How should I put this?
There was a lot I wanted to say, but I didn't know where to start.
So I'll just say whatever comes to mind.
If I copied the original plot all the way through and only made tiny changes, writing would be easy for me, but I'm guessing reading it definitely wouldn't be enjoyable for you.
Because I'm a longtime bookworm myself, and if I were in your shoes, I definitely wouldn't enjoy reading that.
So I made some small changes to things in Hokage Ninja that I personally found a little unreasonable, or not quite logical-what everyone calls fan-created settings.
And my readers with their off-the-charts IQs have probably already guessed that, as the story develops according to these settings, some later content will definitely change along with them.
I'm explaining this in advance because I'm worried someone will tell me it doesn't match the original.
Of course, when it comes to the broader setting, distinctive characters, and other things where changes would affect the reading experience, I'll avoid touching them as much as possible.
When you write fanfiction, you're relying on someone else's work to make a living, so you should still respect the original.
For example, I found an amazing video creator online who calculated Konoha's approximate area at 400,000 square meters.
At first, that sounds pretty big, but convert it and it's only 0.4 square kilometers.
With such a tiny patch of land, how many people could they possibly cram into it?
In case you can't picture it, let me give you a real-world comparison.
My village is tiny, with only a little over 800 people. Read that carefully: a little over 800 people, not 800 households.
Even so, it covers nearly 1.5 square kilometers.
Subtract the farmland, which takes up over half the area, and there are still 0.7 square kilometers left. And that's for just over 800 people.
For another example, you've all probably heard of Vatican City.
[Area] 0.44 square kilometers.
[Population] 764 permanent residents.
You should have a vivid picture in your heads now, right?
Think about how many people could fit into 0.4 square kilometers. Konoha isn't exactly packed with skyscrapers hundreds of stories tall.
So how did they later keep sending out tens of thousands of people at a time?
Where did those people live?
What, was Konoha a futuristic doomsday city with a few floors aboveground and hundreds below?
And don't tell me Japan's real-world territory is small.
That has nothing to do with manga. There's no necessary connection between the two.
On the contrary, people from countries with such small territories yearn even more for vast lands. Which popular Japanese manga doesn't exaggerate the size of its world to high heaven?
Take Dragon Ball. One universe was no longer enough to contain all the action, so it had twelve universes, and even parallel timelines.
Ahem, back to the point...
I couldn't find figures online for things like the Shinobi World's total population or total area.
I had no choice. To make the worldbuilding complete and logically consistent, I could only make them up myself.
Besides, we Chinese readers like lively, large-scale scenes.
So I could only make the population and area larger.
Only with a big enough world and enough people would the fighting be fun to read.
Otherwise, wars between villages would really just look like gang fights with a dozen or twenty people on each side. There'd be nothing interesting about that.
It would feel like middle schoolers arranging a fight in a school's public restroom, without enough room to turn around or stretch their legs.
I put together a simple framework.
(Of course, if you have more reasonable settings later, you can tell me.
Be quick, though. While the word count is still low, I can make changes easily. Once it gets higher, that'll be harder.)
The preliminary setting is that the landmass in the Hokage world is ten times Japan's area, or 3.78 million square kilometers-roughly half the size of Australia.
That's mainly because ninja generally travel on foot when deployed. Make the area any bigger, and it could easily break immersion.
The Five Great Nations account for 85 percent of the total land area, or 3.213 million square kilometers.
I checked the Shinobi World map.
Of the Five Great Nations, the Land of Water looked the smallest.
So I'll use the Land of Water as the baseline.
Based on what the map showed, I made some rough estimates by eye. They might be a little off, so bear with me.
The Land of Earth is nine times the size of the Land of Water.
The Land of Wind is six times the size of the Land of Water.
The Land of Fire and the Land of Lightning are about the same size, so I'll count both as five times the size of the Land of Water.
9 + 6 + 5 + 5 + 1 = 26
Divide 321.3 square kilometers evenly into twenty-six parts, and that gives us the areas of the Five Great Nations.
The Land of Earth: 1.112 million square kilometers.
The Land of Wind: 742,000 square kilometers.
The Land of Fire: 618,000 square kilometers.
The Land of Lightning: 618,000 square kilometers.
The Land of Water: 124,000 square kilometers.
Since this is a Japanese manga, I'll use Japan's current total population: 124 million.
The people of the Shinobi World are constantly at war, and productivity can't keep up either, so a population over a hundred million is already pushing the limit.
Any more, and the Shinobi World really couldn't feed them.
(Later, I'll need to... a lot of people. I'd feel bad going too hard on anyone else, and this makes it feel more immersive!)
Of that, the Five Great Nations account for 75 percent of the total population, or 93 million people.
Then I'll divide those 93 million among the Five Great Nations according to how rich their resources are.
The Land of Fire has the richest resources, so it gets 40 percent: 37.2 million people.
The Land of Water borders the sea and ranks second in resource abundance, so it gets 25 percent: 23.25 million people.
The Land of Lightning and the Land of Earth are about the same, both ranking near the bottom in resources, with neither in a position to laugh at the other. So each gets 15 percent, or 13.95 million people apiece.
The Land of Wind is the most barren, with deserts everywhere. Even if I gave it more people, it couldn't feed them, so I'll give it just 5 percent, or 4.65 million people.
Since there are so many people, I didn't set a fixed ratio of ninja to ordinary people.
My idea is simply to give each nation a fixed number of ninja.
Wasn't the later Allied Shinobi Forces of the five nations said to number over eighty thousand, nearly ninety thousand?
Then I'll take that at face value.
Using ninety thousand, the others each contribute 18,500, while Sunagakure contributes 16,000.
The Land of Iron's people aren't ninja, so they count as extras.
Not every country in the Shinobi World participated in this alliance. It was only the Five Great Nations, with the Land of Iron as a little extra.
Looking at it that way, when sending the allied forces out, they couldn't possibly mobilize everyone. At most, they'd send some more of their high-end fighters, to avoid having someone else raid their home bases.
Generally speaking, unless nations are fighting a war of annihilation against each other.
Otherwise, an army sent on a punitive expedition wouldn't exceed 30 percent of the nation's total military forces.
Any more than that would start to affect the balance of domestic security.
So, apart from the Land of Wind, I'll give each of the other four nations around a hundred thousand ninja. The Land of Wind is a little weaker, so I'll set its ninja population at around eighty thousand.
The proportions of ninja ranks can be fixed.
Under the normal setting, the ratio of Jonin, Chunin, and Genin is 1:3:6.
The other four nations each have ten thousand Jonin, thirty thousand Chunin, and sixty thousand Genin.
The Land of Wind's proportions get a slight adjustment: nine thousand Jonin, twenty-four thousand Chunin, and forty-seven thousand Genin.
For Konoha's setting, I used Macau as a reference.
Macau has an area of thirty-three square kilometers and a population of 690,000.
So Konoha's area expands from 400,000 square meters to forty square kilometers.
Its population is tentatively set at 300,000.
Of those, around fifty thousand are ninja, and 250,000 are ordinary people. The ratio is one to five.
The remaining fifty thousand ninja are spread throughout the Land of Fire, stationed at its borders, or dispatched abroad as spies.
The other villages have about as many ninja as Konoha, but because their conditions are worse, their total populations are all set at around 150,000, with a ratio of one ninja to two ordinary people.
With these basic figures, writing the rest will be much easier.
I won't go into too much detail about the other odds and ends here.
That's it for now, then.
If necessary, we can talk more later.
Well, everyone, see you in the main story!