A. 明智光秀　B. 石田三成　C. 織田信長　D. 徳川家康　E. 豊臣秀吉

Well, Theoman got them all right again.  However, my guess is that this one actually required a little guesswork and figuring out on his part, so he may be awarded a modicum of praise.

COMMENCE GOLF CLAP.

CLAP.  CLAP.  CLAP.

CEASE GOLF CLAP.

Anyway, on to A Fan, who for some strange reason doubts the historical accuracy of video games.  What about Space Invaders?  That actually happened, didn’t it?  Anyway, he picked A to be Tokugawa because he thought it looked like a winner.  I think the person who had this name must have thought so too, because he believed that he could rule Japan.  History, however, had other plans.  A is the backstabbing Akechi Mitsuhide.  Also, his identification of kamikaze as a significant force in Japanese history (and also as having nothing to do with this period) is correct: this “divine wind” was a typhoon that blew away the invading Mongol fleet in the late 13th century.  D is not Toyotomi, nor Toyota, but we’ll give partial credit because it does start with ‘To.”  Finally, A Fan chose to rely on the movies, which, unlike video games, are 100% historically accurate, all the time, every time.  Just to be clear: none of these are Tom Cruise, and, like the kamikaze, “The Last Samurai” is set in a period far distant from the one currently under discussion (though it was roughly 300 years later instead of 300 years earlier).

Fortunately, Dragon stood up to defend video games and their impeccable historical accuracy.  She conclusively proved that they get all the facts right by getting A right . . . err, wait, no, she didn’t.  Well surely B . . . nope.  How about C . . . looks like not (though I think we can all agree that, had one been available at the time, Tokugawa Ieyasu would have chosen to wield a spear that also fires cannonballs, shoots lasers, and serves as a flamethrower).  Aha!  E!  She got E correct!  It’s Toyotomi Hideyoshi.  This conclusively proves that Samurai Warriors–and, by extension, video games in general–is precisely 20% historically accurate.

Last came Shirley, who put her knowledge of European history and innovative spelling techniques to work in solving the puzzle.  And . . . she got roughly the same results as Dragon, who based her guesses on the video game.  Oh well.  Shirley correctly picked out Ishida Mitsunari as B; the loserest-looking characters for the member of the list most famous for being a loser.  She also got two out of three in her picking A, C, and D as the 3 unifiers, though she jumbled them up a bit and also tossed in Akechi Mitsuhide, who simply believed that he had a chance to be a unifier.  But hey: Hideyoshi thought he was destined to conquer Korea, China, and India.  These folks aren’t exactly boasting sanity in spades, here.

Now, over the years (hey, it’s been more than one year!), there are several topics I’ve considered for KYPC but had to drop because the answers would all be written in katakana, the series of phonetic characters often used to represent non-Japanese names and other words.  For one thing, this would be unfair–well, more unfair than usual–since Theoman can handle them swimmingly and I think Dragon may know a few.  For another, using characters with no supposed “meaning” component would defeat the purpose of the exercise, right?  But I think after 67 weeks we’ve pretty well proved that these self-contained “meanings” are at best obscure.

Way way back, before things like katakana and hiragana were developed, the Japanese had nothing but Chinese characters to use to write words.  There was a system of kanji that were used essentially the same way that katakana are used today (except that they could be used for pretty much any word instead of a specific subset of words); these were called man’yogana.  They’re no longer used, of course, but I figure: why should that stop us?  So let’s try it.  The first experiment in Know Your (Really Phonetic But They Look Like) Picture Characters will be simple: common names.  I have selected the names “Shirley” and “Theodore” for obvious reasons, and then at random I decided to toss in “David” and “Abigail.”  Choose whichever one of these names appeals to you most, for whatever reason, and try to locate it.

A. 代衣鼻特　B. 之意藤憶留　C. 子也阿里伊　D. 安弥義依流