The great Pheasant War

A foreword

What is "the great Pheasant War"? The expression "great Pheasant War" refers to a story written thousands of years ago by unsuspecting Chinese scholars. Indeed, the origins of this story are deeply rooted in the history of the hanzi, the Chinese characters, themselves. These characters have undergone many changes since then, especially in their Japanese version, when the Japanese imported them to write their own language, turning the hanzi into what we know today as the kanji characters.
But what exactly is this story? Simply put, it is a romanced depiction of a great war opposing humanity as well as most of the animal kingdom against a malevolent turkey empire seeking world domination. Through much effort and determination, humans and allies are able to quell this threat, albeit at great cost.
If the enemy was a "turkey" empire, why call the war a Pheasant War then? The explanation lies in the sad fact that the word for "turkey" in English can also mean Turkey, the country. And since in the story, the Turkey Empire are thought to originate from Central Europe, to avoid any political misunderstanding, it has been deemed preferable to sacrifice a bit of accuracy in hope of preserving ourselves from any unwanted attention. And so we turned almost all mentions of "turkey" into "pheasant", the closest animal we could think of, hoping only that the pheasants of the world may forgive us.

More information

Let's remain in a meta explanation of how the story came to be. In today's real world, there's a man called James Heisig, famous for his work in the field of Asian Philosophy. But he is also well-known among Japanese learners because he wrote a series of books, titled "Remembering the Kanji", aiming to help readers to learn the Kanji and their meanings (and their readings, in the second volume).
The method employed in these books, developed by Heisig, consists in learning the meanings of the characters by remembering stories involving the elements of which they are formed. Each kanji is indeed formed of a number of what Heisig calls "primitive elements", usually between 2 and 5, and by using these elements to invent stories, the reader is able to more easily remember each kanji's meaning. For example, the kanji for "risk", 冒, is made of two elements, "sun" (above) and "eye" (below). By making a simple little story about a character taking the risk of looking at the 'sun' with his 'eyes', it is possible to remember that the kanji means "risk".
By learning the characters this way in a certain order, little by little, day after day, it is thus possible to remember all the kanji presented in the first volume of Remembering the Kanji, that is to say the 2100+ kanji of the official jouyou kanji list established by the Japanese government.
In early 2020, I set out with the intention to go through the whole first volume. As I went, as I wrote more and more of these little stories, I couldn't resist the temptation of weaving a greater narrative into which each kanji would depict a certain event or plot point. In the end, most kanji stories are pretty mundane, but, with a few exceptions, I like to think they all belong to the same shared "universe". And it is in this universe that the great Pheasant War takes place.

Which kanji are important?

As stated above, because of the nature of the task of writing a little story for each kanji, each story is rather mundane; here we see a child being scolded by his parents, here we see a woman picking up cherries, there we see a king sleeping on his throne. But some kanji were made of elements suggesting more than just a mundane story.
Although most kanji characters do take place in this larger narrative, a few are undoubtly more important than other; they are either hinges in the unfolding of the conflict, or simply descriptions of the daily lives of citizens suffering from the hardships brought upon their world by the war, or even depictions of pheasant artifacts. Whatever the case, these kanji are telling something directly related to the ongoing events.
The kanji that started it all was the kanji to which Professor Heisig gave the keyword "gather", 集, made of the elements "turkey" and "tree". The little story, unsuspectingly starting the whole shebang, was as follow:

""""To avoid attracting human attention, the great *turkey* empire is gathering its forces on top of *trees*. The final onslaught will begin soon.""""

Later, when reverting all the cards from RTK3, the following text was added: "The great Turkey War... has not begun yet. This was the kanji to talk about it." To be perfectly honest, I don't really remember what I meant by "This was the kanji to talk about it".

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