Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6192846-20150304021219/@comment-146.113.65.171-20150408042913

I'm not saying it is or isn't--I think i'm wrong on these things a lot, but I think we should be very careful about making any assumption that the watchman and the wall are Jakoku related. There are several indications that it's meant to reference China (the great wall and the fact that Chinese skintones are slightly darker than Japanese), which has already been acknowledged on here, and I'm not sure mothy, as a Japanese producer with Japanese attitudes, would merge China and Japan into one country in his story. The fact that they want to keep out foreigners is a trait that many eastern countries share in real life, and not really indicative they're the same kingdom, imo.

It's also impractical to have a mainland defense to begin with, so I'm not sure that theory holds up. The ocean would be enough of a deterrant for a while, followed by walls and artillery from the island shoreline. A mainland defense would just alert people to your presence across the water when you would otherwise be out of sight, and would require constant trips to and from the mainland to maintain the wall and rotate guards.

We don't actually know how long they walked after they passed the wall. It could be that the country was wiped out for some reason that has yet to be explained (that the watchman didn't know about because he's always stationed on the wall), and they just passed through the empty landmass to get to the shoreline.