Bonus Translation Notes: On Chuunibyou

Hello, and thank you for reading the first volume of When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace! This is your translator, Tristan, here to bring you all the notes and insights into the translation of this ridiculous series that I can offer!

Supernatural Battles is a series that is very firmly rooted in the pop culture of its time. Almost a decade later, however, its references are, well...a little dated, to say the least, but they’re also a fascinating time capsule for the trends of the era! As such, I’ve decided to use this translator’s notes section to run through the many, many references and pop-culture shoutouts in each volume.

Before I start on that, though, I’d like to take a moment to discuss a concept that’s extremely important for this series: chuunibyou. The series does a good job defining the concept of chuunibyou—and believe me, it’s nowhere near done discussing it—but I feel like a little extra real-world context on the word is merited! Chuuni is complicated, as Chifuyu would put it.

Let’s start at the beginning, which allegedly dates back to January 1999, when the radio personality Ijuin Hikaru jokingly coined the term. It would seem that the way Ijuin used the word was pretty distinct from what it would eventually evolve into—from what I can gather, he used it to mean embarrassing behavior characteristic of that stage of childhood. The certain aesthetic flair that’s associated with the term these days was, for the most part, not present. Ijuin asked listeners to submit stories about their own chuuni moments and read them for a segment on his radio show that lasted for around three months before the bit got stale and he stopped doing it.

The term lapsed into obscurity for several years after that point, but eventually it resurfaced in the most predictable place possible: the internet. Specifically, it surfaced somewhere around the year 2005 on 2channel, an extremely popular image board that directly inspired the English-speaking internet’s 4chan. Many aspects of the modern usage of chuunibyou—the “evil eye” association, the general air of humorous self-deprecation that surrounds the term, the borderline delusional obsession with being somehow special—date back to this era of its usage.

This is also where the spelling of the word ‘chuunibyou’ that Supernatural Battles favors originated. While the word was originally written “中二病”—the first two characters meaning “second year of middle school” and the third meaning “sickness”—the 2channel/Supernatural Battles spelling swaps out the first character for 厨. This character can be pronounced the same way as 中, and it’s broadly used in derogatory internet slang. (厨 literally means “kitchen,” but its literal meaning is entirely unrelated.) The original spelling is still used in most contexts, and the fact that Supernatural Battles features the 2channel version is indicative of how internet subcultures had a heavy influence on its content.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before the term started slipping off the internet and into the real world, and it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to actually take it seriously. That somebody turned out to be a man named Saegami Hyoya, who published a book called the Chuunibyou User Manual in 2009, codifying the three types of chuuni as he perceived them.

Normally, this is the part where I’d describe those three types, but I actually don’t have to, since Tomoyo already did it for me back in Chapter 1! When she talks about “all the different types of chuunibyou,” the three examples that she gives are simplified descriptions of the three types that Saegami identified. I think it’s safe to say that the User Manual was used as reference material for this novel.

All right, I’ve been rambling on for long enough, and we have a lot of ground left to cover—let’s get started on those references! I’ll be organizing this section chronologically by chapter, and omitting references that get directly explained within the text itself.

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Chapter 1:

△ ...a hundred magical children will be dispatched from another world...

This is a reference to (and more or less a plot summary of) Zatch Bell, a popular battle manga by Raiku Makoto that ran from 2001 to 2007.

△ ...we’ll be inexplicably drawn together to take part in bizarre battles!

This is the first of many references to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, a classic battle manga by Hirohiko Araki that started in 1987 and is still running as of the writing of this section. The JoJo rabbithole is a deep one, but for the sake of this line specifically, all that you need to know is that the series features an elaborate set of supernatural powers called Stands wielded by individuals called Stand Users, and these individuals are drawn to each other by a mysterious and ill-defined force.

△ ...it’s like a combination of The World and Clock Up.

The World just so happens to be another JoJo reference: it’s a Stand that gives its user the ability to stop time. Clock Up, meanwhile, is a supernatural power from Kamen Rider Kabuto. Kamen Rider is a live-action superhero series: it is (in some ways) the sister series to Super Sentai, which is perhaps best known outside Japan for being re-edited and adapted into Power Rangers. To make a long story short, every Kamen Rider series is about people who wear special belts that allow them to transform into armored superheroes. In Kabuto, that transformation is accompanied by the Clock Up effect, which causes the transformed characters to move at outlandishly superhuman speeds, effectively causing time to stop for the rest of the world.

△ ...though Sayumi’s family name was spelled with totally different characters than the more well-known Takanashis out there.

While ‘the more well-known Takanashis’ could refer to any number of characters, I’m inclined to believe that this line was specifically in reference to Takanashi Rikka, a central character in the light novel series Love, Chuunibyou & Other Delusions. Considering how the first volume of that series came out almost exactly a year before volume one of Supernatural Battles and that the two series overlap substantially in terms of themes and subject matter, it’s easy to imagine that this was a subtle but deliberate shoutout. Note that the Takanashi phenomenon continues to this day, with the VTuber Takanashi Kiara being a contemporary example.

△ ...I’d say it’s a lot like how Shining Diamond’s power or Inoue Orihime’s Rejection of Events works.

Shining Diamond is a Stand from JoJo that (to put it simply) has the power to heal and repair objects and people by punching them really, really hard. Inoue Orihime, meanwhile, is a character from Bleach, a manga by Kubo Tite that ran in Shonen Jump from 2001 to 2016. Rejection of Events is an aspect of her power set that (again, to put it simply) allows her to undo events that have occurred.

△ ...issues of Jump from the golden age when Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk, Yu Yu Hakusho, JoJo Part 3, and Otokojuku were all running concurrently...

While most of these series have been localized and gained a western following, Sakigake! Otokojuku is an exception. The series was a comedic school battle manga by Miyashita Akira that ran from 1985 to 1991, and it was never released in English in any capacity.

△ ...the Used Bookstore of the Divine: God Off.

“God Off” is a play on “Book Off,” a franchise of secondhand book stores that’s extremely widespread in Japan. Other stores in the Off franchise include Home Off (for household appliances and clothing), Hobby Off (for, well, hobby stuff) and, most entertainingly from an English perspective, Hard Off (for hardware and electronics).

△ She asked you, not the leader of the Phantom Brigade.

In this line, Tomoyo is calling Andou out on the fact that he just directly quoted Chrollo Lucilfer, a character from Togashi Yoshihiro’s Hunter x Hunter.

△ People like you are always going on about how ‘L’Arc-en-Ciel’s the visual kei band, right?’ or ‘Nisioisin’s the light novel author, right?’

L’Arc-en-Ciel is a Japanese rock band that is, in fact, associated with the visual kei movement. Visual kei bands are largely characterized by their extremely distinct visual aesthetic—think goth meets glam rock, basically (though it’s really a lot more complicated than that). Nisio Isin, meanwhile, is the author of the ever-popular Monogatari series of light novels.

△ I bet you only bother with the surveys cause you read about them in Bakuman, you bandwagon jumper!

Bakuman was a Jump manga by Ohba Tsugumi and Obata Takeshi (the author/artist pair of Death Note fame) that ran from 2008 to 2012. The series was about the life and careers of a pair of aspiring manga creators. The reader surveys in question are included in every issue of Shonen Jump, and they’re used by the magazine’s editorial staff to assess the popularity of the various series that run in it.

△ ...there’ve been all sorts of Kamen Riders over the franchise’s history; some of the riders in Ryuki and Faiz weren’t exactly great people, for example.

The Kamen Rider franchise is notable for dealing with some pretty dark themes that Super Sentai shows are much less likely to touch on. It’s common for riders to get killed off, for instance, and in some cases, riders even commit murder. This is especially true of the Kamen Rider series that aired in the early 2000s, a category that both Ryuki and Faiz fall into.

Chapter 2:

△ As Shinomori Aoshi would put it, “I know your swordsmanship all too well—after all, it is my own.”

Shinomori Aoshi is a character from Watsuki Nobuhiro’s Rurouni Kenshin, a samurai battle manga set in the late 1800s. This particular quote was pulled from a chapter very late in the series’ run in which Shinomori defeats a mimic who replicates Shinomori’s strengths as a sword fighter, thus inadvertently also replicating his weaknesses as well.

△ The JoJo in Part Five got to be called GioGio instead just because it was set in Italy...

Each plot arc (or “part”) of JoJo stars a new main character, and every main character has a name that allows them to be referred to by the nickname JoJo. Part 5’s protagonist, Giorno Giovanna, slightly subverts that trend, but as Andou notes, it’s okay because he’s Italian.

△ Take the volleyball team ‘the Oriental Witches,’ or how Kazuhiro Sasaki was called ‘Daimajin’ by his fans.

The Oriental Witches was the nickname of Nichibo Kaizuka, an extremely successful women’s volleyball team that won two Olympic gold medals over the course of its existence. The nickname was given to them by the European media after they went on a particularly devastating winning streak during a tour in 1961.

Kazuhiro Sasaki, meanwhile, is a baseball player who played in both the Japanese league and the MLB. Daimajin was a series of Japanese kaiju films—think Godzilla, but a giant living statue instead of a lizard—and Sasaki earned the nickname thanks to his supposed resemblance to said living statue.

△ Like ‘the Comedy Craftsmen of the Heisei Era,’ or ‘the Wizards of Words,’ right?

“The Comedy Craftsmen of the Heisei Era” is almost certainly a play on the fan nickname given to Summers, an extremely famous manzai comedy duo. Their actual, real-world nickname would translate as “The Comedy Craftsmen of the East.”

Unfortunately, the origin of “the Wizards of Words” proved impossible to track down, largely due to the fact that a totally unrelated manzai duo received the fan nickname “the Wizards of Vegetable Peelers” in 2020. Any attempt to run a search for “the Wizards of Words” in the context of manzai pulls up the peeler people exclusively, and if there ever was a means to track down the duo this is referencing, it seems to be lost to time.

△ She watched a super long-running comedy show called Shoten on a weekly basis, and she actually cried when the M-1 Grand Prix comedy competition went off the air.

Shoten and the M-1 are both real comedy TV programs! The former has been airing continuously every Sunday since 1966, and the latter is an annual competition. While the M-1 did indeed go off the air in 2010, it actually went through a revival in 2015 and has been airing annually once again ever since.

△ But when the protagonist of that basketball comedy light novel I read the other day gave girls titles as presents, they were over the moon for it...

This one’s a reference to Ro-Kyu-Bu!, a light novel series by Aoyama Sagu that ran from 2009 to 2015. The plot centers around a high schooler who gets recruited to coach an elementary school girls’ basketball team. I highly recommend against looking it up in public.

△ Kiyomori of the Taira

Kiyomori is both a historical figure who played a major part in the Genpei War, a Japanese civil war that took place in the late 12th century, and also a major character in The Tale of the Heike, an epic retelling of said war that dates back to somewhere around the 14th century.

△ Her chuuni power level—it’s over nine thousaaand!

This line required less localization than you might imagine! When localizing Japanese internet memes, it’s common practice to swap in a close-to-equivalent meme that your readership is more likely to understand. In this case, however, the original line was not only also from Dragon Ball, it was even from the exact same scene in Dragon Ball, just two lines before the one we went with! By happy coincidence, the English and Japanese-speaking fanbases for the show both turned lines with similar meanings from that very same exchange into memes.

△ I can’t see the limit of her chuuni level! If I used Hakoware on her, how long would it take for her to go bankrupt?!

This is an almost 1:1 quote from chapter 266 of Hunter x Hunter. There is a lot—and I do mean a lot—of deep lore that’s required to understand what’s going on in the scene where the line is dropped, but the simplified version is that it’s delivered by a character named Knuckle Bine, who is astonished by how powerful a character named Menthuthuyoupi is (hence Tomoyo’s comeback). Hakoware is Knuckle’s supernatural power (Or “nen ability”), which is themed around predatory interest rates (hence the use of the word “bankrupt”).

Chapter 3:

△ ‘Here the great poet and heart-reader discerned one of the deepest and most mysterious traits of the human spirit,’ he said of one passage, and called the novel on the whole ‘the grandest and saddest book conceived by the genius of man.’

These are, in fact, real Dostoevsky quotes! They’re taken from A Writer’s Diary, a compilation of his various writings both fictional and non-fictional. This passage was far and away the hardest reference in the novel to track down, thanks in no small part to the fact that the two halves of this quote come from entirely different sections of the original work.

The story behind the passage still goes a little deeper than that, though! You might be wondering why Kiryuu would be familiar enough with Dostoevsky’s diary to directly quote two passages separated by hundreds of pages, and I can say with great confidence it’s not because he’s actually read A Writer’s Diary. After all, the quotes he references are lifted 1:1, word for word, from the Japanese Wikipedia page on Don Quixote!

That’s right: less than a page after Andou calls himself out on only having a Wikipedia-level understanding of the literature he loves to reference, Kiryuu directly quotes Wikipedia at him without batting an eyelash. Personally, I see this as an extremely meta but important characterization moment for both Andou and Kiryuu (which is unfortunately lost in translation by virtue of the English Wikipedia page for Don Quixote making no mention of Dostoevsky whatsoever).

△ Edison, who disputed the idea that one plus one must equal two.

This line probably stood out as strange to American readers, and there’s a very good reason why! It comes from an apocryphal account of Edison’s childhood, where allegedly he made the argument that in some cases 1 + 1 = 1 on the basis that when you stick two mud balls together you get a single, albeit larger, mud ball.

The funny thing about this story is that it appears to be entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. I’ve found absolutely no evidence of the incident ever being mentioned in any English sources, trustworthy or not; meanwhile, over the course of my research on the Japanese side of the internet, I actually found an article that noted the lack of English sources for the story, and said article speculates that it was made up wholesale by a Japanese person.

△ I’m talking, like, Kudou Shinichi- or Yagami Light-level incredible.

Kudou Shinichi is the protagonist of Aoyama Gosho’s Case Closed (sometimes referred to as Detective Conan), an incredibly popular manga that was adapted into an equally popular anime. Shinichi is a high school genius who works as a detective in spite of his age, even after he’s turned into a little kid through anime shenanigans. Yagami Light, meanwhile, is the protagonist of Death Note, and he is also portrayed as a genius in just about every field.

Chapter 4:

△ What was it...Kuroko’s Back Skin Mole?

This pun took a lot of work (on my editor’s part—it totally stumped me, honestly) to make work in English! The original story behind Hatoko’s wacky misunderstanding is that the main character of Kuroko’s Basketball is named, well, Kuroko, and that name is written with the exact same characters used to write “mole” in Japanese. She knew how the name of the manga was written, but she knew so little about the story itself that she didn’t know how it was actually read, so she said the word for “mole” instead.

△ Y’know the dragon in The NeverEnding Story?

This is the only pop-culture reference in volume one that had to be altered entirely for the sake of accessibility! The original text referenced the opening theme to Manga Nippon Mukashibanashi, a classic edutainment anime from the 1970s that primarily focused on retelling Japanese folktales. The opening features a dragon flying through the air with a little kid riding on its back.

The problem, and the reason why we decided to alter the reference, is that while this would be an accessible reference to a Japanese reader, it would be almost impossibly obscure for anyone living outside of Japan. To make matters worse, it’s very difficult to find the opening in question online unless you have a semi-functional grasp of searching the internet in Japanese.

Our options were to either add in a substantial quantity of explication or to come up with another piece of media more accessible to our readers that features an appropriate, similar image. As luck would have it, a very famous piece of media was available that featured an iconic image so appropriate, it fit right in without us having to alter the surrounding text at all!

Since the core of the joke revolved around Andou’s super cool dragon being ruined by a little kid on its back, and since the actual nature of the piece of media reference mattered much less than the image it conjured, we decided that in this one specific instance the more heavy-handed localization would be the better approach for the sake of communicating the original text’s intent.

△ This isn’t a dark dragon—it’s the main character of that one yakuza comic, Hakuryu!

Hakuryu is another manga that’s fairly well known in Japan, but has never been officially published in English. Written by Tennouji Dai and illustrated by Watanabe Michio, the story centers around Shirakawa Tatsuya, a crime lord who earns the nickname Hakuryu, or “White Dragon.” As Sayumi notes, the series regularly uses dragon imagery of the same sort that Andou describes in this chapter.

△ ...you’re drawing Hakuryu, the famous actor who’s done a bunch of yakuza movies!

This Hakuryu, on the other hand, is the stage name of a real person. His real name is Jun Jung-il, and he’s made a name for himself both for playing ruthless, hardened criminals in yakuza films and as a musician. He’s also done a certain amount of work in the anime industry, having portrayed Tonegawa Yukio in the anime adaptation of Kaiji and a thinly veiled version of himself named “White Ryu” in Zombieland Saga: Revenge.

△ ...a card that was first seen used by Dinosaur Ryuzaki, but was eventually claimed by Jonouchi...

Also known as Rex Raptor and Joey, if you’re familiar with the English dub of Yu-Gi-Oh.

△ Hey, you’re going for something like Hiei’s arm in YuYu, right?

In this case, Yuyu refers to Togashi Yoshihiro’s YuYu Hakusho, one of the manga referenced in the context of Jump’s golden age back in chapter one! Hiei was a character who was initially introduced as an antagonist, but he quickly became a fan-favorite character and eventually joined the main cast of the manga.

By modern standards, his character design is as chuuni as it gets, from the Evil Eye on his forehead to the dark dragon on his arm to the curse bindings that Tomoyo references later on in this chapter. He is, in short, an extremely influential character in manga history, and considering that one of his major powers—the Dragon of the Darkness Flame—involves him summoning black flames that dwell within his right arm, it’s fairly safe to say that he’s a personal favorite of Andou’s.

△ Think of it in Swords Aren’t Online terms...

Though the reference itself here isn’t even remotely obscure—it’s an obvious shoutout to Sword Art Online, a mega-popular light novel series by Reki Kawahara—it is notable in the sense that it’s the only title in the entirety of volume one that’s obviously, intentionally censored. The Japanese text actually renders it as “SA◯”, with ◯ being a character that’s very commonly used to censor the titles of pieces of media like this. In this case, of course, it’s so ineffectual it’s downright hysterical, so I’m inclined to suspect that they only censored it for humor’s sake.

△ Think about Anpanman. Every episode, Bacteriaman does something to mess up Anpanman’s head, but Uncle Jam bakes him a new one that he uses to save the day!

Anpanman is a long-running children’s cartoon that’s all but inescapable if you find yourself in Japan. Anpan is a sort of sweet bread roll stuffed with red bean paste, and Anpanman is a superhero whose head is made out of the stuff. Anpanman’s creator makes new heads for him on a regular basis, which is good, since he regularly lets people eat parts of himself.

△ And take Mito Komon...

Mito Komon was an exceptionally popular period drama that ran from 1969 to 2011—the longest running period drama in Japanese television history. Set in the 17th century, the show featured the serialized adventures of a fictionalized version of Tokugawa Mitsukuni, a powerful political leader of the era.

In the context of the show, Mitsukuni travels incognito under the name Mito Komon, roaming across Japan to fight crime with his two retainers, Kakunoshin and Sukesaburo. The stamp case that Andou references is a prop that more or less appears in every episode. Since the case can be clearly identified as belonging to Mitsukuni, the shtick is that he can flash it whenever he solves a crime to prove his identity and use his authority to dispense justice.

△ Why else would Uncle Jam mutter ‘Bring forth new life, Golden Wind!’ under his breath every time he’s kneading the bread for Anpanman’s new head?

Golden Wind is the Stand that GioGio, the protagonist of JoJo Part 5, uses. Its power gets used in so many creative and outlandish ways that it’s sort of hard to describe exactly how it works in a succinct and accurate fashion, but for the purpose of this reference, all that you need to know is that it can grant life to inanimate objects.

△ There’s no going back now...I don’t remember how to put these back on.

This isn’t just Andou being silly—it’s also a word for word quote from Yu Yu Hakusho.

△ Rin-pyo-toh-sha-kai-jin-retsu-zai-zen!

These are the kuji-in, a series of mudras (or hand seals) with religious significance in a variety of sects. They’re particularly associated with Shugendo, a religion known for its practitioners traveling into the mountains for ascetic training purposes.

As for why Andou’s doing mudras, Tomoyo’s comeback more or less spells it out: one of the practices that has incorporated the kuji-in over the centuries happens to be ninjutsu, and modern-day media has appropriated them as more or less ninja magic. They bear an unmistakable resemblance to the hand seals in Naruto, for instance.

△ Spiral staircase! Rhinoceros beetle! Desolation Row! Fig tart! Rhinoceros beetle! Via Dolorosa! Singularity! Giotto! Angel! Hydrangea! Rhinoceros beetle! Singularity! The secret emperor!

Yup, more JoJo! This is a reference to JoJo Part 6, specifically. I’ll refrain from going into too much detail on this one, since most English-speaking JoJo fans experience the story through the anime, and the adaptation of Part 6 has only just started airing as of the writing of these notes. Suffice it to say that the phrases play into a central mystery that the part revolves around!

△ A real palmtop dragon, as it were.

This is a very straightforward reference to Toradora, a light novel series by Takemiya Yuyuko. One of Toradora’s main characters, Aisaka Taiga, is nicknamed “the Palmtop Tiger” by her classmates.

△ When a child tells you that they want to be Ultraman or a Kamen Rider when they grow up...

We’ve gone over Kamen Rider fairly extensively already, but Ultraman deserves specific mention as well. The big factor that distinguishes it from Kamen Rider and Super Sentai shows is the fact that while Rangers and Kamen Riders remain generally human-sized, the Ultramen grow to massive sizes when they fight their enemies, most of which are giant monsters (or kaiju, to use the genre lingo).Picture a giant Power Ranger throwing down with Godzilla, and you’ll have more or less the right idea.

Chapter 5:

△ Not the president of the student council, not God, not even DIO!

DIO is, of course, a character from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Not just any character, though—he’s the most notorious villain in the series’ history. Not only does he play a starring role in both Parts One and Three, he’s also referenced constantly in most of the other parts as well.

Chapter 6:

△ I’ve imagined what Devil Fruit I’d eat, what sort of Zanpakuto I’d wield, what Stand I’d awaken to, and what Nen ability I’d possess.

These are, respectively, references to the supernatural power systems from One Piece, Bleach, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and Hunter x Hunter. Devil Fruits are magic fruits that give you superpowers (at the cost of your ability to swim), Zanpakuto are magic swords that give you superpowers when they’re powerful enough, Stands are manifestations of the Stand User’s spirit that give you extremely weird superpowers, and Nen abilities are techniques powered by an individual’s aura—simply put, they’re basically superpowers in and of themselves.

△ I can stop time and shout ‘WRYYYYYYYYYYYY!’ all I want...

This is yet another JoJo reference! It’s also another DIO reference, as it so happens. DIO is a vampire who frequently shouts “wryyyyyy,” particularly when he attacks people. This tends to happen whenever he uses his Stand, The World, to stop time.

△ Some random new character just NTR’d Dark and Dark, right before my eyes...

NTR is an abbreviation of the Japanese word “netorare,” which basically means, well, cuckoldry. It’s a term that’s very frequently used in a pornographic context—hence Tomoyo’s appalled reaction.

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And on that note, that’s all the references worth mentioning in volume one! Last but not least, I’ve translated the author’s and illustrator’s notes from the inside cover, which you’ll find below. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little feature, and I hope to see you again in the next book!

-Tristan Hill

Author: Kota Nozomi

Kota Nozomi’s Cringe Chronicles: Part 1

I was in the tennis club back when I was a student, and every time I bought a new racket, I always made a point of secretly giving it a name. Racket #1 was called Raven, #2 was Black Oak (since the pattern of its strings reminded me of the latticework you sometimes see made from black oak wood), and #3 was Khronolucifer (khrono being a pun on “chrono” and “kuro,” the Japanese word for black). Needless to say, every one of them was black.

Illustrator: 029 (Oniku)

Illustrator for The Devil is a Part Timer! (Published by ASCII Media Works) and Dragon Lies (Published by Shogakukan).

This hand of mine glows with an awesome power! Its burning grip tells me to defeat you! Take this—Shining Fingeeeeeer! (Brandishing my manuscript)

That should tell you all you need to know about what sort of person’s illustrating this series.