Irish Influences in Japanese Media (Patreon)

When I finished Metal Gear Solid for the first time I was just a kid so its references to previous games and themes of selfish genes went over my head but the most confusing part of all was the end credits. Basking in the afterglow of finishing a cool game, I was totally caught off guard two minutes into The Best is Yet to Come when I realised the song was being sung in Irish. In an interview, composer Rika Muranaka explains how this came to be.

Muranaka: So when Hideo asked me to write music for Metal Gear Solid and he just told me “I just don’t want to hear English lyrics, I don’t want to hear anything I would recognise the language.” so that’s why I said to him “Well, I could write the music in Gaelic.”

Writing the lyrics in a lesser known language is a smart move if you ask me. The Best is Yet to Come has an ethereal charm to it that something like Can’t Say Goodbye To Yesterday doesn’t quite manage. In an interview about Persona 5, composer Shoji Meguro apologised to anglophones for writing some songs in English. 

Meguro: Apologies to the Western gamers, but to Japanese gamers, because many Japanese don't speak the language and they don't understand the lyrics, the English lyrics blend in as background music. The lyrics are not distracting to the gamer, so it's convenient to use as background music. If the lyrics were Japanese, the players would probably find the music too distracting from the game. Also, [some things] just sound cooler in English.

It’s tempting to suggest that he write the soundtrack of his next project in Irish to avoid distracting anyone. After all, even I can’t speak as Gaeilge.

The Best is Yet to Come’s Irish lyrics were just a means of obfuscation but that moment opened my eyes to the notion that a game made half a planet away could still have a small piece of Ireland in it. In the two decades since then I’ve consumed a disproportionately large amount of Japanese media compared to the output of other countries, especially per capita, and over time I’ve gotten the sense it’s not an entirely one-way relationship. For a country with a smaller population than Tokyo, Ireland seems to have been a unusually large influence on Japanese creatives.

Dracula, seemingly annoyed that another axe is hurtling towards his face.

First and foremost, I could probably do this entire post about Dracula alone but that’s practically cheating. Dracula has become so ubiquitous it transcended its Irish origins so we’ll gloss over that one, except to say that Vampire Hunter D and the Castlevania series either wouldn’t exist or would be pretty different had it not been for Bram Stoker’s contribution to Gothic Horror literature. Without Vampire Hunter D we might not have Bloodborne and without Castlevania we might not have Devil May Cry. As with all art, there’s a chain of influences at play but let’s stick with the more direct stuff.

This might be a familiar sight even if you’ve never watched the film.

The earliest modern example I’ve found is Laputa Castle in the Sky. Released by Studio Ghibli in 1986, the titular castle draws heavily from and even directly references Gulliver’s Travels by Irish author Jonathan Swift. In the story, Laputa is a city suspended on a giant magnetic disk but the real connection runs a little deeper than that. At the time, Swift had just written a series of papers under a pseudonym objecting to a business contract that would risk lowering the value of Irish currency for the benefit of a few in England. In the papers, Swift asserts that the Irish people “ought to be as free as your brethren in England”. In subsequent years he would go on to write an incredibly dry satire about how the Irish could alleviate their poverty by selling children as food. There’s recipes. With this context in mind, it’s easy to see how the story of Laputa’s rule over the land of Balnibarbi is analogous to the rule of Britain over Ireland at the time. So not only does Castle in the Sky draw an inspiration from an Irish author, the original story was even about Ireland in some sense as well. The Ghibli film reflects little of these themes but it’s an interesting connection all the same.

In Gulliver’s Travels it’s mentioned that the Laputians can not only aerially bombard the lands below them but they can even lower Laputa itself to crush rebellious cities. In what seems to be an insane coincidence, just two months after the release of Castle in the Sky, Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ would air an episode wherein an orbiting space colony is intentionally dropped on Dublin. It's also worth pointing out that the floating city trope, perhaps inspired by Castle on the Sky, appears in many JRPGs as well, although I won’t list any here so as to avoid spoilers.

A colony about to hit Dublin. This might no longer kill me.

While we’re on the topic of authors, Samuel Beckett’s work has also gotten at least small nod. Probably his most famous play is Waiting for Godot which was almost certainly the inspiration for the name of the prosecutor in the third Phoenix Wright game. The dialogue even includes an allusion to people waiting around for him but maybe that was added in translation.

Wait while he finishes his coffee.

These more modern influences are the minority of the Irish stuff you’ll find, the rest of it comes from mythology. This is especially interesting to me because when Christianity became the dominant religion, much of the information about what came before faded away. In modern times that culture is all but gone. I’ve learned more about the ancient mythology of my own country by consuming Japanese media than I was ever taught in school. If you’re Irish yourself you might be surprised to find that there’s more to it than you think but let’s start with the one we’re all familiar with, Cú Chulainn.

A stylish representation of Cú Chulainn.

Probably the most well known figure of Irish mythology and as such he gets well represented in Japan too. His spear, Gáe Bulg, appears as a weapon in many Shin Megami Tensei games and can also be found in Final Fantasy from 10 onwards. The character himself appears as a summon in FF12. He’s a prominent and well known character in the Fate series and even has his own Yu Gi Oh card. Cú Chulainn’s demise happens because he takes up two separate oaths: one to never eat dogmeat and another never to refuse a meal offered to him by a woman. When a woman offers him some tasty canine (maybe Swift would approve?) he’s trapped in a dilemma which weakens him. This kind of promise is referred to as a geas which some of you may be familiar with from Code Geass, that’s where the name comes from.

A not so stylish representation of Cú Chulainn.

Another well known piece of our history hides in plain sight. Halloween derives from the ritual of Samhain, a fact which has become more well known in recent years. Little Witch Academia uses the name Samhain instead and even features the Claiomh Solais as a major item. This was traditionally referred to as a sword of light capable of killing Gods, although its depiction in the anime is a little different. While we’re on the topic, some pronunciation tips. When you see an mh in a word, as it is here, that’s actually a v sound. Irish doesn’t have the letter v but it does have the sound, so that’s how it’s represented. Clouv Solas. Similarly for Samhain, the mh comes out like a u. Sau-ahn.

Thou shalt suffer this witch to live.

While Little Witch Academia seems to take most of its inspiration from Harry Potter, perhaps it’s actually set somewhere more like Ireland. Not that there’s a big difference in terms of geography or climate or anything. If it seems far fetched that an anime would be set in Ireland then look no further than Fractale where you can even see a Garda car at one point.

That’s what we call the police here.

At least one Japanese game takes place on the emerald isle as well, Folklore. Being an early PS3 title this one got a fair bit of attention at the time but seems to have faded into obscurity since then. Its rendition of an Irish countryside is impressive, I’m willing to bet at least one person on the team visited at some point because there’s details here they probably wouldn’t have got right otherwise. The signposts look exactly like the old ones that are still up in some places and Doolin, the tiny village of about five houses, even has its own pub which it may not surprise you to learn is also accurate.

I thought Doolin was a terrible fake name until I found out one really exists. Sorry Doolin.

One of the producers on Folklore was Kouji Okada a founding member of Atlus and director of the early Megami Tensei games. The Megami Tensei series and spin offs take from all kinds of mythologies with Digital Devil Saga being heavily inspired by Hinduism so it’s not surprising to find some Celtic figures in there too. Still, they seem to be very well represented. Banshees (bean sídhe) are obvious but Leanan Sidhe (leannán sídhe), not so much. Other Irish demons in the series include: Cú Chulainn, Setanta, Badb Catha, Dullahan (also the star of an anime called Durarara!!), Brigid, Scatach, and, of course, the humble Leprechaun.

Not sure what they were thinking with this one, maybe he’s up to something in there?

Dagda is a major character in Shin Megami Tensei 4: Apocalypse, getting a much bigger role than is common for any deity to take, even in the Shin Megami Tensei series. The only other one to get this much screentime in a single mainline game is Lucifer. Dagda is represented as an extremely powerful god, capable of resurrecting the main character. Which fits his name, Dagda meaning “The Good God”. Not good as in good-natured but good as in good-at-everything. He’s like the Odin of Irish Mythology except you haven’t heard of him. Dagda’s mammy Danu gets some screentime as well, herself becoming another major character in the plot.

The spiral might represent a question mark to symbolise how little is known about Irish deities.

Just a year after Apocalypse, Nioh would come along with another protagonist being resurrected by their Celtic protector. This game is very loosely based on the life of William Adams, an English navigator who ended up in Japan. In this version William is Irish and apparently the developers made the decision to change his nationality because a spiritual Englishman was less believable.

A perfectly typical Irishman.

Shin Megami Tensei and Nioh hint that this trend might just be accelerating. Recently, Berserk introduced a character called Danann. As in Tuatha Dé Danann, the race of Gods which supposedly fought the Fomorians here in ancient times - and the name of a submarine in Full Metal Panic. There are other gems to be found such as Clannad whose writer apparently thought the name meant “family” in Irish, it doesn’t. For now though, my well is running dry so it's time for the wrap up.

Some spiral rocks from Beserk, arranged into triplets these are called a triskelion.

Let’s be real, Irish mythology probably isn’t especially interesting to Japan. Living on the opposite side of the globe I can only really guess, what, if anything, these influences might collectively indicate. There’s a sort of anthropic principle at play here. My experience living in Ireland and consuming Japanese media is atypical and primes me to see things that others would not. Likewise, others will see things I don’t so the full picture might just elude us all. If I had to guess, I would say that the survival of Shinto rituals has left Japanese people more interested in neglected polytheistic traditions than many other parts of the world. In my experience, Norse mythology crops up most often but even there you might find a Celtic thing or two mixed in. Perhaps my research skills have failed me, but as far as I can tell Pookas aren’t a Norse invention so their presence in Odin Sphere can only be explained by mythological cross-pollination. There’s a decent chance these details are irrelevant to those using them. Our leprechaun friend is probably wearing his Union Jack without a shred of irony.

Whatever the case, Irish mythology presents a strong catalyst for creatives because it was undeniably real at one stage but now it’s full of holes. Naturally, imagination takes over to fill those gaps eroded by history. Although it sometimes gets unrecognisably twisted in the process, I’m glad to see those ancient characters live on a little longer.

So there you have it. Ireland may be a small country but apparently we punch above our weight in literature, influences on anime and of course, most crucially of all, insightful game analysis. Slán go fóill.

Disclaimer: This is a scrapped video script which I decided to salvage by posting as a blog, as such I haven’t researched it to the degree I probably should’ve and I’m not knowledgeable about Irish history in the first place so please take everything with a pinch of salt.