The Tale of Genji is a sprawling story of love, lust, grief, and ambition a thousand years ago. Orbiting around the shining prince Genji, a handsome playboy and charismatic politician, the tale also introduces hundreds of others, from elegant retired empresses to diplomatic serving-women. The heart of the book is the middle third of its fifty-four chapters. Genji's star rises, and very different women gather within the four quarters of Genji’s palace. The action shifts to maneuvering his children and foster children into advantageous positions. How can they elevate Genji's foster daughter to the throne and help her thrive there? Who should raise Genji's young daughter to best prepare her to become empress eventually?

Ghosts over the Water: Changing the Tides of Japan's Future is an immersive strategy game built upon a familiar and accessible visual novel framework. The game incorporates over 130,000 words of meticulously researched text and lasts for around 10 hours. It is the summer of 1853; a group of unexpected visitors have arrived on Japanese shores. A powerful fleet of ships commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry has stormed into Edo Bay, causing panic and threatening the possibility of violence. Over two hundred years have passed since Japan’s borders were closed, limiting trade to Chinese and Dutch merchants. Now an American fleet is at the country’s shores demanding trade and concessions.

Traveling from Tokyo to Yokohama Sugoroku Style. Literally translated as “double six,” a sugoroku is a die-based race game that at its most basic level resembles the game Snakes and Ladders. The sugoroku, comprised of action-packed boxes that each contain an image and Japanese text, acts as our game board. Fast travel squares function as our ladder, allowing players to whizz up to Yokohama at a faster speed via new modes of modern transportation. Taking place at the beginning of the Meiji period (1868-1912), “Catalogue of the Trip to Yokohama in Sugoroku” is reflective of the historical transition between isolation and globalization. Acting as the players’ travel guide throughout Yokohama treaty port, this sugoroku provides a window into the 19th century boomtown and cosmopolitan space of globalized trade in Japan.

Japanese Online Self-Help Utility (JOSHU) is a set of innovative language tools developed by Dr Naoko Suito, who taught Japanese courses at the University of Texas at Austin for many years. JOSHU includes a range of tools for Japanese language instructors and for anyone interested in learning Japanese. In Japanese, JOSHU literally means "assistant", or "tutor", which is what this website attempts to do for anyone interested in learning the Japanese language.

To censor or not to censor, that is the question — and the game. When faced with morally or politically sensitive materials that come across your desk, what do you do? This project asks you to take the historical experience of a censor in Japan and to translate it into a video game or other interactive digital resource that will that bring these censored texts and censors to life. Imagine you are a government censor working for the Japanese government in imperial Japan. Or an official in the CCD (Civil Censorship Detachment) at General Headquarters working under General Douglas MacArthur in the late 1940s during the Allied Occupation of Japan; an employee at Eirin, the self-regulatory agency for film ratings and regulation, after its establishment in 1949; or an in-house “editor” working for a literary or photography journal in the postwar period.

Welcome to Sumoroku–the sumo-themed sugoroku! Sugoroku is a type of Japanese board game with a very simple premise: reach the end. While playing sugoroku may be a breeze, life as a rikishi fighting his way to the top is anything but. In this game, you will follow our rikishi’s arduous journey from humble beginnings to the very pinnacle of professional sumo. You will be given a glimpse into the life and tradition surrounding sumo through various minigames, diary entries, and informational excerpts. So, rise and shine, new recruit! It’s time to don your mawashi and show us all what you’re made of.

JapanLab’s first game was developed in 2020 as part of a pilot program. The game, Ako: A Tale of Loyalty, was built by four undergraduate History majors with no specialized games design background. They were asked to develop a fully functional video game built around a specific historical topic and using only freely available platforms. The game they produced draws from the latest scholarship while incorporating a series of teaching points, allowing it to be deployed in high-school or college level classrooms. Ako: A Tale of Loyalty places the player in Japan in 1701 in the role of a young samurai born into a low-ranking family that is struggling to survive. It is built around a famous episode in Japanese history known as Chushingura, the 47 ronin or the Akō incident.

How do we make sense of a violent, fragmented period? Many histories treat the Warring States era of Japanese history as a formless and chaotic swirl of violence, almost a natural disaster, that swept away older structures in medieval Japan to make way for a new early modernity. Others make it the stage upon which the heroes of countless novels, dramas, or video games battled their way to power. Conflict has a logic to it that we can map and understand.

In the 1880s, Yokohama was one of the fastest-growing cities in Japan, a showcase of Meiji modernization and gateway to an international market. Much of the infrastructure of the treaty port period has since been lost to earthquakes and postwar urban development. In this project, we used cutting-edge techniques in virtual heritage to recapture the environment of two areas of old Yokohama, Noge Hill and Bentendо̄ri.

Civil war divided Japan for most of the fourteenth century, a conflict that ultimately resulted in the rise of regional lords, led by shoguns who controlled less territory but held it in a far more autocratic grip. Yet at the start of the century, ambitious people dreamed of very different outcomes. In Kyoto, a branch of the imperial family sought to wrench power back from those ruled in their name, and nobles planned to rule as their ministers. In Kamakura, a family of warrior-administrators attempted to consolidate their power to summon warriors to law courts and to battle. North of them, a well-connected warrior lord thought he was the culmination of his grandfather’s prayer that his family should seize the realm.

Between 1873-1945, Japan built a massive Pacific Empire. Its first colonies, Taiwan and Korea, were internationally recognized, like British control in India and French in Vietnam. Later conquests, such as the puppet regimes in Manchuria and mainland China, were rejected by the US and UK, leading to WWII in the Pacific. How did the Japanese people understand this empire, its growth, and its collapse? This project will explore public attitudes through a neglected source: board games. The Japanese empire was a popular theme for sugoroku, a game similar to “Snakes and Ladders.”

How would you like to write your name in the annals of history alongside some of the world’s most outstanding athletes? Come join the select few who will pioneer the creation of The Virtual Museum of Japanese Sports—the only museum of its kind in the world! The wings of the museum will be filled with detailed descriptions of many Japanese sports, both native and imported, and their greatest practitioners through time. You will create the initial framework upon which this project will continually expand.

Are you interested in true crime? Do you love solving mysteries? Do you want to turn a genuine legal mystery into an exciting video game? For Spring 2024, we’re recruiting 5 interns to work on an innovative video game focused on the Amboina incident, a famous and controversial conspiracy case that took place 400 years ago but which remains unsolved today. For centuries now scholars have dissected the Amboina case. It’s been the subject of countless pamphlets, books and other publications. But no-one has turned it into an exciting video game that places players at the center of a unsolved mystery. This is where you come in.

Succession struggles are dramatic gold, from classic theater to modern TV. But they're also enlightening, revealing our assumptions about what makes a family--what makes a marriage, or a parent? What can be inherited or earned by personal effort? How much say do the beloved dead get after they are gone, and how do we the living prove what they wanted? The team will decide, together, how best to take centuries-old legal documents and bring to life the world they depict with a visual novel, courtroom drama, puzzle solver, or another interactive story. Our goal is to help teachers of world history put medieval Japan onto their syllabi and guide interested players through the complexities of premodern Japan's legal principles to our shared humanity.