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.
The term "hunter-gatherers" undoubtedly reminds you of ancient and primitive peoples, a stage in human development that we have progressed far, far past. The only hunter-gatherers that still exist today are stubborn jungle people and the poorest of rural communities in far flung regions of the world. Modern civilisation has made hunting a highly inefficient form of food production. We now farm almost every animal or plant that we require, except for one large class of food: fish.
Even the most technologically advanced nations still almost exclusively rely on hunting to bring in saltwater, and usually also freshwater, fish supplies. Giant trawlers and fishing dinghies alike head out daily across the world to fish, and without them there is no alternative source. They must sail out into nature and take directly from the natural resource available. And while fish-farming is possible, it is still economically unviable as a solution and will be for a long time to come. It has actually been this way for a very long time. Ever since the neolithic agricultural revolution spread across the planet, most food we eat has been farmed: both meat and crops. But fishing has remained as the last hunt we still need to perform.
In the anime Houkago Teibou Nisshi (Fishing Girls) we see the strange juxtaposition of the modern world and the archaic art of angling. The girls are in a hunting club, where they go on hunting trips after school to trap, slaughter and butcher animals to eat. At first the city girl Hina is put-off by the barbarity of it all. We are used to a huge abstraction between animals and food, even though most adults come to accept the truth of it. But the reality hasn't changed, and Hina learns to understand and respect the nature of the exchange we make every time we eat meat; thus bringing her closer to accepting the world around her. Fishing acts as a lifeline to reality, it anchors us in the real world where we work hard to carve out what we need to survive from the world around us, neither as theft or as a right, but as a necessity and a responsibility.
Japan has always been a nation of fishermen, and today is far more reliant on commercial fishing than most of the first world is. Its a fact that often gets them into trouble from the other developed nations, whose populous are all but disconnected from the reality of the food chain. They can't understand why the Japanese kill whales or other exotic fish (yes whales are fish), and they see it as an unacceptable barbarism. But it is the very fact that Japan has this culture of fishing that allows them to see past this modern delusion: they are forced to come to terms with the brutality and necessity of slaughter in daily life. Which is something they share with the farmers of our Western countries too. Do the animal-rightists ever stop to think how, if livestock farming is such an affront to moral decency, farmers across the world can accept it? How that the more you know about farming (first-hand, not from propaganda), the more likely you will be to be able to understand and accept the truth behind our relationship with nature? If anything is an affront to humanity it is a rejection of our stewardship over nature, and our place firmly within it.
