The Japanese word for bread is “pan”, reflecting how much Asian and African cuisine has really been Portuguese fusion for centuries now (well, I guess to the extent spaghetti and tomato sauce is Sino-Mesoamerican fusion, at least)
Basically at any time you are in Japan, you are at the coast (the plains count), in the mountains, in the foothills, on Hokkaido, on a minor outlying island, or at Lake Biwa.
So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).
If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)
@youzicha said: Didn’t @xhxhxhx discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn’t rigged?
Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like “oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it”
The major elements were
Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops
Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others
Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating “rotten borough” districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies
So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.
Finding out that the creator of Ultraman was Catholic so he made Ultraman getting crucified a recurring thing of the franchise and that became influential in tokusatsu and anime is so funny to me. This is the funniest thing to come from Catholicism
In Japanese, I’m told, a slight modification in one word or reference changes a sentence entirely, so that— I don’t know Japanese, I’m making this up— if a syllable changes in one word, then “the crickets are singing in chorus in the starlight” becomes “the taxicabs are in gridlock at the intersection.” I gather that Japanese poetry uses these almost-double meanings deliberately. A line of poetry can be translucent, as it were, to another meaning it could have if it were in a different context. The surface significance allows a possible alternate significance to register at the same time.
does anyone know if this is a real thing UKLG is referring to? if so, word for it, examples?
which looks like is just “japanese has a lot of homophones and poets will use them for artistic effect,” more or less the same as they will in english
Yeah a lot of it is that Japanese (a non-tonal language) repeatedly borrowed words from tonal Chinese, stripping them of tone (so that several words once distinct were now identical) and then re-borrowed the same roots centuries later after meaning and pronunciation had drifted, with the result that there are a ton of words that sound the same and punning is a major feature of Japanese-language culture.
It is huge in Japanese poetry (where the regular suffixed conjugation makes end rhyme trivial), the most honored stuff – even stuff you might be familiar and impressed with – translates poorly because you can only translate one meaning at a time, lacking the centuries of cultural context that would make the others even make sense.
Often the Chinese borrowings were primarily in a literary written context and semantic drift between the borrowings, Chinese language sounds, and Japanese sounds had proceeded differently in terms of written characters and sound. Sometimes the borrowings were from dialects that used completely different sounds for the same characters.
Haiku developed from a form of battle rap where competitors alternated verses and the goal was to continue the poem while retroactively forcing reinterpretations of your opponent’s lines
In Japanese, I’m told, a slight modification in one word or reference changes a sentence entirely, so that— I don’t know Japanese, I’m making this up— if a syllable changes in one word, then “the crickets are singing in chorus in the starlight” becomes “the taxicabs are in gridlock at the intersection.” I gather that Japanese poetry uses these almost-double meanings deliberately. A line of poetry can be translucent, as it were, to another meaning it could have if it were in a different context. The surface significance allows a possible alternate significance to register at the same time.
does anyone know if this is a real thing UKLG is referring to? if so, word for it, examples?
which looks like is just “japanese has a lot of homophones and poets will use them for artistic effect,” more or less the same as they will in english
Yeah a lot of it is that Japanese (a non-tonal language) repeatedly borrowed words from tonal Chinese, stripping them of tone (so that several words once distinct were now identical) and then re-borrowed the same roots centuries later after meaning and pronunciation had drifted, with the result that there are a ton of words that sound the same and punning is a major feature of Japanese-language culture.
It is huge in Japanese poetry (where the regular suffixed conjugation makes end rhyme trivial), the most honored stuff – even stuff you might be familiar and impressed with – translates poorly because you can only translate one meaning at a time, lacking the centuries of cultural context that would make the others even make sense.
Silent Hill is nominally set in Maine (I think largely as a Stephen King reference, like the street names) but from architecture and typology it’s clearly in the Pacific Northwest, it shouldn’t be surprising that’s the kind of American small town that’s most legible to Japan
shinzo abe day was incredible. still not over seeing all the rumours about what happened, joining everyone in wondering how the fuck a shotgun assassination could have happened in japan, and then seeing the first photo of the doohickey
somebody from work tried to booty call me during the first like hour that details were coming out
Oh man that reminds me of the most meta- thing I’ve ever seen.
0) World War II happened.
1) In postwar Japanese pop culture, “thinly or completely unveiled reference to nuclear explosion” is rivaled in thematic popularity only by “thinly or completely unveiled alternate-WWII in which Japan wins and is totally the good guys”.
Actually I’m almost afraid they finally got over this in the late-90s with the passing of a generation. I liked that, something somber and elegaic in the culture that wasn’t pure fanservice or third-generation commercial ripoffs. Anno and Miyazaki and remember when Final Fantasy had Cyan and the ghost train instead of a bunch of fucking EZ-Bake popstars?
2) Okay so there was this recent trend, they call “moe anthropomorphism” to represent things and concepts as cute girls, because obviously, Japan. It was particularly popular in terms of military hardware, because obviously, Japan.
3) Manga, etc., etc., so comics are a big thing in Japan, and part of the farm team for that is working on basically fanfic of established properties, they call it doujin, and like all fanfic, like most pulp, a lot of time it’s only good for the sex. Which is often violent and involves 13 year old girls, because obviously, humanity.
OKAY
4) So 1) and 2) combine to create Strike Witches - it was this series about a school/force of teenage girls representing various planes from all the nations of WWII, like they strap on these leg-things to fly around, and because they’re all allied together against an alien force literally representing militarism and war descending on the world even though no one particularly wants this militarism and war oh no, they’re just all brave and innocent warriors, and they might have to put on these leg things and fight the aliens at any time, they never wear pants so you can see their panties all the time, because obviously, Japan.
5) so 4) and 3) combine to make a hentai (“pervy”) doujin of Strike Witches. Which I read, to masturbate to. The first twenty pages of this doujin is mostly lesbian dominance, all of the girls breaking down and raping one of the more innocent characters, who was the Japanese one and I think a Mitsubishi Zero?
6) and then 5) combines with 1) again, which was already baked in, and the last 8 or so pages are the apocalyptic showdown with the aliens as seen from the Zero’s eyes. The American and British girls are out of the picture, dismissed in one panel. The French and Italian girls have surrendered and slunk away because they’re pussies.
The French and Italian girls have surrendered and slunk away because they’re pussies, but the two German girls went boldly into battle and lie bloodied and dying on the ground, this is the thing.
And so finally, the Japanese girl is fighting alone. She’s scared, she’s meek - she was the natural submissive for the first 20 pages, getting hazed by all the older nations^H^H^H^H^H^H^H girls but now it’s just her, now it’s her turn to prove her honor, and she jets out shrieking her vengeance, dodging alien missiles, coming straight out of the page…
And the next page is imitation newsprint, with a period photo-offset litho as the header. It’s an alien aircraft carrier, obviously American in design, with an exhaust trail streaking into one side of the island and a giant explosion blossoming out of the other.
And THAT is the most meta- thing I’ve ever seen.
(UPDATE for incoming 9/15/16: Takotsuboya’s “Witch-tachi no No-Pantsu”
)
Actually while I am not an expert, to me that CV design looks Japanese, not American - the really minimal tower and exposed flight deck support pillars suggest it. Looks like it might be the Akagi, though it doesn’t have to be an exact replica or anything:
I would probably suggest there isn’t much to that, the author probably just pulled a CV reference image and Japanese google threw up a Japanese design; but its a fucking Strike Witches doujin, obsessive schematic detail is literally the point, there is no way its just a ‘whatever’ decision.
New headcanon is our lesbian sub-Zero was metaphorically saving Japan from its own militarism with a new ideology of moe hedonistic perversion.
@bookworm-blackshoe calling in a second opinion, what is our alien lesbian-hating CV
That’s almost certainly Akagi, yes. It gets sorta corrupted/assimilated by the aliens at some point and they have to fight it.
Also, they’re not personified planes, they’re animeified pilots. The American is literally big titty Chuck Yeager.
“Environmental degradation resulting from trade in Ezo [old name of Hokkaido] cautions against the argument that commercial growth in early-modern Japan was confined to, as some suggest, a “total environment”. In the Tokugawa years, the Japanese did not set their collective sights exclusively on resources that lay within the traditional provinces or confine themselves to a “total environment,” but rather cast their gaze widely over Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin Island, searching for new resources to fuel the flames of markget growth, to fertilize cash crops, and to feed a stable urban population. In this way, even in early-modern Japan, the environmental context was not fixed but was, as Conrad Totman insists, “shaping and beaing shaped by human activities.” Environmental changes were “crucial variables in the Tokugawa economic experience.” This economic expansion into Ezo, in addition to having implications for Ainu and other groups in the North Pacific, raises intriguing questions concerning whether Japanese colonialism in East Asia should be viewed as an exclusively post-Meiji phenomenon, or in other words, as the imperialist implications of modernization shaped predominantly by Western models. To begin with, in the realm of what Alfred Crosby calls “ecological imperialism,” the exchange of contagions in Ezo and the demographic and cultural consequences of massive epidemics introduce the horrible specter of the interactions between semi-insular populations such as the Ainu and endemic-disease carriers such as the Japanese. Of all the many facets of the Ainu-Japanese relations […] disease clearted the way for the Japanese settlement of Hokkaido possibly more than any other factor and, hence, pushes historians to confront the ecological implications of expansion in Japan’s pre-Meiji world. On a political leve, moreover, the link between the state, merchants and foreign conquest in Ezo resembles the later Japanese colonial experience in Korea, where, as Peter Duus argues, the “symbiotic ties” formed between government and business facilitated the national enterprise of the annexation of Korea. The political process of colonizing Korea, writes Duus, was associated with the “penetration of the Korean market by an anonymous army of Japanese traders, sojourners, and settlers,” resembling with important distinctions, the situation in Ezo.”
— Brett L Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion 1590-1800
I really like that anime about the person who lives in a world where supernatural stuff exists and he starts off weak but it determined to be the greatest there is. I am also partial to that anime where the school student who is a shy loner meets that quirky energetic girl who helps make him more confident.
so @dagny-hashtaggart made a really interesting post about how Japanese Pop Culture Stories About War are often about Japan’s position vis a vis the world during the Cold War more than about WWII.
They’re heavily informed by WWII, don’t get me wrong. But let’s be honest- it’s easier to get your audience to identify with a plucky underdog than the agent of a fascist regime. Post-WWII Japan is much easier to spin into an underdog than WWII Imperial Japan.
And that got me thinking about the Fire Emblem Tellius games- y'know, the ones with Ike- because holy shit, looking at it with that interpretation in mind opens up a whole new avenue for analysis.
