Dude, who even knows.
Question with 2 notes
Anonymous asked:
I am a recent follower and not up to date on the whole rich gentry thing. Did you get rich through work or inheritance? Do you work now, or just do yardwork? Did you work in the past? Why live in Portland and not somewhere more glamorous if you are rich? Why name your house Karafuto?
Yeah you’re not up on the “rich gentry” thing.
Karafuto was the name of the Japanese province on the island of Sakhalin, back when they had half of it.
(They originally won it in the Russo-Japanese War, the Soviets took it back when they finally declared war on Japan in WWII)
I’m going for a Japonisme styling (basically, “Japanese inspiration filtered through Western practice”), so “Japanese territory in range of 50°N that the Russians used to claim, totally ignoring the natives” fits.
Post reblogged from her.meneutics of suspicion with 39 notes
Hot take: insofar as it represented domestic capital and labor overcoming divisions to cooperate in a project of national uplift amidst liberal use of canned slogans and mass gatherings and the suppression of leftist mass action, Japan’s postwar recovery was more fascist than its interwar period
Imperial Japan tortured pregnant women to death and you say this
Whereas postwar Japan valorized motherhood (to boost birth rates to refill a population hole from war). See how it works?
Post with 1 note
So were there cases of WWII Japanese infantry “banzai” charges successfully overrunning the enemy? What did everyone do, go back to normal combat operations where they tried to preserve their lives?
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 39 notes
Hot take: insofar as it represented domestic capital and labor overcoming divisions to cooperate in a project of national uplift amidst liberal use of canned slogans and mass gatherings and the suppression of leftist mass action, Japan’s postwar recovery was more fascist than its interwar period
@plum-soup said: I mean post war Japanese government has been very much been defined by the recruiting of former Japanese fascists, war criminals, etc to form the LDP and make sure an American friendly government maintained a stranglehold on Japanese politics. So yeah, fascism
Maybe there’s something in the way the South Korean government was pretty lineally descended from the Japanese occupation compradors too, and under the postwar settlement these two states took parallel paths, but both of self-directed development within a First World order.
And that was the capitalists’ Cold War pitch: operate within a multilateral capitalist order and you’ll be able to become a rich developed country.
And that was also the communists’: “the capitalists’ plan is really just to put the fascists back in charge!”
Well?
Post with 39 notes
Hot take: insofar as it represented domestic capital and labor overcoming divisions to cooperate in a project of national uplift amidst liberal use of canned slogans and mass gatherings and the suppression of leftist mass action, Japan’s postwar recovery was more fascist than its interwar period
Post with 6 notes
Occasional reminder that the long, skilled, and impressive process of forging a katana did not yield a super-weapon, it mostly compensated for the extremely low quality iron sand and charcoal inputs.
Post with 8 notes
One thing behind the Japanese practice of treating houses as consumable rather than capital goods, intended to last one lifetime and then be replaced, is the legacy of centuries of urban culture in which it was understood that every building would be destroyed in a fire about that frequently so there wasn’t much point in using more relatively more precious building materials in trying to push durability further.
Post with 7 notes
In the 1950s, the Japanese export sector just then standing back up was known for pottery and cheap folded-tin toys.
In the 1960s after investing in machinery more modern than western legacy forges they started towards a leading position in steel.
In the 1970s, they came for big-ticket consumer products like appliances and automobiles.
By the 1980s they were exporting electronics, industrial management expertise, and capital.
(They had been known for optics since before WWII.)
Since the 1990s they have been exporting their culture.
Korea has very intentionally been following the same path with maybe a 25 years’ lag.
Question reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 204 notes
Anonymous asked:
Recently I saw some news articles online claiming that an infant was jailed because its parents possessed a Bible in North Korea. And everybody’s eating that shit up
i think i do remember hearing somewhere that if the primary caregiver of a family goes to prison in north korea then the whole family goes with them so that they stay together as a social unit, but definitely don’t quote me on that because like 90% of what comes out about north korea is completely unable to be verified.
there also seems to be a massive industry of english language NGOs set up in South Korea to take advantage of that fact. they conduct “independent investigations” into human rights abuses in the DPRK and report their findings from these investigations to the U.N., which gives them more access to human rights grants and other massive funds.
the methodology for the investigations published by these NGOs is interviewing and giving surveys to a couple dozen north korean defectors. it pretty much starts and ends there. Yeonmi Park is a pretty notorious example of one of these defectors who found monetary incentive to lie and become a media figure, which is what she did. other defectors also usually aren’t going to have a positive opinion of the country considering they left in the first place (if you don’t count the people who defect back to north korea after living in south korea for a while). it’s not exactly rigorous investigation, and there’s usually not a verifiable way to prove that what they’re saying is true.
in the case of religious stuff specifically, north korea has a long history of being harassed by christian missionaries as well as a christian-led reactionary backlash to the revolution that makes this even more complicated. people seem to think that north korea destroys all christians on sight because they hate God and Freedom and are Satan Loving Communists or some shit but historically christianity has existed in NK entirely as political opposition. i made another post on that here (x)
but generally speaking if you google something and it was first reported in the New York Post it’s safe to assume it’s fake and laugh about it
Prophylactically suppressing children of Christian families in defense against Christianity as an avenue for foreign influence of your East Asian country is a tradition!
(The thing was Japanese diplomats at the Chinese court saw Indian nobles complaining about losing their domains to Christianity-as-European-entryism, and when they brought word back to the home islands the Shogunate looked up to notice the Portuguese following the exact same script there and was like “hmmm”, and after Christians joined a local rebellion proceeded to crucify them all for the rest of the bakufu’s rule)
Question reblogged from welcome to the bog with 204 notes
Anonymous asked:
Recently I saw some news articles online claiming that an infant was jailed because its parents possessed a Bible in North Korea. And everybody’s eating that shit up
i think i do remember hearing somewhere that if the primary caregiver of a family goes to prison in north korea then the whole family goes with them so that they stay together as a social unit, but definitely don’t quote me on that because like 90% of what comes out about north korea is completely unable to be verified.
there also seems to be a massive industry of english language NGOs set up in South Korea to take advantage of that fact. they conduct “independent investigations” into human rights abuses in the DPRK and report their findings from these investigations to the U.N., which gives them more access to human rights grants and other massive funds.
the methodology for the investigations published by these NGOs is interviewing and giving surveys to a couple dozen north korean defectors. it pretty much starts and ends there. Yeonmi Park is a pretty notorious example of one of these defectors who found monetary incentive to lie and become a media figure, which is what she did. other defectors also usually aren’t going to have a positive opinion of the country considering they left in the first place (if you don’t count the people who defect back to north korea after living in south korea for a while). it’s not exactly rigorous investigation, and there’s usually not a verifiable way to prove that what they’re saying is true.
in the case of religious stuff specifically, north korea has a long history of being harassed by christian missionaries as well as a christian-led reactionary backlash to the revolution that makes this even more complicated. people seem to think that north korea destroys all christians on sight because they hate God and Freedom and are Satan Loving Communists or some shit but historically christianity has existed in NK entirely as political opposition. i made another post on that here (x)
but generally speaking if you google something and it was first reported in the New York Post it’s safe to assume it’s fake and laugh about it
Prophylactically suppressing children of Christian families in defense against Christianity as an avenue for foreign influence of your East Asian country is a tradition!
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