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Gosick 07 – The Black Wind Howls

Posted by Author | Anime, Anime Review, Commentary, Manga Review, Rakuen, geography, gosick, history, warfare, world war II | Monday 21 February 2011 10:58 pm

Well, I’ve managed to couple my lateness with getting a post up with my interest in the ideas and questions posed by other bloggers. Maybe this’ll be a trend for the rest of the series. For episode 7, I’m going to take a look at the prophecy the old guy gave to Kujo. Flareknight wonders what it means for the couple. I think he’s right, it very clearly points to their separation somewhere in World War II. I also want to believe he’s right about the strength of Kujo’s character. I don’t think he’d go back home to join the war effort despite his heritage. So what else could possibly separate the seemingly inseparable pair? Well, let’s expand world events in the war years.

Okay, seriously, why are all old people in this series creepy?

You need to know a little about geography and world history in order to assemble the Chaos. Sabure (or Sauville) is portrayed as a fictional country. This can make it easy to forget it still has to sit on a map somewhere. After all, they bill this series as occurring on planet Earth with the geography and time line seemingly intact. If you recall, the anime places the territory “between” France and Italy. That’s all well and good, but pay close attention to the map when they show you it at the beginning of the series. Now look at a real map. Do you see the problem yet? They didn’t add land to Europe, they just redistributed it to make allowance for a new country. The fictional land of Sabure is really the western border of Italy. If you know anything at all about World War II, feel free to use the expletive of your choice now.

Yes, that’s right, Italy sides with Germany to form the Axis powers. Specifically, they join as France starts to retreat into itself in the face of German advances. Italy’s very first move is to try seizing some territory from their neighbors. They aren’t very successful, as the resisting forces stop them at the Alpine Line. For our purposes, it doesn’t really matter. For Italy to reach the Line, they would have to roll over Sabure, where Kujo and Victorique live. We already have a problem, and it only gets worse.

They do have the option of fleeing, but none of the options is particularly good. If our heroes flee to France, they immediately end up in enemy territory. Shortly after Italy’s stalled offensive, France surrenders to Germany. They could alternatively head north to Switzerland, but the Swiss had very strict refugee policies during the war years. They even turned some people away. It’s possible the couple would have better odds in enemy territory. Kujo’s background could also play against him. The Pacific War theatre opens in 1941, and Kujo is a military man from Japan. He’s not the most welcome person in Neutral or Allied territory, and there’d be a lot of pressure to contribute to the war effort in Axis territory.

Try not to think about it, and enjoy it while it lasts, buddy.

The series would likely never get to this point in the time line so all we can do is speculate on what separates them. However, there’s guiding point here. Victorique and Kujo have no control over their situation. They really can’t do anything in the face of the world around them going to hell in a hand basket. With the open nature of this conclusion, I open the floor to you readers. What do you think happens to split the couple? Additionally, if you have a greater understanding of WWII than my admittedly amateur research, feel free to share it as well.

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When Two Anime Converge Unexpectantly: Part 2 – Digging into the History Side

Posted by Author | Anime, Anime Review, Manga Review, Taishou Yakyuu Musume, general anime interst, history, youtube | Thursday 17 December 2009 5:07 am

I’ve been curious about the buildings that were shown in the opening skit from episode 1 of Taishou Yakyuu Musume but I never felt like I’d know enough information to track them down. (Silly me, this is the internet we’re talking about.) Suguru’s comment about the identity of the building in question from yesterday’s post gave me the push to start investigating.

After looking at the information I could find on-line, I’ll have to respectfully disagree with Suguru, I don’t think it’s Tokyo Station for a couple reasons that I’ll get into later but I wanted to first mention that an additional reason is that I rewatched the song from Baseball Girls and Tokyo Station is mentioned later in the song so I think it’s a bit weird that they’d show Tokyo Station more then once. Here’s a Youtube video of the song in question to refresh everyone’s mind.

I first started by checking the wiki link for Tokyo Station and was surprised that the building is still there after almost a hundred years (WW2 air-raids almost destroyed it but when it was rebuilt, it wasn’t rebuilt exactly how it used to look). I looked at the old pictures on the wiki article but I couldn’t match that with the building in question so I googled Tokyo Station to see if I could find a picture from another angle that would better match when I stumbled upon a very interesting site that went a long why in answering my questions. It’s called The Meiji and Taisho Eras in Photographs and it’s exactly what I was looking for (and the best part is that it’s available in English). I’m going to post some of the photos from that site for comparison purposes but I do suggest people head on over to that site since there’s tons of other interesting stuff there.

Here’s their two pictures of Tokyo Station from the same time period (click to enlarge):

See how the architecture is similar but it just doesn’t look like the same building. I set that aside and started looking at the various other pictures because they were really interesting when I found this picture:

Inadvertently I hit the jackpot, those two building were definitely the same two from Taishou Yakyuu Musume and what cinched it was the title of the picture “Street-scene outside Babasaki-mon” and the song used the word Babasakimon when it was showing those two building. And it got even better, that site also had another picture under the title of Babasakimon:

Which matches to the scene from the song almost perfectly:

At this point I also realized that Babasakimon was referencing an actual street and I then found a map that showed the relationship of Babasaki street to Tokyo Station. It’s modern but I figured it’s probably accurate enough.

Notice how there’s a couple of blocks from the water on top and Tokyo Station and how the first picture of Babasaki-mon shows water across the street from the building in question. Therefore, I concluded that the building can’t be Tokyo Station though, heaven knows, I could still be wrong.

I continued to search the site for the identification of the building but came up empty-handed but I did discover the identity of the building on the left of the above screenshot from Taishou Yakyuu Musume. It’s the Meiji Life and Fire Insurance Company according to the title of this picture:

At this point I looked for some of the building mentioned in the song and found out about most of them. Here’s the Japanese Diet building. I don’t think it’s still standing since a newer building has taken it’s place but I couldn’t discover if war tore it down or just the need for a larger building.

And here’s the Imperial Theatre. The first Western style theater that opened in Japan, according to this site it was torn down in the 60’s and replaced with a more modern, if uglier, theater.

I notice that the pictures hosted on this site seem to have been the inspiration behind how J.C. Staff drew the buildings in question. Which made comparing the two easy but for the Metropolitan Police Department, they drew it in such a way I can’t tell if it’s the same building.

See, it’s hard to tell if they are the same but according the title of the photograph, they are the same.

Going back to my initial point from the last post about how the buildings where the same, seeing how there are at least two buildings that had similar architecture and how the roof copula from the building shown in Blue Literature don’t appear to exactly match the building from the photos and Taishou Yakyuu Musume – I’m no longer sure that they are same building but, at least, I discovered a bunch of interesting historical type stuff.