TOKYOMANGO

Vintage cigarette and beer ads

I like this one a lot! Badass soldiers with their courageous manly cigs.

via Pink Tentacle

Vintage photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from LIFE

Tomorrow is the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. In honor of that, Life Magazine has posted photos from the immediate aftermath taken by its photographers who were on the ground around that time. As they point out in a 1945 article:

20 men and one woman [all LIFE photographers] spent a total of 13,000 days outside the U.S., of which half the days and nights were spent in combat zones.... [Five] were wounded in action, two were torpedoed ... and about a dozen contracted malaria, sometimes complicated by dysentery and dengue fever." No fewer than five of those photographers spent time in Nagasaki, Hiroshima, or both, in the late summer and fall of 1945.

Link

The Sun, a documentary about WW2 Emperor Hirohito

Emperor Hirohito is the subject of a new Russian film that's showing in New York City right now, called The Sun. I have not seen it, nor do I know much about it, but it sounds it could be interesting for those who have a fascination with Japan before, during, and after WW2.

By the way, the best book that explains how Japan changed after WW2 is Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower. Read it now if you haven't already.

My favorite movie about this era is a documentary by famed filmmaker Kazuo Hara called Emperor's Naked Army Marches On — it chronicles the journey of one WW2 vet whose mission is to get soldiers to atone for crimes committed during the war, many years later.

Related stories:
Wings of Defeat: a documentary about kamikaze pilots
New uncensored HBO documentary on Hiroshima

46 years ago today: a coal mining accident and train wreck kill 600

Wired.com spotlights two tragedies that happened on Nov 9, 1963: industrial accidents that killed more than 600 people in one day.

The first accident occurred at the Miike coal mine between Omuta and Arao. Ten mining carts loaded with coal were being hauled to the surface at around 3:12 in the afternoon. One of the chains linking the carts together severed and sent eight of them careening out of control to the bottom of mine. The carts traveled nearly 400 yards and hit speeds of 73 mph before crashing....As if that weren't enough, several hundred miles away in Yokohama, a deadly three-train railroad crash had occurred.

This day in tech [Wired.com]

Japanese full names used to be super long

My mother sent me an interesting article published in The Japan Times earlier this month that digs up the origins of Japanese first and last names. Japanese names used to be super long back in the pre-Meiji period, including clan name, birth order, two ancient titles, and a personal name. The first name-last name simplified combo is only a century or so old.

The story also comes with a fun sidebar that lists the 10 most common Japanese last names. Can you guess what they are? I'll post the answers on Monday.

Link