Ogata and his "Low Empathy"
A little while ago, I made a shitpost where I called Ogata "low empathy," and it hasn't sat very well with me since. It somehow feels both incredibly accurate and incredibly inaccurate at the same time. So, after ruminating on the subject and doing a little extra research, I come to you with my thoughts about how Ogata might experience and express empathy.
To start, I need to lay some groundwork. The word "empathy" is actually a very broad term for a range of different feelings and behaviors. There are actually three widely accepted types of empathy. They can go by slightly different names depending on who's writing about them, but they are generally described as follows:
Cognitive Empathy: The ability to look at another person and reasonably intuit what they might be thinking or feeling based on a range of factors, such as body language, facial cues, social cues, and broader situational context. If your friend's pet just died and they're crying, they must be really sad.
Emotional Empathy: Put simply, it is the ability to feel another person's emotions with them. If you know your friend is really sad, it makes you feel really sad too.
Compassionate Empathy: The desire to act accordingly to another person's emotions. If you know your friend is really sad, you'd want to do something for them to help them feel better.
These three types of empathy are often thought of as being loosely ordered, with cognitive empathy happening first and compassionate empathy happening last. And it makes sense for the most part, since one would need to know what someone is feeling first before they can take any action. However, it's not a strict rule by any means. It's a bit like the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are ordered like so, because that's the most common way people experience their grief. However, not everyone experiences the five stages in the same order, nor do they even experience all five stages. The "Three Stages of Empathy" can be thought of in the same way.
And this brings us back to Ogata. I believe that he specifically struggles with emotional empathy, but his cognitive and compassionate empathy are working just fine.
Ogata's emotional empathy
I don't believe that it's controversial to say that Ogata is neither good at, nor interested in matching other people's emotions. In fact, it's one of his most notable characteristics. I think this frame here really speaks for itself.
He's almost certainly wondering what the big deal is and why everyone is so collectively excited to be at the beach.
Other people's moods just don't have any major effect on his own. Seeing everyone else happy doesn't make him feel happy. If he is feeling excitement, or frustration, or any feeling other than 😐, you can be sure it's got nothing to do with everyone else's moods.
Ogata’s cognitive empathy
I think Ogata is actually pretty good at reading other people's feelings. In fact, he even seems quite sensitive to people's emotions at times. I can't help but specifically think of his journey up through Karafuto with Asirpa, Kiroranke, and Shiraishi. He was keenly aware of Asirpa’s grief over Sugimoto the entire time, and actively tried exploiting it to manipulate her into trusting him. When everything came to a head out on the ice sheets, he didn't have to do any guesswork about what emotional state she was in. That's why he almost succeeded in manipulating her.
We can also see his lack of emotional empathy on full display in that scene, as it's painfully obvious how much he's just pretending to feel her grief with her. And it's ultimately what makes him slip up. Because of his inability to feel grief with her over Sugimoto, he starts filling the gaps with his own experiences with grief and ends up saying the wrong thing.
I think it makes perfect sense for his character that he has good cognitive empathy. Not just because it's damn near required for a person to be able to engage in effective emotional manipulation like we see above. But it's literally shown to be a byproduct of his upbringing.
Parentification: In short, it is when a child is forced to take on a caretaker role for their own parent(s).
When a child is raised in an environment with a mentally or emotionally unstable caretaker, it literally becomes a matter of survival for them to develop the skills to accurately read people's emotions and anticipate their needs. Even though his mother is never shown to be abusive, there's no doubt that he was forced to play into her delusions in order to get any real attention from her.
By the way, has anyone else noticed how he'll often get this completely blank 😶 look on his face whenever someone is clearly trying to get a certain reaction out of him? You can see it in action in almost every interaction he has with Usami.
This is a common defense mechanism; a specific kind of freeze response that's often seen in victims of bullying and emotional abuse, which he canonically endured a lot of in the military. Remember, "Wildcat" was originally a derogatory term that the other soldiers called him to make fun of him having a geisha for a mother. The fact that he was also born an illegitimate child no doubt made things worse for him.
The point of this defense mechanism is to maintain power and control by denying the offending party what they want. Of course, in order for this defense mechanism to work, one needs to be adept at reading other people's wants and intentions in the first place.
All this to say, yes I think Ogata is perfectly capable of intuiting what others are thinking and feeling. He might even be better at it than most people.
Ogata’s compassionate empathy
I think this is gonna be the section with the most controversial takes. Earlier, I said that I believe Ogata has a normal amount of compassionate empathy. On its face, that probably doesn't make sense, since he's clearly one of the least compassionate characters in the whole story. To understand this, we need to remember that there is a difference between desire and intent.
We also need to remember that Ogata is revealed to be someone who actively chooses to behave in antisocial ways in order to play the part of a "psychopath."
Remember, compassionate empathy is a desire to behave in accordance with other people's feelings. But Ogata is someone who intends not to display any appropriate behavior towards people's feelings. Meaning, he is not someone who lacks compassionate instincts, but actively chooses to act against them.
I think the fact that he's a professional ragebaiter is evidence enough that he does have these innate empathy skills, only he just chooses to use them for evil.
But let's go over some actual examples. Before his big reveal right at the end, there's actually a few hints throughout the story that he does have compassionate empathy.
The first notable example is when he and Nikaido are trying to hunt down Tanigaki, but shit happens and Nikaido ends up getting mauled by a bear. If Ogata shoots the bear, he'll give away his position to Tanigaki. So, the most strategic option for him would be to let Nikaido die, even though it means sitting there and listening to his comrade's death screams and pleas for help. Based on what we've seen of Ogata so far, he seems perfectly capable of taking the most pragmatic and inhumane option.
Only for him to surprise us all by saving Nikaido's life at the risk of his own (granted, he didn't know at the time that Tanigaki had a rifle too). This is not something he'd do if he didn't have a desire to alleviate Nikaido's suffering.
But I think the biggest example I can point to is his relationship with his own mother.
He didn't just hunt ducks for his mother because he was sick of eating anko nabe every day, he thought with his flawed child logic that it would finally snap her out of her delusions.
He also reveals that his motivation for killing her was in service of fulfilling her desires, not his own (again, with his flawed child logic). I think his completely subdued reaction to her death is pretty telling. He already saw her as dead by the time he decided to poison her. And if she's already dead, then reuniting her remains with the man she loved was the only thing he could do for her.
In other words, all he wanted to do was alleviate his mother's pain. But when he eventually gave up hope of ever getting her back to normal, he decided that he had to take drastic measures. These are not the actions of someone who lacks compassion.
I'm certain that as he got older, the full weight of what he had done to his mother began slowly sinking in. He adopted his antisocial persona as a means to alleviate his own cognitive dissonance. If he was born that way, born without the ability to feel things like love and empathy, then it means he doesn't have to face the emotional and psychological consequences of doing something so morally reprehensible. He pretends to lack compassion for the sake of his own sanity. But sometimes it slips through the cracks.
So, there you have it. TL;DR: Ogata doesn't full-stop lack empathy. He only struggles with certain forms of it. And where he doesn't struggle, he actively chooses to express it antisocially. This merely gives off the appearance of having little to no empathy. Calling him "low empathy" might not be inaccurate, but it's overly simplistic.
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