User:RabbiTechno/Sylvanian Families

If you go down to the woods today, you'd better... hope none of the locals mistake you for a drug dealer moving into their territory. Note that none of the members of this group of Sylvanian Families bears has more than three fingers per hand. The evidence begins to mount.

Sylvanian Families is the name given to a range of Japanese toys, known in their native country as シルバニアファミリ (Shirubania famirii), in the English-speaking world. The toys, unleashed upon the world in 1985, feature several groups or "families" of animals including rabbits, mice, badgers, cats, foxes and hedgehogs and a wide range of accessories is available so that the manufacturers can screw every last penny out of harassed parents collectors can create detailed scenes and imaginary siutations using the variety of houses, cars, boats and other items available.

Some parents have raised questions as to whether the Sylvanian Families offer any educational value, most notably querying whether children should be "taught" that fluffy animals live in houses, drive cars, sail boats and so on. ToyCorp. of Tokyo, who produce the toys, however, counter by stating that the toys do have educational value as they are based on reality, being closely modelled on the real life Shirubania Famirii, a famous family of "entrepreneurs" from Tokyo.

So just who are this Shirubania Famirii, and how exactly did a family of woodland creatures - more typically found inhabiting damp holes in the ground - find themselves in a position to purchase a series of palatial forest homes and stylish classic cars? The truth makes for disturbing reading, and when little Jenny hands you her letter to Santa this Christmas you may find yourself thinking long and hard about whether the Sylvanian Families are really a suitable toy for an eight-year-old girl.

How did a family of uneducated woodland creatures, with no taxable income, come to own vast mansions such as this in the prime real estate surrounding Tokyo?

The Early Days

The early history of Tokyo is well known - a defenceless fishing village that found itself subject to an inexplicable increase in monster attacks and decided that it would need to become a worldwide hub of industry and commerce in order to afford the great financial burden of the sophisticated anti-monster systems it required. In those days, the towering city of skyscrapers was still a long way into the future and the tallest building in the region was the double-height hut used to dry out seaweed. The urban sprawl that so characterises the great metropolis of today was yet to happen, for Tokyo consisted in its entirety of just thirty thatched dwellings, a massage parlour and a shop selling nothing but comic books featuring pre-pubescent girls dressed in maid's outfits having sex with cephalopods. Yet, despite the presence of this store, the people of Tokyo were unhappy for the monster attacks had proved to be greatly disruptive to everyday life and so it was that the council of village elders established a series of criteria designed to be advantageous to companies wishing to settle in the area, thus creating tax revenue that could be used to fund the monster prevention program.

Meanwhile, hungry eyes watched the development from the bamboo forests surrounding the embryonic city: a group of animals had tired of fighting tooth and claw, spending their days in the neverending search for food while all the while never knowing when they themselves might form a meal for some larger beast, and they decided that they too wanted a piece of the economic action. However, as animals they were afforded only the lowest social ranking in a nation split into many intricate hierarchical strata and as a result found that even those among them who were able to demonstrate financial prowess were able to find employment in Tokyo's nascent banks and commercial insititutions. Some of them, finding the human world of high finance too hectic, gave up and returned to their traditional lives; but others simply became even more determined.

The Sylvanian Families have a highly romanticised image in Western popular media, but the reality is very different and a great deal more violent. Tokyo's police deal with several new victims of drive-by punishment shootings every day, and few who find themselves targeted by the Families survive.

Among those that did not give up were the Bakuto, a family of badgers and as such among the lowest of the low due to being little more than a sort of very large, stinky weasel. But despite their social status, badgers - as anyone who has ever taken had to take their pitbull to the veterinary surgery after it stuck its snout into a badger's sett will be well aware, are not an animal to be messed with. Utterly without fear, the Bakuto established a gambling den in a shady Tokyo backstreet, with family members providing security. Gambling was strictly illegal in Japan at that time and those found guilty of facilitating it faced stiff penalties, included death by beheading, so the establishment soon came to attention of the police who mounted an ill-fated raid on the premises during October 1679. As officers entered the building, they immediately faced resistance far greater than they had expected and were forced to retreat within minutes. Members of the Bakuto family, supported by members of other families with whom they had formed an allegiance, persued them into the street and so began a shoot-out that lasted for almost days and which has become an infamous event in Japanese history. Eventually, the police were forced to give up - more than three quarters of their number had been slain. From that point onward, they turned a blind eye to the Bakuto and their unlawful activities, adopting a softly-softly "keep quiet and we'll pretend you don't exist" approach

It was not long before the Bakuto owned and ran a number of similar establishments throughout Tokyo which had by now grown considerably and historians estimate that, by the early years of the 18th Century, the family controlled the lucrative gambling scene in the city. They had also begun to branch out into other areas including prostitution - it is estimated that around a thousand brothels were owned by the family, a percentage of the total that steadily increased as brothels under non-Bakuto ownership suffered a series of mysterious, highly destructive fires (Tokyo's fire service were unable to extinguish these fires, claiming that the narrow streets upon which the brothels tended to be located prevented them effectively tackling the blazes). Brothel ownership placed the family in an ideal position to also move into the opium trade and also to take advantage of the lucrative hentai market, for which they formed a partnership with the Squiroshi-kai, a family of squirrels that, using the extreme savagery in dealing with opponents that had made them feared throughout the city, had for some years controlled the production of this type of material (aided no end by the marriage between 神経過敏なひげ, daughter of Squiroshi-kai boss 柔らかい耳, to ネバネバしたたわ言, male heir of the Squidoshi dynasty.)

Into the Modern Era

Due to the nature of their operations, the Shirubania Famirii preferred to keep all their activities covert and as such they did not come to the attention of the public until the latter years of the 19th Century when they became engaged in a long, blood-thirsty and highly publicised war with arch-enemies the Hello Kitty Organisation.

The HKO began some years previously, originally as a legitimate business marketing a range of pink things designed to appeal to Japanese teenage girls. However, this was deemed unsatisfactory and the outfit's bosses began moving into areas, some of them distinctly shady, which soon brought them into direct competition with the Shirubania Famirii who did not take kindly to this encroach upon their own business. Soon, small localised battles began breaking out when young Famirii members ran into HKO members on Tokyo's streets. Things moved up a notch and became considerably more worrying when, one night, a Famirii-owned restaurant mysteriously caught fire while gang leader おそらく得られた狂犬病's beloved daughter was dining in the restaurant. Although it was never proved that the HKO had started the blaze, Famirii boss 糞便は肛門の毛皮に付いた nevertheless sought retribution - that very night, more than ninety HKO operations throughout the city were torched and hundreds of the organisation's members were killed, in most cases by being fatally slashed with katana swords.

Yet this was not the event that turned gangland skirmishes into out-and-out warfare. 糞便は肛門の毛皮に付いた wished to strike right at the heart of the HKO and so, while attention was diverted to the fires breaking out across Tokyo, he sent a team of ninjas to the HKO leader's compound. Under cover of darkness, they somehow slipped past the private army guarding おそらく得られた狂犬病's secure compound, gained entry to his private quarters and removed the battery from his very favourite Tamagotchi which he had kept alive for more than three months, the longest he had ever managed, and in doing so killed it. おそらく得られた狂犬病 was furious and in response sent 糞便は肛門の毛皮に付いた a letter declaring war. That letter has, remarkably, survived and is reproduced below.