House Jurai Lexicon

Arcadia II is a Clan Homeworld, in the Pentagon Cluster.

Clan homeworlds are typically occupied by more than one Clan.

In planetary leagues, they usually divide the Clan homeworlds into "sectors" to allow multiple ownership, and make each sector otherwise just like a full planet (allowing full industry values, full garrison, etc.)

Normally those planets are not able to be attacked by Inner Sphere forces, because it would take so long to get there through the Exodus Road(s) that a House would have to tie up a bunch of resources from the start of the league, and by the time they finally arrived, they league would probably be due for a reset.  In other words, it would just be a waste.

HJ had never heard of anyone attacking a pentagon world.  Until we did.

In NBT-Mercs, HJ joined as a pirate unit again.  This time we were determined to stay a pirate unit, however, despite the desires of the admins that we take on a bigger role, and knowing we wouldn't be happy being just a "minor little pirate with no significant impact".  They were right, of course, and we began carving out our own little empire again.  In doing so, we ended up stealing a ton of 'Mechs in raids, but many of them were crap.  (We had limited ability to choose what was stole or salvaged, and they were near worthless to sell.)  Eventually, we ended up with too many crap mechs clogging up our Jumpships, and had to do something with them.  When queried, HJs unanimously agreed: hit the Clans.

Of course, all the attack slots were full against the Clans we could hit in the Inner Sphere, so we decided to be bold, and use our Pirate jump to get into the Pentagon Cluster.

After a few probing strikes, we choose the C sector of Arcadia II C, owned by Clan Snow Raven (or was it Clan Steel Viper?), and launched a Planetary Assault with our ship full of crap 'Mechs.  We managed to not only win, but the salvage was so great we replaced all our combat losses with Clan tech.

The league admins got annoyed at our bold actions, and decreed that when we got kicked off, we had to leave the Cluster, and changed the rules that no one would be allowed to use special jumps to gain access to it again.  Over the course of the next year, we would successfully defend the planet against repeated counter-attacks from multiple Clans.  Although one Clan would eventually manage to kick us off, this became one of HJ's Epic Campaigns, which has its own combat ribbon for those that participated in the battles.

HJ's Aussie contingency celebrated our actions at Arcadia II C in real life by holding a Juria Meeting at the Arcadia Pub.  Maxtac has photos posted of the experience.

House Jurai has inspired quite the following over the years, and not just with our gamers. Over the years HJ has had an ever-changing set of "groupies" that like to hang out with us in chat, and meet up with us at both online and real-life events.

HJ's civilians have been almost as important as our warriors, helping us get through stressful times.

Most of our civvies have been real-life friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, or family members, but now and then we have complete strangers stumble across our website, and want to hang out with us.

We even have a Civilian level of access for our website, to allow these individuals to have access to our information hub and social tools, without getting spammed by the all the war-related data.

We welcome, and even cherish, our civilian members.  We are glad to have them around, and be part of the growing international family that is House Jurai.

CommSpec is short for Communications Specialist.

This special designation is given to recognize those who perform communication services for HJ, such as managing or hosting our various channels of communication.

The life blood of Jurai exists in our ability to disagree. A famous and well-known tradition in Jurai is for arguments to roll on into the early hours of the morning as members exchange words over topics such as religion, politics, freedoms, guns, technology, computers and a dozen other subjects. Many of these debates become heated, and almost always are passionate. The worst mistake a newcomer can make is to assume that the people arguing are really mad at each other. This is rarely the case and most often the members engaged in such discord are actually very good friends. Often such debates will embroil an entire room as two dozen Juraians enter a melee of argument and debate about one topic or another. The people taking part in these storms of opinion and theory range from the inept to the brilliant, and the exchange of ideas is hot and fast.

Despite some popular opinion, Jurai is not a unit devoted to the pursuit of hentai. That'd be the Asagiri and Satome families, but that's also another subject entirely.

Jurai does, however, delve into such subjects from time to time, and the principle of "Get your mind out of the gutter, you're blocking my periscope" has become a rather beloved tradition in Jurai. At the very least you are almost certain to find another member with a matching fetish for you to discuss such serious matters as Japanese Rope Bondage with.

Herotitus is an Inner Sphere world, traditionally considered an unoccupied periphery world.

In The Registry planetary league, during 1997, House Jurai launched a campaign against the Clan Godzilla occupied world of Herotitus.  The campaign for Herotitus became one of HJ's Epic Campaigns, with its very own combat ribbon for those that participated.

Although HJ never managed to force CGZ off Herotitus, due to always being terribly out-numbered, we did inflict massive enemy losses against overwhelming odds.  The first battle took place on the map Yamarovka, at 2.5 Gs.

Our second attack was November 1997, and even though we didn't take the planet, the battle is considered one of HJ's greatest victories.  The map used was also Yamarovka, but this time at 4.0 Gs.  House Jurai destroyed 3 mechs for every one we lost, with 64 kills and 22 losses.  (Those were straight kills, not forced losses invoked by any type of league automation setting.)

Every now and again you'll log onto HJ Chat and find members engaged in a strange text-based combat ritual. This is known as "Jurai Kombat" and was a favourite pastime in HJ in our early days, but can still be seen now and again.

The only rules are keep it 'realistic', and be creative as possible. Games may be refereed by a third party who makes sure that the players are fighting a believable game. Before it begins players may choose wether to fight hand-to-hand, or use melee weapons, they are warned no "power weapons" (such as nukes, Jurai, or Premtech powers) are to be used. Players are encouraged to be very creative, and Jurai Kombat is often compared to a Hong Kong action film in style. The best players of JK are the ones who type and think the fastest; a dodge simply does not count if it's typed after the player has taken a hit. Good players don't just fight to win, they play for the audience as well, perhaps a dozen or more other Juraians, who are cheering or booing. Anyone can play Jurai Kombat, it's a fun text-game Jurai has enjoyed since the '90s.

A staple in the diet of Jurai MechWarriors, Jurai Sake keeps spirits up, and can be stored within the cockpit for a sip of hot sake at any time.

For some reason, this is another one of those cultural things that just happened when HJ was new, before our founders were even old enough to drink.  Oddly enough, we all came to really like sake, especially with our sushi.

For the HJ AU '03 meet, Maxtac relabeled some bottles of Sake as House Jurai sake.  Check out his photo album for the action shots!

Jurai Story Time is a semi-irregular presentation on Angel Radio by Misato, in which she plays back various radio dramas from different eras.

Haydon's opinion: best experienced while consuming the adult beverage of your choice.

Regular programs include:

• Alien Worlds
• Chicken Man
• Ruby
• Deck Gibson
• Black Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon, girl Detective!
• The Shadow

Jurai Sugar Cookies are a cultural icon of House Jurai, and made from a secret recipe developed by Misato, which gives our MechWarriors the pep and vitality they need to carry on through a hard day of fighting.

Ok, really, they're just something we made up one day, and it stuck.  They come up at least once a day, strangely enough.

They were first made a reality in 2003 by Maxtac, as a door prize for the HJ AU '03 meet.

Kali was a program we used in conjunction with Trumpet Winsock and Netmech DOS in order to play games on the internet back in the days of dial-up and MS-DOS.  It enabled us to launch IPX games over TCP/IP, and had an IRC-like chat interface, which is where HJ first organized online.

Wikipedia provides a wealth of info about Kali.

Anything you say can and will be used against you in the form of a macro, a text recording of something you have said in the past.

Beware the macro-members of Jurai who record almost every stupid thing anyone has ever said, for they are insane and quick to tease. This teasing is of course all in good fun, but the especially careless will probably be far more abused. Innocent statements will be taken out of context. For example, the statement; "I'm going to come in second" might sound innocent, until mixed with another macro. Or you could just use your imagination and enjoy that one.

Many macros will only make sense if you understand certain cultural elements of Jurai.  If you're new to HJ, there are many references you aren't likely to understand, such as anything relating to Paul.

Nodachi now has a Macro Feed that displays along the bottom of some pages, and the site admins can upload new macros into the system.  Some of those are public, but the raunchy ones are usually made private, so as to not totally offend the mundane non-members that stumble across our page.  The best of the classic macros will now be preserved on the website for postarity.

Note: These days, macro mixing/combining isn't very common; that lost its entertainment value when we stopped being teenagers.  It is much more fun to capture an actual chat faux-pa or embarrassing remark/typo.

The term "macro" derived from Kali, which allowed you to save lines of text into one of several "macro" slots, which would paste out at the press of a single key.

You can read the entire Macro Feed here.

Newcastle is an Inner Sphere planet, traditionally held by the Free Worlds League / House Marik.  It is a core FWL world, very close to their capital.

HJ took Newcastle away from FWL in the NBT4 league.  Newcastle is considered one of HJ's Epic Campaigns, and has its own combat ribbon for those that participated.

After months of probing attacks, collecting data, and serious planning, Haydon initiated a bold move to take a core FWL planet while we were still a pirate unit. Although we launched the attack while still a pirate unit, the league admins weren't very happy by our being able to attack such a world, nor with the size we'd already grown to, so forced us to upgrade our unit status twice during the course of the battle. At first they were OK with us being Mercs, but when it looked like we might actually win, they made us upgrade again to Periphery

We won Newcastle, but rules changes and the forced upgrade prevented us from having a way to reinforce the planet, so we were forced to trade it to our allies, CapCon. We got the better end of the bargain, and CapCon was able to harass FWL's core planets from Newcastle throughout the rest of the NBT4 league.

The attack on Newcastle led to the popularity within HJ of the beer Newcastle Brown Ale, aka a "newkie".

What the hell is a Newkie?

Newcastle Brown Ale -- the beer of choice for thirsty Jurai warriors.

Newkies became popular in HJ after House Jurai launched an attack on the planet Newcastle, owned by FWL, in NBT4.  Some HJs already liked Newkies, so during the attack, it became known as "the beer planet".

If you hadn't yet noticed, we in Jurai have a quasi-Japanese culture, to such a degree that several of us have learned to speak or write Japanese, with varying degrees of success.

Our culture has a lot of Japanese trends and influences, from the kimono and hakima uniforms, to the kanji decorated war machines we pilot. We take this sort of thing very seriously, and we do our best to get certain traditions and details as correct as we possibly can.

An important level of Jurai tradition descended from anime, which has only complicated matters over time.  While HJ has out-grown most of the anime-related cultural references from our early days, the Japanese tradition remains.  

Some of our members are still fervent otaku or hentai, of course, and that's OK.

Note: If you spot a translation error, be sure to let command know.  (Except the family logos, we know about those already.)

Our ranks are listed on the Oraganization page, but that doesn't tell you much about what they mean within HJ.

First, the ranks themselves, in order from top to bottom:

The Officer ranks are, from highest to lowest:

• Tai-shu (Warlord)
• Tai-sho (General)
• Chu-jo (Lieutenant General)
• Tai-sa (Colonel)
• Chu-sa (Lieutenant Colonel)
• Sho-sa (Major)
• Tai-i (Captain)
• Chu-i (1st Lieutenant)
• Sho-i (2nd Lieutenant)

The Enlisted ranks are, from highest to lowest:

• Sho-ko (Talon Sergeant)
• Gunsho (Sergeant)
• Go-cho (Corporal)
• Heishi (Private)

New recruits start off as a Heishi.

Promotions reflect your level of activity, and your dedication to Jurai.  Besides combat, you are expected to be a social member of HJ, too.  Our social aspects are a major part of what sets HJ apart from everyone else.

Typically it isn't hard to get that first promotion to Go-cho -- we just need to see that you're active, and actually interested in being a part of HJ.

The other ranks are increasingly harder to achieve.

As you gain rank, realize that it isn't just a reward for service, but that it is a reflection of command's faith and confidence in your service to Jurai. As is traditional, with rank also comes responsibility.

Many rank responsibilities are not quantifiable. You are expected to act increasingly mature, and exercise your role such as is appropriate to your appointed rank without stepping on the toes of your superiors.

If you become a Commander - at any level - you're expected to take responsibility for the subordinates assigned to you.

In HJ, being accepted as a samurai is the ultimate honor bestowed upon a warrior.  Such a title does not come easily, however.  Some samurai had to attempt dozens of trials before being accepted into a particular family.

Although the exact guidelines for acceptance vary from family to family, you must not only excel at combat arts, but you must also be an exceptional HJ.

To be samurai is to be legend.  Our samurai will earn a permanent record on our website and history, and will provide character references for future HJ fiction.

A Warmaster is directly responsible for the training of House Jurai's field units and has authorization to command Juraian troops in sanctioned combat drops at the tactical and sometimes operational levels.