#Persuant to eventually more thinky thoughts

[solivar]

Since I couldn’t find my original post on this topic...

....Seriously, Tumblr, I hoped your finding stuff features would be better than this...

My Thinky Thoughts On The Shimada-gumi (With A Special Emphasis On Hanzo and Genji’s Mum)

Things I Have Learned While Doing Research About the Yakuza:

Firstly, the Yakuza, as a whole, is an extremely male subculture – not much different from the dominant culture in any significant way, to be perfectly honest. One can literally count the number of women who have held significant positions of authority within any Yakuza sub-organization on the fingers of one hand. (Notable instance: when Fumiko Taoka, the widow of the Yamaguchi-gumi’s late kumicho stepped into the power vacuum created when both her husband and his chosen successor died within a few months of each other and held the clan together while the rest of the elders selected a new kumicho.)

Secondly, the Yakuza as a whole tends to be rigidly hierarchical and, bizarrely, socially conservative to the point of being outright reactionary in many ways. The Yakuza is not a friend of democracy or democratic institutions. The Yakuza is, for all practical purposes, medieval in its internal structure, its social rules and customs, and the manner in which its sub-organizations interact with one another and the rest of the culture at large. In fact, it romanticizes Japan’s lengthy medieval period to point of occasionally claiming legitimacy as the final bastion of Japanese culture untainted by outside (i.e., western) interference.

Thirdly, most popular history and depictions of the Yakuza tends to gloss over the extent of their involvement in the ultranationalist right wing organizations that drove Japan’s swift modernization and militarization in the years preceding World War II, favoring instead the colorful/tragic gangster/gambler with or without a heart of gold narrative when it comes to pop culture. This tends to neatly elide their ongoing support for and involvement with reactionary right wing political organizations, and through those organizations their influence on Japanese domestic and foreign policy to this day.

Fourthly, the Yakuza was as strongly impacted as the rest of the country by Japan’s domestic economic issues, to the point that traditional Yakuza “industries” and their subsequent organizational financial stability were deleteriously effected. This has caused a spike in internecine friction among the various Yakuza subgroups where expansionist efforts to secure new sources of income among several parties encroached on one another’s territory, setting off actual gang warfare in several instances. The ultimate result of domestic economic instability among the Yakuza has been an outward expansion into the Asian mainland and the Americas, with lesser penetration into Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In short, the ultranationalists started going transnational for the sake of economic survival. Many Yakuza organizations run, in addition to the expected criminal enterprises, multiple legitimate businesses, for purposes of both money laundering and providing stable income streams for their members.

 My Not Entirely Organized Thoughts About the Shimada-gumi

Point the First: Canon is silent on the topic of how much and how badly Japan was impacted by the Omnic Crisis. Korea was severely impacted and is still regularly impacted, though whether any of this spills across the Sea of Japan is debatable.

My Personal Supposition: Japan was less physically impacted by the Crisis than it was by the global economic downswing/New Great Depression that hit when the Omnica Corporation collapsed. (Is there any canonical information on where the Omnica Corporation was headquartered or who actually owned it? Even international corporate conglomerates have a headquarters, a CEO, boards of directors.) Canon implies that a great many territorial governments and private individuals invested heavily in Omnica’s promise of a world of post-scarcity profit-for-all built on the back of omnic slave labor and when Omnica imploded under the weight of its own inability to deliver, it blasted the sort of hole in the global economy that causes whole governments to resign in disgrace and extremist factions on all sides of the political spectrum to seize the advantages to be found in chaos.

Point the Second: The Shimada-gumi is, canonically, clearly intended to be read as a Yakuza organization though it is never explicitly referred to as such, being called a “criminal empire” instead. But, yeah, they’re totally Yakuza with all the baggage that this suggests.

My Personal Supposition: The Shimada-gumi was one of the organizations that seized the day in the aftermath of the Omnica Corporation’s collapse – primarily because they were among those who presciently declined to involve themselves with it, through either investment in the corporation itself or by employing its technologies in their plethora of legitimate financial endeavors. While many of their compatriots/competitors were going down in flames, they were positioned to snap up assets at fire sale prices, seize territory they desired through coercion (I’ll bet they absorbed the useful remnants of more than one organization that completely dissolved in the midst of economic and political upheaval) or judiciously applied violence, and insert political operatives beholden to them and their largesse into the reorganized Japanese government (those laws specifically targeting gang-related activity are such an impediment to the nation’s economic recovery). This campaign of ruthless acquisition and consolidation of power was the brainchild of [Papa Shimada], who emerged as a thoroughly competent and capable lieutenant from one of the cadet branches of the House of Shimada (because the Shimadas are one of the organizations whose innermost core of power is, in fact, built around an actual clan of blood relations – achieving access to it requires marriage or formal adoption), and who ascended to the rank of kumicho after the death of the previous head...and his marriage to the late kumicho’s daughter.

Point the Third: The Shimada-gumi is also pretty obviously not just a Yakuza clan because, seriously, we’ve got ninjas and dragons and unambiguously supernatural shenanigans going on here. Hereditary supernatural shenanigans.

My Personal Supposition: The Shimada are far, far older than their involvement with the Yakuza, dating all the way back to the Heian period, where they served as onmyoji to the imperial court, being part warrior, part kannushi, and weighing far more heavily at the Shinto end of the spectrum. They persisted, part civil servants, part quasi-noble retainers with the castle to prove it, until the 19th century – when the practice of onmyodo was outlawed as superstition and their grip on power evaporated completely, reducing them to the same marginal social status as the tekiya and bakuto “clans” that made up the nucleus of the proto-Yakuza, into which they were eventually absorbed.

This is my way of saying that not only are the Shimada-gumi hugely old school, they are also hardcore social conservatives who resent the entire twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the intrusion of western values into Japanese culture, and the diminuation of everything they once were in the face of modernity. It’s a good thing the Omnic Crisis came along when it did and offered them the chance to assist in the reconstruction of their country into what it always should have been and should always be.

Point the Fourth and My Personal Supposition: [Mama Shimada] is the Shimada of Shimadas. She is the daughter of the kumicho of the House of Shimada – only daughter, and only child, bearer of a dragon, who took one of her own distant cousins to husband to secure the legitimate bloodline of the clan. She is the embodiment of all the traditional Japanese feminine virtues: wisdom, loyalty, modesty, and, above all else, loyalty to her family – its needs, its goals, its mission – even to the detriment of her own heart, more than once. Highly educated, it was she who advised her somewhat younger husband when he came to the leadership of the Shimada-gumi after the death of her father, her skill at determining which alliances to accept and which to spurn, which resources to fight to claim and where to reserve the clan’s strength for later conflicts, which politicians were sympathetic to the cause of purifying the government of corrupting outside influences and which were too deeply compromised to be worth the effort was uncanny nearly to the point of being supernatural. (It is definitely supernatural. She and her dragon are old hands at the magic of knowing, of reading stars and omens and the movements of the seasons.) Deeply committed to the cause of restoring both her family and her nation to the pre-eminence she feels they both deserve, she bore her husband two sons and did her best to raise them to value all the things that she valued, as well as to perpetuate and expand what was, indeed, rapidly becoming an empire-within-an-empire, eclipsing its rivals within the Yakuza, building itself into a hidden pillar of the post-Crisis government of Japan.

She succeeded, for the most part, with one of them. Hanzo was everything she wanted in a son – fortunate, because he was the heir and could never be anything else until his father died and passed the rulership of the Shimada-gumi to him, dutiful, devoted, obedient in word and deed. He worked so hard, did her Hanzo, to master the skills she required of him – not only the rigorous practical education in contemporary academic matters but also the more refined physical and mental arts that were the true heritage of the House of Shimada and his perseverance was rewarded. He was the first Shimada in generations whose summons was answered by more than one dragon, though she harbored a fear that it was because he would, in the end, need more than one protector.

Genji…was his father’s son from the moment he took his first breath, to his mother’s never-ending despair. Younger, much less inflexibly conservative and traditional in his outlook that she herself, her husband took their second son in hand and very simply ruined him. Oh, Genji was well-trained – Genji was gifted, enormously so, everything that Hanzo had to work for came easily to him – and immensely skilled but he lacked discipline, the inner core of strength built around loyalty and duty, and he was permitted to spend entirely too much time with unsuitable companions, unsuitable pass-times, to become a child of the debased and unsuitable age in which they were forced to live. Her husband protected him from the consequences of his actions, against her advice, to the frustration of the senior members of the clan, again and again, and so he learned nothing.

Point the Fifth: The Yakuza does not, as a general rule, hand down a death sentence for the crime of being a feckless playboy. That’s what fingertips are for. Death is generally reserved for serious breaches of trust like, you know, betraying your family/organization to its enemies. Like another Yakuza clan. Or to law enforcement.

My Personal Supposition: Genji was up to way more damaging shenanigans than being a premeditatedly unreliable spendthrift with green hair. That alone would not be worth expending the sort of effort that went into training him in the first place, not to mention that fact that he is a legit dragon-carrying supernatural being/heir to supernatural heritage himself. Death is a high price to pay because it’s messy and not particularly possible to undo – which is why it’s reserved for seriously unforgivable crimes, like actual treachery.

This is my way of saying that I seriously doubt it was coincidental that Overwatch happened to have a team handy to scrape up what was left of Genji and whisk him off to cybernetic rescue.

Point the Sixth and My Personal Supposition: [Mama Shimada] knew the score with her fractious younger child, even if she didn’t know the precise details, and moved to neutralize him for the good of the family. Her husband, too? Maybe. Hanzo was young and strong and, as far as she knew, completely devoted to both the family and its goals – coming to power in his youth would finish the process of forging him into a kumicho capable of bearing the weight of what circumstances would ask of him, and that would be solidifying the power of the Shimada-gumi into something that could not be broken or dislodged without breaking far more than them.

Executing judgment on Genji was, in essence, her last test of will for Hanzo and, ultimately, he failed it. He did what needed to be done but it broke him and she was forced to confront the fact that she had honed her best weapon to too sharp an edge. She had not done enough to wedge them apart, had not weakened the bond between them to the point that it would fray under the weight of what Genji was doing.

And then Overwatch dropped on them anyway.

Now? She has had to start all over again with a greatly reduced base of power, a greatly reduced quality of tool – the only thing she still possesses in its entirety is her own power, which is still considerable, and disregarded only by the foolish. She managed to talk the rest of the clan’s elders into not sending any more cousins after Hanzo because, even if they aren’t dragon-bearers themselves, they are still Shimada by blood and their children could be what they are not. She has not entirely given up hope on Hanzo, even though it would take genuinely supernatural effort to reinstall him as kumicho after all he’s done – because he has, after all, retained what she taught him, even if he hates himself for it. If nothing else, she hopes he will one day give the Shimada-gumi an heir of her blood.

She has no idea that Genji is still alive.