The Original Eroge Podcast
Author: beef2929
First published 2023/11/08
Hi everyone, welcome back to “neat things I found on the internet”. That’s what this blog was about, right? Before we begin, I want to note that the distinction between online radio shows and podcasts is pretty arbitrary in Japanese. The loanword ラジオ is used to describe audio programs that are streamed live and ones that are pre-recorded and on-demand alike. Promotional eroge (and anime, for that matter) ラジオ of both varieties are extremely common. KIRA☆KIRA had one in 2009 hosted by the game’s creator bamboo and its three heroines in-character. One for Rewrite started the same year and lasted for over a hundred episodes. Amateur hour compared to the official Yuzusoft show, which has managed over 500 episodes over the past decade. The tie-in podcast for the eternally delayed Daresora will take you longer to listen to than playing what’s available of the game itself. The show we’ll be talking about today predates all of these by years, and it isn’t a promotional podcast tied to any particular game or brand either. It’s a doujin show, by eroge fans, for eroge fans.
1. The Show
エロゲー古今東西 金町工場長かく語りき (Eroge Kokontouzai: Thus Spoke the Kanamachi Foreman, or Kanamachi for short) was an radio show co-hosted by the eponymous Kanamachi Foreman (an eroge fan) and Tanimichi NON (an eroge creator). The show was first launched in 2002, with each episode being distributed on physical CDs sold at conventions and via mail-order. It was produced by Shimamura Hideyuki, a guy whose Twitter timeline is filled with erotic Kagamine Len cosplay. He owns the label that distributes the show, but… more on that later. Tanimichi NON was in a pretty unique position to discuss eroge as an employee of FlyingShine—if you were an eroge aficionado looking to enter the industry yourself in the early 00s, I don’t think you could have picked a better brand to join than FlyingShine. They were about to experience an unprecedented influx of creative talent, releasing titles from Arakawa Takumi, Tanaka Romeo, Nagaoka Kenzou, Setoguchi Ren’ya, and the future author of Toradora! Takemiya Yuyuko in the span of just a few short years. Tanimichi NON was there for all of it; he scripted CROSS†CHANNEL and even directed SWAN SONG. This was more than enough of a claim to fame to catch my interest, so when I noticed that the show is now available to purchase and download through Booth, I decided to check out a few episodes for myself.
On the 1st of September, 2009, a Kanamachi live event was held at the LOFT/PLUS ONE venue in Shinjuku, featuring a panel and Q&A with a slew of guests including Kyonyuu Fantasy creator Kagami Hiroyuki, recurring guest and STONEHEADS founder Tadokoro Hironari, and, in possibly his only ever public appearance, Setoguchi Ren’ya. If you've ever heard of Kanamachi, there's a decent chance it's through this—in fact, it was an auction listing for a signed CARNIVAL novel that led me here in the first place. Episode 7 of Kanamachi, released in October of 2009, is unfortunately not a recording of this event, but a postmortem. It, and the show in general, is… not as focussed on eroge as you might have assumed from the title. Nevertheless, the chaotic tone and rhythm of the hosts' banter as they gave a lukewarm defense of Endless Eight and recounted watching their friend get arrested quickly endeared me to the show. Tanimichi is naturally entertaining to listen to, and plays well off of Kanamachi’s tsukkomi. By the time the episode devolved into a 15 minute rant about how face-tracking technology could revolutionise panchira in eroge I felt right at home, and not just because Tanimichi wouldn't stop fucking around with the reverb effects. When they floated the idea of a "Google Maps eroge," I had to stop and wonder if this is one of those eroge ideas that everybody has at some point, like “eroge heroine becomes sentient”; even Romeo wrote a story with the same concept. Great minds really do think alike.
We don't know much about the event itself. Kanamachi and Tanimichi allude to distorted second- and third-hand reports circulating online but even these have mostly been lost to the sea of time, and the hosts themselves don't give any details beyond the fact that the audience was comprised almost entirely of Setoguchi fanatics unfamiliar with their show. We can gather two things: that (according to Morinaga Touko, also the source for Kagami Hiryuki’s unannounced appearance) Tadokoro treated the audience to a live performance of Maid-san Rock'n'Roll and that Setoguchi introduced himself as Karabe Yousuke, confirming for the first time ever that the eroge writer and the SQUARE ENIX author were, as many had speculated, the same person. At the time, SQUARE ENIX had just cancelled the publication of Karabe's third novel Kurai Heya, claiming it violated their code of ethics in a fundamental, unfixable way. Months later, he would retool the manuscript into a digital novel with the help of none other than Tanimichi NON; its site would be plastered in endorsements from just about all of the FlyingShine alumni I listed two paragraphs ago.
The next episode I checked out was recorded in November 2015, in the wake of eroge giant elf announcing their dissolution, and opens with our hosts desperately trying to recall the topic of the previous episode, even poring over the track listing to no avail until Shimamura reminds them they were just talking about panchira again. Sounds like not much has changed during our six-year time skip. elf had what might be the most sordid fall from grace any eroge brand has ever had, with years upon years of bizarre controversies slowly destroying the reputation of what was once the industry’s most universally beloved team of visionaries. I figured then, that this would be a pretty juicy episode, but no such luck. It turns out neither host kept up with elf much after Hiruta's retirement, so they don't dwell on the topic for long, but their conversation is still pretty enlightening. Tanimichi suggests that the artists of elf’s heyday (Takei Masaki, Yokota Mamoru) might be responsible for the trend of using dutch angles in CGs to fit a whole girl on-screen–I’d always thought of this as a recent trend and never stopped to think about the PC-98’s 640x400 resolution. I also had no idea the Sakura Taisen guy (who, incidentally, was also wrapped up in elf’s downfall) wrote the old 1993 Rance OVA… To my delight, Tanimichi drops some CROSS†CHANNEL lore I’d never heard before—that the game’s voice acting was handled by Aslead, a company fronted by Horikawa Ryou a.k.a. the voice of Vegeta, which is how “Vegeta” and his real-world wife ended up in C†C as Yutaka and Misato. The episode is rounded out by (okay, comprised mostly of) lengthy discussions about the A-Train series, Osomatsu-san BL ships and the international popularity of Futabu!, which happens to be one of the first ero anime I ever saw as a teenager. Please try to imagine how seen I felt listening to Tanimichi repeat “futanahry!” in an American accent.
Kanamachi’s 27th and final episode was released in April of 2018, coinciding with (and this time focussing exclusively on) the recent release of Rance X—as definitive an ‘end of an era’ moment as eroge have ever had. The timing is somewhat coincidental (in reality, the show ended simply because Kanamachi himself grew tired of it) but couldn’t have been more perfect. Tanimichi even brings up towards the end of the episode that the Rance X had dredged up more enthusiasm towards the show than he’d had in a while. This was my favourite of the three episodes; Tanimichi’s joy for the game is so infectious that I couldn’t help but pick it back up myself and play idly as I listened. I was also very happy to hear I wasn’t the only person who picked Keibnyan on my first run, lmao. The one caveat here is that neither host managed to finish the game in time for the episode; in Tanimichi’s case, he had apparently stayed up all night binge-reading after reaching his first A-ending the literal night before the recording. The game’s gargantuan length is a sticking point (“why make a game for ossan that ossan can’t play?!”), with Tanimichi joking that they’ll reboot the show in ten years only to find that Kanamachi still hasn’t finished it. The episode also featured exactly as much hardware talk as you’d expect from this show, with the browser-based Javascript recreation of Kichikuou Rance getting a nice little shout-out.
The plan, tracing back all the way to Episode 7, was to record the show’s 30th episode live from a kominkan. Since the show never made it that far, this episode was recorded live instead, albeit from a café in Tokyo. Exactly one fan showed up to the recording and a chunk of the episode is spent talking directly to him. When he reveals the first eroge he ever played was Kanon the crew ask in bewilderment how somebody so normal could end up listening to Kanamachi and whether he showed up by mistake. As it turns out, he’s a long-time listener who missed out on the 2009 live show and was determined to make it out to this one to make up for it. The episode is full of cute, serendipitous ‘full circle’ moments like this; at one point the hosts bring up the Saori incident and suddenly burst out laughing when they realise they already discussed it on the show’s very first episode back in 2002. Even having only heard three episodes, it’s hard not to appreciate the sense of closure that comes from a sixteen-year-long run winding up like this. Kanamachi goes out the only way it ever could have—with its hosts wondering aloud why anybody bought it, then insisting Shimamura score their closing reminiscences and goodbyes with the sappist nakige BGM he can find. In reality though, they’re played out by a track from Oodeo Keisatsu, which is………… well,
2. The Circle
While I was satisfied with the episodes I’d heard, at this point I figured I’d quickly read up on the doujin circle behind the show—an endeavour which immediately spiraled out of control once I realized just how storied of a group this actually was. They were first founded in 1996 under the name “Quelf,” a play on elf, to whom much of their work paid homage. Their early works belonged to a world I didn’t even know existed until researching this post, that of WRDs. WRDs were these programs designed to display lyrics alongside MIDI audio tracks in real time, but it seems you could do pretty much anything with them if you set your mind to it. Their debut, a Super Sentai parody, survives on Niconico in the form of these unauthorised vocaloid covers, and even more bizarrely, a 2023 AI cover with a ChatGPT-written description insisting the source is a nonexistent 2018 tokusatsu YouTube series. Wow, I love AI! Also preserved are an array of Doukyuusei 2 and Kakyuusei WRDs, some of which seem to just be entire fan-made “visual novels” built directly in the music program. Their site (under 旧サークル履歴 here) alludes to an Evangelion WRD and a "virtual idol project" (twin sisters named 柏木枝葉 and 柏木実果 by the sounds of it) in 1997, but sadly I couldn't find a trace of either. Their most iconic work from this era, I suspect, was 1998's Otousan wa Pachipachi Punch! I implore you to stop reading this post and go watch it right now. You’ll thank me later.
Naturally, the members of Quelf also set their sights on making their own original bishoujo game, collaborating with some other doujin groups to form the team ppp (“peace passion pretty”) and create あさがおの咲く頃, a game about a young musician and internet-dweller entering the video game industry, which tragically never saw the light of day. What did was this set of photos of a six-hour-long offline meeting to plan the game showing anime girls and intricate charts alike scrawled onto a whiteboard. The circle’s main focus was still music, although the medium had switched from WRDs being distributed through local BBSes to physical, self-produced CDs. In the year 2000, by which point Tanimichi NON was the only founding member left, ownership of the circle was passed from its founder Quess to Shimamura. This was accompanied by a new name: 大江戸宅急便, or ooedo Express mail, a name that would stick for decades to come. It’s at this point that I must admit that I've buried the lede a little. Please navigate your way to the absolute motherload of /sovl/ that is ooedo's "releases" page. Scroll a little.
Over the past two and a half decades, ooedo have appeared at Comiket over a hundred times and produced, in addition to countless posters and merch, over 200 CDs of amateur music, radio shows, just about everything you could imagine. As you’d expect, their albums cover some popular properties—a LOT of Touhou, Ragnarok Online, Falmcolm games—but plenty of deeper cuts including, of course, a lot of eroge. We have Elfin’, Leafin’, Air in, and a whole lot of ‘variety’ eroge albums, a scant couple of which have recently made their way to digital redistribution via Booth. But why stop at eroge when you could make arrange albums for A-Train and sci-fi shows from the 80s? They’ve done everything from an Azumanga Daioh-themed radio show to this interactive “visual sound theator” CD-ROM, of which only the ending theme is available in any form—and even that was only uploaded a couple months ago by the singer herself (Morinaga Touko, whose blog post about the Kanamachi event I linked earlier). Here’s an album by a fictional(?) band called The Cabbage Rolls. Wait, this one made it onto Booth?
But the absolute cream of the crop is Ooedo Keisatsu. A parody of a Japanese police procedural from the 80s, Ooedo Keisatsu is a series of chaotic, bombastic home movies starring more or less everyone who’s ever been associated with the circle, including Kanamachi, Tanimichi, Shimamura, Morinaga, Chata, Katakiri Rekka, even Raito. The best look at the series we have is probably this Niconico upload, which you can watch to see Katakiri in her giant mascot cat head slicing through an entire line of guys who all explode one after another, Morinaga dressed as a secret agent dual-wielding rifles and fleeing a gigantic CGI mecha-Katakiri, and a shirtless Shimamura transformed into a kaiju terrorizing Akihabara. I think this anecdote Morinaga shared on Twitter perfectly captures the blend of passion and 適当さ that make doujin projects so special: though she’d worked with Tanimichi before, having belonged to one of the other doujin circles who joined ppp, she wasn’t yet associated with Ooedo when she stumbled upon the first two installments of Ooedo Keisatsu in a store in Akihabara, and was simply amazed that a doujin group could make something like this. Soon after, she was invited to guest star on one of their radio shows, only to be handed the script for the next Ooedo Keisatsu upon arrival and told, much to her confusion and delight, that she was now a part of the show. She would be a permanent fixture of it for years to come.
I’m so obsessed with this series, it looks so incredibly fun that it breaks my heart that these aren’t available digitally anywhere. I guess that’s inevitable when you’re dealing with ancient media this niche… is what I would have said, but these guys are still going! They aren’t as active as they once were, but they’re still collaborating to this day. The newest installment of Ooedo Keisatsu came out literally last year; it was a fucking COVID-19 special! Even their tenuous link to Setoguchi endures, with Tanimichi, Morinaga and Kunai Uri all working on his most recent game BLACK SHEEP TOWN behind the scenes. At this point, all of these people have their own lives and careers to attend to, so I find it incredibly heartwarming that they’ll still get together to collaborate and run around in costumes and pretend to shoot lasers at one another even twenty years on. Shimamura, if you’re reading this, please release Ooedo Keisatsu digitally. I promise I’ll buy every last episode.
Well, that about does it for today’s post. This was an absolute delight to explore and I hope you enjoyed hearing about—OH FUCK!!! WAIT!!! I forgot to review a fuckin eroge in this article for my eroge review blog ShIT FUCK GHJKLTFHJDLCHKPL
3. UhhhhHHhHHHHHH
As luck would have it, Ooedo actually have released an eroge! 2007's Yarisugi! Swimming School was produced by Shimamura, playtested by (among others) Kanamachi, directed, written, and animated by Tanimichi, and illustrated by popular eromangaka and creator of FUCKING Futabu!, Bosshi—who, of course, has also been a part of ooedo from the start. He was in Ooedo Keisatsu (initially playing himself, getting killed off, then instead playing his relative’s cousin’s roommate also named Bosshi) and regularly guested on Kanamachi, including on one episode themed around this very game! Seems like a cool ep, looks like they talk about the Leaf fanclub and Steve Jobs and A-Train ag—fuck!!! No more getting distracted. I am going to review this eroge if it’s the last thing I do.
Okay, this was pretty cute. You play as a swimming coach whose only students are a pair of sisters. During one class, they get tired of swimming laps and ask him to adjudicate something more important: a sex contest. Yarisugi! is a game that wastes no time getting to the point—actually, it won’t waste much of your time at all. It’s a low-budget nukige, released for just 1400 yen, but it’s incredibly short even for this price and will only last you an hour or two.
Yarisugi! is real rough around the edges in some ways, yet… surprisingly polished in others? They got Misonoo Mei and Enokizu Mao to play the sisters and they sound great as always. Bosshi’s art is obviously the main draw and it’s good, the character designs are adorable. The protagonist’s cock is ridiculous but, like, he’s the Futabu! guy, I can’t act too surprised. I love that they went to the effort of letting you pick between having thick, glossy swimsuits and those flimsy sheer ones—call me Rubber’s Lover because I chose the former in an instant. Every CG is actually animated too, which is really impressive, but the quality leaves something to be desired. They don’t loop properly, the textures clip, the heroines flail around so violently they have motion blur (it honestly looks like they’re headbanging more often than not)... I found it more distracting than anything, and there’s no option to turn it off. In fact, the only option you are given is to make it even faster, which you’re free to do at any time by slamming the Z key. It’s never been easier to give yourself motion sickness.
After listening to hours of the man talk, I was particularly curious to see what Tanimichi’s writing was like (he’s credited on CARNIVAL, but Setoguchi actually rewrote all the text he provided for the game lmao). Obviously there isn’t much space in this game to flex, but I was left thinking he has a pretty distinct way with words, even in text. The narration eschews efficiency for a clunky but more amusing casual voice. Or something, I dunno, how much can you really take from an hour-long nukige? Speaking of Tanimichi though, the game was actually published by a circle called Rocket⑱Icecream, which seems to belong to the man himself—although a venn diagram of its members and ooedo’s would probably just be two concentric circles, and ooedo’s logo is still printed on the game’s cover, so, it counts!!! Rocket⑱Icecream’s other titles include the hilariously bold Ki-On! as well as a sequel to Yarisugi! titled Itazura! Swimming School and a Yariita double pack that seems to feature a sugoroku minigame for some reason?? I was tempted to play it too, but I’ve hit my quota for this post and November is already shaping up to be a busy eroge month for me so it’ll have to wait.
Eroge Kokontouzai reference?!?!
Okay, this is the end of the post for real this time. Everything about this topic was so much fun. If you’ve found this interesting, please do check out and support ooedo! Their Booth store is here, you can find all the Kanamachi episodes along with previews here, here, and here, and if you live in Japan you can get their 2022 best-of set including the new Ooedo Keisatsu special here. More posts soon. Bye!