Season 10, Episode 19: Blood Destiny (Patreon)

This week on MSB: Victory Gundam episode 19 and a wide ranging discussion that touches on the dystopian nature of life in space, Tasilo Wago's resting creep face, Odelo's newly woken Gundam lust, and of course: motherhood. For the research, Thom returns to the Shrike team to discuss the inspiration behind their character designs.

Please listen to it!

Show Notes

• Character designer Ousaka Hiroshi told an interviewer that the Shrikes were based on a volleyball team in the 1993 Anime Mini Album, the relevant portions of which are translated here by Mark Simmons.

• This promotional image appeared in the October 1993 issue of Animedia (although by the time it was published, half the characters depicted were already dead). 
   

• General information about volleyball:

  • Encyclopedia Britannica has an extensive article about volleyball and its history.

  • The International Olympic Committee has its own page on volleyball's history.

• Volleyball in modern Japan:

  • I got many of my statistics from the Sasakawa Sports Foundation's 2023 white paper on sport in Japan (available in English).

  • The Japanese Wikipedia page for volleyball in Japan is extensive.

  • In the past decade, volleyball has enjoyed a popularity boom attributed to the success of Haikyuu!!

• Origins of Japanese Volleyball:

  • Nationalism and Imperialism:

    • Early interest in women's volleyball in Japan was driven by international competition with other East Asian countries: China and the Philippines.

    • Western sports like volleyball, basketball, etc. were introduced in each country by Christian missionaries operating under the auspices of the YMCA, as discussed in:
      
      Sport, Nationalism and Orientalism: The Asian Games - Prologue: The Origin of the Asian Games: Power and Politics by Fan Hong (archived). 

    • The three nations competed in the Far Eastern Championship Games, which eventually kinda sorta turned into the Asian Games that  are still contested today. The International Olympic Committee has a brief article by Shintaro Kano recounting a somewhat sanitized version of how that happened.

    • The Olympic Council of Asia also published a brief history of the Far Eastern Championship games (archived).

    • A Wikipedia overview for the Far Eastern Championship Games, and for the Japanese-led replacement, the East Asian Games.

    • A detailed discussion of the relationship between athletics and Japanese fascism:
      
      Sport and Physical Education under Fascistization in Japan, by Abe Ikuo, Kiyohara Yasuharu, and Nakajima Ken for the Univeristy of Tsukuba's Bulletin of Health and Sport Sciences in 1990 (revised version).

    • More information about the Far Eastern Championship Games has been compiled by the Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation.

    • Likewise, the Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation has information on the Japanese-led replacement for the Far Eastern Championship Games here, and here. These are mostly focused on soccer statistics but where possible include information about other sports contested. 

    • An archived copy of the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser newspaper from 1934 includes a reference to the complicated international wrangling over whether and how the Manchukuo team would be allowed to compete.

  • Industry:

    • Young women working in factories, especially in the textile industry, were encouraged to join company volleyball teams partly to alleviate widespread concerns about the unhealthy nature of factory work. 

    • The role of female labor in the silk industry in rapidly-industrializing Meiji Japan is discussed in: 
      
      Population, Resources and Female Labor in the Raw Silk Industry of Nagano in Meiji Japan by Tim F. Liao (2013).

    • It's also discussed in Sophia University's Digital Japanese History page.

    • This photo depicts women working in a silk factory in the Taisho period.

    • An expose on the conditions in these factories, Tragic Story of a Factory Girl, was published in 1924 by Hosoi Wakizo.

  The Witches themselves:

  • The city of Kaizaku where the Witches were based maintains a page on the history of the famous volleyball team.

  • On Wikipedia there are pages on the Witches in English  and in Japanese, as well as a page for the Nichibo Kaizaku team in general.

  • The legacy of the Witches was discussed extensively in the leadup to the Tokyo Olympics of 2020, including in a series of articles by Roy Tomizawa, author of a book on the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (1964: The Greatest Year in the History of Japan). 

    • Part 1: Japan Takes Gold in the First Women’s Volleyball Olympic Championship.

    • Part 2: Was the Training of the Women’s Volleyball Team Abuse or Tough Love?

    • Part 3: A Symbol of a Nation Rising from the Ruins.

    • Part 4: Japan’s Great Novelists Reflect.

    • Part 5: Part 5: First Comes Gold, Then Comes Marriage.

  • Unsurprisingly, the International Olympic Committee published their own articles reflecting on the Witches' historic achievements:

    • Bewitched: How seeds of Japan's 1964 gold in women's volleyball were sewn over a decade by Shintaro Kano.

    • Masae Kasai: What it took for women to lead in 1960s Japan, by Shintaro Kano.

  • In 2013, Iwona Merklejn of Aoyama Gakuin University analyzed the narratives about the Witches as part of the larger phenomenon of Showa era nostalgia in her paper:
    
    Remembering the Oriental Witches: Sports, Gender and Shōwa Nostalgia in the NHK Narratives of the Tokyo Olympics, for the Social Science Japan Journal, Volume 16, Issue 2.

  • And of course, the 2021 French documentary, The Witches of the Orient, by Julien Faraut, featuring many of the surviving members of the team, is available on the Criterion Channel.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

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