Blogfonte

Since I'm in the middle of Busy Busy Week (albeit the quietest, smoothest Busy Busy Week to date, were it not for the fact that our supplier has not, um, supplied), my brain is fried and I am unable to think of anything to post. [So what's new? — Ed. Quiet, you.]

Which means that it's time for Blog of the Day, that regular feature at Ambient Irony where someone else gets to do all the work.

Today, it's one of my regular - or at least semi-regular - readers and commenters, so this time I'm going in knowing that he has me blogrolled (under "Folk's I'm Reading", which is about the highest compliment one can give a blog). It's Mitch H., folks, of Blogfonte, and he's not happy:

It left me in a very sulfurous, torch-waving mood of irritation...

Either he's been in for a root-canal, or he's been dealing with idiotarians:

...irritation at academic historians. I'll try and get into more detail later; suffice it currently to say that I may not believe in Truth, but I hate lies. Such as the one's we've been told, and are still being told, about the mythical innocence of the Rosenburgs, Alger Hiss, and all the rotten rest of the CPUSA.

Maybe you should just have gone for the root canal, Mitch.

As are the majority of right-thinking people (me, for example; Steven den Beste; Nowhere's Jeff Lawson) Mitch is an anime fan; he also reads U.S.S. Clueless. So I'm particularly glad to see him taking up a point that bothered me in one of SDB's recent anime posts:

It would be a period of a couple of years around the time of the Berlin Olympics, and it could also be seen in about the way these series' see 1925 Japan. No one does that for 1936 Germany, because they understand how monstrous it really was.

This belief, that mid-20s Japan was the same chaotic, oppressive hell that the late 20s and early 30s were, is a misunderstanding of the period. It isn't true. The early and mid 20s represented a "bubble economy" between the end of World War I and the social/political collapse into full-bore militarism of the late 20s. This brief period - the second half of the Taisho era in which both Steel Angel Kurumi and Sakura Wars are set - was the closest Japan ever got to European-style bourgeois prosperity. The Japanese of the period were still uniform-addled, regimented, prone to let paramilitary organizations take the place of private society, and poor by European standards - but it still was a sort of calm before the Showa storm.

Indeed, we have a propensity to glamourise the past, particularly any era that seems a bit colourful to us now, and the twenties certainly were that. I was watching Bottle Fairy the other day, and one of the little fairies was dressed up as a gangster complete with machine gun (they have these odd little shared daydream sequences), with another of the fairies as a flapper girl swooning at his (well, her, really, but I'm trying not to confuse you) coolness. The twenties are long enough ago that hardly anyone can remember them now, so we get to use the soft-focus and the peach-coloured filter. Mitch takes the historical analysis further, and I'll let you wander over there and read it rather than stealing quoting the whole essay here.

He's been home for Thanksgiving, too, and reminds us:

Ah, family. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mitch H. and Blogfonte He does the in-depth analysis, so that I you don't have to.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:23 PM

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Posted by: Mitch H. at December 04, 2003 03:31 AM (tVSJJ)

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