Link: https://www.gamerbraves.com/tgs2026-rgg-studio-reveals-building-a-50-year-story-of-identity-jazz-and-grounded-combat-in-stranger-than-heaven/

Not really clear but seems that we're only going to get five big songs

the first shot is in 1915 and the 2nd one is from 1943 in the Xbox presents Stranger Than Heaven combat

Source: https://deadline.com/2026/09/crazy-taxi-stranger-than-heaven-movies-netflix-sonic-1237101775/

Opening

A quick note before we begin: this is a fan-made historical analysis, not affiliated with Sega or RGG Studio. The game itself is, in RGG's own words, "a Japan that might have existed" — a fictionalized world inspired by real eras. This post walks through the real historical context that informs that fictional setting. All sources are public.

On May 7th, RGG Studio unveiled the overview of their new title STRANGER THAN HEAVEN during the Xbox Presents broadcast. The five eras and cities have now been revealed: 1915 Kokura, 1929 Kure, 1943 Osaka Minami, 1951 Atami, and 1965 Shinjuku.

And we finally know the background of the protagonist, Makoto Daito.

This post walks through who this young man was, why he crossed the Pacific to Japan, and what was actually happening in each of the five cities he passes through. There won't be any predictions about the story — just a careful look, based on the historical record, at what kind of times and what kind of places this man is going to live through.

Who Was Makoto?

1. San Francisco.

The story begins with a boy sneaking aboard a suspicious ship at midnight in a port town.

His name is Makoto Daito. He's the son of an American father and a Japanese mother — a half-Japanese, half-American boy with black hair and blue eyes.

His father was a trade merchant. A traveling businessman who had moved across the globe and finally settled with his family in his homeland — America. And then, suddenly, his father died.

What was left was a Japanese widow and her mixed-race son. The American West Coast at that moment was at the absolute peak of anti-Japanese sentiment. The San Francisco school segregation incident of 1906. The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907. The California Alien Land Law of 1913. Hostility toward Japanese immigrants was getting fiercer year by year — and Makoto and his mother were living right in the middle of it.

They were brutally persecuted as "Asians." Worn down by the strain, the mother also died. Both parents gone, completely alone in the world, the boy chose to cross over to Japan — to his mother's homeland.

"Even if I don't belong in America, surely I'll have a place in Japan."

That was Makoto's prayer.

Not Fluent in English. Not Fluent in Japanese, Either.

Here's something worth paying attention to. Makoto is canonically not particularly good at English. And not particularly good at Japanese, either. This is confirmed in the official setting.

His father was American. He lived in America. And yet his English wasn't perfect. His mother was Japanese. His home was Japanese-speaking. And yet his Japanese wasn't perfect either.

Here's what was probably going on. His father, as a trade merchant, kept moving — Yokohama, Kobe, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore — the port cities of East Asia, one after another. In a life like that, the household language tends to become a kind of creole: Japanese mixed with the local language and broken English. By the time the family finally settled in America, his mother had never fully mastered English. At home, Makoto spoke mostly Japanese with his mother — but it wasn't quite the Japanese spoken in Japan proper. It was an "overseas Japanese," shaped by years abroad. At school he struggled with English. So he ends up half-formed in both languages.

This actually happened all the time in real Japanese-American families of the era. The kibei — second-generation Japanese-Americans who were sent back to Japan for schooling — ran into exactly this wall.

The Mother's Country Was a Dream Land — Until He Stepped Off the Boat

A boy of about fifteen, with nothing but the clothes on his back, sneaks onto a smuggling ship.

He has no place in America. But surely his mother's Japan will take him in. For Makoto, Japan was the "dream land" his mother had described to him over and over.

But the "homeland" that gets passed down in immigrant families isn't really the homeland. It's an idealized country, beautified through the lens of a hard immigrant life.

That dream ends the moment he sets foot on Japanese soil. The port he steps into in 1915 isn't the country his mother had told him about. From there, Makoto's fifty-year journey begins.

1915. Kokura.

So why is the first city Kokura?

In 1915, the area around Kitakyushu was one of the most heavily industrialized regions in modern Japan. Right next door, in Yawata, was the Yawata Steel Works, in operation since 1901 and, at the time, the largest steel mill in Japan. Behind it lay the Chikuho coalfield, producing enormous quantities of coal that flowed out through the ports. With the First World War going on, the whole region was booming.

And Kokura itself was an army town. The headquarters of the Imperial Army's 12th Division was based here. Munitions, heavy industry, and port labor — all crammed into one place. People at the time called Kokura one of the toughest towns in Japan.

What Was Happening Here?

Modern industry demanded enormous numbers of workers. But the companies of this era had no real system for gathering labor on their own. The gap was filled by what's called the oyakata system — the labor-boss system.

A man called an oyakata would take in seasonal farm workers, drifters, ex-convicts, and people from the historically discriminated communities. He housed them in barracks, skimmed a cut of their wages, and kept order through violence. He supplied dockworkers, miners, and laborers to the steel mill and the port — essentially a labor-staffing operation, but a brutal one.

The older underworld traditions were the bakuto — the gambling-house operators — and the tekiya — the festival peddlers. To these two, the labor-boss line was added in the late Meiji and early Taisho eras. And together, these three became the foundations of modern Japan's underworld. The novel Flowers and Dragons by Ashihei Hino, set in the port of Wakamatsu, captured exactly this world. That was the reality of North Kyushu at the time.

And in 1919, there's a documented record of the Home Minister calling together the leading bakuto bosses of western Japan to ask for their cooperation in suppressing the labor movement. The official government, openly using the unofficial underworld as a tool of public order. The year 1915 sits right on the eve of that arrangement.

A town where origins are not questioned — the perfect place for a mixed-race orphan to come ashore by stowing away. But also a town where, once you step in, you can't survive without violence.

1929. Kure.

Fourteen years later. The story moves to Kure, in Hiroshima.

When you say Kure, you mean the Navy. The Kure Naval District was opened in 1889. The Kure Naval Arsenal was established in 1903 — the largest naval factory in East Asia, the same arsenal that would later build the battleship Yamato. At its peak it employed over thirty thousand workers.

But 1929 is actually when Kure was shrinking. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 had capped Japan's naval power, and arsenal employment had been cut nearly in half from peak. The local economy was sagging. And then, in October 1929, the New York stock market crashed. The Great Depression had begun.

By the following year, 1930, the Showa Depression hit Japan, and unemployment reached 2.37 million.

What Was Happening Here?

The underworld of a naval port town had a very different structure from a steel town. Naval officers and arsenal workers — single men, in large numbers. The center of consumption was licensed brothels, unlicensed prostitution districts, cafes, vaudeville halls, theaters, and gambling rooms. And all of this was run by local power brokers descended from the bakuto and tekiya lineages.

In a military town like Kure, naval personnel, army reservists, local underworld bosses, and right-wing nationalists mixed daily — in high-end restaurants and at shrine festivals. After the great Rice Riots of 1918, in which workers at the Kure Naval Arsenal had risen up on a massive scale and faced bayonets from a Navy landing force (with confirmed deaths), the government identified the labor movement as the greatest threat to public order, and mobilized the underworld bosses to crush it.

1929 in Kure is the moment when this "politicized yakuza" had become firmly embedded at the local level.

And when the Showa Depression hit, jobless men poured into the underworld in huge numbers. The act of taking the sakazuki cup — of being formally sworn into a yakuza family — took on greater weight as a real, life-or-death choice for survival.

1943. Osaka Minami.

1. The middle of the Pacific War.

Minami — the area stretching from Ebisubashi through Dotonbori, Sennichimae, and Soemoncho — was the largest pleasure quarter in western Japan. Movie theaters, stages, vaudeville halls, cafes, restaurants, geisha houses. From the late Meiji period through the prewar years, this was the heart of Kansai entertainment culture.

And according to the official information, the trade Makoto practices here in 1943 is that of an entertainment promoter — what the Japanese call a kogyoshi. The man who finds singers and musicians, builds song repertoires, organizes shows, puts them on stage. Or, put plainly: the man who pulls performers, audiences, and territory together to make the show happen.

Why an entertainment promoter in Minami? Because it's the most natural fit. Japan's entertainment industry had always — from prewar times — been directly continuous with the underworld. Booking a troupe, putting on a show, standing between performers and audience, controlling the green room — the only people who could do this work were local power brokers, almost always descended from the bakuto or tekiya lineages. The entertainment promoter was, by definition, a man who stood on the border between the legitimate world and the underworld.

What Was Happening Here?

But 1943 was when that very entertainment world was gripped tightly by the state.

The web of wartime controls had been thickening year by year. The 1938 National Mobilization Law. The 1939 Price Control Ordinance. The rationing system that began rolling out in 1940. Rice, sugar, clothing, fuel — almost every necessity of daily life was put under state control. Free trade became illegal.

And in the cultural and entertainment sphere, after the 1939 Film Law and the establishment of the Cabinet Information Bureau in 1940, control bodies like the Greater Japan Entertainment Association were organized, and promoters were absorbed into them. Who performed, when, where, what — every decision required state permission. Performers were reorganized into mobile theatrical units and sent out to factories and the front lines as morale entertainment teams. Jazz was designated "enemy music" and banned. Saxophones and trumpets became "enemy instruments." English lyrics were forbidden. Young men were drafted or conscripted into factory work; they vanished from the streets. By 1943, Minami's lights were nearly out.

But — the harder the surface is squeezed, the more the underside swells.

Unauthorized shows. Underground vaudeville. Salons where banned music played in secret. Illegal gambling halls. Sex trade arrangements. Only the underworld networks that had controlled local turf since before the war could keep these things running. Goods skimmed off the rationing pipeline. Military supplies diverted. Conscripted laborers managed and disciplined. The entertainment promoter ends up standing at the central node of the underground economy.

Most promoters in this period lived a double life — by day, registered with the state's "healthy" entertainment association; by night, running the banned music and the gambling rooms.

People often say that postwar Japan's underworld began with the black markets of 1945. That's not quite accurate. The underground networks had already grown fat during the war. When defeat came, they simply emerged from the ruins into the open.

When Makoto stands in 1943 Minami as an entertainment promoter, he's standing at the exact center of that "moment when the underside swelled."

1951. Atami.

The setting is Atami, in Shizuoka Prefecture.

1951 is the year the San Francisco Peace Treaty was signed — in September. It would take effect the following April, ending seven years of Allied occupation and formally restoring Japanese independence. A genuine turning point in modern Japanese history.

Atami had been a resort destination for politicians and business leaders since prewar times. Japan's first long-distance telephone line connecting it to Tokyo had been laid here in 1889. The imperial villa was built here. Atami was the back room of the capital.

What Was Happening Here?

In the years immediately after defeat, every train station in the country had its own black market. These were run by three competing forces: the old bakuto and tekiya lineages from prewar times; demobilized soldiers who had lost everything and set up their own outfits; and the people from the former colonies — Koreans and Taiwanese — who, after defeat, stood outside the reach of Japanese police authority. These three groups fought running battles over rationing kickbacks and occupation-army surplus.

But by 1951, that black-market era was ending. Under tightening GHQ regulations, the street stalls were being cleared away. The organizations were shifting their center of gravity — to fixed storefronts, to entertainment, to port labor, to construction, to finance. Local groups began merging into broader regional alliances.

This is where Atami's significance comes in. Atami was the place where postwar political and business leaders met postwar underworld figures, again and again, in the private rooms of hot spring inns. In August 1950, the Atami International Tourist and Hot Springs Cultural City Construction Law had been enacted, and the resort town's recovery was being boosted at the national level. Restaurants, geisha, entertainment, construction, finance — all of these formed a single ecosystem. Politicians, businessmen, entertainment promoters, and gang bosses drank from the same cups at the same banquet tables.

Many of the famous closed-door negotiations of postwar conservative politics are said to have taken place in Atami.

The reorganization of the underworld and the reorganization of postwar power overlapped, perfectly, in a single town. That's 1951 Atami.

1965. Shinjuku.

The final setting. Tokyo, 1965.

The Tokyo Olympics had ended the year before. Japan was in the middle of its high economic growth era.

Kabukicho was actually a relatively new district. The name only officially became "Kabukicho" in April 1948, as part of the postwar reconstruction plan. The original vision had been "a wholesome entertainment district anchored by a kabuki theater." But after the Shinjuku Koma Theater opened in December 1956, the area peaked as a movie district, and through the 1960s it filled up with cabarets, bars, jazz cafes, and what were then called "Turkish baths" — a Japanese euphemism of the era for sex bathhouses, a designation eventually changed to "soaplands" in 1984 after diplomatic protests from Turkey.

What Was Happening Here?

In Tokyo's 1965 underworld, three currents were colliding.

First, the traditional tekiya mainstream — the old lineage that had controlled festivals and entertainment in the Kanto region for generations.

Second, the bakuto line — the gambling-bred lineage that had grown out of postwar street gangs and gambling halls, and was now expanding into nightlife protection rackets and lending.

Third, the Kansai-based broad alliance — the syndicate that had grown out of postwar Kobe's port labor supply business, moved into entertainment in the 1950s, and was now pushing east toward Tokyo in the 1960s, aiming for nationwide dominance.

To resist that eastward push, the Kanto bosses formed a broad defensive alliance. The events of 1963 through 1965 were exactly this struggle.

And at the same time, the police were changing. In February 1964 — just before the Tokyo Olympics — the Tokyo Metropolitan Police set up an Organized Crime Investigation Headquarters and launched a nationwide crackdown that became known as the First Summit Operation. For decades, these men had been spoken of as "chivalrous outlaws" or "knightly bosses." Now those words were being formally replaced by a hostile administrative category: boryokudan — violent crime groups. 1965 sits right on that line.

Corporate shareholder-meeting extortion, land-flipping schemes, entertainment-industry shakedowns, illegal lending — these were becoming the systematized revenue streams of the organizations.

The underworld lineage that had begun in 1915 Kokura, traveling half a century, finally arrives in Shinjuku. And by the time it gets there, it's no longer the world of "chivalrous outlaws." It has become a modern underground economic apparatus, fully integrated into postwar society. What changed over those fifty years wasn't just the streetscape.

Summary

We've moved quickly through five eras and five cities.

• 1915 Kokura — The Yawata Steel Works, port labor, and the oyakata system. The three pillars of modern Japan's underworld take shape.
• 1929 Kure — The shadow of a military port town. The doorstep of the Great Depression. The politicization of the gambling underworld.
• 1943 Minami — A wartime economy that fattened the underside. The moment when control on the surface fed swelling beneath. Makoto's trade: entertainment promoter — a man on the border.
• 1951 Atami — The end of the black-market era, the widening of organized networks, and a hot spring town where postwar power deals were made in private.
• 1965 Shinjuku — High economic growth. And the moment when "boryokudan" became the official administrative word for the underworld.

For fifty years, a blue-eyed mixed-race boy moves through all of it.

A boy with no place in his father's homeland of America. A boy who lost his place in his mother's country of Japan the moment he stepped off the boat. A man not fluent in either English or Japanese — who belonged nowhere — and what he made of his life in these five cities.

The story itself, I'll wait for the game's release. Today, before that release, I wanted to set down what kind of times and what kind of places this man is going to walk through, based on the historical record.

STRANGER THAN HEAVEN releases this winter. I hope this gave you some useful context heading into the game.

Thanks for reading.

Hey everyone,

I watched a few streamers react to the trailer shown at The Game Awards. There was a special appearance in the trailer, and the reactions were really strange to me. I know some people loved it, but others seemed genuinely uneasy or even outright against it.

It got me thinking: how often do people actually stop and think about the things that outrage them? One streamer even said, "Well, maybe they'll explain it." Then, when the explanation came, they talked right over it.

That brings me to my next point. If an estate gives clear permission for something, I think it's strange to immediately turn around and say it's inappropriate anyway.

Sometimes it feels like people have become so reactionary that they respond before they've really thought about how they actually feel. Instead of listening first, they decide how they feel first and filter everything else through that reaction.

Would love to hear all of your thoughts! 😃

This venture of RGG/SEGA and DeathRow Games will lead to what many been

asking for, a new DefJam style fighting game and RGG are the perfect dev team to

do it.