Every Time I Read A Different Translation Of Senbonzakura I Feel Less Confident As To What It's Talking

I'm sure it was because of volcano activity, people saw fire emerging from the earth and so always had a vague idea that beneath the surface, it was hot. The Phlegraean fields, Vesuvius, Etna etc.

btw does the characterisation of christian hell being hot and underground predate modern knowledge about earth's core and magma layers? was it because people dug deep enough to notice it was hotter? did people directly attribute the eruption of volcanos to something exiting from inside the earth and therefore hell? i haven't read dante's inferno feel like that might have some answers.

by Hiroshige III (a student of the more famous Hiroshige).

It's extra Dai-Nippon Gothich because it's an ad for a circus performing on the grounds of the Yasukuni shrine.

People have noticed! My uninformed guess is that whoever is writing these is trying to like, emulate some kind of Chinese prose style that has lots of four-character phrases/proverbial allusions or something? And is using English figures of speech as an equivalent? But I can't read or speak any kind of Chinese so I don't know if that's a real feature of Chinese prose writing. It's just a vibe I get that this is a translation of something that hit different in the source language

flipping back and forth between the document i’m editing for work and the wikipedia page for cantonese opera like a kid hiding a comic book inside their textbook

in the endless battle between aesthetic reactionaries and consumer slop nobody will ever win

it's cool how they have a reference just for Fukiko's hair... not exactly a braid, but the component of her hair that's somewhat analogous to one. So elegant...

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does anyone still teach how to calculate directional taboos through Onmyōdō like in the Heian period. I want the experience of not being able to travel in a certain compass direction due to a divine presence

My opinion: Yukio Mishima doesn't fit into the "Dai-Nippon Gothic" aesthetic. Mishima's writing is suffused by sunlight and healthy, powerful bodies, symbolic opposites of what "gothic" makes us feel. Mishima's writing is the sea under blue skies and the Ise Grand Shrine. Gothic is disease, frail bodies, lightless spaces.

The difference is that Mishima was actually a fascist and believed it was beautiful, while the Dai-Nippon gothic aesthetic uses imperialist imagery as a form of grotesque violence, mixed up with disease and perversion. Mishima's view on death can shade into this but there's a disconnect because in the gothic aesthetic, it's an outsider's perspective on fascism. Fascism as excessive violence, extravagant criminality, a heterotopia where everyday morality is reversed.

It would be wrong to reduce "Dai-Nippon Gothic" to the restrictive label 'antifascist' but I don't think real fascism can mix coherently with the aesthetic.

Writers who the "Dai-Nippon" aesthetic would do well to appropriate --- Ranpo, Yumeno Kyūsaku, maybe Izumi Kyōka, definitely much of the work of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

Of course, recontextualized images of Mishima can be appropriated but it's good to remember they're being twisted away from their original meaning

another universe with different laws of physics

precure deep fried

You can trace an ideological lineage from Tezuka to Miyazaki, where both promote a kind of 'pacifism' which is at its core conservative and hostile to the idea of fighting against real evil. Thinking specifically of Tezuka's "Buddha" series here

My hot take is that I feel like “ghibli films are pro Japanese imperialism” is a lazy jab that grabs at a few soft spots in the oeuvre to make the cheapest most rhetorically damaging shot it can, and that an honest analysis would generally struggle to say even the most problematic of the movies like The Wind Rises come out of the wash with a positive opinion of imperial Japan. My hotter take is that if you rigorously pull at the threads where the nominally anti-war films thematically collapse, you’ll find the issue isn’t a support of Japanese Imperialism but a lack of a rigorous critique of industrial civilization.

it feels like we're only beginning to realize how much psychological heterogeny exists among humans

let's forget about the idea of human nature together