I Am Completely Serious

I'm working on a huge post campaigning for Regency (Romance Novel) English as the default mode for translating Gozaru Japanese. I would also accept Victorian English.

In terms of urban popular culture, I think I see why you might want to equate the Elizabethan Era to the Edo (Elizabethan theatre vs kabuki = one of my phoned-in college papers), but my feeling is that finding the language with the closest cultural equivalency - if such a thing can even be said to exist, and if the internet could ever be prevailed upon to agree on what it was without anyone dying of outrage right at their keyboard - is less important than finding a type of language that's going to evoke a similar set of reactions from the intended audience in both the original language and the translated one.

Jidaigeki and Gozaru Japanese strike me as occupying a pretty similar cultural position in Japan as Regency and Victorian stuff do in English-speaking countries - a romanticized, implicitly-nationalistic past with a clear class structure (comforting because the heroes are generally on top or on their way there very quickly), very few alarming foreigners or racial minorities (most of them evil or crazy), arranged marriages to villains and people fretting about family honor and the endangered family fortune (instant drama!), etc etc (see also: My Thoughts On Steampunk).

So, that's why I voted Georgette Heyer in the primaries: Not necessarily because of an actual cultural congruency, but because of (what I see as) a congruency in the ideas people tend to associate with the periods.