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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Panda-s1" data-source="post: 8030973" data-attributes="member: 59554">so I kinda want to come back to this bit: who exactly are these people? who is this group of individuals who apparently comprise a large chunk of the entirety of Asian people credited in an official D&D release? maybe I'll make a new thread about this—haha jk that sounds exhausting.without any real context we probably just believe that these 5 individuals are experts in Asian culture, though given they all have Japanese names it's more likely they are only experts in Japanese culture. so okay, maybe OA is full of some very dated ideas about East Asian culture, but at least they got help from some cultural experts. but... who are they? I decided to google their names individually and... nothing seemed to stand out. this felt weird, only one of them, Akira Saito, has a name you might call "typical" for Japanese and unsurprisingly the top hits included a 3d modeler and motorcycle racer. it doesn't help I don't know the kanji for their names either, that would actually narrow down things a lot.so I decided to google all of them at once, maybe someone has already written the story on the creation of Oriental Adventures and I got... this very forum thread (awkward), but also the sample bit from Drive Thru-RPG and I found their credit:[EXCERPT]To the Japanese players—Masataka Ohta, Akira Saito, Hiroyasu Kurose, Takafumi Sakurai, and Yuka Tate-ishi—for critiquing and improving the manuscript on short notice. [/EXCERPT]so... they're just players? now I know at least some of you already knew this, fine, but I didn't, and it's like really? some of the only Asian people to receive credit in an English language D&D product were just players? not even contributing any content or subject expertise, just "critiquing and improving the manuscript"? what exactly does that even entail?and again, who are they? I did some digging and learned in 1985, the same year OA was published, redbox saw it's first release in Japan. maybe some of these guys were part of the nascent tabletop RPG scene in Japan. maybe they were part of Shinwa, the company who published D&D in Japan at that time. again no real leads, but then I started googling their names again and realized something: each search got a hit on DBLP. DBLP is a German bibliography website that lists academic articles about computer science. each one of those names brings up at least one article from the 1980's. at this point it's pure speculation, but I'm now under the impression they were just a gaming group at some college who were all studying computer science and were playtesters for the Japanese version of D&D.which, more power to these guys, they got more credit than your average video game QA tester could ever hope for, and I really want to know their story and what role they might have played in D&D's release in Japan. I wish I had the connections and know how to interview them and write that article.but in the bigger picture, it's extremely disappointing. did TSR ask them for their help because they were Japanese? was this supposed to be a concession for people like me? if they had connections in Japan did they not bother trying to get an actual expert in Japanese history and culture from Japan?also what of this bibliography that people seem to laud because it somehow justifies the existence of this book? I can't read it (legally), but are these books by actual authors from Asia that were translated in to English, or are they just books by Western authors? if OA is considered dated, can you also imagine that some of the books they cite are also dated and might have views on Asian culture that might be problematic? can you understand how upsetting it might be that the majority of Asian people to be credited in D&D are all in one book and likely contributed no actual content to the game?if no Asian person made any meaningful contribution to the creation of a book about Asian culture, directly or otherwise, can you at least concede that that in of itself is a little messed up?</blockquote>

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