Banzai!

We sell t-shirts aimed at Japanese history nerds. One of them sold!

Every now and then, I have a brainstorm for how to expand Ramen Sandwich Tees’ offerings of novelty apparel and accessories. Not all of them are good. Some of them are good, but it takes time for their worth to become apparent. About five years ago, I thought it would be worth a try targeting people who are interested in Japanese history — in particular, the heyday of the samurai. Maybe they got hooked in by the original “Shogun” mini-series. Or, like me, digital games like the Nobunaga’s Ambition series or Shogun: Total War lured them in. Maybe they’re Akira Kurosawa fans. All of those are legitimate routes, and I know that people who have followed them are out there.

Anyway, if you watched Ran or other period-piece movies set in the Warring States period, you know that Japanese soldiers used to wear banners fixed in sockets on the back of their armor to identify the feudal lord whom they served. You also know that it’s a pretty impressive sight, seeing thousands of soldiers arrayed for battle with those big flags attached to them. It must have worked a lot better as a form of identification than the Western practice of wearing heraldic badges, if only because they were so large and the devices tended to be simpler.

I thought it would be a neat visual pun to have t-shirts with a depiction of a soldier’s sashimono on the back with a clan mon, while on the front they would have the mon with the name of the clan, just to make it clear. I offered a range of mon to our designer with the intention that they were both from famous samurai clans, but also simple enough to duplicate without much bother. She picked the six playable factions from Shogun: Total War II — Oda, Hojo, Shimazu, Takeda, Uesugi and Imagawa. And away we went.

I’m pleased with how they turned out. I still think it’s a neat visual pun. I have one of each in my t-shirt drawer, and I wear them to conventions and such. However, they have not sold overwhelmingly well. We did not get off to a good start, and that is a problem when you’re selling on any big venue like Etsy, eBay or Amazon Marketplace. If you don’t get off to a good start you get a poor sales ranking, which gives that venue no incentive to help you through its search algorithm. So you get buried.

Furthermore, we did not put much effort into advance publicity, so it’s not surprising that the shirts died at launch. In retrospect, we should have gotten behind them by putting a big push on venues where Shogun: Total War players, history buffs, anime fans and other such Japanophiles hang out. We treated them like an experiment, and the results came in as if we didn’t care about our own products. Selling through print-on-demand eliminates your inventory risk and the time-pressure to sell through a print run, but it doesn’t absolve you of the need to promote aggressively.

Also, I don’t bring them to shows. First of all, they’re printed front and back, which makes them more expensive. Pre-printing them means more inventory risk. If I bring them to a general-interest gaming or fan convention, how many would I actually sell? And which combination of clan and color should I bring? I don’t know. The Oda are probably the most famous clan (certainly they were the most successful, thanks to Nobunaga), but the Takeda might have more recognition thanks to Kurosawa’s classic movie Kagemusha. Also, I suspect that of the six, Takeda is far and away the most common surname among Japanese-Americans. But on yet another hand, the Hojo mon looks a lot like the Mitsubishi logo, and a contemporary audience might pick up on that.

Even so, we do get a sale every now and then. Last week, someone bought a Hojo Clan shirt through our eBay proxy store, and his feedback indicates that he is well-satisfied with it. It always warms my heart when it happens, just because it’s affirming when someone validates one of my ideas. So we’ll stick with it because it costs us nothing to keep them listed and maybe, as with our Richard III shirts, their time will come.