The hero of the Ace Attorney series of video games, Phoenix Wright is one of Japan’s most notable video game characters, and he’s without a doubt Japanese. Originally named Ryuichi Naruhodo, the defense attorney is being grossly misinterpreted by a social justice-minded and ignorant Paste magazine writer, who claims that he is white.
In a piece entitled “How Phoenix Wright Avoids the White Savior Complex in Spirit of Justice,” Shonte Daniels draws parallels between the game’s story and Black Lives Matter.
In the game, Phoenix Wright and his friends travel to the fictional country of Khura’in, which is in the middle of a revolution. As the only attorney willing to put his life on the line, Wright fights in court to establish a fair and just legal system while solving murder cases.
According to the country’s laws, both accused criminals and their lawyers are punished together. The court’s legal practices also incorporate (fictional) religious mysticism, and determine guilt through divination and seances. In the game’s internal logic, the magic is real, but a diviner’s glimpses of a murder victim’s final moments only provide a piece of the puzzle to be used in solving the crime. The court takes these visions as absolute, and usually punish the wrong culprits.
Storytelling aside, the Paste writer claims that the game “positions Phoenix in the trope of the Western hero, which relies on the white savior complex.” Although the writer admits that the original games take place in Japan, the “localization takes place in the United States, a country known for imposing its ideologies and cultures onto smaller, developing countries.”
The English version of the game does indeed take place in an “alternate Los Angeles,” but it’s one without any American cultural baggage.
Writing on the Capcom Unity blog, localizer Janet Hsu said she “created a little headcanon for [her]self” in which “the Los Angeles that Ace Attorney takes place in is an alternate universe where anti-Japanese sentiments and anti-immigrant laws were not enacted, and Japanese culture was allowed to flourish and blend into the local culture in the same manner as other immigrant cultures.”
In other words, it’s a Japanese game with an American veneer.
Aside from translating the text, changing a few names (many of which are direct translations) and adding cultural flair, localizers have absolutely no input on the stories, which were originally written by Japanese writers for a Japanese audience.
This doesn’t matter to Daniels, who reads the game from a “colonialist context,” and states that “Phoenix plays the role of white savior, and saving Khura’in from itself is now, as the imperialist Rudyard Kipling wrote, the white man’s burden.”
Cleverly enough, Phoenix’s role in the revolution is largely secondary. His actions support the revolution but he himself does not lead it—something the writer admits before going on a tangent about the Black Lives Matter movement. Daniels argues that Phoenix’s support of the revolutionaries without speaking for them paints him as a model for white allies of Black Lives Matter.
The comparison falls flat when you realize its creators only set the story in the mystical land of Khura’in to remove Phoenix Wright from its familiar Japanese setting and give players new puzzle and crime-solving mechanics to play with. If there are any parallels to be drawn, Spirit of Justice serves as a reflection of Japan’s national policy on foreign intervention—and nothing else.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
