#or technically you could say his natsume era

[sad-emo-dip-dye]

No but imagine Dazai with a cane after this

[beantothemax]

so first of all we have to determine roughly when tgaa takes place, considering that we don’t get an EXACT year. technically speaking though, it should be yearS considering that the adventure of the great departure (1-1) takes place in the later months of one year, while the rest of the games take place in the earlier months of the next (1-2 might also take place in that first year?? I can’t remember). we know the game takes place at the turn of the century so we’re narrowing it down to the 1890s to the early 1900s I think. we know it’s the victorian era as queen victoria is still on the throne during the events of the game, so considering the fact that she died in 1901, we know for a fact it can’t be any later than that. I’d hazard to say the games take place in the period of 1899-1900. those are the years I’ve always used at least. another thing we can use as a base for this is the fact that the real soseki natsume arrived in england in october 1900, which would be much later than he’s said to have arrived in the games, but I never said these games were 100% true to life accurate.

ok so what’s happening in the world around this time? well the industrial revolution kicked off around 1750, which fueled the age of imperialism as western european powers competed with each other for literally everything but especially colonies to get more resources and raw materials for factories. the united states eventually joined in on all the imperialism as well. you could argue they started that almost immediately after the revolutionary war, but even more so in the mid 1800s and so on.

japan had a closed door policy for years (since 1639), in which they would not, for the most part, interact with any foreign power in any way. in 1853, matthew perry of the us navy essentially coerced japan into ending this policy (known as sakoku, or “a country in chains”) through sailing a whole squadron of steamships and sailing vessels into the tokyo harbor, thus opening up trade between the us and japan. then in 1868 the tokugawa shogunate, which had been reigning since 1603, was overthrown and thus began the meiji restoration, the time period in which tgaa takes place.

the meiji restoration involved a lot of selective borrowing, where japan would take concepts and ideas from other nations in the west and implement them, pushing towards industrialization. in 1854 (a few years before the restoration but bear with me), they signed the anglo-japanese treaty of friendship. they signed a treaty of alliance with england as well in 1902, but that’s out of my range here and also I wanna focus on the 1854 treaty especially because of a specific right it granted the english. english citizens were granted extraterritoriality in japan, meaning if they committed a crime in japan, they’d be transported to a british court elsewhere. sound familiar? in 1-1, they specifically mention a british consular court in shanghai I believe, which was part of england’s sphere of influence in china as an effect of the treaty of nanking ending the opium war in 1842.

another big thing with the selective borrowing, was that japan was bringing in all kinds of people from other places to teach about all kinds of things, and then sending students to other nations to learn about certain things and bringing them back to japan. hence the plot of the game, essentially, and also why an english professor and student might be in japan at the time. that’s also why soseki natsume was sent to england, where he reportedly had a miserable time and spent most of his time inside surrounded by books. so the games are pretty realistic in that regard pf-

now another character I wanna talk about a little bit is madam tusspells, who’s based on marie tussaud, or madam tussaud. madam tussaud founded a wax exhibition in england. she was french, and some of her first works were louis the sixteenth and marie antoinette, so if you remember that bit of the tusspells family sculpting people fresh from the guillotine then well. I think she actually went to jail for creating molds of people’s heads straight from the guillotine. I’m not sure though, so don’t quote me on that.

I think that’s it for the most part? most of what I could say about england during this time period is very straightforward, it’s primarily just industrialism and imperialism and everything that comes with that. this time period was considered the peak of the british empire after all, so…

as an additional fun fact for you, world war one started in 1914, meaning many of the characters in this game likely went to war! unless ww1 never happened in ace attorney’s wackass timeline, but bordering on reality here… yeah. I dunno I just think it’s kinda funny in retrospect. weird to think about.

but yeah! there’s me rambling about history and connecting it back to one of my favorite games (counting the chronicles as one) ever for however long. hope it was at least bearable, and if I got anything wrong then. sorry- I will say I was doing searches and reading wiki articles to fact check myself so it should be at least mostly accurate? I tried.

thank you for reading pf 

I didn’t know the stuff about natsume hating his time in england and mostly staying in his cramped room full of books was actually reflective of the real-life natsume’s time in england!! woah!!!!!

this was very fun to read thank you for the food calc :]