Chronicles of the Kampfgruppe - The End of Senshado
This is going to be the last post on my blog, but it may very well be the most important. As I head towards graduation from Kuromorimine, I've had a lot to think about regarding the future. Not just my future, but the future of Tank Sports, especially professional Japanese Senshado.
As this may be the only post a lot of you will read on my blog, I feel its pertinent to introduce myself.
My name is Yamato Hitomi. I'm currently a 3rd Year high school student at Kuromorimine Women's College, and I'm a Senshado-ka. Specifically I'm a gunner on Kuromorimine's high school team, who once had aspirations to go pro.
I was on the championship winning team in the 61st Inter High Senshado Tournament in my first year, and I was on the runner up team on the 62nd and 63rd Inter High Tournaments in my second and third years respectively. And if you're curious, I wasn't in the tank that fell in the water against Pravda in the 62nd Tournament finals, but I did see it happen. I started with Senshado competitively in Seirin Middle School, and I was a starting gunner there during their three year Inter MIddle winning streak as well.
You may then be wondering why I suddenly decided that pro Senshado was no longer the way for my future to go. Assuming that I continue as I am now, with my resume I could get picked up by a pro team once I leave college. But I don't think Senshado is going to be big enough for me to make a living from it when I'm old enough to start.
Before we start talking about what needs to change, we need to get one fundamental fact about Senshado as we know it today out in the open:
Senshado is boring.
There, I said it. I'm going to talk at length about many other factors, but if only one thing is addressed, it has to be that its boring. 95% of the time is spent waiting around waiting for contact to happen. Matches last upwards of five hours, with maybe twenty minutes of actual fighting (source). For those of you who've been to live events, how many times have you found yourself reaching for your phone to surf the internet? How many people do you see in the stands reading books or kindles. By contrast, how many people do you see reading a novel at a basketball game? Or a cage fight?
Its not just for the audience though; for crews, matches are just as mind numbingly boring too. Most of the time, we're doing mundane things like, driving to point A on a map, or checking the engine is OK. And if you're a loader? Well, first of all, nobody cares if you're a loader. Seriously, if I were a loader instead of a gunner, my blog would not have survived the past three years.
For those of you who want an actual specific example of how dull Senshado is, in the 63rd Inter High tournament during the Pravda vs Ooarai match, the Pravda girls (some of whom were from the reigning championship team, I might add) were having a Cossack dance off, around an oil drum fire, on camera, while Ooarai's tanks were literally less than five hundred metres away from them in a warehouse. Name a combat sport where you can get away with that level of showboating. In fact, name a sport where you can get away with that level of showboating. The closest thing I can think of is actually on the E-Sports scene, with Korean Starcraft Brood War players doing things like clean their glasses mid match versus American opponents, and even then it was no more than five seconds of AFK. That should tell you everything you need to know about the sport.
But of course, this is all just opinion and anecdotal evidence, so here's a few facts that back this up. Viewership and attendance for Senshado Matches in every single professional league in Japan has been in decline for the last ten years (source) with a massive sharp drop in the last four years from pro leagues all over the world (source). As a whole, player salaries have dropped by 10% on average, with the average rookie's starting salary being slashed down by 30% (source). The number of high school Senshado license renewals has been on a downward trend for the last five years (source). There is a slight upwards trend from this year in Japan, but that's only because the Senshado World Cup is coming to Japan next year, and whenever the world cup for anything is on, interest goes up without fail (source). And even then, the increase in interest because we're the host nation is absolutely pitiful compared to say what happens to soccer when the FIFA World Cup is near (source), or interest in Judo when the Olympics are coming (source).
The fact is, Senshado is no longer culturally relevant. But how could it be, if the chair of the professional Senshado has been doing everything she can to prevent it from growing?
Let me explain.
Senshado is a hard sport to get into. You need to have a tank first of all. You then need to have enough people to crew a tank in roles that are all vital: someone to direct the tank as a Commander, someone to drive the machine (with a license, hopefully), someone to operate the gun, someone to use the radio, and someone to get the job of hauling shells into a breech. Some tanks let you double up on certain roles, but all these roles have to be fulfilled.
Consider that for most people even a single tank is far beyond their price range, most people will then need to be part of an organization to even take part (source). For most people, this means that their school needs to have the money lying around to fund a Senshado club, and enough people interested to form a full team. If you're looking to crew just five tanks, the number that most friendly matches are held with between non-competing schools, you'll need twenty to twenty five members. To field ten tanks, the number allowed in the first round of most competitions, that's around forty to still need to get enough interested teammates to do something about it.
The sport then really favours having Senshado-ka stick with their teams and avoid transfers. In the professional scene, this isn't actually too big of a deal, and it creates a nice environment where a pro will stick with one, maybe two organizations for her entire career, but what about school and varsity level Senshado where every year you have people graduating and new blood cycling in?
At the middle school to university levels of competition, organization reputation suddenly becomes important. Strong tournament results will attract girls with stronger desire to do well in Senshado, and thus are more likely to put in the time and effort needed to go pro, which will then give strong tournament results which attract stronger Senshado-ka and so on and so on. Strong results in middle school means you're more likely to be chosen for the roster of a championship winning high school team after your trials.
High school results are important because this is how you get college and university scholarships that are what pro teams will take massively into account when they're scouting for new talent. Here's where the problem lies though: the vast majority of Senshado scholarships have been given to Kuromorimine Alumni in the last ten years (source). If your school isn't called Kuromorimine, you would probably need to be captain or vice-captain of your team to even be considered for a scholarship (source). The only other schools where regular team members have even a remote chance at securing a scholarship are Pravda and St Gloriana, and even then that's a huge stretch. But it wasn't always like this.
Remember how I dedicated a huge section to how Senshado is boring for the tankers? Well, that's about to play into things here. It means that those who still are interested in Senshado at high school probably have aspirations to go pro, or they want an extra-curricular activity that they could literally sleep through to put on their university applications (looking at you, freeloading loaders). This means that all the best tankers will inevitably come to the best schools.
However, if we look at the results of the 42nd to the 52nd inter high tournaments, which took place during what many fans call the golden age of Japanese Tank Sports, we can see that despite the massive incentives for all the strongest Senshado-ka to come together and form one or two super-teams, the top eight schools of that time all had at least one grand finals appearance, and the school that performed the best during those ten years was actually St Gloriana with four podium finishes, and two overall wins, with Kuromorimine only getting at most a runner up finish in the 48th, 49th, and 50thtournaments, and a single championship victory in the 42nd tournament, right at the start of our sample. In short, it was a lot more competitive between schools, and the rankings were much more fluid, which you would expect as the rosters go through massive changes every year. Senshado scholarship statistics reflected this, and were handed out fairly evenly among the top four schools of that era, and were still spread out to schools in the bottom half of the top eight as well (source).
That era came to an end when Nishizumi Shiho took over as the chairwoman of the professional league. Its not necessarily her fault per se, its just she has a massive conflict of interest in her current position. This is because Kuromorimine is the largest school and varsity organization that practices Nishizumi Ryu as its primary discipline.
Its pretty much an open secret that Nishizumi-san pours her own funds into the Kuromorimine Women's College's School and Varsity teams, but this all started actually at the high school level. They came back in the 52nd Inter High tournament much better equipped than their opponents, swapping out about half of their PzIIIs for Panthers and Tigers, worth about 400 million yen in the process (source). This made the net market worth of Kuromorimine tank roster about 180,000,000 yen more than their next closest rivals, Pravda (source).
This is how the end of Senshado really began: by proving Senshado is a pay to win sport.
With Kuromorimine blowing everyone else off the face of the map with literally hundreds of millions of yen of net worth advantage, universities started to give out scholarships more and more to Kuromorimine at the expense of everyone else. By the third year of their winning streak, about 80% of Senshado related scholarships were heading their way, with the remaining 20% heading towards schools which have close ties with another university (anyone wondering how Anzio's Senshado program survived so long, this is why). On top of this, the Nishizumi Ryu Senshado school has been massively promoted in as many official channels as possible, to the point where the captain of their high school team can get interviewed on the national news, sharing a timeslot with professional baseball players. Name another sport where a high school athlete managed to get on a sports programme to talk about their plans after their latest inter-high victory.
You can't.
Aspiring Senshado-ka then basically have to get into Kuromorimine to have a shot at going pro, and they certainly would not settle for anything else. Why would they, after all, seeing as Senshado is so boring. But the Kuromorimine starting lineup is still the same size. That means that there are a lot of highly skilled Senshado-ka who would have got a spot in another top Sensha-do school, and had the drive and potential to go pro, who are warming the bench at Kuromorimine, and will never get a scholarship based on middle school results, and there are girls on the other teams who are even better than the Kuromorimine starters who may get passed over. Here's a few notable Inter High Championship records just from the last three years:
-Best Gunner: The most shots on target and highest kill shot percentage in a single match was set by then 3rd Year Pravda Gunner Amelie Lacroix-Kuribayashi in the 61st Inter High tournament in their grand finals match against Kuromorimine (source). But Pravda lost that match, so Amelie didn't get her scholarship. Last I heard she's looking to get into sports journalism, hopefully to cover anything other than this crappy dead game.
-Best Driver: The tank that had been hit by the least shots per match is Ooarai's Panzer IV, set during the 63rd Inter High championship, driven by 2nd year Reizei Mako (source). She's probably the best driver of the tournament and yet she's a rookie (source). Ooarai's PzIV is the only tank that was never taken out during a match in the 63rd Inter High, if you exclude the post bell KO that Saunders' Firefly landed on them during their first round match.
-Best Strategist: Ooarai Girl's Academy's 2nd Year Nishizumi Miho, who you may recognize as the Nishizumi Daughter who transferred out after last year, won the 63rd Inter High championship with enormous numbers, net worth, and total weight disadvantages (source) in every single match. The only reason I omitted firepower as another disadvantage is because they faced Anzio, and the majority of their forces were tankettes with machine guns.
You might then think that based on these records, that maybe now that Kuromorimine's Inter High winning streak is well and truly broken, we may be seeing more interest in Senshado again. Well, there are two main reasons the impact of this won't be as widely felt.
-Even though these upsets are absolutely huge, they're at the high school level. Not only that, the upsets were Nishizumi Ryu practitioners losing. Do you think that the chairwoman of the professional Senshado committee is going to let her own school of Senshado get negative press like that?
-The losing streak started after a potentially fatal accident. Do you think anyone is going to want to start doing Senshado seriously after seeing that?
But the evidence that these recent trends are too little too late can be seen in the more immediate impact of the most action packed Senshado match of all time. I'm sure you're wondering why I'm not talking about Ooarai's victory over Kuromorimine in the finals of the 63rd Inter High tournament. Its because any talk about that particular match is preaching to the choir at this point. Instead I need to draw our attention to the Ooarai Combined High School Team vs the University Strengthened Team match.
We had a dream match earlier this year where the strongest tank crews from the high school and varsity levels came together to fight each other. A match where the a Morser Karl railway gun was taken out by a flying Hetzer launched by an L3/35 (Image for scale). A match which had an M3 Lee send a goddamn Ferris Wheel into a formation of Pershings (click for clip). A match where three tanks had a chase literally on a rollercoaster track (clip). Was there a sudden increase in sign-ups for Senshado clubs? No. How about an increase in attendance for the Japanese Senshado Pro League? Nope. Did the pro leagues earn new sponsors? Nope.
What Senshado got was the real nail in the coffin. Bear in mind this is a sport where somehow high school level competition receives airtime on primetime TV news alongside actual professionals in other sports, but when the biggest upset in the last ten years and the most action packed match of all time happen all within six months of each other. What did we get?
Panzer On Crack (Part 2 here and Part 3 here), Drifting compilations set to Eurobeat and audio from the D1 championship, and Play Of The Game Memes.
Are pros supposed to inhale memes now? Maybe Captain Shimada can earn royalties on a plushie wielding a bow made of steel cable and leaf springs, that says "Only a Shimada can control the Centurions!" when you press its bellybutton. But none of this is going to help Senshado survive ten years down the line, maybe not even five.
I want to close this post, and this blog by saying I love Sensha-do, despite its flaws, I really do. But at the moment, Senshado is on life support, and the doctor is staring at the instruments whilst drowning herself with whiskey.
To anyone who's reading this in the future, I really hope that you're laughing at how inaccurate this. But with this many sources backing up my claims, I'm not holding my breath unless I fall into a river
To all my loyal readers, thank you for reading the Chronicles of the Kampfgruppe for all these years, and for sticking around to the very end.
This is Yamato Hitomi, signing off.
Nishizumi Maho would come home to find her mother seething in quiet anger. This was the first time she had seen her mother drink alcohol; in fact she was pretty sure that she had stopped drinking alcohol after she got married to her father, long before she was born.
"Mother... are you alright?"
"I'll be fine," replied Shiho. "I just know that my next board meeting is going to be unpleasant, that's all."