Working Through Weightlessness in Postwar Japanese Tactical Wargames

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
The paper argues that tactical wargames work as a sublimation of libido, in the Lacanian sense, that must be socially recognizable, letting players 'master' war without violating shared social values; it treats wargame realism as a simulacrum in which play is 'weightless'.
02
Using close readings of SPI's War in the Pacific (1978) and Epoch's Battle of Pearl Harbor (1984), the author contends that Japanese and U.S. wargames embody the Pacific War differently, with Japanese postwar identity shaped by suppressed trauma and a 'what if' alternative history of Pearl Harbor.
03
Hobby Japan published several SPI wargames, including War in the Pacific, in Japan, while Epoch (founded 1958) entered the wargame craze in the late 1970s and early 1980s after observing Hobby Japan's success.
04
War in the Pacific handles the atomic bomb purely mechanically: it is a special attack by B-29 Air Points that permanently destroys industrial or resource centers in a hex, with no mention of civilian deaths or the wider discourse around the bombings.
05
Epoch's Battle of Pearl Harbor (part of the Epoch Wargame Electronics series) uses an electronic LED device in place of dice and frames the conflict as a binary opposition, in contrast to U.S. wargames that feature multiple factions such as the U.S., Soviet Union, and China.
06
Victory Games' Pacific War (1985), published with Hobby Japan, omits the atomic bomb and instead ends the game in an Allied historical victory if a strategic bomber reaches a Homeland Resource hex with at least one Strategic Bombing Point at the conclusion of July 1945.
07
The author argues that Japan's postwar 'mukokuseki' (without nationality) global identity, built on neoliberal economic recovery, masks wartime memory, so wartime trauma is sublimated through metaphor and fictional narrative to avoid 'contaminating' its marketable identity.

Summary

Postwar Japanese tactical wargames, the document contends, use the medium's apparent "weightlessness" to sublimate Japan's colonial and wartime past into socially acceptable forms of play. Drawing on Iwabuchi's notion of "odorless" mukokuseki identity alongside Baudrillard and Lacan, the analysis treats titles such as Epoch's Battle of Pearl Harbor (1984) as outlets for suppressed psychic energy, in which war crimes such as ethnic cleansing are omitted as "too heavy" for play and a popular U.S.-Japan binary, including the Yamamoto quote linking Pearl Harbor to the atomic bombings, reframes history as a moral lesson that obscures Japan's role as colonizer and aggressor in Asia.

Comparison with American tactical wargames sharpens the argument. Titles such as SPI's USN, GDW's Pearl Harbor, and SPI's War in the Pacific render kamikaze attacks and atomic bombs as neutral mechanical rules that exclude civilian death and wartime discourse. The cover art of War in the Pacific, depicting the 1945 Bunker Hill strike, is read as a paratext that carries the trauma the rules themselves suppress. Japan's postwar silence, shaped by occupation-era censorship and a national turn toward economic recovery, is presented as the source of the ill-sublimated energy that resurfaces in Japanese game design, with Epoch's historical background text and dissenting voices marking a partial departure from that pattern.

The study's scope spans Japanese and American publishers from the 1980s through 2015, centering Epoch's "World War Games" catalog, EWE's Battle of the Pacific, Victory Games' Pacific War (1985), and Game Journal's The Great East Asian War (2015). Across this lineage, the author finds that games frame defeat and imperial desire as cathartic, indirectly expressed experiences, and that Pacific War's omission of the atomic bomb, explained only in designer notes, illustrates how absence itself carries meaning. The conclusion is that these games occupy a "liminal space" for postwar reflection, shaped by publisher positionality and a Japanese audience's ambivalence toward its own history.