A Geek History of Time - Episode 252 - Robotech's Anime-ted Past Part I

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Okay, so there's there there are two possibilities going on here. One, you're bringing up a term that I have never heard before. The other possibility is that this is a term I've heard before, but it involves a language that uses pronunciation that's different from Latin it. And so you have no idea how to say it properly. An intensely 80s post-apocalyptic schlock film. And schlong film. You know, it's been over 20 years, but spoilers.

Oh, okay. So the resident Catholic thinking about that, we're going for low earth orbit. There is no rational. Blame it on me after. And you know, I will. They mean it is two o'clock in the fucking morning. I am.

I don't think you can get very much more homosexual panic than that. No, which I don't know if that's better. I mean, you guys are Catholics. You tell me, I'm just kind of excited that like you and producer George will have something to talk about That basically just means that I can show up and get fed This is a geek history of time. Where we connect in order to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a World History and English teacher here in Northern California. And last night in my monthly Pathfinder game, I had what I have to

say is possibly the most satisfying critical hit I have ever scored in a tabletop role-playing game. We made our way through a couple of waves of undead ghouls and ghasts. And we came face to face with the big bad of the the particular module in the adventure path that we are currently following. Anybody not familiar or anybody who is familiar, it's it's Rise of the Rune Lords. And last night we came face to face with the skin saw man. And I managed on the second round of combat, whiffed on first round. Second round of combat, I managed to score a critical hit for a total of 50 points of damage in a single attack. And had a suitably dramatic moment of Divine Fury that left the other players

at the table all making remarks to the extent of remind me not to get on the paladin's bad side. So it's always nice to remind everybody at the table that Waffle Good does not mean Waffle Nice. And then in an even more satisfying moment immediately after that later in the round, my son managed to score the killing blow on the big bad with an offhand attack. I've built this character to be a two weapon fighter. And he managed to score a hit with a with an offhand dagger shot for eight points. And that's without a critical.

So that was pretty impressive. We were all pretty stoked. So yeah, overall that was a really nice moment. Felt good, man. Felt good. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a U.S. history teacher at the high school level up here in Northern California. And I gotta say you buried the lead.

Your son is now playing D&D and has his own character. That is newsworthy. You talked about getting him into it. Oh, yeah. You talked about getting him to take turns. You talked about him getting to roll dice, but now he is now playing a character a name character. I assume. Yeah, I mean Characters name is a zentified version of his name. So you know, but yeah, very cool

Yeah, I I broke in my children to a new tradition They watched with me the encounter at Farpoint. Oh. Very first episode of T&P. And though they both commented on the cheesiness of the graphics in space. Okay, yeah. And I just simply, my response was, it was 1987. They both yes it was.

Ah, you. Oh, man. Yeah. We are further away from that debut than that debut was from the original debut. The original series. Yeah. God. Twice as far a matter of fact. Oh Oh that hurts. Yeah. Oh my god. All right. But they they got to so they got to see it. Both loved that the the spoiler alert by the way the creature at Farpoint Station and its mate both look like cephalopods. Yes. And they both liked that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Or I'm sorry, is the jellyfish not a pothole pod? I don't think so. They're a colony life form. But yeah. Well, anyway, they both really liked that. They also, William turned to me and he's like, wait a minute, that's Zanatos' voice. I was like, that's right. And then I pointed out, as Julia, I'm like, hey, do you recognize the counselor's voice?

Like, that's Demona. Like, that's right. And then I pointed out, there's Cold Stone and there is, you know, Elise's little brother and there is and there is. Because everybody but Patrick Stewart basically and basically showed up. Yeah. And in Gargoyles. Yeah. So that was fun. But but they got to watch the it's really funny to wind up like having having that experience in reverse like, you know, for us, it was, oh dude, they got they got yeah, Frank's right

That's really cool. Wait a minute. That can't be Marina search. That's totally right like what the hell and then everybody else who showed up was just Oh, okay. Well, it's just old home week right in the recording studio and and having it be in reverse That's actually yeah, that's pretty cool, I gotta say. So yeah, they're digging it. Oh, and you know, oh, yeah, I said, do you recognize that guy? I was like, I don't know. I'm like, remember Puck?

And they're like, wow, he's a really good actor. That's right. Yeah, he is. Brett Spiner. But so yeah. Also, he has the most puckish sense of humor of all of them. Indeed, indeed.

You know, so kind of fitting. But yes, they both really liked it. And Julia said, wait, is that the guy who always sits down with his leg going way out? Like, yeah, that's the one. That's the one. That's when she heard Riker's name. She's like, doesn't he sit down with his leg going way out?

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that was. You learned the memes before seeing the source material, child. You. It was, that was you learned the memes before seeing the source material child. You it was cool. Yeah. So that's what's up. That's what's going on. Cool. Yeah. So what do you got for us tonight? Because I got no, um, I have, I have, I don't know, I don't know how to, how to, how to quite to verbalize it what I what it is that I have.

But I have a lot to say about it so there's that. It's perfect for a podcast don't know how to say a lot. Yeah. Yeah and there's certain J'ai desse clas but I know I'm going to say an awful lot about I know not what. So I guess my opening question for you is, do you have a connection, an emotional memory of a of a favorite toy from childhood? I really liked the helicopter motorcycle guy from mask Okay, cool. All right, so there's that

And then the dig about play set I'm not match, right? Yeah, okay And then I'm trying to think of any other toys that I really was oh, oh, yes. Yes, of course The thumb wrestling Yes, yes, of course. The thumb wrestling WWE guys. So you stuck your thumb up his back and you could thumb wrestle with them. I'll show you the commercial between episodes.

Okay. But my parents bought me a wrestling ring and it was the AWA ring with a canvas. And the characters were like outsized for the size of the ring. Like the characters were probably 12 inches high, but the ring was definitely made for like, you know, the two and three quarters. Seven inch, eight inch, oh, okay, yeah.

And so, but the AWA ring, I used regular WWE thumb wrestling guys because they were the perfect size for it. And I had Logan, Nikolai Volkov, Iron Sheik, Big John Stud, Junkyard Dog, and I want to say I had one more, whom I forget. But oh, Roddy Piper. I have Roddy Piper, of course. Oh, I mean, yeah. And I remember my parents gave me a wine box. They bought wine. And I said, oh, can I have the box? And so I masking taped it and I labeled each, you know, spot for the things for the individual wrestlers.

Oh, okay. I love the shit out of those. Those were really nice. And then G.I. Joe's were pretty cool. I had a fair amount over time, but none that like those wrestling guys. Now that you mentioned it, those, those thumb wrestling buddies. That was, yeah, that's the one where

it's an emotional connection. All right. All right, cool. So in the summer of 1985, my father made a trip to Japan. Oh, now at the time, you got go bots, you lucky fuck. No, no, even, even. I couldn't get out. I'm gonna get into that. No, even luckier. I'm sorry, there's no such thing. We have wildly divergent memories of what was cool when we were that age. There was a guy named Copter, and he was a copter.

Because of course that was what, yeah, okay. It doesn't get cooler. Because that's because that's who I'm working with here. Yeah. So. At the time, uh-huh, he was serving in a fleet composite squadron, which may or may not still exist, VC one.

And what that meant was he flew a whole bunch of different kinds of missions. He flew A4 Skyhawks, a fair amount of the time, to tow targets for ships in the fleet to shoot at. And his favorite job was using the A4 Skyhawk to act as the aggressor in aerial combat training against Marine F4 Phantom pilots from Kenny Owe. So he actually that was that was the one the one time in his career he got to play

fighter pilot was flying the A4 Skyhawk in air to air combat training against Marine pilots. And so those those were that that was his favorite part of the job. And the towing the targets took up a certain amount of his time. But the job that took up the most of his flight time was acting as the aerial show for for the Sink Pack fleet, Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet. At the time that was four star Admiral Sylvester Foley. He left later in 85, got replaced by Admiral Lyons in 86. And Admiral Lyons would remain sync packed fleet for the rest of the time we were in Hawaii. But anyway, and there's all kinds of memories I have about my dad

talking about or venting about his boss's boss's boss at home. But anyway, for the job of transport pilot, you know, Ariel Schofour, he was flying to P3 Orion that had been specially kitted out to be the Admiral's, you know, personal airplane. And he would be gone for a week to 10 days at a time, depending on where he was going. And he got to visit a whole long list of places around the Pacific and Indian oceans. And what that meant, he'd be gone for like a week.

And flying to wherever they were going would take a day and a half. Flying back would take a day and a half. Flying back would take a day and a half. And they'd have, you know, two shifts of flight crew and then the ground crew for the airplane and then the Admiral staff, they had a whole bunch of people flying. But while they were were And that meant that my dad and the other members, the flight crew were technically on call, but they were left in their own devices. And so in a lot of places that meant they played a lot of golf. In the Philippines, in the whole lot of different places, they spent a lot of time on the golf course. On the island of Diego Garcia, which dad must have visited at least four or five times over the time that we were in Hawaii, that meant taking

along a fishing rod and going out on the beach and surf casting and doing that. But every time they went to Japan, universally for everybody that meant shopping because this was the mid 80s and Japan was the place to get all the cool shit. OK, so it wasn't because it was like a duty free center or that the dollar went super far there. It was specifically the items that you could get were. It was it was a combination. It was a combination of all of it.

Oh, those those those were also factors. But but this this was like my mother's first Walkman. He he bought in in Japan. Our first VCR he got on a trip to Japan. OK, I was a Panasonic and To my great chagrin at the time my father's credit. It was VHS Not not beta max even though that was a security technology and it

It was it was a it was a superior technology and like every time we went to the video rental place on base. I remember like walking into the beta section and being like literally everything I want to watch is on beta. Right. But I got to go over here to the VHS aisle. You know, and I say it's to my father's credit because like he, he, you know, talked to a bunch of people and figured out that no, no, that's that's the format that's going to be the one that's gonna that's gonna last. So anyway, we got that there. And a pair of replica samurai swords, which were a Christmas gift one year for me, which naturally I still own and treasure beyond beyond measure Despite them being really really really cheap knockoffs

Like I've grown up and and developed like an understanding of like what what makes a sword a good sword and they Certainly are not but I treasure them beyond beyond reason And most importantly for this episode. He brought back a VF one S strike Valkyrie toy in the colors of Vermillion squadron from the automated film Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. Now, it caught his eye because he he was, you know know in the toy store looking for that to bring back for me and to him it looked And it's in in the form that it was in the box. It was in the form of a jet And it looked like kind of a stockier F 14

Okay, which he looked at and was like, okay, this is cool because they've laved her right? It immediately rocketed to the top of my favorite toy list when he brought it home because it was a fighter jet that turned into a giant freaking robot. Oh, so it was all not a transformer. No, not a transformer was not from Takara toys. It was from the manufacturer. Oh, saying it was from Bandai would be tempting, but I know it's wrong. I'd have to look it up. But this particular the model that I got as a kid is no longer

made. But ones like it are referred to as high metal, H I metal. It had a number of parts that were die cast metal, it had landing gear that were spring loaded and and could be retracted and deployed It was just about a foot tall in robot mode It had a third mode that was like fighter jet with arms and legs And it came with an extensive set of accessories including underwing ordinance a gun pod and a pair of gigantic rocket boosters Okay, it is really it is really hard really hard to overstate Just how incredibly cool this thing was to nine or ten year old me What my dad didn't realize

Was part of the reason it was so amazingly cool to me was he had bought me a toy tied to my absolute favorite cartoon series at the time. Okay. Gem and the Holograms. Now a little. Yes. Yeah. Yes, precisely because we all remember the episode of Gem and the Holograms where the

gigantic alien hunting robot showed up and started shooting everything up. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was hunting the misfits and it was the time that the holograms had to protect the misfits. Right. The the time. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, because I know you didn't watch the Wuzzles and there was obviously a guest spot on the Wuzzles That it used because the Wuzzles are all about and if you go back to our episodes of cartoons that deserved more You will find my my discussion of the Wuzzles, but they were also a hybrid so it made sense that they guessed it on that and if I recall correctly it was the finale of the Monchichis where the it was the finale of the Monchichis where the Macross plus team showed up and killed them all in an ethnic cleansing to make it okay for the Smurfs.

Yeah, and you know what? There's a part of me that really wants to get Ralph Bakshi on the line because that's exactly the kind of shit he'd do. Like, okay, I need you to find a way to license these properties. And this is what I this is what I need you to do. Pardon, I left out one important thing. Okay, okay, this is what I need you to do. Bump another line. Okay, so bump another line. Okay. So. Now, um, the Transformers

since September of 84. Right. Okay. And talked about G.I. Joe in episodes two, nine through two, 12. You did a masterful job of connecting the latchkey kid phenomenon Very solidly to the telling a story to sell toys cartoon era and Transformers was another example That's very notably it was few Yeah, very notably it was fueled by toys from the same manufacturer

Hasbro, right? Now I was not I was not a true latchkey kid. My mother was a stay at home mom at the time. So I was the beneficiary of the marketing without having yet the downside of the semi abandonment. That wouldn't happen until middle school. And that's that's a fish of a completely different color. So now we're rewinding the clock a little bit in Christmas of 1984. Mm hmm. G.I. Joe figures and transformers took up basically like my whole wish list. Like, like everything that was on my list, you know, would have been would have been from those from those two series.

I desperately desperately desperately wanted Blue Streak like having having seen the the toy in the store. Blue Streak was the one I looked at and I was like, oh my god, I want that one. I want that one. Now, if I recall correctly, there are seven. I want that one. There was Blue Streak. Is he one? I might be mixing up names blue streak Uh, sky are star scream and sky warp correct. They were like a trio of fighter pilot or fighter planes Uh, you have you have the last two names correct Those are both decepticons and they are both aircraft blue streak. Street was one of the Autobots. Oh, he was

Yeah, he was a twin that even even in gen one Hasbro was already doing this. Oh, he was with Sun Street. It was all the same toy It was the red the red sports car and the and the and the yellow sports are yeah, or is there a different? No, no those those those were a different pair of twins Okay, that was some streak and I want to say side swipe, but I could be wrong That might have been sideswipe. Mm-hmm the red one might have been sideswipe. Okay, but blue streak was twinned with prowl Okay, and prowl was the RX 7 pursuit cop car and Blue streak was the metallic blue painted RX 7. The really sharp sporty looking one. And for whatever reason, the Ferraris, you know, Sunstreak and Sideswipe,

I like just because I wasn't like a car kid. Like I had friends who like the first time they saw the Lamborghini God This is amazing. Right. It was like it's a car Sure, sure. Yeah, it's cool. But by the way, it's Sunstreaker. I was wrong. There's Sunstreaker Okay, and then yeah sideswipe was his twin brother Okay, there you go. Yeah, I was a hound and so oh twin brother. Okay, there you go. Yeah. I was a hound. And so, oh, there you go. Yeah.

Was the Jeep who could do the hologram. Yeah. So yeah, you didn't get a guest spot on Gem and the Holograms. Oddly enough. Oddly enough. You think you would have. Yeah. Actually, I do think though that Gem and theini holograms did have the the Geraldo Rivera guy, the cut out for Geraldo Rivera. They did. They had it. Yeah, they did. Yeah, they did Geraldo Rivera XB.

Yeah, he did. Yeah, he was there. He was I think he was in Transformers. I know he was in G.I. Joe and he was in the, oh God, what were they called? They were the I talked about them in that, in the cartoons to deserve more the, the inhuman type things that think in human oids, in human oids, he was in that as well. So that means all those universes in tandem or in, in the same spot. Yeah.

OK, so anyway, and you like the RX seven. Yeah. OK, so anyway, and you like the RX seven. Yeah. So every time, literally every time by mother, I went to the Pearl Ridge shopping mall. I wanted to go to the toy store that sold not only the Hasbro transformers, but because it was Hawaii and we were in the middle of the Pacific, you could also get the Takara Tomy made Japanese versions of the toys.

And they were more expensive and in in social circles at school. Having the Japanese ones was a power move. It was it was a prestige thing. Because there was there was like this this certain idea of them being somehow more authentic. Mm hmm. Transformers like transformers weren't like we didn't treat transformers like well, you know, they're knockoffs, but like the Japanese ones were the elite version And I do think looking back with with an adult perception of what I remember I do think that the Japanese made ones the molds were a bit better

Okay, and the fit and the and the finish was a little bit tighter. OK. But anyway. So. And this this is a gateway to step back a little bit. Because there's a trend going on at the time in media. And as a kid for a while, I assumed that my experience with Japanese inspired cartoons was because I spent the time I did in the middle of the Pacific, where one of the stations on on the dial,

stations on on the dial, literal dial, because, you know, 1985 was, you know, a local affiliate, essentially almost of NHK from Japan. Like I've talked before about how, like, you know, if I stayed up late enough and I somehow got away with it, I could sit and watch, you know, actually really age inappropriate ninja stories straight from Japan, like, you know, actually really age inappropriate ninja stories straight from Japan, like, you know, on the TV. And I, I. I had this idea for a while of like an an over an over over emphasis, I guess, or overestimation of the exceptionalism of my media landscape when I was when I was that age. But it turns out that really a lot of what I was seeing kids back on the mainland in as we jokingly referred to it, Amarik Hashima, we're watching a lot of the same kind of stuff. And a lot of anime series, we're getting a lot of attention from animation producers and the distinctive art style of anime got some very notable exposure.

And there's kind of a lot going on here. In the mid 80s, part of what was going on was the expansion of cable TV. Okay. And you you talked about this in in prior episodes that there was suddenly this this explosion in the number of households that had access to cable. Yeah, that was also the GIO episode. As well as the Hulk Hogan episodes. Yes, yes. The Hulk Hogan episodes we got, yeah, basic cable. There are so many things about the media landscape that that changed. And one of the things that happened was there was suddenly this profusion of channels instead of only having

You know three channels or if you were in a really big market, maybe five channels available, right? right with with a cable box Even if you didn't have premium cable even if you weren't Subscribed to the Disney Channel. Well, actually, I'm, Disney Channel was part of like basic cable plus like it wasn't read. Anyway, even if you didn't have HBO or Cinemax or any of that kind of stuff. Mm hmm. There were a whole host of other basic cable stations that that, you know, there was this profusion of them at the time.

One of those basic cable stations was Nickelodeon, which, you know, found it's a niche as, you know, we're gonna be a family friendly station that you can, you know, tune to us and parents can understand that as long as nobody doing anything, you know, wildly inappropriate. Right. The most inappropriate thing you'll see is Dobie Gillis reruns.

Yeah. And that was actually later. Dobie Gillis reruns wasn't until Nick at night, which is true. True. Yeah. Half a decade or so later. I mean, I remember seeing a lot of black and white stuff in the evenings on my friends, Nickelodeon, like I didn't have cable. So it was a treat, you know, kind of thing. But but yeah, they they would show a whole bunch

of different like Donna Reed, Dobie Gillis stuff like that. They didn't quite market it as Nick at night for a little while, but they were essentially programming that largely to fill space. You know, they have all this time. Boom, let's let's do it. So but well, it's a good time. Go on. Yeah, it's during the same time period that we end showing up and everybody is at first, you know, telling Ted Turner What the fuck are you gonna do with a 24 hour news cycle? Right? What what and for a while they were just kind of throwing whatever they could at the wall to try to stick. Yeah

So Nickelodeon and CBN Cable Bible Network, I think something like that. Yeah, which later became the family channel in particular We're working really hard to try to find programming. They were they were looking for whatever they could and In their search for material They found dubbed versions of Japanese cartoon series. And they said, well, OK, we can work with this. And they and they and they started putting them out on the airwaves.

Now, there had been other Japanese cartoons that had been dubbed into English and heavily edited and put on the airwaves. The most notable example of that is Speed Racer, which had been in syndication in the United States back in the, I want to say the 1960s. racer, they had just taken taken the film stock from from Japan. And the producers of Speed Racer had had taken that and watched it without having any understanding of what the actual scripts were. And they had just cut it and edited it and made shit up. Yeah, it was like found poetry, but yeah

Yeah, really really low-end animation because it was fairly low-end like it was it was a lot of still frames a lot of Light movement behind the frame and then you know a mouth that looked like a guppy's mouth. Yeah, you know Yeah Yeah, it was it was low-end Yeah, not not high quality. It was like the early fantastic for Yeah, yeah comparable comparable so So that that had had been out there for a generation before you and me Mm-hmm had had been out there for a generation before you and me. But in the 80s, Nickelodeon and CBN took series that were another generation older,

were better animated and they actually put in the effort to like look at the scripts and have somebody translate them for real. And so we got series like the Mysterious Cities of Gold. If you remember that one at all. No. Oh, man, it was a head trip. It was a Japanese made cartoon series that they made in. I want to say it was made in cooperation with South American production companies as well. And the main character was a boy who essentially stowed away.

If I'm remembering right, stowed away on a Spanish galleon during the age of exploration. And yeah, it he wound up falling into an underground kingdom and he and you know, a group of other other characters were on a quest to try to find the lost cities of gold. It was this trippy, yeah, fantasy, historical fantasy kind of thing led into like connection between Latin American civilizations and the Atlanteans and like, yeah, it was it was amazing stuff. But yeah, still very, very what what we would look at and say, well, this is this is focused at eight and nine year olds, right? And then there was the series Bell and Sebastian.

nine year olds, right? And then there was the series, Bell and Sebastian. That one, I think I know about a little girl and a very large dog. Superbook, which interestingly enough was stories from the Bible. This one's from CBN. It was stories from the Bible that had been animated by a Japanese animation studio. Interestingly enough, the flying house and one that I was particularly fond of, Transor Z, which started out as a giant robot series called Mazinger Z, which then got translated into English, and is descended from a Japanese comic series that is

kind of one of the foundational series of the giant robot genre. So so now all of these went onto the air before Voltron or the Transformers. Okay. All of these were on basic cable. And at the time, our national relationship with Japan was complicated. Be a good way to put it. Now, this is at the point where smaller cars are becoming imports that are a fork. Yeah. And that had actually been an issue by 85 that had been an issue for half a decade. So in international relations in 1975, as Vietnam came to a close, Secretary of Defense James R Schinger, made some disparaging remarks about Japan as a defense partner.

How can you make disparaging remarks against a group that you have literally said you don't get to have any armaments worth naming and will handle your defense? Like how can you have a disparaging remark? thing, and will handle your defense like, um, because it's barraging remark. Well, number one, it's 1975, and you are trying desperately not to admit to yourself or the rest of the world that you've lost Vietnam. That probably has something to do with it. Sure. Sure. Sure. And two, this is the next administration,

which is how many administrations removed from the end of World War Two. Wait, 75. That's going to be Ford. Oh, you're right. I mean, it is still the Nixon administration. But yeah, Nixon Ford. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, I mean, so. So is some of this also the the the over generalization and vicarious hatred of some Asian group because you just got beat by one. And so now you got to go hate on another because I know that there was that

shifting that happened between like the Chinese or the barbarians and the Japanese or the proper race and then all of a sudden that got reversed or two. Yeah. Yeah. I know I don't I don I think it is the Japanese at the time had a had a very, very, very small budget, military budget as compared to their GDP. Yeah, they had to by treaty. Well, okay, here's the thing. What Schlesinger probably would have liked and what the Ford administration, the Nixon administration and probably the Johnson administration before them, what they would have liked, I'm sure, would be in order to create a deterrent to other other to the Soviets. Because remember the Japanese shared

a border with the Soviet Union. That's right. In in, I'm going to say it's the Kuril Islands. Yeah, yeah, it's the Kuril Islands. And and you know, they shared they shared a nominal border with the USSR there and I think those administrations would have liked it if well, you know, you're not allowed to have a military, you know That that is expeditionary in any way, but you know, you could maybe spend some more money on yourself defense forces. And there was also a lot of public that was very anti-nuke. I know anecdotally, my father told stories about when he was aboard the Enterprise when they pulled into Tokyo Harbor, they would be met by Japanese protest boats that would come up alongside the carrier and dump dead fish

out of their boats alongside the carrier and then film that. And on the news in Japan, the story would be nuclear carrier pulls in and hey, look at all the dead fish in the wake of the ship. This is my dad's, you know, relation of the story. Which, you know, I mean, there's bias going on in several different directions there.

Let's assume for a second that it's fully true and he's reporting it completely in his faith. That is still a very valid form of protest of the fact that you nuked us 30 years ago and we're still dealing with it. That would be fine as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And and kind of getting around to saying that it's it's a it's a definite reflection of the sentiment within the Japanese public

toward the presence of nuclear weapons, because there were nukes locked up aboard the enterprise and aboard other US ships and US air bases on Okinawa, you know, with the Air Force and everywhere else, there were nuclear weapons there. Wow. That's like just real quick part of to just look at that for a second. You are the only country that has had nuclear weapons dropped on it. You are the only country that has had a belligerent drop nuclear weapons on you.

And now they're they they have dismantled your entire ability to fend for yourself. And now they are circling your islands with bigger bombs than the ones they dropped on you. Like just psychologically there's a lot going on there. Oh yeah. On another episode when I actually get into the genre implications of this stuff, this yeah, like it's all over. It's all over the Japanese storytelling landscape post war and into the 80s and all kinds of places. Yeah, it it it lives very large in the mythic Japanese imagination would be a way of putting that.

Yeah. So this this criticism got made by Schlesinger in in 75. Because, you know, we just we were we were running away with our tail between our legs, but trying to look like, well, no, no, we we we meant to do that. Like, you know, um, peace with honor. Fuck does that even mean, uh, then by the early 80s, the relationship between the two countries was being redefined post Vietnam. And successive Japanese governments worked against those deeply pacifist public opinions to strengthen the Japanese self defense forces. By the way, remember the acronym SDF?

Remember, remember SDF. OK, SDF. OK. And by the time my father was chauffeuring an admiral to and from Tokyo and Kobe and wherever else in Japan he was going, the coordination between the JSDF and US military forces was very, very close. Multiple defense manufacturers either sold systems to Japan with federal permission or else licensed technology to Japanese companies to produce themselves Very notably the Japanese had their own version still have their own version of the f16. It's called the Mitsubishi f2 viper

Okay, which we we sold that to people But the Japanese are one of only a few countries that we were like no no here's all the plans Crazy go nuts. OK, you know. Now, on the international stage in specifically in 85, the Nakasone government was moving in near lockstep with the Reagan administration. They were one of the first U.S. allies to enact sanctions against various people that we wanted to sanction. There was a misstep

right after the Iranian Revolution. They got oil from the Iranians and that made us very mad and they immediately they turned that around real fast and ever after that they were absolutely in lockstep internationally. Okay. And they supported US forward stationing of missiles in Europe in 83 at the V7 summit. That would make sense that they'd support that. They'd be like, yeah, yeah, do that over there. Over there. Let them see how they like it. The other side of a continental landmass.

That's fine. Thank you. We have a whole continent between us and that that's great Yeah, you're still threatening the same group. We get it. Oh Yeah, France and Germany you say yes, please do that by all the UK. Yeah by all means please And they generally supported large US military buildups in Japan and across East Asia in order to counter the USSR and China. Right. Right. So on the international make make the fight happen over there, like please. Yes, please. All the attention and all the wind on that side. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, we think they ought to build. Yes, build all the Navy bases in Singapore. Please. Right. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Malaysia. Yeah. Hey, Malaysia, come on, pick it up. Right. Come on. Yeah.

Hey, I hear more East. More needs a genocide. Can you can you go down there? Can you? Oh, good. You have already. Oh, okay. Thank you. Like go down there? Can you? Yeah. Oh good. You have already. Oh, okay. Thank you. Okay. Well, yeah. Yeah. Oh, hey, South Korea, you guys. Right. You know, no, the same time. So we have this, this issue where on the world stage, when it's when it's, you know,

nations talking with each other. Japan is like, you know, I don't want to simplify it to say there are hype man, but they're solidly, you know, standing somewhere in the rank behind us going, yeah, yeah, you fucking tell him, man. Yeah. All that. All of that. Just what he said. Yeah. Right. But at the same time, this is also the era of massive economic paranoia. Yeah. Yeah. InS. about Japan's rapid industrial growth and their economic power. Right. Okay. 1979 was the year that Japanese imports outsold U.S. built cars for the first time.

That was 79. We talked about that before in a battle-check episode. Oh, that's so free. The talked about that before. In a battle, so free. The giant robot. Yeah, yeah. Way back in the beginning. And a whole long series for, you know, four decades by this time. A long series of Japanese governments had worked hand in glove with industrial

conglomerates to strengthen their position on the world stage. And I mean, there's been a whole lot, there's been a lot of inks spilled mostly here in the United States, but also in some places in Western Europe and other areas that talks about, well, they gave, they gave up, you know, warfare as warfare and they're they started waging economic warfare if they couldn't dominate things militarily, they do it economically. And this is how they did it. Right. And I'm I have to say that there, there are statements statements that were made by people in Japanese government and by people in Japanese industry that talked that way. But I think part of the issue there is the same kind of translation error that leads to us being really really

shocked when we hear that crowds in Iran chant death to America. Oh, just what I mean by that. There's a tonal difference, not just a vocabulary difference. Yes, there's there's a tonal difference. There's a vocabulary difference and and there is a a cultural element of the translation that doesn't come across right when and that's partly tonal I realize as I say that but when when a crowd in Tehran shouts death to America, you need to understand that in Arabic and in in, you know, Arabic culture in Muslim culture, when, you know, you get a flat tire, you might say, death to my flat tire, you know, right? Yeah, you know, death to this thing, death to this thing. And it's, it's to us, it sounds like an exhortation to murder to a native speaker of the language. It's like it's I mean, it's still not nice,

but it's like a fuck you. Yeah, it's a long line of God damn it. Yeah, yeah, it's like son of a bitch, right? You know? And, and so the same kind of thing, especially when you take into account that everybody who was writing government and economic policy in post war Japan had been living through pre war Japan in which the whole culture had been militarized. And so when they use a phrase that translates into English as, you know, we have to fight warfare by economic means, right? That's just an exhortation that like, OK, no, this is for the survival of our country, we got to rebuild, we got to be, you know, as the Japanese are really good at doing, we got to be 120% committed. You know, because the Japanese are kind of the

griffin doors of world cultures in the way that like, no, they have no chill. Like on a cultural level, you just, you don't have ass anything. Right. If you commit to something, you commit 100%. Right, if you commit to something you commit 100% Yeah, and a failure to be 100% committed is a moral failing on a deep level Sure, and so when they when they use that kind of language To to an analyst who aren't native Japanese speakers and are just reading, you know word-for-word Translations and stuff. They're like, oh my God, they mean to conquer the world.

Well, this gets at the issue of a couple of things. Number one, transliteration versus translation. Like translation is at best imperfect and imperfect because you don't have the mindset of the language you're translating from. Yeah. Even if you have studied it for years and years and years, your ability to communicate that to your superiors and explain to them like, okay, when they say this, it doesn't

mean what you think it means. It means this actual thing. So there's that. And then on top of that, I do find it interesting that a country that their solution to any problem is to declare war on it. We literally have a drug czar. Like we have a war on poverty, a war on drugs, a war on homelessness. We declare war on shit. And then for us to get all up in our feelings about, like when somebody says death to,

or when somebody says, hey, we we need to do things like that. Then yeah, like, what are you doing? What? Come on now. Yeah. Yeah. And the other the other thing there's a there's an issue of. Paradigm. Like the the paradigm that we operate in as as products of our culture is on some levels different from the paradigm in which the people of Japan operate just because our

of Japan operate just because our cultural legacy, the things that we have inherited are what we refer to as Judeo-Christian ethics and a legal system and the outlook that goes along with that legal system that we inherited from the English with some influences from the Romans and like, you know, and all of that shapes. With influences from people who were fanboys of the Romans. Like, let's be real. It wasn't like Roman jurisprudence that really, you know, really pushed us in any way. It's English fanboys who fetishized Romanness. Yes. Yeah. But your point still stands. This idea of westernness, like, however shaky a foundation might be built on,

it is still a thing that was the underpinning culturally for how we run things. Whereas Japan, I mean, you've got, first off to Island, it didn't have expansion as like part of its on its land kind of approach to things. Like we had to make a manifest destiny. I'm not saying they didn't do imperial shit.

They absolutely did. But like once they got to that, that was after they'd been contacted by, you know, like there's so much so many layers of taking, I'm not going to say taking the wrong lesson from the world because that kind of puts it on them, but their their maladaptations make a lot of sense. of sense and then to be so badly destroyed by the culmination of those efforts and the hyper nationalism that then you get this Americanized 1940s sense of democracy pushed onto them without them getting a say with MacArthur being the one doing it Like there's so many things wrong with that well and and and and you know the overlay that's that was all an overlay over a culture that that you know goes back to

Confucianism right and and the values of the underlying culture are rooted in Buddhism Confucianism and animism, you know and and like You can you can introduce the idea that no no everybody gets a vote and We do this based on the will of the people and they're gonna go to go, Yeah, okay, we, okay, we get that we understand that. But, but they're their outlook on like, okay, and the people should be, you know, properly, you know, listening to the people who know better, you know, and and, and yeah, there's that up and down the line. Confusion ideas of, you know, Ren and Lee. And in Japan, the idea of Geary and, you know, all just I mean, all of the social

concepts that that you're trying to graft this very for lack of a better word, this very Western kind of set of ideas on to like. Oh, it's deliberately Western and deliberately placed on them. I mean, I've seen the Flyers where they're like before, after it. Yeah. You know, it was a massive shift

and to their credit, they adapted to that. And like they've done a very good job with that. Like that's the next step for them. And, you know, in their culture. Yeah, they have. In terms of their outlook on it. Yeah. So.

Yeah. And what, someday, when I truly get ambitious with this, I'm going to have to do something about the Japanese kurishitan and the relationship that that faith tradition has with Japanese parliamentary democracy politics. Because it's yeah, they're both very, you know, Western ideas that have been grafted onto a culture that came from a very different direction and took that in a very notable notable direction of their own. So but we've kind of drifted a field. the thing I was getting to was, you know, they they had decided, OK, look, our economy has been devastated. Because we we threw all of our all of our production capacity into the war effort. Right.

And we got our production capacity got bombed into shit because it was all directed into the war effort, we have to rebuild from almost a pre-industrial level before we're going to be able to get back to a point where we can manufacture and trade on an equal footing with everybody else on the world stage. And so these successive parliamentary governments had worked very closely with industrial conglomerates in order to strengthen their position on the world stage. They had juiced the economy, they had done their fiscal policy, not fiscal policy, although it is fiscal policy, their monetary policy and their tax policies had all been designed to give their manufacturing base like every advantage and all tons of

subsidies. And of course, they had enlisted labor unions like I've talked about in previous episodes where the relationship between unions and management in Japanese companies was like to an American union worker, they'd be like, I'm sorry, what? You, you, uh, uh, huh? You know, you're all on the same team. Like, no, they're, they're the capital class and we're the workers and they're trying to fuck us every way they can. And we're trying to. Well, no, that's not no, no, no, we're all working, you know, for the good of the organization. And like, we got it. Right. Like, what the fuck? I mean, it's again, it's a paradigm thing. But all of these all of these groups, we're working together because like

otherwise everybody's going to fucking starve in the years immediately post war. Right. So our occupation forces had broken up and forcibly broken up of the Zai Batsu of pre-war Japan. Which had been one of the forces it's interesting to note that the Zybatsu weren't really trusted by the far right Now what are Zybatsu again? Nationalists didn't entirely The Zybatsu were vertically integrated monopoly interests So there'd be a holding company at the top that would be controlled usually

by one extended family. And they would control the entire supply chain and financing. So they'd have banks involved. And they would control the entire supply chain and the financing for a specific manufacturing sector. So like heavy equipment, or automobiles, or consumer goods, or clothing, or what have you, right? And so each Zybatzi would have either one or several manufacturing companies producing and selling the final product, but all of the suppliers, all of the part makers, all of the, you know, everything would be controlled top down. Okay. In a way, like if you look at vertical integration during the Gilded Age, you know, this is this is the kind of thing that the the the, you know, various robber parents of the gilded age.

That's what they worked to do and that our government had to go in eventually and say, OK, no, you can't do that anymore. Knock that shit off, right? Sure. So what replaced the Zybatzu? the Zybatzu were Keiretsu. And now Keiretsu were built kind of out of the ruins of the Zybatzu. And whereas Zybatzu had been top-down systems dominated by a single family, postwar Keiretsu were lateral structures with different companies having shared stockholding. So it would be a network of companies that all like you'd have, for example, I'm just going to use the Mitsubishi, the Mitsubishi auto company on the board of Mitsubishi's auto company, there would be members who represented an ownership stake from a financial institution. There would be members on the board who represented a financial

stake from their parts suppliers. Okay. In return, Mitsubishi would have their own members on the board of the bank and on the board of the supplier. Okay, so they're all they're all integrated with each other, but it is more lateral and less top down. Okay. The corporate structure is still unified, but it's less dominated by it like we were family. One way of looking at it is the Zybatu or feudal Kretu are more like the eco icky or in European example, the guild leagues, you know, cooperative organizations and professionals or trades people, right? Mm-hmm. Now to American capitalist eyes looking at it from the outside, they're like, wait, you broke up the Zybotzu and now they're doing this shit.

It's the same shit. Like they're still they're still all working together. Right. Like, you know, they're all tied together. That's collusion. You can't fucking do that. That's cheating. It's funny what they're willing to call collusion when, like, when it benefits- When somebody else does it? Other than the ruling class. No, not just when someone else does it.

When it benefits anybody but the capital classes, when they collude, it's just business as usual. But when somebody else colludes to the point where the benefits actually do work their way down to the working classes, they're like, oh, that's not okay. That's cheating. You can't do that. That's not fair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, um, and, and there are also,

you know, regulatory relationships with the government that are going to be taken into account. Uh, you know, the government, the Japanese government basically was like, okay, look, whatever you got to do, tell us what you need to do to get back into, you know, economically, the top tier of competing with everybody else in the world, you know, we need we need to get onto an equal trade footing with everybody else, whatever you got to do, we got to do that. And so now I mean, I've talked about this before in episodes 13 and 14. Which, by the way, holy shit, that's, you know, 200 plus episodes ago.

But the foundation of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which was, you know, formed by the Japanese government immediately post war, which worked to coordinate like it was actively saying, OK, this is this is the area we're going to work with you to do this stuff. We're going to work with you to do this stuff and you get this subsidy and you get this subsidy and you get these tax breaks and like all of that. And what's interesting is it's very capitalist, but it's very heavily government managed capitalist. It's social democracy.

Like it's capital. You can have capitalism, but not so that it ruins everyone's life. Yeah. And so they also enacted tariffs and did stuff to protect Japanese manufacturing. Um, by 1980, Japan had become the world's largest exporter of automobiles surpassing first the Germans and then the United States. And we had this weird fear fascination with Japanese culture. Uh, you know, which I which I talked about back in Episode 3 all that time ago, and that filtered

into adaptation of Japanese media. Now, Transformers as a Hasbro toy line came about when Hasbro executives visited the Tokyo Toy Fair in 1983 and at the Tokyo Toy Fair they saw the DIA clone and micro change toy lines from Takara. They looked at this and they went, we want to do this. We can make so much money off of this. They licensed both lines from Takara, Diaclone and Microchange. They decided Diaclone and Microchange. Okay. Japanese company was called Takara Tomi. Okay. They unified them. They said, Okay, we're going to take both of these toy lines. These are the toys that we're gonna do out of them. And we're not gonna keep them as separate things. We're gonna unify them into one toy line in the US because if we keep them separate, it's this is a generate market confusion. We don't want to deal with that. So it's all gonna

be under the same line. And the first Transformers toys were released in the US in 1984 alongside the TV series. Right. And I think before we get into the Transformer cartoon series and kind of what I'm leading into out of that, I think this is a good place to pause. Okay. And so what are you taking from this so far? You know, honestly, we're getting into a lot of the economic history of a place that's a 13 hour flight away. What I actually am most interested right now is the fact that Hawaii is an American market, but it's not an entirely American market.

And it could be on the bleeding edge of Japanese retail sales to the US. And you being there, like those things really interest me in terms of that kind of stuff, because at the same time Hawaii was not leading America into anything like that was still very much on the continent. Those decisions were being made continentally and yet like there it almost feels like there should have been Hawaii as a test market for a lot of this stuff, both the cartoons, the toys, etc. But it doesn't sound like that was the case. What's really weird about it is I totally agree with you.

It would make perfect sense to me at my age now, if I were in marketing of any of this kind of stuff in that situation, I'd have been like, okay, let's see how this goes with the kids there. Right. You know, for a couple of other reasons too. Hawaii has a large, the word that comes to mind is transient, but it's transient is not quite the right word. They have a large population of temporary residents. Right. The word that comes to mind is transient, but it's it's trans it's not quite right where they hit they have a large population of temporary residents. Right.

Um, because especially in the 1980s, the, the percentage of the economy that was built around the Army Navy Air Force Marine Corps, uh, was huge. And so many of my peers were military kids and we were gonna be there for three or four years and then we were gonna go someplace else back on the mainland. And whatever we picked up there, we were gonna take back.

And you also have a culture that's kind of got built into it, greater appreciation of Japanese culture. Yep. On many, many more levels than, I mean, California was intensely anti-Japanese for so very long, culturally. Yeah. And then, you know, I mean, Hawaii was the place that you didn't have internment

like during the war. That's what I was gonna point out was like, yeah, the one Western state is the most extremely Western state. That's the one where you didn't have, yeah. The one where the attack actually happened. Like, and yet you would not have been able to make that state work during the war if you had turned all of the people who were of Japanese descent.

So you've got this built in, if we sell them Japanese stuff here, they will appreciate it more. And then you've also got biosmosis, that appreciation of Japanese stuff and cultural artifacts and things like that that you can buy Will then get carried back to the mainland by the military kids. Yeah And the military parents too, right? Yeah, and and yet I don't see that driving Because all the dates that you're talking about are dates that I'm like, yeah I I had access to that shit, too

dates that you're talking about are dates that I'm like, yeah, I had access to that shit too. Like all the all the things that are that could be driving it aren't. And I find that to be probably the most interesting part. In in some ways, there is a weird kind of. Weird kind of treatment of Hawaii as I think in in the media, there is that there are two forces at work That that work against Hawaii in in in that way One of them is it's it's exotified and treated as this you know location like on the on the edge of the world, right? Yeah and

at the same time, I think for anybody who is doing programming or marketing or anything like that, there is this tendency to look at it as a second or third rate market because the population is not very big. Also true. I think there's another layer too of, it's the one place that you could travel to an exotic location in finger quotes without your passport. Like it, it's very often treated as a state that's not a state.

I mean, it's almost like a Puerto Rico on steroids in most people's minds. Yeah, in a lot of people's minds, yeah. I mean, hell, we had a president who was born there and there are still people who believe that he was not an American. Yeah. You know, and it is our most recent state,

but at the same time, like, I don't know how people treated Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico from 1909 to 1912. And shortly thereafter, but I'm pretty sure they didn't treat those as not American states, you know. And so there is a layer of because it's one of the two non contiguous states. But it's also a place where not white people are. Whereas, yeah, I was I was you beat me to that. I was going to bring up the fact that it is a very, very, very diverse state with a very large Asian Pacific Islander population.

Whether you're talking about descendants of Japanese workers or Filipino or Native Hawaiians Native Hawaiian, you know, all kinds of various groups. Chinese. I mean, you know, it's it's it is heavily Asian enough, Asian Pacific Islander enough that as a nine year old, I figured out how to tell the difference between somebody's Chinese last name and somebody's Japanese last name. Sure. You know, and make and make distinctions like that, because if I didn't, I would get my ass kicked and I was surrounded by people from those backgrounds. Sure. You know, and that that level of diversity, I think is part of the reason middle America and, you know, tend to treat it as not representative of America. Yeah.

You know. So I think that's why it ended up being a missed chance to be the tester market. But but yeah, I still think it's interesting that you were there as these things were coming across. So yeah, it was a bonkers time. It was a particularly bonkers time to be there. It really was. So yeah. All right, cool. Yeah. Well, what's your reading? What I am reading right now, I actually just started it in the last few days. And it's a fascinating read. Totally unrelated to what I'm talking about tonight. But the cutting off way. Gotta take a look at the subtitle here, indigenous warfare in eastern North America from 1500 to 1800 by Lee. It is, I think, a really strong attempt to decolonize continental North American military

history. A lot of the historical all almost all of the historical accounts we have of Native American conflict and the Native American way of engaging in conflict, the Native American way of war, all of our sources, you know, from this during this time period are from Western observers. And the characterizations of the way native communities fought wars against each other show a sadly predictable level of bias in in multiple different ways. And what Lee does in this book is he takes a look at the specific logistical and cultural background that native communities were coming from when they made the decisions they made to decolonize the study of native warfare. And the title, the cutting off way is taken from the way Eastern Native American tribes referred to the way they fought against each other.

So it's it's a fascinating read. If you're into any kind of military history, it's a fascinating read. And a real eye-opener into kind of the level of shitty cultural chauvinism and racism that was involved in the topic and all the historiography around it previously. So yeah, that's what I'm reading. And I really recommend it to anybody interested in the topic. How about you? Well, this will not be any more cheerful. So Ben Kiranen is an author who has wrote definitive books on Pol Pot, his regime in the Khmer Rouge. Just uplifting the morale of everybody in the room. Well, he wrote two books that were so detailed and so good that he was tried in absentia

for crimes against the People's Liberation Front Army, or I forget what the exact name is. Yeah, of the Khmer Rouge. Jesus. And found guilty and absentious. So he's not ever probably gonna be allowed to go there. But he wrote another book called Blood and Soil, a World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. And he essentially highlights the four main highlights the four main cornerstones of a society that has decided to go genocidal and like what to look for and stuff like that and it's really really good.

So I recommend that one plus lots and lots of alcohol or ice cream. Okay, I will say I give him props for starting with sparta Mm-hmm because I don't think sparta takes enough shit for being the bad guys Genocidal ethnic cleansing society, but yeah, all right. Yeah So Anyway, so that's that's what I recommend. Um, all right Let's see. I I know that you well actually I don't know necessarily. Is there anywhere you want to be found right now?

Not at present. Okay, not any place I would like to be found we can collectively be found on the Apple podcast app on Stitcher, not Stitcher anymore, Spotify. And of course, our website, www.geekhistorytime.com. And wherever you found us, please take the time to subscribe to give us the five star review that we that you know we deserve and Yeah, where where can you be found? Honestly best place to find me right now would be on August or i'm not August. I'm sorry march 1st or april 5th at the comedy spot All right at 8 p.m. No 9 p.m

For capital punishment. We are making our triumphant return then. All right. So yeah. Well, for a Geek History of Time, I'm Damian Harmony. And I'm Ed Laylock, and until next time, roll out.