Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 4 - Chapter SS1

Chapter 1

? Isn’t ‘Sugita Genpaku,’ like, the coolest friggin’ name ever?!

Sugita Genpaku was a Japanese physician who was born in the early eighteenth century and died in the early nineteenth century. He’s considered historically significant both for his place in Japan’s medical history as well as his contributions to the field of translation! See Andou’s Genpaku trivia and the next note in this section for more details.

? Sugita Genpaku was the guy who translated the Tafel Anatomie, right?

The Tabulae Anatomicae is a medical text that was written by Johann Adam Kulmus at some point in the early eighteenth century. General information on the text itself isn’t super easy to come by, and from what I can gather, the actual medical content of the text is mostly only relevant as a historical curiosity. Sugita Genpaku’s translation of it, interestingly enough, seems to be the more common subject of study than the actual text itself these days! The Wikipedia page on the subject refers to it by its Japanese name, the Kaitai Shinsho, and spends significantly more time talking about the translation than the text proper. In that sense, Tomoyo calling Andou out on using the more obscure name is actually quite true to life, even in English.

? Almost went and Spirit Integrated with the guy!

Spirit Integrate is a technique used by the shamans in Shaman King! The technique is a core feature of the story’s power system, and it generally involves its users allowing spirits to possess them.

? Have you fallen, apple?!

In this line, Andou is partially quoting a line spoken by Ukitake Jushiro in Bleach. The original line is “Have you fallen, Aizen?!” and Andou’s description of the expression he makes while he says his version is more or less a paraphrasing of the circumstances that surrounded it—at that point in the story, Aizen had just betrayed Ukitake to go join up with the villains.

? Oooh, Perry, is it? Mister Black Ships himself!

Despite the fact that Matthew C. Perry was an American, he’s treated as a substantially more significant historical figure in Japan than he is in the Western world, for admittedly understandable reasons. Perry was a commodore in the United States navy who was sent on a mission to Japan in the 1850s. The Tokugawa shogunate was reigning over Japan at the time, and it had instituted a policy of almost complete isolationism from foreign countries (a policy often referred to by its Japanese name, “sakoku”) that had been in effect for more than two hundred years. Trade with foreign nations was extremely limited during this era, and Perry’s mission was to convince the shogunate to open the country up to American trade—by force, if necessary.

To make a long story short, Perry’s mission was a success, the country was opened up, and in the aftermath of that shift in policy, the shogunate ended up collapsing, prompting the very literal end of an era in Japanese history just slightly over a decade later (namely, the end of the Edo Period and the start of the Meiji Period). The “black ships” that Andou references, by the way, refer to the highly advanced gunboats that made up Perry’s fleet in this particular instance, but the term itself apparently dates back to several hundred years prior, when the Portuguese first made contact with Japan.

? That’s the sort of thing you hear from kids who think you can actually fly by manipulating your chi!

This is a very straightforward reference to how characters fly in Dragon Ball! An interesting note is that the technique in question has a very specific name in Japanese that Tomoyo uses here, but the term in question has been translated in a vast number of different ways or—more commonly—glossed over entirely in official English translations of the series. As such, for the sake of maximum accessibility, we decided to localize it by describing how the technique is supposed to work rather than picking one of the many different ways its name has been rendered up to this point.

? O-Oh, god, I only got four hours of sleep last night! Man, I’m so sleep deprived! Four hours of sleep, I swear!

This is one of those lines that required a very odd sort of localization! In Japan, it would seem that Napoleon was apocryphally believed to have only slept for three hours each night. All English sources I could find, meanwhile, cited the actual number as four hours, so we tweaked the line to make Andou’s attempt at a historical reference more easily understandable. This probably goes without saying, but it’s likely that neither number is actually accurate.

? Queen Himiko.

Himiko is the name of a historical queen of what would eventually become Japan! Precisely who she was or what part of ancient Japan she ruled over are the subject of quite a considerable amount of debate, though—there’s really not much in the way of primary sources regarding her. The oldest extant work of Japanese literature, the Kojiki, dates back to the early 8th century—over five hundred years after her reign—and doesn’t even mention her. What little we know mostly comes from Chinese texts that are rather inconsistent and heavily debated in their own right. Scholars mostly seem to agree that Himiko did exist in some form, or at least that a person who fit her general role did, but the particulars are likely lost to time.

?  It’s time for a Yamatai★Night Party!

“Yamatai★Night Party” is the name of a song by IOSYS, a musical dojin circle mostly known for their Touhou remixes and the animations that go along with them! This particular song is known for being featured in the Taiko no Tatsujin series of rhythm games, features lyrics largely sung from the perspective of Queen Himiko, and is also a total bop that I highly recommend giving a listen. It’s also worth noting that in the original Japanese, Andou quotes a verse from the song’s chorus rather than referencing its title—we decided to slightly shift the nature of his reference to give readers a fighting chance at tracing it back to its source, since the song is extremely obscure on the English-speaking internet, and a translated snippet of its lyrics would be completely impossible to make sense of for most of our readers.

? The Tenpo Reforms...

The Tenpo Reforms were a set of political reforms addressing all sorts of concerns that plagued the late Tokugawa Shogunate. Enacted just about a decade before our pal Perry showed up to throw the country into chaos, it’s pretty easy to forget about this particular blip in history given everything that went down so soon afterward. The Kyoho and Kansei reforms also took place during the late Edo period, and the idea that they’d be easy to mix up with the Tenpo Reforms is, frankly, extremely understandable.

? The Tokugawa Shogunate...

We’ve alluded to this one a few times already so far! The Tokugawa Shogunate was basically the ruling government of Japan from the start of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (see the Perry entry, again). The shogunate was put into place by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the guy who came out on top of the Sengoku era after Nobunaga and Hideyoshi both kicked the bucket. Considering it lasted for two hundred and fifty years, it probably won’t be surprising to hear that a lot of stuff happened over the course of the shogunate’s existence, but all you really need to know to understand Andou’s impression is that it was, eventually, overthrown. Note that the era when the shogunate was in power is usually called the Edo Period, named after the capital of the time (which would be renamed Tokyo shortly following the end of the era).

? The Achaemenid Persian Empire...

The Achaemenid Persian Empire was an absolutely massive ancient empire that lasted for a few hundred years before Alexander the Great took over most of it! There’s a whole lot of history surrounding the empire, but Andou clearly doesn’t know any of it, and you don’t really have to either to get the joke.

? Zero points is just off the table, unless your name’s Nobita!

Nobita is the main character of Doraemon, an absolute all-time classic manga and anime that’s come up a few times before in previous volumes. One of Nobita’s core character traits is the fact that he’s a very, very poor student who somehow manages to score zero points on all of his tests.

? She was perfectly fine with being the second dumbest creature in the world so long as I was the first. What are we, a certain grappler and his stupidly OP father?

This one’s a reference to Baki the Grappler, an extremely over-the-top martial arts manga that came up once before back in volume 3! The characters Andou’s shouting out in this line are Baki, the protagonist, and his father Yujiro, the primary antagonist and an absolute monster of a man. Yujiro is referred to throughout the series as “the strongest creature in the world,” and the plot revolves in part around Baki’s quest to earn the title from his father.

? Oh, y’know Tao Ren’s catchphrase, ‘I shall not waver’? I thought that was so cool, I ended up learning all about that sort of archaic speech!

Tao Ren is another Shaman King character! He’s notable for having a very distinct aesthetic thanks to his unique way of using kanji in his speech that gives him a cool, somewhat archaic flair. That distinct manner of writing is what Andou refers to having learned in the original Japanese text, and in lieu of including a detailed explanation of how it—and Japanese writing in general—works, we chose to spin the reference more around the effect and tone of his speech style rather than its linguistic complexities.

? Y’know, it’s written like the ‘shura’ in Oreshura!

Oreshura is the abbreviated name of Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru, a light novel series by Yuuji Yuuji. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because Kota Nozomi shouted him out for endorsing Supernatural Battles back in the afterword for volume 2!