When did Magic: The Gathering first appear in Japanese?
Magic began in English in 1993. Its first step into Asia came with Fourth Edition, released in April 1995: 378 cards, the first Magic set printed in Japanese, traditional Chinese and Korean, alongside new Spanish and Portuguese editions. Japanese Fourth Edition is where the interesting print story sits, because Wizards of the Coast ran a border policy that treated a card's first printing in each language as an event to mark in its own right.
THE BORDER RULE
Black first, in every languageThe policy had two halves. Core sets were printed with white borders, the mark of a reprint set. But a card could not appear with a white border in a language until it had first appeared with a black border in that language. English, French, German and Italian had years of black bordered history behind them, so their Fourth Editions could be all white bordered. Japanese had no Magic history at all, so Japanese Fourth Edition was printed black bordered first.
Europe needed a patch to keep the rule. For German, French and Italian, Wizards printed a special set, Renaissance, containing black bordered versions of the cards that had never appeared in those languages, so that their Fourth Editions could then be uniformly white bordered. Japanese needed no patch. It simply started where every language starts: in black.
BLACK, THEN WHITE
The Japanese sequenceJapanese Fourth Edition exists in both borders. The black bordered printing came first, classed with the other first time languages, and the set was then almost immediately reprinted with white borders in Japanese, as it also was in Spanish and Portuguese. A Japanese Fourth Edition card's border is therefore a printing order tell: black border means the first Japanese printing, white border the reprint that followed at once.
The set Japan received was the full new core set, not a sampler. Fourth Edition removed 51 cards from Revised Edition and added 122 cards from Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends and The Dark; it was the first set with basic lands printed on their own sheet, and it introduced the modern tap symbol, the turned arrow that replaced the rotated letter of the earlier sets and has been used in every language since. Japan's first Magic set is also the set that gave the whole game its tap symbol.
WHY IT MATTERS ON THIS SHELF
A reverse splitEvery other game on this shelf was born in Japan and split on its way West. Magic runs the pattern in reverse: an American game that arrived in Japan two years in, printed with a border decision that made the Japanese edition briefly unique, and stayed. Japanese became one of Magic's standing languages, and a generation later Wizards was commissioning art for the Japanese printing alone. That is the next page on this shelf.