It’s hard to believe, but this December marks five years since Wayfarer Daves began posting on that date which will live in infamy, Dec. 7, 2015.

Our first post was actually a story I’d written that had been published in 2012 but since then we’ve put out nearly 200 original articles. I hope this doesn’t scare you off but today we’re going to look back on 2020 and at what 2021 may offer. I’m also going to get into some of the behind the scenes bits of how this year’s stories were made despite the travel situation not advancing in my favor.

A pre-dreadnought battleship encased in concrete best sums up my travel situation this year. I was slightly more mobile.

Looking back at 2020, despite the extreme travel restrictions the year mostly went as planned. That’s one of the benefits of not planning. But this year I did want to make a conscious effort to diversify our travel writing topics and try new things, this was before the pandemic started in earnest. That kind of forced my hand.

We began this year with a lucky opportunity to visit Showa no Kurashi and see their “Suzu’s House” wartime home life exhibit, which I am very thankfully to the museum for allowing me write about and take picture for, and a good part of the year was taken up with the Himeyuri high school student nurses series. This World War II-centric content I think is what most people have come to expect from us and makes up the biggest part of our writing.

The Himeyuri story was a real challenge because being on Okinawa gave me an opportunity to plan several trips to see caves, museums and get permission to shoot at Abuchiragama, but because of the limited amount of English resources on the topic I had to scrounge the internet and get every book I could on the topic. To top it off there are no photos of the girls in battle and the Himeyuri museum has a strict no photo policy, which forced me to get creative to avoid handing you walls of text in the first article. This led to the Himeyuri illustrations which were as hard as the story as every piece of those images from the clothing the girls wore and the things they carried to what they did and where, had to be researched.

For example, look at the above illustration based on one account of an anesthesia-less amputation. Looks straight forward, right? The account describes holding a guy’s hand as the arm is sawed off, focusing on the experience but not the little details. At the Haebaru museum the operating table is depicted as a wooden table. On a Himeyuri museum-commissioned DVD it’s metal. In different Himeyuri girl’s account she says they conducted amputations on the dirt floor. So… yes.

How should the girls be dressed? Uniforms have been depicted in media as everything from highly inaccurate sailor suits to plain white blouses. There are no pictures from the time period, but the museum displays an enlisted man’s collarless undershirt worn with homemade monpe as the uniform. In some accounts, especially Miyagi Kikuko’s diary, they talks about their army uniform which would have to be the shirt only as the rest of their wardrobe was homemade monpe, shoes and flash hood. I ended up buying a pair of real shirts for reference. That’s part of my other expensive hobby; I collect World War II Japanese home front items for presentations I gave at schools. I actually own every single item of clothing these two girls are wearing both here and fully encumbered, except for Yuki’s shoes. Those are based on pictures.

Yuri’s Himeyuri uniform on my display mannequin. What do you put on your display mannequin?

Oh yeah, the glasses girl is “Yuki” and her friend with the beauty mark is “Yuri.” All the characters I drew are fictional but have names and back stories based on a mix of real Himeyuri experiences, though these are never shared to keep the focus on the real history and the scenes they are acting out. As the illustrator, making them this way helped them feel more like real people living out their lives and not just cardboard cutouts pantomiming scenes in someone else’s. (Yuki, Yuri, and friends are now being re-used in a different, happier non-war story. I feel I kind of owe them that much.) I also drew a lot more illustrations than were used as I’d wanted to make a full book but I really needed to take a break for awhile and now its hard to come back to. If you read the articles I think you’ll understand why.

I’m not sure how apparent it is, but most of my articles are very research heavy. You may see 1000 words on a topic, but all the reading I needed to do in addition to the trip or trips is very time consuming. When you see the articles coming slow, though I have a backlog of unreleased material, I’m loathe to just put it out to maintain a façade of normalcy- This isn’t my everyday life after all. So sometimes that has led to publishing gaps this year, the Himeyuri research especially ground things to a halt at times. When I thought I was clear and everything made sense, I’d stumble across more resources that may contradict other sources I was using then I’d have to reconsider my position and rewrite the article yet again. (As you might expect, living with this constant depressing research for months is also a little mentally destructive.) But I’m happy with this process as I’m never worried about the quality of what I’m giving you.

This year I was pleasantly surprised to find this is likely what has led to my articles being used as resources in actual colleges and universities. Last month I learned that our article with the Ro-25 submarine memorial is now also being cited on Wikipedia, which makes me an official source of unquestioned authoritative knowledge. Still, knowing that people in schools trust my writing well enough to use it is the greatest honor.

Beyond that I hope you’ve enjoyed our many Meiji and Taisho-centric offerings and dives into historical fiction. I’m a really big fan of these eras which feel like they hardly get considered outside of Japan, I just find the traditional Japanese ways, and importation of foreign ideas, customs, red bricks and steam engines, combining to create this new Japan is fascinating.

Shimbashi Station 1900

Absolutely no one was asking for a series on Meiji and Taisho alcohol yet with the travel restrictions I had a reason to basically pull from these incidentals, old-fashion drinking in historic places, that occurred during other trips in previous years and make new niche articles on the topic. (Since the pandemic began I’ve made one trip in October, which is where I took the Handa red brick place imagery) Reaching out to the Imperial Hotel I was able to get information that filled in knowledge gaps and essentially make a historic travel article without the need to actually travel.(Taisho-era Cocktail Hour)

Feel free to make a drinking game out of how often my articles had to reference Meiji-mura this year. Consider that my free gift to you!

Sakura Wars was a surprise but a welcome one. Because of the dedication the original Sakura Wars team and the manga had to making their Taito, Imperial Capital, feel period accurate it was a lot of fun researching the real Tokyo of the early 20^th century. I’d like to do more stories like that in the future as historic fiction done right is the best kind and shows that even a steampunk mecha dating sim adventure can be educational.

Education in Action!

It’ll never be a big part of the repertoire, but we will continue doing pop culture-related articles in the future. I knew before publishing the period anime reviews of Meiji Tokyo Renka and Woodpeckers Detectives’ Office wouldn’t be our most popular stories as neither of those anime series are really popular outside of Japan. I still felt they were worth sharing in case they did reach people who would be interested.  On the other hand, the visit to the K-On school, the former Toyosato Elementary School, is the most popular story we’ve ever done and our Demon Slayer Taisho Secrets is also among the most popular in what’s otherwise a sea of popular World War II-related articles.

This image perfectly sums up everything.

Next year I’m also looking to intermix shorter pieces on specific places or pop culture, like we do on Facebook, on the blog. Not everyone does social media, so I’m going to test the concept with some of our previously Facebook-exclusive content being put out here later this week. Or tomorrow. Or when I feel like starting. This isn’t a New Year’s resolution; I can break this commitment anytime I want. These won’t replace proper articles, but will supplement them on weeks that we’re not posting new full-length material.

I plan to return to our normal publishing routine next year, there are currently no big research-intensive series like Himeyuri planned to slow us down but that’s subject to change on a whim. Our normal routine will be posting at 6 a.m. every other Monday (Japan Standard Time), with a month break in August and a light December.

So I hope this year we’ve both brought what you want and what you didn’t know you wanted. Thanks to everyone who’s stuck with us and I hope you we have a better 2021 than a 2020. Then I hope the year after that tops 2021.