Addition to Bai Ze

Hello everyone,

I’m sure that a lot of you have come to love the new summon of Li Yiming, Bai Ze, soon after her first appearance at the start of Book 2. Allow me to spend a little bit of time to provide more information about what exactly she is, and, more importantly, provide a few artistic renderings so you can really “see” her.

Description first. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bai_Ze)

Baí Zé (simplified Chinese: 白泽; traditional Chinese: 白澤; Wade–Giles: Pai Tse), or hakutaku (白澤) in Japanese, is a fantastic beast from Chinese legend. Its name literally means “white marsh”. The Baí Zé was encountered by the Yellow Emperor or Huáng Dì while he was on patrol in the east. Thereafter the creature dictated to Huáng Dì a guide to the forms and habits of all 11,520 types of supernatural creatures in the world, and how to overcome their hauntings and attacks. The emperor had this information written down in a book called the Bái Zé Tú (白泽图/白澤圖). This book no longer exists, but many fragments of it survive in other texts.

Note: In my weebiness, I can tell you that the Japanese name, hakutaku, is exactly as the Chinese one, just that the characters are pronounced using the Japanese way.

More interesting are the depictions of Bai Ze available online.

Here’s a very good artistic rendering of Bai Ze: (https://www.weasyl.com/~kujo/submissions/1279448/bai-ze)

Here’s a more… classical representation I shall say, but uh… For some reason I don’t really like this one. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/aliinjapan/3770972905)

Here’s a much cuter one, rendered according to the Japanese version (http://japanlover.me/cool/kakkoii-information/japanlovermeyokai%E2%80%AC-hakutaku/)

Also, interesting fact. The pokemon Absol is actually inspired from Hakutaku, the Japanese version of Bai Ze. Notice the resemblance (kind of?) here:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2w8laddBpE)

Well, hope you liked it. Next time you see Bai Ze, remember her true form!

TL;DR You’ve all been fooled, Bai Ze’s a pokemon and this book is actually a doujin-shi for pokemon black. Any day now, and the MC will pull out his master-ball and catch ‘em all.

Zhao