceed that of ordinary men? Hardly. Christianity is the sole key to their success. It is a truly evil and base religion, barely worth discussing.”
¹²
As Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi described, “Aizawa feared an indirect Western takeover through Christian transformation, or what we today would call ideological subversion and cultural assimilation,” and speaking to the political leaders of Japan, Aizawa used metaphors of disease to warn them of “the barbarians’ cunning designs.”
¹³

In the same way that Ifalna uses the language of disease to describe Jenova (whose name resembles the Judeo-Christian name for God, Jehovah, and whose two-thousand-year-old arrival pairs up with the beginning of Christianity), so, too, Aizawa spoke of the Christians as an ideological plague. “They [Christians] win a reputation for benevolence by performing small acts of kindness temporarily to peoples they seek to conquer. After they capture a people’s hearts and minds, they propagate their doctrines.”
¹⁴
When Jenova comes in contact with the natives, it behaves in the very way Aizawa feared: cultural assimilation. Eventually, exposure was unavoidable, and Japan’s rapid industrialization in the 1920s and the 1930s cemented a culture of capitalism. But modernization (a foreign value orientation) and its effects continued to instill fear in the Japanese.

Harry Harootunian wrote that “Modernism in Japan sought, therefore, to resist the culture of capitalism . . . and an emerging modern life that itself was constantly being buffeted by a process of revolutionizing production, chronic civil strife, and social and economic uncertainty.”
¹⁵
But in the battle against this foreign influence and culture of capitalism, radical Japanese thinkers ultimately betrayed the traditional values that they sought to restore. In order to cope with the invading Western/Christian value orientation, they began to assimilate aspects of Western philosophies to form an “essentialist” Shinto. They ended up with a Shinto philosophy that resisted syncretism—a fundamentally different Shinto altogether. Aizawa, for instance, developed his concept of
sonno joi
by studying the Christian missionaries’ efforts to proselytize, which often meant the total suppression of non-Christian beliefs. New Shinto thinkers constructed a
doctrine
of the
kami
, rather than following the
way
of the
kami
. Christianity’s dogmatic influence on Shinto was altogether dissonant with its traditional manifestations, and the cultural effects of this shift were substantial. This kind of prescriptive Shinto helped provide a philosophical justification for war, as was the case with State Shinto in World War II.

The presence of a culture of capitalism and emerging modern life are all over
FFVII
. For instance, in the beginning of
Advent Children
, Marlene—Barret’s daughter and the narrator for the introduction—recapitulates, “Because of Shinra’s energy, we were able to live very comfortable lives.” She adds, “But wasn’t that because we were taking away from the planet’s life?” The cause of this shift of living is very clearly the result of Jenova’s influence. Thus, the game commences with an attack on a large capitalist corporation, an analog of the
zaibatsu
dominating early modern Japan’s economy, and Cloud—last name “Strife”—is at the center of it. He, like Marlene and many others, is torn between the lifestyle that Western thinking offers and the native spirit that it threatens.

Like Jenova, Sephiroth’s name originates in Western Kabbalistic spirituality, where the sephirot represent the ten emanations of an Absolute God. As traditional Shinto lacks any notion of an Absolute, Sephiroth’s very name should warn us that he is the product of a potentially problematic syncretism. In the game, this translates into his two contradicting forms: first, as the violent response to foreign influence (when he assassinates a major capitalist figure, a common foe of the game’s Heroes), and then as the voice of the foreign influence itself (when he becomes the Heroes’ primary enemy). We learn that Sephiroth was made by Shinra’s mad scientist, Hojo, who forced foreign matter (Jenova cells) into him as a fetus—a defilement that can be read as
tsumi
. Although Sephiroth refers to Jenova as his “mother,” it was a human woman who carried and gave birth to him. That woman is Lucrecia. Her name carries the connotation of rape and reform, which directly applies to her role in
FFVII
. According to Livy, the son of the last king of Rome raped Lucretia, who then killed herself as a response.
¹⁶
The fruits of her suicide—her husband’s revenge—brought an end to Roman monarchy and ushered in the republic. This is exactly what Sephiroth (the fruits of experiments in obstetrics) does to the existing body politic of
FFVII
—not only does he assassinate the president, but his actions ultimately destabilize the Shinra company.

In this way, the Lucretia metaphor might refer to a technological rape of nature that Cloud is attempting to purify. The consequence of Hojo’s unnatural science produces the being who finds the means to endanger the entire planet. In other words, ambitious industrialization (the science inspired by Jenova) is responsible for the state of postwar Japan—its postwar constitution and postnuclear environmental problems (Sephiroth summoning Meteor). The problem is not so much that Jenova has made contact, it is the failure to cope with this contact that results in a negative overreaction. The game’s solution, then, is to follow the way of the
kami
. After being exposed to the
tsumi
of her unnatural pregnancy, Lucrecia seeks purification in a very Shinto way. Just as one does in
misogi
, she secludes herself from society by a pool near a waterfall. There, she “purifies” herself in the same way as her namesake: by killing herself. Linked with Lucrecia and Hojo, Vincent has also contacted
tsumi
. While attempting to stop Hojo, he ends up as one of Hojo’s experiments. “[His] body is . . . the punishment that’s been given to [him]” for being unable to stop science’s rape of nature. He even says, “Hearing [Cloud’s] stories has added upon me yet another sin [
tsumi
].”

Just as
tsumi
in the game can be read as environmentally detrimental to the natural world, it figures in a cultural sense as well. After all, if Jenova is an allegory for Western thought (modernization, technologization, and Christian indoctrination), then the game must refer to its effects in such terms. If we recall, Kadaj refers to Geostigma as the inheritance of a memetic legacy. Vincent also calls it “The Sephiroth gene. Jenova’s memetic legacy.” Exposed to this memetic legacy, individuals become sick with Geostigma; once indoctrinated, they dissociate from their society (hence the zombie-like behavior of children influenced by Kadaj). In the game, Cloud says, “I’m fighting to save the planet, and that’s that. But besides that, there’s something personal too. . . . A very personal memory that I have.” In other words, the foreign influence endangers not only the physical world, but something conceptual as well—his memory of Aerith, or his “value orientation” toward the Earth. Sephiroth’s insistence that “[he] will never be a memory” suggests that in the view of the game cultural exchange can produce potentially permanent side effects.

Responses to Foreign Matter

Both
FFVII
and
AC
portray a number of solutions to the conflict caused by foreign invasion, but like essentialist revisions of Shinto, many of them are unproductive. Barret will later condemn his early ecoterrorism, confessing “that wasn’t the right way to do things.” Even Geostigma, as Vincent describes it, is an overreaction to the presence of alien matter. Perhaps the most dramatic reaction is Sephiroth’s assassination of President Shinra,
FFVII
’s embodiment of capitalist villainy. President Shinra tells Barret, “These days all it takes for your dreams to come true is money and power.” Not only does President Shinra destroy an entire slum, but as he looks down on the destruction from a penthouse (godlike) view, an excerpt of Joseph Haydn’s
The Creation
plays in the background. The particular excerpt we hear involves Adam and Eve telling nature that it shall echo their sung praise of God’s creation. In other words, there is the ironic equation of destruction with Christian conceptions of creation and morality. So while the benefits brought by Shinra’s (foreign-influenced) energy infrastructure are ubiquitous, President Shinra’s assassination does not manage to evoke our sympathies. The game’s characters agree, and for this reason they briefly believe Sephiroth to be a hero.

The assassination seems to be modeled after some high-profile assassinations in Japan’s history—ones that targeted individuals who were perceived to be corrupted by Western thought. Inoue Nissho, a Japanese nationalist and the mastermind behind the most famous assassination plot, wanted to attack modernity and the corrupt elites who represented it. He believed, as Stephen Large wrote, that “If only the Japanese, who had been led astray by fallacious ‘distinctions’ arising from Western reason and logic, could awaken to the intuitive truth that all things in the universe were one . . . they would be empowered by this great life-force (
daiseimei
) to perform their historic mission.”
¹⁷
Although this sounds like Shinto, it is really a distorted Buddhism bent on violent reform. The key here is that like Inoue, Sephiroth attributes social problems to modernity: Inoue accused the corrupt elites of sacrificing the public welfare for their own wealth, and Sephiroth blames modernity on Cloud’s ancestors.
¹⁸
Inoue and Sephiroth may succeed in affecting the history of Japan and the world of
FFVII
, respectively, but their essentialist philosophies fail to replace the more syncretic ones that underpin them.

We have already discussed some characteristically Shinto solutions in the world of
FFVII
, such as the purification imagery in curing the children of Geostigma and Lucrecia’s withdrawing to the waterfall. It is not until the last two minutes of
FFVII
, however, that we see the game’s most successful and overtly Shinto solution. Right when all of the Heroes’ efforts seem in vain, wisps of Lifestream steadily and unassumingly emerge from all over the surface of the planet and head toward the disaster that’s about to take place. The image is one of convergence and neutralization, not destruction and victory of one power over another. As three different forces (Lifestream, Meteor, and Holy) converge, the same image of Aerith’s face from the beginning of the game flashes across the screen, suggesting that the way of the Earth (as Aerith’s name shares a phonetic correspondence with the word
Earth
) mediates this convergence. We see her mediation, like Shinto, is not articulated but simply lived.