Zipang: If a Butterfly’s Wings Can Cause a Tornado... What Can a Japanese Guided-Missile Destroyer Do?!

If you're familiar with the name Kaiji Kawaguchi, then you've likely heard him referred to as "the Tom Clancy of Japan". I bring this up not because it's 100% true, but it's also not an absolute misnomer. Unlike the late Clancy, who pretty much exclusively wrote political & military-related fiction novels, Kawaguchi has made plenty of manga not involving those two types of genres, like Boku wa Beatles, Actor, or Seizon -Life- (the last with Nobuyuki Fukumoto). However, when you look at his longest & most notable manga, they're almost exclusively about politics or the military; Actor's the only real outlier, unless you include titles he only drew for, like Osamu Eya's Kuubo Ibuki. 1997's Eagle: The Making of an Asian-American President (11 volumes) is about how a man of Japanese heritage runs & becomes President of the United States, and has been deemed rather prescient ever since Barack Obama became the 44th President. 1988's The Silent Service (32 volumes) is about a Japanese submarine captain who takes claim of a brand new submarine & declares it an independent state; not quite the Japanese equivalent to The Hunt for Red October, but I'd imagine Kawaguchi was inspired by it, somewhat. 2003's A Spirit of the Sun (17 volumes) is about Japan being physically ravaged by a series of natural disasters, and how its citizens have to emigrate to refugee camps on the Asian mainland, while also dealing with the political side of things in how Japan itself can rebuild; it even saw a 9-volume sequel, subtitled Foundation Chapter, in 2008. This also applies to the single longest series Kaiji Kawaguchi has ever done, Zipang.

Fiction detailing some sort of alternate history or timeline has been around since at least 1490 with Valencian novel Tirant lo Blanch, and Japan has been no stranger to it, either. One of the most well known would be Sengoku Jieitai, a 1974 novel by Ryo Hanmura that's best known internationally for its 1979 live-action movie adaptation starring Sonny Chiba; it's also known abroad as Time Slip, G.I. Samurai, or Samurai Commando: Mission 1549. Another would be Konpeki no Kantai/Deep Blue Fleet, a 20-volume novel series by Yoshio Aramaki from the 90s most notorious for starring Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who time warps back to his younger self in 1905 after dying in Operation Vengeance in 1943 & proceeds to change the course of World War II... Starting by absolutely destroying Pearl Harbor & occupying Hawaii; Japan eventually joins to Allies the fight the Nazis, though, & gives America back its independence. Kawaguchi decided to dip his toes into the genre with 2000's Zipang, which ran in Kodansha's Morning magazine until 2009, totaling 43 volumes! It also received a "follow-up" with 2012's Zipang: Shinsou Kairyu/Flow of the Deep Blue Ocean, which details the Genpei War & has absolutely no relation to the original series, whatsoever; "Zipang" was likely used simply because it's a semi-equally ancient spelling for the country's name. In late 2004, a 26-episode TV anime adaptation by Studio Deen aired in late-night, adapting partway into Volume 7, & Geneon Entertainment would then license & release it across seven dual-audio DVDs in North America from 2006 to 2007, with the last DVD coming out mere weeks before Geneon's closure. So, as the second of a three-part look at how World War II was reflected in anime, let's take a look at the anime adaptation of Zipang.

Obscusion B-List: Video Game Ports That Shouldn't Have Been Possible... But Actually Happened... Again

Three years ago, I did an Obscusion B-List about ports of video games to consoles that they had no real feasible right to actually exist on, and while some were definitely compromised in the move, if not outright unplayable, others actually came out either remarkably well, if not absolute miracle ports. It's a concept that I've been meaning to come back to at some point, but at the same time I didn't simply want to mention any old notable ports, especially if their status as "ports" can be debatable. For example, while Lobotomy Software's ports of Quake & Duke Nukem 3D to the Sega Saturn are absolutely impressive, they also don't necessarily actually categorize as "ports". Instead, they're downright remakes, since the staff at Lobotomy used their own proprietary SlaveDriver Engine in order to fully recreate those two games to work with the Saturn's complicated architecture, rather than simply port over the "Quake engine" variant of id Tech 2 or the Build Engine.

At the same, though, I shouldn't be too picky about technicalities like that, so let's just get into yet another six games that appeared on consoles so unlikely that the only natural reaction is to ask either "What?" or "WHY?!". Also, half of this list is first-person shooters, which is totally just by freak accident, I swear. Anyway, speaking of Quake...

Got to love how the cover is literally just the PC release,
but with an Amiga sticker slapped on the back.

Making video games for personal computers is a veritable minefield, and that was only all the more true prior to this decade, especially during the 80s & 90s. Back before your choice was between "PC, Mac, or Linux", you had IBM, Apple, Tandy, Atari, & Commodore (to name only a small few) all releasing seemingly countless variants of personal computers, all of which likely using their own proprietary hardware & software; in fact, even computers from the same company were likely to be incompatible with each other! In Europe, Commodore was effectively "King of the 80s" with both its cost-effective Commodore 64 & its more robust Commodore Amiga line. Debuting with the Amiga 1000 in 1985, the latter line would continue to be officially updated & supported up until 1998, even outliving Commodore itself; later Amigas after the 4000T are just modern PCs using the Amiga name & its own OS. Therefore, it's not surprising that computer games would continue to get ported over to the Amiga line during the 90s... But you just know that there's a limit to what even the Amiga 4000 was capable of, right?

Well, tell that to a company called clickBOOM.