Last Saturday, I found myself at DNA Lounge in SOMA for AniClover, which is a monthly anime-themed club night. The night I went, the event specially featured Touhou Project music. A Touhou Project music nightclub event would be pretty niche, even in Japan. So to find this event scheduled in San Francisco, I was pretty shocked to say the least.
As a high schooler, I was heavily involved in the Midwest Touhou Project fandom. I hosted a meet-up or two at Chilis (lulz), was on a few fan panels to discuss the series, and witnessed my fair share of drama at fan communities. I also spent an embarrassing amount of time listening to IOSYS, COOL & CREATE, and various metal remixes of ZUN’s original compositions.
So - what is The Touhou Project? If you’ve spent a considerable amount online, you’ve certainly seen a Touhou meme, but I recently described the series to my housemate as “an open-source fandom”.
Since the late 1990s, Team Shanghai Alice (which is 1 Japanese guy named Junya Ota, aka ZUN) has been making these PC-98. Everything is done solo - ZUN does the programming, the music and the art. All of these things certainly look DIY, but it adds to the charm.
The series takes place in a Gensokyo where a Japanese shrine maiden (Reimu) has to investigate “incidents” involving Yokai (妖怪) which are essentially creatures from Japanese mythology. In the game, each level features a yokai drawn as a cute anime girl whom you have to dodge bullets from. The game is notable for its all-female characters.
However, most fans of Touhou Project haven’t even played the games themselves. What’s most remarkable about the culture that Touhou Project has spawned is that the creator, ZUN, has given the entire internet permission to do whatever they want with the universe.
As with everything on the internet, the typical use case for this has been pornography. However, this radical openness transformed into something resembling a collaborative cultural commons. At Comiket, Japan’s massive biannual fan convention, Touhou dominated for years with thousands of fan circles selling original works. Musicians built entire careers on Touhou arrangements. Fans created so much content that Guinness recognized it as the “most prolific fan-made shooter series.”
With the music, there’s such a strong variation between creators, even when everyone is using the same source material.
Here’s a lullaby version of the song from the gameplay clip above, U.N. OWEN Was Her?
A metal version
Last, the most well known version which was a popular Japanese meme featuring Ronald McDonald.
The best part of this community is that anyone from any part of the world can creatively share something, and it becomes a part of the greater canon. The active fan community is so integral to the series’ success, more than the original content itself.
I also admire this story because it demonstrates that everyday people, with enough creativity and hard work, can put their “children” into the world and have them become “living”, and have a real impact on millions of people.
