You’re ten years old, and you’re walking home from cram school. It’s already dark out, it’s cold, and wet from the rain. You decide to take the shortest route, cutting through an older market street known colloquially as a shatta-gai or shutter town, due to its abundance of foreclosed and abandoned businesses. You make the mistake of looking down one of the side alleys and, in the distance, you see what looks to be an elderly lady beckoning you to come over. You feel a tightness in your chest, an instinctual sense of unease. Your pace naturally quickens as you try to get through the street as quickly as possible. You vow never to take that route at night again.
Sixteen years later, you return to your hometown. You visit that marketplace, but see something entirely different—a modern plaza, complete with its own Starbucks, a bubble tea shop, a second-hand clothing store—and you think back to that moment in your childhood. You remember that, during the day, you’d often visit the market street’s arcade with friends. But it’s gone now. What was I so afraid of? You question yourself. Did that old lady actually need my help? For a moment, you feel a sense of regret, before forgetting about the thing entirely.
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In Ghostwire: Tokyo, you explore a post-apocalyptic Tokyo haunted by ghosts known as “Visitors.” The city is unusually empty as a result of a powerful cultist spiriting away the city’s 14 million inhabitants. This leaves the main character, 22-year-old Akito, free to explore central Tokyo with his mentor-turned-spirit-sidekick KK. The journey leads you from neighborhood to neighborhood, some sleek and modern, some old and dilapidated. While not an exact replica, Ghostwire’s Tokyo acts as a sort of collage of familiar sights and landmarks, akin to Grand Theft Auto V’s version of Los Angeles. And one of its most common scenes—alongside convenience stores, telephone booths, and temples—are construction sites.
On its own, this isn't too surprising. Cities like Tokyo are constantly in a process of rebirth and replacement. The world’s most populated metropolis is always changing—burying the old, creating the new—only to repeat the cycle as the definition of “new” shifts. It’s a constantly pupating cicada, waiting for the end of a transformation that never arrives. It’s been like this for decades, but entered a new wave starting in the mid-2010s. Policymakers like Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike initially claimed the “New Tokyo” would be finished in 2020, just in time for the Tokyo Olympics. It wasn’t.
While overlooking the empty ruins of the city, KK even mentions this “New Tokyo” by name. His sarcasm is palpable. The government liked to talk about making the city “safe” and “smart,” but not much had changed aside from the transformation of “seedy” areas through the construction of fancy shopping centers. Where were these areas, exactly? They were the older lower-income neighborhoods, bathhouses, and parks where the unhoused slept at night. Shibuya’s Miyashita Park, for example, was home to the houseless for decades. In 2017, the police forcefully evicted the people living there. Now it’s a three-story shopping complex.
According to these policymakers, change requires sacrifice. It’s a fact that Tokyo knows in its blood and bones, both above ground and below. Buried beneath layers of concrete is everything from temples, shrines, and houses, to entire cemeteries, tombs, and burial mounds. Centuries of human history hide just under our feet and—would you look at that—some just happen to be situated in prime development real estate. So, what do you do when history is getting in the way of progress? The same thing you do to the homeless and impoverished: move them somewhere else. After all, the dead can’t speak. Out of sight, out of mind.
The houseless and impoverished are living human beings; burial sites and dilapidated buildings are not. But there’s a horrifying similarity in the way the ruling class treats these two completely different things. It mirrors the way Japanese conservative politicians talk about the LGBTQ community, for example—a conversation entirely focused on a neoliberal definition of “productivity”—where, if the existence of said group does not benefit the capitalist machine through the birthing of children, for example, they possess no raison d'être, and were thus sites for the government to do whatever they pleased.
The dead and houseless are also considered “undesirable,” at least in the traditionalist Japanese psyche. Graveyards and burial grounds are associated with death and are therefore tainted with kegare (“defilement”) which has its origins in Shintoism. Similarly, older buildings and public housing projects—on top of being seen as places of death by nature of their age—are associated with crime and similar taboos. The same goes for the houseless and those in poverty. Neither are particularly beneficial for wealthy landlords wanting to sell their property; get rid of them, and you get rid of the kegare, while making a tidy profit in the exchange.
Therein lies the reason behind Tokyo’s transformation, and the source of Ghostwire’s uniquely realistic horror: Gentrification.
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In light of the Tokyo Olympics, the city has been rapidly tearing down and rebuilding everything from train stations to apartments and houses. Ghostwire replicates this in a way that I noticed immediately in my initial playthrough. Locations that were under extensive construction in the game, like the Shibuya underground subway passage and the station’s south exit, were places I’d seen finished months ago. That’s just how quickly Tokyo has changed, and how it continues to change.
As such, the redevelopment of Tokyo plays a key role in Ghostwire’s side quests. One has you purify the evil spirit of a landlord who stole an old lady’s Zashiki-Warashi, a type of house spirit said to bring good fortune. It’s likely not a coincidence that the lady’s quaint old cottage was also located in an expensive-looking neighborhood. Another quest centers around a string of deaths at a construction site, which turn out to be the work of an old samurai spirit angered by the attempted destruction of his memorial stone.
The game’s environment tells a similar story. The northern neighborhood of Kirigaoka, for example, is a Danchi—a term used to describe public housing apartments built during the post-war economic boom. In a recent interview, Environmental Design Lead Takuya Jinda explained that the area’s time-worn, eerie buildings were based on the real-life Aoyama Kitamachi apartments. Those same apartments were demolished and replaced by a new high-rise building in 2019. The Kagerie skyscraper, too, is a combination of the Shibuya Hikarie and Coredo Muromachi buildings, both of which were extensive and costly redevelopment projects of historical shopping locations. The demolished buildings themselves have been reduced to ghosts, in a sense, haunting the digital world of Ghostwire.
In that same interview, both Jinda and Director Kenji Kimura stated the inclusion of retro buildings was to depict “something creepy from everyday life.” The portrayal of older buildings as objects of fear and aversion echoes the same sentiments of kegare. This wasn’t a wholesale condemnation, of course; rather, the developers observed these locations with a simple morbid curiosity. Just like the beckoning woman I saw in shutter town, we’ve been conditioned to see the old and poor as corrupted, scary. “...There are a lot of traditional old things that are sitting right next to very new and modern cutting edge buildings,” Kenji Kimura and Producer Masato Kimura stated in a separate interview. “Tokyo is unique in that way, and we thought if we could make a game that lets you experience that, then it would end up being really cool.” But it’s not hard to imagine a future Tokyo where places like these no longer exist.
The closest Ghostwire gets to any form of social critique is in its enemy designs. Known as “Visitors,” these ghastly apparitions appear as manifestations of the negative emotions felt by people in periods of transition, be it starting a new school or joining a new workplace. These otherworldly Visitors, attracted by kegare and negative emotions, come to reap the souls of those left wandering the world. Again, in these designs, we see themes of exploitation such as overwork, oppressive policing, and child abuse.
I don’t think Tango Gameworks set out to create a game that highlights gentrification, specifically. Neither do I think it wanted to say anything critical about urban Japanese society. For all intents and purposes, Ghostwire Tokyo is aesthetically-driven. By depicting a true-to-life version of Tokyo, however, the designers revealed its truth—Tokyo is built on bodies. Tokyo is gentrification.
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In 2019, construction workers found the unidentified remains of 187 people under the site of Tokyo’s new National Olympic Stadium. These were leftover graves of commoners from a relocated Edo-era temple. After the discovery, the remains were dug up and spirited away to the National Science Museum. Over the course of seven years, the construction project lost four workers to accidents and suicide.
If you ask the city’s more superstitious residents, they’ll say the deaths were caused by the angered spirits whose graves were disturbed. The moral of the story is that we shouldn’t be going around digging up dead bodies. But they’re wrong, obviously—those workers weren’t killed by ghosts. They died because of gross negligence and a toxic work culture that forced employees into working 190 hours of overtime a month.
Four lives and an estimated $1.1 billion, all for another singular step in the metaphorical “cleansing” of Tokyo. To rid the city of its eyesores, its undesirable elements, its unsightly residents. Anything that could remind you of the slow passage of time, of human suffering, and the inevitability of death—kegare.
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Andrew Kiya is a half-Japanese freelance writer living in Tokyo. When he’s not busy figuring out how to localize the word “kokoro,” you can find him talking about Japanese politics and videogames on Twitter @wouldhaus.