‘Simpsons’ Video Games Were Altered in Japan for a Disturbing Reason

For over three decades the Simpsons brand has been churning out tie-in video games of varying quality — from the very first arcade game in which players win by straight-up murdering Mr. Burns, to the recent, beloved, soon-to-be-dead-forever mobile game The Simpsons: Tapped Out.

In the intervening years, there were a whole lot of other Simpsons-themed video games, including racing games, bowling games, even a game in which Bart ascends a giant beanstalk and bumps off his father’s giant doppelganger in order to buy a cow — despite Bart’s historic aversion to possessing cows.

One memorably odd game was 1992’s Bart’s Nightmare, which was first released for the Super Nintendo system. The game invited players to guide Bart through the twisted recesses of his own subconscious, whereupon he battles microscopic germs, transforms into a Godzilla-like monster, and eventually travels to Hell where he encounters a blue Satan.

As one fan on social media recently pointed out, when the game was released on the Super Famicom in Japan, the cover art was slightly different. Specifically, Bart’s outstretched hand contained five fingers, not the usual four. Why? Possibly because of organized crime.

Historically, cartoon characters have just four fingers because it saves time and money — and also because it keeps them from treading into uncanny valley-like oddness. 

But in Japan, members of the Yakuza are “required to chop off their own digits to atone for serious offenses” as part of a ritual known as “yubitsume,” which some have suggested is the reason for cultural sensitivity around four-fingered cartoons. The Simpsons aren’t the only characters to get an extra finger in Japan; in 2000, the BBC reported that Bob the Builder similarly got a digital makeover so that kids wouldn’t start wondering if he was a “gangster.”

But Japanese journalist Chika Miyatake claimed at the time that this reaction was overblown, arguing that “if Japanese kids saw this cartoon with the character having four instead of five fingers then they might make a joke that he is in the mafia but they wouldn’t be scared of it.”

Some, however, have claimed that the four-finger edits are to avoid an “offensive reference to the burakumin caste,” descendants of feudal laborers, who were “were treated as pariahs because they performed work that was considered unclean.” Holding up four fingers is “a derogatory gesture indicating a four-legged animal” and “a symbol of dislike, fear and contempt” of the “suffered economic and social discrimination for 15 generations in Japan.”

Who knows, maybe this won’t be a problem anymore if The Simpsons stay on the air for so long that all the humans on the show evolve and develop a fifth finger.