Well now you have it straight from the horse’s mouth. I don’t take drugs. My point was that the strictness and punitive nature that seems to be a thing in Japan makes it seem miserable to an outside observer (i.e. me). Not that not being able to take drugs doesn’t make life worth living.

I don’t take any recreational drugs, but I disagree with your take here. Cocaine and morphine are amazing pain killers. Ritalin and Adderall are prescription medication. Hallucinogens are mostly harmless. Weed is being legalized for medical or even for recreational use all over the place.

I wasn’t insinuating such a thing, but thank you for putting motivations into pretty clear statements.

I’d be interested to see if there was actually any enforcement of that prior to the 1948 legislation. Do you know if there was? Or what penalties there were? Several times in the Edo Period, for example, there were heavy restrictions on alcohol, but many ignored that. There have been numerous times that tattooing was…

It’s got onions tied to the seatbelt, which is the fashion.

Part of it is, in Japan the police isn’t supposed to make an arrest until they are 100% certain that they have the right culprit. Obviously it isn’t remotely as rosy in real life, but they really are far less likely to make an arrest on frivolous grounds than in most countries, since it’s massive shame for the police…

All I know is my car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it

Pretty much. It’s crime-fighting theatre. It’s punishment with no regard to fixing the root of the problem, or about respecting people’s rights.

What exactly was the ignorant part? Salarymen working themselves to death? Or the lack of a viable replacement population? Because both of those aren’t exactly conspiracy theories... Or do you mean when I stated that it *sounds* miserable to live there, which is pretty clearly an opinion and not a fact...

Agreed that those actions surely helped strike the same kind of concern the Japanese had about, say, the Portuguese trying to convert the whole world to Catholicism. Not sure if that exactly fits here. Yes, there would be those concerns when before and as Perry rolled up (as well as any attempts America made before…

Sounds like the exact same reason that smoking is still legal. We know it kills, we know it’s an infringement on the rights of everyone else who doesn’t smoke. We know there’s litter from smokers everywhere. But it’s still legal because the government makes an insane amount of money from taxing it.

You kinda left out one major reason: Western Imperialism. While the Americans didn’t force opium on Japan the way the British did with China, a historian by the name of Mineta Fuko and a handful of other Japanese scholars wrote an account of the first Opium War that was widely distributed among the Japanese nobility…

As much as I love Japanese culture, it sounds miserable as all hell to actually live there. Small wonder that salarymen will literally work themselves to death or that people aren’t fucking enough for a replacement population.

yet you can drink yourself to blackout and pass out on the steps of the train station and nobody bats an eyelash

They went $30m over budget for the first season despite scrapping a couple of episodes. Then they got a $9m budget per episode for season 2, with a ten episodes order, and Fuller and Green still asked for more. If true, it’s perfectly understandable that the production company would fire them.

I, for one, found American Gods to be extremely excessive, as if Starz gave Fuller carte blanche to do as he pleased and no one bothered to reign him in. And we ended up with a lot of style, not much substance. I think I prefer him when he is working within a strict framework. 

Right? $10 mil per episode gets you dragons and epic battles with thousands of extras. I didn’t see $9 mil on the screen in any episode of American Gods. (And I really liked AG)

He seems to be doing well for himself! Word through the grape vine is that he’s already been hired for and subsequently quit, multiple new shows!

Going 30M over budget is inexcusable, I’m sorry. They were right to get rid of him, or fight him until he left.

The Hollywood Reporter story claims that they wanted a higher budget than the 9 million-per-episode budget offered, which already put it in the very high end of all TV budgets to begin with (the previous season of Game of Thrones and the first season of Westworld each supposedly cost around 10 million per episode).…