Now, after a long time, why don't we start our fourth episode?
In this episode, we are going to talk about some history of Gensokyo, and why does ZUN (or Yukari) choose to release Touhou in the late 90s, in such a particular time. For these, I have got a theory.
First, we all know that Gensokyo is established in 1885, right? Gensokyo is created because of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, that leads to a loss of faith for Youkai. Faith for Youkai is like blood for human, without faith, Youkai would disappear into nothingness.
Faith comes from all sort of form, which are almost all based on recognition of one entity. For example, worshipping, respect, or even friendship is a kind of faith, and that's possibly why some of the Youkai can survive in the modern world, outside the barrier (probably by transforming into a normal human and live like a human).
Oops, I've gone too far into another topic. Okay, now let's go back to Gensokyo. During these months, I have spent quite a lot of time researching folklores and myths, and I have found a quite surprising fact, which is that there are quite a lot of Japanese Youkai had their origin in Chinese folklore. This means that, some Japanese Youkai actually comes from China.
Now, this leads to the point I'm going to talk about. I still don't quite know the mechanism of the Great Hakurei Barrier (In this theory, let's assume it's faith-based) , but one thing for sure, it enables Youkai to survive without faith. But even though they can survive, they still need to gather "fear" (which is actually a form of faith) from the human village. This proves that, even with the barrier, Youkai still somehow requires faith, possibly to maintain their abilities.
After Meiji Restoration, it's not very likely to gather enough faith from Japan, due to rapid Westernization (The faith gathered from the Human Village is not enough to power the barrier, due to low population). I also said before, that some Japanese Youkai actually comes from China. This gave us a very clear answer: To gather faith from China (At that time, China have only one-fifth population compared to today, or even less).
China is a multi-religious country since it's creation dated back to 5000 years ago (I'm Chinese!). Not only do they believe in Taoism and Buddhism, they also worship some other entities, like stouts and foxes. This tradition is carried on even after the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the imperialistic Qing dynasty, but it does not last long, after WWII and the Chinese Civil War.
After the Chinese Civil War, the Chinese Communist Party took control of China, and Chairman Mao (We call him Emperor Mao in Chinese forums) initiates the "Big Jump" movement in the late 50s (I'm not sure if it's the correct English name, I translated it straight from Chinese), which leads to one of the point we are going to talk about, the Cultural Revolution.
One of the core value for the Cultural Revolution is to "break the old tradition", which actually means to kill off the religious traditions, demolish the temples and shrines, and destroy the statues of gods. Many religious people are captured and brainwashed into believing atheism, or if they refuse, they are killed.
This delivers a huge blow to Gensokyo, due to a hefty amount of faith had their origin in China. Because the barrier is faith-based, such loss of faith would inevitably cause a diminish of power for the barrier.
And the next movement, brought by the Chinese Communist Party, is the "Open Up" movement started in 1978. The aim for this movement is to promote technological development and scientific education, especially for the rural population (Where most religious tradition are kept intact). When combined with the atheistic nature of the Communist Party, this movement is the last straw for the faith in Gensokyo.
Due to the scientific and atheistic "brainwashing" by the Communist Party, more and more people begins to ditch their religious belief. This makes the belief for the existance of supernatural phenomenon weaker and weaker, and thus the power of the Great Hakurei Barrier.
Even though she have to sleep at least 12 hours every day to keep up the power of the Barrier, Yukari was quite worried to see the power of the Barrier fading away. Each and every year, due to the diminish of faith, the Barrier loses part of its power. If this keeps going on, the Barrier will completely break down after a few decade, and when that happens, all of Gensokyo would be gone.
In order to prevent this, Yukari thought about an idea, and that's how Touhou was born. Yukari found a promising individual programmer, whose name is Junya Oota. She then begins to interact with him (Either through friendship, or manipulating his fate in an unknown way) to make her dream come true.
In the 90s, the first 5 Touhou games comes out, all under the name of three letters, ZUN. Those games describe a story of a hidden eastern "wonderland" called Gensokyo, and many incidents that happens in it. These games creates a whole new generation in the history of Doujin games, and a huge amount of fanbase was established after 2000, when the Windows games comes out.
The name "Touhou" means "Eastern" in Japanese, and that's exactly what Gensokyo is. A pure eastern wonderland, well hidden from the invasion of greedy capitalism, where Human and Youkai lives in harmony, where the legends come to life.
Fortunately, the tremendous amount of faith from the fanbase restored the power to the barrier. I don't really know if that means Yukari doesn't have to sleep for 12 hours to keep up the barrier, but there are one thing for sure, the dream will carry on, the legend will keep going, and the wonderland will flourish, for centuries and millennia.
