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Tokyo, the biggest city in the world, the biggest city in the history of the world, a galaxy reflected in its own glass. It was a fishing village four hundred years ago, and now: thirty-five million people, a human concourse so vast it can’t be said to end, only to fade indeterminately around the edges. Thirty-five million, almost the population of California.
#Tokyo own glass
His sword, a seventeenth-century weapon forged by the Seki no Magoroku line of swordsmiths, was in a scabbard on his belt. An orange tassel hung from the hilt.
“Please,” Mishima gasped, “do not leave me in agony too long.” He was speaking to his lover, Morita, the student leader of the Tatenokai, whose role in the ritual was to cut off Mishima’s head. In a formal seppuku, the kaishakunin decapitates the dying man, sparing him the prolonged anguish of death by evisceration. Morita hacked at Mishima’s neck but missed, slicing into his shoulder. He tried again and left a wound across his back. A third stroke cut into the neck, but not deeply enough.
Finally another Tatenokai officer, a law student named Hiroyasu Koga, took the sword from Morita—the writer’s sword, the sword with the orange tassel—and beheaded Mishima in one blow.
Morita, as planned, then knelt and tried to commit seppuku. He couldn’t do it. At his sign...
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On my third day in Tokyo I discovered that he was alive.
At the center of the ring, the referee poses and flits his fan, a luminary in silks; the hilt of his knife, which he wears as a reminder of the days when one wrong decision meant his immediate seppuku, peeks out from the sash at his waist.
I rode a bullet train to Kyoto. I climbed the stone path of the Fushimi Inari shrine, up the mountain under ten thousand blazing orange gates. I visited the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, rebuilt in 1955 after a mad monk burned it to the ground (Mishima wrote a novel about this). I visited the Temple of the Silver Pavilion, weirder and more mysterious because it is not actually covered in silver but was only intended to be. I spent a hundred yen on a vending-machine fortune that told me to be “patient with time.”
Koga was a practicing Shinto priest on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s main islands.
during World War II there were POW camps throughout the United States, holding hundreds of thousands of prisoners.
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Robert Goddard, the rocket scientist. Did you know he’d lived in Roswell? He did some of his important experiments there, the ones that paved the way for human spaceflight. Also for long-range missiles. He was there before the war, an intense, tubercular obsessive firing projectiles into the wasteland. Without him, there’d be no moon landing, no ICBMs, no Cold War as we know it.
Area 51 only became mainstream famous in 1989, when a man named Bob Lazar gave an interview on Las Vegas TV.
Lazar didn’t call the place where he said he’d worked “Area 51,” though; he called it “S4.” The CIA was known to use the term “Groom Lake,” but that was merely the name of the nearby salt flats. People who worked at the facility were said to call it “Dreamland.”
The atom bomb was created in New Mexico in 1945, and then—but only afterward, in 1950—a Navajo shepherd named Paddy Martinez discovered the first of what would turn out to be massive concentrations of uranium there.
the general Ozymandias fading away of the Americana through which you’re passing.
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imagine the UFO narrative as a kind of disguised psychic reckoning with the guilt-terror of white xenophobia?
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The first message from a European was carved in 1605. That’s fifteen years before the Mayflower landed.
Kuzya, the dog, snores by the door.
Not that he owns it. This is capitalism; he pays rent like anyone else. It keeps him young, he thinks, having to chase his living.
With a multi-plane animation stand, however, animators could simulate tracking shots by raising foreground and middle-ground planes toward the camera while leaving the background plane in place. An animation stand of this sort would typically be operated by several technicians working at once, and would require an enormous number of calculations to make sure that rules of perspective were maintained.
His last film, Hedgehog in the Fog, was a triumph, a picture-book story that left children breathless and animators baffled: How did he make this?
one of the deadliest man-eaters on record, which had consumed more than four hundred people.
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The first, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, was a worldwide bestseller in the 1940s.
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He dined with Princess Elizabeth, at the Treetops Hotel near Nyeri, on the night her father died and she became Queen Elizabeth II. He wrote in the guest book, For the first time in the history of the world a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess, and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen. It had been Corbett’s devout loyalty to the empire that spurred him to go into the jungle after the man-eaters.
People are fond of saying that tigers do not climb trees.
Albert Einstein said that all true science begins in “the sensation of the mystical.”
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Rugby Colony, in Tennessee. Rugby: truly one of the strangest pedagogical experiments in this nation’s history, one of those rare keyholes through which it’s still possible to spy on the late nineteenth century in the act of discovering itself.
Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W. Marland.
Sundown (1934).
