Screenshot of Otacon saying to E.E.: “You knew our family’s dark history and still got involved?! What’s wrong with you?!”

I’ve been playing a bunch of Metal Gear Solid lately to expose my friends to it, and there’s an interesting cultural understanding hiccup involving the Emmerich family that I thought not everyone might know about: The Japanese concept of the family registry. With a family registry in place, it legally changes the construction of family as a concept. In Metal Gear Solid 2, this Japanese way of doing things is taken for granted, which makes the localization a bit awkward.

When I first played through MGS2 I remember I found E.E. and Otacon’s relationship unusual in ways a little off from the unrequited big brother crush. They remain deeply tied in family bonds even after Huey Emmerich died and Hal went off on his own. E.E. makes it clear that the two of them have no blood relation whatsoever – they are kids from different parents united through the marriage of their mother and father. They’re step-siblings.

As a Canadian, a westerner, who grew up in a single-parent home, I found it strange that the game pointed this out as being remarkable. If Otacon was old enough and had no blood ties or in his case, trauma related to the family, it’s fine for him to remove himself from the situation if he has the means. This is especially the case considering his trauma, and the fact that he probably did not have a mother/son bond with Emma’s mother, Julie. E.E. however, refers to Huey several times as her father, even though they are not related by blood.

E.E.: He left me… my mother — when we needed him the most!
E.E.: When my father died, all he could think about was himself!

While this may be because they were close (although I doubt it, given the circumstances) I believe it’s because the Danzinger girls were legally on the Emmerich ‘family registry’, according to Kojima logic. When a family is married, one of the major parts of that tradition is when the woman is moved onto her husbands’ family registry. She belongs to her husband’s family then, rather than her own, so if this was the case then E.E. was adopted into the Emmerichs at that time. Everyone becomes legally responsible for each other. Emma is legally Hal’s sister, and Julie is his mother, and it would be the case until she marries someone else.

Of course since these characters are North American, this is not actually the situation they would be in. But, because the writers are Japanese, they took this system for granted. I love seeing this little cultural revelations when different cultures tell stories about each other.

The Family Registry comes up again in more depth later with Kazuhira Miller in Peace Walker. Since he was born to a Japanese mother and an American father, his father had no family registry in Japan with which to claim Kaz as his child. I think that, by the time of Peace Walker, Kojima has realized it’s not a worldwide phenomenon.

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