This one is a fun one, so let’s actually go from the top and then backwards.
If you play the game, the loading screens will often show “secrets”. They’re nothing too crazy, they’re a bit like if I told you all about that one time as a little child where I tied a zip tie on my tongue.
If you’re wondering why, I was like 5 years old and 5 year olds aren’t the brightest.
The secrets range from the mundane to the silly. From Rice Shower preferring Bread instead of Rice and Twin Turbo being good at moonwalking. They feel like small details that paint the picture of girls whose character extends beyond whatever story they’re in.
They’re all also Capital L Lore of the real horse.
That bit about Rice Shower? It isn’t just a funny joke about the girl with Rice on her name preferring bread over rice (rice is the Commonfolk Food of Japan so preferring bread over it is seen as “odd”), it’s a nod to the fact that the real Rice Shower has a monument honoring him (and containing his hair) in the Kyoto Racecourse, and in Kyoto most people prefer bread over rice.
These Secrets can be seen at random on the loading screens, but they can also be conveniently found on the “Secrets” menu, which has a cute Grass Wonder doing the thing she did in season one of the anime.
So let’s focus on one secret and work backwards for kicks.
Satono Diamond’s first secret says (roughly):
“Actually, the Jukebox my father gave me is my treasure.”
So let’s try and find what this is a nod to.
I just realized I haven’t explained this yet in this website, but in the Uma Musume world, Horse Girls are a sort of all-female race. They can have kids with human males and if they do all boys will be human and all girls will be horse girls.
As such, a girl’s “mother” tends to refer to the real horse’s mother while their father is usually the real horse’s owner. This isn’t always the case, for example, if we follow the theory that Light Hello is Moonlight Rose, her mother and grandmother are based on Moonlight Rose’s father and grandfather. Likewise, Nakayama Festa’s first owner is represented by an old teacher… but that’s a story for another day.
But in general, “Girl’s dad is based on the real horse’s owner” is a safe bet.
So who is Satono Diamond’s owner?
Satono Diamond is registered as owned by Hajime Satomi. The “Satono” part of the horse’s name is derived from “Satomi” (里 sato, 見 mi). He is the founder of Sega Sammy Holdings.
For those that don’t know, “Holdings” means that a company manages the interests of more than one group. SAMMY acquired 22.4% of SEGA in 2003, making it majority shareholder and putting SEGA effectively under its umbrella.
In short, the same way you can say that Atlus is a Sega subsidiary, Sega is a Sammy subsidiary.
Now, you could stop the rabbit hole here and suddenly a lot of things in the game would make a lot of sense. Like how there’s a comic where McQueen is impressed by Dia-chan’s ability with a crane game and she says it’s a good thing it’s the same model as the one back at her home. Calling to the fact that Sega has a lot of arcades had a lot of arcades that now go by GiGO and I HATE IT THEY LOOK LIKE BOOTLEG ARCADES FOR AN ANIME THAT COULDN’T GET SEGA RIGHTS EXCEPT IT’S REAL LIFE.
There’s also the fact that in Grand Masters, the context is that the player is testing a VR trainer developed by the Satono Group, of which Satono Diamond and Satono Crown are part of. You know, the scenario that is explicitly a collab with Star Horse 4, an arcade game that you might see in say… a Sega arcade a GiGO arcade GOD I HATE IT IN HERE.
But we can go deeper. Why a jukebox?
Well, for that one we actually go to the side of Sega.
The “Sega 1000”, created in 1960 was the first Japanese-manufactured Jukebox. Not only that but it was the first time that the company’s name, Service Games, was compressed into Sega and used as a branding.
And that’s why Dia-chan has a jukebox that she really treasures.
Hopefully this illustrates better why learning about Uma Musume is so addicting. It’s not just the care to detail where they manage to integrate a lot of disparate elements from real life into a girl’s personality, design, and story. It’s the fact that all of these details aren’t just tied to horse racing but… many things in general.
I knew Dia-chan’s real life owner was related to Sega, but until investigating further I didn’t know Sega made the first nationally-produced Jukebox, and while investigating this I learned that Sammy was involved in the Chunichi Stadium Incident, a case of extortion in 1973 where at least 4 murders happened and resulted in an earlier iteration of Sammy going bankrupt from the financial damage (NOT from the extortion and murders mind you).
I learned about a CEO suspected of being involved in the murder of at least 4 people and a stadium in such a bad financial state that the owner commited suicide. And all of that because a fictional horse girl told me she really treasured her dad’s jukebox.
And I don’t know about you, but in my book that’s fucking amazing.
