To San Francisco, where eigoMANGA, the typographically confusing content provider, has announced to the world that they will be doing their bit to support the troops by giving away 5,000 copies of Vanguard Princess. It’s not entirely clear to me whether these games, or rather, the freebie download codes for them, will be actually sent to soldiers on active service, since they are being dispatched via Games to Grunts, an organisation that describes itself as a Veteran Support Ecosystem. But whatever: either battle-hardened men (and women) fighting for their lives in a desert, or possibly old soldiers who like watching big-eyed girls punch each other, will now have something to distract them.

This is, by no means the first time that a company in the Japanese contents field has decided to do something for the military, although in the past people have been rather less brazen about it. Back in the days of the Gulf War, Kiseki Films used to send copies of their new releases out to the soldiers in the field, mainly because many of the staff at Kiseki used to be military men. Their marketing director, for example, once told me he used to drive a tank, although they took away the keys after he parked it on top of a captain’s car.

Manga Entertainment were similarly keen to “do something for the troops”, and would send crates of VHS tapes out to the Gulf, where they presumably entertained, disgusted or otherwise mystified bases full of squaddies desperate to know what happened in episode three of Magic Knight Rayearth.

In neither case, to the best of my knowledge, did either company ever try to make marketing capital out of it. It was a simple act of unsung charity, the sole evidence of which today is me telling you this. Although there was an odd coda several years later, when a handwritten letter arrived from a man in Baghdad, who revealed that some of the Manga Entertainment releases had been copied and re-copied so many times, that the anime fans of Iraq were very keen to buy legal copies, as the requisitioned pirate editions they’d been watching were almost unintelligible.

Perhaps I am wrong, but it’s difficult to imagine that people who’ve been in a dug-out for six weeks dodging ISIS will have much of an interest in “ten girls with unique fighting skills” or using the story mode to “navigate the adventures of a Vanguard Princess.” But maybe eigoMANGA would like to send a copy to the US Army’s Commander-in-Chief…? I bet he’d tweet all sorts of fun things about it.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #179, 2020.