Gensou Chronology

This article arose out of the research process for the Taoism update. During it, I researched the sexagenary cycle of the Chinese calendar, went back to playing Phantasmagoria of Flover View, and became struck by a simple question that has not been fully answered in Touhou canon. This question is: when was Gensokyo created?

There’s certainly information about the time of Gensokyo’s creation to be found in canon sources. Yakumo Yukari’s profile in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense tells us that the seeds for the creation of Gensokyo were sown ”over 500 years ago”. The various youkai had started losing their strenght due to advancement of human science and understanding of the world. This led to Yukari coming up with a plan to increase the power of youkai through the Youkai Expansion Project. Back then, Gensokyo was just a ”spot deep in the mountains in the middle of nowhere”. Her plan was to empower youkai by creating a boundary of illusion and reality around the area, thus creating a new world.

So, Gensokyo was created somewhere in the 16th century then? It’s certainly possible that the process started then. However, a rather defining feature of Gensokyo, the Great Hakurei Barrier, appeared much later. In Imperishable Night, it’s told that the Barrier was created in the year 1885. In canon, it’s implied that before the barrier what became Gensokyo was just a remote mountain location in our world.

Perfect Memento in Strict Sense is in some ways an unreliable source, as it’s known that Akyuu has altered certain profiles, so it’s everything but a Perfect Memento. It’s entirely possible that rather than Yukari taking a long time to create the barrier, Akyuu has given us false information. I think from in-canon perspective both are valid – that the creation process took long, or that Akyuu is not giving us the facts.

There’s very little in canon that could allow us to narrow down the start of the creation of Gensokyo ”over 500 years ago”, if it really started then. But certain factors given in Imperishable Night, Phantasmagoria of Flover View, Seasonal Dream Vision and Bunbunmaru News articles allows us to hone towards a potential creation date of the Great Hakurei Barrier, something never given outright in canon. This date is of course speculative, but I believe it is based on informed speculation.

The year 1885 up very neatly with the sixty year cycle described in Phantasmagoria of Flover View, if we take the ”current year” of PoFV to be it’s release year of 2005 as Touhou canon points towards it being. While Gensokyo uses it’s own peculiar youkai calendar system, the sixty year cycle also features in the Chinese calendar. Thus a reference to a sixty year cycle comes loaded with cultural signifigance. To understand that the idea of a sixty year cycle is not just an arbitrary choice, let’s start by looking at the Chinese system.

The Chinese sexagenary cycle

Before introducing the calender of Gensokyo, I think it’s good to look at it’s most likely source of inspiration, the Chinese sexagenary cycle as it and the way it is constructed is most certainly a source of inspiration for the construction of Gensokyo’s calendar.

Traditionally the Chinese use a lunisolar calendar, and they organized years in a sixty year cycle. This sixty year cycle also contained in it cycles of sixty months, sixty days and sixty hours within it. So the system has a kind of fractal nature to it. To understand the construction, purpose and beliefs around the system, we must understand a bit of both traditional Chinese beliefs of Taoist origin and how they organized their time. The components of the cycle repeatedly feature 2, 5, 10 and 12. These are not arbitrary choices.

The number two in Chinese traditional culture is associated with yin and yang, the two opposing but complementary primordial energies. Yin presents qualities like receptive, contracting, dark and cold while yang represents assertive, expansive, bright and warm qualities. These two forces are forever locked in a kind of active, competing but complementary balance. When one quality reaches it’s peak, it begins to receded and another quality begins to emerge. A very intuitive example is how after sun reaches it’s peak during the day, it begins to set.

The number five is strongly associated with the wu xing, five agents or five phase changes. Sometimes they have been described as analogous to Western elements, but this is not really the case, as they are rather seen as being different stages in an energetic process. Taoism, and by extension traditional Chinese culture, essentially viewd the world in terms of qi, or energy, getting patterned with different qualities in different processes. The wu xing are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. Wood represents growth, Fire expansion, Earth stability, Metal harvesting and Water contraction. This cycle is inspired by both natural cycles but also likely a kind of civilizational cycle of early metalworking cultures.

The wu xing were thought to exist in several different configurations. These include the generative cycle which is the same as the order given previously. Wood fuels Fire, the ashes from Fire turn to Earth, which in turn yields Metal and then Water condenses on metal. There is also the controlling or destructive cycle, which forms a kind of pentagram shape of opposing relations. Fire melts Metal, Metal cuts down Wood, Wood takes nutrients from Earth, Earth drains Water and Water extinguishes Fire. These kind of cycles were thought to be present in not just nature or human actions in their literal forms, but also part of other processes like human health, temperament and disposition.

The wu xing were thought to be of stellar origin, with classical planets corresponding with them or perhaps in a way emanating these patterns. Mercury was seen was the Water Star, Venus as the Metal Star, Mars as the Fire Star, Jupiter as the Wood Star and Saturn as the Earth Star. The Sun was seen as the source of yang energy, and the moon is the source of yin energy. As these energies were thought to basicaly determine the health, wealth and wellbeing of humans, the Chinese naturally drifted towards astrological ideas. While many these days would like to dismiss astrology, it was a crucial skill for early agricultural civilization. The ancient people found correlations between movements of the stellar objects and things like start of the farming season and patterns of animal migration, and thus being able to predict these repeating events became a valuable skill. You can think of the idea of trying to determine the fate of humans or communities as an extension of this idea.

The Chinese astrology proper would feature the sexagenary cycle, constructed from two elements that give us the 10 and 12 of the cycle. The 10 comes from the Ten Heavenly Stems. They are a set of ten symbols which in ancient times, they were most likely constellations or asterisms, perhaps an early attempt at dividing the year. Then they became the weekdays of the ten day week during the Shang dynasty. After the fall of Shang dynasty they became associated with yin and yang and the wu xing. These days they are essentially a duplicated set of wu xing, yin and yang versions of the five, which are used for astrological purposes and constructing the sexagenary cycle.

The 12 comes from the Twelve Earthly Branches, or what is more popularly known as the Chinese zodiac. They form a twelve year cycle, with each year of the cycle being assigned it’s symbolic animal. It’s thought that these symbols embody people born in that year with particular characteristics. The origins of this system are a bit unclear, but it’s possible that it’s connected to Jupiter’s roughly twelve year orbital cycle. Since Jupiter is a very bright object, it would have easily found it’s way into timekeeping systems.

By combining a ten year cycle of Heavenly Stems and twelve year cycle of Earthly Branches using the principle of the least common multiple the sexagenary system emerges. Even people with only cursory knowledge of Chinese astrology will probably have heard of things like ”Year of the Metal Dragon” or ”Year of the Fire Horse”. The English names have bit of an information loss as the yin and yang ”flavor” of the Stems is lost, but it’s from these combinations of Stems and Branches that the years get their qualities. The Stems and Branches pop up in the sexagenary cycle whenever there is a 10 or 12. For example, the ten day weeks in the system retain their association with the Stems, and hours of the day and months have their Branches. This is why you can get things like the legend of Bishamonten first appearing in Japan on the year of the tiger, the month of the tiger, on the hour of the tiger.

The point of this rather exhaustive look is to throughly understand that the sixty year cycle is not arbitrary and that it comes loaded with extremely deep cultural importance. It was an attempt at predicting, systematizing and understanding the world, constructed as much from natural observation as metaphysics and mathematics, an attempt at harmoniously patterning the buildings blocks of existence into a predictable timekeeping system. This attempt is of course less than perfect, even if you wouldn’t believe in Chinese astrology or the Taoist worldview. This is because the construction of the cycle gives us a year of 360 days, five short of the solar calendar, which in itself is not perfectly in tune with orbital cycles either. Whereas the Western calendars have occasional leap days, the Chinese resolved to have about every two or three years a whole extra 13th month.

The Youkai Calendar of Gensokyo

Gensokyo uses two calendar systems: the Gregorian system (ie. the Western calendar) and the lunisolar youkai calendar. Details about this calendar can be found in Curiosities of Lotus Asia while Seasonal Dream Vision details it’s construction. The various Bunbunmaru Newspaper articles use the youkai calendar for their dates, so we know when certain events have happened by Gensokyo’s own timekeeping. While I am a bit unsure if it has ever been confirmed that the various events happen when media depicting them appears, this seems to be the commonly thought case (unless stated) and you can find evidence in it from certain plot points related to outside world events.

In Curiosities of Lotus Asia, the calendar is described as being a lunar one. The reason given for it’s lunar nature is that information related to the cycles of the Moon is much more relevant to youkai, who are creatures of the night. According to Rinnosuke, the youkai calendar makes it easier to predict natural phenomena using it, even things like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. This is related to how the calendar is constructed using factors related to natural cycles.

Seasonal Dream Vision tells us that the cycle is built from ”Three Lights, Four Seasons and Five Agents”. The Three Lights are the Sun, Moon and the Stars. The sun is dominant, drowning out the Moon and the Stars when it’s up. The Moon’s changing nature imbues a ”cooperative, indecisive” personality. The Stars (including things like meteorites) are chaotic and uncooperative, with all their different shapes and behaviors. Thus these three generate different qualities into the world. This way of conceptualizing the Three Lights is of apparently Japanese origin. While the dominating sun and pliable moon can be seen in terms of yang and yin, the idea of stars as restless wanderers is in contrast with Chinese ideas about the world-ordering Heaven manifesting in the night skies. The Four Seasons probably doesn’t need much explanation, and the Five Agents are the wu xing, creating a commonality between the youkai calendar and the Chinese sexagenary cycle.

The calendar isn’t arbitrarily constructed from these elements. Rather, Seasonal Dream Vision tells us that these three components make up a kind of very real, repeating natural cycle of energies that returns to it’s starting state every sixty years. It’s possible that here ZUN was influenced by real ideas about the Chinese sexagenary cycle which might float around in Japanese occult circles. Yin, yang and the wu xing are essentially natural energies, and the Chinese sexagenary cycle is at least implicitly an interplay of these energies.

The way the calendar works is that there is a repeating squence of Light, Season and Agent. So for example you can have years such as Year of Star, Winter and Metal and Year of Sun, Autumn and Fire. Rather than working with a least common multiple system, the cycles simply repeat over and over again as is.

So while the Chinese system is built from 2, 5, 10 and 12, the youkai calendar is built from 3, 4 and 6. However, there are some mathematical commonalities between these two, which allows both to form a sixty year cycle. If you multiply 3 by 4 you get 12, and if you multiply that by 5 you arrive at 60. So in a sense the numbers of the youkai calendar are also lurking in the Chinese sexagenary calendar. This might not be so surprising, considering the numbers three and four have cultural importance in China too.

Three has cultural weight in China through the idea of Heaven, Earth and Humanity. It’s thought that Heaven presents yang qualities, Earth yin qualities and Humanity moderates the two in the middle. The Chinese system actually has five seasons, depending on the context either midsummer or interstitial transitional ”seasons” between the four major seasons, but four has relevance through the cardinal directions. Beyond their practical use, these directions were thought to have guardian deities of their own.

The youkai calendar does not have hours or days, as the smallest unit of measurement of time for youkai is a single lunar cycle or month. The reason given for this is that youkai are extremely long-lived and apparently don’t perceive time quite like humans do. It’s said their ”calendar cycle” is 60 years, but Rinnosuke does not go into details whether there are some kind of sub-constructs. One could imagine there would be some kind of subdivisions based on the cycling of the Light, Season and Agent, but canonical sources don’t go into details.

While the Chinese system does not apparently put particular importance to the occasional 13th month and calls them ”intercalary months”, the youkai call the 13th month just ”the 13th month” and it’s apparently of importance to them. In years with this month, the power of youkai increases, and Rinnosuke claims this is why some humans consider 13 an unlucky number.

When it comes to particular year or ”seasons” and dates, the Bunbunmaru Newspaper articles give several which has been used to establish a timeline of events in Gensokyo. According to this timeline we are currently on Season 140, the Year of Star, Spring and Earth. The year zero for this system appears to be 1885, the creation date of Gensokyo. This raises an interesting question: was the youkai calendar invented in Gensokyo after it’s creation? Or did creation of Gensokyo lead to youkai starting to count the cycles? Canon gives no answers, but apparently the system is not widespread beyond the youkai living in the mountains.

It should be noted that the youkai calendar does not line up the the Chinese sexagenary cycle. The Chinese sexagenary cycle started to be used widely for timekeeping around the Western Han dynasty from 202 BC to 8 CE, and has been running since then uninterrupted for well over two millenia now. The Japanese took the system into use in 604, which conveniently was the first year of a 60 year cycle. In contrast, if 1885 truly is the Gregorian year when Gensokyo was created, it would have been the 22nd year of a 60 year cycle, Year of Yin Wood Rooster. So there is a 22 year discrepancy between the two systems, even though they are both running their respective 60 year cycles which follow the cycles of the moon.

It’s unclear if the youkai calendar uses the same date for the lunar new year in the Chinese system. Often the new year falls on the first or second, sometimes third new moon after the winter solstice. There are however examples of lunisolar calendars where the new year is celebrated on an entirely different part of the year. There’s a Buddhist calendar system use in Southeast Asia where new year begins in mid-April, and the Hebrew calendar’s new year is based on the autumn equinox.

There however isn’t anything to suggest that there would be such a radical departure from the Chinese lunar new year, which usually lands in late January or early February. On the contrary, there’s evidence that Gensokyo’s new year, and the sixty year cycle, ends around the end of winter in Japan and marks the beginning of spring. This comes from Phantasmagoria of Flover View, so let’s take a closer look at it next.

Higan Time

In Phantasmagoria of Flover View, all the flowers in Gensokyo start blooming regardless of their usual season. This alerts the usual incident-solving protagonists and also rouses some others usually not interested in resolving such matters, leading out to to free-for-all danmaku clash. In the end it’s revealed that the flowering is caused by an excessive amount of phantoms becoming stuck in Gensokyo due to Komachi, ferrywoman of River Sanzu deciding to slack. The protagonists end up facing off Shiki Eiki, the Judge of Paradise who tells them that they have to change their ways or be condemned to Hell.

One could write much about the game and it’s plot itself, including how it’s perhaps the most clearest example of a kind of spirit journey narrative in Touhou games. Japanese shamanism usually was more about becoming possessed by spirits and offering oracles or presenting demands to rectify some incident or curse, but there are also stories of people journeying to other realms. Frequently the destination was the hellish realms, and getting scolded by Enmaten, Yama, King of Hell, was common. Sometimes Jizo Bosatsu, a bodhisattva reputed for saving souls from hell, was met instead. Sometimes people would meet both, and in some cases Enmaten and Jizo were revealed to be two sides of one and same entity. It should be noted that Shiki Eiki is described as being a Jizo statue that received so much faith it ascended and became a Judge of Hell…

Our interest here is however mostly about a particular Japanese holiday prominently referenced in the game. This holiday is the higan, and it’s featured in the title of the track Higan Retour as well as the presence of spider lilies, higanbana, strongly associated with this holiday. Higan is a seven day long Buddhist holiday that is, rather unusually, celebrated twice a year. It takes places three days before and after the spring and autumn equinoxes. The reasoning given for this is that when the day and night are of equal lenght, East and West are perfectly aligned, and the border to the other world weakens. This is seen to be a good time for ancestor memorial services, making renewed commitment to Buddhism and pondering the Western Pure Land of Amida Buddha. Higan is uniquely Japanese, and many suspect that it was not initially a Buddhist holiday at all, but something else, perhaps some kind of solar or ancestral festival.

The idea of border to the other world weakening is of course very relevant for us, but since higan takes place twice every year, there’s the question of which higan would be closest to PoFV’s incident. The various elements in the game, such as dialogue and endings, make it pretty clear that the game is taking place in early spring, around the time when cherry trees start blossoming in Japan. Muenzuka’s violet cherry blossoms are not treated as being off-season, and Mystitia’s ending features Reimu and Marisa having a cherry blossom viewing. As cherries generally blossom from late March to early April, and because the spring equinox is around the 20th of March, we can pretty safely conclude that this ”Higan Retour” takes place on the spring higan.

The events of the incident and the 60 year cycle of the youkai calendar are rather directly linked in the game. This cycle is presented as being a kind of large natural cycle. Komachi’s responsibility for the incident is lessened when it’s reveaked that the same happened sixty years ago too, and Seasonal Dream View states that similar incidents have happened multiple times. So this also implies that massive amounts of phantoms appearing is akin to a cyclical natural event. Massive amounts of phantoms means massive amounts of dead people, so in essence ZUN is implying some kind of connection to mass deaths and some kind of sixty year cycle.

This actually lines up with real life history in an interesting way. If you subtract 60 from 2005 you arrive at 1945. This is an obvious reference to the end of the Second World War, and it in fact led me initially to believe that PoFV took place on autumn higan. The nuclear bombing of Japan and it’s surrender took place between august and september of 1945. This would have left many dead waiting to pass into the afterlife. Spring higan doesn’t change much here, as Japan, and the world at large, would have been embroiled in devastating warfare for multiple years by spring of 1945.

The year 1885 doesn’t have any such quite drastic mass deaths surrounding it, the closest perhaps being the Krakatoa eruption of 1883. It however was part of the Meiji era in Japan, which had seen a brief civil war, persecution of Buddhism and campaigns and laws against ”superstition”, so from a youkai perspective, it would have perhaps been something akin to a genocide. The spring higan of 2005 is relatively close to a severe natural disaster, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami which occured in December 2004. While Japan was not directly impacted, it was one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history.

So it’s clear that the sixty year cycle that is based on nature’s energies resets itself somewhere close to the spring higan. The question then remains, how close? We’re left with a handful of potential dates. If the sixty year cycle and youkai calendar follows the Chinese calendar, the reset of the cycle would have been on 15th of February 1885. That’s rather close to higan. There’s also a possibility that’s even closer to higan, and that’s of course the cycle and youkai calendar treating 3rd new moon of the year as the new year. That would have been 16th of March in 1885. Higan itself was on the 20th of March that year.

Informed Speculation on the Creation of Gensokyo

Everything beyond this point is much more speculative. It’s entirely possible that the Great Hakurei Barrier was made on any given day in 1885, and that the lunar new year of 1885 became the youkai calendar’s year zero retroactively. I think it’s pretty give that since the youkai calendar is based on natural cycles, it did not in any functional sense ”start” in 1885. Rather the creation of Gensokyo might have led to a new kind of numbering of ”seasons” being put into use, being an important enough event to warrant something like that. You could compare it to West using the BC/AD or BC/CE division for years, or dynastic years from Japan.

I would however argue that it wasn’t created on just any random date, but one that has astrological importance. Therefore, new year or the equinoxes, higan, would make sense. Consider how Yukari uses powers adjanced with onmyodo, a form magic-religious ritual system and esoteric cosmology based on Taoist magic and astrology. While this is in-canon mostly restricted to her using shikigami, part of the onmyodo system, you could reasonable extrapolate her having command over astrological magic. In onmyodo, figuring out various auspicious times for actions was important, so Yukari could have used to figure it out the best possible time to create the Great Hakurei Barrier.

What would have been such a best possible time to create the Barrier? I would say that there are two possibilities: one that offers a ”fresh start”, or one that offers ”permanent liminality”.

Lunar new years of course offer a fresh start, and would also make for a very neat and clean year zero in the youkai calendar. Higan however would offer kind of ”permanent liminality”. Recall how it was thought that during the equinoxes the borders between worlds become more malleable? One could argue that you wouldn’t want to create a spirit world intended to separe you from rest of reality then. However, perhaps this kind of malleability would have been necessary to cleave Gensokyo off from the Outside World. Or perhaps a certain degree of liminality is needed for the whole thing to function. If Gensokyo were totally cut off, nothing would be able to ”pass into fantasy”. No outsiders would find their way in, no new influence come in. Gensokyo would stagnate and be vulnerable. Leaving some porosity allows for renewal.

Touhou in general is very big on all kinds of borders, boundaries and liminalities. Gensokyo is neither here nor there, neither real nor unreal, and the series constantly plays with fourth wall breaks and implications that things are happening in there in real time parallel as they are happening in our world. At the same time, exists in strange unaging stasis, where every incident which stirs the status quo eventually becomes part of the existing order. Higan is a time for remembering the ancestors, and Gensokyo is in a sense a modern celebration of cultural ancestry, rememberance for all the things which modernity threatens to wipe out of Japanese culture. Yet at the same time, the modern project itself too has started to pass into fantasy. Higan is a Buddhist holiday, but one uniquely Japanese, likely built on something more archaic, just as Gensokyo is, Touhou is, a new form of culture built on older forms. And most of all both higan and Gensokyo might let things pass to and from between different worlds. Perhaps it really is possible to contemplate the distant Western Pure Land, or for ancestors to visit, and for things that have passed into fantasy to pass out once again. Consider too the liminal and ghostly Muenzuka, and how Touhou is full of references to afterlife in one way or another. You could even argue for Gensokyo to be a kind of afterlife in it’s own, just not one for humans…

Would not a date embodying these qualities be the perfect date for the creation of the Great Hakurei Barrier?

Based on this, I present that the Great Hakurei Barrier was created on March 20th of 1885, on the spring equinox, middle of the spring higan.

Illusions of Lore and Time

I leave myself the possibility to be wrong about this particular date though. If anything, the process of researching taught me about what a mess calendrical systems, timekeeping and certain aspects of canonical Touhou lore are. It’s curious that for a youkai a month is like a day, but 60 years is long enough for her to forget the existence of the sexagenary cycle…

Then again, researching this also taught me a lot about how subjective perception of time could be. Our calendars are meaningless to animals and trees who live by their own cycles, which might very well be in some sense more ”real” than ours is. Nature is a process that slides from one state to another. Discrete snapshots, dates, times and distinctions exist only in human cognitive constructs and their externalized versions, which include calendars. Perhaps Yukari-sama lives in some eternal now, eternal return, where one passing of a cycle does not leave much impression. The youkai could for all we know be truly alien, as much as they seemingly like to manifest as cute anime girls these days. What are the cycles of humanity to the likes of the Evening Star, after all?

While researching for this, I was ”coincidentaly” presented some information about how the Japanese viewed the ”other world” of spirits. In there, it was often thought, time ran in kind of mirror image. When humans would enjoy summer, the spirits were living in midst of winter. I won’t go into these views in depth because this has become long enough and rather excessive as is, but it’s worth keeping in mind that when it comes to the numinous, no possibility is too weird.

Perhaps Gensokyo implodes into the past from future as a kind of hyperstition, much like ZUN weaves fictional history, a process of something making itself know by binding together mythology, fantasy, superstition, belief and science. Why or how is beyond anyone’s guess at this point. All we know is that it has survived into the future of the Hifuu Club, even as the kind of cultural and natural structures that would have granted it life have withered into all but nothingness. And if the pc98 era remains canon, there’s the possibility that Yumemi’s Hyperspace Probability Vessel was a time machine…