Looking at Various Illustrations of the Hakkenshi / the Eight Dog Warriors

August 17, 2026

I have always told myself,

“Politics and the economy are not things I can do anything about by myself. All I can do is focus on what I am capable of doing right now.”

And yet, look at the mess I have made of things this month.

“I couldn’t stop myself from overspending on PixAI, nor could I control the money I wasted on overeating and excessive drinking.

In the end, I even had to sell some of my stocks just to cover my credit card payments.

That goes against the principles of dollar-cost averaging, and it also goes against my own belief in contributing to society through investment.

I’m really disappointed in myself.”

Recently, I have often been calming myself down by listening to The Song of Hakaider while carefully looking at the group illustrations I commissioned from that artist:

“The Hakkenshi of the Harem Protagonists”

and

“The Hakkenshi of the Girls und Panzer Captains.”

(I mean the versions in which each of them is showing their spirit bead.)

Apparently, though, even that is not enough.

Originally, these two projects were simply intended to be

“prototypes for finding an efficient way to spread Hakkenden overseas.”

But lately, I have become quite emotionally attached to them.

Whenever I have some free time, I often search Google for terms such as

“Hakkenden”

“Hakkenshi”

“The Eight Dog Warriors”

as well as the names of the individual Hakkenshi written in Roman letters.

The important point here is that I search in Roman letters rather than Japanese characters.

Part of the reason is that I think,

“Foreigners who are interested in Hakkenden and the Hakkenshi must also be searching for them on Google in Roman letters rather than in Japanese.

I want to know how high our Hakkenshi-related articles and works appear in those Google search results.”

(Incidentally, when I search using Japanese characters, my articles and works tend to appear much farther down in the search results.)

When I actually check the results, I suppose we are doing reasonably well.

Since Hakkenden is fairly well known in Japan, Hakkenshi characters also appear in works such as

Tokyo Afterschool Summoners

Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East.

To be perfectly frank, I would like our own Hakkenshi to be able to compete with them as well.

But before worrying about that, I probably need to learn to be satisfied with simply searching Google in English and enjoying that artist’s Hakkenshi illustrations—and try not to spend any more money than necessary.

Come to think of it, apparently an artist named Kimura Naomi created artwork based on Nansō Satomi Hakkenden and exhibited it at last year’s Osaka Expo.