1. The History of Mousetraps

The game features a stylised, yet quite specific, model of a mousetrap, which the characters discuss:

It operates on what is known as a spring-loaded bar mechanism. It is highly recognisable, and there is a well-documented history of patents relating to it.

1. William C. Hooker (US), in 1894;

2. James Henry Atkinson (UK) patented the original model in 1898, and subsequently improved it in 1899;

3. John M. Mast (US) applied for a patent in 1899, and was granted it in 1903.

Since the events of TGAA:1-2 take place (according to the AA Wiki timeline) in Meiji 35, that is to say, in 1902, the third option is ruled out for chronological reasons. The remaining options are quite similar to one another, which is why I cannot say for certain which specific model is depicted in the game. However, if we consider the type of mousetrap that became widespread in Japan, both options are plausible. Historically, both the US and the UK interacted with Japan during that period (and England, moreover, directly, within the canon), and mousetraps themselves are a fairly simple product to transport, which is why, in theory, they could have been brought to and widely distributed in Japan (although the timing would have been slightly tighter for the English variant).

From this, it is impossible to say for certain which specific version it was, or exactly when it reached the Japanese market. The most important criterion here is that the mousetraps must have been in public view for long enough for Ryunosuke, who is not particularly knowledgeable about technology, to recognise them without difficulty.

As for the S.S. Burya, where this mousetrap is located, in the English version of the game, Strogenov says the following:

Hah! We are at sea for ONE YEAR! You want to be so long without close friend? Without someone who understands?!

Due to the somewhat clumsy sentence structure, the meaning here could be different: either Strogenov and Pirozhko HAVE ALREADY been at sea for a year, or it is customary on the steamship to work ‘shifts’ lasting a year, and Strogenov and Pirozhko are somewhere in the middle of this ‘shift’.

However, there is also another interpretation, one more closely based on the Japanese original, and as such, most likely the more accurate one. The same line, spoken by Strogenov in Japanese, goes like this:

フン！　オレたちはなァ。１年のほとんど、海の上なんだぜ？キモチの通いあう“トモダチ”がそばにいてほしいじゃねえか！

In the official localisation, the phrase ‘１年のほとんど’ was translated as ‘ONE YEAR’; however, despite the presence of the number ‘1’ in the text, the phrase ‘１年’ can also be translated as ‘the whole year’, whilst ‘ほとんど’ roughly translates as ‘almost’. This means that here, most likely, Strogenov wanted to say that ‘during any year they spend at sea almost all of it’ — and this could have been going on for more than just one year.

...All this is to say that we cannot say for certain when Strogenov brought Pirozhko on board—and, therefore, when he set the mousetraps to feed his pet. Whether Pirozhko is a snake or a lizard (I’ll save that for another inquiry) — his lifespan can start from 10 years with good care (if the internet is to be believed) — which means he could have come on board with Strogenov even before the classic design of mousetraps was created in 1894. In that case, Strogenov would simply have used traps of a different design, before switching to the ones we later saw in the game.

It is worth noting that the S.S. Burya canonically docks in England, meaning it would have been easiest for Strogenov to stock up on mousetraps there, starting from 1899. It is difficult to say whether the Burya sailed to America — after all, Nikolina was planning to flee there, and the crew intended to help her, but does that mean they would have taken her there on their own ship, or did they plan to transfer her to another one? If the first scenario is correct, then Strogenov could have been buying these mousetraps as early as 1894.

In summary: mousetraps of the type featured in the game first appeared in America as early as 1894, and have likely spread gradually across the world ever since. A second wave of popularity may have been triggered by the invention of a similar design as early as 1899 in England. Both these countries had trade links with Japan, which increased the likelihood, year by year, that Ryunosuke and Susato would see the imported invention in action, and become accustomed to its existence.

2. The Etymology of Mousetraps

…But in that case, why ‘trap for catching mice’ and not ‘mousetrap’.

Perhaps it’s just a quirk of the English translation? The localised version is a bit wordier than the Japanese original, so perhaps they decided to expand on the very short sentence ‘It’s a mousetrap’ a little?

No, in the Japanese version, Susato says exactly the same thing:

ネズミを捕獲するための『ワナ』でございますね。(Close to a literal translation: ‘It’s a “trap” for catching mice, isn’t it?’)

Does this sort of conversation happen just once? Perhaps it’s simply a quirk of that particular moment?

No, that’s not the case either — in TGAA:2-5, when Yujin Mikotoba is exploring the ship, he also refers to a ‘trap for catching mice’, rather than a ‘mousetrap’… at least in the Japanese version; it’s likely that the English localisation might have overlooked a similar moment in TGAA:1-2, and translated it slightly differently. But even in the English version, Mikotoba shows some uncertainty when referring to the device as a ‘mousetrap’.

A similar phrase in Japanese:

コイツは、ネズミをつかまえる“ワナ”ですね。(Roughly translated: ‘This is a “trap” for catching mice, isn’t it?’)

Okay... So does the word ‘mousetrap’ (or ‘ネズミとり’) actually appear in the text at all, apart from the English localisation in TGAA:2-5? It does – just once! In TGAA:1-2, when Ryunosuke is talking to Strogenov, he directly says ‘mousetrap’ (‘ネズミとり’ in the Japanese version).

The same phrase in Japanese:

船室のソトの廊下にある あの《ネズミとり》は‥‥

However, the Japanese word is set in quotation marks and written in kana (phonetic characters), not kanji (ideograms). Whilst quotation marks are frequently used in Japanese by AA's characters to highlight a word in speech in general, the simultaneous use of kana (in my experience and knowledge) is employed, for example, when a character asks for clarification of an unfamiliar word. In this way, the text may be signalling once again that the word ‘ネズミとり’ (‘mousetrap’) is not the most natural choice for the character’s speech.

So what’s going on? Is there any pattern or logic to all this? And can we draw any definite conclusions for the AA world?

Well.

The following information and conclusions should be taken with a pinch of salt: these are not definitive statements, but rather assumptions I have made based on the data I managed to find in a short space of time. I think they are interesting in the context of reflecting on a fictional world, but a more thorough investigation would surely find flaws in them. After all, I am not a Master’s graduate in Japanese, but simply a user with internet access.

An attempt to find the word ‘鼠取り’ (a variant spelling of ‘ネズミとり’/‘mousetrap’, which appears in the text of the TGAA) in 19th-century Japanese books yielded no results — the instances where a match was found turned out to be false positives. Nevertheless, this word began to appear in 20th-century books. Based on this observation, it would be logical to assume that the word ‘鼠取り’ did not really exist in the 19th century, but appeared in the 20th.

This may sound strange, as in English ‘mousetrap’ is such a simple and commonplace word that it has existed since time immemorial. Could it really be that the Japanese had no name for such devices in their language for so long? Or did they not have mousetraps themselves?

I do not have a clear answer to this question, but it prompted me to look up the word ‘mousetrap’ in a Japanese dictionary.

It turns out that there are at least five ways to say ‘mousetrap’ in Japanese.

Interesting.

Armed with this knowledge, you can explore a Japanese service that has scanned a vast number of books and magazines, dating back to the 1800s, and track how the frequency of use of different variants of the word ‘mousetrap’ has changed over time.

This produces an interesting graph:

Here, the blue line represents the variant of the word ‘mousetrap’ used both in the TGAA and currently on Wikipedia. As can be seen (if the image quality permits...), this variant was not widely used until 1922, after which its usage began to rise until it eclipsed the others sometime in the 1970s or 1980s.

However, for our purposes, this is too late. Moreover, we will be far more interested in the red line, which effectively dominated all other variants from the 1890s to the 1970s.

(For reference, green, brown, and purple represent the remaining names for mousetraps.)

All this seems interesting, but for our purposes it is better to focus on the period under study. Firstly, let us narrow the period under study to 1890–1905, and secondly, we will exclude books from our analysis, retaining only journals — if the language changed due to any external factors, it is precisely periodicals that would reflect this change more quickly than books, which take much longer to write.

This will produce the following graph:

It turns out that the red variant of the mousetrap’s name was not only the most common, but its usage also began to rise precisely between 1897 and 1900! This was exactly the period when one of the mousetrap models might have entered the Japanese market!

What conclusion can we draw at this stage? Given that for the red word there are only data points for 1897 and, immediately after that, a sharp spike in 1900, it can be assumed that, in 1899–1900, there was a sharp increase in the appearance of the word ‘mousetrap’ in newspapers, which may be linked to the product’s arrival on the market and its advertising — which, in turn, suggests that it was precisely then that mousetraps arrived in Japan. Given that the first model from the US had already been in existence for six years by that point, it would be strange for it to have entered the country so suddenly and abruptly. It is therefore more likely that the model that arrived in Japan was, in fact, the Atkinson model from England (with which Japan, in the TGAA universe, apparently had closer ties).

Consequently, based on all this information, we can say that it was the Atkinson model that became widespread in Japan from 1899–1900, which led to extensive coverage of them in the press and would have given Susato, Ryunosuke and Yujin two to three years to get used to them.

...

By the way, what is this ‘red word’? It refers to the word ‘mousetrap’, so why didn’t the characters use it for the spring-loaded mousetrap?

Well.

For one reason or another, the most common variant of the word ‘mousetrap’ has become ‘捕鼠器’. It consists of three kanji (meaningful characters), and if we break it down into its components, we get:

catch + mouse + vessel

Literally, a vessel for catching mice. A mouse-catching bottle.

A vessel. A container.

A box.

Not a planch.

I hope you see where I’m getting at.

The word 捕鼠器 existed even before English-style mousetraps became widespread in Japan, because mousetraps themselves existed before this particular model was imported from the West. However, if we are to believe the etymology, this particular word referred to a box-shaped device that trapped mice inside — just one of many types of mouse traps.

Why this particular word came to be used, when other, more general terms existed, is something I dare not speculate on. Nevertheless, this is what happened (according to my assumption, which may be mistaken), and flat boards with a spring mechanism began to be referred to in advertising leaflets as ‘vessels for catching mice’. Perhaps the word itself was more familiar to the average person...

Yet a slight dissonance arose between the literal meaning of the word and what it came to denote. Perhaps to ordinary Japanese people this did not seem strange, and they used it out of habit. But what if those who had closer contact with English and knew that these things were called ‘mousetraps’ abroad subconsciously wondered why, in our language, it was a ‘vessel’ rather than a ‘trap’ in the general sense? And what if such people avoided saying ‘a mice-catching bottle’ directly in Japanese, resorting to a slightly longer but correct name, whilst in English they used ‘mousetrap’ without hesitation?

...What if we were to include Mikotobu and Ryunosuke Naruhodo’s family among such people?

Perhaps that is indeed the case.

Summing Up

To sum up

It turns out

In my opinion

In the context of the TGAA

It is possible that cage traps were historically more widespread in Japan, for which there was a specific term: 捕鼠器 (something like ‘mouse-trapping bottle’ or simply ‘mousebottle’). By 1900, spring-loaded mousetraps had been imported from England, and since the Japanese language already had a sort of historical name for them, they used ‘mousebottle’ when describing this mousetrap. However, obviously, a small board is not a vessel, and so the name sounded strange in relation to this design. No doubt other names were used for the trap, but they didn’t catch on (much like if, for some reason, ‘mousetrap’ were unsuitable, they would have sought alternatives, such as ‘mouse-catcher’, ‘mouse-trap’, ‘mouse-getter’, and so on, which convey the essence but are somehow not quite right).

Thus, since mousetraps were imported sometime around 1899/1900, Ryunosuke and Susato had had time to see plenty of them by 1901–1902, when they set sail; at the same time, since the existing term ‘mousebottle’ did not quite fit this contraption, they merely described what it was in their speech, to avoid confusion with their Japanese ‘mousebottle’. When Ryunosuke, later in the story, spoke to Strogenov using English, he calmly used the centuries-old term ‘mousetrap’. And Mikotoba Yujin, in the second game, finding himself in the same linguistic situation as Ryunosuke and Susato, thinks not of a ‘mousetrap’ or a ‘mousebottle’, but rather, ‘yes, that new contraption which has become widespread in Japan, but for which no proper name has yet been devised’.

TL;DR for fanfiction writers

In 1899/1900, a spring-loaded English mousetrap was introduced to Japan, where it became extremely popular.

Ordinary Japanese people refer to it as a ‘mousebottle’ (or another variant combining the meanings of ‘catch’, ‘mouse’ and ‘vessel’), just as they do with their own traditional cage traps.

Characters who are pedantic about language (i.e. for example, those who know English, such as Ryunosuke, Susato, and Yujin, as well as, in theory, those who might fight for the purity of the Japanese language) prefer to use the more elaborate term ‘trap for catching mice’ when referring to this device in Japanese; whereas in English, they have no problem at all saying ‘mousetrap’.

I rest my case.

Sincerely,