Japanese Call of Cthulhu Sourcebooks

For my recent trip to Tokyo, I knew I wanted to pick up some Japanese Call of Cthulhu Sourcebooks, however, once I had made a trip to the games store, I saw that it was not quite as simple as picking a book off the shelf, and saying, 'Look, now I have a book in Japanese!'  I knew I wanted the book to have some functionality, which left me with the problem of not knowing what the options were, short of using Google Lens to translate each book on the shelf one by one.

A quick google search on my phone back at the hotel (yes I should have done my research before I left, but, you know, life) left me very little the wiser, The books by enterbrain, the publisher of Japanese Call of Cthulhu, seems to fall into 2 main categories, reprints of Chaosium books, but in Japanese, and books made for the Japanese market. 

That was about as much info as I could get, as it's clear their main site is not available in English, or at least doesn't come up on my English google searches. Even now, sitting on my laptop, with time to spare, I'm not having much more luck, but that is something I want to rectify and explore through this series of blog posts.

The recent realisation among the Call of Cthulhu community on the west, that CoC is big in Japan has come together with an interest in what they seem to do differently. I want to start to explore this, firstly by looking in depth at the 2 books I picked up, then by casting the net a little wider to see what else is out there, and in doing so, let's try to lift the lid on what the differences and similarities are, and hopefully get access to new and different gaming experiences.