Opinion of Japan

[Beet]

A weird country. A very weird country. Most of you kids are too young to remember when the U.S. was paranoid about Japan. "We won the war, but they won the peace", and other nonsense like that. The country's golden age was 1868-1998, about 130 years, probably peaking in the late 1940s when companies like Sony were getting founded. Today a society that has accepted its own eclipse, like what Thatcher warned against in the Seventies and Eighties. In any case, definitely weird.

[Beet]

A weird country. A very weird country. Most of you kids are too young to remember when the U.S. was paranoid about Japan. "We won the war, but they won the peace", and other nonsense like that. The country's golden age was 1868-1998, about 130 years, probably peaking in the late 1940s when companies like Sony were getting founded. Today a society that has accepted its own eclipse, like what Thatcher warned against in the Seventies and Eighties. In any case, definitely weird.

Weird alright, but not as weird as that post.

The most normal and straightforward interpretation of Japanese history, actually.

[Beet]

'The most normal and straightforward interpretation of Japanese history' most certainly does not analyze the Meiji Restoration-to-Pacific War period and the Occupation-to-Lost Decade period as one continuous era, far less parts of the same 'golden age'.

I don't blame historians for dividing up such a long and interesting period into parts; especially since when these two periods were delineated, the golden age was still going on and seemed 'normal.'