• aeronmelon@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    First to industrialize

    The Japanese were dumbstruck when the Dutch showed them machinery. They had been handpicking rice and painting lewd pictures of octopi up until that point.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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      1 day ago

      First to industrialize amongst their neighbors. And mechanization of rice harvesting is a very late invention.

      As is, for that matter, lewd octopus drawings, which date only to the 19th century.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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        1 day ago

        First to industrialize amongst their neighbors.

        The OP is still misleading to make his point.

        As is, for that matter, lewd octopus drawings, which date only to the 19th century.

        Most famous example from 1814 (NSFW): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman's_Wife Although I bet that for a popular artist to be able to publish this openly, it probably means it was already floating in the culture before. The article mentions earlier netsuke, but without dates and the sources are books.

              • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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                16 hours ago

                About the “first to industrialize”, it didn’t make sense unless you add “among its neighbors”, because Western countries industrialized before and brought a lot of technology to Japan, especially modern guns and much more after the Meiji restoration from 1868 and the reopening of Japan after 2.5 centuries of isolation under the Edo period.

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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            16 hours ago

            I guess it’s just a mean way to say soften to adapt to local taste. It may also be to appeal to racist people who don’t believe cultural mixing is positive. It’s about Japanese curry. Japan appropriated a lot of other foods, for example breads from Europe and did their own versions, it’s rather fun. Their word for bread is “pan” パン, it comes directly from Portuguese (also same in Spanish).

    • PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee
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      21 hours ago

      They were so late to industrialize that they were using mules/donkeys to taxi new zero planes from the factory to the runway during WW2.