Mutual Images

Vol. 2 (2017)
Japanese Pop Cultures in Europe today:
Economic challenges, Mediated notions, Future opportunities

Björn-Ole KAMM
Kyōto University, Kyōto (Japan)
Brokers of “Japaneseness”: Bringing table-top J-RPGs to
the “West”

To quote this article:

Kamm, B.-O. (2017) Brokers of “Japaneseness”: Bringing table-top J-RPGs to the
“West”. Mutual Images [Online], Vol. 2, Winter, 1-38.

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 Brokers of “Japaneseness”: Bringing table-top J-RPGs to the “West”
Mutual Images, Vol. 2 (2017)
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Brokers of “Japaneseness”:
Bringing table-top J-RPGs to the “West”
Björn-Ole KAMM

Abstract
Japanese-language table-top role-playing games (TRPG) stayed mostly under the radar of gamers
and scholars in Europe and the US until 2008, when Maid RPG (Kamiya 2004; Cluney, Kamiya 2008)
was released as the first English translation of such a game. TRPGs made by Japanese game designers
had been overshadowed by their digital cousins, computer and console RPGs such as Final Fantasy
(Sakaguchi 1987), and Japan has subsequently been imagined as a digital game heaven. Instead of
engaging with a computer interface, TRPG players come together, sit at a table and narrate a shared
adventure or story, using character avatars, with the help of dice and – in most cases – complex rules
(cf. Montola 2003). The game world and the plot-line of their play exists mostly in their imagination,
supported in some cases by elaborate character sheets, drawings, maps, and figurines.
Maid RPG is an amateur-made game (so-called dōjin-gēmu) and remains a PDF-only release in the
English version. The first major English translation of a commercial Japanese-language game was
Tenra Banshō Zero (Inoue 1996; Kitkowski, Inoue 2014), chosen for its “Japaneseness,” that is, a
plethora of supposedly authentic Japanese elements such as samurai, Shinto priests, and creatures
from folklore set in a world inspired by the sengoku jidai (Warring States Period, ca. 1467–1603 C.E.).
However, it was not faithfully translated. “Unfaithful” is not meant in any morally negative sense but
refers to the many adjustments necessary to deliver Tenra to an audience that both is perceived and
perceives itself as different from the “original” Japanese one. Such adjustments include not only notes
and clarifications of “Japan” but also explanations vis-à-vis “Western” values. Using Tenra’s English
translation as a key example, this paper traces how cultural brokerage in the case of this game does
not simply translate between cultures but necessarily also produces them as a semiotic-material
reality. It makes “the West” — by stripping away elements, adding information — and similarly also
“Japan,” by assembling selected elements into a single coherent whole. By closely tracking the
endeavours of Tenra’s translator-cum-cultural broker to bring J-RPGs to the West, this paper
illustrates this argument and shows that the “Japaneseness” of this game was its selling point and that
this Japaneseness was not simply there but was created through telling the audience what “authentic”
Japan looks like.
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Translating Japanese-language Table-top RPGs

Japanese-language table-top role-playing games (TRPG) 1 stayed
mostly under the radar of gamers and scholars in Europe and the US
until 2008, when Maid RPG (Kamiya 2004; Cluney, Kamiya 2008) was
released as the first English translation of such a game. TRPGs made by
Japanese game designers had been overshadowed by their digital
cousins, computer and console RPGs such as Final Fantasy (Sakaguchi
1987), and Japan has subsequently been imagined as a digital game
heaven. Instead of engaging with a computer interface, TRPG players
come together, sit at a table and narrate a shared adventure or story,
using character avatars, with the help of dice and – in most cases –
complex rules (cf. Montola 2003). The game world and the plot-line of
their play exists mostly in their imagination, supported in some cases
by elaborate character sheets, drawings, maps, and figurines.
Maid RPG is an amateur-made game (so-called dōjin-gēmu)2 and
remains a PDF-only release in the English version. The first major
English translation of a commercial Japanese-language game was
Tenra Banshō Zero (Inoue 1996; Kitkowski, Inoue 2014), chosen for its
“Japaneseness,” that is, a plethora of supposedly authentic Japanese
elements such as samurai, Shinto priests, and creatures from folklore
set in a world inspired by the sengoku jidai (Warring States Period, ca.
1467–1603 C.E.). However, it was not faithfully translated. “Unfaithful”

1 The Japanese term tēburu-tōku RPG (table-talk RPG), coined by game designer Kondō Kōshi in the
1980s, is an attempt to make a distinction between digital and non-digital games (Kondō 1987).
2 Dōjin stands for “like-minded people,” referring to a group of fans or a community of interest. In

Japan, these groups often produce their own work, be it derivatives of commercial media they
favour or original manga, novels, and software, to sell or share them at conventions. Dōjinshi, self-
published zines, receive the most attention and are usually incorrectly translated as fan-fiction or
fanzine, which obscures that not only amateurs but also professionals create these works (cf.
Mizoguchi 2003).
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is not meant in any morally negative sense but refers to the many
adjustments necessary to deliver Tenra to an audience that both is
perceived and perceives itself as different from the “original” Japanese
one. Such adjustments include not only notes and clarifications of
“Japan” but also explanations vis-à-vis “Western” values.3 Using Tenra’s
English translation as a key example, this paper traces how cultural
brokerage in the case of this game does not simply translate between
cultures but necessarily also produces them as a semiotic-material
reality. It makes “the West” — by stripping away elements, adding
information — and similarly also “Japan,” by assembling selected
elements into a single coherent whole. 4 By closely tracking the
endeavours of Tenra’s translator-cum-cultural broker to bring J-RPGs
to the West, this paper illustrates this argument and shows that the
“Japaneseness” of this game was its selling point and that this
Japaneseness was not simply there but was created through telling the
audience what “authentic” Japan looks like.

A Primer and Brief History of Role-Playing

The often retold origin story of role-playing games usually links
these games to war-gaming in 19th century Prussia (‘Kriegsspiele,’ cf.
Peterson 2012; Appelcline 2013; but also Morton 2007; Tresca 2010),
which had antecedents in ancient India (chaturaṅga, known as chess in

3 Japan, the West, and terms such as original, authentic and traditional appear in inverted commas
at first mention. This awkward rendition seeks to highlight that throughout this paper these
words do not refer to some socio-political or geographical entity out there, but to the image of or
discourse about such entities. Similarly, ascriptions of “original” or “tradition” are understood as
ex post facto judgments that place value on such qualities regardless of when a so-called tradition
was invented, for example.
4 The phrases “to make” and “to assemble” are borrowed from Latour (2005) and Law (2009) to

highlight the performativity of realities: they are done in practices, such as translation, and do not
precede our actions.
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Europe). Crossing not only boundaries of today’s nation-states but also

those of literary genres and theatrical practices, RPGs as they are
known today gained a distinct form in the US in the 1970s by mixing
elements from war and diplomacy games, science- or pulp-fiction and,
last but not least, Tolkien’s novel Lord of the Rings (1954). Nowadays,
the most popular variant of this broad category of games is multiplayer
online games (e.g. World of Warcraft; Pardo et al. 2004) that rely on
mechanics refined by Japanese programmers (cf. Final Fantasy). Live-
action enactments (so-called larps)5 promoted in Northern, Central,
and Eastern Europe have also gained traction elsewhere.
The very first so-called fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons &
Dragons (D&D, 1st edition 1974) was jointly created and later
promoted by Gary Gygax, a high school dropout, insurance agent and
shoe repairman, and Dave Arneson, who had studied history at the
University of Minnesota. Most RPG historians and designers accredit
D&D for the establishment of core elements and mechanics shared by
many games that followed in its footsteps (cf. Edwards 2002; Hitchens,
Drachen 2009; Tresca 2010; Peterson 2012; Appelcline 2013). Players
create and portray characters distinct from their own selves (e.g. not
Jim the sales clerk but Rognar the fighter). These characters have
physical and mental traits (such as intelligence and dexterity), usually
quantified in levels of capability. They are further differentiated by
occupation or profession, such as fighter, wizard or cleric, usually

5 Live-Action Roleplay used to be abbreviated as LARP. Recently, however, “larp” (lowercase, as a

noun; e.g. “a larp” for an event) and “larping” (the activity) are now widely used in English-
language discussions of the practice (Fatland 2005, 12; Holter, Fatland, Tømte 2009, 5). Digital
RPGs link directly to D&D. Contrastingly, even though larp shares elements with this “ancestor,”
such a singular line of development is contested (Fatland 2014). In Japanese, raibu RPG (live RPG)
is sometimes used interchangeably with the term LARP in the Latin alphabet (cf. Hinasaki 2013).
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called character classes. There is an additional distinction between

those players who portray just one character and the referee (e.g. the
dungeon master, game master, or storyteller) who controls the setting
and the supporting cast. In the course of a game, the players explore,
fight, talk, and gain rewards, such as gold and experience. The latter is
collected in a currency of points, and one needs a certain amount of
experience points (XP) to “level up,” to grow from a simple fighter to
Rognar the Invincible — which would take many game sessions and
probably also many out-of-game years for Jim’s character to do. All this
is accomplished by verbal tellings, by dialog between the players and
the referee, and — this is a legacy from war-gaming — with the help of
dice and with optional props such as figurines and maps. The dice are
used to determine the result of actions when the outcome is unclear,
introducing probability into the game. Thus, if a character wants to
climb a wall, then his player needs to succeed at the appropriate dice
roll, the outcome of which is usually modified according to the
character’s traits (a strong character receives a bonus on climbing, for
example). If the roll does not succeed or fails, the character either does
not climb over the wall or might even fall off it.6
D&D soon inspired computer games, such as Wizardry (Greenberg,
Woodhead 1981), and a broad range of similar games, some of which
ventured beyond the sword & sorcery genre. For example, Call of
Cthulhu (CoC, Petersen, Willis 1981) appropriated the horror tales of
H.P. Lovecraft (1928), while Vampire: The Masquerade (VTM,

6 In many games, there is a difference between not succeeding and failing or “botching.” If the dice
roll is below the set target number necessary to climb the wall, the character just does not make it
and may try again. If the dice shows a “1” on the other hand (or another respective number
designated in the game rules), this is called a “botch” or “critical failure,” which often has
additional negative consequences, such as falling off the wall in this example.
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Rein·Hagen 1991) took its inspiration from gothic punk and vampire
romance novels (e.g., Interview with the Vampire, Rice 1976). In
particular, CoC and VTM shifted the focus of the games from fighting
and heroic adventures to storytelling and imaginary but nevertheless
extraordinary experiences. RPGs do not only differ in terms of content
and genre — there are over 600 table-top systems and settings
worldwide that encompass fantasy, science-fiction, horror, adventure,
espionage, (alternative) history, satire, superheroes, and steampunk,
including numerous adaptations of literature and film (name a popular
TV show, comic or manga series, and it will probably have a TRPG
version). Not all games feature humans or humanoids as player
characters — in Plüsch, Power & Plunder (Sandfuchs et al. 1991) one
plays the role of toys of every imaginable kind, while one becomes
home appliances in Isamashī chibi no suihanki TRPG (Brave Little Rice-
cooker TRPG, Koaradamari 2012). Role-playing games are often
differentiated by their mechanics on a spectrum between realist
simulation and narrativist playability (Edwards 1999; Bøckman 2003;
Boss 2008). Settings, themes and rules may reciprocally encourage
certain play styles (Jara 2013, 43) but the agency lies with the players.7
Regardless of labels for genre or style, how game designers describe
their creations, how elaborate or simple their rule systems might be,
these do not necessarily determine actual styles of play at the game
table — in each and every system one may encounter “roll-players”
who favour competition and clear achievement tiers as well as “role-

7 The high-level, almost limitless agency distinguishes TRPGs from their digital cousins.
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players” who prefer storytelling and in-character enactments.8 Game

designers know this and thus often include phrases such as: “But the
rules are only intended to help your imagination. The most important
things are your inspiration and your intention to have fun” (Kitazawa,
GroupSNE 2008, 9; translated by the author).
When fantasy role-playing first saw the light of day in the 1970s,
Japanese model and toy shops were also selling war-gaming
equipment, and some shop owners ordered copies of D&D without
knowing what it was. Yasuda Hitoshi, a fiction writer and game
designer, together with novelists- and game designers-to-be
Kiyomatsu Miyuki and Mizuno Ryō were among the first to encounter
the English-language D&D in American science fiction fanzines and in
the aforementioned model shops during their student days at Kyoto
and Ritsumeikan University (Yasuda. GroupSNE 1989; Mizuno 1997).
Intrigued by this new kind of game, Yasuda and his colleagues not only
started to play but also to spread the word and create one of Japan’s
first TRPG game studios. News about games like D&D mostly spread
via war-gaming and computer game magazines, for example, in
TACTICS (Takanashi 1982). Yasuda and his colleagues later
incorporated their university circle as “GroupSNE” and sought to teach
others about these games. They published their playing as a serialised
“replays,” which were novelisations of game session transcripts, in the
computer game magazine Comtiq. The first issue of this serial, entitled
Rōdosu tōsenki (Record of Lodoss War), was released in September

8 Incidentally, the Japanese TRPG magazine Rōru & Rōru (Role & Roll, Arclight Publishing) hints at
both play styles with its title and markets itself as a caterer to both, role-players and (the often
derogatorily used label of) roll-players.
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1986 (Yasuda and GroupSNE, 1986).9 Record of Lodoss War would not
only become a multimedia franchise successful in Japan and abroad as
anime and manga but also the basis for Sword World RPG (Mizuno.
GroupSNE 1989), Japan’s “gold standard” TRPG throughout the 1990s.
Despite a small boom in the early 1990s which saw the release of
many popular media franchise adaptations of Japanese TRPGs and
vice-versa, TRPGs remain a niche market. Japanese translations of big-
name US games, such as new editions of D&D or CoC, continue to be
released only a few years after their initial release in English.
Indigenous games, however, make up most of this niche. In particular,
dōjin-gēmu, such as Maid RPG and the Little Rice-Cooker RPG, flourish
and are sold at the tri-annual “Game Market”, a convention for analog
gaming and the bi-annual “Comic Market” (komike), Japan’s largest
convention for amateur-produced manga, anime, and games. Not
unlike the indie genre in the US, many of these games explore not only
new mechanics or design ideas, but also over-the-top themes or
parodies of other media. Maid RPG, for example, takes cues from the
figure of the French maid that is prominent in anime and related fan
practices. Similar to Paranoia (Costikyan et al. 1985), in which player
characters are at the mercy of a capricious computer, the maid players
have to fulfil tasks for a non-player “Master” character, gain rewards,
and assist as well as backstab each other during the game. As a light-
hearted but still self-reflexive game parodying current (occasionally

9 Replays today represent the most economically successful part of Japan’s TRPG market, as
members of GroupSNE, Bōken and other game studios have emphasised in conversations (cf. also
sale ranks on amazon.co.jp, for example). Judging from self-introductions on online forums, the
number of replay readers far exceeds that of TRPG players. As novelised, verbatim transcriptions
of player conversations and game events, they go beyond the brief “example of play” found in
English or German rulebooks. Along with the commercially produced light novel replays and
those by amateurs, sites such as niconico increasingly feature replays in video form.
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sexist) anime tropes, Maid RPG appeals to fans of respective anime and
manga products and goods from Japan.
While most non-gamers in Japan associate the term “RPG” solely
with computer games, TRPGs also remain in the shadow of manga and
anime from a consumer standpoint outside Japan. Despite the
popularity of the Record of Lodoss War franchise in Europe and the US,
for example, only a very limited few knew that the stories had their
origins in D&D sessions played in the 1980s. This changed in the late
2000s, when “cultural brokers” took the stage to diffuse the hitherto
obscure knowledge about non-digital role-playing in Japan.

Studying “Cultural Brokers”

Between the summer of 2009 and the winter of 2014, I conducted
fieldwork on sites related to TRPGs in Japan, Europe, and the US to
trace the flows and dynamics of role-playing games across national
borders. I followed a cyber-ethnographic approach, which distances
itself from studies of the “virtual” by not limiting itself to Internet
communication alone. Borrowing from thinkers such as Donna
Haraway (1991), a cyber-ethnographic approach understands the
cyberspacial life-worlds of humans as “entangled” realms of technology
and the social: Mediated by computers10 but also fundamentally linked
to allegedly “real” sites. From this perspective, the ethnography of
online groups is not limited to investigations online, but means “the
ethnography of online and related off-line situations, the ethnography
of humans and non-human actors in these related fields” (Teli, Pisanu,
Hakken 2007). This perspective corresponds to a semiotic-material

10 The term “computer” also includes smartphones.

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image of humanity as “cyborgs” (Law 1991; Law, Hassard 1999; Latour

2005), that is, as networks of human and non-human parts (the
“identity” and “performance” of researchers, for example, are linked to
books, presentation notes, or voice recorders without which they could
not play their role). Consequently, such investigations are not limited
to one location – in this case, the Internet – but should follow the
human and non-human participants to different places, on- and offline.
This approach is similar to and also based on current developments in
trans-local anthropology (Hannerz 2003; Rescher 2010; Brosius 2012).
In the course of my fieldwork online and offline, I dealt not only with
technologies of (inter-) connection, that is, different types of non-
human mediators such as kanji encodings or verification protocols of
social-networking sites (Kamm 2013), but also encountered a number
of entangled human actors who stood out in the sense that they made
themselves — or were made — into nodes of translation, that is, into
“cultural brokers.” The term cultural brokers increasingly gains
currency in transculturally inclined histories of interconnected
“cultures,” of which a recent prominent example is the studies
collected in an edited volume that includes this term in its title:
Cultural Brokers at Mediterranean Courts in the Middle Ages by Marc
von der Höh, Nikolas Jaspert, and Jenny Rahel Oesterle (2013b). The
editors display a sceptical attitude towards absolute definitions but
their conceptualisation of “cultural brokerage” offer a few ideas that
nonetheless resonate with my encounters. There is a range of
potentially applicable terms: translator, mediator, and opinion leader,
for example. But the economic connotations of “brokerage” correspond
to how Japanese-language TRPGs are handled by the human mediators
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I encountered, because their mode of enterprise focuses on

transforming what is widely considered a hobby into a source of
income.
Broadly speaking, “cultural brokerage” refers to the mediation
between environments or spheres, such as the transfer of knowledge,
which can be either deliberately (“manifest”) or involuntarily (“latent”)
(Höh, Jaspert and Oesterle, 2013b, p. 9). As the brokers I encountered
are translators in the most common sense of the term (mediators
between languages), their activities of can be categorised as “manifest:”
Their inter-, cross- or trans-cultural brokerage are intentional acts and
the main function in this instance. There are other cases where
brokerage appears as a “latent” function; for example, nintentional
brokers such as deported slaves (cf. Höh, Jaspert and Oesterle 2013a,
23). A manifest brokers acts as a spokesperson, such as an expert, an
insider or a political representative, who speaks on behalf of “silent”
entities (such as a group of other humans or games, in this case) and
simplifies the networks of these others. Simply put, Japanese-language
TRPGs (and often their designers and players) appear in need of such a
spokesperson because they cannot speak for themselves to non-
Japanese-speakers. This spokesperson displaces these other entities
and their goals and ideas to fit his or her representation — such a
series of transformations may be called translation (Callon 1986, 214).
Translation here does not simply refer to the displacement of one
natural language into another but to characterising representations,
establishing identities, and defining and controlling network elements.
Representation in this sense is always understood as translation in
order to “undermine the very idea that there might be such a thing as
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fidelity” (Law 2006, 48). Many different bits and pieces — such as a
plethora of game mechanics, settings, player attitudes, artworks, and
so on — are translated into a single group: Japanese role-playing
games.
Studying cultural brokerage means tracing how elements are
transformed and assembled, how mediators make the dichotomy
between the entities they claim to transport, how they keep
connections stable. What makes such a spokesperson, cultural broker?
What are the requirements, what are the challenges? What is
transferred, and what is excluded?
This paper traces one case of cultural brokerage: the translation of
the TRPG Tenra Banshō Zero into English and the entangled creation of
a whole group of (silent) entities, ranging from Japanese role-playing
games to Japanese players and Japanese culture.

From Japan to “the West”: Andy Kitkowski and F.E.A.R.

Andy Kitkowski appears as the prime example of very active and
deliberate brokers of “cultural” knowledge. Kitkowski is known as
Andy K on RPG.net, the world’s largest English-language platform for
non-digital role-playing (where he continuously promoted Japanese
TRPGs and talked about his translation projects since 2002), and as the
creator of j-rpg.com, a website geared for those specifically interested
in Japanese TRPGs. The latter was set up to cater to a specific audience:
gamers who spoke a little Japanese and were interested in or already
owned Japanese-language TRPGs. The website was designed as a
workgroup to some degree, a facilitator of fan translations. In 2011 it
offered a rough first English translation of Ryūtama (Okada 2007), a
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low-magic fantasy game, along with a sale of a limited number of

copies of the Japanese game imported by Kitkowski to the US
(Kitkowski 2011). Kitkowski did not remain not alone on his site but
asked others with Japanese language proficiency and access to
Japanese games to join him. Posts included brief presentations and
reviews of J-RPGs, a term Kitkowski used in the style of J-Pop or J-
Culture (see Richter, Berndt 2008) — for example, Night Wizard! (a
contemporary fantasy game, also adapted into an anime; Kikuchi
2007), Tokyo NOVA (a dystopian super-power science-fiction; Suzufuki
2003), and Shinobigami (ninja fantasy; Kawashima 2009).
Kitkowski and his colleagues also discussed practical issues, such as
how to buy J-RPGs when not in Japan, how to study Japanese, how to
go to the Japan Game Convention (JGC), and which text recognition
software works best with kanji and kana. The site is also one major
outlet besides RPG.net where he made announcements about the
progress of his first major project, the translation of Tenra Banshō
(which took over eight years to finish; Kitkowski 2015, i). Members of
j-rpg.com also went to US gaming conventions, such as GenCon, and
European trade shows, such as SPIEL in Germany, to offer demo
sessions of games they translated, such as Maid RPG or Tenra,
alongside professional convention participants (Cluney 2008), such as
Kondō Kōshi and his game studio Bōken, which demonstrated Meikyū
Kingdom (a dungeon management RPG; Kawashima, Kondō 2010).
Born in the US in 1975 and raised mostly in Sparta, New Jersey,
Kitkowski majored in sociology and philosophy, and minored in
Japanese in college. Between 1995 and 1996, he lived in Japan for the
first time as an exchange student at Sophia University where he joined
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“Science Fantastica,” the university’s science fiction club which also

played TRPGs.11 Here he encountered games like Sword World and
Tokyo NOVA but “didn't really have the language skills at the time to
play them,” he said. After graduating from his college in the US, he
went straight back to Japan. Between 1997 and 2000, Kitkowski first
worked as teacher at local elementary and middle schools in Gunma,
then as consultant for the government and businesses like Fuji Heavy
Industries (Subaru). When he returned to the US in 2000 with his
Japanese wife, he “rebooted” his career and did a number of low-level
temporary jobs as a system engineer working for Duke University
Hospital, Time Warner, and Cisco Systems. For the English-language
comic release of Bastard!! (Hagiwara 1988), a dystopian fantasy manga,
he was asked by Viz Media, the translation’s publisher in 2002, to write
some comments on Japanese fantasy role-playing. He reported in one
of our interviews, that this was a decisive moment for him because this
convinced him that J-RPGs might find an audience in the US. He started
his own licensed translation project of Tenra in 2004.
Previously, he had made simple translations of Sword World to be
used within his circle of friends. Tenra was different in some important
ways: First, he had to obtain the license to do a translation. Email
correspondence was apparently not enough, so he ended up calling the
original game studio, FarEast Amusement Research (F.E.A.R.), from the
US. The studio’s president, Nakajima Jun’ichirō, expressed interest in
the project but a face-to-face encounter with the president and the
original designer, Inoue Jun’ichi, in a Tōkyō café six months later was

The following account is based on personal e-mail exchanges and conversations from 2010, 2012,
11

and 2015.
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crucial for the next steps (Kitkowski, Inoue 2014, 34). The studio was
very supportive; Kitkowski says: “It was perceived as an honor,
because in Japan getting your work published in English is a very high
honor worthy of resume boosts, etc. It was a great two-way
relationship.” This is a common trope in discussing Japan’s foreign
relations, where we also find comments on how Japanese value
recognition from abroad (which usually means Europe or the US), or
how changes within Japan are linked to attention or pressure from the
outside. Prominent examples are the ratification of the equal
opportunity act after women’s rights organisations spoke at the UN
against discrimination in the Japanese labour market (cf. Parkinson,
1989) or the turn to manga and “Cool Japan” by government agencies
after Japanese popular media began to receive worldwide attention
and recognition (cf. McGray 2002; Abel 2011).
Initially, Kitkowski picked Tenra for his translation because of its
appeal to him as a gamer, its many “cool” characters and its “Hyper
Japan as Written by Japanese effect” (Kitkowski, Inoue 2014, 34). Thus,
Japaneseness played a major role in Kitkowski’s choice: “I particularly
wanted to translate Tenra because it was clearly the most ‘Japanese’
RPG in terms of art, focus, setting, and rules.” His meaning here is
twofold. For one, it is a “practical” summarising of game mechanics as
Japanese, which were introduced in the 1990s, combined with artwork
and modes of storytelling which follow conventions that developed in
manga writing. F.E.A.R. had been at the forefront, according to
Kitkowski (cf. Kitkowski 2015, 12, 18), when it came to revitalising the
TRPG market in the 1990s with Japanese settings, and producing fast-
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paced, dramatic games that could be played in spaces where time was
a rare commodity, for example in community centres.
F.E.A.R. – which had developed out of a dōjin circle, like so many
other game studios – introduced ideas and mechanics for scenes to its
games. This cut the play experience into smaller chunks, and
encouraged meta-gaming. 12 Such mechanics produce a clearly
structured narrative instead of an endless series of events without a
distinct end, common for many TRPG campaigns before Tenra.
According to Kitkowski, Tenra and subsequent titles focus “on the
anime/manga/console gaming generation: With simple rules, a story-
focus, etc. They made gaming into an experience that could not be
duplicated on a console. And that was a huge change from the past,
which was basically nothing more than translating Western RPGs, or
creating classic ‘very rules intense’ Japanese games.”

12Meta-gaming refers to decisions that are based on dramatic effect or narrative plausibility
instead of sticking to character knowledge or motivation.
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Fig. 1. “Shinobi” from Tenra Banshō Zero: Tales of Heaven and Earth Edition
(Kitkowski. Inoue 2014, 22–23).

The artwork of F.E.A.R. games (see fig. 1) and also those of

competitors underscores his point and links Japanese TRPG to the
broader sphere of stylistic elements globally referred to as manga and
promoted by the Japanese government as Japanese. Many illustrators
also produce common story-manga in addition to creating images for
TRPG books. Inoue Jun’ichi is one of them. Many US games, such as
D&D, favour artwork that is closer to neoclassicism and sometimes
photo-realism (see fig. 2). When talking to “old school” gamers at the
international game trade-show SPIEL in Essen, they suggested to
Kondō from Bōken, for example, that he should avoid the manga-style
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artwork of his games when attempting to enter the German TRPG

market. Furthermore, Japanese game designers explain the desired
dramatic pacing by referencing scenes from well-known anime. Again,
Western TRPGs of the first hour and their successors, such as D&D or
Rolemaster (Fenlon, Charlton 1982), aim less at narrativism and more
at realism, resulting in often extremely complicated rules that take into
account each and every possible situation or circumstance. The game
mechanics of current Japanese TRPGs also often borrow from console
games, such as Zelda (Miyamoto, Tezuka 1986) which was widely
popular in Japan and use far less complex rules in order to immediately
capture their audience. This paratextual mixture of rules, setting and
artwork (cf. Jara 2013) is what Kitkowski calls the Japaneseness of
Tenra that he found appealing and subsequently highlighted as the
core difference of J-RPGs.

Fig. 2. Shiba Tsukimi, Legend of the 5 Rings “Celestial Edition” (2009)

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Kickstarting a Sword & Sorcery Jidaigeki: Tenra Banshō Zero

The world of Tenra adds another layer to the mix, and this is the
second entangled meaning of Japanese. Its game world is a planet
populated by daimyō (feudal rulers), samurai, pseudo-Buddhist monks,
Shinto priests and geisha-like artisans, but also hosts sorcery,
creatures from Japanese folklore (oni, tengū) and magic-fuelled
technology such as mecha and cyborgs popular from sci-fi anime. Set in
a world analogue to the Warring States (sengoku) era of Japan (ca.
1467 – 1603 C.E.), the game appears like a sword & sorcery jidaigeki
(period piece, e.g., in the form of a TV show). Jidaigeki, however, have
been problematized as a specific form of nihonjin-ron (theories of the
Japanese):13 a nostalgia for and reaffirmation of supposedly traditional
Japanese ways and values.

[They depict] a ‘pure’ Japan, untainted by the ‘barbarism’ of the ‘red-haired

devils’ of the West. People wear kimonos and clothing with Japanese family
crests. They have Japanese hairstyles. They eat Japanese food and drink
Japanese sake or shōchū.14 They live in Japanese-style wooden houses, sleep
in Japanese bedding laid out on tatami straw matting, and bathe in Japanese
baths. They visit Japanese temples and speak a language that is pure and
uncontaminated by foreign words (Moeran 2010, 154–155)

The advent of jidaigeki coincides with post-war challenges to the

nihonjin-ron idea of a homogenous society in the form of migrant
labourers and Japanese-speaking foreigners. The genre appears as “re-
processing” history, and so as a “‘structured a feeling’ of Japaneseness
at the very juncture of its undermining,” offering lost Confucian-values
and ideals embodied by mythic heroes (Standish 2011, 434).

13 Authors associated with nihonjin-ron are often criticised for their self-orientalising search for
uniqueness (cf. Dale 1986; Befu 1987).
14 Usually translated as rice wine and distilled liqueur, respectively.
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There are a few US made RPGs borrowing sengoku or Edo Period

images intermingled with fantasy and folklore, such as Legend of the
Five Rings (L5R, Wick, 1997; Wick and Horbart, 2010), a fantasy RPG
taking its name from Miyamoto Musashi’s Gorin no sho (Book of Five
Rings, mid-17th century) and set in the fictional nation of Rokugan, a
feudal pseudo-Japan with elements from other East Asian folklore.
What differentiates this game from Tenra is “authenticity”:

I think that the setup of the game [Legend of the Five Rings] is great, but the
language (place names and group names in particular) are often culturally
ungrounded childish nonsense words; and lack of Shinto/Buddhism
influence are, from both a context and an aesthetic standpoint, a rather
inexcusable oversight. Still, it's got a good setup in terms of ‘interesting,
there are things for the players to do’, etc.
Tenra is more authentic than L5R, but I’m not as ostentatious to label it
‘better’. It has no real ‘deep setting’ compared to L5R. It also has a VERY
‘everything is for the sake of the characters and the story’ rules set with
Fates, Damage, etc. However, L5R is very traditional in the way it deals with
skills, stats, damage (death spiral), etc. (Kitkowski, email conversation
2010).

The concern over Japaneseness also plays out on role-playing

related forums, for example, on RPG.net, where a participant sought
clarification on which parts of L5R are “truly Japanese” and which are
not (Smarttman 2014).
Kitkowski’s nose for authenticity — however nostalgic a
reconstruction this concept may refer to — and its appeal to non-
Japanese players was proven correct when he launched a Kickstarter
campaign with his newly founded game translation firm Kotodama
Heavy Industries in 2012 to fund the production of the English version
of Tenra. Kickstarter is a US based so-called crowdfunding platform on
which projects present their aims and ideas and interested “backers”
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can pledge a certain amount of money in order to fund the project.

Over a given period of time, the project has to meet its funding goal or
it receives nothing. If it is successfully funded, backers receive tangible
rewards or other forms of compensation. In the case of Tenra and,
depending on which pledge tier a backer chose, they would receive
hardcover copies, PDFs and other merchandise, and would be named
in the acknowledgement section of the final product. Also, established
commercial studios, such as Onyx Path Publishing, use Kickstarter to
gauge the interest for a given product and to make sure that it will find
enough buyers (the backers) before they invest in a game project that
does not meet with audience approval. Tenra's pledge goal had been
9,000 US dollars, which was achieved within hours. When the
Kickstarter campaign ended in September 2012, 1,704 backers had
pledged 129,640 US dollars15 — more than fourteen times the original
pledge goal and not so far off from what Onyx Path, with its established
brands, receives — which made Tenra into the highest-funded TRPG
project at the time and speaks for Kitkowski’s promotional skills. The
Kickstarter campaign for the English version of Ryūtama (Okada 2007)
a year later equally exceeded expectations with 2,056 backers and
$97,960 pledged.16 When Ryūtama was published in 2015, Tenra had
already become a “Gold Bestseller” on DriveThruStuff,17 a global leader
in role-playing PDF and print-on-demand (POD) sales. Those who did
not back the Kickstarter campaign have to purchase the game through

15 See: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/diamondsutra/Tenra-bansho-zero-an-art-and-
culture-rich-rpg-from (accessed 2016/06/24).
16 See: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/diamondsutra/ryuutama-natural-fantasy-role-
playing-game?ref=users (accessed 2016/06/24).
17 See: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/111713/Tenra-Bansho-Zero-Heaven-and-Earth-
Edition?term=Tenra (accessed 2016/06/24).
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DriveThru, while the backers received their copies before the public
release.
Right on the heels of the public release followed very positive
reviews, even from people who expressed a dislike for anime:

Tenra Banshō Zero is the most exciting new release for me since Apocalypse
World. […] Confession: I am a long-standing anime hater. That said, I’m
totally into the crazy-wasabi-coleslaw setting of TBZ. It’s a sprawling,
melodramatic empowerment fantasy that really gets my players jazzed up.
I’m grateful and relieved that I didn’t have to grind through seasons of
Samurai Champloo or something (B. 2013).

Thus, Tenra seems to have hit the mark by offering game mechanics
that set it apart from the English-language mainstream and by flowing
into an interest in an exotic image of Japan (ninja, samurai etc.) that
also fuels manga sales abroad — drawing into question the argument
that Japanese popular media are so successful due to their “odourless-
ness,” or “stateless-ness” (mukokuseki), or lack of a Japanese “smell”
(Iwabuchi 2002; see also Berndt 2007).

Tenra and “Western” Values

However, Kitkowski also received criticism which displaced the
translation of Tenra from the realms of fantasy into the sphere of
“cultures” clashing. Under the title “RPGs and cultural context: a
conversation with Kitkowski Kitkowski about Tenra” on the blog
Gaming as Woman, game designer and illustrator Anna “wundergeek”
Kreider (2013), who also provided a campaign setting for the English
version, discusses the cover art of the original 1997 Japanese edition,
reproduced for the translation, in light of possible reactions to it in the
West. The central figure on the cover is a semi-bionic female ninja in a
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“male,” active pose (fig. 3). Kreider is rather disconcerted by this image,
as she suggests while writing about the game in general: “Tenra isn’t a
Western game written for Western audiences. It’s been translated and
adapted for Western audiences, true, but it was initially created for
Japanese gamers and anime fans. As such the cultural issues and
context surrounding this game are different than what Western
audiences are used to dealing with.” She poses this question to
Kitkowski in an email interview: “But by Western standards, the cover
art is pretty damn [sic!] extreme. That’s a LOT of crotch right on the
cover. So could you comment on the cultural differences at work there?
Because it seems like that ‘I don’t want to get seen reading this in
public’ is a very Western reaction.”

Fig. 3. Cover of Tenra Banshō Zero (Kitkowski, Inoue 2014).

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Kitkowski first explains cultural differences concerning nudity in the

West versus Japan and the rest of Asia, where one might encounter a
“non-sexual nudity and casualness that can be strange (and
frightening!) to foreigners.” Who is meant by “foreigners” appears
obscure if one does not consider the blog’s target audience, which is
predominantly Anglo-Saxon and often critical of seemingly overt
sexuality. Kitkowski adds that Japanese culture would also be
characterised by modesty and shame (cf. Ruth Benedict’s well-known
way of brokerage, 1946), which is why buyers could receive paper
sleeves for their purchases in bookstores to conceal the nature of their
purchases.
However, regardless of supposedly Japanese morals in any general
sense, in Tenra’s particular case, the cover and other artwork was, in
Kitkowski’s view, due to Inoue Jun’ichi’s otaku-hood: The original
designer of the game had a history of producing pornographic dolls —
with which he earned tremendous success but also criticism — and
was merely not aware of how others might react to his illustrations,
according to Kitkowski. Being married today “returned him in part to a
real world with real people [ so that] now his art lacks most of the
‘gooeyness’ of the past.” In order to rescue Japan from being seen as a
strange, nudist, crotch-fetishizing “other,” Kitkowski deflects criticism
to the otaku stereotype of a reclusive, asocial media enthusiast.18 He
follows what I call “the disclaiming mode” to highlight what is good

18Especially in the English-language discourse the naturalisation of otaku as a single but global
social group of “fans” proceeds and conflates the different, political and often negative uses of the
term in Japanese with the positive self-descriptor of non-Japanese fans of manga and anime. A
purely negative view as well as the current “triumphant narrative” about the mainstreaming of
otaku equally overlook the tensions and contradictions inherent in this debated term (for a
detailed discussion, see Galbraith, Kam, Kamm 2015).
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and what is deviant: He deflects negative images onto an “other” only

to strengthen the connection between the negative image and the
practices and people it is applied to (cf. Kamm, 2015). Still, Inoue
himself attributes the shift in focus of his art and work to his now being
part of a family, without condemning his previous work or denying his
otaku-hood (cf. Yajima 2013b, 2013a).19
Kreider’s blog post goes on to question why female manga artists
also create nude scenes of their adolescent characters or write porn-
manga, which Kitkowski again explains with a general casualness
towards nudity. The discussion of this blog post and the general
arguments of cultural difference resemble similar several thousand
posts long debates on RPG.net, when Maid RPG was translated (see
hyphz 2008) and also after Tenra’s release (Thrax 2013).
In the instance of their translation and border crossing, these games
become node points for (re-) establishing boundaries: the West versus
Japan, normal people versus “crotch-fetishizing otaku,” sexually moral
women and Asian women without such moral compasses, females who
do not or should not like to create porn and males who do. These
boundary creations do not reaffirm the static nature of established and
rigid conceptualisations of culture and also continue in a dynamic
fashion to become themselves loci for other boundaries: A reader of
this blog post took exception to how the West and Japan were
represented as monolithic entities in the statements (Yin 2014).

19He chose to keep his rather otaku-ish self-image in his bestselling manga Yue to nihongo (Yue and
Japanese) about his Chinese wife’s struggles with learning Japanese, for example, because he felt
that it better matched the kind of statements he would like to express (Inoue 2013; Yajima
2013b).
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Similar voices against “cultural islandism” can also be heard on the

RPG.net forums.
As a translator in the most common sense of the term, a mediator
between languages, Andy Kitkowski’s activities highlight his “manifest”
brokerage: He has actively enrolled many other actors to build a
network that resulted in the translation of Tenra, beginning with non-
human actors such as Japanese textbooks, OCR-software, and
telephones, but also including humans in the form of a fan base —
mainly known to him through their RPG.net accounts — which would
back his project on Kickstarter. Kitkowski was not a faithful translator
of the Japanese language, though again, “unfaithfulness” or “infidelity”
are not meant in any morally negative sense here, but refer to the work
and changes that go hand-in-hand with any translation (cf. Law 2006)
and in particular, to the many adjustments necessary to sell Tenra to
an audience that is perceived and perceives itself as different from the
“original” Japanese one, as Kreider’s questions attest:

This game deserved more than a slap translation into English and then a
kick to the presses: It needed to be more than looked at, it needed to be
played. And to be played, it needed more: More history, more information,
more cultural notes, more everything in order for people who didn’t grow
up in Japan watching weeerkly [sic!] samurai dramas and reading ninja
manga to be able to understand the game enough to play. So as I was
translating the book, I started adding this “More” myself (Kitkowski, Inoue
2014, 34; emphasis original).

He changed what he transported (‘broker as media,’ Höh, Jaspert and

Oesterle 2013a) and added those notes and explanations as a “nifty
culture point” on the “quintessential” TRPG experience in Japan:
singing in a karaoke box (Kitkowski, Inoue 2014, 100, Game Rules).
Issuing Director’s Notes with more explanations of cultural concepts
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and the game’s background (Kitkowski 2015),20 he also addressing the

fear that he may have diluted the authenticity of the original with his
amendments (Spike 2015).21 The interview with Anna Kreider gives
the impression that he not only added but also omitted elements, for
example illustrations that might be offensive for an imagined Western
audience, such as the cover. The potentially offending images he
supposedly omitted but just did not include, however, were never part
of the core rule book itself but came with supplements, from which he
only incorporated some rules and bits of information.
These additions and explanations point to the economic dimension
of cultural brokerage: Without the backing of nearly two thousand
interested gamers, his project would have failed. It took him almost
eight years to enrol enough participants to reach this point. The
economics involved go beyond money: Kitkowski was already well
known among RPG.net users and with Tenra only gained in fame,
enabling him to continue his project of promoting J-RPGs22 and create a
space for Japanese game designers to gain recognition. The label J-RPG
alone, however, attests to how “cultural brokerage” does not simply
translate between cultures but speaks for them and thus necessarily
produces them as a reality. It makes the West — by adding information
— and similarly also Japan. The Japaneseness of Tenra is its selling
point, but has to be made first through assembling an authentic Japan:
a traditionally modern world where samurai battle oni and giant

20 In these Director’s Notes, Kitkowski himself addresses the issue of knowledge diffusion himself,
e.g. concerning Buddhism (ibid, 4).
21 The additions amount to approx. 1.5 pages in total and are mostly limited to sidebars (Kitkowski

2015).
22 For example, via podcasts on the “Asian Popular Culture” platform Geeky & Genki,

http://www.geekyandgenki.com (accessed 2016/06/24).

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robots alike. The dynamic process of mediation here rests on the

necessary production of static, nostalgic images, which paradoxically
underscores the messiness of such endeavours.23

Stabilizing Images
How does Kitkowski sustain his network of silent entities and their
representation? First and foremost, he does so through the support of
shortcomings in language educators and also via the help of the
Internet: he has access to recourses neither his audience nor those he
translates have.
His main ground of dissemination and promotion consists of only a
very limited number of Japanese participants: Between 2008 and 2014,
only one poster on RPG.net self-identified as a Japanese. In the past,
there had been active Japanese users on English-language platforms,
for example during a dispute about the fictional Japan of the science-
fiction cyberpunk game Shadowrun (Charrette, Hume and Dowd, 1989).
Japanese gamers were dissatisfied with the image of a weak Japanese
state in a supplemental setting book created by GroupSNE (Egawa,
GroupSNE 1996). They created their own setting, in which Japan was
an aggressive imperial dictator state — which they found more fitting
to the overall dystopian background of the game — and distributed
their ideas via the pre-Internet USENET group rec.games.frp.cyber
(Nishio 1996, 1997). Since then, the number of active Japanese users of
English-language sites seems to have waned. During my fieldwork, I
conducted over twenty episodic interviews with gamers from the

23Interestingly and adding to the mess, when asked, the original designer, Inoue, posits that players
should not be concerned about playing “authentic” Japanese (Kitkowski 2015, 10-11).
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Kantō, Chūbu and Kansai areas of Japan and spoke to dozens of other
players and game designers who by and large said that they visit some
English websites but would mostly use Japanese-language sites. The
Japanese-language Web has grown to such a degree, also including
TRPGs, that they see no necessity for engaging with websites in other
languages. Many also admitted (or rather assumed) that their language
proficiency would not be sufficient to post on forums, thus they remain
silent.
Similarly, TRPG-related sites and groups, for example on the
Japanese Facebook-like portal mixi.jp, seem to attract only very few
self-proclaimed non-Japanese. As has been discussed elsewhere
(Kamm 2013), one reason for this limited participation comes in the
guise of non-human mediators. To register with mixi.jp and create a
profile page, one is asked for a keitai mail address, an address only
assigned by Japanese telecommunication companies such as DoCoMo
or Softbank, and linked to a Japanese mobile phone. After registration,
a verification link is sent to the mobile or recently also to smartphones.
On English-language forums, I encountered a number of players who
were interested in Japanese games, some of whom also claimed
Japanese language skills — so limited knowledge of Japanese could not
be the reason for their non-participation. This is where the
aforementioned verification script turns from simple intermediary as
part of the registration process to an active mediator that blocks
anyone from joining mixi who does not reside in Japan and who has no
Japanese mobile phone contract. Because prepaid phones are not
equipped with browser functionality, a contract phone is necessary to
register and for that one needs a zairyū-kādo, a residency card gained
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only with a long-term visa. Thus, despite the Internet’s assumed

capability to connect anyone with everyone, a few lines of code can
become a powerful mediator that stops flows of communication and
creates boundaries, not due to xenophobic “us versus them”
mentalities but due to privacy concerns: the script was implemented as
an anti-spam measure.
However, mediators often bring other mediators into existence, in
this case brokers such as Kitkowski who are able to overcome the
obstacle presented by the verification script: His residency in Japan has
given him access to Japanese language sites and games, and he has also
obtained the language proficiency to translate for all those who cannot
come to Japan or speak the language. By doing so, he overcomes the
obstacles of non-human mediators (languages, scripts) and their
boundaries to as act as spokesperson for the silent entities, players and
original games alike.

In Lieu of a Conclusion
Kitkowski is only one of many cultural brokers I encountered who
overcome different obstacles and create different networks. Kondō
Kōshi and Bōken, for example, continuously bring Japanese-language
games to the attention of European and American audiences via
international trade shows, such as the SPIEL in Germany, but have
difficulties in overcoming major points of passages and centres of
calculation, such as customs duties. Kitkowski emerges as one of the
most successful cultural brokers, making use of as many materials and
connectors as possible, ranging from forums and conventions to crowd
funding and podcasts. By crossing boundaries, however, modes of
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brokerage also rely on and rebuild borders, such as the Japaneseness

and the J-RPGs they seek to translate.
The second main characteristic of these modes besides the use of
other mediators is that something is at stake when they mediate. All
cultural brokers I encountered at least seek to promote something they
like and maybe profit from it, even if that only means that they can play
more games of a kind they prefer. For some the stakes are higher,
seeking a profession that does not only sustain them but gives
something back, that produces joy. So they aim not only at creating a
reality in which Japanese games can find a place in the English
language market, but in which they can make a place for themselves.
This active “reality making” or “world building” by enrolling RPGs as a
resource entangles their brokerage with modes of enterprise. Brokers
such as Kitkowski focus thereby on bridging language barriers and
distributing information to which they have access. Other actors of
enterprise play with other cultures, such as the culture of a hobby and
the culture of a business. F.E.A.R. have made themselves into the game
studio some players — especially those who rely on information
filtered by Kitkowski — attribute with “rescuing” the Japanese TRPG
market from the recession of the 1990s. For them, all income and
prestige are at stake should they fail to enrol the necessary mediators
and recourses.
Lastly, the brokers I encountered engender each other so that they
often come in “packs;” that is, actors operating from one specific node
within the network or from one point of departure, for example J-RPGs,
sooner or later cross paths. In this regard, they mediate also between
themselves, offering help to trace other actors. This is an on-going,
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dynamic process, and so a conclusion on how the Japaneseness of

Japanese TRPG plays out would silence the many entangled entities.

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