Fat, raccoon-faced, and with the severed head of one of his enemies at his feet, Ieyasu Tokugawa, Japan’s mightiest shogun, hardly looks like a heartthrob. Yet this is the image of him that confronts awestruck young women when they travel to the village of Sekigahara in central Japan.

There, in 1600, Tokugawa used brilliant tactics—and treachery—to win the deciding battle in a civil war that enabled him to found a 265-year ruling dynasty. Now young women are turning him, and the warlords who fought against him, into objects of hero worship. “It’s like a samurai boom,” says a curator at the local museum. “The young women seem to adore the codes of loyalty and friendship by which the samurai lived.”

Who says video games poison the minds of the young? The phenomenon of the “history-loving women” is the serendipitous offshoot of a Japanese video game called “Sengoku Basara” (Devil Kings), which has the usual male fare of flashing swords, castles and conquests.

What is different, says its creator, Hiroyuki Kobayashi of Capcom, an Osaka-based gaming company, is that there is no severing of limbs or gushing of blood. Moreover, the characters are brave, noble and, above all, attractive—even if their namesakes bore few of these qualities in real life (see picture below).

To his surprise, Mr Kobayashi found himself besieged by women smitten with the characters—sometimes over their boyfriends’ hunched shoulders. Besides the good looks, they said they yearned for the sense of adventure and honour of the medieval era. From a gaming point of view, he may have stumbled upon a badly needed new source of revenue. Women rarely play action video games, but, when they do, tend to be more loyal to a game (men apparently bore sooner of slashing their enemies to bits).

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