#pc98 touhou

Getting character background in the first four Touhou games is a little bit like drawing blood from a stone, but in the case of Meira, it’s not unreasonable to infer that she’s a former samurai/from a former samurai family that, following the dissolution of the samurai class, was unable to transition into the new bourgeois middle class and turned to banditry

(the chronology on that is about 100 years off the mark, but that’s not really too difficult to explain around, especially for Touhou)

One interesting thing about ex-samurai when they had recently lost that status (according to an old academic paper I read recently) is that a proportionately large number of them became Protestant Christians. Socio-psychologically, one of the theories about that is that they were wounded, pride-wise, by the loss of their “specialness” and “superiority” over the common man and resentful of the government that stripped them off their status - and so being one of God’s chosen few and joining a minority religion that was vocally critical of the government was naturally appealing to them despite significant peer pressure against from the majority of samurai who did not convert.  Actually, you can see this way of thinking in action in Meira’s character - her goal of usurping Reimu’s power and position as the Hakurei (without really understanding what it is or entails).

One interesting thing about Protestant samurai is that many of them applied the same sort of strictness and rigidity that they had been taught to demonstrate as samurai to religious rules. These ‘Meiji fundamentalists’ were so thoroughly unforgiving and ascetic that they drove just about the entire rest of Japan even further away from Christianity.

So what I’m getting at is

Meira: The Bible says Adam and Eve, not Madame and Eve!

Reimu, already taking her clothes off, completely undeterred if not a little confused: Who said what now?