This is why I left Seattle
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Merchants used to take their profits to buy titles of nobility because it was a guaranteed form of income for their family in perpetuity in feudalism, today business owners buy their way into political appointments because it is a guaranteed income in perpetuity for them and their family. I’m paraphrasing Sowell here, probably poorly because it was from years ago.
That's why Japan collapsed and had to open up for trade in the 1850's. Everyone says it was Commodore Perry, but even the Shogun was in the red from all his gambling and giving titles to pay off debts.
The Yakuza are from those gambling halls btw.
uh, no. gunboat diplomacy was real an effective. nice try at revising history tho. works on those that have never read the history, I suppose.
Both are true. Japan was (generally) poor as shit, with almost the entire population (by percentage) caught in a cycle of iron age subsistence farming.
Stagnation had occurred long ago, and things had been held stable (and shit) for more than a hundred years due to the (very effective) system of the shogun taking hostages of noble families.
Trade was a way for people to make money and have a better life. The people who were secretly involved in trading with westerners made so much money that it destabilized the entire Japanese economy.
The Japanese are usually obstinate bastards and isolationists to boot. Gunboat diplomacy worked so well because the Japanese people already knew that there was a way out of desperate, subsistence farming for almost everyone if Japan was opened up in trade.
The Shogunate could no longer suppress the people by keeping noble hostages. because the subjects didn't care. A chain of events was set in motion that lead to a popular uprising, the overthrow of feudalism, and the end of the samurai caste.
There's some Japanese people i know who think that jews were behind the overthrow of the Shogunate. The movement that overthrew the Shogunate was funded by the British and the British were cozy with the Rothschild bankers so there might be some truth to it.
There's Japanese that think that the overthrow of the Shogunate was a mistake, because after the Shogunate was overthrown, western ideas like the enlightenment came in to Japan and the enlightenment was basically the proto communist values from the French revolution.