Battening down the hatches for the possibly two typhoons on their way, I've gotten quite confused about what we are arguing about. Looking back, my problem is that wj's first comment seemed to take in the common conservative trope of cultural relativism = fuzzy liberal thinking of anything goes. nous pointed out that for undergraduates, you often have to pound into their heads the fact that _everyone_ carries a lot of prejudices and it is hard work separating oneself from them. Getting them over that hurdle is job 1, but some people take it (or possibly more accurately lampoon it) as all there is.
As Russell notes, humans have a long history of doing shitty stuff, so making anyone doing that the villain is probably going to preserve, and possibly enlarge blind spots. I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering what people in the future are going to make of the things that I do and think 'wtf were they thinking?'
I'm not really sure how marriage is something you want to take as something that, I don't know, argues against cultural relativism? There are a lot of things to pick at, like the oscillation between legal terms and social naming (shacking up, friends with benefits), but the fact that you name it suggests that there is some public recognition of the fact.There is not a 'who is shacking up with whom' column in the NYTimes, but within that person's social sphere, there must be something that had to be named.
Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official and over half of the people do what is called a nashi-kon (no wedding marriage). So your definition seems a bit ethnocentric, at least where Japanese are concerned.
To understand 'marriage', you have to look at the totality of the culture, which seems to require some sort of cultural relativism in order to not fall into false comparisons.
But even if a particular culture doesn’t do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.
They have norms about how people partner or group up. Those generally flow to specific examples, like male/female couples, who comprise the majority, and those norms are kept those in place with social enforcement. But as soon as you say 'marriage', you kind of lose me in making some sort of universal argument.
I mean, you have the word kekkon（結婚）in Japan, which roughly corresponds to marriage and is what you say to explain to your friends. Marriage, right? But if you fill out a government document, it is kon'in (婚姻) which is more meaning affiliation, especially between two houses. In fact, in the Heian era, marriage was matrilocal, with the man _visiting_ the wife at her mother's house, which gives interesting thoughts what 'meeting the family' means. And if the husband didn't visit within 3 months, the couple was considered divorced. As Mr Spock might say, it is marriage, but not as we know it.
That system took 500 years to disappear, in part because it made more sense to move the wife to the samurai husband's (fortified) estate and primogeniture was necessary to prevent a family's lands from being divided, weakening military power. This is when Neo-confucianism got into it and eventually, it was codified that the eldest male of the family had total control over everyone in the household and a marriage could only take place if he approved it. But you still have traces of that matrilocal system, like muko-iri, 婿入り where the husband is adopted by the wife's family.
We can argue whether these sorts of differences are enough to undermine a term of marriage, but regardless, I'd avoid making claims about the universality of marriage until you specifically define what you mean.
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought.
Across time? I'll forgo a deep dive, but the Asian words are all about creating family ties rather than any kind of intimacy or family unit implication, which may be why for Japanese, you have this strange combination of citizenship being represented as an individual passport and having/being listed on a koseki (family register) Just cause it gets translated as 'marriage' doesn't mean that it is.
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up. Well, I'm pretty sure gay people have partnered up through history. Every small southern town had their two spinsters who were living together while President James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor, roomed with a politician from Alabama for 10 years before he became president (and the roommate passed away before Buchanan became president). So why is that not 'marriage'?
But when a lot of people talk about marriage, they are thinking about wedding cake, or licenses, or getting drunk at receptions. But those are certainly not universal, but it is easy to have the lines blur between what is the core and what is peripheral. In addition, there are a lot of things associated with marriage that, if we acknowledge some set of universal human rights, we can't simply say oh, we have to accept that. Dowries? Father giving away the daughter? Understanding it requires understanding the social networks and all the other anthro sort of things, but it's just a conservative conceit that this means researchers _defend_ those practices. You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can't be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.
Cultural relativism is about understanding a culture (or subculture) in its own terms. Look at how its cultural norms work for the benefit of its members — how they impact others from outside the culture is irrelevant.
Hmmm, I think the first part is right, but the second part is problematic. Certainly, no culture, with the possible exception of the Sentinelese, is exists in a vacuum, so you are moving from cultural relativism to ethical relativism. It seems like the second statement could be used to justify anything. Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn't become a moral compass.
I too was surprised at the recency of the trickster and it was interesting that Radin wrote about it in the late 50's given that he was a student of Boas, who is late 19th century/early 20th. Radin must have been in his 70's when he wrote the book mentioned. Something to think about when you hear bitching about the gerentocracy.
Boas came to the US from Germany with an ax to grind, which was that Primitive people weren't as primitive as people said, so I give him points for pushing back against the tide of Social Darwinism. A lot of the research was linguistics, trying to figure out why you had this patchwork of languages and cultures in the US. Brinton, mentioned by nous, was appointed professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at UPenn, becoming the first Anthro professor in the US. He liked the theory of psychic unity, which was that people were people, but then argued that what particular races did with those building blocks determined their evolutionary advance (boo!). This was opposed by Radin's teacher Boas, who argued for cultural relativism, with no culture being superior to another. (yay!) Though I wonder how they would deal with MAGA culture...
But you had both Brinton (under the guise of psychic unity) and Boas, (who argued that no culture was superior to another) pushing the trickster and linking it to Western mythic figures like Loki and Hermes. The whole idea is foundational to studying Native American culture and linguistics, cause you had all these field anthropologists collecting trickster tales which then gives you your data for study.
However, most linguists dealing with NA languages are not really chasing Jung, but are more obsessed with their particular language family and take a more romantic approach, thinking well, I'm sure there's something to that trickster stuff. I recall a presentation about something related to a Coyote tale, maybe from the Southwest by 2 people and just before the conference, one of the presenters had to have emergency eye surgery and the other presenter said, well, what do you expect, we are talking about Coyote and everyone kind of nodded, and probably thought yeah, that makes sense.
Oooo, teaching in the target language. It's one of those things that seems like such a good idea but is focussing on the teacher rather than on what the student does and is therefore destined to fail.
Here in Japan, you get students who just wait the teacher out for a Japanese explanation and if you have enough of them, it can be agonizing.. It also reinforces that native/non-native divide, and I've had folks (both Japanese and non-Japanese) argue with a straight face that the native (i.e. native English speaking teacher) should NOT learn any Japanese, so as to be this rock of immovable language that the students run into over and over. Sigh...
Wonkie, you might be thinking of the book by Paul Radin, a student of Franz Boas. If anyone wants to check out his book on it, it is here
https://ignca.gov.in/Asi_data/4517.pdf
Everyone, that's really fun stuff, and nous, a really nice inversion. So would you say the story of Loki and Baldr, which seems like typical trickster shit, is like a retcon?
Quick tldr, Baldr is the cool handsome kid and is invulnerable to everything because his mom Frigg got everything to promise never to hurt him. Of course, she missed mistletoe (which has a particular resonance with Celtic mysticism and gets imported into Christmas, so that figures). So Loki gets a party game going where all the gods throw shit at Baldr and it just bounces off of him. As everyone's mom used to say, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. In this case, Baldr's twin brother, Hodur (which was the inspiration for George RR Martin's Hodor), who was blind, was left out, so Loki says come on, join in and gives him a twig of misletoe and guides his arm. And of course, it pierces Baldr's heart and kills him and the gods lose it. Baldr goes down to Hell and his mom follows and pleads for his release. Hel, ruler of the underworld, says ok, if you can get everything in creation to weep for Baldr. Spoiler, one giantess (who may be Loki in disguise) refuses to, so Baldr stays put and when the gods discover it was Loki shapeshifting, they bind him to a rock with a poisonous snake.
So the story has overtones of Sisyphus (another trickster) and with the whole bringing back Baldr, you have the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Though it does make Loki out to be a shit (he supposedly did it because he was jealous of Baldr)
When I was looking up Trickster gods, it noted that the trickster god role in Africa is often taken up by a spider, which had me wondering if the story of Arachne and Athena, which I thought was a creation of Ovid, might be related, but gemini says they aren't. Who you going to believe, an LLM or your pet theory?
Wj's observation that Monkey D Luffy is an homage to Dragonball is spot on. Eichiro Oda, who does One Piece (and is from where I live!) has often said how much he idolizes Toriyama and he actually redrew the entire volume 42, which was the last volume in the original series, as a tribute. If the Thai students are really manga heads, I'll bring this up and send them to the prefectural office to see this. https://kumamoto-guide.jp/en/spots/detail/368
And the question about Abrahamic religions, sure, let's go there. I've never really delved into Old Testament as myth, something actively discouraged by my sunday school bible training, but my primary memory of Jacob is going up the ladder and talking to God, which seems to open up the possibility of trickster. A Joseph Smith jr. for biblical times.
But my thinking is that because people think that the Bible is somehow historical fact (or ignore it because they don't want to get in fights) has them fail to see how people and situations are archetypes and that we are placed in those situations in the process of living our lives. For Abrahamic religions, you have people who take their texts as actual historic truth. While the thread passes through a lot of anti-Muslim rhetoric, you've got a place like the Ark Encounter, as well as Israelis right wingers arguing for Greater Israel. All of these seem like taking mythological tales and attributing them a historical truth. Of course, Socrates ran up against the same thing on his way to a hemlock chaser, so it's not like mythic thinking is a guard.
Anyway, this was probably too long, but keep the observations coming!
Maybe I've been teaching too much TOEFL prep of late, but one of the standard questions after a conversational exchange is 'What does the man mean?' and I find myself asking myself that in regards to wj questions to me.
First, about what gender roles were brought in or perhaps overlaid, I've always found that Japanese women are able to exercise a great deal of power, though it is often behind the scenes. I bump heads with a lot of feminist friends here who complain about sexism here. I say well, there is, but there are also ways where Japanese women exercise power and you've got to consider that. It doesn't make everything all right, but lots of ink spilled about how Japanese women should be following the example of Western women and fails to realize they are more independent they one gives them credit.
A small example is the kakeibo system, where the husband turns over his paycheck to the wife. Here's a video about it
https://youtu.be/itMkFmVVWIk?si=b-ZdH19FrZUQjL-n
Korea has a similar system, so it is not a panacea against sexism, and I wonder if tradwife discourse has entered Korea through evangelical Christianity, which has the husband as the CFO who then gifts a budget to the woman.
wj also asks about homosexuality, and from his question, it sound like I gave the impression that all of these developments in Asia has resulted in making homosexuality problematic. While gender roles often is a huge issue in homosexual relatioships, the inability for anti-homosexual protesters to make much of a dent here in Japan suggests that this is not something that rises to the level of an issue.
About gender ratios, my impression is that China's problem is because of a government intervention which was not mirrored in SK or Japan. A lot of people raise the spectre of sex selection, but I don't see any of that. I have two daughters, so I may be biased, but I see a bias for females because male kids are a lot harder to raise, especially during pre-school and elementary schooling when the mother has to invest so much effort.
LGM had this post about 'emotional labour' in Thailand,
and it is interesting, but my feeling is because it gets placed into a capitalistic context, people are expected to put a money value on it. I've got no problem with it being used as a lever, but when you start thinking of dollars and cents, it becomes really difficult. While it is immensely difficult to deal with everything that a 'good mother' needs to do, Japanese women seem to accept it whereas many Western women complain. It is hard to know if this means that Japanese women are simply brainwashed or Western women are a little blind to the non-monetary rewards of that raising children in Japan brings.
As I said, I'm still thinking 'what does the man mean', so if there is anything else, please let me know!
I'm not sure if gender roles is the precise term, but as a starter, I'd note that homosexuality has never been criminalized here in Japan (except for a brief period in Meiji) and there is gender performativity in high culture i.e. Kabuki.
nous, great point. I love basketball, but have disengaged with it a bit for reasons I'm not really sure of. Unfortunately, Japanese news follows basketball a bit when there is a Japanese player, but the nature of the roster and the development of the talent pool means that you aren't going to get an Ohtani or similar level of player, so coverage is spotty and the coverage of WNBA is non-existent. If a Japanese woman were able to break into the roster, that might change, though I wonder if it would be like football (i.e. soccer) where a Japanese player is signed on for the cynical reason of attracting Japanese fans to buy jerseys. Though I suppose they are playing the odds, if a top-ranked player emerged, the club would experience a gold rush.
Interestingly enough, there is a connection between Antipodes rugby and Japan. I've heard the nickname The Cherry Whites or something similar because of the fact that a number of NZ players who couldn't break into the All Blacks would play in the Japan domestic league and thereby get eligibility for the Japan national team, with some of them taking citizenship.
I'm not sure if the rugby was a pull factor or if there are other reasons, but New Zealand football has had several Japanese players who have made an impact and one of them, Hiroki Sakai, who played on 3 Japanese world cup teams, is playing there and is planning on taking NZ citizenship.
nous, thanks for that, it makes a lot of that more understandable. I wish that female fandom were able to be more resistant to some of the more toxic points that you mention, but it's probably not really realistic to think that women can deal with all of the problems. And the whole question of who owns fandom would probably never make that possible.
Appreciate everyone jumping in.
About personality based fandom and nous' observations, yes, I see that in my wife. Not sure if you follow it closely, but if you do, I was wondering about what you thought about Catlin Clark? I'm not a follower, but clips have gotten in my feed and I see her getting beat up and not getting any protection from the ref (and she may be giving as good as she is getting, but a facebook algorithm isn't tuned for balance) Reporting pushes the racial undertone to the whole situation, but it seems a lot of it is ginned up by the media
https://www.sportingnews.com/ca/ncaa-basketball/news/caitlin-clark-angel-reese-beef-history-explained-iowa-lsu/e73dd26ee42cb1928ed9ef51
Anyway, any thoughts on that?
wj, my caution with Ohtani is because there may have been hitters better than Ohtani and there may have been pitchers better than Ohtani, but it's really hard to think that he does both. I also think that one reason there have been no hitters like Ohtani was that pitchers could plunk hitter before, but with the tighter leash held by umpires, he's able to set up. Bonds in particular holds that view, but I'm not sure how convinced I am by the argument.
The Duverger’s Law links are interesting, but isn't it a bit overdetermined? The US is the key example of a 2 party state (which is rather rare) and so it must be first past the post that decides it? That doesn't really get at how the system tends to reinforce itself.
Some discussion about why the US clings so closely to a 2 party system has to be connected to it establishing those practices in the mid-19th century and there being a civil war that enables one party which then sets up a system that perpetuates itself. I haven't figured out all of the ins and outs, but it seems like a multi-factor thing rather than a one and done.
Folks are tossing out names and I've got no idea who they are. I was vaguely aware of Platner, and I guessed that Becerra was a CA gov candidate, but I gave the Ezra the aspiring powerbroker Klein's CA gov roundtable a miss. As I think people in Oz say, I can't be arsed to figure out who is who.
Which leads to a bit of a bleg, Anyone like to post something about political races? Priest did mention Chris Harden,
https://www.chrishardenforcongress.com/
but if anyone would like to toss up something, even if it was just names to watch, I'd appreciate it. Kitty's address is libjpn at "Don't Be Evil" Corporation, if you send something, I can put it up, if you want to post it yourself, happy to work it out.
Nous, this is totally unrequested info, but I was curious about the Canadian teacher program and asked Gemini about it. I won't cut and paste, but because the replacement programs now seem to be run provincially, it seems like there are specific pathways.
I'm also thinking that when I worked in a Japanese board of education, we had a relationship with a BoE in BC and they had these hybrid HS/community college entities and from what you've discussed about your teaching, and more dancing with AI, I see stuff about Collegiate Institutes and HS/community college partnerships. I may be projecting, I teach at a university, but I think I would be much happier in my teaching (but probably not my wage or schedule) in teaching at a high school. It may be a case of assumed greener grass, but teaching kids on that cusp between high school and uni might be attractive.
Though nothing wrong with joining the Cascadian resistance...
hi wonkie, a suggestion, ask AI (I prefer Gemini, I find ChatGPT too obsequious) for information about the process. Needless to say, don't give out any personal data such as SS# and the like, but giving the details of your family history and asking what needs to be done can be really helpful. Because all of the information is usually on public websites, the LLM has scraped them and can assemble the requirements.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Monkey business”
Battening down the hatches for the possibly two typhoons on their way, I've gotten quite confused about what we are arguing about. Looking back, my problem is that wj's first comment seemed to take in the common conservative trope of cultural relativism = fuzzy liberal thinking of anything goes. nous pointed out that for undergraduates, you often have to pound into their heads the fact that _everyone_ carries a lot of prejudices and it is hard work separating oneself from them. Getting them over that hurdle is job 1, but some people take it (or possibly more accurately lampoon it) as all there is.
As Russell notes, humans have a long history of doing shitty stuff, so making anyone doing that the villain is probably going to preserve, and possibly enlarge blind spots. I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering what people in the future are going to make of the things that I do and think 'wtf were they thinking?'
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I'm not really sure how marriage is something you want to take as something that, I don't know, argues against cultural relativism? There are a lot of things to pick at, like the oscillation between legal terms and social naming (shacking up, friends with benefits), but the fact that you name it suggests that there is some public recognition of the fact.There is not a 'who is shacking up with whom' column in the NYTimes, but within that person's social sphere, there must be something that had to be named.
Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official and over half of the people do what is called a nashi-kon (no wedding marriage). So your definition seems a bit ethnocentric, at least where Japanese are concerned.
To understand 'marriage', you have to look at the totality of the culture, which seems to require some sort of cultural relativism in order to not fall into false comparisons.
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But even if a particular culture doesn’t do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.
They have norms about how people partner or group up. Those generally flow to specific examples, like male/female couples, who comprise the majority, and those norms are kept those in place with social enforcement. But as soon as you say 'marriage', you kind of lose me in making some sort of universal argument.
I mean, you have the word kekkon（結婚）in Japan, which roughly corresponds to marriage and is what you say to explain to your friends. Marriage, right? But if you fill out a government document, it is kon'in (婚姻) which is more meaning affiliation, especially between two houses. In fact, in the Heian era, marriage was matrilocal, with the man _visiting_ the wife at her mother's house, which gives interesting thoughts what 'meeting the family' means. And if the husband didn't visit within 3 months, the couple was considered divorced. As Mr Spock might say, it is marriage, but not as we know it.
That system took 500 years to disappear, in part because it made more sense to move the wife to the samurai husband's (fortified) estate and primogeniture was necessary to prevent a family's lands from being divided, weakening military power. This is when Neo-confucianism got into it and eventually, it was codified that the eldest male of the family had total control over everyone in the household and a marriage could only take place if he approved it. But you still have traces of that matrilocal system, like muko-iri, 婿入り where the husband is adopted by the wife's family.
We can argue whether these sorts of differences are enough to undermine a term of marriage, but regardless, I'd avoid making claims about the universality of marriage until you specifically define what you mean.
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Invite him over! I'm sure he's got a story to tell!
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Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought.
Across time? I'll forgo a deep dive, but the Asian words are all about creating family ties rather than any kind of intimacy or family unit implication, which may be why for Japanese, you have this strange combination of citizenship being represented as an individual passport and having/being listed on a koseki (family register) Just cause it gets translated as 'marriage' doesn't mean that it is.
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Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up. Well, I'm pretty sure gay people have partnered up through history. Every small southern town had their two spinsters who were living together while President James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor, roomed with a politician from Alabama for 10 years before he became president (and the roommate passed away before Buchanan became president). So why is that not 'marriage'?
But when a lot of people talk about marriage, they are thinking about wedding cake, or licenses, or getting drunk at receptions. But those are certainly not universal, but it is easy to have the lines blur between what is the core and what is peripheral. In addition, there are a lot of things associated with marriage that, if we acknowledge some set of universal human rights, we can't simply say oh, we have to accept that. Dowries? Father giving away the daughter? Understanding it requires understanding the social networks and all the other anthro sort of things, but it's just a conservative conceit that this means researchers _defend_ those practices. You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can't be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.
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Cultural relativism is about understanding a culture (or subculture) in its own terms. Look at how its cultural norms work for the benefit of its members — how they impact others from outside the culture is irrelevant.
Hmmm, I think the first part is right, but the second part is problematic. Certainly, no culture, with the possible exception of the Sentinelese, is exists in a vacuum, so you are moving from cultural relativism to ethical relativism. It seems like the second statement could be used to justify anything. Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn't become a moral compass.
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A few notes to add to nous summary (thanks).
I too was surprised at the recency of the trickster and it was interesting that Radin wrote about it in the late 50's given that he was a student of Boas, who is late 19th century/early 20th. Radin must have been in his 70's when he wrote the book mentioned. Something to think about when you hear bitching about the gerentocracy.
Boas came to the US from Germany with an ax to grind, which was that Primitive people weren't as primitive as people said, so I give him points for pushing back against the tide of Social Darwinism. A lot of the research was linguistics, trying to figure out why you had this patchwork of languages and cultures in the US. Brinton, mentioned by nous, was appointed professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at UPenn, becoming the first Anthro professor in the US. He liked the theory of psychic unity, which was that people were people, but then argued that what particular races did with those building blocks determined their evolutionary advance (boo!). This was opposed by Radin's teacher Boas, who argued for cultural relativism, with no culture being superior to another. (yay!) Though I wonder how they would deal with MAGA culture...
But you had both Brinton (under the guise of psychic unity) and Boas, (who argued that no culture was superior to another) pushing the trickster and linking it to Western mythic figures like Loki and Hermes. The whole idea is foundational to studying Native American culture and linguistics, cause you had all these field anthropologists collecting trickster tales which then gives you your data for study.
However, most linguists dealing with NA languages are not really chasing Jung, but are more obsessed with their particular language family and take a more romantic approach, thinking well, I'm sure there's something to that trickster stuff. I recall a presentation about something related to a Coyote tale, maybe from the Southwest by 2 people and just before the conference, one of the presenters had to have emergency eye surgery and the other presenter said, well, what do you expect, we are talking about Coyote and everyone kind of nodded, and probably thought yeah, that makes sense.
https://hofstra.github.io/coyote/sources/coyote-as-trickster/myths/opler-lipan-apache-coyote-eyes/
The whole site is pretty interesting and I got to looking at it when my wife asked me if it was kay-yot or kay-yot-tee.
On “Open Thread”
Oooo, teaching in the target language. It's one of those things that seems like such a good idea but is focussing on the teacher rather than on what the student does and is therefore destined to fail.
Here in Japan, you get students who just wait the teacher out for a Japanese explanation and if you have enough of them, it can be agonizing.. It also reinforces that native/non-native divide, and I've had folks (both Japanese and non-Japanese) argue with a straight face that the native (i.e. native English speaking teacher) should NOT learn any Japanese, so as to be this rock of immovable language that the students run into over and over. Sigh...
On “Monkey business”
Wonkie, you might be thinking of the book by Paul Radin, a student of Franz Boas. If anyone wants to check out his book on it, it is here
https://ignca.gov.in/Asi_data/4517.pdf
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Everyone, that's really fun stuff, and nous, a really nice inversion. So would you say the story of Loki and Baldr, which seems like typical trickster shit, is like a retcon?
Quick tldr, Baldr is the cool handsome kid and is invulnerable to everything because his mom Frigg got everything to promise never to hurt him. Of course, she missed mistletoe (which has a particular resonance with Celtic mysticism and gets imported into Christmas, so that figures). So Loki gets a party game going where all the gods throw shit at Baldr and it just bounces off of him. As everyone's mom used to say, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. In this case, Baldr's twin brother, Hodur (which was the inspiration for George RR Martin's Hodor), who was blind, was left out, so Loki says come on, join in and gives him a twig of misletoe and guides his arm. And of course, it pierces Baldr's heart and kills him and the gods lose it. Baldr goes down to Hell and his mom follows and pleads for his release. Hel, ruler of the underworld, says ok, if you can get everything in creation to weep for Baldr. Spoiler, one giantess (who may be Loki in disguise) refuses to, so Baldr stays put and when the gods discover it was Loki shapeshifting, they bind him to a rock with a poisonous snake.
So the story has overtones of Sisyphus (another trickster) and with the whole bringing back Baldr, you have the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Though it does make Loki out to be a shit (he supposedly did it because he was jealous of Baldr)
When I was looking up Trickster gods, it noted that the trickster god role in Africa is often taken up by a spider, which had me wondering if the story of Arachne and Athena, which I thought was a creation of Ovid, might be related, but gemini says they aren't. Who you going to believe, an LLM or your pet theory?
Wj's observation that Monkey D Luffy is an homage to Dragonball is spot on. Eichiro Oda, who does One Piece (and is from where I live!) has often said how much he idolizes Toriyama and he actually redrew the entire volume 42, which was the last volume in the original series, as a tribute. If the Thai students are really manga heads, I'll bring this up and send them to the prefectural office to see this.
https://kumamoto-guide.jp/en/spots/detail/368
And the question about Abrahamic religions, sure, let's go there. I've never really delved into Old Testament as myth, something actively discouraged by my sunday school bible training, but my primary memory of Jacob is going up the ladder and talking to God, which seems to open up the possibility of trickster. A Joseph Smith jr. for biblical times.
But my thinking is that because people think that the Bible is somehow historical fact (or ignore it because they don't want to get in fights) has them fail to see how people and situations are archetypes and that we are placed in those situations in the process of living our lives. For Abrahamic religions, you have people who take their texts as actual historic truth. While the thread passes through a lot of anti-Muslim rhetoric, you've got a place like the Ark Encounter, as well as Israelis right wingers arguing for Greater Israel. All of these seem like taking mythological tales and attributing them a historical truth. Of course, Socrates ran up against the same thing on his way to a hemlock chaser, so it's not like mythic thinking is a guard.
Anyway, this was probably too long, but keep the observations coming!
On “A future so bright”
Maybe I've been teaching too much TOEFL prep of late, but one of the standard questions after a conversational exchange is 'What does the man mean?' and I find myself asking myself that in regards to wj questions to me.
First, about what gender roles were brought in or perhaps overlaid, I've always found that Japanese women are able to exercise a great deal of power, though it is often behind the scenes. I bump heads with a lot of feminist friends here who complain about sexism here. I say well, there is, but there are also ways where Japanese women exercise power and you've got to consider that. It doesn't make everything all right, but lots of ink spilled about how Japanese women should be following the example of Western women and fails to realize they are more independent they one gives them credit.
A small example is the kakeibo system, where the husband turns over his paycheck to the wife. Here's a video about it
https://youtu.be/itMkFmVVWIk?si=b-ZdH19FrZUQjL-n
Korea has a similar system, so it is not a panacea against sexism, and I wonder if tradwife discourse has entered Korea through evangelical Christianity, which has the husband as the CFO who then gifts a budget to the woman.
wj also asks about homosexuality, and from his question, it sound like I gave the impression that all of these developments in Asia has resulted in making homosexuality problematic. While gender roles often is a huge issue in homosexual relatioships, the inability for anti-homosexual protesters to make much of a dent here in Japan suggests that this is not something that rises to the level of an issue.
About gender ratios, my impression is that China's problem is because of a government intervention which was not mirrored in SK or Japan. A lot of people raise the spectre of sex selection, but I don't see any of that. I have two daughters, so I may be biased, but I see a bias for females because male kids are a lot harder to raise, especially during pre-school and elementary schooling when the mother has to invest so much effort.
LGM had this post about 'emotional labour' in Thailand,
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/06/emotional-labor-and-working-women-in-asia
and it is interesting, but my feeling is because it gets placed into a capitalistic context, people are expected to put a money value on it. I've got no problem with it being used as a lever, but when you start thinking of dollars and cents, it becomes really difficult. While it is immensely difficult to deal with everything that a 'good mother' needs to do, Japanese women seem to accept it whereas many Western women complain. It is hard to know if this means that Japanese women are simply brainwashed or Western women are a little blind to the non-monetary rewards of that raising children in Japan brings.
As I said, I'm still thinking 'what does the man mean', so if there is anything else, please let me know!
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No, Japan continues to be pretty chill about homosexuality. However South Korea has real issues.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/13/seoul-pride-festival
On “Open Thread”
Charles must be taking the Johnson line, it is fraudulent precisely because we can't see that it is fraudulent. Tis a head-scratcher indeed...
On “A future so bright”
I'm not sure if gender roles is the precise term, but as a starter, I'd note that homosexuality has never been criminalized here in Japan (except for a brief period in Meiji) and there is gender performativity in high culture i.e. Kabuki.
https://japanpastandpresent.org/jp/teaching-aids/reading-lists/male-male-love-in-medieval-japan
As someone once said, Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
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I don't think it is Western misogyny, it is Western gender roles and I wouldn't say they are 'imported', more like 'overlaid'.
On “Sports fandom”
nous, great point. I love basketball, but have disengaged with it a bit for reasons I'm not really sure of. Unfortunately, Japanese news follows basketball a bit when there is a Japanese player, but the nature of the roster and the development of the talent pool means that you aren't going to get an Ohtani or similar level of player, so coverage is spotty and the coverage of WNBA is non-existent. If a Japanese woman were able to break into the roster, that might change, though I wonder if it would be like football (i.e. soccer) where a Japanese player is signed on for the cynical reason of attracting Japanese fans to buy jerseys. Though I suppose they are playing the odds, if a top-ranked player emerged, the club would experience a gold rush.
Interestingly enough, there is a connection between Antipodes rugby and Japan. I've heard the nickname The Cherry Whites or something similar because of the fact that a number of NZ players who couldn't break into the All Blacks would play in the Japan domestic league and thereby get eligibility for the Japan national team, with some of them taking citizenship.
I'm not sure if the rugby was a pull factor or if there are other reasons, but New Zealand football has had several Japanese players who have made an impact and one of them, Hiroki Sakai, who played on 3 Japanese world cup teams, is playing there and is planning on taking NZ citizenship.
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nous, thanks for that, it makes a lot of that more understandable. I wish that female fandom were able to be more resistant to some of the more toxic points that you mention, but it's probably not really realistic to think that women can deal with all of the problems. And the whole question of who owns fandom would probably never make that possible.
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Appreciate everyone jumping in.
About personality based fandom and nous' observations, yes, I see that in my wife. Not sure if you follow it closely, but if you do, I was wondering about what you thought about Catlin Clark? I'm not a follower, but clips have gotten in my feed and I see her getting beat up and not getting any protection from the ref (and she may be giving as good as she is getting, but a facebook algorithm isn't tuned for balance) Reporting pushes the racial undertone to the whole situation, but it seems a lot of it is ginned up by the media
https://www.sportingnews.com/ca/ncaa-basketball/news/caitlin-clark-angel-reese-beef-history-explained-iowa-lsu/e73dd26ee42cb1928ed9ef51
Anyway, any thoughts on that?
wj, my caution with Ohtani is because there may have been hitters better than Ohtani and there may have been pitchers better than Ohtani, but it's really hard to think that he does both. I also think that one reason there have been no hitters like Ohtani was that pitchers could plunk hitter before, but with the tighter leash held by umpires, he's able to set up. Bonds in particular holds that view, but I'm not sure how convinced I am by the argument.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
The Duverger’s Law links are interesting, but isn't it a bit overdetermined? The US is the key example of a 2 party state (which is rather rare) and so it must be first past the post that decides it? That doesn't really get at how the system tends to reinforce itself.
Some discussion about why the US clings so closely to a 2 party system has to be connected to it establishing those practices in the mid-19th century and there being a civil war that enables one party which then sets up a system that perpetuates itself. I haven't figured out all of the ins and outs, but it seems like a multi-factor thing rather than a one and done.
On “Open Thread”
I hope it is ok, I had just posted an open thread and I saw that Michael was in scribendo, Great minds.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
Folks are tossing out names and I've got no idea who they are. I was vaguely aware of Platner, and I guessed that Becerra was a CA gov candidate, but I gave the Ezra the aspiring powerbroker Klein's CA gov roundtable a miss. As I think people in Oz say, I can't be arsed to figure out who is who.
Which leads to a bit of a bleg, Anyone like to post something about political races? Priest did mention Chris Harden,
https://www.chrishardenforcongress.com/
but if anyone would like to toss up something, even if it was just names to watch, I'd appreciate it. Kitty's address is libjpn at "Don't Be Evil" Corporation, if you send something, I can put it up, if you want to post it yourself, happy to work it out.
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I guess that blows any chance I had of running as a left of center democrat on a progressive ticket...
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Nous, this is totally unrequested info, but I was curious about the Canadian teacher program and asked Gemini about it. I won't cut and paste, but because the replacement programs now seem to be run provincially, it seems like there are specific pathways.
I'm also thinking that when I worked in a Japanese board of education, we had a relationship with a BoE in BC and they had these hybrid HS/community college entities and from what you've discussed about your teaching, and more dancing with AI, I see stuff about Collegiate Institutes and HS/community college partnerships. I may be projecting, I teach at a university, but I think I would be much happier in my teaching (but probably not my wage or schedule) in teaching at a high school. It may be a case of assumed greener grass, but teaching kids on that cusp between high school and uni might be attractive.
Though nothing wrong with joining the Cascadian resistance...
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hi wonkie, a suggestion, ask AI (I prefer Gemini, I find ChatGPT too obsequious) for information about the process. Needless to say, don't give out any personal data such as SS# and the like, but giving the details of your family history and asking what needs to be done can be really helpful. Because all of the information is usually on public websites, the LLM has scraped them and can assemble the requirements.
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