About the Touhou University Network

How Did We Get Here?

When I was a freshman, I joined a school Discord server and saw somebody with an Okuu profile picture. It turns out that he was my neighbor in the dorms! We had the crazy idea of starting a Touhou club, and a quick dive into the other Discords at our university yielded quite a few more people than I expected. We gathered five people together, started the club, made it official in a year, and kept on growing it!

During university orientation day, I remember spotting a sign saying "You only need 5 people to start a club!". I told my best friend about it; we are still Touhou fans and love finding and placing Touhou hijacks (thank you Delta for making us interested in Touhou hijacks). So, a spark came about in us: "What if we started a club? At least just to put a funny Touhou hijack at our university!" We roped in as many people as we could that had a passing interest in Touhou, and started the club!

A small conversation in a server led yukko and I (Delta) to connect the dots of us both running Touhou clubs, so we shared our clubs with each other. We joined each other's servers, chatted a bit, and that was it - all we knew was that there was at least one other Touhou club out there. While we were egging on someone to found their own Touhou club, yukko mentioned an "alliance of anglophone touhou project societies."A week later, a casual conversation in my club server with yukko led to me searching "touhou club university" for the fun of it, and right in the results was a hit from the Touhou club of a third, separate university! We set out on the (rather convoluted) path to contact them, and eventually connected with them. The next year, an r/touhou post appeared of a photograph of someone's Touhou club whiteboard. We had found a fourth club and we knew that we had to do something.

With a few clubs found, me and my best friend decided to search up more Touhou clubs; the things you do on Discord VCs. By pure luck we actually managed to find some other Touhou university clubs, some in America, some in Australia and by a stroke of luck, we managed to find a Touhou club officially endorsed by a Japanese university; where we ended up finding a whole Japanese Touhou club network. So with some spare time, I decided to sift through as many universities as I could and try to find another Touhou club in the West, and to my surprise I couldn't find any more, despite the strong amount of interest in many universities. One university has Reimu as chairwoman of the anime club, another has dedicated Touhou channels cuz of the number of music posts, and famously, Cambridge University did a famous Touhou hijack Delta reported on.

We've found a few more clubs since, and now the Touhou University Network is constantly growing. The biggest question is:

What's the Point of It All?

The Touhou University Network acts as a connector for Touhou clubs/societies at Western universities (broadly defined as "not China, Japan, or Korea"). This scope is chosen because these countries already have a strong Touhou university club culture (I am not sure on Taiwan - some local knowledge would be much appreciated!). China and Japan are standout examples. The Japanese clubs are well connected with each other, this site has a large database. The Chinese ones have extreme scale, according to the THB Wiki's count they have upwards of 760 clubs! These clubs are very important in their respective Touhou communities, taking the role of doujin circles, Touhou-only event organizers, and of course, a core playerbase for the significant number of Touhou board and card games.

The West (again, defined VERY broadly) has a bit of a different environment. There tend to be Touhou meetups at larger conventions, and there are even several decently strong local meetup servers, some of which have organized small but mighty Touhou-only events. With the start of TouhouFest in 2023, there is a renewed interest in Touhou-focused meetups and groups both in the United States (where TouhouFest is located) and beyond! The goal of the Touhou University Network is to overcome the barriers towards unleashing the creative capability of Touhou groups through developing and promoting more Touhou-only events, from the scale of a local club meeting to large conventions like TouhouFest and Reitaisai. In alternate terms, we would like to encourage more Touhou fans to go outside.

How does this look practically? As mentioned earlier, Japanese and Chinese Touhou-only university clubs are core doujin circles and event organizers in their communities. Our theory is that the more successful Touhou university clubs there are, the more this culture of "doujin spirit" can grow in the West and the more Touhou activity there will be. Where we hope to come in play is developing this university clubs and letting them flourish. The Network wants to a) help pre-existing Touhou clubs grow and b) help people create new Touhou clubs in their local areas. We do this by providing a place for people to exchange ideas, resources to help clubs plan events, and inter-club events to promote cooperation, beginning online and moving in-person if the density of clubs works out favorably. We hope you join us in this effort!

Board of Directors

Delta Pie	yukko (parra)	Daichungus
Co-Founder United States (West) Regional Director	Co-Founder Australia Regional Director	United States (East) Regional Director