Ancient Japan

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

1. How Ochakov became Odessa, and Oreshek became St. Petersburg

2. Kiev antique

3. Sevastopol antique

Instead of a preface - a picture of a riddle. Guess which city is shown in the picture. Peter? Kiev? Vladivostok? Yekaterinburg?

No, comrades, this is the city of Tokyo, late 19th century. But first things first.

1. Roots

Japan … What associations come to mind when you hear this word? In the modern world - reliability, thoughtfulness, pedantry, coordination, responsibility, quality. Indeed, the Japanese people are a very meticulous people, paying attention to trifles, and in this we, the Slavs, have a lot to learn from them. The motto of every Japanese is - when you wake up, you must remember that wherever you work, no matter what craft you do, you must bring your business to maximum perfection. That is why we admire so much Japanese technology, its reliability and quality, which is why each of us would like to have some kind of Japanese thing, because the stamp "made in Japan" speaks for itself. It is not for nothing that "right-hand drive" Toyota and Nissan drives from Vladivostok across all of Russia, or by ship all the way to Odessa itself, such cars will always be in demand among our layman, despite the fact that cars are usually old, and we have right-hand traffic. Japan is a brand, the people of Japan are quality. And the purpose of this post is not to humiliate this people, not to elevate one people over another, no, but only to look at the istoria of the territory in which the Japanese now live, on the Japanese islands from a slightly different angle, different from the official point of view, and see the trail more ancient, rooted in the depths of centuries. So, what do we know from the history of the land of the rising sun from a traditional point of view?

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Well, probably everyone has already heard about the Ainu - this is the mysterious indigenous population of the Japanese islands, which has pronounced Caucasian facial features, lush beards and koropokkuru figurines, very reminiscent of our nesting doll, like this:

And these are:

The views of the Ainu on the structure of the world are also interesting:

There are six tiers of the upper worlds and six tiers of the lower worlds. The most significant of them: KANNA MOSIRI - “upper world”. This is the world in which the Ainu live, and at the same time the first tier of the upper world. It is designed as an island resting on the back of a giant salmon.

NITNE KOMUI MOSIRI - "wet underworld", which is the first tier of the underworld. After death, evil people enter this gloomy world, and evil demons live there. It is located directly below Kanna Mosiri - the world of people - Thus, this world is a distinctly formed concept of hell.

Where there is hell, there must be heaven. This paradise is KOMUI MOSIRI - one of the underground worlds, and it is there after death that good people go, living there with good deities. The only disadvantage of this paradise is that you have to live there upside down. (Why isn't the Slavic light Nav for you? Remember what's inside, then outside.)

Unlike the gods of the Japanese pantheon, the Ainu gods are clearly divided into evil and good. The common name for the evil gods TOIEKUNRA, and they dwell in the mountains, although the main evil deity of the Ainu is the goddess of swamps and bogs. These gods symbolize all sorts of dangers awaiting man, and the negative traits of people themselves.

Sometimes people have to turn to evil gods for help - when a predator attacks or when evil demons begin to bother them especially. They also turn to evil gods in order to cope with the natural elements, since it is these gods who are in charge of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, snowfalls, etc. (Today, November 21, the Slavs celebrate the day of Moryna Zima - the goddess of death land with an ice shroud).

Parallels can be drawn for a long time, but let's go further. Genetics is a very powerful thing, and sometimes even among the hereditary Japanese (and as we know, the highest circles of any society usually carry the DNA of people who originally lived in a given area or territory, because they have a rule of observance of "blood purity", and the prince will never marry a simple dancer. This is most noticeable in the highest Brahman castes in India) there are carriers of the great-great-ancestor haplogroup. For example, Okubo Toshimichi, a hereditary samurai from the Satsuma principality, one of the "three noble people" who led the pro-imperial forces in the fight against the Tokugawa shogunate.

But his colleagues from the Iwakura Tomomi delegation to America and Europe in 1871 - Yamagato Aritomo

And Saigo Takamori

And here are interesting photos of real hereditary samurai:

What what, but heredity cannot be faked or rewritten by any means. Now we will smoothly move on to another trail, which is very difficult to hide, and which, in my opinion, is no less a source of information than material artifacts or archaeological finds. So,

2. Architecture

What does Japanese architecture look like? It looks like this:

Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

And now we are looking at one of the main streets of Tokyo in the late 70s and early 80s of the 19th century (the exact date of the photo is unknown):

My favorite "antique" architecture, such as we saw in Kiev, Odessa, St. Petersburg, Sevastopol, and which is present in almost all major cities - the capitals of the world, then everyone can name their city. Here are some more old photos of Tokyo with old buildings. Street in Ginza District, Tokyo

Tokyo Station, built of red brick:

Does it seem to me, or is he submerged in the ground? So two meters? Here's a modern look:

It is advisable to enlarge and examine all the details, the image is clickable.

But a photo of Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake, pay attention to the building, which is covered with earth, just like in St. Petersburg, but not from the earthquake, you can see the steps that were attached much later than construction for convenience:

And more photos of the eastern capital:

National Bank in Tokyo

Photo from the beginning of the article - Tokyo Post Office

Street in Tokyo Prefecture (District) - Ginjo:

Tokyo City Hall

Tokyo City Police Headquarters

Just like in some "European" city. We can certainly say that the fashion for antiquity broke out in Europe, but Japan is a completely different matter, which for more than two centuries was isolated from the outside world from 1639 until the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in Japan in 1854. Perhaps they started building after the removal of the "iron curtain"? That is, an enlightened European comes and says that it would not hurt you guys to build stone buildings, like we do in Europe, otherwise they are all wooden and wooden. Let your architects familiarize themselves with construction technology, projects of famous buildings, train a large number of people who will be bricklayers, train builders who have not built anything like this before, plan new streets in a densely populated city so that there is space, right in the city center, old buildings can be demolished. Well, or use our services, invite our architects and builders, let them sculpt, as they say. Would the Japanese have given the go-ahead for such an event? It is one thing a Japanese architect wants to build a building in the style of "neo-classicism", for example, but most of the projects in tribute to traditional architecture will be in the traditional Japanese style, another thing is whole streets built up with houses that are absolutely indistinguishable from European or Russian cities.

The problem of dense and overpopulation in Tokyo and Japan in general is now especially urgent. Perhaps, in the second half of the 19th century, everything was different? This is what the port city of Nagasaki looked like, the one that was subsequently subjected to nuclear bombardment, founded in the 17th century and being a major trading port, a "window to Europe" for the Japanese:

The layout of Tokyo. Straight lines, no randomness of the building

And this is what we see in Yokohama. Petersburg space and width. According to the official version, the city was founded in 1858 by combining two small villages - Yokohama and Kanagawa, whose inhabitants were engaged in agriculture and fishing. Then construction began on a port capable of receiving foreign commercial ships. Over the next two decades, Yokohama became one of the largest ports on the Japanese islands, and in 1889 its population reached 122 thousand. A significant success in the development of urban infrastructure was the construction of a water supply system (1887) and the electrification of the city (1890).

An antique statue can be seen on the roof of this building.

Very reminiscent of the old Khreshchatyk

Yokohama Town Hall

Foreign Missions Area in Yokohama:

Kobe city

Some monuments are also interesting, for example these ones:

Hmm … Something that reminds me of

And here is the eagle monument:

The eagle seems to be not a Japanese sacred animal, what makes the main symbol of antiquity in the land of the rising sun?

Now let's move on to the megalithic structures of Japan.

3. Castles and "fortresses"

Well, where without my favorite "star" power plants? Goryokaku Power Station, Hakodate City:

Of. date of construction - 1866. After all, the Europeans came and built it. The optimal position to defend the city (from whom?), The ideal position for shelling and so on, according to the fortification textbook.

Edo Castle - Founded in 1457 by the samurai commander Ota Dokan on the site of a fortified estate of the Edo clan on the northern shore of Tokyo Bay. In 1590, it was overhauled by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the shogunate. During the 17th and 19th centuries, it was the main citadel of the Edo shogunate, the central residence of 15 generations of Tokugawa shoguns. Since 1869 - the location of the Tokyo Imperial Palace.

Awesome megalithic masonry. And here is the Peter and Paul Fortress:

Matsumoto castle

It's time to summarize all this beauty.

4. Conclusions

Respecting the individuality of each person individually, I, as in previous articles, will not make huge, detailed, well-thought-out conclusions, giving everyone the freedom to make their own. My point of view may not be the only correct one, I show what causes me a lot of questions, what destroys all the templates and stereotypes that I have known since school. I hope you, dear readers, will also have a bunch of questions, which I will be incredibly happy about.

What can you say? The architecture of such cities as Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Kyoto is another confirmation of the fact that once there was a single culture within a single empire that occupied the whole world, this culture was mass-produced, the economy was of the highest level (try now to make a stable economy within the framework of the world state), the highest level was the skill of making both small household items and huge temple complexes, megalithic structures and the construction of cities. In particular, this is evidenced by the identical architecture, layout and characteristic elements of the central cities of the world in different parts of our planet, and technologies were sometimes used that are beyond the power of modern technology or equipment. But who were these people? As we saw earlier in the United States, these were the same people who originally lived in the Japanese islands. It was they who left in the culture of Japan a deep reverence for the primordial solar symbol - the swastika, which is called Manji and is considered a sacred symbol in Japan. It was they who built the central cities of Japan, where new inhabitants later moved to live, equipping them with their culture and traditions. How the original "tenants" "moved out" is still a great mystery, and I am not sure that this resettlement was painless, as, indeed, from other cities of the world.

All health and sober mind)

Mikhail Volk