As some of you may know, Romance of Three Kingdoms/Sangokushi is very popular in Japan and there are plenty of comics,video games,film..etc that are based on(or loosely based) on the novel. My question is how did it become such a staple of Japanese culture over other popular Chinese novels/myths/legends?
Growing up in Japan, I am aware that the series of video games Koei made were very popular in Japan during the 80-90's. I also remember that Yokoyama Mitsuteru's manga's were popular in the 70'-80's and I am also aware that Yoshikawa Eiji's novels(written during 1939-1943), were very influential too. I would like to know more about what happened between Eiji's novel to the manga/video adaptation in the 70-80s that made Romance of Three Kingdom so popular in Japan. I'd also like to know if there are other works written before Yoshikawa Eiji's adaptation that are influential and may have strong impact on the way Japanese people see ROTK now.
I did not find a lot of scholarly work on this in English, though I am sure it exists in Japanese, but according to Manga and the Representation by Roman Rosenbaum:
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms was imported and widely circulated, which led to its popularisation in premodern Japan. The Taiheki (A Chronicle of Grand Pacification) borrowed many stories about Zhuge Liang (181-234) from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Kusunoki Masashige (1294-1336), a general of the Southern Court, is portrayed as Zhuge Liang in medieval Japan. The dream of another general of the Southern Court, Nitta Yoshisada (1301-1338), was to become Zhuge Liang of Japan. In the sengoku period (1467-1573), military leaders studied the strategies in the Three Kingdoms. Oda Nobnuaga (1534-1582) used Zhou Yu (175-210, Wu military strategist) and Huang Gai's (?-215, Wu general) 'battered body' and sudden attack tactics at the Battle of Nagashino (1575). Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) used Zhuge Liang's 'empty-fort' strategy to cheat Takeda Shingen (1521-1573) at the Battle of Mikatagahara (1573).
There are other parallels too. Hideyoshi and Kuroda Kanbei might have been inspired by the Battle of Xiapi when they flooded Takamatsu. In sengoku period, it was not uncommon for strong warriors to be likened to famous generals of the Three Kingdoms - someone would be called "Zhang Fei of the XX clan."
The Ashikaga shoguns paid tribute to the Ming to earn legitimacy, and there was about a hundred years and fifty of licensed trade between Ming and Japan before the sengoku period, which meant the importation of Ming literature. But it was really during the Tokugawa when Chinese vernacular literature became really popular. The Tokugawa was obsessed with Neo-Confucianism and many scholars of that period had a love affair with Chinese philosophy and ideology.
A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan, Rebekah Clements:
The rising popularity of vernacular Sinitic texts in Tokugawa Japan is often attributed to Ogyu Sorai's call to read Chinese texts using Chinese pronounciation and to the work of his colleague Okajima Kanzan in the mid-eighteenth century.....Furthermore as we have seen, knowledge of vernacular Chinese was necessary in Buddhist circles, too. In Japan this meant that scholars from the temple complexes had some degree of familiarity with vernacular Chinese, either through contact with monks from China or from textual sources. The Nikko Toshogu temple records show that the monk Tenkai (1536-1643) owned numerous examples of Ming fiction, including The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West and, perhaps surprisingly for a monk's collection, even the notoriously erotic Plum in the Golden Vase.
A lot of Ming literature, like ROTK, was published and circulated in Japan during the Edo period and they were widely read. Even Yoshikawa Eiji's novel Taiko probably borrowed certain elements from Romance. For example, Hideyoshi's three visits to Takenaka Hanbei was probably inspired by Liu Bei's visits to Zhuge Liang.
If you're interested in how Romance inspired the Koei games, there is actually a book that talks about it. It's called Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History.