so I don’t really like how the Final Fantasy series got really J-poppy from X (okay 8) on, because whatever J pop culture was right then didn’t interest me as much as the postwar themes I’d gotten used to seeing

(this weird sunny day/elegaic loss thing that in retrospect was some transparent working-through-the-postwar shit - the Ghost Train in FFVI, Porco Rosso-era anime when it made sense for Patlabor to make a whole series about police mecha and have episodes be about the maintenance crew dealing with the summer heat and subtle longing between colleagues on the drive to an offsite conference)

and I think they’ve found a good balance with FFXV, that’s what got me going on Japanese hairstyles the other day, you notice it but it registers as a variant of something you grok.

which gets you the relief to notice the things that are like-you-could-have-been but aren’t, like the way the music titles and styles invoke this concept of Frenchness as high-status romantic

and I could point out how between Perry’s Opening of Japan and WWII the islands’ most important external contacts were German and how Europe in the Japanese imaginary is still kinda tinted by this third-hand take by way of Victorian Prussia

but I could also point out that the English word “deluxe” comes from the French de luxe and a lot of that was Industrial Age London merchants on a superlative treadmill grasping for a fancy way to say “fancy”

Which also casts light on something else - Atomic Age marketing conventions, where spaceships and atoms and associated adjectives came into style for a while? What Fallout riffs on? That was a real expression of (Made in) American pride. America had until the First World War lived in Australia-style cultural shadow of other continents, to the point where “French” or “English” or “Continental”, basically “not American” was a common idiom for “quality”.

In a very real sense, “We fucking nuked Hiroshima” surpassed “We’ve got some nice paintings in Paris” as the symbol of earthly power that brands wanted to associate themselves with because people who matter wanted to associate their personalities with, that was the 1950s.

Eventually France matched Trinity with Reggane and Bikini with the bikini