#its very rare nowadays that i get uninterrupted time just.. online

[jalboyhenthusiast]

hey this is gonna be random and maybe kinda lame but i want to say it's cool how you do things at your own pace and don't give into any pressures. i'm talking about fandom and sm and pop culture and stuff like that. i really like that you're not up to date with what's going on in celebrity land, or what bereal is, or you watching fandom content months later etc. i find it really refreshing and kinda want to be like that sooo any tips? ha i know this sounds odd but it's something i struggle with

oh oh this is so sweet and not at all lame 🥹

honestly i think its a combination of things and not necessarily anything i'm doing consciously. for example, i have a pretty demanding and busy day job that i do from the office (i wfh maybe once a week max.. today is one of those days which is why i can answer rn) so i just dont get a chance to keep up with things as they happen. sometimes ill check in quickly during the day and add things to my likes to come back to later which is why you'll see me add them to my queue like months after its happened lol. i also dont use twitter or tiktok or pretty much any other sm other than tumblr and ig (for keeping up with my friends/the celebs i care about) so celeb news just doesnt cross my path unless someone tells me or its idk hugely viral. my sister actually makes fun of me for this 😭 shes always asking me what rock i live under when im out of the loop on drama dfkgjn and also i think its personality dependent. for example i dont really get fomo so it doesnt bother me if im not in the thick of it when things go down 🤷🏻‍♀️

idk if that was even helpful but basically its a combination of keeping busy doing other things and.. out of sight out of mind. so you wont feel the need to constantly be on top of the latest news if you're 1) doing other things and 2) not even seeing them happen. i think its also worth remembering that none of this matters irl.. i know its obvious but sometimes its useful to repeat. your life still goes on and your bills still need paying even if something crazy is happening online lmao. good luck!! <3

[yamayuandadu]

300 followers special: debunking Arahabaki

Arahabaki is a mythical figure with a relatively large popculture footprint, mostly thanks to Shin Megami Tensei, but little to no source material to go with it. For this reason, especially in english-speaking spheres, many claims rooted in pseudohistory and hoaxes, such as the image above, circulate uninterrupted. Under the cut, I will attempt to debunk their source. If stories about dogu, piss bottles and improbable journeys to Ecuador interest you, you found the right place.

The claims of Arahabaki's antiquity and in particular associating this obscure deity with dogu – specifically the shakoki dogu -  all go back to Tsugaru Soto Sangunshi (I will refer to it as TSS in the rest of this article) and other associated writings, so called ”Wada family documents,” all of them written by a certain Kihachiro Wada. It's a series of forgeries created in the 1970s (with additional works produced through the rest of Wada's life – he passed away in 1999), which in addition to presenting a fictional history of the Tohoku region, centered around a fictional local kingdom, also mention Mayan prophecies, Nostradamus, Mu, and various scientific concepts, usually misunderstood by the author. To my knowledge, TSS is only covered in one english language source, which is horrid and basically unusable - The Sacred Science of Ancient Japan: Lost Chronicles of the Age of the Gods by Avery Morrow, which does present the truth - eg. that it's a forgery - but then the author gets caught up in some sort of Evola-influenced spiritual doctrine which makes him claim that perhaps it's an echo of some "spiritual truth" or something along these lines, which is obviously not a sound argument from the perspective of anyone with even just a passing interest in history. Social sciences are still sciences, not religions. TSS claims shakoki dogu represent an “outlawed” god formerly worshiped by people inhabiting Tohoku, whose name was also their endonym. It doesn't delve deeper into the history of Jomon art, and doesn't acknowledge dogu other than shakoki – considering not all dogu found in the Tohoku region (or even further north) belong to this category, it potentially makes it possible Wada was simply familiar with von Daniken’s confabulations and had no other exposure to jomon art; I have not seen this possibility in any japanese debunking articles, though. It's additionally worth noting here that while the exact purpose of dogu remains unknown up to this day, they're neither a taboo (indeed, many towns use peculiar locally excavated dogu as mascots nowadays, like Ravi from Minami Alps), nor particularly rare – estimatesof the number known today vary between 15000 (National Museum of Japanese History estimate) - 18000 (estimate from this article). The majority are of course not shakoki dogu; the difference between various estimates likely comes from different approach to counting figures only known from fragments.

Wada claimed that he merely discovered TSS, rather than wrote it – according to his account, a case of old documents fell from the ceiling while his  house was being renovated in 1948. Supposedly, the discovery – so called “Kansei original” - was compiled between 1789 to 1822, and then copied between 1870 and 1910. Wada later claimed he lost the original, but based on gathered evidence it seems obvious it never existed. Various pages known to researchers, purported to come from the original, the Taisho copy, and writing Wada confirmed to be his own, are written in the same style, and with the same mistakes. Additionally, as a visit made in the house by a debunker at the request of Wada's cousin, who appears to be its owner currently, confirmed it's virtually impossible that a large number of documents could have been stored above the ceiling; it has also been called into question if the house existed before 1950. What the visit did reveal was a large number of plastic bottles containing human urine, left undistrubed since the 1990s. A relatively unsophisticated way to make paper appear older than it is requires soaking it in urine, and this rather offputting find has proven that this was Wada's preferred method of making his writing appear older than it is to onlookers, especially these lacking formal experience with antiquities.

Truth to be told, even without the grand urine discovery, TSS was not difficult to discard as a forgery. As I mentioned above, its particular weakness are bizarre references to scientific concepts and discoveries, revealing a low level of historical awareness of the author – for example, references are made to quasars, continental drift theory and Pluto – discoveries not yet made in the suggested eras; to make it more embarrassing, TSS claims it was based on foreign sources which weren't yet published at the listed dates. It also references natural disasters which never happened, and urban legends and folklore which only developed recently, like the claims about Jesus' grave being located in Aomori prefecture, which only date back to the 1930s (Wada's documents claimed it was a story already known in the Kansei period, in the 1790s...). On top of all of this, a number of purported authentic illustrations were simply traced from contemporary sources:

It's worth noting that TSS wasn't the only fraud Wada was involved in, as we can learn from his wikipedia biography he fraudulently claimed to be a former Imperial Palace escort officer before embarking on his adventure with crafting false chronicles soaked in urine. Tragically, TSS found supporters not only among the expected crowd of various wannabe occultists, frauds and naive teenagers, but also among a number of genuine historians, most notably Takehiko Furuta. It would appear that he became interested in it in hopes of finding support for his theories about Japan originally having more than one ruling family, but with time he fully embraced it, and actively advocated the bizarre visions it contained. A particularly outlandish claim of his was insisting that Meiji era educator and political activist Fukuzawa Yukichi quoted TSS in his work (the quote in mention appears to be a paraphrase from american declaration of independence). It's worth noting that while Furuta seemingly was a genuinely accomplished scholar of Shinran doctrine, supporting TSS was far from his only adventure with pseudohistory. He was also a staunch believer in the long discredited claims about links between japanese Jomon culture and the Valvidia culture of Ecuador, claiming that various references to fantastical lands lying between China and Japan or beyond Japan prove that the Japanese reached America in ancient times (you can torment yourself with one of such articles here). This theory was briefly advocated by a number of American scholars before him, but obviously has no support today. It's nothing but a new take on XVIIIth century French claims about present day British Columbia being the Fusang described in some Chinese texts. Sometimes strange lands and creatures at the edge of the map are nothing more but fantasy. Furuta's particularly shameful contribution to TSS discourse was declaring that undermining its authenticity is rooted in historical prejudice against the inhabitants of Tohoku and Hokkaido. Personally I'm under the impression that discarding an entire region's real, very complex history in favor of fanciful hoaxes is much more likely to be rooted in such prejudice. The claim Arahabaki was an Ainu kamuy, common online, appears to come from a similar place – I will not examine it here, but I find attempts to shield forgeries from criticism by attaching them to poorly documented and historically suppressed beliefs of historically persecuted groups to be even more disgusting than regular fraud of this sort.   What Arahabaki actually is? This is difficult for me to tell for sure, but certainly nothing out of ordinary - not a dogu, and not the main figure of some lost fabulous country. There is a number of mundane temples enshrining Arahabaki, for example here. This article also mentions a number of mundane locations enshrining Arahabaki today; curiously, many of them are located outside Tohoku. A number of theories exist, linking Arahabaki to the usual suspects: religious beliefs of the Emishi people, who originally inhabited Tohoku, and may or may not be one and the same as ancestors of present day Ainu; snake worship; ironworking traditions; marebito beliefs; gods enshrined in freshly established fortresses... Whatever the truth is, it will inevitably turn out to be more interesting than hoaxes, as study of history generally proves.