The dreams of the warriors

So here's a weird example of how my mind works.

Last evening I drove out to downtown Beaverton and watched the 2009 anime film "Summer Wars". It was great popcorn, gorgeously animated in the best anime style, and hit all the mange/anime-lover (i.e. me...) buttons; high school romance/angst, family drama, high-tech danger, goofy secondary characters, samurai, squid, baseball. It's fun.

After the show I went and looked it up and was unsurprised that the director was the same person who did "Belle", the gorgeous anime version of Beauty and the Beast that my daughter took us too several years ago. 

 

Well done, Hosoda-san.

 

Anyway, as I was reading I was a bit bugged by the title.

 

Yes, it's about a war (well, "cyber-war") and it takes place over two days in summer, so, "summer wars", fine. 

 

But.

 

The Japanese title is "サマーウォーズ in katakana, which is "Hepburnized" in the Wiki as "Samā Wōzu".

 

Okay, now; because I'm me (and do military history and martial sports that have Japanese connections) I'm very familiar with the Japanese word for "war".

 

And it's not "Wozu", it's 戦争, "Sensō". 

 

I tried looking for some sort of katakana or hirigana versions that could be translated as "wozu". 

 

Nope.

 

Then I plugged the katakana title directly into romaji, and Dr. Google gave me this: "Samāu~ōzu".  

 

That's also not "war"; indeed, try and look up "ozu" and all you you get is either a place name or a personal/family name. All the other links went directly back to the film, suggesting that the katakana don't mean "summer wars" in the general sense of "wars fought during the summer" but specifically "the movie "Summer Wars".

 

So now I'm baffled; is the title some sort of phonetic "English"? "Summer" ("sama") "Wars" ("wozu") invented just for the flick? If so...why? Why not just call it 夏戦争; "Natsu Sensō", "Summer War(s)"? Is there some particular reason or meaning for naming it the way they did?

 

I'm now hooked and I want to know.

 

Doesn't make the flick any less fun; indeed, now I want to know more about the movie. 

 

And that's so me. 

 

Sad, but there it is.

 

Blogrolling, resentment, and pronoun trouble

Paul Campos has a good piece at the Lawyers Guns and Money site that pretty much spells out why our particular system makes these people so dangerous:

“But what gives these paranoid visions so much political power is that there is, in fact, an empirical reality in which the MAGA base is suffering a massive ongoing status degradation. The country is becoming less white, less religious, and less culturally conservative, while people who aren’t part of the increasingly mobile and increasingly credentialed professional classes are bearing the brunt of increasing economic inequality, and the precarity that comes with it.

It’s an oversimplification to say…that the Republican party is now divided between college educated people who are embarrassed by Trump and prefer their tax cuts and cultural reaction is a more genteel form, and a working class base that is all in on the MAGA paranoid vision, but there is something to this.

Trump’s support comes primarily from downwardly mobile less educated white people, small business owners obsessed with low taxes, lax regulation, and good old days (read: white supremacist) nostalgia, along with a non-trivial percentage of ethnic minority members who are attracted enough to the authoritarian patriarchal cultural reaction he represents to ignore their own out status within that hierarchy.

It’s a coalition that reflects a rapidly dying vision of America, but one that may not die fast enough to save an increasingly sclerotic constitutional system that, as almost all the experts Edsall interviews assert, is moving into a potentially existential crisis.”

In a more flexible system such as a parliamentary one the whackos would be firewalled into a Monster Raving Looney Party.

(Which, as Israel is showing us, is NOT a vaccine against these political pathogens – get enough of them who are willing to cooperate and you still get Hitler! – so a lot depends on the sociopolitical bedrock beneath the system…)

But here? They’ve taken over one of the two parties we’re limited to by the Constitution and FPTP voting.

 
Guess what? Turns out that maybe the Constitution IS a suicide pact! Whoodathunkit?

(A brief note re: the graphics for this one. I'm frankly sick of posting pictures of MAGAts to go with these. Instead I'm indulging my fondness for 1) old Warner Bros. cartoons and 2) Hayao Miyazaki. In case you're not familiar with the bottom image, it's Bugs as Howl and Daffy as Sophie cosplaying the iconic scene from Howl's Moving Castle. 

Here's the original:

I totally stan for the revision version's expressions; Daffy panicking (because that's what Daffy does) and Bugs smug and kind of smarmy (because, well...Bugs).

Anyway, even in the darkest timeline there's points of light. Excuse me while I go an rewatch Chuck Jones 1952 classic Rabbit Seasoning...

Oh. and...

 Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

Things you didn't know you needed to know

So you probably didn't know that your white blood cells are actually microscopic buxom chibis that work by hitting pathogens with teensy little rocket propelled grenades. 

I know, right? In hindsight is seems so obvious.

Apparently this little character is from an anime, はたらく細胞ＢＬＡＣＫ (Hataraku Saibō Burakku), "Cells at Work! Code BLACK" in which the protagonists are anthropomorphized cells including our little RPG-shooter.

That may be the most Japanese thing I've heard in a loooooong time.

Portland is Burning!

 Wait! No! I mean...Portland is on fire! 

We're LIT! Not actually burning! No smoke, no flames!

No. Just no. Outside of the usual assload of scruffy street people, Portland is fine.

So we braved the Antifa arson mobs the other day to poke around downtown, and ran into two of our favorite places here in the Beehive of Terrorism.

The first was Scrap.

Scrap is...well, pretty much everything. You want old stickers? Weird metal bits? X-ray prints? Patterns from the 1970s? Glitter, ribbon, postcards from 1908, decoupage (who knew that decoupage was even still a thing?), back issues of National Geographic?

Scrap's got 'em.

The Bride goes to paw through the fabric and other sewing treasures. 

I just like the congeries of weird and bizarre old vinyl, hubcaps, and random shit that the place has scrounged up. 

Sewing Susan? Ohhellyes!

There's even some stuff that is not entirely appropriate for the kiddies!

 

This is a postcard, BTW. I'd pay good money to see the look on the other folks at the post office when you take that out of the post box.

Even the street randos like them some Scrap!

Then down to near Pioneer Square to the downtown Kinokuniya.

Our local outlet of this Japanese bookstore has every manga and most anime every released (of course), and it is pretty critical for keeping up with Spy x Family and The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen and all my other manga favorites.

But it also has every cute, silly, whack, funny, goofy, and just Japanese thing that a would-be otaku could ever crave.

 

All topped off with a stop at St. Honore boulangerie for coffee and a croissant?

Because that's how we roll here in Little Beirut.  

Burn, baby, burn!

On the nightstand...

 ...is my palate-cleanser from the turgid prose of Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming; perhaps the most peculiar, wonderful, bizarre, and intriguing train-wreck of a manga adaptation of an anime I've ever come across: Gate: Where The JSDF Fought.

I dunno, but this may possibly be the most manga-y manga I've every read.

(And to out myself as an otaku, I kinda love manga; I've read every tankobon volume of Kimetsu no Yaiba (鬼滅の刃) and everything from the hardcore old-school mecha stories like Shin Seki Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン ) to fluffy romances like Our Teachers Are Dating...)

But this one is...reeeeeally special.

Start with the worked-out premise of an interdimensional gate between worlds.

But then add a bizarre mashup of Tolkiensque fantasy - dragons and trolls? - with Romans (sorta...) and a buxom imperial princess called - I shit you not - "Pina Co Lada". 

Have these mooks invade Tokyo and tear the living hell out of a bunch of innocent Japanese civilians...

(Don't forget to pitch in a whole bunch of gratuitous violence and nudity...)

 ...and then respond to all this with a sort of Japanese Army (sorry..."Self Defense Force") fanservice where the JGSDF proceeds to send an expeditionary force into this fantasy world so we can enjoy antitank weapons against fire-breathing dragons and Japanese recon infantry against Roman legionaries and the boys and girls of the Rikujō Jieitai as heroes...

...plus Rory Mercury, who is so beyond the rest of this weird shit that I leave you to the mercy of Wikipedia.

The whole thing is an absolute hoot, and I hope the outfit that's publishing this thing will continue to put out these in tankobon formate all the way to the end of the original anime run.

If only Atkinson had found a way to write in a loli-goth death goddess into the Battle of Long Island his stuff might work better. I'm just gonna have to call that a serious failure of imagination.

Friday Jukebox: Journey to the West Side of the Palace Edition

 I've got some fairly rough thoughts to put down about this coming Tuesday...but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I've had a lovely couple of days off this past Thursday and Friday, and I wanted to post something fun and lighthearted, so, this.

This is another one of those "anime music videos", or AMVs, and I love this one because the creator - "Sarah the Boring" - is anything but.

First, she took two wildly different anime and mashed them up into a "Prince and the Pauper" story, but which totally works, because of how similar two of the characters look.

Both are tall and skinny with long reddish hair. But that's where the similarity ends.

The scruffy looking pauper guy is from 幻想魔伝 最遊記, Gensōmaden Saiyūki, the anime version of the old, old story Journey to the West. He's Sha Gojyo (沙悟浄) and is some sort of weird human-demon hybrid. He's the Bad Boy in classic anime tradition:

The Prince is 桐生 冬芽, Kiryū Tōga...

...one of the characters from Revolutionary Girl Utena - 少女革命ウテナ Shōjo Kakumei Utena. This anime is described as "...follow(ing) Utena Tenjou, a teenage girl who expresses her desire to be a prince through her strong-willed personality and tomboyish manner of dress." 

Apparently there are sword duels - I've only seen bits and pieces of it.

Anyway, everything about this little AMV is perfect; the editing, the lip-synching, the mismatched-but-matching characters, and most especially the ridiculously goofy, poppy, hooky song "King of Spain" by some sort of Canadian novelty group call Moxy Früvous.

So for your Friday entertainment; "The Prince and the Kappa" - you'll have to follow the link to YouTube; unfortunately the creator won't let me embed it. But do, please; it's a fun Friday entertainment!

 

Back tomorrow with more serious content.

 

 

 

Friday Jukebox: アニメミュージック・ビデオ Edition

I was going to write a post about how I and my nefarious antifa terrorist friends have been lighting off fires in the Oregon forests, but, y'know what? Fuck that. It's been a shitty week, and I wanted to post something fun.

So...these are something called "anime music videos"; they're fan-made, and take clips from anime - that is, Japanese animated films, and set them to music. I stumbled across them reading Athena Scalzi's fun little post on the subject over at Whatever.

Here's the first one. The bulk of the anime is an utterly adorable little slice of life series called Tamako Market, たまこまーけっと , which is, well, adorable.

Couple of notes: the bit at the very end - which is definitely NOT from the rest of the anime, is from another show, Kyousougiga (京騒戯画)

And now I reeeelly want to find the episode of Tamako Market that's sampled at about 2:12 in the video, because I want to find out about the hammer and three nails. WTF? Crucifixion? In an adorable slice-of-life show? Seriously?

The music - which is a huge part of what makes it art - is a song titled "Crabbuckit" performed by the Good Lovelies. Big props to Tamako, the Good Lovelies, and to Copycat Revolver, who made it.

And the second is here:

This one is a lot more complex, and includes the following anime: Your Lie In April, Virgin Soul, Magi and the labyrinth of magic, Beyond the Boundary, Yuri On Ice, Death Parade, and Free!!!

I don't know why I like this one so much, but I think it's the combination of the utterly goofy pop song ("Dance Monkey", by Tones and I) and the clever editing by Light Raider, the creator. 

Anyway, that's for Friday. 

I'll be back this weekend with my take on these damn fires.