McGraw-Hill/public domain; copy from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives
Once upon a time, long before Maurice Sendak illustrated Where The Wild Things Are (1963), he published, notes Ars Technica, “his first professional illustrations in a 1947 popular science book about nuclear physics, Atomics for the Millions.” Only 18 years old, Sendak provided the illustrations; his physics teacher, Hyman Ruchlis authored the text, along with professor Maxwell Leigh Eidinoff.
According to science historian Ryan Dahn, “Sendak agreed to do the work for 1% of the royalties, of which he received an advance of $100, about $1600 today.” Not bad for a teenager creating his first credited work.
If you find yourself grappling with an intellectual problem that’s gone unsolved for millennia, try taking a few months off and spending them on activities like swimming and meditating. That very strategy worked for a Cambridge PhD student named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a summer of non-research-related activities, returned to a text by the ancient grammarian, logician, and “father of linguistics” Pāṇini and found it newly comprehensible. The rules of its composition had stumped scholars for 2,500 years, but, as Rajpopat tells it in an article by Tom Almeroth-Williams at Cambridge’s website, “Within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns started emerging, and it all started to make sense.”
Pāṇini composed his texts using a kind of algorithm: “Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process,” writes Almeroth-Williams. But “often, two or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simultaneously applicable at the same step, leaving scholars to agonize over which one to choose.” Or such was the case, at least, before Rajpopat’s discovery that the difficult-to-interpret “metarule” meant to apply to such cases dictates that “between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Pāṇini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side.”
That may not be immediately understandable to those unfamiliar with the structure of Sanskrit. Almeroth-Williams’ piece clarifies with an example using mantra, one word from the language that everybody knows. “In the sentence ‘devāḥ prasannāḥ mantraiḥ’ (‘The Gods [devāḥ] are pleased [prasannāḥ] by the mantras [mantraiḥ]’) we encounter ‘rule conflict’ when deriving mantraiḥ, ‘by the mantras,’ ” he writes. ” The derivation starts with ‘mantra + bhis.’ One rule is applicable to the left part ‘mantra’ and the other to right part ‘bhis.’ We must pick the rule applicable to the right part ‘bhis,’ which gives us the correct form ‘mantraih.’ ”
Applying this rule renders interpretations of Pāṇini’s work almost completely unambiguous and grammatical. It could even be employed, Rajpopat has noted, to teach Sanskrit grammar to computers being programmed for natural language processing. It no doubt took him a great deal of intensive study to reach the point where he was able to discover the true meaning of Pāṇini’s clarifying metarule, but it didn’t truly present itself until he let his unconscious mind take a crack at it. As we’ve said here on Open Culture before, there are good reasons we do our best thinking while doing things like walking or taking a shower, a phenomenon that philosophers have broadly recognized through the ages — and, like as not, was understood by the great Pāṇini himself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Image via The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives
Seen today, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, seems to occupy several time periods at once, looking both modern and somehow ancient. The latter quality surely has to do with its bright white color, which we associate (especially in such an institutional context) with Greek and Roman statues. But just like those statues, the Guggenheim wasn’t actually white to begin with. “Fewer and fewer New Yorkers may recall that the museum, in a then-grimier city, used to be beige,” writes the New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman. “Robert Moses thought it looked like ‘jaundiced skin.’ ” Hence, presumably, the decision during a 1992 expansion to paint over the earthen hue of Wright’s choice.
Not that beige was the only contender in the design phase. Look at the archival drawings, Kimmelman writes, and you’ll find “a reminder that Wright had contemplated some pretty far-out colors — Cherokee red, orange, pink.”
The very thought of that last “leads down a rabbit hole of alternative New York history,” and if you’re curious to see what a pink Guggenheim might have looked like from the street, David Romero at Hooked on the Past has created a few digitally modified photos. The result hardly comes off as being in taste quite as poor as one might expect; in fact, it could have fit quite well into the Memphis-embracing nineteen-eighties, and even the postmodern nineties. The image above, showing the Guggenheim imagined in pink, comes from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives.
But as it is, “closed off to the city around it, the building’s antiseptic, spanking-white facade, today is in keeping with the neighborhood.” That itself is in keeping with Wright’s ideas for transforming the American city, which he kept on putting forth until the end of his life. Attempting to solve “the problem of the inner city,” he conceived “fantastical megastructures for places like downtown Pittsburgh, Baghdad, and Madison, Wisconsin,” all of them “city-based but anti-urban projects, divorced from the streets.” Even working in the United States’ densest metropolis, Wright expressed a longing for the splendid isolation of the American countryside, where a man — at least as the lore has it — can paint his house any color he pleases.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Andrew Huberman–the host of the influential Huberman Lab podcast–has gotten a lot of mileage out of his recommended morning routine. His routine emphasizes the importance of getting sunlight within 30–60 minutes of waking; also engaging in light physical activity; hydrating well; and avoiding coffee for the first 90–120 minutes. In his words:
I highly recommend that everybody delay their caffeine intake for 90 to 120 minutes after waking. However painful it may be to eventually arrive at that 90 to 120 minutes after waking, you want, and I encourage you, to clear out whatever residual adenosine is circulating in your system in that first 90 to 120 minutes of the day. Get that sunlight exposure, get some movement to wake up, and then, and only then, start to ingest caffeine because what you’ll do if you delay caffeine intake until 90 to 120 minutes after waking is you will avoid the so-called afternoon crash.
And if you drink caffeine at any point throughout the day, really try and avoid any caffeine, certainly avoid drinking more than a hundred milligrams of caffeine after 4:00 p.m and probably even better to limit your last caffeine intake to 3:00 p.m. or even 2:00 p.m.
For many, this isn’t exactly a welcome piece of advice. And you naturally wonder how the advice sits with James Hoffmann, author of The World Atlas of Coffee, who has developed a robust YouTube channel where he explores the ins and outs of making coffee. In the video above, Hoffmann explores the research supporting Huberman’s advice, all with the goal of determining whether Huberman is ruining (or improving) our early waking hours.
For decades and decades, Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons have served as a kind of default children’s entertainment. Originally conceived for theatrical exhibition in the nineteen-thirties, they were animated to a standard that held its own against the subsequent generations of television productions alongside which they would later be broadcast. Even their classical music-laden soundtracks seemed to signal higher aspirations. But when scrutinized closely enough, they turned out not to be as timeless and inoffensive as everyone had assumed. In fact, eleven Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons have been withheld from syndication since the nineteen-sixties due to their content.
The LSuperSonicQ video above takes a look at the “Censored Eleven,” all of which have been suppressed for qualities like “exaggerated features, racist tones, and outdated references.” Produced between 1931 and 1944, these cartoons have been described as reflecting perceptions widely held by viewers at the time that have since become unacceptable. Take, for example, the black proto-Elmer Fudd in “All This and Rabbit Stew,” from 1941, a collection of “ethnic stereotypes including oversized clothing, a shuffle to his movement, and mumbling sentences.” In other productions, like “Jungle Jitters” and “The Isle of Pingo Pongo,” the offense is against native islanders, depicted therein as hard-partying cannibals.
At first glance, “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,” from 1943, may resemble a grotesque carnival of stereotypes. But as director Bob Clampett later explained, it originated when he “was approached in Hollywood by the cast of an all-black musical off-broadway production called Jump For Joy while they were doing some special performances in Los Angeles. They asked me why there weren’t any Warner’s cartoons with black characters and I didn’t have any good answer for that question. So we sat down together and came up with a parody of Disney’s Snow White, and ‘Coal Black’ was the result.” These performers provided the voices (credited, out of contractual obligation, to Mel Blanc), and Clampett paid tribute in the character designs to real jazz musicians he knew from Central Avenue.
However admirable the intentions of “Coal Black” — and however masterful its animation, which has come in for great praise from historians of the medium — it remains relegated to the banned-cartoons netherworld. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t see it today: like most of the “Censored Eleven,” it’s long been bootlegged, and it even underwent restoration for the first annual Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in 2010. Some of these controversial shorts appear on the Looney Tunes Gold Collection Volume: 3 DVDs, introduced by Whoopi Goldberg, who makes the sensible point that “removing these inexcusable images and jokes from this collection would be the same as saying they never existed.” Grown-ups may be okay with that, but kids — always the most discerning audience for Warner Bros. cartoons — know when they’re being lied to.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
After making one of the grandest entrances in music history on the stages of East Village clubs, the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, and Saturday Night Live, theatrical German new wave space alien Klaus Nomi died alone in 1983, a victim of the “first beachhead of the AIDS epidemic.” The disease frightened Nomi’s friends away—no one knew anything about what was then called “gay cancer” but that it was deadly. Soon afterward, the immensely talented singer’s reputation declined. Writer Rupert Smith pronounced Nomi “largely forgotten” in a 1994 issue of Attitude magazine, and made a case for renewed attention. “Nomi,” wrote Smith, “remains rock music’s queerest exponent, who outshone the many acts following in his wake.”
But Nomi has since received his due, in a moment of revival that has extended over several years, thanks in part to many of those later acts. In his own day, wrote LD Beghtol at The Village Voice, “the underground punk-opera singer was mostly unknown beyond his small circle of friends and fans.” Nomi was “queer in multiple senses of the word and stood well apart from his fellow East Village bohos.
And he possessed an undeniable gift, a voice that surged up from a husky Weimar croon into the falsetto stratosphere. Operatic countertenors, though, were hopelessly déclassé. His professional options were few.” It’s also the case that Nomi’s opera experience wouldn’t have taken him very far. “As young Klaus Sperber,” writes Smith, “he had worked front-of-house at the Berlin Opera in the late Sixties, and would entertain colleagues with his renditions of the great arias as they swept up after performances.”
But with or without the résumé, Nomi had the voice—one audiences could hardly believe came from the strange, diminutive cabaret character with heavy makeup and tri-cornered receding hairline. At the top of the post, see Nomi’s 1978 debut at New Wave Vaudeville, a four-night revue at Irving Plaza. “Nomi,” Smith tells us, “was a smash.” Skip ahead to 2:14 to see Nomi’s musical director Kristian Hoffman introduce his performance of “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix” (“My heart opens to your voice”) from Camille Saint-Saëns’ 1877 opera Samson et Dalila. After every subsequent performance, Hoffman says, the cabaret’s MC had to assure audiences that Nomi’s voice was “not an electrical recording.”
Nomi’s voice and presence attracted the attention of stars like David Bowie, who hired him as a backup singer for that SNL appearance in 1979 after he appeared on the cult New York public access show TV Party. Glenn O’Brien’s introduction of Nomi as “one of the finest pastry chefs in New York,” above, is only partly tongue in cheek; that was indeed the singer’s day job. But in character, he wielded his otherworldly falsetto like a raygun. “Every song,” writes Pitchfork in an appreciation, “included dramatic multiple shifts in octave, where Klaus would rise to extreme highs and lows, handling both effortlessly. He would jerk his hands into karate chops with each changing note, widening his eyes every time he skirted into higher octaves.”
Nomi’s brand of opera-infused synth-pop and retro-futurist, shiny-suited cabaret act—the “Klaus Nomi Show” as it was called—brought him notoriety in the New York art scene during his lifetime, and has since made him a star, decades after his tragic death. As gratifying as that may be for longtime fans of Nomi’s work, we should also remember that Nomi’s devotion to opera was no mere gimmick, but a lifelong passion and undeniable talent. As we noted in an earlier post, in Nomi’s last performance before his death—in a small 1982 European tour—he sang the aria “Cold Genius” from Henry Purcell’s 1691 opera King Arthur or, The British Worthy, a performance, wrote Matthias Rascher, that was “certainly one of the most memorable in operatic history.” Perhaps we might call it one of the most memorable moments in pop music history as well.
Marcel Duchamp didn’t sign his name on a urinal for lack of ability to create “real” art. In fact, as explained by gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, Duchamp’s grandfather was an artist, as were three of his siblings; he himself attained impressive technical proficiency in painting by his teen years. In 1912, when he was in his mid-twenties, he could transcend convention thoroughly enough to bewilder and even enrage the public by painting Nude Descending a Staircase, which also drew criticisms from his fellow Cubists for being “too Futurist.” From then on, his independent (and not entirely un-mischievous) streak became his entire way of life and art.
That same year, Duchamp, Constantin Brâncuși, and Ferdinand Léger went to the Paris Aviation Salon. Beholding a propeller, Duchamp declared painting “washed up”; what artist could outdo the apparent perfection of the form before him? Getting a job as a librarian, he indulged in a stretch of reading about mathematics and physics.
This got him thinking of the power of chance, one of the forces that moved him to put a bicycle wheel in his studio and spin it around whenever the spirit moved him. This he would later consider his first “readymade” piece, deliberately chosen for being “a functional, everyday item with a total absence of good or bad taste” that “defied the notion that art must be beautiful.”
The famous urinal, entitled Fountain, would come later, in 1917, after he had relocated from Paris to New York. Technically, he didn’t sign his name on it at all, but rather “R. MUTT,” for Richard Mutt, a name partially “inspired by the comic strip Mutt and Jeff, which Duchamp loved. And Richard is French slang for a rich showoff, or a moneybags.” Submitted by a “female friend” and hidden behind a curtain at the show at which it made its debut, the original signed urinal would never be seen again. But it provoked a sufficiently enduring curiosity that, nearly half a century later, a market had emerged for carefully crafted sculptural replicas for Fountain and the other readymades. The irony could hardly have been lost on anyone with a sense of humor — or a willingness to question the nature of art itself — like Duchamp’s.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
How can we know whether a claim someone makes is scientific or not? The question is of the utmost consequence, as we are surrounded on all sides by claims that sound credible, that use the language of science—and often do so in attempts to refute scientific consensus. As we’ve seen in the case of the anti-vaccine crusade, falling victim to pseudoscientific arguments can have dire effects. So how can ordinary people, ordinary parents, and ordinary citizens evaluate such arguments?
The problem of demarcation, or what is and what is not science, has occupied philosophers for some time, and the most famous answer comes from philosopher of science Karl Popper, who proposed his theory of “falsifiability” in 1963. According to Popper, an idea is scientific if it can conceivably be proven wrong. Although Popper’s strict definition of science has had its uses over the years, it has also come in for its share of criticism, since so much accepted science was falsified in its day (Newton’s gravitational theory, Bohr’s theory of the atom), and so much current theoretical science cannot be falsified (string theory, for example). Whatever the case, the problem for lay people remains. If a scientific theory is beyond our comprehension, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to see how it might be disproven.
Physicist and science communicator Richard Feynman came up with another criterion, one that applies directly to the non-scientist likely to be bamboozled by fancy terminology that sounds scientific. Simon Oxenham at Big Think points to the example of Deepak Chopra, who is “infamous for making profound sounding yet entirely meaningless statements by abusing scientific language.” (What Daniel Dennett called “deepities.”) As a balm against such statements, Oxenham refers us to a speech Feynman gave in 1966 to a meeting of the National Science Teachers Association. Rather than asking lay people to confront scientific-sounding claims on their own terms, Feynman would have us translate them into ordinary language, thereby assuring that what the claim asserts is a logical concept, rather than just a collection of jargon.
The example Feynman gives comes from the most rudimentary source, a “first grade science textbook” which “begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science”: it shows its student a picture of a “windable toy dog,” then a picture of a real dog, then a motorbike. In each case the student is asked “What makes it move?” The answer, Feynman tells us “was in the teacher’s edition of the book… ‘energy makes it move.’” Few students would have intuited such an abstract concept, unless they had previously learned the word, which is all the lesson teaches them. The answer, Feynman points out, might as well have been “’God makes it move,’ or ‘Spirit makes it move,’ or, ‘Movability makes it move.’”
Instead, a good science lesson “should think about what an ordinary human being would answer.” Engaging with the concept of energy in ordinary language enables the student to explain it, and this, Feynman says, constitutes a test for “whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way”:
Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language. Without using the word “energy,” tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.
Feynman’s insistence on ordinary language recalls the statement attributed to Einstein about not really understanding something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. The method, Feynman says, guards against learning “a mystic formula for answering questions,” and Oxenham describes it as “a valuable way of testing ourselves on whether we have really learned something, or whether we just think we have learned something.”
It is equally useful for testing the claims of others. If someone cannot explain something in plain English, then we should question whether they really do themselves understand what they profess…. In the words of Feynman, “It is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudoscience.”
Does Feynman’s ordinary language test solve the demarcation problem? No, but if we use it as a guide when confronted with plausible-sounding claims couched in scientific-sounding verbiage, it can help us either get clarity or suss out total nonsense. And if anyone would know how scientists can explain complicated ideas in plainly accessible ways, Feynman would.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Read a novel by Charles Dickens, and you’ll still today feel transported back to the London of the eighteen-twenties. Some of that experience owes to his lavishly reportorial descriptive skills, but even more to his way with dialogue. Dickens faithfully captured the vocabulary of the times and places in which he set his stories, and for some particularly colorful characters, went as far as to render their distinctive accents phonetically: that of The Pickwick Papers’ beloved valet Sam Weller, for instance, with its swapping of “v” and “w” sounds that briefly overtook the East End. But it’s one thing to read the voice of a Londoner of that time, and quite another to hear it.
No audio recordings exist of Dickensian London, of course, but we have the next-best thing in the video above from Youtuber Simon Roper — and specifically the section that begins at about 11:30, when he performs the accent of a Londoner in the year 1826. Most everything he says should sound quite intelligible to any English-speaker today, though few, if any, will ever have encountered someone who speaks in quite the same way in real life.
In this era, Roper adds in the onscreen notes, “you can hear the start of glottal reinforcement, where a glottal stop is inserted between a vowel and a plosive consonant at the end of a word.” What’s more, “non-rhoticity (r‑loss in most positions) has caused vowels that were originally followed by ‘r’ to become centering diphthongs.”
Serious stuff, for a man who describes himself as “not a linguist.” Nevertheless, Roper has in this video assembled an impressive tour of London accents over 660 years, with “twelve recordings, all of men with suspiciously similar voices, and each one is set 60 years after the last one, and each one is the grandson of the previous one.” (When the video went viral, the New Statesman profiled him for his achievement.) The earliest, set in 1346, will sound more familiar in cadence than in content, at least to those who haven’t studied Middle English. Comprehension doesn’t become a much simpler matter for most of us moderns until about 1586, but Roper’s accent comes to sound veritably transatlantic by 1766. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was just before the Americans broke off decisively from the motherland to do things their own way — but also to preserve a few of the old ways, including ways of speech.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Christopher Hitchens once wrote that there were three major issues of the twentieth century — imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism — and George Orwell proved to be right about all of them.
The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. […] Hitler … knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.
Yet Orwell was certainly no fan of Hitler. At one point in the review, he imagines what a world where the Third Reich succeeds might look like:
What [Hitler] envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of “living room” (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or there- abouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder.
The article was written at a moment when, as Orwell notes, the upper class was backpedaling hard against their previous support of the Third Reich. In fact, a previous edition of Mein Kampf — published in 1939 in England — had a distinctly favorable view of the Führer.
“The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes [was] to tone down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all.”
By March 1940, everything had changed, and a new edition of Mein Kampf, reflecting changing views of Hitler, was published in England. Britain and France had declared war on Germany after its invasion of Poland but real fighting had yet to start in Western Europe. Within months, France would fall and Britain would teeter on the brink. But, in the early spring of that year, all was pretty quiet. The world was collectively holding its breath. And in this moment of terrifying suspense, Orwell predicts much of the future war.
When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of timetable. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture — that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question.
In June of 1941, Hitler invaded Russia, in one of the greatest strategic blunders in the history of modern warfare. Stalin was completely blindsided by the invasion and news of Hitler’s betrayal reportedly caused Stalin to have a nervous breakdown. Clearly, he didn’t read Mein Kampf as closely as Orwell had.
Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
If you visit Osaka, you’ll be urged to see two old buildings in particular: Osaka Castle and Shitennō-ji (above), Japan’s first Buddhist temple. In beholding both, you’ll behold the work of construction firm Kongō Gumi (金剛組), the oldest continuously run company in the world. It was with the building of Shitennō-ji, commissioned by Prince Shōtoku Taishi in the year 578, that brought it into existence in the first place. Back then, “Japan was predominantly Shinto and had no miyadaiku (carpenters trained in the art of building Buddhist temples),” writes Irene Herrera at Works that Work, “so the prince hired three skilled men from Baekje, a Buddhist state in what is now Korea,” among them a certain Kongō Shigetsu.
Thereafter, Kongō Gumi continued to operate independently for more than 1,400 years, run by 40 generations of Kongō Shigetsu’s descendants. By the time Toyotomi Hideyoshi had the company build Osaka Castle in 1583, it had been established for nearly a millennium. In the centuries since, “the castle has been destroyed repeatedly by fire and lightning,” Herrera writes. “Kongō Gumi prospered because of these major reconstructions, which provided them with plenty of work.” Throughout most of its long history, an even steadier business came from their specialty of building Buddhist temples, at least until serious challenges to that business model arose in the twentieth century.
“World War II brought significant changes to Japan, and the demand for temple construction waned,” says the tourism company Toki. “Sensing the shifting tides of the time, the company made a strategic decision to pivot its expertise towards a new endeavor: the crafting of coffins.” Governmental permission was arranged by the widow of Kongō Haruichi, Kongō Gumi’s 37th leader, who’d taken his own life out of financial despair inflicted by the Shōwa Depression of the nineteen-twenties. Here time at the head of the company illustrates its long-held willingness to grant leadership duties not just to first sons, but to family members best suited to do the job; for that reason, the history of the Kongō clan involves many sons-in-law deliberately sought out for that purpose.
The combined forces of the decline of Buddhism and the popping of Japan’s real-estate bubble in the nineties eventually forced Kongō Gumi to become a subsidiary of Takamatsu Construction Group in January 2006. “The current Kongō Gumi workforce has only one member of the Kongō family,” the Nikkei Asia reported in 2020, “a daughter of the 40th head of the family” who “now serves as the 41st head.” But its miyadaiku — distinctively organized into eight independent kumi, or groups — continue to do the work they always have, with ever-more-refined versions of the traditional tools and techniques they’ve been using for nearly a millennium and a half. Kongō Gumi continues to receive international attention for maintaining its high level of craftsmanship, but viewers of American TV drama in recent years will also appreciate its having solved the problem of succession.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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