The most satisfying collections are sometimes the most complicated, complex ones.

My growing collection of Yanoman’s ‘Demon’s Chronicle’ mini-figures is certainly the most involved collection that I have. Not only does each subsequent set need to be imported from poorly-translated overseas websites (since I haven’t found any US shops that stock these, due to their very limited appeal), but each and every surreal, creepy character in each set is so obscure and mysterious that I feel the need to hunt down the origin of each and every one – which often involves translating things both from Japanese and Latin, with a whole lot of help from Google Translate and my unending supply of patience.

Did you know that there’s an actual, biblical angel that’s just a ball of wings? Well, there is – and Yanoman made a mini-figure of it. While their Demon’s Chronicle sets vacillate between mythology, the Bible and folklore, they’re always full of really unique, tiny sculptures, which is the real selling point for me.

This most recent set, Exercitus Caelestis, when translated loosely from the Latin, revolves around the idea of ‘Heavenly Armies’. From what I can tell, much of the set deals with creatures and people that were servants and second-in-command to various deities and demons. There are ten figures total, each one being presented in both painted and ‘unpainted’, beige colors, as well as an 11th mystery figure. Every figure comes with a descriptive card – written in Japanese. I ordered a case from Hong Kong, and unfortunately, due to a manufacturing error, I was stuck with a few pieces that didn’t fit together correctly, and one beat up figure that was shoved into a box with a completely incorrect card. This kind of quality control issue is really unusual, and the first batch of problems I’ve had since I started collecting these.

This first figure is a four-headed, angelic creature – having the heads of a human, a lion, a bull and a bird. According to a loose translation, he’s of the genus ‘Cherubim Cherubim’, and his description talks about ‘tanks of the sky with shining wheels’. This creature is mentioned in ‘The Chronicles Akira Hazime’, apparently, though the only coherent website I can find assigns that name to a Japanese erotic model, and a passing reference to the ‘million Emperor calendar’. So, that particular search has hit a premature dead end. All I’m left with is a four-headed freakout angel.

On the other hand, this second angel translates to ‘The Archangel Gabriel’, the biblical messenger of God, and an easy guy to find out a lot about in English.

The cherub on the two-headed dragon isn’t quite so straightforward. Translated from the Japanese, this guy is literally ‘Tatsuko varakku’, from ‘The Chronicles Antinora’, and a mention of the word ‘setsuzou’, which translates to ‘snow sculpture’. There’s also mention of the word ‘Acheron’, which is a river in Greece once believed to flow into the underworld. A little more digging (okay, a few more hours’ worth), and I figured out that ‘Antinora’ was only a phonetic translation, and I should have been looking for ‘Antenora’ – a part of the river to Hades.

So, who’s the baby? Probably something evil, but honestly, it’s another search that’s come up empty.

The cat playing the French horn is a little more penetrable, translating to ‘Cat Bireto no Tsukaima’, or ‘the cat familiar of Bireto’. Now, if ‘BERUZEBURU’ is a phonetic translation of ‘Baelzebub’ and ‘BERIARU’ is probably Belial, one can assume that the phonetic ‘Bireto’ is either ‘Beleth’ or ‘Berith’, both dukes of hell. Because of the limitations of the Japanese language in expressing English sounds, either option is equally likely. Unfortunately, I can’t find any relationship between wither of them and a musical cat, so my search temporarily comes to an end.

Days later, and toggling between Google Translate and Babelfish, I still only have a superficial understanding of these things in my collection. And I kinda like that mystery. I don’t know what this stuff is, I don’t know when or if any more are going to come out, I don’t know where I’ll buy them – but I know that I like these surreal little vignettes. Bring on lucky part XIII!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.