I have found a Japanese manual for PoP1, for the Sega CD version:
http://theromdepot.com/roms/%5BGame%20M ... Persia.pdf
(Beware, the download is very slow. It took me about 5 minutes to download the whole 12 MB file.)
So far, this is the only Japanese manual for any PoP game that I could find.
There are a couple of interesting things about this manual:
* It's in full color. Screenhots are in color, some headers are written in red, and every page has a marble-like light green background pattern and a brown border.
By comparison, the English manual of the same version (
see here or
here) is in black and white, except for the covers.
I wonder why is this.
This is not even unique to PoP. For example,
the manuals of Rocket Knight Adventures have similar differences.
* There is
Furigana above every Kanji (except on the cover pages).
These are usually used in texts written for children.
Oddly contrasting this is that the Brazilian release of the same version has a warning on its
front cover that it's recommended for people above 18 years.
I don't see such a warning on the Japanese
front or
back covers, though.
(Or on the
other PoP Mega-CD covers.)
* There is a portrait of the main characters, taken from the anime-style cutscenes.
In other news, I have also found a Spanish manual for PoP1 SNES:
http://www.digitpress.com/library/manua ... 20(es).pdf
Interestingly
their list doesn't have the English version.
This manual is not as drastically different from the
English version as the Japanese SEGA CD manual above, but some pages have a different background color.