Spoiler File
(223.7KB, 1100x1600) went through a great fucking deal of effort to figure out the real life dates of touhou in-universe articles by using the shitty vague information in the names of the music cd's and the ingame lore explanations the manuals provide
interestingly enough in gensoukyou they started all over from year 1 once they got sealed off from the outside world(17th year of meiji, 1884, according to my expert information) and now as of 2023 they would be at year 139
also in the 5th year of meiji(1872) the emperor abolished the semi-lunar calendar and adopted the gregorian calendar, with this the pesky 13th month thing that happens every 3-4 years disappeared, and the japanese went from calling each month by their traditional japanese names(see https://jpnculture.net/inreki-meisyou/ for a complete fucking list of every single name that each month had, they used all of them) and swapped to calling them 一月(literally 1 month, the first month of the year) and 二月 etc yet in the articles here it still uses the traditional names
interestingly enough in this particular article and the one after it, the month is....completely fucking unknown
the rest of the articles use the standardized traditional names that were in use just before the adoption of the gregorian calendar(see here for them https://www.ndl.go.jp/koyomi/chapter3/s8.html) but in these 2 articles the kanji left of 月(it looks like a mix of 革 and 茶) is not only not one that i've ever seen before, but even after going through comprehensive month name lists and dictionaries i cannot fucking find that kanji anywhere
i thought that it might be a kanji for the 13th month, but it seems to have always just been called a single name(not this one) and no other, and in addition it's impossible for that to be the case in the first place because this article is dated 118, the next one is dated 119 on the same month, the leap month thing only happened every 3-4 years or so
i actually went through an archive of an attachment to the imperial edict that explains how the date will work from now on just to check how they months were written at the time, but found nothing of interest
it seems like shitty busywork thatd drive a man insane but im actually having a decent amount of fun going through all this stuff, slaughtering my free time with machine gun
in general theres lots of buddhist, shinto, confucian and taoist shit in literally everything official/semi-official touhou for some fucking reason, even in short novels(not translated to english and also nearly fucking impossible to find now) written by ZUN to be attached to the end of manga to make it look thicker than it is, or titles of music, spellcards and so on and it's interesting to try and decipher them by myself
in the 1 volume semi-official manga i finished yesterday there were about 12 mangaka who all made one chapter each, all of the chapters had to be independent stories and have flowers as a major plot point, they were all referencing ancient bullshit and i remember one of them was talking about the flower related poems in the 万葉集 which is a massive poetry book from the 8th century and (as far as i can tell) the 3rd oldest book that the japanese produced and have surviving copies/excerpts of now, the other 2 were both compiled on the order of the emperor, one of them was by the order of the legendary emperor literally named 神武(jinmu, "divine/godly warrior") and made to chronicle japanese history up until that point, and the other was by another emperor(or his wife, i don't remember) for administrative purposes, it contained the names of all the land under their rule, their folklore and geography, these 2 books were made within a century of eachother and are the only written sources of japanese mythology
me fumbling through buddhist shit a week or two ago was also me trying to figure out what the fuck "求聞持の能力(the ability of gumonji") was supposed to be, it turns out its some sort of buddhist meditation to perfectly memorize the rules of buddhism and all that trite, and said to greatly increase memory capacity, of course the only explanations of this shit are in japanese(and in fact you cant even write it out with windows ime), the character referenced in the song is one who never forgets what she sees, writes it all down in official records as the sole writer in all of gensoukyou, and every time she dies she gets reborn all over again while retaining all her memories
havent touched the games in a week and just gone through all the official written content and this searching, the next thing im going to read after this are the "official records" thing