Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Japan
-
Now the world’s population has reached 7 billion, there is some talk of the consequences for the planet, and as always happens at this time attention has turned to Japan’s ageing population. This is usually seen as a bad thing for Japan, with various predictions of population crash and economic catastrophe for the world’s second…
-
This is to be my last post on what I’ve learnt from John Dower’s War Without Mercy, and it is also to be my most speculative. Did the feverish anti-Japanese propaganda of the Pacific war era influence at all the allies’ decision to engage in large scale bombing of urban areas in Japan, and/or their…
-
This is a cute variant on chess that I bought in Japan as a souvenir for a friend. I wasn’t expecting it to be anything but a cute example of Japanese children’s game design, but it actually proved really interesting. The game layout and images of the pieces can be seen here: it’s obviously just…
-
We continue our series on Tim Power’s War Without Mercy with a discussion of the role of social scientists in the construction of propaganda. We have already seen that Japan’s social scientists were working on the question of how to construct a new social order for the pacific under a Japanese empire, but their role…
-
Continuing my series on War Without Mercy, Professor Dower’s analysis of race propaganda and its role in World War 2, we get to the last main section, on Japanese racist propaganda. This is a very different section to that on US propaganda, because the Japanese approached the problem of how to portray their enemies very…
-
Returning to Hearts of Iron 2 after a long hiatus, I finally struck the motherlode and annexed the USA after months of trans-atlantic hide-and-seek. The forces of imperialism and racism refused to surrender, showing much more bravery and persistence than my top social researchers had credited them with, and after I captured all of mainland…
-
Summer is the festival season in Japan, and the music festivals come with it. My partner and I went to Summersonic this year, primarily to see Suede, and because the line up was a little boring, we went later than usual, arriving at about 4pm and missing some of the minor bands. Nonetheless, we had…
-
So I was at the gym this morning doing a quick AM session before heading off to see the Ghost Scrolls, when I saw a daytime TV show doing a special report on the “London NEET Riots” (イギリスニート暴動). This was a classic daytime TV formula, consisting of a studio set with a panel of 3…
-
On Friday night I attended the Kagurazaka Festival in Idabashi, Tokyo. In this famous festival, groups of performers dance their way around a course through the streets of a famous part of old Tokyo; the most significant part occurs on the famous “Kagura Slope” to a backdrop of drumming and Japanese pipes. The procession alternates…
-
The Nameless One has spoken, this time through a team of oracles at the German sea-life aquarium, and the cephalopod cabal predicted a win by Japan in the Women’s Soccer World Cup. The closeness of the decision within the tentacled tribunal led some to question whether the final match might be a closely-fought event, and…
Compromise and Conceit 