Takeshi Shudo's Blog Entries About the Incident

Dogasu's Backpack | Features | Pokémon Shock

Below is an English translation of How to Craft a Story: Takeshi Shudo, How Anyone Can Become a Screenplay Writer (シナリオえーだば創作術　だれでもできる脚本家　首藤剛志), a blog written by former Pocket Monsters series organizer and head writer Mr. Takeshi Shudo. The following are excerpts taken from Blog Post No. 164 "The Pokémon Incident: NHK's Own Incident Comes to Light," a blog entry related to the Pokémon Shock incident.

Notes about the translation below

I have two notes about the translations you're about to read.

One, the Japanese version of the blog is written the way a lot of Japanese blogs are written in that the author only types out (roughly) one sentence per one line. To a native English speaker like me this makes the blogs seem weird and choppy but that's just the way a lot of Japanese blogs are written, for some reason. For simplicity's sake I've replicated this one-sentence-per-line writing style in my English translation.

Two, the following translation is a truncated version of a much, much longer blog entry. Mr. Shudo is an absolute treasure trove of behind-the-scenes information you can't get anywhere else but his blogs are, as far as your average Pokémon fan is concerned, about 80% filler. The writer had a tendency to trail off into some very off-topic tangents in his blog and so what I've decided to do is to pick out the parts that actually discuss the Pokémon Shock incident and present that to you on the page below. I hope you will find this abridged presentation a bit easier to read that it would have been otherwise. If you're someone who would prefer to read an unabridged translation, however, I've also got you covered; you can check those out here.

Blog Post No. 164 "The Pokémon Incident: NHK's own incident comes to light"

Posted November 19th, 2008
Original Text (Japanese)	Unabridged Translation

Toward the end of this blog entry -- which is mostly talks about Japanese work culture and the history of Shogakukan -- he very briefly returns to talking about the Pokémon Shock incident:

Even if we say That Person isn't the one who made that magazine it was, as far as S-gakukan is concerned, a key part of Pokémon's rise in popularity.

And then the Pokémon Incident happened.

For S-gakukan, the "gaku" ("study") part of its name flew out the window with this incident.
S-gakukan is a huge publisher.

It wasn't one of those small publishers that wouldn't be all that affected by something like the Pokémon Incident.

But the company's image still took a hit.

Because no matter what, the company had the word "gaku" ("study") in its name.

"Well we are making those kinds of magazines…" or "I told you so…" or "All the good will we worked so hard to build up has been lost…"

It wouldn't be strange for even those employees who hadn't really spoken up in the past to have some sort of opinion on this.

The person in the position to have to stop these verbal attacks was That Person.

But That Person's troubles didn't end up being so bad or last all that long.

That's because we all found out about a similar incident the happened before the Pokémon one, an incident that happened with some other animated series.

The number of victims was small, but the incident happened on NHK…yes, the very same NHK that goes door to door collecting licensing fees. It's a huge network.

And NHK had been keeping that incident under wraps.

The Pokémon Incident, as it turns out, wasn't something unique to Pokémon.