I should really buy something from jet pens. Not sure how how expensive they are for non-US international orders but I’ll have to check. It could potentially add quite a mark-up to a cheaper item such as the sampler packs someone else mentioned. But those packs look GREAT.
You should check out the rest of their posts/articles. I’ve ended up on them before when trying to find out the difference in the types of inks and types of pens. I have always been really impressed by the quality of their articles. Really want to give them some cash so will wander over there in a bit.
Sadly, my writing has got worse and worse since my life has become more and more digital. I should really have a goal for 2022 to be able to write legibly once again. I can’t even read my own hand writing any more - it must just be the lack of practice and it’s very sad as people used to comment on how beautiful it was (decades ago). Now it looks like a Doctor’s prescription order!
> I can’t even read my own hand writing any more - it must just be the lack of practice
I still write checks to pay bills (remember?). I have a timeline now of my handwriting and notice that it has deteriorated in periods of my life when I was under stress – sometimes unawares. But it has improved since retiring.
I did some research into pens and my preferences 10 years ago. I settled on the Zebra Sharbo X LT3 from jet pens. I've gone through about 5. The matte paint gets worn smooth and chips to the brass underneath, the coating on the stainless steel pocket clip starts to come off and irritates my skin, and occasionally the the plastic mechanism on the inside melts because it goes through a clothes drier. I love it. I flip and write with it every day. I got through undergrad and grad with it.
Unfortunately, it does not come in orange anymore. I use 0.5 mm graphite, 0.7 mm blue ballpoint (most uses), and 1.0 mm black ballpoint. I've considered red ink instead of blue for a long time, but I'm not a teacher or accountant.
I struggle to think of any moment in someone's daily life where they have to write something down. You'd have to make an active decision to make your life more complicated! I noticed that even my mom who is 66 years old has terrible handwriting while it used to be quite pretty.
> I struggle to think of any moment in someone's daily life where they have to write something down.
I am finding that life without a smart phone in my pocket is palpably more pleasant — and without a smart phone, the utility of a notepad and pen increases quite a bit.
Not a pen geek but I did buy some Jetstream Uni 0.5 pens (one of the pens in the lead photo on the article) on Amazon for me and my other half to use in our home office and they are very nice. Price wise it was less than £10 for 3 shipped from Japan - can't argue with that really.
This is a shame. I got through to payment and I am presented with ‘Due to recent changes in United Kingdom's tax laws, we can only accept orders over $200 USD to the United Kingdom at this time.’
Wonder what recent tax law changes they’re referring to?
their prices seem a tiny bit higher than local japanese paper/pen shops in my area (SF bay area)... maybe such stores are limited to the west coast us?
pens that you won't find at Staples or Walgreens (or the
office supply closet)
You'll still have to hit up the office supply closet or one of those other places for "decoy pens." You leave the decoy pens in a cup on top of your desk, while you keep the good stuff inside a drawer. That way your officemates and/or partner and/or housemates borrow (steal) the decoy pens and not the good stuff.
This bring back memory of middle school. I grew up in one of the poorest overseas territory of France, and if you left anything on your table while the teacher was calling you to the board, you had a 50/50% chance of having them stolen before you came back to your seat.
Therefore, we all got into the habit of picking our pencil case with us when we went to the board.
Then I moved back to metropolitan France and all the teacher and kids where looking at me like an alien when I was picking all my stuff up before coming to the board ...
This is me bringing my backpack and laptop to the bathroom with me at cafes. Nothing has happened to make me do that, except knowing how fast things can happen. I leave something like a mouse or charger cable behind to show that the seat is not abandoned, and that's easier to replace.
Most people just get up and leave it there. Being homeless, losing anything expensive is going to ruin my year. It's the little things that give our social status away, even if we work and shower every day. Status illegibility is a key to climbing the ladder; going off on a bit of a tangent there, but indeed conformity in things like these is rational.
I used to get very anxious about leaving stuff laying around even amongst people I know wouldn't steal things (think like a meetup or something) and eventually got over it. If I'm concerned I'll ask someone if they can watch my stuff. It depends on where I'm at though obviously. I think in Columbus where I live most places you can do this and 99.9% of the time it would be fine. I don't begrudge someone who doesn't trust this though. I'm familiar with "if you lose contact with it, it's compromised".
> It's the little things that give our social status away
I'm not with you on this one. I don't think a single person at a coffee shop is looking at you like you're "of low social status" for taking your backpack to the bathroom. They probably just think you don't want your stuff stolen...
It goes back to when someone in the MIT student center asked to borrow a pen to fill out an ATM deposit slip, I had only a Cross pen engraved with my name and the first project team I was on, and I reluctantly handed it over while emphasizing that I needed it back...
For a slightly contrarian opinion: I just use printer-paper (for a laser printer). It works fine with ballpoint or fountain pens (some notebook papers don’t work well with fountain pens and people think they need special expensive paper). Obviously it doesn’t come in a neat book. I just used plastic document sleeves for the first level of organisation (one could then view more than two pages at once too) and box files for the second, though it wasn’t very necessary. I don’t have much to write and record these days.
I currently use paper for free-form drawings or diagrams for work as photographing a paper drawing is the most efficient process I currently have for getting such diagrams into emails/our wiki.
I'm a big fan of Feng Zhu, and he often recalls asking his class "how many of you have a Moleskine notebook? Almost all raise hands. How many of you have filled them? And almost nobody raise their hands. So, just take a stack of printer paper, staple it, and that will be your notebook". With great paper comes great expectations, and that prevents you from using it.
I was gifted a Moleskine notebook, tried to make a drawing on one page, it was pretty bad, and I never opened it again. I got the cheapest work notebook, and I actually filled it with great city drawings during my travels, interspersed with some ideas about probabilistic descriptive complexity and other stuff I was working on.
I also use laser paper for my fountain pen scratch stuff! The premium laser stuff has a nice enough surface, but it's quite thick/heavy once you get multiple sheets together. The benefit for the special expensive paper is that you can have the same nice usable writing surface, but many, many, many more sheets in something thin and light enough to carry around (as in a notebook) or mail (as in letter paper). One big difference between Japanese and non-Asian paper cultures that I've found is that there's much less loyalty in Japan to the [brick-like codex aesthetic], so there's more design consideration placed into keeping things convenient to carry around -- textbooks split into thin volumes, notebooks tending toward copybook length even when of luxurious quality, etc. (Also may have something to do with diff. writing system facilitating info density on pages, etc. but that would need more expertise to weigh in on) If you're working at a desk, all that doesn't matter, and it sounds like you have a great system for your setup.
My experience with laser printer paper is that it does not work well with most fountain pen inks. Although I acknowledge that there may be some that do, there are lots of paper manufacturers after all.. I've found plenty of cheap spiral bound notepad paper that does work well though. You just have to try it out and see what works. Paper can't be to absorbent or the ink will spread out.
I mostly agree. I use cheap paper at home, but my work recently switched suppliers and the new stuff is fine for printing, but bleeds terribly with liquid ink pens. Comes in plain white wrapper so I'm assuming it's pretty cheap.
I always loved the look of notebooks in pen and paper ads. Neat text here, nice drawing there… however, does anybody actually take notes like this? My notes always look like trash, and back in school it was the same for everyone.
It almost looks like if you want to take notes this way you have to plan ahead to be sure to have space?
I once had a fellow physics student show me his notes about some topic. It look like good himself dictated the formulas and placements. My and most of my friends notes like complete trash. But there are some weird people that really can take exceptional notes.
Does your living room look like the advertisement photos at Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, or any other furniture store? I’m guessing not. This stuff is staged. Like notebooks advertisements.
An interesting tidbit is that some of the picking processes described in the video I linked to above were implemented only recently as COVID-19 simultaneously applied upward pressure on order volume (people shopping online more) and downward pressure on fulfillment capacity (warehouse worker density restrictions). We literally had to stop taking orders for a short while to keep the backlog of orders reasonable.
It was gratifying to apply things we learned from computer science and industrial engineering together to help us keep up with demand.
Itoya is Disneyland for people who love office supplies. I have never found such a store in the US. Itoya is similar to Staples in the same way a Tesla is similar to a garbage truck.
Itoya is amazing, it's like a wonderland of stationery!
I also highly recommend kakimori, which builds custom notebooks that you can select all the parts for (binding, paper, cover, etc.). Really memorable experience, and it's in a quieter residential part of the city (but still fairly convenient/central) that feels very different from the usual tourist spots.
Tragically, due largely to Covid, Muji has only one store left in the US, in Manhattan.
I'm hoping they can bring them back, though, there's nothing to compare to. In the meantime, online shipping works fine for what they happen to offer on the website, and that stock has increased recently, which is encouraging.
I can recommend their luggage in particular, there's just nothing quite like it.
I still see several Manhattan and non-Manhattan stores on their store list, but it does look like they're not in the Bay Area anymore, which is a bummer: https://www.muji.us/pages/store-information
Kinokuniya[0] has plenty of locations in the US if you're around a major city. The one nearest to me is a small shop within an asian grocery store, but the selection seemed pretty good for how small the store was.
It's fun, until you live there, and find yourself forever filling out tens of useless forms and workout that pretty much everything requires a form, whether or not it makes sense.
Don't get me wrong, I think the art work, Kanji and calligraphy is awesome, there are many amazing things about the 'paper culture' but, there are many drawbacks, especially in 2021 when the rest of the world has gone digital in so many areas.
I'd put cleaning the mailbox in second place behind filling forms. They get filled up daily with flyers and paper ads of all kinds. It's so bad that most buildings have a dedicated trash can, just for these. Right next to the mailbox area.
To be fair, my last apartment in NYC was like that. Convenient trashcan right in the mailbox room. Though I suppose my mailbox didn't literally get filled daily. If that's the case in Japan, that's pretty bad.
This drives me crazy. Greater than 90% of our mail is junk mail and goes straight into the recycling bin. I was watching some recycling process videos the other day, and when it came to bailing up the sorted paper, it looked like it was basically all junk mailers. We literally have systems that supply time and money to design the mailers, supply ink and paper and probably some plastic to make them, mail them, pass them around in the mail system, deliver them, then they're promptly thrown away or recycled, then they're carted off to be processed, and then the mailers eventually end up in landfills or partly recycled. It's insane. It's a closed system that does literally nothing but expend resources and output emissions.
I wish the government would make it illegal to mail advertising mailers. But then the USPS, which has had funding purposely cut by those who want their privately held investments to win out in the postal game or just hate anything that is available for everyone, probably relies on a lot of the revenue that comes from those mailers. So it continues.
I've found it's basically impossible to get rid of receiving them.
In the Netherlands we have stickers you can stick on your letter box that stop 99% of unaddressed spam from being put in. The sender can get into trouble with the regulator if they don't adhere to this system.
It works really well (it has existed for decades), and many municipalities are now moving towards making this 'no sticker' the default! This means that if you want flyers, you have to put up a 'yes sticker' instead of having none, and without a sticker you won't get any. This opt-in approach has quite an impact on the amount of useless paper pushed around.
This actually works in Japan too. I'm not sure if there are regulators who have your back here but I've been using a "no spam" sticker to pretty good effect.
The need to fax a form is just a giant “I am sorry, what?” The answer after a bit of back and forth and pushing (which to be fair is un-Japanese of me, even rude) is almost always 仕方がない which is a very fatalistic term meaning “it cannot be helped”. I thought it was cool to be a Gaijin have a Kanji version of my name (carefully argued over and by close friends to convey the right meaning) with the associated 判子 (hanko) stamp (a name stamp you can use for forms), but now I know better. Japan is so well organized. I love the rhythm of the subway, the perfection of the trains, the absolute cleanliness of it all; the flaw exposed by the ham fisted response to vaccination that done properly should have been sorted at every “konboni” (convenience store). Oh well. Still an amazing place full of wonderful people.
Pens aren't my thing, but I am impressed with the quality of the article considering its part of a commercial website. Compared to the low quality content marketing most companies put out this was a breath of fresh air.
JetPens is by far the most useful web site for learning about Japanese stationery. I especially appreciate the customer reviews, where you sometimes get more critical analysis than you would see in the official description.
It's worth also checking other sellers like www.tokyopenshop.com and jstationery.com, especially for older products or things that JetPens has run out of.
Shipping out of the USA can be pretty expensive. For larger and more popular items, there are sellers operating from Japan that sell through Amazon and manage to keep shipping charges more modest.
Midori MD Notebook - A6 Grid Paper, Pilot FriXion Ball Slim Biz Gel Pen - 0.38 mm, and sticky notes helped me organize my life the last two years.
I never knew an eraseable pen could be so good. Midori paper is on another level.
I love jetpens. I'm trying out the Hobonichi Techo Weeks as a 2022 journal for more structure. But I'll always have a Midori MD for free flowing thoughts or sketches.
I have, using Handwriting Repair by Briem. It was less work than I expected, and my handwriting looks pretty cool now. Even if you don't adopt the italic style advocated by the book, the other advice is still generally useful. I printed out the tracing page and did that a few times a day for a few days to get familiar with it. After that, it took a while, but it eventually became natural to write that way. The italic style helps with writing fast.
I used the book "The Italic Way to Beautiful Handwriting" by Fred Eager. The italic method, in contrast to printing or cursive, seemed to have enough connected letters to write quickly, but without insisting on connecting everything like cursive, even when it made writing awkward. I also followed some of the movement drills from a manual for the Palmer method, a cursive pre-typewriter "business" handwriting style from the early 1900s that was meant to be written quickly and legibly all day, but which some folks think looks too old-fashioned today.
One tip is that you need to train your eye as much as you train your hand.
First redo your grip, it probably sucks.
Then relearn the alphabet using that grip to the standard of your eye.
Then relearn to see the flaws in your handwriting in increasingly subtle ways and keep training to eliminate those flaws up to the standard of your eye.
I took a calligraphy course when I was in uni. Interestingly enough by a Japanese woman. City I went to school in also has one of the largest Japanese communities in Europe and a even a few Japanese crafts/pens/office shops. Article definitely rings true.
If you have a university close by that's I think a decent place to start.
I massively improved my handwriting with near daily practice for a few months. Just the alphabet and various words (stuck with print, not script, so limited need to practice hard letter sequences). Pretty much just filled legal pads with letters and some words until my handwriting was to a level I was happy with.
It’s like playing a piano. Start with slow tempo and get everything right. Then gradually speed up while maintaining the quality. And at a certain point it is not possible to write faster without changing the shapes of letters to be more cursive like, and that is ok.
I have been using Midori MD notebooks for quite some time, I really like their format and paper.
I recently purchased a pack containing a Kunisawa notebook, it's so nice and well made that I'm sad to start writing in it, I'm waiting to start a project or idea for something interesting enough to release it.
That said I also think that there are many things coming from Japan that are incredibly overpriced just for the fact of coming from there, like stationery and clothes, the prices they reach when they arrive in Europe are sometimes even in bad taste, especially if you compare them with many local products that are equal or better and worth 1/3 of the price.
The first on the list, the Kokuyo Campus notebook, is a favorite in Japanese schools everywhere, IF ONLY because it has the words “CAMPUS” emblazoned across the cover.
Reading this makes me yearn for paper/fountain again! But I think the convenience of Rocketbook scanning plus reusability has me hooked. At least for now.
I recently found myself wanting to source some Japanese notebooks en-masse, as I prefer handwritten notes for meetings and general "thinking" work. I continually run out of notebooks at the worst possible times.
Instead, I ended up buying a Rocketbook. I thought I'd try it out, it wasn't a huge outlay (compared to, for example, ReMarkable). I've gone through the notebook quite a few times now, works quite well.
Rocketbooks definitely aren't perfect. The tactility is nowhere near that of fountain/paper. You must use Pilot Frixion pens. And you can only buy frixion pen inks in their insanely small and wasteful plastic cartridges (you cannot just buy a bottle of the ink, as far as I'm aware). I do sometimes wonder if it is better to fill up my recycle bin with paper, or fill up my garbage can with frixion cartridges.
But, I'm still not sure I'll go back to standard pen and paper any time soon for my daily notetaking.
Slightly off-topic but I'd be curious if any of you are Rocketbook "expats" or converts.
Edit: spelling, plus further thought on wastefulness.
They also manufacture some great fountain pens. I recently got a Pilot Capless (Vanishing Point) and really like it after writing on Lamy pens for years.
My black Pilot Vanishing Point, from Itoya in Ginza, is the crown of my collection. Great story and fantastic pen, although for sentiment it can't compare to the Montblanc my father gave me for matriculating from university.
Fun timing to run into this article, I have the pen and fresh ink sitting next to the converter as a nice project to work on during the intercalary week.
I have an itoya oasis notebook that I adore. Paper feels lux and has the right amount of tooth and it magically lays flat despite having a cloth binding. Got it at that Japanese paper/pen shop on Santana Row in san jose.
also have a kyokuto side-bound wire notebook that has held up like a champ. The wire doesn't get mangled from jamming it into my backpack like some POS mead notebook would. Got it at the japanese paper store in japantown sf
https://kencrooker.com/review-kyokuto/
Still I think from now on I'm going to stick with the magic lay-flat cloth bound.
one curious statement from the article:
> Despite Japan’s international reputation for using futuristic technology...
maybe in the 1980s? As late as a few years ago, it was rare for a hotel in japan to have wifi. They're lagging in tech now in several industries.
Stationary from Japan is really something else. Notebooks, pens, scissors, etc... They feel great, look great. Even the cheap stuff you get from convenience stores is nice.
Many innovative pens and art supply you can find in the west came from Japan too.
For anyone who prefers mechanical pencils over pens (like myself), I have been extremely happy with the pairing of a Zebra M-701 and Uni Nano Dia HB 0.7mm on Leuchtturm1917 or Moleskine paper.
I personally prefer a heftier, thicker pencil as the skinnier ones make my hands cramp up a little after a lot of writing (something . I do have some drafting pencils from a different brand (nothing spectacular) but they're mostly relegated to my art supplies drawer.
> YAMAMOTO PAPER told us that they believe paper selection will be more limited in the near future as manufacturing becomes more streamlined and people move to digital tools. Their hope is that people will get to know Japanese paper culture as it is now before it permanently changes.
Do Japanese paper companies make much use of recycled paper?
I understand the feeling of nostalgia in this thread, but for the actual handwriting and its flexibility I would highly recommend a ePaper tablet like remarkable.
I have one and run KOreader on it. The stylus is good for highlighting passages, but as for being a contender to my paper notebooks ... I'd still take my worst pens over it. There's just something so ... one-dimensional about the navigation of pages on electronic devices. The ability to zip around and 'random access' bound pages just feels natural in a way nothing seems to be able to replicate for me on any kind of electronic device. Sometimes it feels like looking at the world through a straw.
EDIT:
Also the storage is just too tiny. It's really the thing that aggravates me about it the most. (No, I won't cloud. I operate too often in environments with no outside net access. And if the whole point is to have everything on one compact device, I want everything on the device.)
I would love to get some actual real-world experience stories about the remarkable - when the Apple Pencil came out, I thought it would replace my pen and paper approach, and I invested in the platform (2018 iPad, Pencil, Goodnotes) - but ultimately was disappointed because the writing felt ackward and "fake" on a glass surface. Because of this experience, I am wary of investing in a new toy with little usage reports which may follow the way of the Pencil, which now gathers dust in a cabinet until finally being put into the refuse pile...
The reMarkable is a very impressive piece of hardware with unfortunately bad software and a business model that looks to be deteriorating (see recent moves to subscription services, etc.).
In physical/tactile terms, it's a really impressive writing experience, but I've found the utility of that so constrained by the absence of indexing and navigation features that I don't use it for much besides occasional drawings. It turns out that navigating a physical notebook works in ways that flipping through electronic pages can't keep up with without a lot of work on the interface.
As an e-reader, recent updates to the rendering have made it usable, though there are still sometimes hassles with display and getting documents onto the device. It's theoretically great to be able to annotate PDFs, but in practice not being able to easily navigate the annotations later makes it substantially worse than writing notes in the margins of a paper book.
I'm sure a lot of this can be improved with 3rd-party hacks, but it isn't designed as a platform and it feels only grudgingly open to modification, which seems like a huge missed opportunity. (Not to mention being yet another product built on open code that doesn't return the favor.) Being able to SSH to the device and poke around the filesystem is cool, but it mostly feels like a glimpse into how much more utility the whole thing could offer.
I'll use mine as long as it works, but I'm unlikely to buy another one and I can't in good faith recommend it for most users. I do know several folks who are happy with the narrow range of things it's good at, which is why I bought it in the first place. Personally, I'm placing my hopes for a more useful-to-me e-ink future on devices like the PineNote.
Growing up, I had a friend with a Japanese parent. She had supernaturally neat handwriting, produced with various impossibly cute and meticulous-looking Japanese pens and stationary over the years. I felt like some kind of clumsy, nasty barbarian in comparison.
Japan is, of course, just a place. The people there are ordinary humans. Fetishizing a particular culture is both cringeworthy and genuinely harmful. Their country and society have plenty of problems, just like any other. There is nothing magical about Japan or any other place.
However. If all that remains of their civilization in 10,000 years is a curiously well-preserved Japanese stationary store, perhaps buried Pompei-style and frozen in time... future historians may conclude otherwise.
> Japan is, of course, just a place. The people there are ordinary humans. Fetishizing a particular culture is both cringeworthy and genuinely harmful. Their country and society have plenty of problems, just like any other. There is nothing magical about Japan or any other place.
Japan, by your own description, isn’t just a place. It’s the place of a people who share a long and deep culture. If you substituted New Yorkers for Japanese in Tokyo, it wouldn’t be like Tokyo for very long! (Feeling like a “clumsy, nasty barbarian” is certainly an apropos description of how I feel returning to New York after visiting Tokyo.)
Most Japanese wouldn’t describe Japan as “just a place.” A Japanese acquaintance of mine (a law professor) and I were once discussing the issue of government corruption in Asia. My acquaintance dug into some 400 years of Japanese history to explain why it had less problems with corruption than China, next door.
Of course it’s not “magical”—just as there is nothing magical about Apple under Steve Jobs. But it is an achievement—the achievement of a group of people who share a particular culture. When my dad was born in 1951, Japan had a GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) similar to Bangladesh’s today. Within a generation they had become a first world country. You shouldn’t fetishize their culture, but it’s okay to marvel at their achievement!
I certainly do not mean that Japan is "just a place" in the sense that the nasty, slightly unkempt area behind my garage is "just a place." Japan is the sum of thousands of years of culture and achievement. I truly marvel at many things about Japan.
I did my best (in my admittedly hurried and casual post) to be clear that fetishization is what was to be avoided, and not appreciation.
Often, particularly in the 90s/2000s, one would see Japan fetishized as some sort of magical place of technical advancements, weirdo tentacle porn, cute and submissive women, etc. That sucked for a number of reasons too obvious to type out. That's the sort of thing of which I'm dismissive, not the sort of informed and genuine appreciation you expressed.
> My acquaintance dug into some 400 years of Japanese history to explain why it had less problems with corruption than China, next door.
Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong are closer to China in terms of both geography and culture without having problems with corruption. It's almost as if 400 years of history has very little to do with it.
Hong Kong was long a British colony. Taiwan and Singapore are tiny island nations, with founding generations small enough to retool the culture and institutions. The founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was deliberate about reshaping the country’s culture because he was adamant that “culture is destiny.” https://paulbacon.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/zakaria_lee.pd...
So was Afghanistan. But a short duration of military dominance and writing words in paper can’t change the culture of the people. Colonization, as with Hong Kong, or a generation of top-down rule over a small population, as with Taiwan and Singapore, can. Again, read Yew. He was deliberate and methodical about all this, and has written and spoken widely about what he did to transform Singapore.
I dunno. That suggests that it's not culture and it's not geography... So what's left? Genetics and history? I'd pick history, the accumulation of aggregate choices.
I don't understand the premise, where Japan is supposedly uniquely high-integrity. It ranks around the United States in metrics of corruption, sometimes higher and sometimes lower over the last 20 years, and historically was significantly worse than it is now. It's about as corrupt as any of the many countries on this planet that have the rule of law.
> My acquaintance dug into some 400 years of Japanese history to explain why it had less problems with corruption than China, next door.
That's a bit suspect considering a lot of pre-WW2 Japanese governments were based off Chinese models (not to mention, as another commenter mentioned, there are other examples of Asian governments with low corruption, maybe even less than Japan's). In China's case, if we're going back hundreds of years, I suspect the explanation is a bit more complex, you know, having to deal with all that sheer area in the age of horses, no natural sea barrier against foreigners, not to mention a population size that easily dwarfed Japan's (and most countries in the world).
One of the things attractive about Japan is that it actually does have a lot of unique culture in a world otherwise somewhat dominated by a global culture, when you are actually different there are bound to be several things about your culture which others see in awe.
One of the disappointing things (not that there aren’t awesome things) about traveling across the US is all the things which aren’t different even though separated by thousands of miles. I recently moved back to Minnesota from several years in California and often get the strange sense that I’m still there because I’m in an environment so familiar that I think I’m in Sunnyvale for a moment. (Walking through a shop or doing this or that… the snow though is a bit of a differentiator)
Yeah. It's depressing when you fly 3,000 miles across America and hey, there's another shopping certain with an Applebees and a Target, exactly like the place you just left.
As a Chinese my friends and I are always amazed by the contemporary Japanese art, music and movies. I attributed the success partially to the democratic system and remain hopeful for our own culture.
Japan had interesting art and culture before their modern political system, which largely stems from post WWII.
Btw, there's a reasonable argument to be made that constraints are what drives creativity. From my own experience, East Germany had much better political jokes than West Germany. Mostly because you didn't need a carefully worded joke in the West, you could just open a newspaper.
I agree constraints can generate creativity, but is there evidence that constraints generate more of it? It seems like no. This is all difficult to quantify, but if I were to attempt to paraphrase history and try to quantify anyway, at least from a Western perspective, it seems like the cultural output of free "Westernized" countries vastly exceeds those from restricted places (Russia, China, etc), or it could simply be because we free countries mainly import and exchange with other free countries and just don't know what Russia or China or Iran are up to culturally. Without going out of my way to dive into Wiki or to find foreign shows/films, I can't say I come across Russian culture very frequently beyond rough stereotypes (or dash cam videos /s), and Chinese culture seems vastly misunderstood or is a complete unknown in the US. Neither really come up in the day to day, or even month to month of daily life. I probably encounter Japanese and European things daily.
As for the parent comment, I think he's alluding that pre-modern Japanese art and culture had a lot more overlap with pre-modern China's, which makes it somewhat less notable from a Chinese perspective (e.g. something like England vs Australia; different, but there's overlap).
But post WWII we see a massive divergence in cultural export and exchange (e.g. England or Australia vs the US). South Korea is another example (I've actually seen Japanese entertainment consortiums lamenting at the perception that the S. Korean entertainment industry seemed to be better funded and more able to export their culture). Just looking at Chinese history, the golden age of creativity and inventions seemed to occur when there were more freedoms (which I would argue is pretty much any era prior to the PRC since their control is unprecedented in conjunction with modern technology). Granted it was the olden times, so there were more things to be discovered, but it seemed like China back in the day was on a roll (off the top of my head, movable type, paper, matcha, bonsai, porcelain, celadon, silk, gunpowder)
I agree constraints can generate creativity, but
is there evidence that constraints generate more of it?
It's hard to talk about evidence for something as subjective as creativity, right?
I think the strong general consensus is that the right kind of constraints can indeed foster innovation - think of the constraints imposed by, say, early video game consoles. Or forms of music that grew from various constraints - the energetic DIY ethos of punk, or how hiphop thrived within the constraints of working with turntables and early electronic tool vs. live instruments.
Of course, the kinds of constraints matter. I think you're talking about societal constraints. I would guess that they generally have a much more negative effect on creativity.
> Granted it was the olden times, so there were more things to be discovered, but it seemed like China back in the day was on a roll (off the top of my head, movable type, paper, matcha, bonsai, porcelain, celadon, silk, gunpowder)
You seem to be throwing together all of pre-PRC China into one big blender?
There have been lots of different dynasties and long stretches when China was not unified. Many of these dynasties were more different from each other, than some dynasties might be from the PRC 'dynasty'.
Tossing all the achievements of thousands of years into one bin, and comparing them to what has been produced in the last few decades also seems a bit off.
Most (or all?) of the examples of inventions you describe predate the Qing dynasty.
The last emperors before the republic and later the communists were off the Qing dynasty.
Well even in PRC it’s widely recognized that we saw a boom of high quality cultural work in early 90s - peak of Chinese rock band, movies from the fifth generation Chinese directors, mainland/HK/Taiwan music. This time coincide with the time CCP’s control is loosen
there's a reasonable argument to be made that constraints
are what drives creativity
It has often been said that budgetary and technical constraints were the genesis of many of the visual trademarks we see in Japanese anime/manga. I am no expert (just a fan for many years) but certainly of the belief that this is the case.
When writing that sentence, I had hoped it would be clear that I (a) was describing my naive childhood perspective and (b) was employing some lighthearted hyperbole.
I also hoped that the second paragraph would really drive that home, sans subtlety.
("Maybe they'll even think it's funny," I dreamed)
I therefore chose not to insult the reader by further clarifying that she was a pretty regular-ass person, not some kind of magical exotic creature. We were friends for quite a few years and folks tend not to be friends with weirdos that fetishize them.
I even heard her fart once (which would have really confirmed her non-ethereal nature) but she swore it was her seat making some kind of noise so let's give her the benefit of the doubt.
I wonder if there are resume ghostwriters you can hire for that?
I imagine you'd send them the text and a sample of your handwriting, and they'd produce a neatened up version that's close enough to your handwriting that someone could believe you'd produced it with enough care.
(Cheaper versions would just give you a generic neat hand, without customising it to your own handwriting.)
You should check out the rest of their posts/articles. I’ve ended up on them before when trying to find out the difference in the types of inks and types of pens. I have always been really impressed by the quality of their articles. Really want to give them some cash so will wander over there in a bit.
Sadly, my writing has got worse and worse since my life has become more and more digital. I should really have a goal for 2022 to be able to write legibly once again. I can’t even read my own hand writing any more - it must just be the lack of practice and it’s very sad as people used to comment on how beautiful it was (decades ago). Now it looks like a Doctor’s prescription order!