Talk:Kyūketsuki

I've seen this mistake repeated quite often, as this translation comes from a Japanese cartoon called 'Kyuuketsuki Miyu', known as 'Vampire Princess Miyu' in the US.

What's really funny here is that so many people have used the kanji of this word for tattoos. Kyuu means "to suck", ketsu means "blood", and ki was expected to mean "demon" - as the Japanese do not have a traditional word for vampire.

Unfortunately ki means alot of things when translated as a word and not a kanji. In the series title and its theme song, the ki kanji is not the meaning for "demon," ... it is the kanji of ki as in "princess," - thus changing the literal meaning of kyuuketsuki to a blood-sucking princess.

This is why the series & theme song are translated as "Vampire Princess Miyu." The better way to use vampire in Japanese would be to simply say kyuuketsu "to suck blood" or "one that sucks blood".


 * Er... No? Kyuuketsu would simply be the act of sucking blood, i.e. the performer of this act would not be implied. No matter how you turn this around, the -ki is an essential part of the word. TomorrowTime 15:41, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Moved from Talk:Shinso
There was an article Kyūketsuki that had existed since 11 October 2005, until on 23 August 2007 it was made a redirect to Vampire. Then the link to Shinso was deleted, reasonably, from the folklore section of Vampire. I do think there's information here that is worth providing in Wikipedia, but the link from Vampire ought to be under popular culture, rather than folklore. It also seems that there should be just one article, with all the material from here and Kyūketsuki in it; but then, one of them needs to be the article title and the other a redirect to it, and the question is, which should be the article title and which the redirect? From the old Kyūketsuki material, it seems the question might revolve around the etymology of Shinso (which I don't know), because the Kyūketsuki article had "shinso vampire" in quotes. Pi zero 13:24, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

12.24.07 Much of the information in this article concerning "shinso" seems to be taken from the visual novel Tsukihime. The term 'true ancestor' specifically is used in that novel. Unless the term was preexisting, I think this is not really general Japanese folklore but anime/manga folklore :) unfortunately I am not a Japanese studies person.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.160.5.25 (talk) 22:29, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Merger proposal
Afaik, the word kyuuketsuki is only used to describe Count Dracula-esque bloodsuckers (coming from Transylvania, likes to dress in black, and such) or, to lesser extent, Chinese Jiang Shi, and there's no apparent reason to have a separate kyuuketsuki article from the main vampire one which thoroughly covers the legends of vampires (both West and East). I don't know but even article itself states that bloodsucking monsters are relatively new to the Japanese culture, which further negates this article's warranty. Concerning the Shiso things, it probably is neither a popular nor widespread notion, actually I've never heard of it. Also, none of the specialties written in the Shiso section sounds to me not unique to Japanese fictions. Neko jarashi (talk) 06:53, 3 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Support I have, after a brief discussion at the J-project talk page, already done so in August last year. The redirect was promptly reverted. I left a message at the reverting user's talk page, but there was no reply - the crux of the message was that IMO the article as it stood then didn't really deserve a stand-alone role apart from the Vampire article, but I'd be willing to let it go, if some improvements were made. No serious changes were made since then (apart from the addition of info from the Shinso article, which now redirects here).I still believe that a decent article (under a slightly different name, such as "Vampires in Japanese pop-culture", for instance) could be made from this, one that would deal with how the concept of the Western vampire was adopted and adjusted by the Japanese, but for the article as it is now, a redirect seems in order. When (and if) a contributor willing to work on the article to make it a sociological study shows up, the redirect can always be reverted. (Oh, one more thing - according to ja.wiki, Jiang Shi aren't referred to as "Kyūketsuki", but rather "Kyonshi"(キョンシー) - Kyūketsuki (or Vampire) is not even in the See also section of the Japanese article. Mummy and Zombie are, however.) TomorrowTime (talk) 12:04, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment - Uh yeah. In most cases the word kyuuketsuki implies Dracula-type vampires, but calling kyonshi a kyuuketsuki is not incriminating either. Neko jarashi (talk) 09:46, 4 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Oppose I wasn't sure I wanted to say anything at all, but on reflection, I've got three observations to make here, which add up to "merging into Vampire isn't the answer".  So since there is something to be said on that side, somebody ought to say it.  One: Although I agree this article isn't great as it is, it does have useful information in it, the sort of thing I (for one) would hope to find in an encyclopedia... somewhere.  Two: The folks over at Vampire, where they've been doing a huge upgrade for the past several months, aren't going to want this content cluttering up their article.  In fact, there used to be several times as much about Japanese vampires there (all of six sentences), and they reduced it to a few words in a larger sentence with a reference here; so "merging" this into there would simply result in information being lost - and, as I said, I think this information is worth not losing altogether.  Three: Although this article is, perhaps, just at the edge of the penumbra of mythology, it seems a good deal more relevant for anime and manga.  I wonder if the folks at Wikiproject Anime and Manga would know quite what to do with it, since, last I checked, they seemed to go in for articles about specific stories or even specific characters, whereas this is trying to be about a theme that spans multiple stories and multiple authors; but the desire to lose this article entirely looks, to this observer, like a result of viewing it too strictly in terms of mythology and folklore, which is a secondary facet of its value.  Pi zero (talk) 14:22, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * This article's information as of now is quite unreliable, IMO―inconsistent, speculative, and unsourced. Besides, just making this a redirect towards the vampire article doesn't render the content of it inaccessible anyway, so I find no problem in 'losing' the current information that the article has. If you care about the anime and manga stuff, there are more apropriate articles here like this and this. Also we can start an article like Vampires in Japanese fiction. Neko jarashi (talk) 09:46, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I can't seriously fault your assessment of the article's current content; my sense of something worth saving seems more about the implied potential than specifically what's there now. As for the practical accessibility of an article under a redirect, as a general principle you may be underestimating the "out of sight, out of mind" effect - but in this particular case, being "in sight" doesn't seem to have done much good for the content of this article over its two years of life, which rather blunts the "implied potential" theory.  Pi zero (talk) 01:34, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * There is possibility that someone shows up someday and makes this article a decent one, but still, my thought is, that this article is best served as a redirect to the vampire article, because the kyuuketsuki word mostly works as a Japanese equivalent to the English word "vampire." Plus, given that there is little to no legends about local Japanese vampires, what specifically should we talk in this article? Anime and stuff? Then articles I pointed above would serve better, because Japan≠anime. (okay, since I'm no expert in Japanese folklore, there perhaps is a notable legend or two about a vampire - in that case, I wouldn't go against you.) Neko jarashi (talk) 14:59, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Having pointed out the other side of the question, I think I can agree (with a wisp of lingering regret) that this article is going nowhere, and a redirect to Vampire is appropriate; as I suggested, if someone were likely to pick this up and do something with it, two years is plenty of time for that to have happened. In retrospect, I wonder if the article would have done better if it had been all this time under Anime and Manga rather than Mythology, on the theory that it would have been more likely to be seen by someone able and willing to do something useful with it - but that might not have made any difference, and that isn't the way things played out; at this late date, it's probably better just to let the article go for now.  The phrase "beating a dead horse" comes to mind.  Pi zero (talk) 20:31, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Merge done. Neko jarashi (talk) 16:23, 11 January 2008 (UTC) Sorry, User:Rtac reverted my edit. Neko jarashi (talk) 16:46, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
 * To make it clear at a glance that I have withdrawn my opposition, I'm crossing out the "oppose" on my original remarks. Pi zero (talk) 00:07, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'll try it again after a few days. Neko jarashi (talk) 00:32, 13 January 2008 (UTC)