I keep having an experience lately that is something like "wow, history actually happened, to people who really existed, some of whom are alive today." It's striking that I didn't get this experience from history class in school.
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Example: Hayao Miyazaki was born in 1941, and survived a WWII bombing when he was 4, which deeply affected him. Once you start looking for this in his movies you see it everywhere (spoilers) - e.g. the superweapons in Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky.pic.twitter.com/RrVxD3jZdx
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In general Japanese fiction gets a lot richer once you start reading it as grappling with Japanese cultural trauma, the most obvious example being the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When I learned about these in school they were 100% abstractions, 0% real to me.
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Ex #2: the Cultural Revolution. Hooooly crap. This really happened to my parents, and to the parents and grandparents of tons of Chinese people, and Chinese-Americans never talk about it. It is our Holocaust. We've all been shaped by this cultural + ancestral trauma.
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My parents fucked me up, but:https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1133495413175013376 …
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