General Japanese Culture Thread

Keep in mind that East Asian cultures tend to have a fairly strong authoritarian mindset and traditions based on honoring the past and such. Which in Japan at least amounts to denying war crimes committed in the past. Far-right nationalism is a problem in Japan.

edited 20th Feb '17 9:21:15 PM by M84

But at least their ****-ups usually don't screw over the rest of the world like the West's does.

edited 20th Feb '17 9:23:02 PM by Bat178

That's partly because Japan just isn't as powerful. It also doesn't have nukes — probably has something to do with being the only country that has ever actually been nuked — or a significant military force.

edited 20th Feb '17 9:24:42 PM by M84

Japan did fuck up when it tried its best to imitate Britain-San in invading half of all Asian countries with Pacific coastline.

China fucked up monumentally when Cixi rolled back her predecessors' modernization programs, consolidating her power at the cost of her nation's future security.

Japan's culture isn't any more "unique" than America's, in the sense that each country has a past which influences their modern culture, and a whole bunch of fuck ups in their pasts. Acting as if their fuck ups are somehow "better" simply because they don't have the reach we do is idiotic equivocation.

Your commentary leans towards romanticizing Japan simply because it's not your culture and you haven't had to deal personally with their problems. It's easy to gloss over the faults when you don't live there.

And having lived there, it does indeed have plenty of faults, and listen to the above.

We have really fucked up the world just like the rest, limited only by the fact we haven't had as big of a military.

I know. No country is perfect, and I am well aware of their imperialistic past.

edited 20th Feb '17 10:24:09 PM by Bat178

My grandmother's family lost everything, including at least one cousin, because of the Imperial Japanese military's actions, so to say their fuckups didn't mess up "the rest of the world" just because you never lived in any of it is a very relative term here. I'd even say it's insensitive of you if I wasn't so used to you making messed up comments with regularity.

edited 20th Feb '17 10:39:11 PM by AlleyOop

My grandparents and their relatives also suffered under the Nazis and Franco Spain (Remember, we are from Gibraltar. We were sandwiched between Franco Spain and a Vichy French-controlled Morocco, and were all forced to evacuate, leave everything behind and become effectively homeless for up to 10 years. You can read about some of what happened to us here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_of_the_Gibraltarian_civilian_population_during_World_War_II ), and two of my great grandfathers were physically brutalized in some way by them (One of them got HIS FUCKING NAILS RIPPED OUT by them, and the other was killed during the evacuation of Gibraltar and my grandmother witnessed it). Despite that, I don't hold any grudges against modern Germany or Spain. Anyways, I think we should change the subject before this becomes too heated and the mods become ornery.

edited 20th Feb '17 11:24:25 PM by Bat178

Huh? I never said or implied anywhere that I held a grudge against the Japanese people because of it, and I'll be the first to tell someone to fuck off if they try to take out historical grievances towards modern-day people because of it. I do have relatives who are like that and it sucks. If that's what you got from it, then it's not at all what I was trying to say.

It's more that, the way you not only romanticized Japanese culture, then followed up after someone pointed it out by bluntly downplaying their flaws when they were brought up, is a little troublesome. After all I don't think you'd appreciate it very much if we were on a Chinese message board and I posted about how much more interesting and superior German culture was than anything Asia could produce, then I claimed that eh, the things they did in WWII weren't that bad because they weren't directly responsible for invading China and Unit 731.

Also in general you should really think about how you come off when you post political opinions. You have a tendency to post in ways that suggest you think strongly in absolutes, and if you sincerely 100% mean everything you say whenever you post, including those times you talked about relishing the idea of Americans being shot over the admittedly shitty things the US has done, then I am 100% sincere in suggesting that you talk to a mental health specialist about it.

edited 20th Feb '17 11:35:03 PM by AlleyOop

Behold, pufferfish!

I was trying to bring up a point that both our families suffered from fascism by neighboring countries and lost a lot to them, and that's one of the reasons I hate Far-Right parties so much and am completely furious that they are taking over the West, not to mention Gibraltar is about to suffer again from fascists due to Brexit, as we mostly rely on the EU for our economy, have a broke asshole neighbor/"ally" that is the only way out of the country by land, wants to assimilate us against our will (And we have fought wars with them before to stop them from assimilating us) and now has the opportunity to do so, and we voted almost completely against Brexit (So we are basically the UK's California, except not as rich), and then the country I fled to to avoid the fallout just happened to vote in Troll Pot (AKA Trump) and screw pretty much everyone over. I admit that I shouldn't of said "the rest of the world" before, though.

edited 20th Feb '17 11:51:31 PM by Bat178

Alright, I can accept that.

Anyways, let's get back on topic.

x4 I've always wanted to try pufferfish, toxin be damned.

If you have fugu at a licensed restaurant, you should be fine - the chefs are required to be trained in identifying the poisonous parts of the fugu and only preparing the non-poisonous parts.

I wonder what all this talk about poison-free fugu is about, though.

Probably the farm-raised ones. Wild ones are toxic in part due to what they eat, I think.

fugu (and I believe some other species of puffers as well) get their toxins by weaponizing bioaccumulation. Puffers feed off of shellfosh, which are filter feeders. the toxins (in this case a particularly nasty one called tetrodotoxin, or TDX) come from the bacteria that are taken up by said shellfish in the wild. Can't exactly dig up the relevant article right now (on a mobile phone and in China currently), but I believe there was a Japanese scientist a while back that bred toxin-free fugu by farming them and carefully controlling their diet.

There are of course fugu fans who decry the "non-toxic" fugu as inferior and not as tasty as the wild fugu. As I've never eaten either, I don't know if there's actual merit to that or if this is just typical pretentious culinary snobbery.

edited 21st Feb '17 2:19:35 AM by M84

Don't know about fugu, but farmed fish does taste significantly different. Not bad, but different. It's about what they eat and so on.

As the video says, decades ago they used to actually have a little bit of the toxin left in the fish creating an intoxicating effect. This is illegal as hell now, but apparently it still does happen among the more elite, or those who remember the "good old days".

edited 21st Feb '17 2:25:39 AM by TerminusEst

As I recall, a famous kabuki actor died because he liked the numbing sensation a little too much, to the point of ordering a plate of fugu liver, with obviously fatal results.

He boasted that he was immune and ate three livers. He died after seven hours of paralysis and convulsions. I remember someone saying that due to the length of time, ironically enough, he had quite the resistance to the toxin.

Today when I fought a random player in Puzzle of Empires, I noticed that he is one of the host of the official YouTube channel videos. It turned out that he is the game's composer.

While apparently hiring company employees to do these videos is a common practice in mobile games (Elemental Story also has one), I wondered why, aside of being a cost cutting measure....

By now, any time Hayao Miyazaki calmly spouts hateful things about the world, I just happily say "good morning to you too"!

It's generally taken that Miyazaki has switched from director to professional grumpy old man.