Review: The Once and Future King, by T.H. White

Some time ago I came upon someone asking what would be a good introduction to the Arthurian cycle and the matter of Britain, and the replies mentioned that this book would be a good one that covered “most of it“.

Dear Reader, if you have been here me for a while you’ll know I am deeply lazy and love “most of it” works, so this piqued my interest.

I am glad it did cause this book was very good, and also extremely odd, but in a good way. Mild spoilers ahead.

The book was actually multiple shorter novels published separately and then bound together in a single volume, and while there is some unity, they read quite differently.

What’s in the books

First, let me mention this: did you see the 1960s “The Sword in the Stone” animated movie from Disney? The one where they turn into squirrels and flirt with other squirrels? The one with the magic battle where they turn into animals and such?

Well, that’s the first book in this saga. Almost all of the movie is from the book. This isn’t Disney making a crab jamaican, it’s 90% White’s imagination.

And the whole saga has all the same character the movie does! It has a ton of anachronisms, Merlyn is a time traveling savant with a bad memory, badgers and urchins (hedgehogs) discuss political systems, Guenevere and Lancelot argue as an old couple (I loved the fact that Lancelot and Arthur call her “Jenny“), the fearsome Questing Beast has to be nursed back into health after falling in love with two knights in a costume (a scene worthy of Laurel & Hardy!). And there is so much more beyond the comedy.

The second book contains the most harrowing unicorn hunt I have ever read (SPOILER!): the children of the Orkney clan (who will end up as the knights Gareth, Agravain, Gaheris, Gawain) saw their Mom going with various man looking for a unicorn in the forest, so the good children decide to hunt one to make her happy.

Except, they end up murdering it. And then decide to carry the corpse to their mother. But they are children and can’t obviously lift a horse, so they decide to hack at its neck to detach the head and then have to drag the poor thing until the castle, crying and commiserating themselves and the creature, finally having to prop the ruined thing on a chair. And their mother does not notice it at all. Until she does, and has the kids beaten.

Look, this single bit may be one of the best bit of literature I have read in my life. I will never forget it. I literally can see the kids doing this in my mind for how beautiful a rendering it was.

Book three is instead a proper cavalry book! With the quest for the grail, and the Lance/Jenny love story. And even here, White is brilliant, even tho he does not make it epic, it’s still great, and as he says “That (Thomas Malory‘s) way of telling the story can only be done once“.

And then we get Mordred’s betrayal and everything else, and we get to the last book, where once again Arthur joins up with his old teacher Merlyn, the badger, the urchin, the snake. And he has more adventures turning into birds, and debating the nature of humankind.

What’s actually in the book

The whole saga might be about Arthur’s (or Merlyn’s) effort to bring might under control, to see whether our species can be better than brutes. That is what Camelot is about! That’s why the round table exists!

The original books were published between 1938 and 1940, with the background of the rise of war and totalitarianism (Merlyn is staunchly individualistic and anarchic and never fails to criticize communism too, although he throws shade on democracy and capitalism too), and these topics come up again and again in the book, but particularly in the last book, written much later. But notice, they are always put in the context of the use of force, e.g. at one point Merlyn says

There was just such a man when I was young—an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos.

The saga, which opens with hope and a young Arthur which learns from animals, ends up in the same way, except this time he no longer has his life in front of him to fix the world, and has to actually abandon it.

The book has a certain sadness to it, because despite all their efforts, Arthur can’t fix the world, Lance can’t help but betray his king, and Jenny can’t help but end up alone (to leave her lover free of the choice between her and God!). All this while Elaine, Gawaine and all the rest of the cast suffer and die.

And yet, it is a book of hope. The conclusion has this bit

For I am inclined to believe that my beloved Arthur of the future is sitting at this very moment among his learned friends, in the Combination Room of the College of Life, and that they are thinking away in there for all they are worth, about the best means to help our curious species: and I for one hope that some day, when not
only England but the World has need of them, and when it is ready to listen to reason, if it ever is, they will issue from their rath in joy and power: and then, perhaps, they will give us happiness in the world once more and chivalry, and the old mediaeval blessing of certain simple people—who tried, at any rate, in their own small way, to still the ancient brutal dream of Attila the Hun.

(I will note en passant that, like maybe Arthur and many others, Attila’s son Csaba also lays in wait ready to come and help his people in time of need.)

Btw, this is an infinitely quoteable book. I am not aware of a good place for book quotes (wikiquotes sucks for this) beyond goodreads, so go read some there.

Conclusion

This was in no way the book I expected it to be. In almost every way, it was a better book than that. I enjoyed it as an audiobook from Naxos read by Jason Neville, which was a wonderful narrator in many, many morning walks.

So my judgement is clouded by his voice, and if you read the book in dead tree form it might be better, or worse.

And I missed a lot of details, because of that. Audiobooks are great but also terrible. I may re-read it in paper one day.

Vote 8/10: I hope I’ll have time to back to childish things when I’m older, like Arthur.

My 2c on the AI/GenAI/LLM bubble

A premise

I am writing this to clarify my ideas more than anything else. This blog has such a small following that I doubt anyone will be influenced, but if you have opinions, please share them.

I will refer to AI/LLMs interchangeably in this post. I am aware the translate function in your phone, or the spam filter in your email inbox is also Artificial Intelligence. I know it’s also what we used to call Machine Learning. It’s also what we used to call statistics. It’s also, obviously, not AGI.

It does not matter. I went through the whole era of telling people that no, the people who get into your computer to steal your money should be called crackers, not hackers, but I am older, and I have realized it’s not worth it to fight all the battles. People will call AI-powered a toothbrush with a led, and that’s fine.

Mixed feelings

I am a mastodon user and my circle over there is dominated by people who, for one reason or the other, hate AI. Their arguments are, in large part, reasonable. I will not debate the power, water, and general resources usage arguments, because I don’t feel strongly about those.

The fairness argument is the one I will consider: the big AI labs have built their fortune on a trove of illegally obtained data, and are making money by offering to replace people whose data they stole. While we can argue about the details (some data was legal, some labs are trying to give back something, there are blurry lines on what constitutes fair use) it seems objectively shitty.

I understand the feeling, more for artists than for programmers, and I would welcome a sort of regulation that compensated them somehow, but I cannot imagine how that would work. Maybe let’s fund UBI taxing AI vendors? That sounds like a good idea! But to me, so does taxing megacorps in general to fund welfare.

What I do think, it’s that it’s not useful to yell at people using AI to do inferior knock-off “art” and expect it to disappear.

You can vote with your eyeballs and avoid content that is clearly AI slop, but I don’t think this will be effective long term.

AFAIR boycotting products has never been effective long term: Nestlé still markets powder milk for babies in poor countries, after 50 years of boycotts.

This does not mean boycotts are useless, but IMO a boycott is only effective if it leads to regulation, and that is what people should strive for.

Grief and all those thing

I think what I’ve seen in myself and others is a response that very closely resembles the five stages of grief pattern. When confronted with the idea that AI can somehow replace their skills, people have clearly gone through these things: denial that computers could ever do their work, anger at the peddlers of slop, then getting to the idea that yeah, sure, they can do some things but not everything I can (bargaining). I expect depression will follow and then perhaps acceptance.

Most reactions I’ve seen were anger. That’s where most people complaining about AI these days are, even if they’re not aware of it (I wasn’t, either).

Why wouldn’t they be angry? If you’re someone like me whose identity is strictly tied to what you do and you get told what you do is no longer unique or useful, of course you’re going to get angry. If you think insecure about your ability to keep a salary, you will be upset. Add to this that people like Sam Altman or Elon Musk are genuinely horrible people, why wouldn’t you be fuming?

But I think being angry is not useful to anyone. Luddites were right in their anger, but it did not stop the rise of automation.

But riffraff, haven’t you heard this quote?

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. – Ursula K. Le Guin’s

I have, and I think this is a misrepresentation of the issue. Systems need to be changed, but the righteous anger needs to be directed properly.

I do not think it’s possible to stop the increasing usage of LLMs, because even if we burned all the data centers we’re at a stage where it’s becoming more and more simple to just get an open weight model and run it on your machine.

And in my memory, we were never able to stop something that everyone can do at home. People still distill illegal alcohol at home in countries where it’s forbidden. You can still download pirate movies. You can rip CDs on your machine.

Containers and dockworkers

I think one needs to look at what’s happening in the optics of an industrial revolution of some sort. There will be winners and losers. Our duty to humankind is to make sure there are not too many losers, and that they don’t lose too much. But we cannot deny the technological changes.

A few years back I read “The Box”, a wonderful book about the rise of shipping containers. Did you know that in the past there were whole towns of dockworkers? Some cities were basically wiped off the map economically once shipping became automated, because they failed to adapt, others rose to prominence. The people didn’t really go anywhere tho, they had to transition to different jobs, because what else could they do?

I am not sure the same will happen with workers whose job can be partially or totally replaced by LLMs.

Perhaps, as some say, this is more a case of raising productivity while not really losing workers. In computers, we saw this happen with the move from punch cards to hand coded assembly to ever higher level programming languages. At each rate, the productivity went up (allegedly), the level of abstraction rose, but people just adapted, and companies chose to do more, not to do the same with less.

I subscribe to this idea. Perhaps artists will get to work 1/10th of the time on commissions, and 9/10 they will just ask Photoshop to copy their style.

The most positive perspective is, in my opinion, that in a couple years we will all be able to run inference on our machines with open weight models. This will still be unfair to people who get copied more but I think it is an acceptable outcome: the commons have built a data set of images, words, codes, and it will get back to them. We need to fight for this outcome, and avoid more data getting siloed.

Where I stand

Nolan Lawson wrote a good piece about how programmers are mourning our craft. I got exposed through it through another post, by Les Orchard, in which he notices that programmers seem to mourn the craft coming from two different sides. I was literally going to write the same thing in this post when a colleague shared it, but he put it in a nicer way.

My idea, in brief, is that, some programmers were into coding for the typing, some of it where in it for the output.

I was, and still am, more interested in the typing than in the outcome, most of the timing. I enjoy working on things which are not world-shattering, provided I can code it nicely. That’s why I love the Advent of Code. Or why I used to read about weird programming languages (I miss Lambda The Ultimate!). Heck, once I printed and read a whole manual on SGML and I am not exactly sure why.

But some other people see programming as a tool to achieve something, or enable other humans to do it.

For those who mostly saw programming as a mean to an end, going one more level up in abstraction is good, you get more stuff done!

For me, it removes a part of the programming experience which I enjoyed, and I am left with more of the part I enjoy less.

I am afraid we will all have to deal with this. Continuing with the bad analogies, it looks like this might be a case of photography vs painting. Photography didn’t kill painting, but it did supplant it as the mean of getting someone’s image. Painting had to be reimagined as something other than realistic painting. But realistic painting still exists!

I’m not so sure there will be people doing hand crafted code as a hobby, and I’m pretty sure the chances of people paying premium for free range humanely developed code are close to zero. But I’ve been wrong before.

Personally, I am at the bargaining stage of grief. At this point in time, in the Year of Our Lord two thousand and twenty six, it appears machines still can’t do everything I do as a programmer. They for sure can’t do what a good designer can, so visual artists will be fine for a while longer.

A good agent can actually write decent code and do whole features at this point. A good human still needs to review it, and direct it and integrate it, but it makes no point to put your head in the sand and think it’s useless now, or that it will never work.

Be prepared

What I find interesting, is that different people have completely different experiences with coding via LLMs. Some seem to think they are barely more productive, some sound like they’re producing whole businesses every weekend, some feel they can’t get anything done faster.

I think, as it’s often been said, that typing code was never the hard part of the craft. Most of my job is talking to people, and I expect it will continue to be so. That’s not the case for everyone tho, Depending on how you worked before, your feeling of LLM usefulness will be different.

And if you do use some agent to code, you have to at least invest some time. For a couple years I’ve repeatedly tasked every LLM with the same coding task (write a simple weekly meal planner) and I think we’re at the point where they work well enough. I can ask to implement the thingy, and they produce a working prototype.

More importantly, they are able to do changes incrementally. Until a few months ago, coding agents would run wild and undo what they did so you would never “converge” to what you wanted. Now they seem to work okay.

So, in my opinion, whatever your craft is, you should invest some time now and then to see if agents can help. I don’t think (or can’t accept, yet) that AI will wipe out knowledge workers, but it’s not wise to stick your fingers in your ears and go LALALALALALA.

Parting words

Do not be too anxious about this. Do not be to angry about this. Things that worked before will continue to work: be ready to learn, take care of yourself, have people close to you and be close to people. Try to change what you can, and put an effort into understanding what that is. Save money for the bad times, stay healthy, be good.

We’ll get through this.

On Lisbon: of hills and water and sadness

I meant to write this for a long time, but I kept putting it off, cause I’m lazy. It’s almost a year now, and I think it’s about time.

6 kids in an apartment

When I was an exchange student, I had the lucky experience of living with two and a half portuguese guys (one didn’t technically live with us, but ended up spending most of the time at our place) and two italian guys.

As you do, we often ended up talking of Rome and Lisbon.

“Ah, the seven hills city” they would say, referring to Lisbon. Cause, yeah, apparently Lisbon does have seven hills, exactly like Rome.

“dude, of course we know baccalà, it’s traditional” we would tell them.

“Oh man, I hate clubs where you have to stand in the line and then they don’t let you in cause you are not with some girls, or you don’t have the right clothes and shoes” we would both say, and “I’m so happy I don’t get stuck in traffic going to the University, traffic is crazy in my city“, and so on, and so forth.

I kinda had a mental image of a city which, while very different, felt familiar. Still, it took me almost 20 years to finally visit it.

Old cities and new cities

In my mind there is a clear distinction between (european) cities which hit their zenith before or after 1492, the year Columbus got to the Americas, Lorenzo de’ Medici died, and we decided the middle ages had come to an end.

Rome, Istanbul, Athens, Florence, Venice… these cities were great when the mediterranean was the important part of the world, and they seem to be share some undefinable traits. Perhaps ruins and old monuments. Maybe the narrow streets. Maybe just the layers of dust over past greatness.

On the other hand, there’s cities which became rich and powerful once european imperialism started to eat the world, and the cities were rebuilt and modernized with the fruits of that success. Vienna, Paris, London, Madrid. Wide roads, neoclassical buildings, equestrian monuments to kings with exotic plants.

(I am aware Paris was important in the middle ages, London is a roman town, a lot of stuff in Rome is from the baroque era etc.. but this does not change how I feel about things).

My theory is that countries that had a ton of money in the 1700 and 1800 had more chances to tear down old stuff and rebuild, while those that had been sunsetting just gave up.

Lisbon and Lisbon and Lisbon

So in Lisbon, I had the feeling of a new city.

Massive large roads, check. Large square with bronze dude on top of a marble monument, check. Bronze dude on top of a corinthian-style marble column, check. Neoclassical arch with allegories and notables, check.

Turns out Lisbon got a pretty big chance to rebuild in 1755, when the city got destroyed by an earthquake. They also rebuilt using state of the art anti-seismic designs.

But Lisbon is an interesting city, because part of it is lowlands, and part of it goes up on the hills. And you don’t get many large straight roads on hills.

The part of the city that had grown on the hills outside of the old town survived the earthquake, and while it’s been adapted over the centuries, it keeps its own character, which seems pretty different from the rest. Buildings a bit more run down. Streets a bit more rundown. Houses are smaller. A ton of stairs. Graffiti and street art. Cobblestones. Stairs. I liked this part a bit more perhaps.

But the other cool thing that Lisbon has, that sets it apart from most European capitals, is that it’s also a city married to the Sea (note: Istanbul and Athens. Or, well, at list flirting with it. So when you go down to the water, you find yet another kind of city. A city of low buildings, waterfront promenades, and monuments to sailors.

And it is odd to find out that water is not the Atlantic Ocean, but the Tejo river, the Ocean is just a bit further out. The river is weird. I remember arguing with my portuguese flatmates that it was impossible they built a seventeen kilometers long bridge on it. No river is 17km wide. You guys must have built it sideways instead of across.

Well, the Tejo is, when it goes to the estuary. It’s a weird river, and it has an inverted delta: it’s smaller at the point it goes into the ocean, and widens up as you go upstream. Lisbon grew up on both sides of the river, and so they had to put a bridge seventeen kilometers long to cross it. And then you follow the river, and you end up in the ocean, and go explore the world.

A kind of sadness

I was lucky to wait almost a year to write this, and coincidence blessed me with a new Asterix story (I love Asterix!): Asterix in Lusitania. It’s set in Portugal, and the authors made fun of the fact that they have a sad happy music, Fado.

Fado is a sentimental music, often focused on unhappy life, and resignation (the word “fado” is ethimologically linked to “fate” or “death”). But it’s not just sad music, I think. It’s kind of sad, but not sad.

Among the things you should do in Lisbon (eat fish, eat cakes, take the small tram up to hill, go to the museum of azulejos) you should include a Fado concert.

I had the chance to attend one, and it was pretty pleasant, even if my understanding of the lyrics was pretty limited. But there’s a ton of them on the internet, you can find them easily.

I can’t say if Lisboans are happy and sad like that. I don’t know the city enough, and my friends seemed more happy then sad, cause we were young and having a nice time, so I don’t have anecdata either.

But I thin a city that survived an earthquake and kept both old parts, rebuilt parts, and completely modern parts, is probably a bit happy and sad.

Closing words

I think I don’t have many words to say, I loved Lisbon and would love to go back. The city has its own issues with overtourism and is overrun with digital nomads, so maybe visit off-season as I did, and try to be nice to people.

But I mean, that is valid for every city everywhere.

I’ll leave you with words from a portuguese song which is not fado, but I feel represents the city quite well. Here’s a video. Coincidentally, I saw this dude perform, and then found his performance online even tho I didn’t know his name, and he’s just doing a cover. The transmedial world is a very small place.

Anyway, this is the refrain

Basil and moonlight
this is Lisbon
the Fado that sobs
this is Lisbon
the Tejo that murmurs
this is Lisbon
a narrow little street
an old little house
this is Lisbon!

Review: Il sergente nella neve di Mario Rigoni Stern

Conoscevo il titolo di questo libro da sempre. È uno di quei libri del dopoguerra che hanno formato la classe degli adulti quando io ero bambino.

Ho sempre evitato di leggerlo perché, fondamentalmente, ho avuto un’overdose di racconti di guerra, di olocausto, di fascismo etc.. quanto ero bambino. Col senno di poi, meglio averlo avuto, visto come va il mondo di questi tempi.

La scorsa estate avendo finito la scorta di audiolibri che ascolto quando vado a camminare la mattina, ho provato a cercare qualcosa su MLOL – Medialibrary Online, il servizio meraviglioso che permette di accedere a tantissime biblioteche italiane.

Nella mia ho trovato questo libro in versione audio, e ho deciso di dargli una chance. Sono contentissimo di averlo fatto.

Tanti racconti della seconda guerra mondiale sono stati fatti dalla parte dei partigiani, dei deportati, degli alleati, ed è ovvio il perché.

Questo invece è un racconto fatto da un membro dell’esercito italiano durante la catastrofica campagna di Russia, e della marcia di ritirata.

È un libro delicato, quasi rarefatto. C’è tanta umanità dentro, senza la mitizzazione della guerra, ma anche senza dipingerla come un continuo dramma. Perché alla fine, la guerra è fatta da persone, e le persone non sono mai una cosa sola, quantomeno non per troppo tempo.

Ci ho messo tanto a scrivere questa recensione, e il caso ha voluto che nel frattempo leggessi Tapum, che ha una citazione proprio di Rigoni Stern.

Pare che Emilio Lussu, autore di Un anno sull’altopiano, fosse rimasto deluso dalla totale amarezza del film Uomini Contro, basato sul suo libro, e gli avesse detto che lui lo sapeva, che “in guerra qualche volta abbiamo anche cantato..”.

Era un’altra guerra, ma poco cambia.

Certo, leggendo il libro viene da chiedersi quanto abbia omesso l’autore, che si trova sempre “dalla parte dei buoni” quando si incontra con le popolazioni locali, o quando ha a che fare con altri soldati.

Suona un po’ il solito mito degli italiani brava gente, ma è un mito confortante.

Voto 8: uno dei libri che ho apprezzato di più nel 2025.

‘Member GMail Goggles?

Once upon a time, GMail had a functionality called Gmail Goggleswhich was a tool to prevent you from sending emails while drunk§ .

If you sent a late night email, GMail would ask you to solve some math questions (64 * 34 or similar), which either stumped you because you were drunk, or gave you enough forced slow down to regret your decision to send the email§.

So yeah, I’d like that but for SSH. Not because I SSH under influence, but because “activate your brain when you do X” is a generally useful thing.

Still, thinking of this made me realize how far today’s Google is from the company that could introduce a functionality like that§.

I miss old Google.

Mini Review: Tapum di Leo Ortolani

Leo Ortolani è famoso per Rat-Man, il fumetto comico italiano. Io non son un lettore storico di Rat-Man, ma nel corso degli anni mi è capitato di leggere cose scritte da lui, e ho capito perché i suoi fan lo amano.

Leo fa ridere. Riesce spesso ad essere profondo e commovente anche tra le battute, ma direi che non è quella la cosa principale nei suoi fumetti che ho letto.

Questo libro ribalta la situazione: è un libro che parla della battaglia dell’Ortigara, uno degli episodi drammatici della prima guerra mondiale, e quindi è prima un libro commovente, e poi un libro comico.

Si è detto, scritto, filmato tutto sulle guerre, quindi è difficile essere originali, ma l’autore riesce a trovare un suo spazio e una sua dimensione espressiva. I personaggi hanno senso e hanno una loro identità. I dialoghi son sensati, e i disegni sono belli (a meno di non odiare la “maschera” delle facce di Ortolani, che è sempre quella di Rat-Man).

Ci sono un po’ di cose troppo didascaliche per il mio gusto, ma a me questo libro è piaciuto un sacco. Le note a fine libro rendono più chiara la genesi della storia, e quali fossero i riferimenti dell’autore, e li ho apprezzati molto.

Consigliatissimo.

Voto: 8/10, sarà che mi hanno sempre affascinato gli Alpini.

Copilot in vim when using multiple node versions

This is just a quick note to myself and to fellow people who may encounter this issue.

If you use a node version manager such as nvm/asdf/mise, you may have a situation where you need a given version to work with a project, but that version is too old to support Copilot.

This shows up as an error in Vim

Copilot: Node.js too old. Upgrade to 22.x or newerCode language: CSS (css)

Or, if you switch while Vim is already running, with copilot just silently not working anymore.

To solve this “nodejs too old” error, you can put this in your vimrc

let g:copilot_node_command='/opt/local/bin/node22' # or whatever absolute pathCode language: PHP (php)

I rely on the right macports version here but you can just as well use a mise binary

let g:copilot_node_command=/Users/riffraff/.local/share/mise/installs/node/22.22.0/bin/nodeCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

Now just restart vim and all should be good.

HTH, HAND.

Of tinnitus and gratefulness

A few years ago, AS Roma destroyed Barcelona in a thrilling 3-0 in Champions League quarter finals. Around that time, I started hearing a whistling sound in my ear. The two things are unrelated, but that’s why I remember the year.

I went to see my doctor about it, the day Roma was going to play the return leg against Liverpool, she asked me if I had any sort of stress, and I blamed work, cause I didn’t feel like blaming football.

Turned out, I had very high blood pressure, and I needed to make some lifestyle changes and get some pills. I did, and my blood pressure is under control now.

But the whistle didn’t go away, and after many tests, doctors, hacks etc.. I had to accept the fact I have tinnitus (acufene), and I am going to live with it for the rest of my life.

It felt horrible at first. You can’t turn it off, ever. I no longer know how silence sounds. It’s like being unable to close your eyes.

But I am lucky, mine is not too strong, and I can barely notice it if I’m in a room with other people talking, or watching TV, or driving.

Today I was asked about, as someone else started suffering from it, and they’re going crazy. I feel genuinely sorry for them.

But also, this was a good reminder: my problem is not too bad. It sucks, but it could have been so much worse.

I’m very lucky.

On Japan

Japan, my country

I wanted to visit Japan since I was a kid, I finally got the chance as a grown up, I planned my trip… for 2020. COVID19 happened.

I finally managed to travel in 2025, and it felt a bit like going home.

Places and architecture were familiar. Behaviours seemed natural. Signage made sense. Food I’d never tasted was clearly recognizable and appetizing.

It turned out, I had been living in Japan for a long time. Consuming inordinate amounts of foreign pop culture has an effect on you. And I’ve consumed a lot of Japanese content, for a long time.

An Italian childhood

I grew up in Italy in the ’80s, when Japan had become the strongest economy in the world, and Italy was becoming more economically liberal.

We saw Japan becoming dominant first hand through TV. So called “private” TV channels (in contrast to the public broadcasting of RAI) were booming§, and very often they used Japanese shows to fill their programming.

All the kids of my generation grew up watching anime such as Captain Tsubasa, Lupin The Third and many more. We also got some live action such as Godzilla, Megaloman, Ultraman etc.. I suppose TVs bought TOHO stock in bulk. I can’t forget the Megaloman fighting scenes, and his hair-on-fire-attack, which was translated in italian as something like “flame of megalopolis” (see here). There were even anime/tokusatsu hybrids such as the awesome Kyouryuu Daisensou Aizenborg.

Ironically, “cartoni animati” in Italy were mostly identified with western children animation, which does not really translate to Japanese anime 1:1. This meant we got ultra-violent stuff on afternoon programming such as Fist of the North Star. Parents complained, kids loved it.

We also got TV shows (Takeshi’s Castle and Za Gaman), with italian commentary. It was deeply funny.

So, it’s only natural that, when I finally got to the country of the rising sun, it felt familiar. The two-story houses, the trains, the school kids in their uniforms, the monks and mikos, the takoyaki vendors and the ramen bars. Just like I remembered it.

A tourist country

Truth is, Dear Reader, I didn’t have a chance to see the real country. I spent a couple weeks going around popular destinations, and I got exposed to what may effectively be the Disneyland version of Japan.

I am not one to decry the fact that tourists visit popular spots. There’s a reason they’re popular. I’ve lived near Rome all my life, I know how it goes.

people queuing up to take an insta-worthy picture
queuing up to take an insta-worthy picture.

So I don’t mind the touristified version of the sights. But I am aware that it does not reflect the reality of the country outside of those places.

What I found interesting, as a European, is that you get less of a feeling of overtourism due to the presence of many asian tourists. You’re walking around, and thinking “look at that cute couple dressed in kimonos” and it takes a while to realize those are Korean tourists who’re just taking pictures in cool foreign clothes.

It is my understanding that Japan is overrun with tourists, and locals are annoyed by them. I’m not sure there’s a “solution” to mass tourism. I can point out there’s at least one initiative to educate tourists and locals to interact in a positive way.

I’ve gone trough it, and I thought it was pretty obvious stuff. Then I was on a bus where a bunch of tourists (germans, americans, koreans) did not leave a seat to an old lady with a small kid, and it made me realize it wasn’t that obvious.

Try not to be a dick, at home or abroad.

Off the main path, just a little

To be fair, it’s not that difficult to move away from the main tourist crowds. You may have noticed this before, Wise Reader, but quick trips have a problem of prioritization. If you spend one day in Rome, you will go see the Colosseum and St Peter’s Basilica. If you spend three days you may see Saint Paul Outside the Walls. Only if you spend many days, you will have a chance to visit the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, even tho it’s one of the most interesting artifact of rationalist/fascist architecture, and a pretty unique sight.

This is the same in Japan, in my experience. Some people plan to spend 3 days in Tokyo, and that’s barely enough to get off the plane. If you spend a week, you’ll be visiting many places where there’s not that many tourists.

This also works if you get away from the crowd time-wise. I visited a couple temples at sunrise, when the monks do their morning rituals, and the streets are almost empty, and it was a pretty nice experience.

Variety

If you think about it, it’s pretty obvious that Japan is a very varied country.

one floor to 40 floors, in a single block.
One floor to 40 floors, in a single block.

In a short walk you can go from buddhist temples to pachinko parlors, from shopping malls to old micro shops ran by old ladies . Heck, I found a shrine in an underpass. Small houses, skyscrapers, and everything in-between.

Even the people appear to be… weird? I mean, not weird in the sense that they are not like Europeans, they seem to genuinely have a bunch of overlapping subcultures.

Maybe it comes from living in megalopolis like Tokyo? It’s hard to be a rockabilly dancer when everyone around you is a metal head or a b-boy. But if you know you can find your kind of people then you become free(-er?) to be whatever you want. The urbanization offsets the social pressure: on the Tokyo metro, nobody knows your mom.

And talking of moms: one of the things that really surprised me about Japan was the amount of kids going around. Given the messed up demographics of the country, one would expect to see few small kids. But there’s a ton of them! I believe this is mainly caused by kids going to school alone, which is cool.

I also saw something really odd a couple times, a bunch of babies and toddlers carried around in a small cart by women§. I suppose this is some kind of home-nursery delivery system for busy parents, which is kind of cool. Again, Japan is weird, and varied.

In the year 2000 since the 1980

This hodge-podgeity naturally extends to technology. Japan was insanely advanced in the ’80s, what with their fast trains and their computerized things. And they’re still there. What seems to be missing, is that the rest of the world has moved on, and Japan hardly did. This means you still have futuristic trains, and you can use a single contact card to get on public transport everywhere… but you need to pay with cash, cause the machines won’t take a payment card.

Many things in Japan seem to have reached some kind of weird local maximum, often based on the incredible dedication of the average worker. Why automate paying with a credit card, when people can queue up to top up their cards with cash? I suspect this is the reason things like shisa kanko are a thing.

Japan is a country of strong traditions and identity, and, no pun intended, it has in many ways an insular culture.

The country was practically isolated§ from the west for centuries, until the so-called Meiji restoration/revolution happened. The country was opened up and modernized practically by force.

Perhaps mass tourism will represent a new form of forced opening. The hope is that, as the culture survived the 150 years after the Meiji restoration, it will survive the next 150. It would be sad if we lost it.

Family & Future

My kids were, somehow, natural born weeaboo, even tho I seldom consume Japan content near them. The young ones claims that Japan is his favourite country, and the older one bought a “drawing kawaii characters” book last year. By sheer chance, they go to a school where they can learn Japanese as an optional class. This is the weirdest kind of epigenetics I have ever seen.

So my hope is to go back in a few years time, with them perhaps. They’ll be more in sync with modern Japanese culture than I can ever be, cause the future is a different country, much further away than a continent. It will be interesting to be there.

I have more things to say, but I also have things to say about a bunch of other things, and this is getting long enough. I’ll have another article on Japan later, perhaps. Hopefully, before my next trip.

Micro Review: Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

I listened to this last summer, but it took me a long time to write something so here it is: the book talks about the first great financial crisis, the South Sea bubble.

The actual full title is “Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich” which is an appropriately verbose title to talk about the early 18th century.

The South Sea bubble is one of those things that often come up when talking of the issues of the financial system, together with tulip mania and John Law’s bankrupting of France, but I had never actually understood what happened there.

The book explains that, and it does it in a fairly enjoyable way, without being too preachy and showing how disastrous events came about following a lot of reasonable choices and only a modicum of dishonesty. It also explains how innovations from the era have become staples of our modern world (e.g. ideas on how to compute the value of financial investments).

Where the book fails, imo, is trying to connect the events with contemporary developments in science and mathematics. There are connection (Isaac Newton was Master of the Mint after all) but they seem kinda stretched.

Also, in the most important bits, I felt the explanation could have been better, I could not understand, at first, how the South Sea company could make any sense.

The South Sea company was funded as a way for the government to get rid of a bunch of previous debt obligations: the government allowed the creation of a company that could emit shares in exchange for obligations, and the government would grant the company the monopoly of the South Seas trade (notice the plural, and realize this meant slave trade).

The government would get simplified accounting as it now only owes money to the company (and at a lower rate), the company owners would make money, but why would an investor give their government-baked bonds to the company? Well, because they were forced to, but the book doesn’t really explain why they couldn’t be forced even without the company existing?

I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter, since people were eager to do the exchange as they had very little trust in the government, and because soon the share price was skyrocketing, and stonks only go up is not a modern invention.

Anyway, the book does a pretty good job of explaining the situation before, during, and after, and if you have a casual interest in finance or economics, I recommend this book.

Vote: 7+/10, recommended if you like finance, and seeing the world burn.