Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Next week I'll be going to Japan for the first time. A trip half a decade in the making, I and two friends (Bread-is-Dead & CammyJFTW) are flying out for a two week holiday: one week in Tokyo and another in Kansai. Speaking just for myself, but also probably for them, it's something of a quasi-religious pilgrimage to finally visit the place we've experienced vicariously so much through anime & manga. We've each got different things we're hoping to get out of the holiday, but the overarching desire seems to be to simply to exist within the islands of Japan for a while. To experience and communicate with the place that currently exists only as a vivid dream in solid terms, and to compare the Japan of our minds with the Japan of the material world.
While we have all been exposed to a lot of Japanese culture, albeit skewed through an otaku lens, it has been very interesting talking about my trip with others who have not had much exposure to Japan. With everyone I've spoken to it's clear to me that Japan, despite its lack of real presence in the everyday lives of the average British person, lives large in the imagination of us all, as it has for centuries now. Recurring comments focus on Japan's advanced technology, low crime rates, immoral sexual practices, hivemind culture and, most interestingly to me, its artisan industry. While the truth of any these sentiments can be argued (although all seem to based on some truth to me), I'd like to focus on that final point. Everyone has hobbies, and they delve into those hobbies to various depths. But it seems if someone goes deeper and deeper into a hobby or interest they will eventually and inevitably reach Japan at some point. It seems you can find the apoapsis of any obsession in Japan acted out by the Japanese. My Dad likes whisky, my Mum likes pottery, my colleague likes board games, my friend likes cycling, my sister likes fashion. All of these people have, when I mention my upcoming trip to them, told me they would love to go to Japan to visit some institution that is seen as the highest form of their specific interest. It seems nearly universal that Westerners, or at least Brits, have found something in Japan that expresses a love for their specific interest to a degree matching or exceeding that found at home. And while a part of this is surely an orientalist fantasy, I believe there to be truth in the sentiment; Japan does seem to be a nation of obsessives and artisans.
This particular interest in Japan (over other similarly distant nations) extends back in British history to even before we discovered the existence of the Japanese Archipelago, but reached a crescendo during the "Belle Epoque" of the late Victorian Britain. Labelled "Japonisme", it came about as Japan ended its "Sakoku" period of self-inflicted isolation and Japanese products started to flow into the highly developed, very wealthy and artistically experimental markets of the European rich. As they did so said Europeans discovered products that were totally foreign, but of similar quality to those produced in Europe: something that existed nowhere else in the world. Even the products of China, India and Arabia paled in comparison, as well as in dearness, rarity and exoticism. Japanese decorative arts were incorporated into Western high art, being driving inspirations behind the natural curves of Art-Nouveau and the ukiyoe-ness of Impressionism, with many artists and romantic-types visiting Japan to learn from the oriental masters. Think martial arts, Zen gardening, or lacquerware. And this success of the Japanese export market became a self-fulfilling prophecy for the newly international-facing country. High-end artisanal manufacturing became much more profitable than low-end production that could be done at much higher volumes and at lower prices by the world-spanning resource-controlling world empires of the day. And so Japan began to import raw material and export high-end products. Japan is a country where honour still counts for a lot, and as such craftsmen bring their work to a higher level of precision than anyone else on Earth, albeit with a severe loss in their ability to innovate and change.
This "nation of artisans" continued after a brief intermission in the 1960s with the excelling of Japanese technology, but now with a powerful twist. It seemed that for several decades the upheaval of the fabric of Japanese society post-war had allowed Japanese society to accept change, and to innovate like no other country could. Japan became the world leader in high-end technology: computers, cars, architecture, etc. This lead to domination over markets that they had created such as mobile phones, video games or electronic household appliances. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a fear in the West that this new liberal and innovative Japan would soon be able to rival America and Russia in their places as world-superpowers through purely economic efforts (much as China has done today, although much less glamourously). But this odd postwar miracle did eventual fade, fizzling into stagnation of innovation and continued economic depression starting in 1990, and since then Japan has returned to being the best only in hyper-specific industries for export markets, rather than any general national economic strength.
As I mentioned before, the West's obsession with "the land of the rising Sun" extends far back: even into the minds of mediaeval scholars. In Hereford Cathedrals hangs the largest mediaeval map known to exist, depicting the entire world as it was thought to exist in the mind of its anonymous cartographer. The map is orientated with East up (hence the word "orientate", from "orient"), and its singular great continent is split in three. Europe in the Northwest quadrant, Africa in the Southwest quadrant, and Asia in the Eastern half, all bounded by the "world sea". Europe and land around the Mediterranean Sea are remarkable accurate, showing cities, river, mountain ranges and islands in roughly correct positions. However as you look further and further up, the map's purpose seems to morph from geographical accuracy to Christian allegory. East of Jerusalem (the centre of the world) lie vague Biblical locations, the true placement of which being unknown. Then further on are depictions and descriptions of uncivilised tribes and terrible beasts, and often a chimaeric mix of both. But sitting right at the top lies a lonely island, on the far reaches of the Eastern end of the world: "Eden". This "Eden of the East" acts as the (literal) genesis of man, the Earthly Paradise from which all of human civilisation and culture spread. Through a Platonic-lens this island acts as a worldly version of the realm of forms: that place from which the idea of all things emanate, and even from where the Sun rises from. The island from which the true, beautiful and uncorrupted form of all the objects we have around us were designed and lovingly crafted by divine forces: an island of heavenly artisans.
