MealtimeVideos Cafe

A brief explanation of the origins, popularity, and sudden revival of one of Japan's most iconic musical genres.

(This is the original mini-documentary uploaded to Van Paugam's YouTube channel several years ago. Due to persistent copyright takedowns, almost everything he uploaded to YouTube has been deleted and his account is now inactive. I was fortunate enough to save this video before they started disappearing from his channel, enjoy.)

For the majority of the 8th century, Nara was home to Japan’s first permanent capital. Known as Heijō-kyō it was a massive planned city with somewhere between 100,000-200,000 inhabitants. But it was suddenly abandoned when the court moved to what would become Kyoto. Buried under farmlands for over 1,000 years, many remains of this lost city have now been excavated, and some of its most important buildings are being reconstructed. This video showcases several of these projects.

Uploaded to YouTube by Kings and Things.

@kingsandthings
While making this video I kept finding interesting things I wanted to include in the script, but in the end had to cut out a lot because it was getting way too long and because a lot of it wasn’t strictly necessary in order to talk about the reconstructions (which was the intended topic). So I thought I’d briefly mention some of the things I read here instead:

Heijō-kyō wasn’t the first Chinese-style capital built in Japan. That distinction goes to the city of Fujiwara-kyō, about 20 km to the south, at the other end of the Nara Basin. It is actually believed to have been larger than Heijō-kyō in terms of area, but only lasted for sixteen years, between 694 and 710. One of the main roads of this city extended in a straight line all the way to Nara. It had a total width of almost 35 m, and upon reaching the main gate it widened even further, transforming into Suzaku Avenue. As mentioned in the video, the gate was called the Rajō-mon. An equivalent of it also existed in Heian-kyō (Kyoto), which provided the setting and title for Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story "Rashōmon". In 1950 it was adapted into the classic film of the same name by Akira Kurosawa.

Before these cities were created, Japanese capitals had consisted of a series of ever-grander 'palace complexes', courts that moved with changes of reign. More than a dozen such transfers of the court have been identified for the period from 593 to 710. There were probably a number of practical reasons for this custom, but it has also been attributed to the Shinto belief that the death of a ruler caused his palace to become polluted. So, to avoid bad luck, it became necessary for his heir to transfer the court to a new, ritually pure location.

The fact that Nara had once been the capital of Japan was never forgotten, but the exact size, layout, and location of major buildings were unknown until the 1850s, when a scholar and government official called Kitaura Sadamasa began to survey the area. He discovered that parts of the grid still survived on the ridges of rice fields and on local roads, and managed to compile a map, estimating what Heijo-kyo had looked like. Sadamasa correctly guessed the location of the Imperial Palace, where Sekino Tadashi would later find the remains of the Second Daigoku-den.

Not long thereafter, in the early 1900s, a preservation movement began to take shape. One of its leaders was a gardener called Tanada Kajūro, who planted many of the old trees that can now be seen in Nara Park (famous for its free-roaming deer). He would dedicate his life to commemorating the Heijō Palace ruins, and at one point advocated the idea of rebuilding the palace as a Shinto shrine. This idea came from Heian Shrine, a copy of the ancient palace in Kyoto, that had been rebuilt in the 1890s as a shrine dedicated to the first and last Emperors that reigned from the city. This scheme never gathered enough support however, and while the preservation efforts were making steady progress in the 1920s, Tanada became embroiled in a controversy related to the project, and chose to commit seppuku to prove his innocence. A statue of him can now be found along the reconstructed Suzaku Avenue, near the entrance of the Palace Complex.

The true scale of the palace was only understood when ongoing excavations began in the 1950s. Before then, a railway line had unknowingly been built over the southern part of the ruins, which still remains today. There have recently been plans to relocate it, but they were put on hold last year by the new governor of Nara Prefecture, over doubts about the financial viability of the project.

Just to clarify. The guy in the video criticize the decision of some of footballers for not wearing the rainbow armbands.

The Windows 95 Launch was nuts. Never before and never since would an Operating System create the kind of excitement and hype that Windows 95 did. This video explores exactly why and how.

Uploaded to YouTube by Nostalgia Nerd.

Consider using FreeTube, an open-source program for YouTube, because your privacy is important.

To many, SereneScreen Marine Aquarium screensavers are most well known by the versions for Windows XP. Or perhaps the Aquatic Life version on Roku 4K devices. But there were many more releases and editions in the 2000s, plus a whole history going back 40 years to the Commodore 64 and Amiga days!

Uploaded to YouTube by LGR.

Fairly interesting video about a tiny transitional hamlet, if even that.

The math background needed to enjoy the video is not very extensive. Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) explains everything to the best of his ability from a perspective of "discovering mathematics" and helping you "convince yourself" that you could have come to the same conclusion as well (i.e. grasping as much of the proof as you can). And if that goes over your head, then the animations are still really pretty!

My description:

An intreguing video that takes an innocuous problem of finding an inscribed square in a closed, continuous curve and connects it to familiar topologic objects, like the torus (or the coffee mug!), the Möbius strip, and the Klein bottle.

Timestamps:

0:00​ - Inscribed squares

1:00​ - Preface to the second edition

3:04​ - The main surface

10:47​ - The secret surface

16:45​ - Klein bottles

22:38​ - Why are squares harder?

25:10​ - What is topology?