Yume Maboroshi no Gotoku

A CHALLENGER APPROACHES.

Is this also your explanation for how smaller Mongolian sumo wrestlers have been dominating the Japanese sport for years now?

I think you're kind of missing the point. There's a massive difference in matches between two people of proportional build where one guy is smaller than the other and between two people where one guy is proportionally a child compared to the other. Asashoryu might be smaller than many Japanese sumo wrestlers, but he's proportional to them in primary anatomical size. More importantly, the Mongolians are stout-bodied but WEIGH THE SAME as the average Japanese wrestler. Going back to Asashoryu, he peaked at 157 kg. The average weight of his contemporary peers was 152 kg.

What we're talking about here is a 70-kg full-grown man  wrestling the 50-kg 12-yr old version of himself. That's how extreme the body size comparison was between northeast Asian nomads and the Japanese islanders. In this time period, Japanese, Koreans, and most of the Chinese were proportionally similar in body size, but Mongols and Jurchens (later Manchu) were on average much larger physically. 

Aisingioro Nurhaci was said to have been the height of a warhorse. Not that tall, actually, since the local warhorses would have been the short Mongolian breed averaging about 175 cm in height. Oda Nobunaga was around a head shorter than the famed tea master Senno Soueki, whose funerary records indicate to have been around 170 cm tall. A wrestling match between the two would have ended in an instant with Nurhaci playing with Nobu like he would a child. Japanese people in Sengoku times were short, a trend that continued well into WW2 when northern Chinese called them "the eastern midgets". The tall Japanese we know today came about due to better nutrition in the postwar era. 

Is this also your explanation for how smaller Mongolian sumo wrestlers have been dominating the Japanese sport for years now?

Aisingioro Nurhaci was said to have been the height of a warhorse. Not that tall, actually, since the local warhorses would have been the short Mongolian breed averaging about 175 cm in height. Oda Nobunaga was around a head shorter than the famed tea master Senno Soueki, whose funerary records indicate to have been around 170 cm tall. A wrestling match between the two would have ended in an instant with Nurhaci playing with Nobu like he would a child. Japanese people in Sengoku times were short, a trend that continued well into WW2 when northern Chinese called them "the eastern midgets". The tall Japanese we know today came about due to better nutrition in the postwar era. 

I'm not exactly a wrestling fan but I am pretty darn sure that having a head-and-a-half's height over your opponent is not an assurance of victory in any form of wrestling (including sumo). Nor, actually, in any sport that I'm aware of--not even basketball, or even foot races.

And, thus, Kid Jesus forded the Sea of Japan.

Aisingioro Nurhaci was said to have been the height of a warhorse. Not that tall, actually, since the local warhorses would have been the short Mongolian breed averaging about 175 cm in height. Oda Nobunaga was around a head shorter than the famed tea master Senno Soueki, whose funerary records indicate to have been around 170 cm tall. A wrestling match between the two would have ended in an instant with Nurhaci playing with Nobu like he would a child. Japanese people in Sengoku times were short, a trend that continued well into WW2 when northern Chinese called them "the eastern midgets". The tall Japanese we know today came about due to better nutrition in the postwar era. 

Naked Wrestling.

It's how men make friends.

My only disappointment so far is that the Philippines don't appear on the map remotely properly. I mean he does plan on conquering Luzon right?

Guess I slipped up there, I must've been meaning to put a note but forgot (either that or I had put in a note at an earlier chapter, or thought I had). Either way, my goof, I'm sorry about that.

A "koku" is an archaic Japanese unit of time measuring one-twelfth of the day, which is generally about two hours long, though they are measured from sunrise and sunset, meaning a koku is shorter during the night and longer during the day in summer, and vice versa in winter. I would've translated if it weren't for the fact that this is a historical series, and translating it into hours felt like an anachronism.

BTW, Nobu is an idiot. Paper cartridges can't be stuffed into a muzzle-loading firearm because there's no way to remove the paper residue from the breech. This is why paper cartridge shooters were all breech loaders. Paper packets were used to fast load muzzle loaders, but the packing paper is used as wadding, stuffed in front of the bullet so that the paper residue is removed by the bullet itself.

Thanks for the assist. And yes, that part seemed too far-fetched even for me and I figured it wasn't actually possible. But counterpoint: he's Oda Effin' Nobunaga.

For the record, I generally loathe the practice of leaving Japanese terms untranslated like "just according to keikaku", and sometimes I even translate terms that better translators than me will leave untranslated (you may notice that I changed "Honno-ji" to "Honno Temple", for instance. As far as I know, I'm the only translator that does this). I believe translation should give readers the same experience as readers in the original language. But when translating historical series in which archaic units of measurements are used, it's more authentic to use those archaic units, especially when there's no direct analogue, like with "koku". Even then, when it's used to state what toki it is, I'll sometimes translate it as "Hour of the [zodiac animal]" (which I think sounds archaic enough), but when used as a measurement of duration it's not analogous to the hour as a measurement of duration so I don't convert it (unless the author provides the conversion). I did experiment with translating it as "hour" for a while for the sake of simplicity but stopped, partly for the sake of accuracy and partly because sometimes the author does provide the 1 koku = 2 hours conversion, and it's weird seeing "this went on for two hours (four hours)", and as far as I know English has never had a unit for subdivisions of the day besides the hour, so there's no archaic unit that I can substitute for a bastardized translation. Regardless, since these units of measurement aren't used in modern Japan, they're only slightly more foreign to us as they are to Japanese readers.

There's another archaic unit of measurement that's even more complicated and is used all the time in historical series, which I also leave untranslated but haven't had any complaints thus far. Incidentally, it's also called koku, but it's a different koku. The time koku is written 刻, while this koku is written 石 (which is also the character for "stone") and is most often used in historical manga as a measurement of land. More accurately, however, it was a measurement of volume equal to about five bushels. It became a measurement of land in the Edo period because for the purposes of taxation, fiefs were not measured by their area but by the equivalent of their annual economic yield in rice. So if a fief was capable of producing 50,000 koku of rice (regardless of the actual harvest, and assuming the fief had no other sources of revenue) it was considered a 50,000 koku fief. The largest fief, Kaga, was about a million koku. I think it's even more clear with this koku that it would be completely inaccurate to convert it to a unit of area such as acres or hectares, which are based on distance rather than based on the economic value of the land within a feudal system, since the area is not 100% proportional to the economic yield. And of course, it would sound completely ridiculous to convert it into a unit of volume, and translating it literally as "stone" would make it a unit of weight. So I leave that as koku as well.

So there's my rationale. Please don't lump me in with the idiots who think "nakama" is a special word that can't be translated into English.

What’s a koku? SystematicChaos, why do you use Japanese terms but don’t give us the translation? Just according to keikaku, huh?

Koku just means time. Traditionally the Japanese day was subdivided into twelve toki, six yoake (sunrise) toki and six higure (sunset) toki. Each subdivision is literal, in that all six yoake toki must be "spent" in daylight and all six higure toki must be "spent" at night. What this means is that the length of a toki changes according to season. The yoake toki are longer in summer and shorter in winter. Because of this, the Japanese originally didn't have a concept of the fixed hour, and the toki was not considered a unit for measuring length of time but a unit for marking the NAME of each start and stop of a twelfth subdivision of a day. Each toki is named after an animal of the Chinese zodiac and the traditional way of marking time was to say the name of the toki + no koku, for instance uma no koku (time of the horse). Therefore, a koku is the time between whenever something was started to when the bell is rung to mark transition to the next toki. The maximum length of a koku is slightly over two hours.

You can see why translating this may be a bit difficult. For that matter, an intellectual leap must first be made by the reader to comprehend the concept of unfixed hour.

EDIT: Sorry, neither Chaos nor I managed to properly explain this. When a Sengoku-era Japanese person says you've spent a koku doing this, he doesn't mean you've been working on it for two hours. He's actually just saying the bell has rung once since you started. This could mean ten minutes or two hours.

BTW, Nobu is an idiot. Paper cartridges can't be stuffed into a muzzle-loading firearm because there's no way to remove the paper residue from the breech. This is why paper cartridge shooters were all breech loaders. Paper packets were used to fast load muzzle loaders, but the packing paper is used as wadding, stuffed in front of the bullet so that the paper residue is removed by the bullet itself.

What’s a koku? SystematicChaos, why do you use Japanese terms but don’t give us the translation? Just according to keikaku, huh?

Guess I slipped up there, I must've been meaning to put a note but forgot (either that or I had put in a note at an earlier chapter, or thought I had). Either way, my goof, I'm sorry about that.

A "koku" is an archaic Japanese unit of time measuring one-twelfth of the day, which is generally about two hours long, though they are measured from sunrise and sunset, meaning a koku is shorter during the night and longer during the day in summer, and vice versa in winter. I would've translated if it weren't for the fact that this is a historical series, and translating it into hours felt like an anachronism.

What’s a koku? SystematicChaos, why do you use Japanese terms but don’t give us the translation? Just according to keikaku, huh?

That advice is even truer now

What is this shit?

Don't ask, or try to understand. X_X Just read, laugh, scratch your head, and move on.

Yeesh, them Japanese and their funny thoughts about “bloodlines” ...

This manga is f'in gold. XD I can't believe I stopped at chapter 2.

Punishment maybe ?

Punishment for what?

THE UNBEATABLE YI SUN SHI AW YEAH

How disrespectful!

When you fight a life of wars and never lose a single battle you have earned the title unbeatable.

When you pit your thirteen warships against the enemy's 133 and sink 31 of them, damaging 63, forcing the rest to turn tail and run, then let your opportunistic nephew start chasing the enemy's 200 transport ships out to open sea with his puny flotilla of 3 - all without losing a single ship - GOD is the title Heaven has bestowed upon you.

You know, the biggest mystery in that battle isn't how the admiral did it, but how Hideyoshi still found it possible to not demand every single samurai involved in that battle to cut open his belly.

Historically the next arc will be the Japanese showing the complacent Koreans what REAL warfare looks like. Also historically Admiral Yi will look at that display, find himself unimpressed, then proceed to hand the Japanese their own heads on a platter. 

THE UNBEATABLE YI SUN SHI AW YEAH

Historically the next arc will be the Japanese showing the complacent Koreans what REAL warfare looks like. Also historically Admiral Yi will look at that display, find himself unimpressed, then proceed to hand the Japanese their own heads on a platter. 

So, uh ... why did he kill those two?

Punishment maybe ?

So, uh ... why did he kill those two?