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Ayabito and Neo Japanese Trad
First, eight billion disclaimers. I am not Japanese, I haven't lived in Japan for many years now, this is not an ethnography (auto- or otherwise) about "How Japanese People Play RPGs", this is not based on a thorough review of Japanese actual play content (of which, due to a quirk of history, there is a surprising amount available, and that's actually something I'd love to do some day), and I'm not attempting to repeat or inform anyone about an idea or ideas that Japanese gamers may hold about the way that they play.
I'm using the word "trad" here to draw a parallel to its use in English-language discourse, namely: to identify a social construct that refers to a hypothetical mode of play whose existence and nature was formed by piecing together concepts gleaned from the hermeneutics of primary and supplementary game texts (such as rules texts and advice columns, respectively), participant and author reports (sometimes second- or third-hand), and the like; as with many categorical definitions, game texts that appear to align with the hypothesised play mode and people who express an affinity for said play mode or game texts might also be called by the term "trad", but it fundamentally is meant to refer to a hypothetical mode of play which exists (or doesn't!) regardless of the people participating in it being aware of it as a distinct object or form.
Whew. So...
Japanese Trad
Back when Andy K. was far more active in the online RPG community and busy promoting the games he was translating and publishing, he did a lot of explainers on podcasts and forums introducing people to some of the more unique aspects about RPGs and RPG play culture in Japan, in part (I imagine) to explain how these games fit into it, and how they ended up being designed the way they did.
A big thing for Andy was the pressure that Japanese cultural norms about private and public space put on people's ability to play; it's harder to just casually invite a group of your friends over to your home (to say nothing of friends-of-friends or even strangers), and so for many people finding places to even play RPGs was difficult. They might rent karaoke boxes by the hour, or organise sporadic "conventions" (more like one-day gaming meetups, usually with two ~4-hour sessions and a break between them), but regardless, this resulted in a push for a way of playing that could offer a satisfying and complete experience in a short amount of time.
This put a lot of pressure on GMs, to keep play moving and relevant and concise, which was another responsibility on top of the already largely GM-centric play culture inherited from the (mostly American) RPGs that had seeded the hobby in Japan in the first place: games like Runequest, post-Dragonlance D&D (and especially its legally distinct Japanese cousin, Sword World), Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, and of course the early Japanese imitators that often did not fall all that far from the trees that spawned them.
Early Japanese RPG theory/advice also often took on a theatrical bent, likening the GM to a director who would set scenes, move actors (PCs) around on the stage, and generally exert a large level of control over the events of play. In some older texts you can find techniques like limiting PCs to one major roll per scene to exert their influence, or even rules for a character being able to break into a scene in which they weren't originally meant to appear. As much as this collection of rules/techniques/procedures/advice can be called a coherent play style, as a point of historical comparison, I refer to this as "Japanese Trad," but I don't think anyone else does that or cares. Regardless...
Ayabito
So I played Ayabito last week. It's a Japanese game that came out a year or two ago, set in Taishou-era Japan; after the end of a major war between youkai and humans, youkai are starting to integrate into human society. Players take on the role of "Ayabito" (might as well just translate this as "Witchers"), special teams of youkai and humans whose job it is to seek out and stop oni from doing bad oni things.
The GM preps a scenario that consists of Threads (scenes that drive the story forward) and Scraps (scenes that provide supplemental information about important characters or items that may be part of the scenario). Both are keyed to a specific character type (Youkai, Human, or Hanyou--half-human, half-youkai) that restricts who can "unlock" it, along with a skill and the number of successes you need to roll to successfully unlock it (Stat + Skill D6 dice pool). We were playing with them written on cards, with the front consisting of all the mechanical info and a lead-in relating to how it fits into the greater scenario story; the back had the rest of the story that gets revealed once you successfully unlock it.
Threads will unlock more threads and/or Scraps, and players play in turns where they can pick a Thread/Scrap to unlock, do a Hangout scene with another character (PC or NPC) to increase your Bond level with them, or to Meditate (which recovers all damage and gains 1 Fate point, which are a communal resource that can be used to bump dice rolls up or down). After a set number of turns, you get shuffled into a final battle regardless of how much story you've unlocked, although if you fail to unlock all of the relevant Threads, the last boss becomes harder to defeat.
Neo Japanese Trad
And so the big thing that Andy meant to highlight with those stories about the pressures that finding space to play put on Japanese gamers, was that many of those techniques and people's experiences of play got boiled down into newer games that didn't just include them as guidelines or tips on how to run/play a game, but actually had them embedded directly into the core procedures of play. It's been a few years since Andy was last out talking about this, but I feel like since then that a few isolated but interesting games that had caught his eye have coalesced into a more clearly identifiable design language.
The thing I call "Neo Japanese Trad" is a kind of procedurally-driven, storygamified version of "GM Story Hour" (a big part of the Anglo "trad" play where the play involves the GM prepping some sort of at-least-vaguely-plotted story that the players are expected to play through). There's often some element of currency accumulation/manipulation (such as Bonds and Fates in Ayabito), balancing the progression of the story with gathering the necessary resources you need to mechanically succeed at the challenges you're presented with in play. It's a bit like Fate, but with more flexible arcs than the "accept compels to win" mono-arc of Fate.
The thing I really, really like about NJT is how it's absolutely shameless about putting the "breadcrumbs" of GM Story Hour on full display, as objects that you're encouraged to overtly interact with. I think it's a very refined vision of what happens when you take the plot (that is, the causal relationship between the events of a story) out of the Fruitful Void where most roleplayers put it (for a lot of them, it's seemingly the only place it can go and the only thing that can go there), reconfiguring the focus of play not on "What happens?" but "How does it happen?" And it achieves this by giving players lots of touchpoints to draw in to explaining how: relationships with other characters (PCs and NPCs), your character's own individual traits, thematically appropriate fictional elements conjured up by rolls on tables (it's common for the process of scene-framing to include a roll on a table to choose the place/circumstances of the scene), etc...
Okay, and...?
I dunno, that's all I got. Go buy a copy of Shinobigami and play it, I guess. It's arguably the game that was most important for solidifying this style of play in the first place, and it's actually available in English to boot.
I'm using the word "trad" here to draw a parallel to its use in English-language discourse, namely: to identify a social construct that refers to a hypothetical mode of play whose existence and nature was formed by piecing together concepts gleaned from the hermeneutics of primary and supplementary game texts (such as rules texts and advice columns, respectively), participant and author reports (sometimes second- or third-hand), and the like; as with many categorical definitions, game texts that appear to align with the hypothesised play mode and people who express an affinity for said play mode or game texts might also be called by the term "trad", but it fundamentally is meant to refer to a hypothetical mode of play which exists (or doesn't!) regardless of the people participating in it being aware of it as a distinct object or form.
Whew. So...
Japanese Trad
Back when Andy K. was far more active in the online RPG community and busy promoting the games he was translating and publishing, he did a lot of explainers on podcasts and forums introducing people to some of the more unique aspects about RPGs and RPG play culture in Japan, in part (I imagine) to explain how these games fit into it, and how they ended up being designed the way they did.
A big thing for Andy was the pressure that Japanese cultural norms about private and public space put on people's ability to play; it's harder to just casually invite a group of your friends over to your home (to say nothing of friends-of-friends or even strangers), and so for many people finding places to even play RPGs was difficult. They might rent karaoke boxes by the hour, or organise sporadic "conventions" (more like one-day gaming meetups, usually with two ~4-hour sessions and a break between them), but regardless, this resulted in a push for a way of playing that could offer a satisfying and complete experience in a short amount of time.
This put a lot of pressure on GMs, to keep play moving and relevant and concise, which was another responsibility on top of the already largely GM-centric play culture inherited from the (mostly American) RPGs that had seeded the hobby in Japan in the first place: games like Runequest, post-Dragonlance D&D (and especially its legally distinct Japanese cousin, Sword World), Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, and of course the early Japanese imitators that often did not fall all that far from the trees that spawned them.
Early Japanese RPG theory/advice also often took on a theatrical bent, likening the GM to a director who would set scenes, move actors (PCs) around on the stage, and generally exert a large level of control over the events of play. In some older texts you can find techniques like limiting PCs to one major roll per scene to exert their influence, or even rules for a character being able to break into a scene in which they weren't originally meant to appear. As much as this collection of rules/techniques/procedures/advice can be called a coherent play style, as a point of historical comparison, I refer to this as "Japanese Trad," but I don't think anyone else does that or cares. Regardless...
Ayabito
So I played Ayabito last week. It's a Japanese game that came out a year or two ago, set in Taishou-era Japan; after the end of a major war between youkai and humans, youkai are starting to integrate into human society. Players take on the role of "Ayabito" (might as well just translate this as "Witchers"), special teams of youkai and humans whose job it is to seek out and stop oni from doing bad oni things.
The GM preps a scenario that consists of Threads (scenes that drive the story forward) and Scraps (scenes that provide supplemental information about important characters or items that may be part of the scenario). Both are keyed to a specific character type (Youkai, Human, or Hanyou--half-human, half-youkai) that restricts who can "unlock" it, along with a skill and the number of successes you need to roll to successfully unlock it (Stat + Skill D6 dice pool). We were playing with them written on cards, with the front consisting of all the mechanical info and a lead-in relating to how it fits into the greater scenario story; the back had the rest of the story that gets revealed once you successfully unlock it.
Threads will unlock more threads and/or Scraps, and players play in turns where they can pick a Thread/Scrap to unlock, do a Hangout scene with another character (PC or NPC) to increase your Bond level with them, or to Meditate (which recovers all damage and gains 1 Fate point, which are a communal resource that can be used to bump dice rolls up or down). After a set number of turns, you get shuffled into a final battle regardless of how much story you've unlocked, although if you fail to unlock all of the relevant Threads, the last boss becomes harder to defeat.
Neo Japanese Trad
And so the big thing that Andy meant to highlight with those stories about the pressures that finding space to play put on Japanese gamers, was that many of those techniques and people's experiences of play got boiled down into newer games that didn't just include them as guidelines or tips on how to run/play a game, but actually had them embedded directly into the core procedures of play. It's been a few years since Andy was last out talking about this, but I feel like since then that a few isolated but interesting games that had caught his eye have coalesced into a more clearly identifiable design language.
The thing I call "Neo Japanese Trad" is a kind of procedurally-driven, storygamified version of "GM Story Hour" (a big part of the Anglo "trad" play where the play involves the GM prepping some sort of at-least-vaguely-plotted story that the players are expected to play through). There's often some element of currency accumulation/manipulation (such as Bonds and Fates in Ayabito), balancing the progression of the story with gathering the necessary resources you need to mechanically succeed at the challenges you're presented with in play. It's a bit like Fate, but with more flexible arcs than the "accept compels to win" mono-arc of Fate.
The thing I really, really like about NJT is how it's absolutely shameless about putting the "breadcrumbs" of GM Story Hour on full display, as objects that you're encouraged to overtly interact with. I think it's a very refined vision of what happens when you take the plot (that is, the causal relationship between the events of a story) out of the Fruitful Void where most roleplayers put it (for a lot of them, it's seemingly the only place it can go and the only thing that can go there), reconfiguring the focus of play not on "What happens?" but "How does it happen?" And it achieves this by giving players lots of touchpoints to draw in to explaining how: relationships with other characters (PCs and NPCs), your character's own individual traits, thematically appropriate fictional elements conjured up by rolls on tables (it's common for the process of scene-framing to include a roll on a table to choose the place/circumstances of the scene), etc...
Okay, and...?
I dunno, that's all I got. Go buy a copy of Shinobigami and play it, I guess. It's arguably the game that was most important for solidifying this style of play in the first place, and it's actually available in English to boot.