After the Rain and Serious Matters | Mafumafu blog post 2016.01.08
Good evening, Mafumafu here.
As I am writing this blog post, itâs 2am on the 8th of January.
By the time this blog post has been published, I believe the announcement livestream would have already ended.
First Iâd like to make an official announcement here, and then talk about something on a more serious note.
Iâd really appreciate it if you would read all the way to the end.
Announcement
Serious matters
Announcement
So, after working as Soraru x Mafumafu for 2 years and completing our ATR Live tour,
finally
we have finally decided on a name for our unit!!!
Itâs
After the Rain!!
Finally! More like, why didnât we even have a name for 2 whole years!
Truth be told, weâve actually been thinking of a name for our unit ever since working on our first song.
But without any sort of reason or preface, just coming right out and saying âSo from now on weâll be working as ăă,â would surprise just about anyone.
Thatâs why at the beginning we just went along without fixing a name.
We didnât even have a name for our circle, and ended up having a lot of trouble when we had to identify ourselves. Really, it was a lot of trouble.
Starting with our first album, âAfter Rain Questâ, and completing our first Live Tour, âAfter the Rain tour 2015â, we decided that we wanted to keep the name that had found a place in our heart.Â
Thus, we decided on the name After the Rain.
With that said,
2016.4.13
After the Rain will be releasing an album,
ăBlack crest storyă !!
Yayyyyyyyy!!!
Weâre in the midst of production right now, please look forward to it!!
Album details
Release date: 13 April 2016
First-run limited edition CD A (+ tokuten CD) 2500 yen + tax
Tokuten CD will include music tracks (TBA) and Hikikomoranai Radio special edition
First-run limited edition CD B (+ tokuten CD) 2500 yen + tax
Tokuten CD will include a collection of MVs of the listed tracks and footage of live audio recording and interviews
Normal edition 2000 yen + tax
Tokutens available at the following corporations, applicable only to limited edition CDs A&B
Animate: Secret DVD âSoramafu goes to an Onsenâ edition
Amazon: B3 poster (of Soramafu themselves)
Tsutaya: TBA music track CD (1 solo song each, total of 2 songs, vocaloid cover ver.)
Tower: TBA music track CD (1 solo song each, total of 2 songs, anisong cover ver.)
WIth that said, Iâve come to the end of the announcement.
Serious Matters
Just writing the announcement already took up more time than expected.
Itâs now 3:20am.
Iâm sure there are those who are looking forward to what Iâm about to say,
and on the other hand there are also those who feel anxious.
So let me start by addressing a few things first.
First of all, as usual, I will still be continuing solo activities as Mafumafu.
Iâd like to think of solo x solo activities as a chemical reaction, which makes everything even more fun.
We also did not enter a company or sign any contracts.
Weâll be learning many things again now with a different setting, but I always, always want to treasure this freedom.
In the first place, even if I had the ability to listen to what other people are saying,
I donât have the cooperativeness and social skills needed to make a decent living. (´-Ď-ď˝)
All of our activities will be carried out following our intentions, with the album this time being no exception; everything from production, writing, composing, editing, mixing and mastering, all 100% of it will be completed with our own hands.
The big things that canât be done individually, I believe they can be accomplished when the two of us combine our powers! Weâll definitely create a wonderful album so please look forward to it ăž(*´âĄď˝*)ďž
To be honest, I was really, really scared of everything and anything.
By experiencing all sorts of pain and sadness, Iâve become the person I am today.
I am someone who canât really sense another personâs evil intentions, and can be quick to trust people.
Easily swallowing the tales that were told to garner my sympathy, I slowly started hating myself.
I will not disclose the details, but a few years back I was bullied terribly.
It was something made me feel socially, mentally and physically pressured.
Being woken up in the middle of the night by the door being kicked open, or being shouted at,
being dragged out while still in my pajamas, or just having insults hurled at me.Â
After doing some investigation, I learned that I, as well as a group of people, have been cheated by someone, and it seemed that they had the intention of sowing discord amongst us.
Now, Iâve already made up with that group, and we treat that incident as a joke, but at that time it was really painful, depressing, and scary.
Unable to overcome a part of this incident, wrecked by the spite and violence,
swallowed by despair, the one who reached out his hand to me was Soraru-san.
Soraru-san, who found out about the truth, defended me and made the culprit promise âNot to do anything to hurt Mafumafu againâ.
He also said that heâd always look out for me, and thanks to soraru-san, I was able to find release.
Urata-san, Amatsuki-kun, luz-kun, all these friends were also there for me when I needed someone to talk to.
And after packing my stuff, and movingâŚ
Just thinking that if things were left alone is enough to send shudders down my spine.
âWhat the hell is that? A story from some manga?â might be what youâre thinking right now, but this is all true.
In fact, all of this doesnât even amount to a fraction of the whole incident.
With all these things happening, I started working together with Soraru-san.
I feel like itâll come off as too staged if I were to praise this friend of mine right now,
so I wonât praise him, but just let me say that Iâm utterly grateful to him.
Without knowing, it seems like Iâve told an unbelievable story, so itâs no surprise that I have such a gloomy personality right!?
It seems like Iâm still trying to justify my gloomy personality. I seriously donât know when to give up do I!
Being cheerful and having fun is still the best huh~_( _ `Ď、)_
Our two albums After Rain Quest and Prism Ark,
as well as our ATR tour, have gotten amazing response.
Makes me nervous.
Being so afraid of dying to the point of nearing death and having had my head trapped in an endless cycle of pain,
I transformed all these thoughts into songs and lyrics, which so many people hear today.
I canât help but cower in fear under the eyes of others, to the point where I canât even take the train,
yet I was able to stand on that stage, look forward and smile.
Last year was a peaceful year and I was able to devote a lot of my time to music.
I donât really know how to put this into words, but Iâm really happy that there are people out there who can accept the person that I am today.
Iâm really grateful.
Right now itâs 5am in the morning.
Just how long am I gonna take to write thisâŚ
Iâm writing this while being in a state of half-sleep so maybe all this is just an incoherent mess? Will it be okay?
In any case, whatever I write will end up becoming a really formal essay right
I tried my best to write it in a lighter tone but well
Itâs gonna be hard to readâŚ.(´ăťĎăťď˝)
Now then
My activities as Mafumafu, as After the Rain, as a composer,
whichever it may be, Iâll definitely create more good music in 2016.
Iâll write till Iâve written out everything I wanted to say.
I want to have the most fun when doing lots of fun things.
What even is a composer
I kinda have an inkling as to what it is but please make a guess
So long wwwwwwwwww
wtf is this wwwwwwww  I feel like someone who suffers from some communication disorder when they canât stop talking wwwwwww
Thanks for reading all the way till here www
From now on itâll be busy again but Iâll give it my all! Goodnight! ăž(*´ăźď˝*)ďž
(t/n: really really grateful that mafu had the courage to come out and tell us about his past, his story, and it just shows how far heâs come as a person, how heâs grown, how important ATR is to him and how much Soraru means to him, how much he has saved him, and Iâm really really glad theyâre friends today. and mafu is a precious angel. congratulations on their major debut as After the Rain, congratulations to a lasting partnership, congratulations to mafu for being brave, to soraru for his courage to save mafu and Iâm really super happy!!!!Â
side note first time translating one of mafuâs blog posts and itâs one of the longest and probably is BUT thanks for reading!! kinda gave up halfway cos mafu also kinda gave up talking coherently so whatâs a coherent translation man
once again congratulations to soramafu!!!!!! ^^)
also first song of ATR!! check it out here
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LMAOOO
(i hope we all agree the best revenge plan ever is nie huaisangâs)
On a scale from Eren Jaegar to the Count of Mount Cristo, how good is your revenge plan?
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:(
Japanese author Osamu Dazai giving a lecture at Tokyo University of Commerce (the predecessor of the current Hitotsubashi University) entitled 'Modern Diseases' on October 2 1940.
Fun Fact: Dazai was nervous and sweaty on this day, his friends recalled him being extremely nervous, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.
The lecture was a success though, and his popularity grew among the students with many of them starting to enthusiastically read his work.
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Manuscript of No Longer Human by Japanese author Osamu Dazai
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Sign of the Times: Akutagawa RyĹŤnosuke and TaishĹ Era Literature
Sign of the Times: Akutagawa RyĹŤnosuke and TaishĹ Era Literature
This served as the introduction to my thesis, and it makes a good starting point for Akutagawa, I think. This is my way of saying that I already wrote a whole lot about why Akutagawa is important and I donât want to do it again.
I do not wish to remove the inline citations, also known as the worst kind of citations, so you can ponder over whether Yu or Ueda was a better source.
***
Japan was in a state of turmoil when Emperor Meiji took the throne at the young age of sixteen in 1868. Twenty years before then, Commodore Perryâs mission to open up Japanese trade to the westâby force, if necessaryâhad broken over two hundred years of self-imposed isolation. Japan found itself on the end of unequal treaties dictated by American diplomats, and it appeared as those Japan would join most of Asia in being colonized by Western powers. During his forty-year reign, however, Meiji oversaw a massive modernization of the country politically, economically, militarily and culturally. By the time of his death in 1912, Japan had undergone a technological revolution, reversed its unequal treaties, bested China and Russia in war and even claimed its own colony, Korea (Sims 2, 17-8, 69, 93).
Meijiâs grandson ShĹwa (Hirohito) ruled, as both regent and emperor, for almost seventy years. He saw Japan through its empire building in the 1920s and 30s and through success and defeat in, as it is called in Japan, the Fifteen Yearsâ War. As a cultural figurehead, he oversaw the trials and rebuilding of occupation, the ascendant economy of the 1960s and 70s, and died in 1989 with Japan as a major world power (Bix 5, 13, 16). These two emperors together saw Japan through over a century of massive political upheavals, beginning with a feudal system largely unchanged since the 1600s and ending with a modern democracy (Sims 1-2). Their presence and drive shaped Japanâs modernization, wartime, and rebuilding.
However, the leadership in between these two strong rulers was found wanting. Emperor TaishĹ, son of Meiji and father of ShĹwa, ruled for a mere fourteen years, and in name only for the last five. His son acted as regent for the rarely-seen emperor (Bix 93). Bereft of charisma, TaishĹ was an ineffective leader and lacked the strong guiding touch of his father and son. While Meiji had rejected the traditional role of the unseen emperor by making public appearances and official visits, TaishĹ was confined to the Imperial Palace (Sims 17-8, Bix 53). The genrĹ, the elder statesmen of the Meiji era, intended to use the instability following the death of Emperor Meiji to enact laws and edicts favoring themselves, but the public saw through this plot and political parties overthrew the genrĹ as the primary force in Japanese politics (Sims 106-7). Without a strong imperial influence from either the emperor himself or his advisors, society and culture proceeded in a more liberal direction. This era has been called the âTaishĹ Democracy,â but this liberalization also extended to the arts. Communism and socialism gained popularity alongside naturalism, social realism, âDekanshĹâ (the works of Descartes, Kant, and Schopenhauer) (Jansen 540), and a gothic style called âerotic, grotesque nonsense.â A campaign of poorly executed strike-busting led to citizens favoring workers over the military (Bix 52-3). Japanese workers celebrated their first May Day in 1920, the Japanese Communist Party was formed in 1922 (Putzar and Hisamatsu 200-1), and the Imperial Diet approved universal male suffrage in 1925 (Yu 47). Literature and culture thrived in this transiently permissive atmosphere.
Though Akutagawa RyĹŤnosuke was a member of this generation of TaishĹ writers, in many ways he was everything they were not. Works such as âThe Monkey and the Crabâ (Sarukani-kassen) and âPeach Boyâ (MomotarĹ) could not have been written by any of Akutagawaâs contemporaries. Though these stories had one eye on present-day society, they were still too rooted in traditional Japan. They were too ironic and too satirical for the naturalists, and though they expressed awareness of the lower classes, they were not concerned enough with the struggle of everyday life for the Marxists (Rimer 142). Unlike many of the other writers who came of age in the TaishĹ era, Akutagawa, though he sympathized with their causes, had little patience for either proletariat literature or naturalism (Yu 49).
Japanese naturalism was commonly expressed through the shishĹusetsu, or the âI Novelâ (Putzar and Hisamatsu 187). These novels were primarily based around thinly-veiled fictionalizations of shameful events in an authorâs life. Akutagawa, for most of his career, deliberately avoided writing about his own life and experiences. He claimed later in life that his first stories were written to try and take his mind off of a badly ended relationship (Keene 558). Akutagawa believed that to write too honestly about his own experiences would leave his own life, rather than his stories, open to criticism. This, he intimated, was something he would be unable to bear (Tsuruta 24). As a result, even in his final, troubled years, when his writings were marked by deeply personal explorations of his own life and psyche, Akutagawa maintained a veneer of fiction on his short stories. He never relied on the confessional style practiced by many of his fellow authors (Yamanouchi 92).
Those same worries and fears that eventually drove Akutagawa to suicide were born shortly after he was. The signs of the Chinese zodiac are not limited to years: the month, the day of the week, and the hour also have a representative animal. And Akutagawa RyĹŤnosuke, âSon of the Dragon,â was born in the year and the month and the day and the hour of the dragon (Shaw i). Born to parents of rather advanced age, he was given to a wet nurse instead of his mother (Yu 7). When he was less than a year old his mother became insane and he was adopted by his motherâs sister, effectively destroying his relationship with both his father and his mother. His mother died, still suffering from insanity, when he was eleven (Yamanouchi 88). This fear of insanity haunted Akutagawa all his life; at the time, insanity was believed to be a hereditary condition (Keene 557). Akutagawa began publishing in literary magazines while still a student at TokyĹ Imperial University, and one of his early successes, âHanaâ (The Nose) earned praise from veteran Meiji era author SĹseki Natsume for containing three elements missing from I Novels: humor, novelty, and brevity (Tsuruta 22). Afterwards, he carried himself as the elder authorâs disciple. SĹseki gave the young writer some advice that apparently stuck: ignore what everybody else is writing about (Yu 16). In 1919, he resigned his position as a professor of English at the Yokosuka Naval Engineering School (to the benefit of the navy, he joked) in order to become a full-time writer (Hibbett, âNegative Idealâ 439).
Contemporaries of Akutagawa both applauded and lambasted him for favoring style over substance. His critics called his works âdetachedâ (Yu 18), âartificialâŚâ (Ueda 137) and said that he was too clever for his own good (Hibbett, âIntroductionâ 11). His works, they said, were very consciously works; they were too deliberate to be stories. Akutagawaâs writing was filled with perfectly formed phrases, but the accuracy of his phrasing destroyed any sense of spontaneity (Ueda 137). Akutagawa found this to be a foolish and pretentious criticism; nobody, he said could write a story on accident (Ueda 18-19). More irritating for Akutagawa would have been the claims that he was too stylistic, claims which he dismissed at first. In Akutagawaâs mind, content and form were inseparable. He considered writing that was too skillful, too stylistic, to be antithetical to art (Yu 19). Later in his life, Akutagawa himself would wonder if his deftness was not holding back his writing ability. Speaking of the work of other writers as well as his own lesser stories, he said, âIt is easy to cover a lack of sincerity with skillâ (qtd. in Cavanaugh 53).
A more oft-noted contention, however, was the issue of Akutagawaâs originality. Akutagawa famously relied on a diverse number of sources from various times and places. Nearly half of his 150 short stories are dependent on other works, ranging, as Yu puts it, âfrom mere inspiration to outright plagiarismâ (21). However, even Akutagawaâs plagiarism was not as simple as it might appear. The basic plot points of his short story âRashĹmon,â for example, are largely drawn from a single story from the Konjaku monogatari (Stories from Long Ago), an anthology of tales about a thousand years old. However, the story, just a few pages long, incorporates elements of a few other tales in that collection as well as medical details Akutagawa gleaned from his university lectures (Yamanouchi 89). And of course, the analysis of the protagonistâs psyche is all Akutagawaâs original work. Yu provides another example in âKumo no itoâ (The Spiderâs Thread). This story, dripping with Buddhist symbolism and imagery, is actually an adaptation of a Christian parable which appears in The Brothers Karamazov (25). Akutagawa, for his part, claimed that his use of disparate elements was pragmatic: a story needs an unusual incident, and an audience is more willing to accept an unusual incident in an equally unusual or unrealistic setting (qtd. in Keene 559-60).
Akutagawaâs strategy is readily apparent in this collection. Three of the four short stories are, like much of Akutagawaâs output, based on prior sources. In this case, they are each based on popular Japanese fairy tales. Just as Akutagawaâs early work relied on the Konjaku monogatari, his âmiddle periodâ of 1920 to 1924 often incorporated fairy tales and traditional stories from both inside and outside Japan (Yu 51). However, Akutagawa stretches the limits of the fairy tale format in these stories, as he did with his works based on the Konjaku monogatari, by using them to explore contemporary themes, keeping one eye on the past and one eye on the present (Putzar and Hisamatsu 194). He uses the fairy tale format to explore the gap between a uniquely Japanese past and a present in which the Japanese arts exists alongsideâor opposingâWestern culture.
As TaishĹ era authors took prominence, some of the old guard of Meiji writers grew concerned with authorsâ increasing focus on Western-style literature at the expense of Japanese-style works (Chance 145). Akutagawa differed from his TaishĹ contemporaries in that regard: he sympathized with the authors of the Meiji era, such as Mori Ogai and SĹseki. Because Akutagawa, like Mori and SĹseki, was extremely well-versed in Western literature, he was more willing to be critical of it (Putzar and Hisamatsu 192). Whereas most writers of Akutagawaâs generation embraced Western literature and culture, Akutugawa, like his literary heroes, always perceived even his favorite aspects of Western culture to be fundamentally different and alien. This theme would dominate Akutagawaâs writing in the last years of his life (Dodd 194).
Akutagawaâs output in his final years explored his childhood as well as his anxieties about the modern age. Death increasingly took the forefront in Akutagawaâs later period works. In one, he details the lives and deaths of all of his immediate family, including a sister who had died before he was born. The death of his sisterâs husband appears in two separate stories. However, true to form, he continued to fictionalize some details of his actual life experiences: one is told entirely in the third-person; he exaggerates the (what can only loosely be called) poverty of his childhood, and, in one of those stories featuring his brother-in-lawâs death, he omits the fact that the man, suspected of arson, had thrown himself under a train. Many of these stories were published posthumously, and one, âThe Life of a Foolâ was entrusted to his friend, the author Kume Masao. Akutagawa gave Kume the responsibility of deciding whether or not it was worth publishing. Akutagawaâs suicide note, written a month later, was also addressed to Kume (Akutagawa, âIsshĹâ).
Emperor TaishĹ died on Christmas Day, 1926 and Akutagawa took a fatal overdose of sleeping medication seven months later. In the coming few years the TaishĹ Democracy came to an ignoble end, as liberalism and permissiveness were crushed by worldwide economic depression and the military machine. Akutagawa cited the reason for his suicide as being a âvague unease about (his) own futureâ (Akutagawa, âShukiâ), and, looking at the course of the next few years, it is hard to deny that it seems prophetic. Akutagawa was no stranger to censorship; his short story âShĹgunâ (The General) was targeted by government censors for its unpatriotic, satirical and critical portrait of the war here Nogi Maresuke (Arita). However, it is unlikely that the author would have continued to get off so likely. The same riots that had demonized the army in the eyes of the public in the early TaishĹ years had inspired the top brass to take measures against liberal movements (Sims 123). In 1928, the year after Akutagawaâs death, police began rounding up suspected political leftists under the auspices of the Peace Preservation Law. Fifteen long years of war began with a false-flag attack in Mukden, China, that served to justify an invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Leading proletariat author Kobayashi Takiji was tortured to death by special police forces in 1933 (Rubin 232). The main character of âMomotarĹ,â the fairy tale upon which Akutagawa based his blistering anti-war satire of the same name, became a symbol for Japanâs power projected overseas (Tierney 117-8). For those authors who cut their teeth during the comparatively permissive TaishĹ Democracy, the war years of the early ShĹwa period would have been almost unrecognizable.
Critics have debated whether Akutagawaâs suicide was born out of the authorâs failed attempt to forge a new, more personal style with his late career turn, an inability to blend his prose with the leftist politics he supported, the only logical course of action for a man who declared that literature was more important than life itself, or nothing more than the product of a tortured soul. However, it is only natural that Akutagawa would go out so soon after the end of the TaishĹ era. The new style that Akutagawa was on the verge of mastering was cut short as much by the emperorâs death as by his own. Akutagawaâs career followed the course of the TaishĹ era particularly well: TaishĹâs reign and Akutagawaâs career began and ended within a year of each other, and Akutagawa symbolizes TaishĹ literature to such an extent that it is his death, rather than the eraâs namesake, that traditionally rings the literary era to a close (Lippit 28). Akutagawa flourished in that short period when Western novels were in vogue yet still new enough to be strange, in the period between the censorship of the Meiji era and the oppression of the early ShĹwa period. Most of Akutagawaâs best stories required nothing more than good material for inspiration, and so it is fortunate that one of Japanâs most fruitful authors happened to be planted in some of historyâs richest soil.
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here we areeeeee
just a coincidence my game copy crashed and damaged JUST AFTER THAT SCENE and now i have to REDOWNLOAD IT and START IT FUCKING OVER. well you donât even want me to see that scum boy dontâyou? got it, I have to agree
kawase my boy iâm coming to you again
The amount of hate IÂ have for Hanazawa is huge. Iâd pick Kawase a million times over this guy. I feel nothing but disgust. That smut scene made me physically ill. Easily the WORST route in the entire game. FUCK THIS GUY.
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OMFG i just realized even the hashihime quartet tamamori-kawase-minakami-hanazawa IS from Aizu too. LMAO aizu best historical bl city ever
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quello che ho scoperto sul contesto storico di Hybrid Child perchĂŠ ho voglia di rantare: (A Hybrid Childâs historical setting theory. eventually a brief summary in perhaps bad english will follow. just for fun)
siccome hybrid child occupa un posto specialissimo nel mio cuore e non so neanche bene perchĂŠ, ogni tanto mi diverto a fare qualche ricerca per capire se lâambientazione è completamente frutto di fantasia o, visto che soprattutto la vicenda degli ultimi due capitoli (leggi: oav) si svolge in un periodo storico ben preciso, se invece presenta piĂš elementi storicamente verosimili. io non ho alcuna preparazione in merito (sigh vorrei), semplicemente mi intriga mega quel periodo di sommosse casini riforme prima della restaurazione di meiji; quindi, fonti: wikipedia e qualche blog. ho letto anche i capitoli di due libri di storia giapponese sullâargomento ma sono stati completamente inutili lmao.
cosâho scoperto quindi? partiamo con ordine. le cose che si sanno esplicitamente dalla storia: si sa che quando lâidillio spensierato dei tre dellâave maria crasha è perchĂŠ lo shĹgun se ne è scappato via, quindi il loro feudo è bollato come fazione ribelle. sappiamo anche che lâimperatore, ormai tornato sul pezzo, si era impadronito del castello di Edo e ora stava andando a fare il culo al loro clan. allego prove:
il giappone in quel periodo era una militocrazia, dove il potere esecutivo era completamente nelle mani dei generali, gli shĹgun. appunto per questo motivo il governo viene chiamato shĹgunato o, in giapponese, bakufu (governo delle tenda. non mi ricordo perchĂŠ). fatto sta che lâimperatore nel corso dei decenni aveva perso sempre di piĂš il proprio potere effettivo, rivestendo poco piĂš che una carica formale, dato che il governo era tutto in mano allâesercito. al di sotto dello shĹgun câerano i vari daimyĹ, ovvero i signori feudali di ogni rispettivo clan (han) che ricevevano le terre dallo shĹgun e a loro volta le distribuivano ai samurai loro sottoposti. tra di essi, alcuni venivano scelti come ministri/vassalli e i piĂš importanti erano i karĹ, che rispondevano direttamente al signore feudale; generalmente câera un karĹ che stava a Edo dove câera lo shĹgun e un altro che rimaneva a fare la guardia al castello del feudo. da HC sappiamo che non siamo a Edo, ergo Tsukishima doveva essere il ministro che restava a casa e infatti era nei dintorni del castello (quando non era a casa di Kuroda o in giro a mangiarsi dolcetti *cough*).
quando cade il regime feudale aka lo shĹgunato? quando guarda caso lo shĹgun allora in carica, tale Tokugawa Yoshinobu, abdica! perchĂŠ convinto/costretto dallâimperatore che si è fatto come alleati due dei clan grossi sostenitori del bakufu che non sopportano piĂš la mollezza delle riforme shogunali e vogliono un Giappone fedele allâimperatore e pronto a espellere gli i barbari occidentali che premono per farlo uscire dal sakoku (chiusura blindata del Paese) that means: nessuno entra, nessuno esce e nessuno può essere cristiano o imparare una lingua straniera, tieâ. solo nel tardo periodo Tokugawa si era giunti al compromesso di accettare solo gli olandesi e di permettere a qualunque giapponese, non solo agli interpreti diplomatici, di imparare lâolandese. perchĂŠ questa precisazione? perchĂŠ, fun fact, i documenti che si vedono nellâanime quando Kuroda smanetta con gli hybrid child sono in olandese! lol (allego prova di quando mi sono messa a decifrarlo solo in base ale mie conoscenze del tedesco)
comunque, lo shĹgun prima di arrendersi del tutto prova a scappare a KyĹto perchĂŠ è incoraggiato dal clan Aizu ma durante lo scontro armato contro le truppe imperiali si accorge di essere troppo debole, lascia capra e cavoli (dove i cavoli sono del suo esercito) e fugge a Edo. viene raggiunto dallâimperatore, si arrende, chiede di essere risparmiato e messo in prigione e praticamente concede allâimperatore di appropriarsi del castello di Edo. direi che fin qui tutto combacia: siamo nel 1868, gli imperiali sono a Edo e si stanno dirigendo a sottomettere anche gli ultimi clan che, ora che non câè piĂš uno shĹgun, sono automaticamente considerati dei riottosi nemici pubblici. è lâinizio del bakumatsu (fine del bakufu) e della restaurazione imperiale che procederĂ fino alla salita al trono dellâimperatore Mutsuhito (futuro Meiji) inaugurando cosĂŹ una nuova e complicatissima epoca della storia nipponica.
ma torniamo ai gays. il momento della convocazione effettiva alle armi coincide con quello in cui viene spiegata la strategia di attacco del nemico:
Kazusa, Utsunomiya e Dewa erano tre province storicamente esistite che coprivano alcuni territori a nord di Edo. E la traiettoria ipotizzata dellâinvasione combacia ancora una volta con il percorso che viene mostrato nellâanime. Se ne deduce quindi che, siccome il clan dei nostri eroi si caga sotto per lâavanzata dei lealisti allâimperatore, la sede del feudo sia per forza di cose a nord di Edo e vicino ai territori menzionati. Skippo la parte successiva sulla strategia di Tsukishima che assegna i comandanti alle cittĂ /zone, perchĂŠ stranamente non credo siano toponimi storicamente accurati, non ho trovato nessuna conferma al riguardo.
avevamo detto che Yoshinobu aveva ripreso a lottare contro lâimperatore perchĂŠ incoraggiato dal dominio Aizu. Ecco, la mia ipotesi è proprio che il clan di cui si parla in HC sia (fortemente ispirato a) Aizu. PerchĂŠ?Â
1. era conosciuto per la qualitĂ e il valore dei suoi samurai (speaks for itself)
2. era stato uno dei maggiori alleati dello shĹgun e, in seguito al tradimento dei clan Satsuma e ChĹshĹŤ che erano passati dalla parte dellâimperatore costringendo lo shĹgun a fare altrettanto, è stato considerato da annientare in quanto ribelle.
3. è passato alla storia per una battaglia molto feroce e sentita che aveva come obiettivo quella di costringere il feudo alla resa o scioglierlo, in cui sparavano non stop al castello. e che ovviamente è stata persa e come conseguenza ha portato alla resa di Aizu-han e alla deportazione dei suoi samurai superstiti.
4. la posizione combacia con la possibile ubicazione della cittĂ di HC, ovvero: lâodierna Fukushima, appena piĂš a nord di Utsunomiya e perfettamente circondata dalle altre province verso cui gli imperiali erano diretti.
5. il castello di Aizuwakamatsu, noto come castello di Tsuruga, looks like this:
  ^ aizuwakamatsuâs castle             ^ hybrid childâs castle
beâ direi.. no doubts about it. questo castello è stato gravemente danneggiato durante la battaglia di Aizu dellâottobre 1868, ed è stato ricostruito solo nel Novecento inoltrato. Nello specifico, le cronache dicono che era stato danneggiato senza sosta da palle di cannone che venivano agevolmente sparate da unâaltura montagnosa che sorge proprio di fronte al castello.Â
again:
câè una montagnetta della stessa altezza del castello raffigurata sulla cartina che combacia proprio con la prospettiva in primo piano dellâimmagine da cui presumibilmente venivano le cannonate.
QUINDI RIASSUMENDO SĂ I KUROSHIMA SONO DI AIZU POSSO MORIRE FELICE ORA CHE LâHO SCOPERTO
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english summary: my task on HCâs historical setting is that Tsukishimaâs clan is very likely to be Aizu domain. Because Aizu clan was one of the most loyal shogunate supporter, and after the shĹgun surrendered himself to the new-restored emperor and handed him Edo castle, this feud found itself abandoned and marked as rebellious. Thus the imperials started a fight in Aizu (october 1868), which is a land renown for its famous castle, and after a hard battle the Aizu people lost, the clan was dissolved and the castle burnt down. The toponymies mentioned in the HC story match the actually existed ancient provinces in late Edo Japan, and the location of them too fits the position on the map that Tsukishima displays. Aizu itself used to be in the now-called Fukushima prefecture, north of TĹkyĹ. And pls look at the castle it is THAT castle. undoubtedly.
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what is it with overprotective big brothers and their tendency to lose their heads đ¤
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One of my fav hilarious scene of the novel. Cried my ass out
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would you believe a man says this because heâs mad about his house getting knocked down and he needs to sufficiently stun everyone so he can fling his toxic meatballs into their mouths in order to stop one of his colleagues from strangling his other colleague
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My fav foxy eyes
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Modern AU Xue Yang is a tongue piercer can't change my mind
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reblog and put in the tags what your favorite fictional characters have in common
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Wretched beginning
Wretched end
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Tbh I'd buy jgy's hat to wear it inside my room while playing acnh. I kinda like this combo it gives me powerful vibes
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