Script (with Gentleman of the Han Notes)

Context: The feedback from the Gentlemen of the Han (the subbing group whose footage they graciously lended to me) was very helpful, and I found that perhaps it might be good to show some of the feedback, since they do have quite a bit of interesting information.

Note: This is the script I sent them, so it won’t encompass everything (as videos are won’t to change). This is mainly so folks can find the feedback they left helpful. Things will have changed over time.

Remember that time I said I was going to do short videos with basic observations? Well…

This is a stray note, videos that are brief ruminations that don’t have particularly strong guiding arguments, but nevertheless small snippets that I thought people might find fun, or interesting.

Preface

This video isn’t about Paripi Koumei. But, I’m going to explain why it kinda is.

Let’s start with an awkward segue: I’m particularly bad at anime music quiz. Many people who know me know that I absolutely refuse to play the game. And there’s a reason for it; I…uh, I don’t watch anime OPs.

Now this isn’t necessarily because I have something against them, I just tend to skip them.

But I didn’t skip Paripi Koumei, or Ya Boy Kongming.

Paripi Koumei is a PA Works Adaptation, their first according to people who know more about PA Works than I do, of a manga where ancient Chinese strategist Zhuge Liang (courtesy name Kongming) after his death gets reincarnated into modern day Shibuya. After being ensorcelled - ensorcelled? - enchanted by the voice of struggling artist Tsukimi Eiko he decides he’s going to make her famous.

The show straddles between two general threads; the first is Kongming’s real concerns about showing up more than a thousand years in the future, having left his friends behind, and the second concerns the somewhat convoluted strategems he employs to help Eiko succeed.

It can feel, at a glance, like another kooky fun entry in the deluge of seasonal anime, and perhaps, on a more practical level, it is. I mean, it’s not surprising we have something like this, that with the explosion of reincarnation and tensei stories pushed by an isekai wave it makes a lot of sense that something like Paripi Koumei would get the treatment. And the thing is, the subject isn’t obscure; Kongming and Three Kingdoms, to put it simply, very big in Japan. So it just makes a lot of sense that a story like this would happen now.

And the premise makes a lot of sense on a general basis; I mean, a strategist in an environment as brutal as the music industry makes a lot of sense, given that business has this fascination with war and tactics; think about anecdotes of business people having copies of The Art of War.

But let’s talk about something a bit more abstract, which brings us to the thesis: Paripi Koumei, perhaps as a result of its subject matter, is deeply interlocked with questions of national culture, that it acts like a moment in time which speaks and engages with questions of cultural authenticity.

And it begins with that OP.

It’s catchy and rambunctious, and I love the imagery at play here, the collision of cultures and subcultures, and…apparently Bruno Mars? 

So yeah it concerns an ancient Chinese figure in Tokyo but the imagery is neither fixated on just Chinese or Japanese, I mean hell, its song, quite literally, is a Japanese cover of a Hungarian earworm. Now this isn’t unique, anime sometimes is quite upfront about its influences; I mean, I’ve already talked about Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro and part of Tokyo’s Hip Hop culture, but you can also see more direct influences: the use of the Chinese (though it maybe Korean) violin, the erhu, in Akatsuki on Yona.

But I want to stress, for Paripi Koumei, Ya Boy Kongming, that there’s images drawing upon a wide variety of cultures and places. 

Now that brings up a question…why not just talk about Tsukimi Eiko and her struggles in the music industry? What does Kongming add to the manga, and subsequently, the anime?

Well first of all, he’s cool, he’s got a huge-ass fan, and also really good at footy.

Okay, okay, more seriously, let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Part 1: Romance of the Three Kingdoms

This is a big topic and has been covered elsewhere in much more detail and much better, so I’m going to hit on the basics to get everyone on the same level. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is also known as sanguo yanyi, historical drama, was written during the Ming Dynasty by Luo Guanzhong. It was based off a historical text known as sanguozhi, or the Records of the Three Kingdoms, by the historian, Chen Shou, during the Jin dynasty. 

Now you might notice, “wait a minute, that’s a thousand year difference,” but I want to stress that the transition from Records to Romance wasn’t necessarily something that happened smoothly - multiple variations and revisions of the Records and the motivations of the people in them - existed, and many of these revisions are based on the political motivations of the people making them. Luo Guanzhong was not the first person to adapt the Records; in fact, the historical data and commentary feature pack Chen Shou and Pei Songzhi established a bedrock for revisions during the Song, with debate, for example, between scholars over political legitimacy, arguing for Wei or Su Shi with a lot more admiration for Shu, especially the virtues demonstrated by Kongming. And Anne McLaren makes a really important note, which is that a lot of this is built off the beliefs of its revisers as to how to grapple with what defines the legitimacy of statehood. The increasing protagonist-isation of Liu Bei in Romance of the Three Kingdoms somewhat serves that political purpose. And by extension, that puts more emphasis on Kongming, Liu Bei’s Prime Minister.

What I want to stress is that Romance of the Three Kingdoms has, historically, and remains, a very deeply political text. It is inter-implicated with questions of who fights, who sacrifices, who commands, and what gives them the right. Keep that in mind.

Okay, so with that out of the way, let’s talk about the other ground rules.

I’m mainly using the massive Three Kingdoms manga from Yokoyama Mitsuteru, the mangaka of Giant Robo and Tetsujin 28-Go, arguably because it’s an incredibly influential work on its own and draws heavily from Japan’s most influential variant of the Romance, but more practically, showing just walls of text is kinda boring.

For footage, I will also be using the 1994 TV version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms - which is considered the superior version in China - for footage, which is currently the project of the Gentlemen of the Han, who are the wonderful people who helped me out with this script. I do strongly recommend checking out their work and the show if you’re at all interested in this subject matter.

So let’s talk a little bit about what it’s about.

The Romance of the Three Kingdom is a 120 chapter novel which concerns the pursuits of a huge number of picaresque heroes after suppressing the peasant revolts known as the Yellow Turban or Scarves Rebellion. The narrative spans from the fall of the Han to the establishment of a new dynasty, the Jin, where throughout the period, its characters ultimately seek equal parts power and survival in the wake of one of the deadliest periods in human history. And I mean that literally; the Three Kingdoms period, while the exact numbers, as far as I can understand are difficult to grasp, still clocks up a rough fatality count that wouldn’t really be matched until the 20th century.

If you’re interested in more specific comings and goings of the show, Cool History Bros has a whole channel which talks about some of the specificities of the Three Kingdoms period, so I feel like it’d be better just to recommend that channel rather than try and reinvent the wheel. I’ll post some videos which summarise that if you want to get a grasp of some of the details. 

But there’s something about the Romance, which is that it’s deeply influential in East Asian literature. A lot of its characters have been sanctified to the extent where you’d have Three Kingdoms characters like Guan Yu have multiple giant statues devoted to him.

But it doesn’t even have to be literal; once you’re familiar with the general events of the story, you can see its influence even in non-literal analogues. Fire Emblem: Three Houses, comes to mind; even by the admission of its developers, the game wasn’t meant to be a Three Kingdoms analogue, but there’s a lot of similarities - the Church of Seiros, on the brink of change, is fundamentally concerned with losing the support of its disparate nobles, and it is no surprise that to wage a catacylsmic war, three major powers emerge with different aims and start coalescing. And it’s fascinating that regardless of which ending you choose, the solution is one where the continent - the realm - is united.

The Empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.

But we don’t even need to go into metaphors or analogues. Romance, especially in Japan, is a huge subject. Now a friend of mine was working on a similar topic when I said I would be working on this, so I thought it might be better just for him to give an overview of exactly how deep this rabbit hole goes:

<FKA GHOST SECTION>

This guy here is particularly important. Yoshikawa Eiji’s version of the Romance plays a crucial role in terms of how its understood, primarily because Eiji’s version, which would become the de facto Japanese variant, had a few things going for it.

One, Yoshikawa Eiji’s Sangokushi weren’t initially distributed as novels, but as serialized chapters in newspapers from 1939 to 1943. So even from the beginning, Three Kingdoms material is very reflective of something that happens quite often, what we may call a transcultural flow, where material and data moves through spaces and people regionally, but it is constantly being negotiated locally. This is even more impressive considering that this is, effectively, a monstrously popular piece of Chinese literature being rewritten in Japanese newspapers during the height of the Sino-Japanese war.

The second - is that word. See, Yoshikawa’s Sangokushi wasn’t just one of the many translations of the Romance; it was a rewriting.

And this brings up questions and discussions of authenticity, because we aren’t running into a Tezuka Metropolis scenario, where the author gets a vague idea of the original source material off a poster - no, Yoshikawa himself mentioned how when he was young, he’d grow up reading Kubo Tenzui’s translation:

“....At the time of this writing, when I was a small boy, I was transfixed reading Kubo Tenzui’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms till 2 am, 3am by the lamp, until my father would pester me to get to bed.” (Sangokushi 1)

In other words, though Yoshikawa played a deeply important role in the explosion of modern-day Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he himself was influenced by a lineage of others before him. And it’s those influences that would, arguably, shape Yoshikawa’s rewritings.

And these rewritings were influential beyond Japan. See, Sangokushi and its plot beats would move beyond just its Japanese audience; with the explosion of Dynasty Warriors, the Koei strategy games, and the numerous manga and anime adaptations, the Yoshikawa-based Japanese offerings would go on to influence new adaptations back home.

For example, one of the big manga outside of Japan, is Chen Mou’s The Ravages of Time, where the author himself notes that he took a significant amount of influence from the Japanese rewritings, specifically the historical manga and games, as well as Akira Kurosawa films. 

So we’re back at authenticity and transcultural flow, because these rewritings nevertheless play a role in terms of how new readers and consumers jump into the world of the Three Kingdoms.

So if they’re so damn important, what are the rewritings?

Part 2: The Rewritings

There are a few on-the-ground changes; Romance is relatively scant on the motivation and characterisations of a lot of its female characters - it very heavily centers around its men, but Yoshikawa’s Sangokushi somewhat addresses that: Liu Bei’s mother and Diao Chan are two whose characterisations are fleshed out.

And the stories start differently: the original epic is a summary of the history of Imperial China up until the Han:

Here Begins our tale. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has even been. In the closing years of the Zhou Dynasty, seven kingdoms warred among themselves until the kingdom of Qin prevailed and absorbed the other six. But Qin soon fell, and on its ruins two opposing kingdoms, Chu and Han, fought for mastery until the kingdom of Han prevailed and absorbed its rival, as Qin had done before. The Han court’s rise to power began when the Supreme Ancestor slew a white serpent, inspiring an uprising that ended with Hans’ ruling a unified empire.

And it sorta just goes on from there.

In comparison, the Yoshikawa rewriting starts from one of its protagonists, Liu Bei:

Around 1780 Years before the Present Day,

There was a traveler. Affixed to his lower waist was a simple sword. He had voluminous eyebrows, deep red lips, rich cheeks, a stoic intellectual stare, and always a thoughtful smile. He did not give off the feeling of a lowborn man. He was around 24, 25 years old.

He sat on the grass, alone, his hands cupping his knees. Time flowed with the waters. A cool gentle breeze stroked his sideburns. It was the air of Autumn.

It is, effectively, a more modern and accessible rendition of a classical tale.

And this isn’t an accident. Remember I mentioned that Yoshikawa grew up on Tenzui’s translation of the Romance…but Tenzui’s translations didn’t do well as Yoshikawa’s. So, what happened?

During the Meiji period, there was a deep division on spoken versus written Japanese. At the time, written Japanese had a multitude of styles, such as…listed here…and one of the battlefields of Japanese modernization was its language. See, at the time, written Japanese was often also written with written Chinese, so it was very different from spoken Japanese. Some folks wanted to compose written Japanese more similarly to spoken Japanese. This was called the “unity of spoken and written language,” or the genbun itchi movement, and while they ran into some initial resistance, by the time of the Taisho period, they eventually won out, so the more colloquial form of contemporary Japanese that we’re more familiar with today, was ultimately the victory of this Meiji movement.

In fact, Patrick Heinrich makes a really interesting note, which is that “The last residues of the old written style in public life were removed in 1946 when the new constitution was drawn up in the colloquial spoken style.”

This is an argument presented by Ou Choutsune...woah, that’s a cool name…who makes the observation that retellings became increasingly popular as more colloquial forms of writing became the norm. Yoshikawa’s offering, in this sense, can be seen as one of the first retellings (I think it’s the first but I’m going to say one of the first because I’m a coward and I’m hedging the bets of my argument) of Romance of the Three Kingdoms not only with this style in mind, but also with this approach to the written language firmly entrenched.

So why Yoshikawa? Well, it’s probably because he knew how to rewrite the stories in the way at the right place at the right time.

And some of these rewritings affected the way the characters are presented. Cao Cao, for instance, who’s one of the major players and….I guess you can kinda say the antagonist?...is presented in the original Ming-Jiajing editions as a rather Machiavellian antihero, but he starts to become a bit more of an outright antagonist in the later, and more widely well-known Mao Zonggang editions. In the Japanese adaptations he’s depicted with a notably more pragmatic image. In fact, that’s exactly at the heart of what folks like Daisaku Ikeda and Jin Yong stress::

“Idealism and Pragmatism. Ideals that are not firmly based on reality are merely fantasy. Cold, hard reality without ideals is too odious. But above all, the result is that people are forced to make an enormous sacrifice.”

This is important because you can see how it starts to shift. Yoshikawa’s rendition concerns the stories of individuals who stand for something, whether it’s Idealism or Pragmatism, and how they rise and fall become somewhat emblematic of the state of being.

Now this isn’t necessarily unique to the Japanese rewriting; in fact, one of the things McLaren mentions is that Liu Bei underwent attempted reframings during the Song dynasty because he kinda acted as a sort of avatar for political legitimacy.

People as stand-ins for something broader, greater, is a recurring theme in the Romance. Yoshikawa’s changes, though they may be technical, are pretty thematically close, they’re just more grounded for a modern audience. And the grounding is quite deliberate - Yoshikawa, at the end of the eighth and last novel, mentions how in an attempt to ground much of the story past its mysticism, also ended up writing a somewhat “nationalist drama.”

But there was another big one, and it’s how it ends. See the original Romance spans, quite literally, from the fall of one dynasty to another. But Yoshikawa’s version ends with - spoilers - the death of Kongming at Wuzhang. This is not the end of the original Romance: the Chinese version continues on. This is the end of the Japanese version. And this particular ending is quite important because Yoshikawa’s reach influences a lot of how Japanese takes on the Three Kingdoms is understood.

It’s why many of the Dynasty Warrior games ended at Wuzhang: that’s where Kongming dies, that’s where the Yoshikawa stories end. That’s where Paripi Koumei began. 

In fact, this mentality was so ubiquitous, that when we get back to question of authenticity, when Tatsuma Shousuke translated Romance of the Three Kingdoms into Japanese, he got responses from readers criticising it and asking why this was “so different from the original,” the original being Yoshikawa’s rewrite. 

Kongming was so popular that in the 60s people were literally naming their kids after the guy, and at first I thought people were joking, but when I went to buy the first volume someone mentioned that he named his son after him, so…I guess it’s still happening.

Kongming is a thematic bookend, he represents the end of something…so what was it? And why is that important?

Part 3: Why Zhuge Liang?

Now I want to clarify something: Kongming wasn’t the only one to get the treatment - Cao Cao, when he was rewritten for a Japanese audience, became more of a pragmatist rather than an outright villain. And his popularity also reflected that. And some elements of Kongming’s character which I’ll go on to mention, such as his loyalty, isn’t necessarily unique to him; Guan Yu’s enduring popularity in China, for instance, is primarily because of how ride-or-die the guy is.

Instead, Kongming’s massive popularity in Japan is primarily because he’s…kinda a perfect storm.

Let me explain, it’s a trip.

In Romance, Kongming doesn’t show up at the beginning, but he’s rather recommended, a polymathic genius, capable in administration and statesmanship, adept in both military and civil engineering. He was a force of nature. And he’s quite important in terms of ultimately what he becomes; the inheritor of Liu Bei’s vision.

See, despite its title, Romance of the Three Kingdoms doesn’t start off with Three Kingdoms; the story takes a little bit before it actually gets to the literal Three Kingdoms part, which is mainly kickstarted when Cao Cao’s son, Cao Pi, declares himself Emperor.

Xu Shu, who was employed by Liu Bei, essentially put in a good word for his friend, who happened to be Zhuge Liang, or Kongming, or Koumei. They’re the same guy.

So Liu Bei goes to Kongming, but it takes him a while to convince the hermit scholar to join him. This is the famous three visits, mainly because, like a LinkedIn recruiter, Liu Bei makes the pitch three separate times before Kongming reads the offer. Kongming outlines the Longzhong Plan, which essentially dictates what Liu Bei must do if he is to resist the Cao Pi, whom Liu Bei considers illegitimate.

Kongming is thus very important as a character specifically because of what he represents: he’s the piece of the puzzle that accelerates the establishment of Shu-Han, the beginning of the second arc of the epic, and emblematizes the ideology of the meritocracy. Kongming is the one who gives Liu Bei the ideological ammunition he needs to realise his vision, and is arguably the most influential character to really establish the Three Kingdoms - plural - part of the Three Kingdoms narrative. But it’s also really important because Kongming is an outsider.

See, a recurring theme throughout the Three Kingdoms is the destruction of lineage, which has been allowed to happen because of the loss of the Mandate of Heaven, the quasi-animistic force from above in which the Emperors and their legitimacy to rule are drawn from. All three figureheads of the Three Kingdoms, though they are deeply tied to the Han court in some ways, aren’t exactly high up in the Han Court at the collapse of the dynasty. The story is, in effect, partly discussing the rise of characters with relatively humble origins. Relatively being the key word, they still have power, to varying degrees.

But Kongming becomes the logical conclusion of that idea. See characters like Cao Cao and Liu Bei and Sun Ce are people who rise to the occasion because of the opportunity afforded them in the chaos, but they are still relatively connected to political court. I mean, Liu Bei has ties to the Emperor, Cao Cao’s grandfather was a Eunuch in the court, and the Sun family arguably draws their lineage all the way back to Sun Tzu…y’know, the Art of War guy. But Kongming came from relatively humble origins, and it’s specifically through his intellect and his skill that he climbs to become the Prime Minister of one of the Three Kingdoms.

And it is because of his presence that Shu-Han survived as long as it did; he is, effectively, the one who fosters and defends the ideal of the Kingdom.

And that’s why he’s so popular in Japan. 

Most people generally attribute - correctly - that Kongming’s popularity hugely exploded and maintained its dominance because of Yoshikawa Eiji’s decision to end the story at his death. His death is also the death of Shu-Han, and “end of the dream.” In the original Chinese, it gets really dark after dark after Kongming’s death, so it makes sense that he’s the last of a noble era of idealists.

But let’s throw a wrench into that.

Midori Hakozaki makes a really interesting observation: while many Japanese drew inspirations from and comparisons to the Three Kingdoms, she notes that Kongming exploded in popularity during the Meiji period, and out of all of the Three Kingdoms characters, he was the most popular character to write about, and he doesn’t even just show up in his biographies; 

here he is referenced in the Hanahato, one the earliest of modern Japanese elementary textbooks and here he is as a topic in a cram book for junior high and high school admissions.

Now, let’s be clear: Kongming’s reverence in Japan isn’t particularly unique to modern Japan: a highly respect (though not commercially successful) bunraku play was the 1724 play Zhuge Liang’s Military Talk on the Three Kingdoms by Takeda Izumo.

So why is that the case? It’s because he’s the inheritor of the dream. After Liu Bei’s death, Kongming attempts to maintain Liu Bei’s vision, that he was, even by Yoshikawa Eiji’s admission, a loyal individual. 

This is why the Yoshikawa story ends with his death: the first episode of Paripi Koumei isn’t just a funny play on the tensei trope, it’s actually quite close in subject matter to the Yoshikawa version. See, in the original Romance, the story continues. But both Yoshikawa and Yokoyama, while they have somewhat different end points, nevertheless see the death of Kongming as the end of the Three Kingdoms.

He was, in effect, the perfect subject for this matter: a steadfastly loyal individual, someone of immense talent and ability who doesn’t rise to his own egotistical glory, but someone who is willing to fight for a dream, especially someone else’s dream. And while Eiko’s dream is to be a singer, not a…fucking emperor, it’s still a dream, her dream, that he seeks to make come alive.

He is, in some ways, an artifice of the perfect modern Japanese subject, especially from the perspective of the state, someone who sacrifices their talents, ability, and ego, for the “ideal.” So it’s no surprise then that the formation of the modern Japanese also saw the explosion of attention on Kongming.

But…he’s not Japanese.

Kongming, in some senses, is a construct. Something or someone borrowed from afar and remade, something that straddles the line between “authentic” and “appropriated,”

What we have here are two moving parts, both of which are funnily enough expressed quite deeply in the show; on one hand, we have a very broad, macro sort of narrative, where it expresses something that’s been a mainstay of Japanese cultural production: to take something from abroad, blend and localize and re-express it as a part of its culture. And on a more intimate level, laser-focuses on fulfilling this character’s dream, this crucial aspect of Kongming’s character that has, rocketed his way to cultural stardom.

In a lot of ways it’s…very Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Part 3: Ramen

Midori Hakozaki makes a really fascinating comparison, which is that Three Kingdoms, and I’d say Kongming as well, can be understood kinda like Ramen…something I’ve never talked about.

Ramen didn’t come from Japan, it was originally Chinese, and then it blew up in Japan and it’s now one of the country’s national dishes.

Three Kingdoms is kinda like that; it began in China, but a Japanese version also blew up in Japan. But why did it blow up?

Part of it is the movement between cultures, as well as a process of consumption and reconfiguration. Three Kingdoms in Japan wasn’t just translated into Japanese, it was made Japanese. This isn’t the first time I’ve spoken about this process: I made a Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro video….a long time ago, where some Japanese hiphop reappropriated messages of black struggle as a sort of form of minzoku madness, but I think the subject of Paripi Koumei is much less fraught.

And I think, with that in mind, the anime OP…makes a lot of sense? The swirling of images that are, noticeably, notably, not Japanese, but at the same time it tells us, reminds us, that we’re watching a piece Japanese media. A Japanese cover of a Hungarian earworm. Frames rushing by like photo strips, but also like frames of an anime.  And I think it’s very appropriate that this happens for an anime, a medium that, ever since its inception, has grappled with these transcultural flows, whether it’s intentional or not.

They’re images that aren’t Japanese expressed through what we often think of as a quintessential Japanese medium that, for most of its history, has been deeply dependant and reflective of non-Japanese influences.

So perhaps, in a way, Kongming, and that large fan of his, seems extremely appropriate and relevant, making him the perfect example.

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Famously many in Japan drew comparisons to the Three Kingdoms with their own situations particularly in the Sengoku period, such as Takenaka Shigeharu of the Sengoku-period being called "the Zhuge Liang of the era"

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Technically even within history the lineage was asterisked with a "maybe". It is true however that Sun Family in regards to Sun Ce and Sun Quan, heavily draw from the legacy left by their father Sun Jian. The style of clan politicking would define the Sun Family would also become the status quo of the Southern lands for generations.

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To emphasize; In both history and folklore he has been depicted as a polymathic genius, capable in administration and statesmanship, military and even engineering and other matters.

This is why Zhuge Liang is synonymous with intelligence and virtue. Similar to how in the west the word "Einstein" is immediately associated with "smart person"

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Despite imagery attached to Zhuge Liang, he's technically not a Taoist

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Technically "reframings"; Popular narrative retellings of the Three Kingdoms during the Song Dynasty haven't survived intact. It is true however that, due to various sociopolitical factors such as rise of Northern Dynasties, common people's pre-existing preferences and biases, and Neo-Confucianism, saw the "legitimacy" (which translates to "protagonist"-status) gradually pivoting towards Liu Bei and Shu-Han

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In the very original renditions of Luo Guanzhong's RoTK that can be found, such as the Ming-Jiajing Edition, Cao Cao was also depicted as a sort of machiavellian antihero or antiheroic antagonist.
Later Mao Zonggang's revision, which is the version of ROTK most widely available and well-known today, removed some of the passages of the prior editions praising of Cao Cao, among others. However still keeping to some major parts of Cao Cao's complex personality

Many opera plays and even older, non-Luo Guanzhong written version of narrative retellings of Three Kingdoms however tend to have Cao Cao be more one-dimensional

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There is another (unfortunate) dimension to this, as Japan's imperial warmachine was on full-gear.

Since the fall of the Ming and rise of Qing Dynasty, Japan had considered China to be "corrupted by barbarians" and "lost its legitimacy" as a cultural center/national power, with some (including Emperor Meiji at one point) even claiming to be the "true inheritors of the Culture" (the so-called "Little China"-ideology).
While respect for its ancient history still remained, over time as Japan managed to successful modernize itself while China couldn't, Japan's views on China as it exists only lessened into xenophobic zeals while imperialist ambitions started to assert itself, leading to the Sino-Japanese wars.

This might be too much of a bummer to include in the script, but I'm including it just in case.

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During the Song Dynasty (960–1279), there existed a scholarly debate over the "legitimacy" of each of the Three Kingdoms among the the era's most prominent intellectuals, such as Ouyang Xiu in his commentary "原正统论" arguing for Wei, while Su Shi over time became more sympathetic and admiring of Shu, in particular the virtues of Zhuge Liang.

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Technically reframings, as popular narrative retellings of Three Kingdoms of the Song Dynasty haven't survived. However during the Song Dynasty due to various socio-political factors the question of "legitimacy" AKA. "protagonist"-status was gradually picoting towards Liu Bei and Shu-Han from top to bottom.