#i keep saying that east rukongai is soul society's new jersey

[bleachbleachbleach]

I started typing this in the tags and then I was like, well, that's probably a mistake, so I'm aborting mission and just starting up here. XDD The whole land question in Soul Society has always been interesting to me, because if the souls of Rukongai do not need to eat, I feel like that removes one of the biggest motivators for ag and commerce that supports people eating, and why having a shitload of land would be valuable in any real way, since the eating population of the Seireitei isn't really that big, either, even if that means there's some element of Rukongai peasants farming on behalf of the Seireitei's food supply. But I guess that's also assuming that their value system would equate land only with value through arability, and if everything is reishi maybe they're better at valuing land as land than a lot of the LIving World tends to be. Land is land, tracts of land act as wells of reishi, and idk, this inspires status-play where owning a lot of land implies that your line will have greater reiryoku. Not through any direct biological mechanism, but through the general feeling that it's a way of maintaining your connection to the sacred/to the mystery that is the Soul King, or something like that.

(I don't actually *know* anything useful about this, except that the European divine right of kinds functions slightly differently than the conception of divinity re: the Japanese emperor. I feel like that might be generative for discussions about the Soul King business, except 1) I don't know enough political history or religious studies to have understood the one article I skimmed one time, except that a lot of the time it seemed like being a conduit for the divine in the Japanese sense was a much suckier deal than being a God-appointed King of France or whatever, and 2) I am a professional at retaining absolutely zero knowledge of anything even remotely related to the Soul King, LOL. SOUL KING WHOMST. Yhwach talks and my brain stops processing language, oh no.)

And maybe back in the way your power as a noble family could be demonstrated by the amount of land you could steward/keep clean of Hollows, up until this part gets less fun to them and becomes the purview of the Gotei. And now instead of that, we largely just have the districts as defined by the Gotei and maybe scattered in there some random nobles with connections to this or that area, like the Shiba. To say nothing of the districts that might be 'districted' nominally, but like, no one ever goes there or really knows what that is, like you mentioned!

And then the Seireitei is its own issue because even though it's a contained urban space with limited growth potential because it's got these giant walls constraining its edges, it's certainly not... hurting for space? Like, sure, we can be boring and say that no one's ever in the streets because it's a pain to draw/animate but I rather feel like the empty-streets quality is a huge part of the Seireitei's characterization, with a bunch of random empty buildings that nobody actual uses, and all the rooms are built just a little too big and the furniture never looks right in the space and it's all just a bit Weird. Which is a quality of the Seireitei's that I am very fond of!

I'm kind of into the idea that at some past point the population of the Seireitei used to be a lot larger, and it's been constricting for some time now. Well, I mean, post-TYBW it's even smaller. But pre-TYBW! So the Seireitei used to be right-sized at some point, maybe even a little too small and in need of expansion, and now that's not the case, and quite the opposite. I guess what I'm saying is that some element of the Seireitei gives me Detroit vibes. OR it was built in anticipation of a population boom that never actually happened.

(Even if the stated reason for "needing" to commit genocide against the Quincy was an issue of soul stoichiometry, I feel like simultaneous long-term anxieties about Seireitei and/or shinigami proliferation (let's say high spiritual energy souls, regardless of their enlistment/employment) would probably create a socio-political climate that would sway Seireitei denizens into thinking some type of way about Quincy and soul stoichiometry...)

Though now I've ended up in a place that has nothing to do with the original post and not a lot to do even with your post I am trying to reply to, which is what I was trying to avoid doing in the original post LOL because what a mess this reply is!!! But I've enjoyed all the directions these replies have gone anyway! I guess the full-circle here is that despite the fact that supply-and-demand would suggest obtaining land/property in the Seireitei would be achievable, the nobles were just like "fuck your supply-and-demand curve, land costs 999999999999999 eleventy kan. Begone, peasants. To the superfund pit with you!"

This probably requires a much longer, sprawling post (the number of tentacles increased exponentially every 2 seconds as I was thinking about this) but despite Gotei captains making good money and having fairly high social standing, I feel like land prices must be set artificially, astronomically high so that no one but the already-landed nobility [or a governmental entity, lie the Gotei] could possibly ever own anything. That 'officer's neighborhood' or whatever it is is cushy, but it's also technically just a reserve the nobility has consented to so that there's no reason for these people to live anywhere else (unless they already have property by virtue of being noble). Not sure how this works for commercial leases--are they subsidized by the 46? or does running a business require you to have some kind of arrangement with a noble family. DOES SILVER DRAGONFLY LEASE FROM THE KUCHIKI.

I'm not sure how this would work for Rukongai (except that surely it's very controversial to be buying/selling parcels in Rukongai to begin with, many considering it a foolish audacity to assume such a place can be owned) but I imagine that at the very least the property taxes (or whatever payments/responsibilities inhere in "ownership" in Rukongai, re: assuming responsibility for whatever shit happens out there/keeping it Hollow-controlled, etc.) present a functional barrier to ownership for most individuals.

The generational wealth gap (mostly in terms of having family vs. having no family, but also I guess in terms of shinigami who are really old vs. those who are not) must be bananas, too. But NO, NO, STOPPING, this post was supposed to be 2 sentences about Seireitei land prices and it's already about seventy other things. It's 9AM stopping STOPPING

[bleachbleachbleach]

[Bleach e312]

Snake Wines and Beer Steins*: An Anthropology of West Rukongai

* I learned this morning that is not a stein, but I’m keeping it for the assonance!

Really down the rabbithole with this episode and cannot put it down, but this cap is such a completely fascinating glimpse at potential Rukongai cultures and trade routes! 

The first thing that caught my eye, naturally, was the snake, which when this scene first came up I thought was just a completely undressed snake on a plate. But when I went to take the cap, no! It’s a snake in liquid! Which led me to believe it was a pickled snake. 

But then my co-blogger brought up snake wine, which it definitely is. According to Wikipedia, the liquid part of habushu, snake sake from the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa), is mixed with herbs and honey, which is why it has a yellow tint. The Habu snake is a pit viper viewed as both a menace (it can launch itself and bite you from pretty far away) and as a god, bestowing health and virility. (Contemporary Ryukyuan/Okinawan literature sometimes includes habu snakes as an anti-colonial metaphor, such as Medoruma Shun’s 1999 short story, “Hope.”)

1. Increased Importance of Medicinal Food vs. Sustenance Food in Rukongai

Makes all the sense in the world to me that Rukongai would have virility wine. If you don’t need to eat to survive, I imagine the value of virility wine is quite high. ...I mean, what else is there to do out there?

2. Climate Profiles Suggest Far-Reaching Trade Networks

Because the Gate Guardian who shows up in this episode is Jidanbou, this means the village Oomaeda encounters is in West Rukongai somewhere—probably close to the gates, since Soi Fon expected him back after a day trip. (But per the Bount arc, Renji can apparently run to the ass-end of Rukongai to the Seireitei and back in a few hours, so there’s some wiggle room here.) 

Nothing we’ve seen from West Rukongai suggests it’s climatologically similar to the Ryukyu Islands (or to southeast Asia, where similar pit vipers live), which are subtropical. Soul Society always gives the impression of being fairly temperate. At least, it snows in the Seireitei without mountain elevations being involved (Winter Fireworks chapter). West Rukongai is where Hokutan is, the mountains where Kaien and Rukia trained, which gave the impression of being pretty temperate. West Rukongai is also where Junrinan is—where Hitsugaya and Hinamori are from. Judging by Hitsugaya’s behavior in the Beach Episode, if Junrinan was anything like the Ryukyu Islands, he’d have perished long ago.

So… DID THEY TRADE FOR IT. DID THEY GET THE SNAKE WINE FROM ELSEWHERE. How far away is that elsewhere? How many different owners’ hands did it pass through to make it to this village, to this feast? Snake wine is intended to age fairly substantially, which in Rukongai could mean quite a bit of time. How old is this snake wine? What is its provenance?? Potential evidence of complex and far-reaching patterns of trade and shared ascriptions of value, is what I’m saying. snake wine snake wine snake wine

In my mind, I’ve mostly transposed Japan over Soul Society and imagine  North Rukongai as northern Japan, West Rukongai as western Japan, etc. Except in my mind sometimes south is southern Japan and sometimes it’s northern New Mexico lol. East Rukongai in my mind is "idk, New Jersey?" Maybe the snake wine is from the version of southern Rukongai where Pirate AU Soi Fon lives, dominating the high seas…

3. Evidence of Glassworking and Alcohol Production Characteristic of the late 19th/early 20th Centuries

[For reference, Soul Society is typically described as being similar to the Edo Period of Japanese history, which spanned the 17th-19th centuries.]

The second standout beverage here is the beer stein, which I called a stein and then learned that the original beer steins came from the Bubonic Plague era and had tops, for plague reasons, and were made out of wood and leather and then pewter. What do I know, I don’t drink, LOL.

That is more technically a ten-sided handled glass pint, which became popular in the early half of the 20th century in England, though some sources place it in Austria a few decades earlier. Drinking beer out of various forms of glass predates that, and there was a whole period of ceramic drinkware and trade with China and Japan thrown in the centuries between, blah blah. But two things are probably true if there’s a glass beer mug: 

 1. Glassworking has developed enough to make this workable/not a holy pain, production-wise. But again, this is Rukongai—maybe this is the one mug in all existence in West Rukongai and not something intended for mass production. They’re toasting the once-in-a-lifetime event of a Gotei captain slumming it with them, after all. Heck, maybe they got it from the Seireitei, which definitely has more than one of these, though after a cursory look at two places I thought they’d appear, neither does. LOL. Welp. 

2. Beer production has developed enough that it’s filtered and there’s not unseemly gunk floating around in it (made obvious by the fact that you’re drinking it out of a clear glass mug). This could mean Rukongai is pretty with the times with is alcohol production.

Not that that begins to touch why ten-sided handled glass pints from late 19th/early 20th century England and/or Austria are in West Rukongai, a place less likely to have them than the Seireitei, where weird anachronistic stuff seems like it would come into circulation with more regularity.

I love the idea that even if souls don’t remember their previous lives, there’s still imprints and rogue dreams and strange images floating around in their heads, their muscle memories. But like, specifically the version where sometimes the rogue dream is just a gigantic, bomb-ass cup that Some Guy then proceeds to spend his entire afterlife re-developing. He is a VISIONARY. A GENIUS. A rare mind inventing something the likes of which have never been seen is this world but that exist in his mind so clearly it is as though he has seen it in his hands before!!