Raujbum : Gick det daligt? (Something's wrong?)

Daneydzaus : Inget gick daligt. (No.)

Raujbum : Du verkar mer deppig nu for tiden. (You made me worry for a moment just now.)

Daneydzaus : Sorry. To make your worry for a moment just now.

Raujbum : Ar det nagot som tynger dig? (Someone who troubles you?)

Daneydzaus : Det ar nagon inte. Det ar nagonting. Den ar Toyamaskultur. (Not someone, something; Toyama Culture)

It stopped to evolve and is becoming a reallife-size museum, where there is no more culture, only folklore.

Raujbum : Isn't folklore part of culture?

Daneydzaus : Traditions are part of it, if people do it for the traditions themselves and not for tourists.

But when it becomes a show for the tourists, it isn't part of the culture anymore, it is merely a museum exposition.

Raujbum : They're making their culture bend over and spread its buttcheeks for cash?

Daneydzaus : They're using what's left of their folklore to try to bring tourists, thinking it while boast their economy like in Tokyo. They will obviously fail, because they failed to understand the principle behind Tokyo's wealth, but then it turns their folklore into a caricature of themselves, and being from Toyama will be a dancer of the Etchuu Owara Kaze no Bon dance.

Raujbum : I don't know what that last part meant, but I'll assume it's not good.

Daneydzaus : What would be a caricature of a Swede?

Raujbum : A really sexy blonde chick?

Daneydzaus : No, I mean a flokloric caricature.

Raujbum : Would a norse god or a viking count?

Daneydzaus : It could. Imagine a whole region like that.

Where the only thing is that old folkloric caricature and nothing else.

Raujbum : Like a medieval fair?

Daneydzaus : Bingo

Raujbum : Is all of Toyama doing this?

Daneydzaus : Pretty much. Except for the second part : turning into an industrial suburb of Tokyo.

Raujbum : How big is Toyama?

Daneydzaus : 1 milion people, over a region that you can cross by bike in about 4 hours.

På Sverige och Kanada (For Sweden and Canada), it is a huge place. For Japan, you have Tokyo, 40 million people in a single city-region.

Raujbum : That's big by my standards. In Gothenburg I reckon there's about half a million.

Almost a million if you also count the sorrounding areas.

Daneydzaus : I know, it is by mine. By Japanese standards, it's a country side town.

Raujbum : Jelly.

Daneydzaus : And by my urban study standards, Toyama is slowly becoming a suburb of Tokyo.

And not even the focus of the suburb; its focus is in neighbouring Kanazawa city.

Reachable by train in more or less one hour.

Raujbum : Isn't Toyama on the western side of Honshu?

Daneydzaus : Technically; but the Shinkansen that's being built is not going to Osaka, and there is reason why it isn't; the most important link is towards Tokyo, not Osaka. And it isn't for Hokuriku, is for Japan. Indeed, I described Osaka as... Tokyo's branch for Western Japan.

Raujbum : Is Japan just becoming one big city?

Daneydzaus : Like any country where there is no regional autonomy.

Raujbum : And then, Japan would become just one huge city-state.

Daneydzaus : Indeed, a city-region will die if it is ruled over by another city-region. Because people will tend to gather where the decisions are taken.

In due time, it will.

Think of Sweden; everything is probably slowly turning around Stockholm.

My urban studies heart tells me so.

Raujbum : And when the surface no longer suffices to support all the people, they'll start digging into the mountains. Creating huge cities beneath the rock. But they'll dig too greedily and too deep. And then they won't be able to get out. People eventually forget about the cities in the mountains; passed off only as folklore, and after several millennia, they finally emerge from within the mountains once again. Isolated for so long, they've become a new species of human, hungry for world domination! *cue Red Alert sound track*

Daneydzaus : Haha.

But do you understand what I mean? Many of our cities that we think are cities are turning into either suburbs of the big ones (for industrial plants or other stuff that does not involve moving people around) or turning into mere villages, however big they may be.

For the economy, it's the best thing : huge cities means specialization and scale economy. For cultures, those that aren't big enough to follow the specializations and scale economies will slowly fade, trying to save their folklore, thinking that it is culture, but ultimately failing to understand that they are dying because they were not big enough to follow the big ones.

Evolution at work for the win. (Or loss, in some cases like Toyama)

It is not a fatality, far from it (nothing is fatality), but if you cannot adapt, you disappear.

Raujbum : One thing I've always wondered about is how they managed to get such huge populations in Asia compared to rest of the world. China has a higher population than all of Europe, and so does India. And look at Japan which is not that big in area, but manages to cram over a hundred million people on that space. Take Sweden for comparison, which is bigger, but hardly has ten million inhabitants.

Daneydzaus : First, food production. Rice is one of the highest yielding crop in the world. China, Japan and Indonesia are very wet countries as well, offering that possibility. Warm countries as a whole have a longer green season, enabling more people to live there. And then you have the fact that its urban civilisations go back about 5000 years ago, when we Europeans were just starting to build our first isolated farming towns.

Combine everything with the huge boom related to hygiene, and then you have the huge populations of Asia. And in many parts of Africa and Asia, the hygiene boom is done, but the cultural process leading to low birth rates in industrialized countries isn't done yet, leading to higher population growth.

Raujbum : I wonder if Europe would've had a higher population today if we had the potato from the very start.

Daneydzaus : No. Europe has generally a short green period and its warm zone is basically an agricultural wasteland (not enough water).

Raujbum : Shit...

Daneydzaus : In many parts of Asia, the whole Moonsoon thing helps to bring water inland in those regions that would otherwise be dry. Nothing like that happens in Europe.

What Europe had, and not Asia, is a relatively cool weather where insects don't thrive as much as in the south, and a very complex landshape with seas dividing regions and mountains as well making sure that in a relative small space, there can be many ･･･もっと見る

Exchange is more important than anything, and Europe got better at it quickly.

Well, since Exchange is the most important part but exchange can only occur between equals, Europe with its convention that there is no central State but States that coexist together was bound to be more quick at exchange than other countries around the world, where it usually worked as "I am the cental State, and you are my vassals".

And now you understand why being an independent State is important.

It's not for culture, it's not for nationalistic pride. It's for the purpose of being treated as an equal with other groups.