Rest in Piss Koichi Sugiyama

By the time this likely goes up it'll have been a few weeks since Koichi Sugiyama passed. If that name's not familiar to you then... well mostly I'm sorry for the information this is going to transmit to you. Sugiyama was the composer of the Dragon Quest titles and, by the title of this you can probably tell that aside from being a very very gifted composer, he had very little to recommend about him as a human being.

Sugiyama was, to contextualize the kind of person he was, born in 1931. Being born and raised in Japan basically directly as the period of Japanese Colonialism reached a crescendo would probably break a lot of people's brains if they never tried to disentangle what they'd learned in their first 14 years, this is not an ecuse, merely a contextualization. Sugiyama would end up a popular composer on movies, commercials, TV, etc. Really he was the kind of person a company went to when they wanted a clasically bombastic composition. He was put into contact with Enix after sending in the survey card that came with a lot of old games that you never sent in. Someone actually reading the survey cards for Morita Shogi noticed the name and called him to ask if the already quite popular composer was willing to compose music for their games. This gave rise to the reason anyone in the game industry has heard of this man and seemingly his most lasting cultural contribution in Japan. Sugiyama would be called on to compose for their new RPG Dragon Quest.

The Dragon Quest overture is a brilliant composition to be 100% fair, and many of Sugiyama's compositions for the series are excellent. The other thing I can say is that I respect his knowing his worth as a composer and retaining music copyright, even if it means that every purchase of a DQ game felt materially compromised because he was very much not a work for hire composer. If Sugiyama had been a better human being he would have felt good to point to as someone who did not let the game industry take advantage of him, but it's hard to get worked up over someone's flex of creative rights when the money he receieved was infamously and knowingly put toward war crime denial and anti LGBTQ+ campaigns. Enix and other pressures would occasionally cause him to very half-heartedly backtrack when these views became too overt for the general tenor of public conversation but it was honestly the most newsmaking thing he did over the last few decades of his life.

I've been vague about Sugiyama's actual awful opinions to this point because they kinda need their own section to unpack. Sugiyama used his public platform and money most frequently (in terms of awful things go do) to deny Imperial Japan's war crimes during World War II. He was a signatory of a full page ad in the Washington Post in 2007 denying the Nanjing Massacre in which the Japanese military killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civillians. As with many denialists who attempt to maintain a public face his argument was that the facts issued were "selective" which is the traditional cry of the war crime denialist coward who wishes to massage their public image with a vague platitude that "something" (thus framing their argument as some sort of "reasonable" center) happened but that it has been misrepresented in systematicness, scale, or something else. Not content with that though he also denied the well documented systemic institution of sexual slavery of the Japanese military forced upon Chinese women during World War II. Sugiyama also engaged in the more garden variety kind of jingoism anyone in America is familiar with, complaining about how people treated overt shows of "patriotism" like the national anthem and flag were treated as negatives. This kind of crank obviously exists somewhere in most any culture but it's a tremendous displeasure to see them any time they're found.

Further note should go to his late in life public instances of anti-LGBTQ+ statements. These are perhaps notable for being among the few he was publicly cowed enough to at least pretend to retract (though realistically he didn't retract much). Sugiyama would trot out hoary old arguments about how queer people don't reproduce so the government shouldn't need to help them, how children shouldn't have any indication they exist from the education system, etc. He eventually once again submitted his "apology" by saying nonspecifically that queer people have existed throughout history and that sometimes the government should maybe help them I guess in some nonspecific fashion. As a man well into his 80s by that point it's among the least statistically surprising of his prejudices, but it would be remiss not to note it.

That's Sugiyama though, a man with an incredible cultural legacy among video game fans, a man whose compositions hold incredible cultural power in Japan. The DQ Overture was part of Japan's olympic ceremonies, but then tainted by the fact that he couldn't even be subtle about the prejudices that consumed him. To purchase DQ games after learning of this was always a compromised act and one that I can't pretend was justified. Everyone draws their own line, it's likely someone internal to Square Enix will be replacing him and I'd suspect they'll be doing whatever they can to buy out the rights to the compositions he made for the series so they never have to worry about this again. If nothing else there is some comfort in the idea that whatever bad acters get my money from future DQ games will be harder to trace.