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Kawada_Kira's Replies
No.
Hmm. The thing with historical events is that they tend to involve a lot of turmoil. Even if the end result is good, the event itself is sometimes rather messy. Which is why it's said that it's better to live in boring times than in interesting times. There are some events I'd like to see (such as the 1917 Russian Revolution), but I'd be more interested in being able to go back and witness daily life for ordinary people in the past. The Roman Republic and Empire. Ancient China. Pre-colonial America (particularly the Aztec and Inca Empires). Medieval Europe. The Abbasid Caliphate. Japan in various historical periods (especially the Nara and Edo periods). The Levant in the days of the Crusader states. India in the time of the Mughals. The Ottoman Empire. Ancient Egypt. Ancient Greece, particularly Athens. I'd like to be able to see prehistory too, the days before writing first appeared. Quite a lot would have happened back then that we have no idea about today, and can never know.
It's a very underappreciated one.
What a stupid comment. In the first place, the foreign population of Tokyo is very small compared to the native Japanese population (there are a lot of foreigners, but the native population is huge, bigger than many small countries; we're talking about one of the biggest urban areas in the world here), so while you would see foreigners around, they wouldn't be a great abundance in comparison with the native population. Especially in the 1960s. Secondly, most of the movie isn't set in locations with large concentrations of people; much of it is set at Gondo's house or the police station. How many Americans would you expect to see hanging around Gondo's house? Thirdly, the club in question clearly just happens to be a club that was popular with US military personnel. The sequence was filmed in an actual club, not a set. Those people weren't actors who were deliberately placed there; they were extras, people who were there anyway and were told to just keep doing as they were doing. There was no insinuation of foreigners and drugs. The only characters in the movie who were portrayed as being involved with drugs were Japanese. Finally, nearly all of the people in the club would have been just ordinary people, not druggies. The drug dealers would have been using that place precisely because they could hide in a crowd of normal people there and look normal.
Also, "dancing their lives away"? It's just people enjoying an evening out, it doesn't mean they're somehow spending their whole lives there.
Xenophobia is certainly a big problem in Japan, but that doesn't mean it needs to be read into every little thing.
Difficult choice.
Seven Samurai (1954)
No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
High and Low (1963)
There's a lot more of his movies that I love but I think those three edge out the rest.
Nah. My life has just been going badly lately and I haven't felt up to posting. Hopefully things will change soon.
A lot of the same kind of stuff there is to see in most countries, plus a number of things unique to the DPRK. Museums of various kinds, musical and other kinds of artistic performances, amusement parks, monuments, festivals. There's a lot of gorgeous natural scenery. At certain times of the year there's big public events like the parades in Pyongyang and the Mass Games. In the summer there's beaches, in the winter there's skiing. Boat rides on the Taedong River are popular. The Munsu water park is very popular in summer. Foreigners can participate in the yearly Pyongyang Marathon if they want to. The Pyongyang Metro is considered a must-see, not just as a way of getting around Pyongyang but as an experience in itself. There's visiting the DMZ from the northern side. Mount Paekdu is beautiful and one of the main tourist destinations. Mount Myohyang too is a popular tourist destination, it's a nature preserve and you can go hiking around there and see the wildlife. There are a lot of historical sites around the country, like also at Mount Myohyang there's a famous medieval Buddhist temple. This is all off the top of my head but there's plenty of other stuff. Contrary to popular myth, you can go pretty much anywhere in the country and take pictures of most anything except military facilities. The tours are all guided but the Koreans are pretty accommodating.
Any movie where the antagonists are leftists, socialists, communists.
Well, it is possible that I'm thinking more of the earlier period at the empire's height. I'll have to look up what you're talking about, as I've never heard of it before, but considering the condition of the western empire toward its fall, I suppose it wouldn't be surprising. I would still describe that as more a symptom of the empire's decline than a cause of it, though.
Rome got too big and top-heavy for its economy to sustain. It was a huge, corrupt bureaucratic military machine. It was able to sustain itself on the plunder obtained through conquest and plunder of new lands, but after the empire hit its geographical limits it began to decline. It was based on the slave mode of production, which worked well so long as there was a constant supply of new slaves, but the supply of slaves came mostly from war. Once Rome's expansion came to a halt, the supply of slaves declined. There was still an international slave trade, and slaves could of course reproduce and give birth to new slaves, but this wasn't enough to meet the demands of Rome's massive economy. The slave mode of production had hit its limits and gradually began to decline, becoming less and less profitable over time. Roman slavery had also greatly harmed the agriculture of its Italian heartland (the original foundation of Rome's power), as the smallholding peasants were ruined because they couldn't compete with the big slave estates which gobbled up their land, and production had shifted more and more from staples to cash crops that benefited only the big landowners. Rome became dependent on its overseas territories (particularly Egypt) to feed itself. Italy's economy could no longer sustain the empire. The empire was massive, and required a huge military machine to maintain its borders. This placed an onerous burden on the Roman economy, which gradually weakened due to the limits of expansion, the decline of slavery and the ruin of Italian agriculture. Without the plunder to be gained from expansion, the empire had to increase the tax burden on its population higher and higher to maintain itself and sustain both the huge military machine and the lavish lifestyle the rich had become accustomed to at the empire’s height. This further crippled the peasantry, not just in Italy but all over the empire.
Meanwhile the so-called "barbarians" were becoming more sophisticated economically and militarily, developing more powerful states and tribal organizations that the Romans had a harder time contending with. Not that this relationship was always antagonistic; the "barbarians" worked for the Romans as often as they worked against them, and over time, as the Roman military faced severe manpower problems due to the economic decline, the Romans became more and more dependent on the "barbarians" themselves to defend the borders. Which they were often perfectly happy to do in exchange for being given land within the empire, but the problem was the chauvinistic Romans treated them like garbage (making them prone to rebellion), not a very wise thing to do to the people you depend on for military defense.
The split of the empire into western and eastern halves greatly exacerbated all of these problems, because the west was nowhere near as rich as the east, so without the wealth of the east, the west could not sustain itself. Cities and towns declined, no longer economically viable. Cities in antiquity were essentially parasitic, not so much centers of production as they are today, and with the empire’s economic decline, it was no longer possible to sustain the cities. The city of Rome itself was reduced over the years from a population of about a million to a few tens of thousands. The western empire eventually fell, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions.
The eastern empire went on for another thousand years, though in a more and more truncated form as time went on. It suffered from some of the same problems, but it was richer and more developed than the west and had shorter and more defensible frontiers, so it was able to sustain itself for longer and withstand the transition to a new medieval economy. But it still had some of the same problems, in addition to new ones like issues of managing religious strife as Christianity split into more and more sects. Part of the reason why the new Muslim Caliphate was able to conquer the Levant and North Africa so easily was because the local population largely welcomed the end of Roman rule and its system of rapacious exploitation and onerous taxation as well as religious persecution. Even with the jizya tax on non-Muslims, the economic burden on the population was greatly reduced, and Christian sects that weren’t aligned with the official doctrine of Constantinople found that they had greater freedom in the Dar al-Islam. The Byzantine Empire was a sort of fossil of the old Roman political and military system, and although it did manage to adapt itself to some extent to the new world, it was plagued by chronic instability and was never able to regain its old power and relevance, and it was gradually eclipsed and overwhelmed by the new and more dynamic and stable feudal polities of Europe and particularly the Middle East.
The Roman military was never comprised even partly of slaves. Soldiers and especially officers often had slaves that they took with them on campaign, but the slaves weren't soldiers and weren't given combat roles; they were given jobs like cooking, cleaning and generally attending to their masters' needs. It was illegal for a slave to even apply to join the legions, and doing so could result in execution. There were a few exceptional cases where slaves were allowed to join the military due to a severe manpower crisis, but when they did so they were immediately freed from bondage.
In any case slavery was already well into its decline, being gradually replaced by serfdom, by the time the empire fell.
I have a friend who works as a tour guide in the DPRK (north Korea). Well, obviously not at this moment, because the Korean government has suspended tourism from abroad due to the pandemic, but he'll be going back when the suspension ends. He's still officially employed in that job anyway, but in the meantime he's doing other work for the tour agency.
He's actually offered to help me get the same job, when it becomes available again. I might do it.
Damn. Can't believe it's already been that long.
Imagine having such a small and meaningless life to spend time doing something stupid like that, just to ruin a forum for everybody else.
The Quiet American (2002).
I don't have any problem with it, other than that I'm usually not crazy about romance-focused movies in general, regardless of orientation.
There are some pretty good ones. Some that I like are "Shang Gan Ling" from I think 1956, "The Red Detachment of Women" from I think 1961, and "The East is Red" from 1965.
I thought it was ok, honestly. Not great but not bad like that.
Hate it. It gives me nothing but grief. I enjoyed it when I was a kid, but that was when I lived somewhere that got only light snow. Heavy snow causes all kinds of problems.
It is. I'm sorry about your cat. My dog is almost 11 years old, his birthday is in exactly two months. I don't think he's going to make it that far.