Chapter 1. Jichuan Mingjing: Zhang Mingjing and His Bond with Japanese Games

A chapter from THE HISTORY BEHIND CHINESE GAMES, the author's unfinished second book, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 一 吉川明静“张茗靖” 的日系游戏情缘

First published in the author's Zhihu column on September 11, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19845155

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 3, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Zhang Mingjing, known to his friends as Jichuan, was born in Shanghai in 1977. His father was an executive at a state-owned enterprise and his mother a laboratory technician at a factory. He is now product director at Meiyu (美娱), a company under Shanda Games, where he runs Chain Chronicle, a Japanese mobile game with revenue in the tens of millions of yuan that has reached the top ten of the App Store's grossing chart at least twice.

Jichuan is also an authority on Japan, steeped in its games and its history. He has translated and published several well-known Japanese historical novels: Tokugawa Ieyasu (德川家康), Hana no Keiji (花之庆次), Liangchuan Xiangke (两川相克) and Weixin Mingwen Zhaibu (维新名文摘补). Many readers will be more familiar with his pen name, Jichuan Mingjing (吉川明静).

His family was comfortably off, so he never wanted for anything, and he grew up in a big city where information circulated freely. As a child he had plenty of choices when it came to feeding his mind.

When he was at secondary school, in the early 1990s, Shanghai had a mecca for anime, comics and games that could stand comparison with Akihabara in Tokyo: Wenmiao, the Confucian Temple district.

At weekends there was a book market at Wenmiao where you could buy piles of second-hand books and comics, and there were plenty of well-known game shops selling the latest cartridges. The market is still there today, but it went into a slow decline once the internet took off.

Back then, though, it gave a great many Shanghai children happy memories. It was where you could get the newest volume of Saint Seiya the moment it appeared, along with cartridges for the Nintendo Family Computer, the FC or "red and white machine" as everyone called it, and all sorts of games for the Sega Mega Drive, released in 1988 and known in China as the litiji (立体机) or MD, and the Super Famicom, the SFC, released in 1990.

Wenmiao had an enormous influence on Jichuan's life. Shanghai Datong High School, where he studied, was not far from it, and walking over with classmates after school to hunt for comics and games became almost a daily ritual. Most of those comics and games were Japanese, and most of the games had never been translated.

So if he wanted to play them, Japanese was the first mountain he had to climb. That was what first pushed him to learn the language.

The other thing that shaped his teenage years was the weekly journal.

Plenty of people were made to keep diaries and weekly journals at school, but Zhang Mingjing's experience was a little different. Their journals were not marked by the teacher. The students marked each other's, and the teacher only looked them over at the end. That did a great deal to encourage written exchange among classmates, and it gave rise to a whole new culture in their class.

The hardback notebook.

Everyone wrote stories together in a single hardback notebook. The front of the book held a serialised relay novel: each person had to write a chapter that followed on from what had come before, then pass the book to the next person. The back was for whatever each of them liked to write, so every genre was in there: romance, wuxia, time travel, even scripts for the school variety show. They passed the book around and commented on one another's work.

Those three hardback notebooks from three years of high school are still carefully kept at Jichuan's home, and the handful of people who stayed with the project became close friends. Their friendship has held firm, and they are still in regular touch today.

Playing games, learning Japanese and writing.

Without anyone planning it, those three things shaped his first dream: to make games of his own.

He narrowly missed a place in a Japanese department when he sat the university entrance examination, but he did not give up on that dream. He signed up for evening classes in Japanese, and in the library of Shanghai Normal University, where he was studying, he found an entire wall of Japanese books, including both fine Chinese translations of Japanese novels and a large stock of novels in the original.

The Japanese in games is fairly simple, Jichuan says, but the Japanese references behind them are extremely complicated. To work out what a game is actually about, you have to know something about Japanese history and culture.

So he started reading Japanese historical novels in bulk. For someone teaching himself the language this was no easy task, but although the stories in historical fiction are complex, they carry far fewer loanwords than modern novels do, and a great deal of the text is written in Chinese characters, so he could read and guess as he went.

That was how Jichuan pushed his way through nearly 300 Japanese books. The ones that stayed with him most were two novels by Shiba Ryotaro about the Battle of Sekigahara and the Siege of Osaka Castle in Japan's Sengoku period: Sekigahara (关原) and Josai (城塞).

Sakura Wars, from Sega of Japan.

This game, which Jichuan played while he was at university, would change the course of his life more than once.

Even after all these years, Jichuan's eyes still light up at the mention of Sakura Wars. It was a game with an unusually rich cast, he says, every character sharply distinct from the others, so you were always going to fall for one of them. It also combined strategy gameplay with role playing in a way that was revolutionary at the time, and it pulled you right in. He put hundreds of hours into it and finished every character's route.

He graduated in 1998 and began bringing his interests and his talents together, writing anime fan fiction and articles on games and history. He is said to be the first person in China to have published fan fiction in a print publication, and he wrote regularly for print outlets such as Computer Trade News (电脑商情报). He even thought about living off his writing fees, but that idea was quickly shattered by how unstable the reality proved to be.

By 2000 he had moved from one thing to another and landed a chance to work in Beijing as an editor at an IT magazine. He still hoped to work in games, but he knew Beijing was where the games industry had the best atmosphere at the time, so he went without hesitation, moved into a basement room and joined the ranks of the Beijing drifters.

Fate can be theatrical.

The IT magazine folded three months later, and he had to take a job at another company editing a games website. That company then announced that it would be licensing games from Sega of Japan, among them Sakura Wars, the game Jichuan loved most and knew best. From that point on the company turned itself entirely into a game publisher and operator, and it kept growing. After Zhang left, it even licensed the well-known online game Mojian (魔剑), released in the West as Shadowbane.

The company was called Tianren Interactive, known in English as Object Software.

Tianren Interactive had a lasting influence on the Chinese games industry, and a good many of the leading figures in games today came out of it: Wang Tao, CEO of Sohu's Changyou, and Li Haiyi, SVP of Perfect World, among others.

Jichuan has done reasonably well for himself now, but back then at Tianren Interactive he was just an ordinary member of the marketing department.

We often say that opportunity favours the prepared. That is only half true.

Opportunity favours those who are prepared and who take the initiative.

Zhang Mingjing is one of those people. When he heard that the company had licensed the PC version of Sega's Sakura Wars, he volunteered to help. A Taiwanese company had in fact already finished the Chinese localisation, but after going through it carefully Zhang felt the Taiwanese translation differed a great deal from the way people speak on the mainland. He went to the project manager and proposed redoing the localisation. Seeing how serious he was, the company agreed to let him try.

Over the next two months and more, Zhang had to keep up with his own job while using every other hour he had to translate five or six hundred thousand characters of text, translating and looking things up day and night. It was exhausting, but he was happy. What could make a person happier than taking part in his own dream?

In August 2001, the official Chinese edition of Sakura Wars published by Tianren Interactive sold 100,000 copies, and a budget edition and a TV edition followed. It made an enormous impression on players. In an era of rampant piracy, that was a remarkable result.

During his Beijing years Jichuan also made several close friends through his games writing: Cunyu, Salala, cOMMANDO and Shangdi Pian'ai Bubing, whose name means "God favours the infantry" and who, as Bubing, founded CSCHINA. All of them were well-known games writers. At the time they worked at AsiaGame and shared a rented flat in the Ganluyuan estate in Beijing. Zhang went over almost every weekend to play games and shoot archery with them, sleeping in their living room at night. It felt a lot like a university dormitory.

Later Jichuan got to know someone else who worked at AsiaGame, a man who became both a mentor and a friend and one of the people who opened doors for him in life: Chen Guang, who would later become a vice president at Tencent in Shanghai.

In 2003 Zhang Mingjing moved back to Shanghai and joined Tencent's Shanghai office in overseas business development, where he was responsible for bringing in Japanese games.

After all those years of moving from one thing to the next, he was a step closer to his dream of making games.

In 2004 Sega of Japan came knocking again, this time to discuss licensing with Tencent, and Jichuan naturally became the official point of contact. In those talks, his deep grounding in Japanese culture and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Sega's games left a strong impression on the Japanese representatives.

So when Sega set up a Chinese subsidiary that same year to pursue a game platform strategy, Jichuan received a formal invitation. For someone who had grown up playing Sega games, this was the stuff of dreams and a tremendous honour, and he accepted almost without stopping to think. At Sega Network China he worked as a game producer, responsible for Sakura Wars Online and for Saint Seiya Online, which had only just been proposed.

Looking back now, Jichuan feels he let his old friend Chen Guang down by leaving, but Chen Guang did not hold it against him, and years later he opened another door for him.

Jichuan had assumed his time at Sega China would become one of the happiest memories of his life. Instead it became the period he is least willing to talk about.

He summed up those two years in a single exasperated sentence: a group of Japanese who did not understand China, leading a group of Koreans who did not understand China, directing Chinese staff on market strategy and game content development, which made a crushing failure inevitable.

In mid-2006, disappointed and angry, Jichuan resigned. Sega Network China shut down not long afterwards, and the press later reported some of what had gone on inside. The main cause was plainly a failure to adapt to local conditions.

His childhood dream had come close and then receded again, and the rollercoaster left him badly deflated for a while. After resigning he set up a small company of his own, using the contacts he had built up over the years in the Chinese and Japanese games industries to broker introductions, licensing deals and executive placements. He did not earn much, but he kept quietly building, waiting for another chance to make games.

In 2010 Apple released the iPad.

Jichuan believed mobile games would be the mainstream of the future, and he planned to move in from that direction: start with motion comics, build up his own intellectual property and characters, and then move into game development.

It was a roundabout route to developing his own games, but Jichuan had no better option, because the cost of game development was still high at the time and investment was the only way for anyone who wanted to build something on their own.

So he bought the comic rights to Ghost Blows Out the Light and made a motion comic app, even hiring someone to write a score for it. Just as his fundraising was beginning to take shape, another fully animated comic he had finished got stuck in Apple's review process and could not be approved, and that directly sank the investment round.

Years of work came to nothing all over again, so completely that he could not even go back to the comfortable, modest life he had had before. He had a wife and daughter by then, which made it all the more impossible to bow to fate. For his family's happiness and for his own dream, at 35 Jichuan decided to have another go.

In 2012 Chen Guang, by then a vice president at Shanda Games, recruited him once more. Jichuan quickly got back in touch with Sega in Japan, and it happened that they were preparing to bring several new games to ChinaJoy, among them Chain Chronicle, which had not yet launched even in Japan.

Today Jichuan can fairly say he has realised his dream. He is making games, and he has learned a great deal along the way. Mobile games have turned out just as he expected and entered a fiercely competitive phase. With card games booming over the past couple of years in particular, Jichuan drew on the wealth of mature card game experience in Japanese titles to write up three pieces of his own: "A General Theory of Card Games", "How to Get More People to Draw Cards" and "Card Trading Systems". They were well received across the games industry. He also set out a number of things he had noticed while running games. He found, for example, that in-game promotions are a double-edged sword and have to be used with care.

Asked about his plans, Jichuan says he still wants to make games developed by Chinese teams. Foreign games have many strengths, he says, but they do not fully match the habits and needs of the domestic market. We need to absorb their strengths, not only the high production standards of Japanese games but also the broad, ambitious vision of Western ones, and then combine that with Chinese culture and what Chinese players want. Only then can we respond and adjust quickly enough in operations to keep a product healthy over the long term.

Jichuan Mingjing, Zhang Mingjing, and his bond with Japanese games.