Eclipse Effect - Introduction

On 1st day of year 2020, at 7.31 am, the sun over Japan darkened as if due to an eclipse, but without any apparent astronomical reason. The phenomenon, which then spread across the entire globe as the Earth rotated, lasted exactly 24 hours.

In the following weeks, months and years, children endowed with supernatural or super-human abilities were born around the world, but mainly in the countries that had fought for the Axis during the Second World War. Sometimes even teenagers or young adults suddenly begin to develop similar skills (although their number is limited)

Some abilities are very obvious, such as breathing fire or manipulating gravity, others are more subtle and elegant, such as perfect aim or eidetic memory.

All this while a terrible COVID epidemic spreads across the world increasing chaos.

The world has descended into chaos. Japan even more so and has elected a militarist ultra-right party that is committed to imposing order.

In 2022, the UN decided to establish an agency to control Super-Humans, but Japan refused to join, revealing its new self-defense forces to the world. Technologies that were unthinkable until two years ago, such as cybernetics, were now the typical equipment of Japan's bionic soldiers, the ashigaru breakers, as well as ships and planes guided by advanced AI.

First it was China. The Dragon asked Japan not only to sit at the negotiating table and join the UN agency, but also to demobilize the bionic armed forces. Japan refused. A few weeks later the Chinese fleet positioned itself around the archipelago in war stance.

The turning point was 2024. Japan, perhaps believing it had American support, turned on a fusion power plant. Unlimited energy for Japan and especially for the robotic fleets and armies.

The US didn't take it well. 

United States, fearing a japanese nuclear fusion weapon, orders Japan to shut down the power plant. In front of a japanese refuse, Usa Air Force send a squad of five stealth bombers to boom fusion facilities. When they entered the Japanese Air space, the bombers, simply disappears. Without any trace. 

Terrified by what could be a japonese secret-weapon, Usa joins China in blocking the Land of the Rising Sun until it agreed to the terms of the United Nations

It seems that the imperial family was inclined to pander to the USA. The army took control of the country. On January 1, 2025, the Self-Defense Forces, calling themselves the Imperial Armed Forces, took control of Tokyo, forced the Imperial family to flee to America, and elevated a secondary branch to the throne. The chosen emperor was a six-year-old boy. Daigo. Since then, Japan has been under the control of the military government of General Naigubo Takao.

The Diet is suspended and there is virtually no trade with the outside world. However, thanks to almost miraculous robotics developed in the early 2020s, the country is self-sufficient even if, due to the birth rate decline, it has lost almost a third of its inhabitants, with entire areas uninhabited and semi-empty.

Today, more than ten years after the military coup d'état, details of censored intelligence reports and questionable TV programs are adding panic to an already tense situation. It is said, in fact, that in the most rural areas of the country, or in the abandoned corners of the large technological metropolises, creatures of Japanese myth and folklore appear. The Yokai.

From beyond the information and naval blockade operated by the allied powers of China and the USA, news is arriving that similar events could occur elsewhere, throughout the world... making many Japanese wonder whether the naval blockade is due to robotic weapons or whether there are other, more supernatural, reasons.