Meiji Japan is kinda weird.

[Verenti]

By which, I mean there are some weird things in the civ.
First of all, their unique buildings "ginkou" and (mispelled) "jukougyou". These aren't historically Japanese unique types of buildings. Ginkou means bank. Jukougyou means heavy industry.

I imagine this will be very confusing in the Japanese translation when asked to choose between building a bank and building a bank.

Himiko, not Meiji Japan, is also kinda weird. It's not known if she existed, giving her a sort of King Arthur vibe. I've heard it speculated that because she only appears in CHINESE histories that maybe she was actually an amalgamation of several regional kings or otherwise distinct rulers that Chinese historians didn't really know about so they just told this story of a mysterious island nation ruled by a divine queen.

This is why one of the recent Tomb Raider games Himiko was a god like figure that possessed one of your friends. She's mythical. And Firaxis knows this which is why she appeared in Civ 6 as a Mythic unit. It's like making Sun Wukong the leader of China or, as said, King Arthur, the leader of Britain. While I'm not opposed to seeing Hercules rule Greece, it is a bit odd.

[plaguepenguin]

I suspect that one of the senior people in Firaxis is a big Tomb Raider fan.

Okay, sure it might seem odd to make that a criterion for choosing leaders, but, what other criteria can they use that don't lead to both odd results and inconvenient associations?

It's even worse for choice of civs, since a lot of people project onto the selection process some sort of judgment and rank ordering of a nation's, or a society's, or an ethnic group's (or whatever odd thing the civs are supposed to represent) worth, or "impact on history".

The devs end up choosing leaders and civs mostly to create a variety of game-play possibilities, and maybe, as with Himiko, because they had a nice experience playing Tomb Raider. Then they reduce their chosen leaders and civs to an amazingly reductive stereotype, because this is a game, not reality, so everything gets reduced to the one dimension it needs to be to allow it to be meshed in with all the other features in a complex game. Greece can never be, in any game, anything but a set of very odd choices of characteristics.

Add on top of that choice by variety of game play possibilities, the attempt to meet the expectations of some of the game's fans that the civs and leaders should be of a certain supposed importance that justifies their playing the game -- and you're going to get odd results from that process.

[parent child bowl]

Himiko is also mentioned in the Samguk sagi.

I'd argue that she isn't less likely to have existed than Kupe.

[Verenti]

It's odd that she's not recorded in Japanese history though. Typically, those countries that a person is from has some record of their existence.

Beyond that, while yes, in Japanese today, 和 is associated with Japan, in the history, Himiko's island kingdom of Yamatai isn't really stated where it exists. Historians don't know. Is it Japan itself? Is it Okinawa? Is it a different Island?

I don't know much about Kupe and I don't know the Samguk sagi at all, but I'm guessing from the word structure that it's a Korean source. But the things we do know about Japan's history makes an omission at that time period a little suspicious for me.

[jodnus]

The civvii webpage does acknowledge that she is from 'folk history'

It is an odd choice, given the subdued realism the art direction this iteration of the game has taken.

Not complaining, and it is kind of fun to have a leader that has a mystique that is borderline magical