So,

here's why this page exists again, in a summary form. It was originally a longer rant form, but when you take a week to get around to writing something, it's hard to care quite as much anymore.

I'm reading this book for my class, "The Enigma of Japanese Power" by Karel van Wolferen. I went to look it up online, and found that while it is apparently this premier book on Japan in the west, it is regarded rather poorly by actual Japanese. Testing this theory however, seemed fruitless, as it has an average rating of 4/5 on http://amazon.co.jp, with only one review giving it a 1. Not that I can read the comments, but stars are easy enough.
Anyway, it appears to be a pretty decent book, if harsh on the authorities. Yet it does have some glaring problems, namely, if things were as out of control as he makes it sound, it's nothing short of a miracle the country still exists. The other is simply the date. The book was written in 1989. In comparison, the 2nd largest political party in Japan, the liberal DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan), was formed and grew that large just since 1998, and just in 2007 took control of the upper house from the conservative LDP (Liberal Democratic Party, the practical "only party" since 1955). So it's hard to know if anything he says is still accurate.
(Side note: Want to know why the LDP wins? Check out their logos in comparison: DPJ LDP)

But the final point, and probably the stupidest thing he wrote is right on page 3: "One can hardly say that much emanates from Japan today... in the way of great music, great literature, or even impressive architecture." While I don't know about architecture, apart from sensing that was noting but a rude afterthought, the first two angered me. It seemed a pointless and blatantly wrong statement, especially with a great piece of literature recently in my mind. After all, when was the last time we came out with any great literature? I can't name one book written in the last 50 years that would really be certified as such. (On the other hand, Karel is not American either, he's from the Netherlands, so maybe he'd say the same thing about us).
However it soon occurred to me that it was not entirely the comment against Japan bothering me as much as it was one that he could not have even thought of in 1989 - the comment against modern forms of storytelling. I realized that even if all the great Japanese works I had in mind were released in the West, they would still never be considered great literature. Video games, predominantly, were what I was thinking of. To a lesser extent Anime, but television as a whole has become an accepted form of art, even if very little out of this country warrants such a title. (Of course, these forms are almost exclusively Japanese in origin, so the two hits go hand in hand).
Yet there isn't a person out there who will defend video games as placing on the same level as literature, even when that is exactly what some of them are, sometimes exclusively. I tried to find someone, even just searching blogs of other internet nobodies, but could not find a single place saying just this. Even among threads on forums of gamers, the opinion was split evenly whether any games could be considered art.

So with that in mind, and some comments about a particular game/story running about my head, I decided to see if I could post a blog on my own unused domain. Indeed I can, hence my previous post.

What is the game that got me out of a 2-year retirement from essay writing? Find out next time, on: this page. Slightly above here. Later.