Not surprising, but sort of disappointing that the writer thinks that modern Japanese culture so heavily defined by its interactions with the West, esp. from WWII. It's not that it's untrue or incorrect, it's just that Japan is more complicated than that. Lots of old paradoxes and influences that don't really lend themselves to a neat thesis. You're doomed to fall short, like when you try to explain a beautiful dream to someone who didn't see it.
A lot of USA's current culture is from our interactions with Japan and Germany from WW2. I mean... Capt. America, Superman, Wonder Woman to name a few... but also Rosie the Riveter, Baby Boomers (and their children: the Echo Boomers), etc. etc...
It turns out that WW2 was a big cultural event, no matter what side you fought on.
The most popular dinner dish is called "french bread", and it is a Brazillian imitation of french baguette, invented after Brazillian soldiers came home from WW1 and tried to copy the baguette. (yep, Brazil fought on WW1 and WW2! it was truly world wars! Just numbered wrong, Napoleon caused the first real world war)
WW2 is THE defining moment of the XX century. In 200 years time, we will have forgotten everything about Watergate, red/black terrorism, punk, vinyl, the Space Race, ICE engines, the labor movement, sexual revolution, Beatles and Rolling Stones - but kids in school will still have to learn about the Nazis and the Soviets and Pearl Harbor, in the same way today we have to know about the French Revolution - because it fundamentally altered the cultural and political setup of the world in ways that have been felt ever since.
One of the things kicking around the back of my brain is that we won't have forgotten this stuff 200 years from now, because it happened within living memory of people who were around during the rise of effectively infinite digital storage and searching. We remember a lot more than you suggest from the 17th-19th centuries, and the recorder is functionally "clicked on" from about 1900 forward; that's only ramped up.
You see this a lot with music services, and with the way that availability has shaped musical tastes in younger folks. It isn't uncommon to have people who are much older than me really into modern pop, and it isn't uncommon to have people who are much younger than me listening enthusiastically to stuff made twenty years before they were born. Obviously both sets of people existed before Spotify etc. - but now anybody can be those people without effort, and it has created an effect where older stuff is never really ejected from the mental map of "music listeners". You can, if you listen and have a breadth of understanding, know when a piece of music was written in the last ~30 years or so, but there's a leveling effect where it's all just part of the library now.
Barring significant events(tm), we aren't going to forget much of anything going forward. It's just going to be a question of who was driven, either intentionally or by accident, to trawl the right archives.
I disagree, we have a choice to learn or remember, but the effect of communism, the Republican Party not being the party of trump, China not being communist for decades, life before internet or bottled water is long forgotten.
Anyone can play music, not everyone can read tomes of history.
I find that hard to believe. 200 years ago was the early 1800s. We have hardly "forgotten everything" about Beethoven, Dickens, the abolitionist movement, the war of 1812, etc. I can almost guarantee in another 200 years, the civil rights movement, the vietnam war, the cold war, and the beatles will all be taught to some degree or another.
In the US, they sing a song about the war of 1812 before every major event. People might not remember the details, but it's fully baked into our culture.
I think that's because race issues are still very much (and sadly) a thing in 2021, and understanding race issues in historical context is very important. Also slavery still exists to this day.
Anecdotally, I was taught much more about the Industrial Revolution than the French Revolution; and plenty of the musical names from 200-300 years ago — Bethoven, Schubert, Bach, Mozart — were ones I listened to on Classic FM in my school years[0].
Certainly most culture will be forgotten (the Wikipedia list of 18th and 19th C. classical composers are 676 and 1620 long respectively)… but I can say much the same of their timeline of the 18th century[1], including a famine that killed 10%-20% of Ireland[2], and the 7 years war[3].
[0] I blame the “Mozart effect” getting in the news at the time, but still.
The 7 years war was just that, a war over territories - as such, it's fundamentally forgotten. The French Revolution, on the other hand, was a cultural upheaval that affected society everywhere, so it's still mentioned. Obviously the British have an interest in downplaying it, like the Irish famine, but still it cannot be ignored.
Was the French Revolution as close to “pure evil” as any thing/event could be? And a cause, for all time, for red faced shame on the part of French speaking persons the world over?
No, but it was as controversial an event as it could ever be - it polarized pretty much every aspect of society across the entire continent. There is a Before and After that event that affected pretty much every European country, and most of the following century (arguably all the way to WW2) was fought over whether that event and its principles were Good or Bad. Even countries that were left somewhat unscathed, like Britain, still defined themselves (for a very long time) in antithesis to what the event generated (Napoleon).
Cultural exchange isn't what the parent post suggested though. More that a lot of modern American culture has emerged as the result of the war with Germany and Japan - popular comic book heroes being one of them. Capitan American beating up Nazis wouldn't be a thing if well, you weren't at war with the Nazis.
The creation of Israel (largely as the world reacted to the horrors of the Holocaust). The creation of Atomic weapons. The use of total war upon each other. The damage and/or total loss of cities (not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also Tokyo firebombings, Stalingrad, Dresden, Nanking, Manila). The creation of rockets (V2, which directly led to Space technology). The creation of cruise missiles (V1). The creation of Aircraft Carriers.
The rise of propaganda around the world. The rise of ideology associated with that propaganda (Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism). Fascism mostly died out but Capitalism / Communism grew stronger after the war.
WW1, the "great war", was thought to be the defining moment of the 1900s. Instead, an even greater and bigger war was fought that almost completely overshadowed WW1.
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After the war, when peace was finally established, everyone shared in the pain and loss associated with the war.
Lets take the Siege of Leningrad / St. Petersberg, well accepted by historians to be an attempted Genocide against the Slavs. Hitler's plan was to kill everyone in the city, and Hitler's methodology was starvation (cut off the food supply, and watch everyone die inside the city).
No matter how you look at it, Leningrad was an atrocity on a massive scale. With over 3-million dead in this singular siege alone, I think we can safely declare the Siege of Leningrad to be the biggest loss-of-life in a __singular__ military operation ever... albeit spread over multiple years (it was a big campaign), but a singular operation nonetheless.
Nothing else in history compares. Not the atomic bombs in Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Not the Toyko firebomings. Not even Holocaust (because the "Operation Barbarossa" was ~20-million dead, far dwarfing the Holocaust. Leningrad was just one piece of the overall plan).
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That's what I mean by total war. War on a scale and scope so massive, it makes the rest of history look puny in comparison.
Arguably the attacks on say, Nanking or Manila, are more akin to historical (with soldiers raping and pillaging as they see fit). I can find historical examples similar to Nanking / Manila for certain (Mongols or whatever). But not even the Mongols starved 3+ million to death in an explicit campaign of genocide in a singular military operation (The Mongols, as "evil" as they were, sought conquest and not genocide on this scale)
And we've got all sorts of bad examples to choose from WW2. Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden, Berlin, Leningrad, Stalingrad.
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You won't see Joan of Arc destroying cities on this scale... nor William , nor King Henry. Some of the Crusades were known to be bloody... but even the Siege of Jerusalem (1st Crusade) resulted in "only" 70,000 deaths, a number that is far smaller than the total-warfare of the WW2 era.
Well... maybe William the Conqueror did destroy a few towns actually, if I recall. But not on anything approaching WW2 scales.
> With over 3-million dead in this singular siege alone, I think we can safely declare the Siege of Leningrad to be the biggest loss-of-life in a __singular__ military operation ever... [...]
> Nothing else in history compares.
That's what I mean by total war. War on a scale and scope so massive, it makes the rest of history look puny in comparison.
> Mongols or whatever [...] but not even the Mongols starved 3+ million to death in an explicit campaign of genocide in a singular military operation.
> The mongols killed up to 2 million people in less than two weeks
I very much doubt that account. The Holocaust was 15,000 deaths-per-day at its peak, and that was a fully industrialized gas-and-bury operation.
2-million in 2 weeks is 140,000 people killed per day, or roughly 10x "more efficient" than the Holocaust at its peak.
I have severe doubts that the Mongols in the 1200s had the efficiency of the Nazi genocide operation. Just from technology alone: the Nazis were able to use poison gas and bullets to quickly and efficiently kill, as well as the use of fully loaded Trains and logistics to ensure that these death-machines were operating at maximum efficiency.
Absolutely agree with a small nitpick. My read of (more recent) history leads me to the idea that the distinction between capitalist and communist nations incrementally eroded (think 1970s onward) until true fascism (merger of corp and state) re-emerged and became the dominant organizing principle for most of the world.
In my humble opinion it should be no surprise that the mere existence of a state itself establishes perverse incentives for corporations to leverage until their power is at least comparable. To that end the state becomes an arm of corporate hegemony and we are left with simple fascism.
What I think confuses the majority of people is that within the left-right paradigm, the current crop of fascists claim to be left-leaning where fascism was understood to be a right-wing ideology. No one asked, but if they did, I would tell them that it's still a far-right ideology, the powers that be are actually far-right, and they use pathological altruism, compassion and politeness (i.e. typical leftism) as a cover for their operations (e.g. "Think of the children")
And lots of people understand about effective storytelling.
It's not any more dishonest to "focus" and craft a narrative that has a dream as its source material than it is to do the same for any other source material.
>that modern Japanese culture so heavily defined by its interactions with the West
It's maybe a small detail: The hero picture of the article shows Miyazaki in front of his atelier near Studio Ghibli with an old German mailbox ("Postkasten") next to him.
It should be noted that Japan has a very special and long history with German Countries. Germans brought modern western medical knowledge to Japan in the 17th. Century, influencing the country to the point that the language used in the medical sector was German (AFAIK still is today to some degree). In the 19th. Century when Japan was forced to open itself to the world, Japan had a friendship and treaty with the German state Prussia, which helped to modernize Japans industry and society. The whole education-system at the time was basically imported from there, to the point that the iconic look of Japanese pupils today are going back to Prussia.
That mailbox is in similar style, it's very old and the design is so classic that the word on it is not even common any more today.
You'll also notice that the manufacturer, Caproni, is the same guy who shows up in all of the dream sequences in The Wind Rises. Also, IIRC, the engine in Porco Rosso's plane is from a Ghibli.
