Like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, it’s been reproduced on all manner of improbable items and subjected to liberal reimagining — something Sarah Urist Green, describes in the above episode of her series The Art Assignment as “numerous crimes against this image perpetrated across the internet.”
Such repurposing is the ultimate compliment.
The Great Wave is so graphically indelible, anyone who co-opts it can expect it to do a lot of heavy lifting.
For those who bother looking closely enough to take in the three boatloads of fishermen struggling to escape with their lives, it’s also narratively gripping, a terrifying woodblock still from an easily imagined disaster film.
It’s also an homage to Mount Fuji, one of a series of 36.
Thousands of prints were produced in the early 1830s for the domestic tourist trade. Visitors to Mount Fuji snapped these souvenirs up for about the same price as a bowl of noodle soup.
Green, a curator and educator, points out how the water-obsessed Hokusai borrowed elements from both the Rinpa school and Western realism for the Great Wave. The latter can be seen in the use of linear perspective, a low horizon line, and Prussian blue.
Hell, there’s even a Lego set and an official Sanrio characters greeting card showing Hello Kitty nonchalantly surfing the crest in a two piece bathing suit, more interested in disporting herself than considering the sort of extreme oceanic events we can expect more of, owing to climate change.
The world has heard much about the aging and shrinking of Japanese society, a process that has created ghost towns like those we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. But however seriously Japan’s population may be contracting, its love of cats abides undiminished. Hence the replacement of people by felines — effectively, anyway — on the island of Aoshima, visited in the CBS Sunday Morning segment above. “Here, cats outnumber humans more than ten to one,” says correspondent Seth Doane. Its “tiny fishing village once had a population of 800 people, but the sardine fisheries depleted, jobs moved to cities, and human residents left the island.”
Such is the way, it seems, of any post-industrial society — but as always, Japan has ways of setting itself apart. On Aoshima, Doane says, “the big moment of the day is when the tourist boat shows up. It’s 45 minutes of bliss for all involved,” including the cat-lovers bearing treats as well as all the peckish animals awaiting them at the dock. But Aoshima is only one of ten such “cat islands” around Japan. The much larger (but still small) Tashirojima boasts not just over 100 resident cats, but also Neko-jinja (猫神社), literally “Cat Shrine,” one of a host of such feline-dedicated religious sites in the island’s Miyagi Prefecture.
Whether Japan’s attitude toward cats amounts to worship remains a matter of debate. But the fact remains that cats have proven to be the salvation of more places in Japan than a few of its islands: take Tama (literally “ball,” but the Japanese equivalent of “Kitty”), a calico whose assumption of the position of “station master” brought a train stop in Wakayama Prefecture back from the brink of closure. In the old days, Japanese cats did the dirty work of killing rodents that would otherwise infest fishing boats and destroy silkworm farms; today, their ancestors drum up tourism. The Japanese may love cats with an enthusiasm unknown in the rest of the world, but clearly they still expect them to earn their keep.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The world, we often hear, used to be bigger. Today, if you feel the faintest twinge of curiosity about a distant place — Beijing, Paris, Cambodia, Egypt — you can near-instantaneously call up countless hours of high-quality video footage shot there, and with only a little more effort even communicate in real-time with people actually living there. This may be the case in the early twenty-first century, but it certainly wasn’t in the early twentieth. If you’d wanted to see the world back then, you either had to travel it yourself, an expensive and even dangerous proposition, or else hire a team of expert photographers to go forth and capture it for you.
Albert Kahn, a successful French banker and speculator, did both. A few years after making his own trip around the world, taking stereographic photos and even motion-picture footage along the way, he came up with the idea for a project called Les archives de la planète, or The Archives of the Planet.
Directed by the geographer Jean Brunhes (and influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson, a friend of Kahn’s), Les archives de la planète spent most of the nineteen-tens and nineteen-twenties dispatching photographers to various ends of the earth on fewer than four continents: Europe, America, Asia, and Africa. And if you click on those links, you can see the project’s photos from the relevant regions yourself.
Having been digitized, the fruits of Les archives de la planète now reside online, at the web site of the Albert Kahn Museum. You can browse its collection there, or on this image portal, where you can view featured photos or access whichever part of the world in the early twentieth century you’d like to see. (Just make sure to do it in French.) The online archive contains a large chunk of the 72,000 autochrome pictures taken in 50 countries by Kahn’s photographers before he was wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929. Made freely available in high resolution a century after the height of his project, these vivid and evocative pictures remind us that, however small the world has become, the past remains a foreign country.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
I never use a metal detector and I often walk little more than a mile in 5 hours, yet I can travel 2,000 years back in time through the objects that are revealed by the tide. Prehistoric flint tools, medieval pilgrim badges, Tudor shoes, Georgian wig curlers and Victorian pottery, ordinary objects left behind by the ordinary people who made London what it is today.
As she says in the short film above, her first find has become one of her most common — a clay pipe fragment.
The term mudlark was invented to describe the poverty stricken Victorians who scoured the foreshore for copper, wire, and other items with resale value, as well as things they could clean off and use themselves.
Today’s mudlarks are primarily history buffs and amateur archeologists.
The hobby has become so popular that The Port of London Authority, which controls the Thames waterway along with the Crown Estate, has started to require foreshore permits of all prospective debris hunters.
Permitted mudlarks can claim as souvenirs however many Victorian clay pipes and blue and white pottery shards they dig up, but are legally obliged by the Portable Antiquities Scheme to report items of potentially greater historic and monetary value — i.e. Treasure — to a museum-trained Finds Liason Officer:
Any metallic object, other than a coin, provided that at least 10 per cent by weight of metal is precious metal (that is, gold or silver) and that it is at least 300 years old when found. If the object is of prehistoric date it will be Treasure provided any part of it is precious metal.
Any group of two or more metallic objects of any composition of prehistoric date that come from the same find (see note below).
Two or more coins from the same find provided they are at least 300 years old when found and contain 10 per cent gold or silver (if the coins contain less than 10 per cent of gold or silver there must be at least ten of them). Only the following groups of coins will normally be regarded as coming from the same find: Hoards that have been deliberately hidden; Smaller groups of coins, such as the contents of purses, that may been dropped or lost; Votive or ritual deposits.
Any object, whatever it is made of, that is found in the same place as, or had previously been together with, another object that is Treasure.
How did all this historic refuse come to be in the Thames? Maiklem told Collectors Weeklythat there are many reasons:
Obviously, it’s been used as a rubbish dump. It was a useful place to chuck your household waste. It was essentially a busy highway, so people accidentally dropped things and lost things as they traveled on it. Of course, people also lived right up against it. London was centered on the Thames so houses were all along it, and there was all this stuff coming out of the houses and off the bridges. It was the biggest port in the world in the 18th century, so there was all the shipbuilding and industry going on.
And then of course, there’s the rubbish that was used to build up the foreshore and create barge beds. The riverbed in its natural state is a V shape, so they had to build up the sides next to the river wall to make them flatter so the flat-bottom barges could rest there at low tide. They did that by pouring rubbish and building spoil and kiln waste, anything they could find—industrial waste, domestic waste. When they dug into the ground further up, they’d bring the spoil down and use it to build up the foreshore, and cap it off with a layer of chalk, which was soft and didn’t damage the bottom of the barges.
One of the reasons we’re finding so much in the river now is because there’s so much erosion. While it was a “working river,” these barge beds were patched up and the revetments, or the wooden walls that held them in, were repaired when they broke. But now, they’re being left to fall apart, and these barge beds are eroding as the river is getting busier with river traffic.
There are numerous social media groups where modern mudlarks can proudly share their finds, and seek assistance in identifying strange or fragmented objects.
Maiklem’s London Mudlark Facebook page is an education in and of itself, a reflection of her abiding interest in the historic significance of the items she truffles up.
Witness the pewter buckle plate dating to the 14th or 15th-century that she spotted on the foreshore in late November, turned over to her Finds Liaison Officer and researched with the help of historic pewter craftsman Colin Torode:
Prior to c.1350 pewter belt fittings seem to have been rather rare, although a London Girdlers’ Guild Charter of 1321 which banned the use of pewter belt fittings does show that the metal was certainly in use. In 1344 the Girdlers’ guild again reiterated the ban on what they felt were inferior metals such as pewter, tin and lead. In 1391 however, a statute recognized that these metals had been in use for some time and that their use could continue without restriction
This ornate plate would have had a separate buckle frame attached to it and is probably a cheaper copy of the more upmarket copper alloy or silver versions that were produced at the time.Although the the openwork design is similar to those found in in furniture or church screens, it’s not religious or pilgrim related.
Maiklem also challenges fans to play along from home with “spot the find” videos for such items as a Tudor clothes hook, Georgian cufflink, and a German salt glazed, stoneware bottle’s neck embossed with a human face.
The river also spews up plenty of drowned rats, flushing them out with the sewage after a heavy rain. Other potential hazards include hypodermic needles and broken glass.
In addition to such safety precautions as gloves, sturdy footwear, and remaining mindful of incoming tides, Maiklem advises novice mudlarks to look for straight lines and perfect circles — “the things that nature doesn’t make.”
It takes practice and patience to develop a skilled eye, but don’t get discouraged if your first outings don’t yield the sort of jaw dropping discoveries Maiklem has made — an intact glass Victorian sugar crusher, a 16th-century child’s leather shoe and Roman era pottery shards galore.
Sometimes even plastic comes with a compelling story.
I’m still feeling quite giddy over this bit of plastic. I came to Cornwall this week to write and to beachcomb. I hoped I might find a small piece of Lost Lego, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. Calm weather means less plastic: good for the beach, bad for the Lego looker. Then I found this wedged between two boulders. It’s one of the black octopuses from the Lego spill of 1997 when, 20 miles from Land’s End, a huge wave hit the cargo ship Tokio Express. It tilted 45 degrees and 62 containers slid into the water. One container was filled with nearly 5 million pieces of Lego, much of which was sea themed. Little scuba tanks, flippers, octopuses, cutlasses, life rafts, spear guns, dragons and octopuses like this still wash up on the beaches of Cornwall and further afield.
Stay abreast of Lara Maiklem’s mudlarking finds here.
Try your hand at mudlarking the Thames in person, during a guided tour with the Thames Explorer Trust.
Two and a half years ago, we featured the concept art for Studio Ghibli’s theme park here on Open Culture, and just two weeks ago it opened its doors. Located on the grounds of Expo 2005 in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture (a three- to four-hour train trip west from Tokyo, or a two-hour train trip east of Osaka), Ghibli Park comprises several themed areas like the Grand Warehouse, the Hill of Youth, and Dondoko Forest. Just hearing those names surely fires up the imaginations of many a Ghibli fan, even before they hear about the park’s visitor-ready reconstructions of everything from Castle in the Sky’s ruined gardens to Whisper of the Heart’s antique shop to My Neighbor Totoro’s Catbus.
“Unlike Disneyland, Ghibli Park does not feature roller coasters or rides,” writes My Modern Met’s Margherita Cole. “Instead, it welcomes visitors to immerse themselves in life-size sets that are harmoniously integrated with nature.” You can get a sense of how this concept has been executed in the fifteen-minute video at the top of the post from Japan-based travel vloggers Didi and Bryan.
In it, they pass through the aforementioned spaces as well as others including Cinema Orion, which screens ten short films once only viewable at the Ghibli Museum, and the Siberia milk stand, which offers the eponymous sponge cake from The Wind Rises, Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki’s final animated feature — or rather, his penultimate animated feature.
The repeatedly un-retired Miyazaki returned to the studio in 2016 to begin a film called How Do You Live?. Though the COVID-19 pandemic slowed down its production by forcing him and his collaborators to work from home, it seems not to have thrown the new theme park’s construction far off track. In three years’ time, Cole writes, “Ghibli Park will open its last two sections — Mononoke no sato (‘Mononoke Village’) and Majo no tani (‘Valley of the Witch’) — which are dedicated to the films Princess Mononoke and Kiki’s Delivery Service, respectively. There may even be a future ride in store, as some of the concept art appears to depict spinning teacups inspired by Kiki’s cat Jiji.” That will require careful designing: a certain other animation studio with long-standing theme parks has a teacup ride of its own — and little patience for apparent imitators, no matter the artistic heights to which they soar.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The popularity of the phrase “style over substance” has encouraged us to assume an inherent and absolute divide between those concepts. But as the most ambitious works of man remind us, style pushed to its limits its substance, and vice versa. This truth has been expressed in various specialized ways: architect Louis Sullivan’s maxim “form follows function,” for example, which went on to attain something like scriptural status among modernists of the mid-twentieth century. It was in that same era that aerospace engineering produced one of the most glorious proofs of the unity of style and substance, form and function, mechanics and aesthetics: Concorde, the supersonic jetliner that flew between 1976 and 2003.
Nobody who flew on Concorde (colloquially but not officially “the” Concorde) has forgotten it. The sharpness and length of its ascent; the thrust of the after-burner, pressing you into your seat like the acceleration of a high-performance sports car; the visible curvature of the Earth and the deep purple of the sky; the impeccable food and drink service that turned a flight between New York and London into a sumptuous French meal. A host of former passengers, crew members, and pilots reminisce vividly about all this in the BBC documentary Concorde: A Supersonic Story. That story is told more briefly in the Vox video at the top of the post, which asks the question, “This plane could cross the Atlantic in 3.5 hours. Why did it fail?”
The short answer has to do with business viability. At supersonic speeds an aircraft leaves a sonic boom in its wake, which relegated Concorde to transoceanic flights. Its inability to hold enough fuel to cross the Pacific left New York-London, operated by British Airways, as its sole viable route, with Air France also running between New York and Paris. For Concorde was an Anglo-French project, launched as a partnership between the two governments in 1962, at the height of the Space Age — and despite enormous subsequent cost overruns an effectively un-cancelable one, since one country couldn’t pull out without the other’s say-so.
With national pride at stake, French commitment did much to make Concorde what it was. “Because it went so fast, the V.I.P.s on board wouldn’t need much more, from an English point of view, than a sandwich, a cup of tea, and a glass of whiskey,” says Jonathan Glancey, author of Concorde: The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner. But the French said, “No, this a luxury aircraft,” and it was ultimately luxury — as well as a sleekly functional silhouette that never stopped looking futuristic — that kept Concorde going until its retirement in 2003. (Nor could the convenience factor be ignored, for investment bankers and international celebrities alike: “It’s always exciting to get to New York before you’ve left,” said frequent flier Sting.)
“The real flaw in Concorde was not technological but social,” writes Francis Spufford in the London Review of Books. “Those who commissioned it assumed that air travel would remain, as it was in 1962, something done by the rich: and not the mobile, hard-working managerial rich either, but the gilded upper-crust celebrity rich,” the original “jet set.” Alas, the future lay not with speed but volume: “The Boeing 747 was just as bold a leap into the unknown as Concorde, just as extreme in its departure from the norm; nothing so large had ever left the ground before. And Boeing’s gamble paid off.” Supersonic jetliners have nevertheless re-entered development in recent years, and if any come to market, they’ll surely do so with such luxuries unknown in the Space Age as personal, on-demand entertainment systems. But will anything they can show be as thrilling as Concorde’s cabin speedometer reaching mach two?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Just yesterday, Japan fully re-opened its borders to tourism after a long period of COVID-19-motivated closure. This should prove economically invigorating, given how much demand to visit the Land of the Rising Sun has built up over the past couple of years. Even before the pandemic, Japan had been a country of great interest among world travelers, and for more than half a century at that. Much of that attractiveness has, of course, to do with its distinctive nature, which manifests both deep tradition and hyper-modernity at once.
But some of it also has to do with the fact that, since rising from the devastation of the Second World War, Japan has hardly shied away from self-promotion. “A Day in Tokyo,” the short film at the top of the post, was produced by the Japan National Tourism Organization in 1968.
Its vivid color footage of Japan’s great metropolis, “the world’s largest and liveliest,” captures everyday life as it was then lived in Tokyo’s department stores, stock exchanges, construction sites, and zoos.
The film puts a good deal of emphasis on the capital’s still-ongoing postwar transformation: “In a constant metabolic cycle of destruction and creation, Tokyo progresses at a dizzying pace,” declares the film’s narrator. “People who haven’t seen Tokyo for ten years, or even five, would scarcely recognize it today.” And if Tokyo was dizzying in the late nineteen-sixties, it became positively disorienting in the eighties. On the back of that era’s economic bubble, Japan looked about to become the wealthiest country in the world, and Tokyoites both worked and played accordingly hard.
This two-part compilation of scenes from Japan in the eighties conveys that time with footage drawn from a variety of sources, including feature films (not least Itami Jūzō’s beloved 1985 ramen comedy Tampopo.) “It was a magical place at a magical time,” remembers one American commenter who lived in Japan back then. “Everything seemed possible. Everybody was prospering. Almost every crazy business idea seemed to succeed. People were happy and shared their happiness and good fortune with others. It was like no other place on earth.”
As dramatically as the bubble burst at the end of the eighties, Japanese life in the subsequent “lost decades” has also possessed a richness of its own. You can see it in this compilation of footage of Japan in the nineties and two-thousands from the same channel, TRNGL. Though it no longer seemed able to buy up the rest of the world, the country had by that era built up a global consciousness of its culture by exporting its films, its animation, its music, its video games, and much more besides. Even if you haven’t seen this Japan in person, you’ve come to know it through its art and media.
If you’re considering making the trip, this video of “Japan nowadays” will give you a sense of what you’ve been missing. The Tokyo of the twenty-first century shown in its clips certainly isn’t the same city it was in 1968. Yet it remains “an intermingling of Orient and Occident, seemingly new, but actually old,” as the narrator of “A Day in Tokyo” puts it. “Beneath its modern exterior, there still lingers an atmosphere of past glories. The citizens remain unalterably Japanese, and yet this great city is able to accommodate and understand people of all races, languages, and beliefs” — people now arriving by the thousands once again.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The city of Hamburg’s nickname is Tor zur Welt- the gateway to the world.
If the German language production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s record breaking hiphop musical now in previews in that city’s St. Pauli Theater is as warmly received as the English original has been in London, Melbourne, and, of course, the US, it may earn itself with an additional one — Hamiltonburg.
Excitement has been building since early summer, when a dual language video mashup of the opening number placed the original Broadway cast alongside their German language counterparts.
One need not speak German to appreciate the similarities in attitude — in both performance, and internal assonances, a lyrical aspect of hip hop that Miranda was intent on preserving.
Translator Kevin Schroeder quipped that he and co-translator rapper Sera Finale embraced the motto “as free as necessary, as close as possible” in approaching the score, which at 46 numbers and over 20,000 words, more than doubles the word count of any other musical:
At least we had all these syllables. It gave us room to play around.
Good thing, as the German language abounds with multisyllabic compound nouns, many of which have no direct English equivalent.
Take schadenfreude which the creators of the musical Avenue Q summed up as “happiness at the misfortune of others.”
Or torschlusspanik — the sense of urgency to achieve or do something before it’s too late.
Might that one speak to a translating team who’ve devoted close to four years of their lives to getting everything — words, syllables, meter, sound, flow, position, musicality, meaning, and double meanings — right?
Before Schroeder and Finale were entrusted with this herculean task, they had to pass muster with Miranda’s wife’s Austrian cousin, who listened to their samples and pronounced them in keeping with the spirit of the original.
As translators have always done, Schroeder and Finale had to take their audience into account, swapping out references, metaphors and turns of phrase that could stump German theatergoers for ones with proven regional resonance.
In a round up demonstrating the German team’s dexterity, the New York Times’ Michael Paulson points to “Satisfied,” a song wherein Hamilton’s prospective sister-in-law recalls their first encounter:
ORIGINAL
So this is what it feels like to match wits
With someone at your level! What the hell is the catch?
It’s the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light
It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite
You see it right?
GERMAN
So kribbeln Schmetterlinge, wenn sie starten
Wir beide voll auf einem Level, offene Karten!
Das Herz in den Wolken, ich flieg’ aus der Bahn
Die Füße kommen an den Boden nich’ ran
Mein lieber Schwan!
ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF GERMAN
So that’s how butterflies tingle when they take off
We’re on the same level, all cards on the table!
My heart in the clouds, I’m thrown off track
My feet don’t touch the floor
My dear swan!
Miranda, who participated in shaping the German translation using a 3 column system remarkably similar to the compare and contrast content above, gives this change a glowing review:
That section sounds fantastic, and gives the same feeling of falling in love for the first time. The metaphor may be different, but it keeps its propulsiveness.
And while few German theatergoers can be expected to be conversant in Revolutionary War era American history, Germany’s sizeable immigrant population ensures that certain of the musical’s themes will retain their cultural relevance.
The Hamburg production features players from Liberia and Brazil. Other cast members were born in Germany to parents hailing from Ghana, the Philippines, Aruba, Benin, Suriname…and the United States.
For more of Michael Paulson’s insights into the challenges of translating Hamilton, click here.
Hamilton is in previews at Hamburg’s St. Pauli Theater, with opening night scheduled for October 6.
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