To be fair, at least our clash ended in a mutually respectful conversation that laid the groundwork for fruitful collaboration in future projects. So a rare example of the internet actually working.

Can also listen here:

I have too many comics t-shirts, but what's one more?

Well, yes that was what I was getting at in terms of the different power relations between Japan and Europe circa 1550 or so.

Absolutely agree on this point, and I think you can really see Clavell's experiences from the 40s in those sections.

Not what I was arguing at all. Rather, I'd say Japanese colonial administration of Korea in the 19th century was heavily influenced by Western models of colonialism in a way that wasn't true in the 16th century. But that's not about capitalism.

Leaving aside the complicated issue of indigeneity as a concept, I would agree that it wasn't a new phenomenon, but Japanese colonialism of the 19th century was markedly different in character than earlier efforts in the 16th century, etc.

Sure, but those wars generally leave evidence in archaeological records - bodies that are marked by violence. That doesn't seem to have been the case in this instance, and that's not uncommon in prehistory. People move to/away from regions for different reasons, pops rise and fall for diff reasons.

And by the time Shogun is set in, more than two thousand years have passed since the supposed founding of the Imperial dynasty. At that point, splitting hairs in an academic sense really doesn't do a good job at accurately portraying lived experience on the ground.

Well, this gets into the complicated question of what indigeneity means. Yes, there was a migration of the Yayoi people who supplanted the Jomon people, but from the archaeological evidence, this seems to have been more the result of environmental and food supply issues, not warfare.

But it's a different scenario than the one the author envisions, because Japan is ultimately not colonized - it enters into a 200 year period of successful isolation, and then in the 19th century becomes the colonizer.

And certainly there are aspects of colonialism going on - the Portugese and Spanish are actively trying to colonize various areas of Southeast Asia, meanwhile the Japanese are wrestling with a failed attempt to conquer Korea (and China).

This is a case where I think the author is over-extending their argument, but isn't entirely wrong. There's certainly a theme in Shogun of characters (both Portugese, English, and Japanese) seeing the Other as less than human in moments of culture shock.

Even if this wasn't abundantly stupid, and it is, there's already a cottage industry that already does this for corporate executives with low attention spans. So not only is Musk intellectually vacant, but he also can't be bothered to do a basic search.

Actually that gives me an idea...