Why you shouldn’t let your prop guy pick any random Japanese names he wants.

The Imperial Japanese Army occupied areas of China in the period leading up to World War II, and as such there’s an entire genre of Chinese-language movies and TV series about the period. As you might expect, the conquerors are often depicted as covetous and heartless, but one such program inadvertently implies that the Japanese soldiers were also sexy.

Japanese Twitter user and Taiwan resident @jubeifang recently tweeted a series of screenshots from a Chinese-produced period drama set during either the occupation or directly before it, in which a character stumbles across a secret Imperial Army document.

The on-screen English subtitles read “Also leaked large Japanese Empire hidden” and “Information personnel in North China,” and even with the rough translation it’s clear that the booklet is supposed to be a list of Japanese agents operating in China. Inside the booklet, the camera pans over a series of names such as Sho Nishino, Asami Ogawa, Kasumi Risa, and Kasumi Kaho. Those are all indeed real Japanese people, but there’s no official record of any of them ever having performed any operations for the Japanese military. A little digging does turn up confirmations, however, that they were vital personnel in projects including:

Captivating Working Woman Fucked While Completely Clothed
Tempting Sister in Law~Under One Roof with My Older Brother’s Obscene Wife
Quick-Breaking Condom
Retirement! And Then Removal of Restriction! Final Anal Fuck Debut 11th Anniversary! Special Guests Also Enter the Arena!! There’s Gulping! There’s Bukkake! There’s Anal Sex!

And no, the Imperial Japanese Army didn’t give its plans sexually explicit code names. Whichever prop designer was in charge of making the book used in the Chinese TV drama decided to cram it full of names of modern Japanese porn stars, none of whom were alive at the time the TV show is set in.

▼ Also listed in the book is “Purukawa,” the name of a song performed by Ebisu Muscats, an idol singer group made up of adult video actresses and swimsuit models.

While this isn’t the first time for Japanese adult video stars to suddenly show up in books seen elsewhere in Asia, previously incidents involved innocuous, non-sexual photos of porn stars that were ostensibly used without knowing who the pictures were of. But this time around it’s hard to think this was an innocent mistake, given that the list is one adult actress after another.

It’s also worth pointing out that though the book’s cover reads pasuwado no hon, literally “book of passwords,” the use of katakana and hiragana phonetic script isn’t something that the Imperial Japanese Army would have done, as the all-kanji angosho was the preferred term, with a much more official, nationalistic nuance to it.

Getting back to the book’s contents, aside from being sort of distracting for anyone who knows who those women are (as with many forms of entertainment media in the modern age, pornography can now attract fans far beyond its country of origin), it’s also got to be sort of embarrassing for the prop designer, since he just essentially leaked his personal porn recommendations.

Source: Jin
Featured image: Twitter/@jubeifang