General Japanese Culture Thread

The big problem now with that is its everyone around them has been quite unruly as of late, the U.S. has been coming off a flighty and then there is the US soldiers that keep getting involved in rapes and such.

That keeps giving the Rightwingers ammo to keep bringing up the idea of ditching the whole peace thing and reform the army.

Well, there's nothing morally wrong with having an army. Heck, I'm not even fundamentally opposed to offensive operations on foreign soil.

As long as they don't declare war in the name of gaining more rice fields, I'd say let them reform whatever. It might even help getting the Japanese a little more invested in the world outside their little island nation.

Define "what happened all those decades ago", because AFAIK, even the Japanese who lived through that period remained woefully ignornat of the true scale of the Imperial military's atrocities that it committed in the people's name, and none of the nationally approved textbooks for eduction or public libraries delved into said atrocities in anyway, to the point that the advent of the Internet led to an increasingly growing portion of the newer generation of Japanese youth either having their faith and patriotic loyalty to their country shattered by discovering just how horrible their ancestors were during the war, or going into tragic denial about it all.

edited 24th Mar '15 6:38:52 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Japan has too many rice fields as it is. Their agriculture is woefully un-competitive and propped up only by massive subsidies. They grow rice that they literally cannot sell because the government-backed prices are too high compared to cheap imported rice from their neighbors. Effectively busy-work for the farmers.

What they need is oil, actually, especially given the national mood after Fukushima.

Spaghetti is decently popular in Japan. You could buy spaghetti meals at the 7-11 (next to the "Hamburger" that earlier posters mentioned, as well as proper Japanese Bento). The marinara sauce it came with had a little pat of butter on the top, that melted in when you microwaved it.

When you start getting force projection capabilities and carrier task forces to back them up then you got a situation where the old nationalistic mentally might come back and really even a hint of that would throw the entire Far East into chaos and the U.S. would be caught in the middle.

The visits to a certain shrine by high ranking government officials just keep reminding the area of that.

Honestly all the push and pull by all sides just seem to be aimed at keeping the status quo, if only they could get the islands dispute sorted then maybe some progress could be made especially in the PR department.

But yes I do agree it would be good if Japan could stop looking like a pansy to everyone outside of the Far East, that whole ISIS kidnapping thing was a disaster.

edited 24th Mar '15 7:03:04 AM by Memers

Nuclear power is still far cleaner than oil. That plant had been inadequately prepared for the tsunami.

Tsunami of that size. It was far larger than anything that was expected.

If by famous stories you mean "fun ways to traumatise Hanshin Tigers fans" then yes, that's true.

Edit to fix tag

edited 24th Mar '15 3:50:07 PM by KnightofLsama

Heh.

Not sure if this is the right thread, but Tokyo Electic Power Corp. has admitted that Unit One at Fukushima Daiichi did actually melt down during the 2011 accident.

Direct all enquiries to Jamie B Good

Nuclear power seems like a good idea at first but then the whole meltdown and radiation thing.

"We are just like Irregular Data. And that applies to you too, Ri CO. And as for you, Player... your job is to correct Irregular Data."

Hydrocarbon fuels sound like a great idea and then you have the massive oil spills and coal mines that don't stop burning for years and such.

Solar power sounds like a great idea and then you get one of those really fucking nasty sunburns that gets all blistery and there's pus and it's really gross.

The Japanese Self-Defense Force is using a cutesy smartphone game as a recruiting tool.

...Well, it could have been mecha musume.

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

Japan has none of these things. The only aviation ships operated by the JMSDF are their four helicopter destroyers, Izumo^note Literally just commissioned today., Hyuga, Ise, and Kurama and their LSDs Osumi, Shimokita, and Kunisaki. None of these are capable of operating fixed-wing aircraft. Izumo, the largest, despite all the hullabaloo, is not suitable for operating fixed-wing aircraft without extensive conversion work, and even if it was, the Japanese don't have any plans to acquire the jets they'd need to launch off it.

—

Imperial Japanese military music was pretty cool:

Warship March.

Battleship Shikishima March.

Battle of Tsushima Sea March.

edited 25th Mar '15 3:13:44 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

OMG this is like Psycho Pass!

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Did you happen to read what I had posted before? They dont have that now but every time some incident happens it gives fuel to the hardliners to get that and that could start all that up again.

Most, if not all, ancient empires developed and deployed this geopolitical doctrine as they came to realize the practical necessity of diplomacy that came along with conquering and controlling huge swathes of territory. However, the extent in which they practiced this also could vary - unlike the Romans for example, the Mongols were far less interested in "civilizing" their subjects and developing their lands than making sure that the taxes and tributes to the Khan were paid.

Funny how we're talking about the strategic bombing of Japan, because I attended a book signing at my local library featuring this fellow from my hometown that wrote a book dedicated to the topic. He gave an hour-long lecture on the subject matter of his book, which, while I found admirable given his attention to detail and creative ways to explain the otherwise really technical aspects (he used a Google Maps projection of said hometown to convey the different results from strategic and saturation bombing), felt rather hollow to me in how he dismissed the Japanese defense efforts in a single offhand remark about them having to shuffle "a single set of AA guns from city to city guessing where we were going to go next." I mean, while it's fact that the Third Reich's skies were so clogged with flak that Japan's had to be a heavenly hallucination, he could have also brought up the infamous Toryu "ramming squadrons" and some more information from the Japanese perspective as a whole instead of how Curtis Le May was, to him, one of the most underrated commanders of the war and supposedly brought the Emperor to his knees with more "results" sustained from B-29 firebombings instead of the atomic bombs.

Perhaps it was less the author himself, whom I insist was quite an easy-to-talk-to fellow and excellent lecturer, and more-so the rest of his audience than made me uncomfortable; the question-and-answer session was basically a dick-waving contest between the loud-mouthed numerous war veterans in the room over who could sound the smartest and most enlightened in front of the obvious academic researcher with the most credentials on the stuff. Now I've met plenty of World War II veterans before, but these guys were basically turning the place into a jittery flag-waving patriotic rally where the general attitude towards the Japanese (and perhaps Asians in general, as when the author remarked how Mac Arthur got in hot water for constantly threatening to carry the Korean War to China, one verbally well-endowed veteran coldly uttered "Cha-neese" in the most disgusting way possible) resembled that of white colonists looking down at some strangely savage untermenschen. I mean, there was this old lady who bothered to ask why the Japanese didn't surrender despite all the suffering inflicted by our good ol' boys in the USAAF - well, why didn't the US nation bent backwards and die when 9/11 happened? Perhaps the Japanese, like the Germans, were only driven further into their siege mentality and wanted to get back at us while they still could?

Forgive me for the rant, but I had never seen such a congregation of Category I Eagle Land believers in my life.

edited 25th Mar '15 7:38:11 AM by FluffyMcChicken

If the Japanese people in general are horrified with the war crimes committed back in the 1930s and 1940s, with the problem being right-wing nuts, how are the Japanese people in general in regards to the Tokugawa Shogunate's cruel treatment of Christians?

That was just politics as usual.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Then how is it handled education-wise, given the war crimes being another educational issue in Japan?

edited 25th Mar '15 7:55:00 PM by HallowHawk

That didn't happen in Germany or Japan though - the strategic bombing campaign caused a collapse in German morale, and was a key factor in convincing many Germans that the war was lost. The bombings also caused the fabric of German society to break apart - lootings, thefts, families split up due to refugee problems, the cutting of rations, and, most of all, the realization that there might be a different truth than the one their leaders told them. 9/11 didn't break American will because Americans knew they could - and would - retaliate. The raids on Japan and Germany made those peoples realize that they were not masters of their fates, and moreover it gave the lie to the military assurances that Germany and Japan were safe.

There's a pretty good chance the Japanese could have been driven to surrender by starvation and strategic bombing. It would have killed many more than the A-bombs, but it could have been done.

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Thats what I was saying a page ago when the A-bombs were the least-worst option in defeating Japan

To add that what you've said, I suspect that the sustained nature of what happened to Germany and Japan is what made the difference. 9/11 was a one off, Japan and Germany were being bombed constantly, there was no stopping it no matter how hard they tried. If the US had been subject to terrorist attack after terrorist attack following 9/11 then I think US moral would have tanked.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Wow.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Some of those are quite good.