Uncovering the prehistory of Japanese: The structure and origins of Japonic verbs

In a series of lectures published in the comments section to the previous 2 posts, I discovered and detailed the Yeniseian origins of the Japonic language family. That's not to say that Japanese is a Yeniseian language, but that the Wa people used to speak a Yeniseian language, and they carried over many of their lexical items into the Altaic language that they shifted to after Yeniseian -- probably a Para-Mongolic language -- and have retained them even into the Japonic stage of their history, after incorporating Emishi / Ainu speakers along the way.

But the numerous examples I gave are mostly nouns and adjectives, and some highly important closed-class items like pronouns, kin terms, and particles / affixes. There are very few verbs in the examples -- until now!

The reason I couldn't draw Yeniseian origins for Japanese verbs is that I was trying to capture too many segments from the Japonic form, but it turns out that the final 2 segments in Japonic verbs -- Cu (some consonant, and "u") -- are just verb markers, not part of the semantic core of the word. I knew that already about the final "u" for Japanese verbs, but I did not appreciate the fact that the final consonant is not semantically crucial, it's only there for phonotactic reasons.

And that reason I didn't know that, is that nobody else knows that! So I couldn't just read about it in a Wikipedia article, Wiktionary entry, or even scholarly article, unless it's an obscure / forgotten one, entirely in Japanese, from the 15th C...

So in the interest of not only revealing the nature of Japanese verbs, but also to help connect them back to earlier Yeniseian forms that have been carried over after language shift, I'm going to start a new post on this topic.

The source of Proto-Japonic verbs is Wiktionary's list. See also some helpful intros from Wikipedia on the topic of Japanese conjugation and Japanese five-way vs. one-way verbs ("godan" vs. "ichidan").

First, to briefly summarize what *is* already known about Japanese verbs. They characteristically end in "u", not some other vowel, and not a consonant (coda consonants are banned in P-J). Other parts of speech are not this regularized in their ending, Japonic really wanted to clearly mark its verbs.

Before this final "u" is a consonant. Verbs fall into 2 classes. By far the most common are those where this consonant is considered the final segment of the stem of the verb. Less common are those where this consonant is "r", but the verb stem is considered to end in the vowel just before that, always followed by "ru". These classes are called consonant-stem verbs vs. vowel-stem verbs.

Example of a consonant-stem verb -- "kaku" ("to write"), has the stem "kak-".

Example of a vowel-stem verb -- "miru" ("to see"), has the stem "mi-".

The consonant-stem verbs are also known as "godan" or 5-way verbs, since the vowel that follows the stem comes in all 5 different Modern Japanese vowels, depending on the tense, aspect, etc. that the verb is being used it. So "kak-" is followed by "a", "i", "u", "e", and "o", before other suffixes and particles are added on, to indicate whether it's a negative, a command, the infinitive, the past, and so on.

The vowel-stem verbs are also known as "ichidan" or 1-way verbs, since their stems end in a vowel, and this is the one and only vowel in their conjugation pattern (before the negative, command, infinitive, etc. suffixes are added onto them).

Since the vowel-stem verbs have stems that end in a vowel, and the unconjugated verb must end in a vowel as well, and Japonic phonotactics prefer syllables that are "CV", a consonant must come between the end of the stem and the final "u". In every single case, this consonant is "r" -- showing that it is a dummy consonant, not semantically crucial to the particular verb it occurs in. For example, "miru" and "tomeru", whose stems are "mi-" and "tome-".

Now, for the part that is not understood, or if it was once understood, has not been transmitted to the present. This preference for verbs ending in "ru" is not unique to the vowel-stem verbs, where it is obligatory -- the most common final consonant for the consonant-stem verbs is "r", which means they also end in "ru"!

Can any ol' consonant be the final segment of a stem for the consonant-stem verbs? I skimmed through the list of P-J verbs and could immediately see that "r" was the most common, followed by "k", with others rare, and some non-existent. How is this not widely known??? There's a massive preference for and against certain segments as the final consonant of consonant-stem verbs.

I present these in the following list of 61 consonant-stem verbs and 16 vowel-stem verbs, which are the entire list of P-J verbs at Wiktionary. First they're split into the consonant (godan) vs. vowel (ichidan) stem verbs. And within them, they're ordered by the frequency of the final segment, from common to absent. Wiktionary lists "woi-" as "wo-", but it has an "i" in some forms, so it's like the others ending in a vowel sequence of "Vi". The vowel "ə" is AKA "o2".

Godan

R, 21

ar-
asar-
kir-
kukOr-
kur-
mapar-
nar-
nenpur-
ninkir-
panpakar-
pikar-
sir-
sur-
ter-
tukur-
tur-
ur-
watar-
wəntər-
yar-
ər-

K, 18

arik-
ik-
isonk-
k-
kak-
kik-
mak-
muk-
nonk-
sik-
suk-
tonk-
tontok-
uk-
unkok-
yak-
ək-
əyənk-

P, 9

ap-
asump-
ip-
kup-
op- ~ əp-
sinənp-
turunp-
tənp-
yukəp-

T, 5

kat-
mat-
mət-
ut-
ət-

S, 4

kərəs-
s-
əs-
ətəs-

M, 2

nəm-
yOnkam-

N, 2

in-
sin-

Y, 0

W, 0

Ichidan

A, 12

pukor-a-
wasur-a-
ank-a-
mak-a-
int-a-
nant-a-
nis-a-
wosam-a-
koy-a-
moy-a-
kuw-a-
uw-a-

I, 4

ai-
mi-
poi-
woi-

E, 0

O, 0

U, 0

Again, all of the vowel-stem verbs end in "ru" in the uninflected form. But the most common final segment for consonant-stem verbs is "r", yielding the ending of "ru" in their uninflected forms as well! This preference for "r" dwarfs nearly all other possible choices for consonants. In a close 2nd place is "k". In a distant 3rd place is "p", and even further behind are "t" and "s", with "m" and "n" rounding out the list of those that are actually present but rare, while "y" and "w" do not appear at all.

So, far from the final consonant of consonant-stem verbs being open to any ol' choice, there is clearly a strong preference for "r" and "k" and against most of the others. Next we investigate why this is, and draw conclusions for the study of etymologies -- very important to know if the final consonant in consonant-stem verbs is semantically crucial or vacuous! Turns out, it's vacuous, and that was what prevented me from discovering Yeniseian origins to Japonic verbs. Thankfully, that can now be corrected!

* * *

So why is "r" the default consonant for the final syllable -- "ru" -- of the uninflected form of Japonic verbs? When the Wa people were shifting from Yeniseian to Altaic / Japonic languages, their morphology changed from polysynthetic to agglutinative, i.e. where you stick or "glue" basic building blocks together in a long chain.

There are only so many building blocks, which introduces the homophone problem -- how can you tell that some suffix is a verb ending vs. a particle connecting two words vs. a noun ending vs. a prefix vs. anything else that a building block could be?

Polysynthetic languages are fusional, where all these changes to a stem are not building blocks concatenated together, but "bound" morphemes that can only appear in certain contexts and not on their own. English has very little of this left, although it is still fusional. A better example are the Romance languages that we studied in school.

In Spanish, the verb "to sing" is "cantar", and the stem is "cant-". Unlike Japanese, though, this stem does not merely receive a series of building blocks stuck on the end, one block for each bit of information added. Rather, the entire rest of the meaning comes from just one ending, which therefore come in dozens of forms.

One of these "bound" endings is "-o", yielding "canto", "I sing". This is the present tense, first person, singular number, indicative mood, simple aspect -- all of those bits of additional information, "fused" into a single morpheme that cannot appear on its own, but only on a verb stem. If you want "We sing", the ending is "-amos", yielding "cantamos". There is no clear relation between "-o" and "-amos" -- opacity is a feature of fusional morphology, whereas agglutinative morphology is transparent, since each bit of meaning has its own building block. That's not even to mention the dozens of other endings that "cant-" can receive, to fill out all those differences in tense, person, number, mood, and aspect!

Well, although agglutinative morphology is far more transparent than the opacity of fusional morphology, that comes at a trade-off with the homophone problem. In Spanish, there are almost no homophone problems across the dozens of endings that "cant-" can take, and none of them are homophones with other words throughout the language -- "amos", "aste", "arian", etc., are not free-standing words that could be confused with these fusional verb endings.

This makes the detection of word boundaries crystal-clear for fusional languages -- "Oh, I just heard '-aste', which can only be a verb ending, so that's the end of a word. And it followed 'cant-', which is a verb stem, so that must be the beginning of the word."

Agglutinative languages like Japanese have a huge potential homophone problem, since building blocks can hypothetically be combined in any which way, so how do you know which meaning is intended? Is "mi" the stem of a vowel-stem verb, is "mi" a noun", is "mi" a particle, is "mi" a suffix, or prefix, or pronoun? It could be any of those things, and in fact in Japanese it *is* several of those things.

Agglutinative languages also have the problem of detecting word boundaries, since the building blocks can appear in initial, medial, and final position, hypothetically. They aren't like "aron" in Spanish, which is a fusional verb ending that cannot appear as a prefix or as a stem of a noun or verb. Unlike hearing "aron" in Spanish and immediately knowing it's the end of a word, hearing "mi" in Japanese gives you zero information about whether it's the beginning, middle, or end of a word, since that building block can appear in all places!

Therefore, agglutinative languages have to try to impose a set of rules about which building blocks can appear at the beginning, middle, or end, and for verbs vs. nouns vs. adjectives. It mitigates some of the confusion about homophones and word boundaries, but doesn't entirely solve it.

How can they do this, if their whole morphology is about gluing together any ol' string of building blocks? Well, that's just the semantic side, where "mi" could refer to various things.

* * *

Enter, phonotactics! That is, the rules or constraints on what sounds, sound sequences, sound structures, etc., words can take in the language.

Getting right to the point, Japonic phonotactics prohibit "r" in initial position. It only occurs initially in words borrowed from Chinese, English, or other non-Japonic language. So it works perfectly to indicate medial or final position, eliminating initial position. When you hear "ru", you know it's the middle or end of a word. Again, doesn't totally solve the problem, but it helps.

That also means that "rV" cannot be a particle, since that would mean "r" in word-initial position. Japanese has tons of connecting particles, but none of them begin with "r". So when you hear "ru", you know it's not a particle, not a prefix or beginning of a stem, so it's either a suffix or a later part of a stem.

Why did the vowel have to be "u"? To avoid homophone problems, it seems: "ra" was already taken as a pluralizing noun suffix, "re" was already taken as a nominalizing suffix, and "ri" for and adverbial suffix. "Ro" seems to have been dispreferred on phonotactic grounds, it's by far the least common "r" syllable in OJ. So that leaves "ru" (3rd-most common "r" syllable in OJ) as the best choice for default verb ending.

From "ru", the default vowel ending for verbs became "u", even for verbs whose final syllable has some other consonant, like "kak-". In OJ, the most common syllable for a consonant does not always end in "u", e.g. "p" and "t". So it's not consonant-by-consonant phonotactics that determines the final vowel of the verb -- it's a default vowel that was originally established for "r", and it was copied for all other verbs in order to standardize the final segment of verbs -- "u".

Why didn't nouns and adjectives receive such rigidly standardized endings? Cuz they don't add on as many building blocks as verbs do in Japanese. Nouns are not inflected for number (mostly) or gender. They only take case suffixes. Adjectives do not have to agree with the nouns they modify, for number, gender, or case. Since verbs are going to take on all sorts of suffixes, it's more necessary to know where the end of the stem is, that all these blocks are being stacked on top of.

Which consonants other than "r" are allowed for consonant-stem verbs? This is both phonotactics and avoiding homophones, especially with suffixes and particles. And this is the only place where the 5-way conjugation of verbs is relevant -- since many vowels are going to follow the final consonant of the stem, this presents phonotactic and homophone problems for that consonant plus any of the vowels. That's a lot of problems to avoid, and only a few consonants can do so.

Starting with the consonants that are absent from consonant-stem verbs -- the approximants "y" and "w". From the P-J stage, the syllables "wu" and "yi" were banned in order to dissimilate approximants from their vocalic counterparts. Since both "i" and "u" would appear after "y" and "w" in the 5-way conjugation pattern, this would result in the syllables "yi" and "wu" appearing, and that's illegal. So, no consonant-stem verbs can end in "y" or "w". In fact, if they were intended to be the final consonant of a consonant-stem verb, they were given an invariant "a" afterward, and put into the 1-way / vowel-stem class instead. We'll get to those later.

The nasals "m" and "n" would not result in illegal syllables when conjugated, but they would involve too big of a homophone problem. "N" plus any vowel is already a highly common suffix or particle, especially the possessive particles "no" / "na" and the locative particle "ni", as well as the diminuitive noun suffix "ne". "M" would yield a bunch of homophones for common concepts like "seeing", "body", and "three", as well as the non-unique topic marker particle "mo", and "mu" was already a verb suffix (volitional, etc.).

Originally, "o" was not one of the vowels following the last consonant of the stem, so these homophones aren't so crucial, but they indicate the homophone problem nonetheless, which "r" does not have.

The problem with "s" is that "su" is already a verb unto itself, one of the very few that is monosyllabic, and a very ancient and common verb -- "to become" and "to do". Hearing this at the end of some other verb whose consonant stem ended in "s" would make it sound like the final "su" was this standalone verb being used as the 2nd element of a compound verb, or as an auxilliary verb for the part of the stem preceding "s". WAY too confusing. Evidently so confusing that over time, Japanese standardized "su" into "suru" with the most preferred verb ending, "ru", just to prevent any confusion.

I'll get to the handful of exceptions to these rare consonant verbs, in a bit, but briefly they seem to be compounds where the rare consonant was not originally the end of a stem, but the start of the 2nd element of a compound. So they're not such exceptions anyway.

"T" would yield "tu", which was already a common particle (genitive), as well as a verb suffix (completion), and a counter suffix for nouns. "To" was already taken by connecting word "and".

"P" would yield "pu", which was already a verb suffix (ongoing, repeating). Worst of all, "pa" was the topic marking particle.

That leaves only "k" as able to compete with "r". The only particle it would yield a homophone of is "ka", but that's a sentence-final particle, not one that connects words, so it's no problem for the end of a verb. However, "ka" was an adjective suffix in OJ. "Ki" as a certainty suffix for verbs came later during Classical Japanese, not in P-J or OJ. And "ku" was a not-so-common nominal suffix in OJ, but was also a standalone common verb in P-J, "to come", later standardized into "kuru". Same problem with "ku" as with "su".

"K" is not as flawless as "r", but a quantum leap above the other consonants, so "k" is more for the overflow, after a stem ending in "r" has already been taken -- the rest of the stem is fine, just alter "r" to "k", and presto, a new verb with no homophone problems.

E.g., since "sir-" and "sur-" already exist, "sik-" and "suk-" can be used instead. The "su" in "sur-" has to do with "rubbing", while the "su" in "suk-" has to do with "liking, loving". The "si" in "sir-" has to do with "knowing", while the "si" in "sik-" has to do with "spreading out". Rather than conflate the unrelated "su"s and "si"s into homophonous "suru"s and "siru"s, use the default "r" for one and the over-flow "k" for the other. Bingo.

* * *

Before exploring this matter of the less common consonants being an over-flow when the more common consonants were already taken, let's address the matter of how many of these verbs are morphologically atomic vs. complex.

Well, any time there's a nasal + obstruent, it just means there's a morpheme boundary, and this will later get rendaku-fied in OJ. Rarely is there any evidence for the nasal.

Also, Japanese morphemes in general and verbs especially want to be bisyllabic / bimoraic, or perhaps monosyllabic / monomoraic, not more than 2 syllables / moras. Atomic verbs could be hiding inside verbs of 3+ syllables, though, while not being attested on their own. So I'm inclined to only count 4 verbs under stem ending in "p" -- those whose infinitive is 1 or 2 moras ("apu", "ipu", "əpu", "kupu"). The others are complex, and the "p" is really an initial or medial consonant to a later element of a compound, not the final consonant of an atomic stem.

Then restricting the analysis to atomic verb stems, the idea that less common consonants are an over-flow for already taken more-common consonants, predicts that the less common verbs should have more common counterparts -- the ones they are trying to avoid homophony with, by using a less common over-flow consonant. This excludes monosyllabic verbs, since their sole consonant is not a dummy consonant, and you can't tell whether or not there's a competing form -- what precedes this consonant is nothing, not a sequence of vowels and consonants.

Let's see...

Of 10 "k" verbs, 6 have higher-ranking counterparts ("kik-", "sik-", "suk-", "uk-", "yak-", "ək-"). Also, "kak-" may have a counterpart hiding inside of either "panpakar-" or "pikar-".

Of 4 "p" verbs, all have higher-ranking counterparts, and 1 has both of them! ("əp-")

Of 5 "t" verbs, 4 have higher-ranking counterparts, some with more than one.

Of 1 "s" verb, it indeed has every higher-ranking counterpart ("əs-").

Of 1 "m" verb, it does not have any higher-ranking counterparts. This is "nəm-" meaning "to drink", and perhaps it was allowed its very rare final nasal in the stem, as part of onomatopoeia, where eating and drinking tend to have nasal consonants -- both consonants are nasal here, in fact, just like "nom-nom" in English.

Of 2 "n" verbs, both have multiple higher-ranking counterparts.

So yes, the less common consonants are over-flow choices, for when the better choices are already taken, and homophony must be avoided.

And in all cases, to reiterate the main point, these final consonants in the stem are NOT semantically crucial, they are vacuous and only chosen on the basis of phonotactics and avoiding homophony. Important to bear in mind when trying to find earlier ancestors of these verbs...

* * *

What about the 1-way / vowel-stem verbs? Here again we see them acting as either over-flow for already taken forms, or to avoid phonotactic prohibitions.

By far the most common vowel-stem verbs end in "a", and they are transcribed as "-a-", to hint that the "a" is just a dummy consonant. If it weren't, then the other consonants could show up as well -- but they don't. Only "i" shows up as well, and it's rare, and most of those involve vowel sequences, not consonant + "i".

This "a" seems to have been "hard-coded" to prevent the 5-way (or earlier, 4-way) vowel pattern from spawning. Every conjugated form will have "a".

Well, that avoids the ban on approximants "y" and "w" -- both of those are fine followed by "a". Indeed, unlike the consonant-stem class, where "y" and "w" are totally absent, they make up 4 of the 12 entries for vowel-stem ending in "a", just before the dummy "a". Since they couldn't end in "y" or "w" when illegal vowels could result under the 5-way / 4-way pattern, just hard-code the following vowel to be "a", and problem solved!

I'm inclined to think that means these approximants *are* semantically meaningful, since they went through the extreme measure of hard-coding a dummy vowel afterward, to allow the approximant to be preserved. If it were just an over-flow choice of consonant, there are better choices -- the nasals, the sibilant, or "t" or "p", which were generally not chosen. They really wanted the "y" and "w" to stay in these cases.

That goes for the other 2nd-to-last consonants in the vowel-stem class -- which means there's a sick inversion going on! The final consonants in the consonant-stem class are vacuous, while the latest-occurring consonants in the vowel-stem class are meaningful! The 5-way class is really "consonant stem for phonetics, but the preceding vowel for semantics", and the 1-way class is really "vowel stem for phonetics, but the preceding consonant for semantics". Neat.

Another 4 of the 12 vowel-stem verbs are from consonants that are rare in the consonant-stem class (2 "t"s, 1 "s", 1 "m").

Only 2 of 12 vowel-stem verbs are from the super-common "r" in the consonant-stem class, and another mere 2 of 12 from the super-common "k" in the consonant-stem class. In the vowel-stem class, "r" and "k" are not so dominant at all -- combined, they are as common as "y" and "w", which are totally absent in the consonant-stem class!

The over-flow pattern shows up here again. The atomic "kor" in "pukor-a-" could be hiding in "kukOr-" from the consonant-stem class. The atomic "sur" in "wasur-a-" already appears in "sur-". The atomic "mak" in "mak-a-" already appears in "mak-".

As for the vowel-stem verbs ending in "i", 3 of them involve vowel sequences, which are generally a feature of P-J nouns, not verbs. E.g., "tai" = "hand", whose forms have an "a" sometimes and an "e" other times. And the 1 vowel-stem verb that does not have a vowel sequence, "mi-", is cognate with a P-J noun that does have a vowel sequence, "mai" = "eye". Perhaps "miru" began as "mairu", which would make it fit better with the other "i" vowel-stem verbs, and for whatever reason the "a" was deleted.

None of these 4 would have a homophone in the consonant-stem class if they had an "r" hard-coded after their vowel stem, e.g. "ai-" could be altered to "air-" and not compete with an existing consonant-stem verb of that form. Ditto for the others.

Here it seems more like phonotactics play a role -- atomic stems / infinitive verbs cannot be more than 2 moras. "Airu", "poiru", and "woiru" all have 3 moras, so they can't be hard-coded into "r"-ending consonant-stem verbs. In fact, their descendant or variant forms will not have 3 moras either -- "eru", "hiru", and "oru / iru".

Again that suggests that "mi-" used to be "mai". Otherwise it's unusual, since its infinitive, "miru", has only 2 moras as is desired -- that should result in it being treated as a consonant-stem verb ending in "r", "mir-". But if it was originally "mai-", then "mairu" would have 3 moras, break the rule, and get lumped into the "i"-ending vowel-stem verbs, along with "ai-", "poi-", and "woi-".

* * *

I'll get to etymologies in a separate post, or perhaps in the comment section to this post. The most important thing before that is laying out this foundation, about what segments are semantically meaningful vs. vacuous. It turns out, a lot of those consonants are meaningless, so they don't need to be captured in an etymology, only the first "CV" syllable.

Sadly, that makes the etymologies less convincing, since a 3-segment etymology is more convincing than a 2-segment one. But that's just the way the cookie crumbles with Japonic historical linguistics...

Aside from showing a number of Yeniseian origins for Japonic verbs, I'll also draw a parallel between the phonotactic structure of their verbs, and how it parallels Japonic.

Briefly, none of the Proto-Yeniseian verbs -- hardly any words at all -- begin with a nasal. Yeniseian is polysynthetic and prefixing, while Japonic is agglutinative and suffixing -- so it's the same process. Yeniseian verbs avoid initial nasals, Japonic verbs avoid final nasals (in the stem). Japonic is rife with suffixes and particles beginning with nasals, while Yeniseian has several prefixes for verbs that begin with a nasal.

So they share this avoidance of nasals in the part of the verb that gets the most modification during conjugation. And since those particles are carry-overs from Yeniseian to Japonic, as I showed earlier, this is not a coincidence across language families. Yeniseian verbs avoid initial nasals in their stem, and Japonic as the end of their stem, for cognate reasons.

I've also discovered another sound correspondence between Proto-Yeniseian and Proto-Japonic, but I'll get to that one later as well. But briefly, P-Y "tɬ" corresponds to P-J "p", at least in initial position. Not very phonetically expected or motivated -- why not alter "tɬ" to simply "t" or "s" or even "r"? -- but it is what it is.

Well, let me end with at least one etymology! P-Y "cej" means "to rip". P-J lacks "c", but can shift its location to velar "k", as I showed in previous examples. The coda consonant is not allowed, and turns into its vocalic counterpart "i". Since vowel sequences are not preferred, and the 2nd usually takes over the 1st, that gives "ki" as the stem.

Whaddaya know? "Kir-" in P-J means "to cut"! Infinitive: "kiru". And that final "r" in the stem is semantically vacuous, it's only there to make verbs adhere to the standard of "ru" being the final syllable. That means only "ki-" is meaningful in Japonic -- and perfectly matches the expected form that would derive from P-Y "cej". QED!

The collapse of the imperial-scale welfare system, due to over-production of recipients (a special case of general imperial over-extension)

I haven't waded into political dIsCouRsE for awhile, since there has been nothing new to add from what I've already said. But with the looming possibility of food stamp (SNAP) benefits not going out for November, amid the federal government shutdown, it's worth examining the collapse of the charity / safety net sector of society, during the broader collapse of an empire -- as well as its stratospheric growth during imperial expansion.

A large majority of English-language internet content comes from outside America, as English has become the global lingua franca -- but that doesn't mean foreigners understand America, just cuz they speak English and have watched American movies or played American serial killer simulators. So when they hear about cuts to the American food stamp program, they project their own nation's status quo onto ours, and imagine cuts to their own system. But America is the last bloated empire left standing, currently entering its collapse stage, so all comparisons from foreigners will fail.

The clearest way to see this is in the scale of food aid across countries. With SNAP in the news, many Americans are suddenly shocked to discover how much of the population receives it -- about 13%, or 1 out of every 8 residents, an astonishing figure.

And that's just SNAP, not counting the various other arms of the food assistance system, such as food banks, where the estimate is about 17%, or 1 out of every 6 residents, receiving that form of food aid. Depending on the overlap between the two -- and presumably some people are getting both -- that's at least 20% of people living here relying on food aid.

Food banks don't supply every meal for every day in every month -- but neither do the benefits paid out by SNAP, which may be merely $25 a month.

Food banks de facto do not put any barriers to eligibility, unlike SNAP which is means-tested -- you have to be making below a certain income, you generally have to work if you're able-bodied and working-age, and so on, and all of this info is documented and verified by case workers. SNAP is targeted more toward rural residents, while food banks seem to be aimed more at urban or metro-area residents. So I don't think there's tons of overlap between the two, meaning the percent relying on food aid could be higher, like 25%. But it's at least 13%, based on SNAP alone.

What percent of other 1st-world countries rely on food aid? It's hard to say, cuz some bundle all social welfare pay-outs into a single allotment, and it goes toward food, housing, and other basic expenses. That is a maximum figure, then, for food stamps. Some countries don't include food payments, but do give out food packages in kind.

Regardless of these differences from the American system, no other 1st-world country is even remotely close to America's level of food assistance -- about 1-2% of the population in Sweden and Glorious Nippon, 4-5% in France and Italy, even in Poland only 3% rely on food aid. I looked for English-language stats on Russia, but sadly they're all slopaganda -- if any legit Russian-language source can be found, let me know.

So outside America, the most vulnerable 1-5% would be affected by cuts to food aid. And because those on food aid are so much lower in the social pyramid, cutting their benefits would strike their citizens as obscenely cruel.

But in America, cutting food aid "only" affects the bottom 13-25%, which of course includes the same bottom 1-5% as would be affected in other countries, but at least an extra 10% of the population higher up on the pyramid, which is between double the share who get aid outside America (in places where 5% get it), up to 8 times the share (in places where 1-2% get it).

Aside from cross-national comparisons at the same time, we can compare America today to America in years past, back to the 1970s when the system was regularized and institutionalized. There has been a jump in both the share of the American population relying on food aid, and the amount spent on food aid (inflation-adjusted, as a share of GDP, however you measure it). This traces back only to the aftermath of the 2008 Depression, from which America has never recovered (the elites only printed up $10 trillion and handed it out to moronic strivers to play around with). It spiked even further during the Covid hysteria, and 5 years later is still not down to pre-Covid levels, despite Covid being over.

There was a gradual increase during the '80s and '90s, although there was also a decrease during the second half of the '90s. So some of this can be blamed on neoliberalism and de-industrialization, but the jump since 2008 and 2020 seems more like the NGO-industrial complex seizing the opportunity to expand their operations, with the crisis du jour as a rationalization. Other 1st-world countries were destroyed by 2008 and 2020, but they didn't expand their food aid system to cover 13-25% of their population like we did.

For comparison, in 1974 as the system went nationwide, food stamp enrollment was 15 million, out of a total population of 214 million, or 7%. Since 1980, it has maxed out at 10% during a recession and/or a phase of greater funding, and dipped into the high single digits during economic recoveries and/or a phase of lesser funding. But tearing above 10% and that becoming the new normal is very recent. And by the looks of things, that percentage may only grow in the short-term.

And again, that's only SNAP, the means-tested form of food aid -- not covering the exponential increase in food bank aid, which used to be nearly non-existent and limited to soup kitchens, canned food drives, and the like, but has now expanded to rival the SNAP program itself. The estimate of 17% using them is over the course of a year, but even at the time-frame of a month, about 5% of respondents use them (see here for discussion of the 2 different national statistical surveys that ask about food security).

Food banks appear to have grown to fill a separate niche than the SNAP niche -- namely, people who don't qualify for SNAP, due to income, work status, citizenship status, difficulty / unwillingness in filling out forms, or whatever else.

There's surely some double-dippers, but most inquiries I found online about visiting food banks said they don't qualify for SNAP and are curious if the food banks will impose similar means-testing on people who show up to food banks (short answer: they will not, de facto, although they may ask you for an ID to show you reside in the area, or to sign a legally unbinding form that you pinky-swear represents your income). Food banks appear more likely to serve downwardly-mobile middle class residents of metro areas, compared to SNAP.

Then there's the growth in the amount spent on the program, aside from the rise in the percent using it. Some of the long-term growth in the SNAP budget is due to overall inflation, but the program's budget was fairly stable at about $20 billion during the '90s and early 2000s. It made a quantum leap to a new normal of about $60 billion in the wake of 2008, and made another quantum leap to a pandemic peak of $120 billion in 2022, although that has declined to a new normal that is still a quantum leap above the 2008 jump, at around $100 billion for 2024.

It doesn't matter that this is "a drop in the bucket" of the national budget, at 1-2% of federal spending -- when every single program uses up 2-3-4 times as much as it used to in just the 2000s, it collectively explodes the federal budget. And this is even more unsustainable these days, since more and more federal spending is paid for by debt -- with ever-soaring interest rates -- and by currency debasement (printing up trillions in a single year of 2020, which never gets withdrawn from circulation).

The good ol' days when "taxpayer dollars" paid for government spending are long gone -- now everybody pays a highly regressive tax, namely hyperinflation once our unsustainably skyrocketing debt gets defaulted on and no one will loan us even a small amount that is necessary, as well as currency debasement which has already shaved off a double-digit percentage of the dollar's purchasing power in the past few years alone -- and that trend is only escalating, as the dollar sinks and gold soars.

So, rather than the deluded para-political game of "musical chairs" that is a constant source of slopaganda in social media fanfic -- or picking which programs to keep and which to slash, and by how much for each program -- the reality is that every single one of those programs is going to collapse, as our empire collapses. All are bloated beyond their original purpose, beyond sustainable levels, and no one will yield, so they will all totally collapse, and be replaced by state-level replacements in the post-imperial era, much like rump states will replace the current federal state as polities.

In 5-10 years, we won't be bailing out Trump's cronies in Argentina to the tune of $40 billion on a whim, since we won't have any worthwhile currency to bail them out with anymore. We might as well hand them 40 gazillion Zimbabwe bucks.

We already have run out of actually valuable military equipment to flush down the toilet in Ukraine, and in 5-10 years, our military manufacturing industry will be even more hollowed out. So we won't be bogged down in that wasteful dead-end either.

But the point is, every one of these bloated, over-extended, ever-expanding cancerous growths on the empire is going to collapse the entire system on which they feed. They will be replaced by state-level replacements, which will not be so imperially over-extended and over-produced, since we will be in the post-imperial stage of our history.

Maybe one or two wealthy rump states, like the Grand Duchy of California, will attempt a relatively more generous welfare system than the kleinstaats that will make up New New England. But the days when well over 10% of the population is receiving food aid, will be over.

That will not be due to the poorest 1-2% getting wiped out -- they'll still be covered by the rump state welfare systems. But the over-produced group of food aid recipients will not be receiving it any longer. As in post-imperial Rome, foreigners will go back to their homelands, as wealth dries up in post-imperial America, the downwardly mobile will not have as many kids, and with no imperial-scale parasites at the top of the wealth pyramid, resources will be more evenly distributed in the rump states, so there won't be so many desperate working and middle class people either. The bloated war-losing military will be gone, the Baby Boomers will be dead, and Wall Street banks will be holding worthless currency, not real wealth with which to bully the rest of the economy.

Through these various channels, population size will collapse in post-imperial America, just as it did in the Roman Empire. The imperial capital, Rome, had over 1 million residents during the empire's peak in the 2nd century, but during the 5th C, it collapsed by an order of magnitude, or 90%, down to 100,000. It never regained the 1 million mark even after it emerged from the Dark Ages, like the Renaissance or Early Modern eras -- only after national unification brought loads of Italians from other regions of Italy to the new national capital, during the 20th C. (NB: not loads of foreigners, as during the Roman Empire.)

I don't know how long it'll take the population of New York -- and other major cities of post-imperial America -- to collapse by 90%, but they all will. It won't be hard to support the bottom 1-5% on welfare, like most non-imperial or post-imperial 1st-world countries manage today, since the total population is going to shrink down to 25-50 million. We may not collapse as hard as Rome did, since we have lots of open land to still colonize and exploit the resources of, but it will be a radical reduction.

The main thing to remember is -- everything of imperial scale is going to collapse when an empire collapses. If there is no state-level replacement, like a foreign-adventuring military, there will be no such replacement at all. There will be "no more foreign wars", just state-level militias for defense of their own territory. If there is a state-level replacement, like welfare, it will be scaled down obviously, but there will be a replacement.

Also crucial to remember -- none of this is up for debate, by anybody. Certainly not by the para-political fanfickers from social media, who treat the dIsCouRsE as though it's a "model UN" activity that will somehow magically alter the course of IRL events. That goes for both the objective / technocrat niche, as well as the subjective / moralistic niche. All fake and gay.

But it's not even up for debate by actual holders of national offices, their appointees, and their mega-donors. The American Empire is collapsing, irrevocably, and so will every institution of imperial scale along with it, to be replaced -- if at all -- by scaled-down state-level replacements, like rump states and welfare systems typical of the rest of the 1st world, not the over-extended and unsustainable system that we have erected up to this point.

Only the cold iron laws of historical dynamics have a say in the course of events, and we can see from every empire how this no-different empire will turn out, at a bird's-eye level.

Japanese Steppe origins: Breaking precious mirrors as a burial ritual

Before getting into the main topic, I'll just link to some observations I made in the comments to the previous post -- about a Korean royal clan claiming descent from the Xiongnu. This establishes that my parallel investigation of the Steppe, and specifically Xiongnu, origins of their Japanese neighbors is already on solid ground in Southeastern Korea.

The clan that united the kingdom of Silla, which then went on to unify all of Korea, was the Kim clan from Gyeongju. Their legend of their origins is that they descend from a Xiongnu prince, who the Chinese call Jin Midi, but who they themselves call Kim Al-chi. I immediately noticed that "alchi" is one of the variant names of the Alat tribe -- the one whose name means "piebald horse" in Turkic, and who were the ruling clan of the Xiongnu confederation.

Did the unifying clan of Korea really descend from Xiongnu rulers? Well, they made this claim themselves, it's not somebody like me 2000 years later attributing it to them. And Korean scholars note how similar the grave goods are for Silla and the eastern Xiongnu.

I think the Japanese chose to make their Xiongnu origins cryptic due to the rivalry between Wa / Yamato and Silla. Yamato was on the losing side of the Tang-Goguryeo War of the 7th C, whereas Silla was on the winning side (allying with Tang China). They wouldn't try to invade Korea for many centuries after that, and wanted to distance themselves from their geopolitical rivals. Since the Xiongnu origins of the Kim clan were well known back then, the Yamato decided not to make the same claim, lest they be seen as copying Silla, or engaging in sibling rivalry.

But all the signs are there if you look.

* * *

Which brings us to the main topic of this post -- the burial rituals of the Xiongnu and other Steppe cultures of that time, as well as the early Wa culture in Japan. (And Silla, too, of course, but I'm not focusing on that.)

To reiterate an ongoing theme, we have to try to avoid using examples of convergent evolution when linking two groups together. What causes two groups to converge on the same outcome is some kind of utilitarian, economic, materially motivated force -- like getting more calories in your diet.

Group A drinks milk, and group B drinks milk -- are they descended from a common ancestor? Maybe, but maybe not -- maybe they each independently took up pastoralism, and began consuming the dairy products of their livestock. Both of them drinking milk doesn't mean they share an ancestor, it may mean that pastoralists will end up consuming dairy products, whether they share an ancestor or not.

Likewise, quite a few pastoralist groups from the Steppe practice horse sacrifice and horse burials, including Indo-European cultures from the West and Altaic cultures from the East. But that doesn't mean they share a cultural ancestor -- it may just reflect that fact that both have adopted horses, which makes horses very important, and so, what greater sacrifice could they make than sacrificing a horse?

We want to look for examples that are not steered by a cold, clinical Darwinian, economic, utilitarian incentive -- things that are more like a shibboleth. I say "po-TAY-to", you say "po-TAH-to" -- and that proves we belong to two separate cultures, whatever else we might share. Pronouncing the word either way does not help you communicate the meaning more efficiently, it is simply a random inconsequential arbitrary coin-flip that we have constructed in order to distinguish the members of group A vs. group B.

When I get to clothing and jewelry styles, we'll really see this idea take off -- what does it matter if you close your robe left-over-right or right-over-left? The robe closes just the same. But in ancient East Asia, this seemingly meaningless distinction made all the difference between who was civilized (left-over-right) and who was barbarian (right-over-left).

And yes, people in Japan at that time, and up until the Nara period (around 700 AD), were firmly committed to wearing their robes in the Northern barbarian style, just like the Xiongnu. So were the Tocharians, an Eastern Steppe group who adopted an Indo-Euro language (the only known Eastern culture to do so), but remained true to their origins in dress.

Similarly, superstitions may have a utilitarian logic to them -- in which case, it means nothing if two groups share a superstition. I was looking up Japanese superstitions, and one of them is to not whistle indoors -- it turns out, almost every culture in the world shares this superstition. Probably because everyone perceives it as rude, as though you're trying to be a band-leader in an impromptu concert that nobody asked for. So it's frowned on all over the world, and it cannot be used to prove that Russians and Japanese descend from a common ancestral culture where this superstition was born. It was born in multiple places and at various times, independently of each other. It's convergent evolution.

So when we turn to burials -- the main material trace that is left in the archaeological record for us to study in the present about cultures from the past -- we have to look for examples that look like shibboleths, not practices that many cultures could come up with on their own.

E.g., "monumental size of the grave to reflect the elite status of those buried there" -- yeah, no shit, what else are they going to do, make tiny graves for the elite and mega-tombs for the commoners?

We also have to take into account the notion of "degrees of freedom" from statistics, or how much room for variation there is. You might think, Well, mega-size doesn't show that two cultures share an ancestor, but maybe the particular shape of their mega-tombs could play the role of a shibboleth.

Only problem is -- how many 3D shapes are there to choose from for a tomb? You've got your box-like shape, your rounded mound shape, a pyramid shape, and that's about it, for a single structure. There are far, far fewer possible shapes to build a tomb in, than there are possible sound sequences to convey the meaning of "father". If two languages share a word for "father", that's highly suggestive of shared ancestry. If they both build mounded tombs, that's only slightly suggestive.

So although mounded tombs were popular throughout the Steppe in ancient times, from the West to the East, and although the most famous tombs in all of Japanese history are indeed gigantic mounds (Kofun, giving their name to the period in which they were built, roughly 300-600 AD), that is only slightly suggestive of Japan's Steppe origins.

It certainly doesn't *contradict* the claim that Japanese culture has a Steppe component -- it's in line with the claim, but it's a weaker piece of confirming evidence than some example where there's lots more room for variation and more of a shibboleth nature to it.

* * *

Enter one of the most bizarre and distinctive burial rituals in world history -- the deliberate breaking of finely crafted, highly valuable, aesthetically adorned, built-to-last mirrors. Not just putting a crack in them with a little whack from a hammer, but breaking them into at least 4 separate fragments on average. That's no accident -- especially when mirrors in the old days were made of (polished) bronze, which is much harder to fragment than glass. And these were fairly large mirrors, around 8 inches in diameter, not a little hand mirror -- something that impressive, you'd figure they would want to preserve in order to show off as a status symbol.

This is a great example because we can rule out utilitarian, Darwinian, etc. incentives for two cultures sharing this ritual. It's breaking something useful, functional, and valuable -- it's going against the utilitarian motive. Even in the figurative sense, where the grave goods are not meant to be used by the living, but by the dead in the Otherworld, breaking the mirror deprives the deceased of its use or exchange value in the afterlife.

Imagine waking up on The Other Side, surrounded by mirror fragments -- "Gee, thanks a lot for making them worth a lot less, in case I wanted to trade them for something that's only available in the Otherworld, which you couldn't provide me with during the burial. Or in case I wanted to see what I look like dead, or if I wanted to reflect light for some reason. Whose idea was it to break them into pieces?!"

A superstition about not breaking a mirror, could arise independently through convergent evolution. Mirrors are functional, utilitarian, valuable things -- don't break them, or else bad things will follow. Breaking them on purpose is the opposite -- that must be due to some unclearly motivated shared tradition.

BTW, as for the modern American superstition about "break a mirror, and you'll get 7 years of bad luck", this is claimed with absolutely no evidence to stem from "ancient Greece and Rome" -- always a telltale sign of bullshitting. We don't come from Greco or Roman cultures, even distantly. No one can point to an author of the ancient world saying it's bad luck to break a mirror, cuz you'll get 7 years of bad luck. Or some other number of years of bad luck. Or even explicitly saying that breaking a mirror is unlucky.

So the "breaking a mirror is unlucky" superstition is likely much more modern than that, from the era when mirrors became commonplace and the targets of superstitions. At that point, multiple cultures could independently come up with a superstition against breaking mirrors, in America or wherever else.

Back to the ancient Steppe -- other cultures did in fact bury their dead with the same Chinese bronze mirrors (or imitations), but without the widespread practice of breaking them. That does *not* suggest a common origin for them -- functional, valuable, finely crafted things will be sought after as grave goods no matter who they are.

As it turns out, both the Western Steppe and Han China included bronze mirrors in their grave goods, but nobody thinks they share an ancestor. They both independently figured out that these things were valuable and impressive feats of craftsmanship, so why not include them with all the other goodies in the grave?

It was only the Eastern Steppe groups that fragmented the Chinese bronze mirrors as part of their burial rituals. See this review article of the broken bronze mirror phenomenon, which surveys the Western Steppe as well as the East.

It began with the Pazyryk culture from the Altai Mountain region during the mid-1st millennium BC. They are misleadingly called "Scythian" as though they were Indo-Euro-phone, culturally Iranian, or primarily Western Steppe, none of which is true -- they seem to be proto-Turkic if anything, the western frontier of the Eastern Steppe.

This practice continued, most famously, among the Xiongnu, around the turn of the millennium...

And as fate would have it, among the Kofun burials in Glorious Nippon, in the early 1st millennium AD (and in Silla). As with the Pazyryk and Xiongnu, not all of the Chinese bronze mirrors are broken in Kofun burials, but a large number of them are -- perhaps dozens of mirrors each broken into 3 or 4 fragments on average, within a single site. And this practice was not just one fluke site, but dozens of locations all around Japan.

Nor was it done only in peripheral or culturally deviant regions of the nascent Japanese nation -- if anything, it was done in abundance at the very heart of the soon-to-be Yamato state, around Nara. See this discovery of over 100 mirrors broken into nearly 400 fragments, from the Sakurai Chausuyama Kofun near Nara, dating from the 3rd C and belonging to a very elite individual, possibly the legendary Queen Pimiko herself.

This early date is also helpful to establish that these Steppe influences of Japanese culture did not only arrive during the course of the Kofun era -- they were there before 300 AD. And it is helpful to show that these influences are not "Korean," as though they were confined only to Korea and Japan. Rather, both of them are extensions of a broader Eastern Steppe tradition, brought by Steppe people who crossed the mountains into the Korean peninsula, the first wave going further into Japan, and a second wave remaining in Korea (the Koreanic speakers).

* * *

These bronze mirrors, and mirrors in general, are so important in Japanese culture that one of the three imperial regalia -- the special material items that legitimize each emperor, which are passed on to each new holder of that office -- is an ancient bronze mirror, the Yata no Kagami. (We'll get to the Steppe origins of another of the three, the magatama or curved jade jewel-bead, in the next post.)

Mirrors have always been important in the rituals of Shinto, as symbols of the sun. It seems like the Eastern Steppe cultures view mirrors as solar symbols -- miniature suns that you can wield with your own two hands, throwing bright beams of light wherever you please, like a demi-solar-god all by yourself. The Western Steppe cultures view them more in terms of reflecting the physical likeness of a person, not as pre-industrial spotlights.

And wouldn't you know it? While browsing the Wikipedia article on "mirrors in Shinto," I nearly fell out of my chair looking at how the mirror is displayed in a typical Shinto ritual. See the center top of this image, where the mirror lies between the 4 animal statues. The mirror itself is a disc, and it's resting on a stand that is curved very much like a crescent moon

There's that distinctly Xiongnu visual shibboleth again! A solar disc, with a crescent moon underneath, opening up to the sun, which remains in use on the national flag of Mongolia. We'll see that in Kofun-era earrings, in the post on clothing styles.

Do an image search for "Shinto mirror," and you'll see all sorts of variations on this theme, but they all involve a stand that is crescent and opening up to the solar disc. I can't determine when this combination of items began, but it has endured right up through the present.

Somewhere along the way, the Steppe fixation on the "sun and moon" duo was downplayed, and the crescent shape was carved in the shape of clouds or sea waves or some abstract thing. But who ever depicts clouds as forming a shape whose border is an upward-opening crescent? Or sea-waves depicted with that same border shape? It's obviously a crescent moon, and that border shape has been preserved -- even though its interior has been (re-)decorated to distract from its moon-focused origins.

I wonder if this Shinto mirror-and-stand configuration goes back to the Xiongnu, and the smaller golden "disc with crescent" items that are found among the Xiongnu, or the identical Kofun-era earrings, are just jewelry representations of their sun-and-moon religious rituals, which would have involved one of those large bronze mirrors as the solar disc, supported by a stand in the shape of an upward-opening crescent moon. IDK, something to think about / look into.

* * *

Like many ancient facets of Japanese culture, they have been preserved or served as inspiration for even the most hi-tech and futuristic domains of contemporary Japanese culture -- like video games. In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, there's a crucial item called the mirror of twilight, and it is in the shape and color of an ancient Chinese bronze mirror -- and it also lies in 4 fragments, which must be re-assembled in order to use it as a massive light-reflector.

In an earlier game in the series, Ocarina of Time, the player uses a mirror shield to reflect beams of light in order to trigger doors opening and such. However, it doesn't resemble the ancient bronze Chinese mirrors, and does not lie in fragments. Even earlier, in A Link to the Past, the mirror shield doesn't bounce rays of light, but absorbs them. And even earlier, in The Adventure of Link, the protagonist helps a townswoman find her lost mirror and is rewarded for it -- it's not shown at all, though, let alone in an ancient Chinese form, or lying in fragments, or reflecting light rays. But these are all still part of the enduring Japanese fascination with mirrors.

* * *

Finally, what the hell *was* the reason for breaking the mirrors back then? It doesn't matter for the purposes of linking various cultures together that share the practice. But just to try to get inside their heads...

I actually came up with a similar concept as the Twilight Princess video game, before even reading about it. None of the other grave goods, whether highly valuable or not-so-valuable, are deliberately broken. They're intact, in good working order, and meant to aid the deceased in some way.

Mirrors left intact would be the same -- an aid to the deceased.

But the ones that were broken -- could have been a reflection of the corpse itself. Something that used to be a finely crafted, highly valuable, built-to-last creation -- but that now finds itself at the end of its use, decaying into pieces, losing its order and structure, never to be used again...

Until some fateful event in the future, where the dead are brought back to life, and where these mirror fragments would be supernaturally placed back together, without the awkward glue or whatever means that a person would use, but actually restored to their original state and in their original working order -- with no cracks, glue, or anything else like that to be seen.

Until that day comes, both the corpse and the mirrors will lie in their fragmented, decaying state, unable to function as they were originally created.

Maybe they didn't have the apocalyptic revival of the dead and restoration of the mirrors, as though Humpty Dumpty had been miraculously put back together again. At the very least, they could have intended the broken mirrors to stand for the broken body, broken family, broken social hierarchy, now that this elite individual has been retired from their role.

Since they viewed mirrors mainly as sun symbols, i.e. projectors of light, then a broken mirror is tantamount to a snuffed-out candle for some other culture where candles represent light projection and mini-suns.

Such an important person dying is like the sun and moon themselves going dark in the sky.

We know that ancient Altaic people used to view the sun and moon as mirrors-in-the-sky -- see the earlier post on their creation myth, which is mainly about churning the primordial sea with a divine staff in order to make land-masses out of the resulting sea-foam on the surface. One of them also mentions that during the age of creation, two mirrors were placed in the sky, which brought light to the universe -- the sun and the moon.

So, far from being a sign of disrespect toward the dead, the broken mirror was the ultimate material expression of grief from the mourners.

Japanese steppe culture: Ruling clans with the piebald horse as totem animal, and ritual horse sacrifice

Following the previous post, we'll look at another sort of "creation" myth from Japan -- the origin myth of ritual impurity, and therefore, of ritual purification measures to counter-act it (the basis of Shinto practices). This myth provides 2 links to horse culture from the Eastern Steppe. It's from the Nihon Shoki, though not the Kojiki, from the earliest writings in Japanese (early 8th C AD).

The god responsible for introducing ritual impurity into the world is Susanoo, the impetuous storm god. The target of his ire in this story is his sister, the sun goddess Amaterasu. He takes the Heavenly Piebald Colt (Ame no Fuchikoma), and flays it alive -- starting with its back end, and working toward the head. The text uses a specific term to emphasize that this is a "backwards flaying" ("sakahagi"), not a standard flaying that starts at the head and works its way toward the tail.

This is a form of ritual impurity, since he has not killed the colt first (e.g., by slitting its throat), and since he's removing the skin in backwards order.

He then hurls the colt in through a hole in the roof of Amaterasu's weaving hall, where one of her maidens is so startled by the desecration that she runs into the spinning shuttle at her loom, which hits her in the genitals, causing her to begin bleeding from there. This is the origin of menstrual bleeding, another form of ritual impurity. Amaterasu then goes into hiding in the Heavenly Rock-Cave Door (Ame no Iwayato), in a form of menstrual seclusion. Susanoo also defecates in her palace, another form of ritual impurity.

This story reveals that the myth-makers of Japan were intimately familiar with horse sacrifices -- how they were supposed to be performed, and therefore, which actions would constitute desecration, defilement, and impurity.

I don't know about every culture that practiced horse sacrifice, but the Cheremis people (AKA Mari) began flaying the horse from the head, then ending at the tail. Of course its throat was slit first, not flayed alive. And it was a colt, not an adult horse (the Japanese term "koma" means specifically "colt," combining the words for "child" and "horse").

The whole ordeal is described in grisly detail in the Finno-Ugric portion of The Mythology of All Races, which I referred to in the previous post. Incidentally, from my reading of their myth and ritual, the Cheremis seem to be mostly Indo-European culturally, despite speaking a Uralic language -- much like the Hungarians, Estonians, and Finns. They live along the Volga River in Russia, a little ways north of the Steppe.

How would the creators of the Nihon Shoki know so much about horse sacrifice, and why would they want to use that as such a crucial example of Susanoo's causing ritual impurity? He also destroys Amaterasu's rice fields, but it's not described in cruel gut-wrenching detail like flaying a horse backwards while still alive. They really wanted to emphasize the importance of horses, and of horse sacrifices, in their culture.

A mainly agrarian culture would not care so much about defiling the horse sacrifice ritual -- and probably would not even refer to such a ritual, since there was never any such thing in their culture. It occupies center stage in the Japanese narrative because they hailed from a nomadic horse-centric culture before arriving in Korea and Japan -- which in that part of the world, means the Eastern Steppe.

Its similarity to the Cheremis horse sacrifice ritual suggests a common ritual all across the Steppe, whether the practitioners were Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, or otherwise.

* * *

However, the Japanese myth's emphasis on the piebald / skewbald / spotted / etc. color pattern of the horse, narrows down which range of the Steppe they originated from.

First, tribes or clans or chiefdoms being associated with particular color patterns of their horses is mainly an Eastern Steppe phenomenon, from the Turkic tribes all the way to Glorious Nippon. It makes their favored breed of horse into a totem animal for the social unit.

Amaterasu is not just any ol' goddess in the foundational texts of Japanese culture -- she is the deity through whom the Japanese imperial family traces their bloodline. So this means that the piebald horse is a totem animal for the ruling clan of Japan.

Where else is the piebald horse the totem animal for a ruling clan? Why, where else, and when else? -- in the Xiongnu confederation during the late 1st millennium BC, and several of its off-shoots after its break-up.

And not just any ol' clan within the Xiongnu, but their ruling clan, the Luandi, whose name likely derives from "piebald horse".

Then there was the Alat tribe, whose name also likely means "piebald horse", a Turkic tribe who also belonged to the Xiongnu, and were either related to the Luandi, or identical to them, or perhaps they coincidentally shared the same totem animal due to there only being so many color patterns to choose from, and due to every clan preferring a horse rather than some other species for their totem animal.

The same situation must have been true for the ruling tribe or clan among the Yayoi-like people who arrived in southern Korea and then Japan. Their totem animal was also the piebald horse, whether their clan was related to the Luandi or Alat by lineage, or just sharing a totem animal by happenstance. In either case, it places the continental component of the future Japanese culture among the Xiongnu confederation during the 1st millennium BC -- not Southeast Asia, not the far Arctic north, not during the 1st millennium AD, etc.

As with the horse sacrifice portion of the myth, specifying the color pattern of the heavenly horse reveals that the myth-makers of Japan were intimately familiar with Eastern Steppe practices for choosing a totem animal, like including its color pattern instead of a broadly defined breed or species name alone.

I don't think the Alat tribe being Turkic means that the ruling clan of the Yayoi-like people were Turkic. They could have been Mongolic or Tungusic. Making the horse your totem animal, and emphasizing its color pattern, was common among all of those Altaic speech communities.

And perhaps the Yayoi-like population was not ethnically homogeneous -- there could have been Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Uralic, or other groups among them. All sorts of people mixed with each other on the Eastern Steppe. Perhaps they only homogenized when they landed in Japan and were defined by a new ethnic opposition, between the various continental arrivals and the native Emishi / Ainu.

* * *

Over the past 10 years in Japan, there has been an insanely popular media franchise called Uma Musume ("Horse Girl") Pretty Derby, mostly based on an anime series and related video games, which revolve around a group of horse-human girls training to compete in horse-girl races. Yes, like in a traditional horse-racing track. They look mostly human, with horse ears, and as a side project devote themselves to singing and dancing on stage as idols.

This is yet another case of the horse-centric origins of Japanese culture re-asserting themselves in the modern age, after having lied dormant or secondary for many centuries.

But by now, horse racing is a very popular sport in Japan, and has been for decades. It's so popular that Lui, a vtuber from Hololive, hosts regular watching parties / informal betting streams as the major Japanese horse races are being broadcast. She can't re-broadcast the sound and image of the race on her own stream, due to copyright, but even just as a watching party, she gets close to 10K live viewers, judging from the one she held a few days ago (pretty good numbers for livestreams).

And as the very beginnings of Japanese literature show, their fascination with horses is neither new nor imported from the West. And far from viewing them as only a neat form of entertainment, they hold them to be one of the most sacred animals in creation, a testament to their origins in the Eastern Steppe, and the OG badass nomadic steppe empire in particular, the Xiongnu.

The steppe origins of the continental component of the Japanese people and culture: The uniquely shared Mongolian and Japanese land-creation myth

In the last comments section, I detailed many ways in which Japan looks like a horse-riding culture from the eastern Eurasian steppe. I will compile and condense those ways in a later post, and add a few crucial new ones in standalone posts, beginning with this one. But in order to provide some big-picture historical structure to this view, I should contrast it with a highly popular and sometimes controversial theory of Japanese origins, within the Japanese scholarly community and Japanese pop culture itself.

That is the so-called "horse-rider theory" of the origins of the Yamato state and its culture, proposed by Namio Egami in 1948 and elaborated / refined / altered throughout the following decades. Here is the Japanese Wikipedia entry, which you can put into Google Translate's "websites" section, to get the fuller details.

Although it sounds similar to the story I was developing in the previous comments section, it's actually quite different. Egami argued for the arrival of eastern steppe horse-riders in the 4th to 5th centuries AD, as part of the broader migrations and conquests of horse-riding nomadic pastoralists from the eastern steppe during the Eurasian Dark Ages (Huns, Bulgars, Turks, Uyghurs, Mongols, etc.). In his view, this invasion of horse-riders radically changed the previous culture of the Yayoi period -- 1st millennium BC to 300 AD -- which reflected the arrival of rice farmers into the lands of mostly hunter / gatherer / fishermen (and adzuki bean harvesters) of the earlier Jomon period (back to 10,000 or so BC).

I'm arguing that the people who arrived during the Yayoi period, who brought rice agriculture and other things along with them, were an eastern steppe people. So I'm saying the steppe origins of the Japanese people and their culture goes much deeper than Egami's theory proposes.

But wait -- isn't the steppe famous for its nomadic pastoralists who ride horses? The continental Asians who arrived in the Japanese archipelago during the Yayoi period did not practice this subsistence mode -- they brought sedentary agriculture with them, mainly rice.

Well, cultures can change their subsistence mode over time, they aren't entirely defined by it. And that includes the very region of interest, the eastern steppe. The most famous example of a people from there who spoke a language in the Altaic family (in the Tungusic sub-family), who were not nomadic pastoralists but agriculturalists -- including rice -- were the Manchus, who founded and led the Qing Empire of China in the 17th C. Their ancestors, the Jurchens, led the Jin dynasty of China, which included northern China in addition to Manchuria, mainly during the 12th C. They were also agriculturalists, not nomadic pastoralists. And their ancestors, the Mohe, were also mainly agricultralists, not nomadic pastoralists. None of these groups were small hunter-gatherer communities from northeastern Siberia.

Once upon a time, there was no rice agriculture in Manchuria -- it was "invented" in the Yellow River region, by the people who became the Han majority ethnic group in China, who spoke a Sinitic language. Because the Mohe, Jurchens, and Manchus were not small-scale hunter-gatherers, presumably they *were* nomadic pastoralists at some point before they settled down and adopted agriculture -- what other subsistence mode is there in Manchuria? So, their subsistence mode changed, from pastoralism to sedentary agriculture, under the influence of China.

The Jurchens also based their writing system on the Chinese system, despite their language being from a totally unrelated family. In fact, they maintained their Tungusic linguistic identity through much of the Qing era, albeit becoming bilingual in Chinese as well as they integrated further into the society they led. By now, most of their young people are monolingual Chinese speakers who live in China. When the Qing Empire collapsed in the 1910s, the Manchus didn't leave back to Manchuria, and they didn't ditch the Chinese language. They are heavily Sinicized by now.

The same goes for their shamanistic religion, which was maintained at least among themselves during the Qing era (they did not try to impose it on the Han majority). As with other domains of their culture, they have largely left it behind and Sinicized by now.

I can't believe that the Mohe / Jurchens / Manchus were the only cultural lineage like this in that region. Although the steppe grasslands favor nomadic pastoralism and horse-riding, that niche can get crowded -- when everybody is doing it, it pays to do something different. Maybe you have to leave for greener pastures, as it were.

And during the 1st millennium BC, that niche was already starting to feel a little full, represented by the vast confederation of tribes united by the Xiongnu, who plagued the sedentary agriculturalists of China, serving as the meta-ethnic nemesis for the incipient Han ethnogenesis. As the Han united into an empire under the threat of the Xiongnu, they eventually turned the tables and broke up the nomadic confederation.

But that was only temporary, as the Xianbei confederation would emerge to fill the steppe empire vacuum left by the broken-up Xiongnu confederation, roughly 300 BC to 300 AD, as rivals to the agricultural and Chinese-speaking Han to their south.

My hunch is that the continental Asians who migrated into the Korean peninsula and from there the Japanese archipelago, during the 1st millennium BC and early centuries AD, were an earlier example of the Mohe / Jurchen / Manchu strategy. Maybe they felt the nomadic pastoralist niche was too saturated, with too much competition, so they decided to try their hand at rice farming instead. Or maybe their tribe was kicked out of one of those many steppe confederations, and sent into exile -- so they couldn't just stay in the region, they moved all the way over into the Korean peninsula and then the Japanese islands.

Whatever the reason was, it had to have been big, since they are the only large-scale migration from Asia into the Japanese islands. Northeastern Siberia, Manchuria, Mongolia, northern China, southern China, the Ural and Altai mountains, the steppe as a whole -- various peoples have come and gone, many times over, throughout human existence. But other than the small-scale migration of primitive hunter-gatherers into the Japanese islands during prehistoric times, the arrival of the Yayoi people are the only large-scale migration into Japan ever.

Even just migrating into the Korean peninsula was a huge move -- that peninsula has not seen wave after wave of migrations either. There were some Jomon-like people in the southern region, then the Yayoi-like people arrived, and after them, the Koreans. There's a small handful of Tungusic toponyms and loanwords in Korea, and some Nivkh as well -- but really the only large-scale migrations into Korea were the Yayoi and then the Koreans who assimilated them.

Especially for nomadic pastoralists from the steppe, accustomed to wide-ranging spaces and grass as far as the eye could see, moving into the cramped and rocky terrain of Korea and Japan would have been quite the downgrade. But if they decided to give up nomadic pastoralism and adapt to their newfound environments, maybe it wouldn't be so inhospitable and uncomfortable after all. They seem to have already decided to adopt rice agriculture before they entered Korea -- as long as they could find a patch of fertile soil for growing rice, that would be enough. It would not be as romantic as the wide-open grasslands where they originally came from, but that was apparently no longer a viable option -- they had some kind of powerful motive to leave the Asian mainland behind, since they were the only group to do so.

* * *

When they met the Jomon-like people, first in southern Korea and then like crazy in the Japanese islands, the Yayoi-like people were a steppe culture, but who practiced agriculture instead of horse-based pastoralism. They spoke a language from the Altaic group -- not a Japonic language, which did not exist yet, but something from Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic.

As they absorbed large numbers of L2 learners from the Jomon-like people, who spoke languages related to present-day Ainu, that acted as a filter that fundamentally altered the original Altaic language, since the Ainu-like language speakers could not pronounce its sounds, and the Altaic speakers could not pronounce some of the Ainu-like sounds, their word-forming processes were different, and so on.

The resulting compromise language for the newly fused cultures was Japonic -- that is why there are no Japonic toponyms in mainland Asia aside from the southern half of the Korean peninsula. It originated in southern Korea, and it was not dropped there by a linguistic stork, nor does it go back to time immemorial -- it attended the arrival of Yayoi-like people during the 1st millennium BC. But the reason it is not a straightforward example of an Altaic language is that Ainu-like languages are sufficiently different from Altaic languages, that the pidgin / creole / synthesis / lingua franca compromise was only half-recognizable as Altaic, and half-not-Altaic.

Likewise, when the Koreans later arrived and assimilated the earlier Yayoi people, and/or the remaining Jomon people, in the Korean peninsula, they inherited the same problem. They arrived in Korea speaking an Altaic language, but they had to absorb large numbers of speakers who spoke an Ainu-like language (unassimilated Jomon), or speakers of a new language that was itself heavily filtered by the traits of Ainu-like languages -- i.e., Japonic (Yayoi and assimilated Jomon).

That is why Japonic and Koreanic are partly included in the Altaic family and partly excluded. The core languages are Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. The only others that anyone entertains including are Japonic and Koreanic, but they are only somewhat entertained because they're sufficiently different -- due to the changes incurred by absorbing large numbers of Ainu-like speakers, who were present in southern Korea and Japan, but who were not present elsewhere on mainland Asia.

The same process must have affected the other domains of their culture. The Yayoi brought a largely steppe culture with them, but it was filtered through Ainu-like culture, and the resulting hybrid / synthesis / compromise / joint-collaboration for something new, was not a carbon-copy of Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic culture. Nor was it a carbon-copy of Ainu-like culture. There are elements from both sides, as well as entirely new elements created after the initial fusion of Yayoi and Jomon peoples.

* * *

And yet, there are telltale signs of the Yayoi's steppe origins, aside from their language. I detailed many in the previous comments section, and will list those briefly in a later post. For now, though, I'll return to the domain of mythology to uncover specifically Altaic-related cultural origins for the very earliest and most foundational forms of Japanese myths.

First, the Japanese creation myth -- hard to find a more important myth than that! Many creation myths around the world tell of the sky being separate from the watery chaos of the oceans. Both sky and water are so uniform, or rather formless, that they are more primordial than land -- land has particular shapes, arranged in particular configurations, with particular landscape features running over them, with particular plant and animal species thriving on them, and later on, particular peoples and cultures or even civilizations thriving on them.

Creating the vast expanse of sky? Bla bla bla. Creating the vast expanse of ocean? Yadda yadda yadda. Get to the good part -- how were the landmasses formed? That's where the story gets good.

Turns out, Japan has a very distinct creation myth. It is unlike the "earth diver" family of myths from Eurasia and the New World, where the creator god orders an animal (like a bird) to dive into the depths of the ocean, scoop up some earth from the very bottom, and return to the surface where it will be placed on top of the water, or on top of a large animal that floats on the water.

It is unlike the family of "giant body parts" myths, where a primordial giant's body is broken into pieces, and these form into landmasses.

Rather, the creator god, Izanagi (along with his sister-wife Izanami) dips a metal-headed spear into the primordial ocean, stirs and churns the water with it, and when he removes it from the ocean, the salty brine-y froth that drips off of the tip and lands back onto the ocean surface, becomes landmasses (specifically, those of the Japanese islands).

Although highly unique among the world's creation myths, it is not *totally* unique -- it is shared with a Mongolian creation myth, recorded by the Russian scholar / adventurer Potanin during his trek through Siberia in the 1870s, and published in his Essays on Northwest Mongolia in the early 1880s. His work was referenced in English in the 1927 mega-compendium, The Mythology of All Races, in the chapter on Finno-Ugric and Siberian myths by Holmberg, which I'm quoting from (p. 328).

In the beginning, when there was yet no earth, but water covered everything, a Lama came down from Heaven, and began to stir the water with an iron rod. By the influence of the wind and fire thus brought about, the water on the surface in the middle of the ocean thickened and coagulated into land.

The Lama element is obviously a later addition from their adoption of Tibetan Buddhism, but otherwise it is largely the same as the Japanese example. The creator god uses a tool (as opposed to his own body, an animal messenger, etc.) to stir the ocean, and the brine-y froth that results on the surface coagulates into solid land. No earth, mud, or other solid is retrieved from the depths of the ocean, no existing solid is re-cycled for solid land (like a giant's body parts). Stirring the ocean creates a brine-y froth, which hardens into landmasses.

A related myth from the times of creation, although not creating the landmasses themselves (p. 419, and still referencing Potanin).

The Altaic peoples speak of a time when there was no sun and no moon. They say that people, who then flew in the air, gave out light and warmed their surroundings themselves, so that they did not even miss the heat of the sun. But when one of them fell ill God sent a spirit to help these people. This spirit commenced by stirring the primeval ocean with a pole 10,000 fathoms long, when suddenly two goddesses flew into the sky. He also found two metal mirrors (toli), which he placed in the sky. Since then there has been light on the earth.

This is about the creation of the sun and moon in the sky, rather than landmasses on top of the ocean, and the agent is a spirit commanded by the creator god rather than the creator himself. And because the bodies formed are not lying on top of the ocean, there's no mention of the brine-y froth that results from stirring the ocean. And yet, the creation of the sun and moon somehow results from the stirring of the primordial ocean with a mythologically big pole.

This motif appears nowhere else in the mythologies of the world. It is found only in Mongolia -- and Glorious Nippon.

I haven't read the original Potanin work, so I'm not sure if the people he collected these stories from are Mongolic, Turkic, or Tungusic. Or, if they used to be Tungusic but then had switched their language to Mongolic by the time he met them. However, they're spoken about as Altaic, and in Mongolia, so they're from one of the core eastern steppe cultures that (at least by the 19th C) spoke an Altaic language. That's all that matters here -- that Japan's creation myth is very clearly genetically related to one from Mongolia.

Could one of the two sides "loaned" their creation myth to the other? No, that's ridiculous. You don't just toss out your traditional creation myth and "borrow" a new one, it's such a core part of your mythology. Only if one culture was such a huge influence on another.

But northwest Mongolia and Japan have not had any cultural contact throughout their histories. The Mongols tried to invade Japan, but their fleet was sunk by a divine wind (kamikaze). And the Japanese invaded Korea at various times, but never crossed over the mountains into Manchuria, Mongolia, and the rest of the steppe.

Plus, the Japanese myth is present in the earliest written works in Japanese -- the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki, from the early 8th C. AD. There was no prolonged contact between them and various Altaic groups before then -- except for the Yayoi people's origins, before they entered Korea and Japan, which therefore must have been from the eastern steppe, and specifically from an Altaic-speaking culture. They descend from a common ancestor.

The Japanese love to emphasize their uniqueness, and this was no different for the 8th-century authors of the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki. If they wanted to imitate China so badly, they could have borrowed the Chinese creation myth. But they didn't. They may even have asked around -- "Psst psst, does anyone near us tell the same story of the creation of land? Anyone? Not the Mohe? Not the Nivkh? Not the Emishi? Not the Turks? Great, we get to emphasize our special uniqueness!"

Little did they know, there was a sub-region of Mongolia where they *did* tell the same unique creation myth, heheh. And thankfully, somebody uncovered this detail before a lot of that region began assimilating toward Chinese and Russian cultures.

As a final aside for this section, I note the difficulty with which these crucial facts reach present-day residents of the American Empire. Learning about Japan is easy, since we've been fascinated by them, and they have been fascinated by us, since the 19th C, and then occupied them outright after WWII. But much of the fieldwork on Siberian, steppe and far NE Asian / Arctic cultures was and still is done by Russians, who became America's geopolitical enemies during the Cold War and sadly through the present.

There was little taboo surrounding Russian scholarship or culture in 1927 (other than remnants of the first Red Scare), when that mega-compendium was published in English in America. But by the Cold War, reading Russian scholarship or being aware of their culture at all became taboo. There was only one further semi-cited reference to the Mongolian creation myth -- the 1979 popular book Primal Myths by Sproul. I haven't read it, so I'm not sure if she even cites Potanin, or just read it via the Holmberg chapter in the 1927 mega-compendium and included it in her survey of creation myths from around the world. In any case, that's the last published reference to it that still circulates on Wikipedia, Reddit, and so on, all of which are ignorant of the source material being Potanin from the 1880s.

The Holmberg chapter notes the striking similarity to the Japanese creation myth in the following sentence. Not like it's a hard comparison to make -- they're practically identical -- but it does require the knowledge of both cultures' creation myths. And these days, only the Japanese one is easy to come by -- the Mongolian one has faded into obscurity, since it was originally recorded by a Russian. In 1927, it was easy for an English-speaking scholar to come by the Russian source, since they were not taboo -- they were not Western, but there was no broad shadowban on their culture, including science and scholarship, at that point.

It was also not controversial to refer to Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic as "Altaic" back in 1927, or to liken Japanese and Korean to them (to a lesser degree). Much of that work was done by Russians, since they're the empire expanding into Siberia and the eastern steppe. Once Russia became rivals of America during the Cold War, suddenly the entire concept of "Altaic" cultures or languages was slandered in the American imperial sphere of influence.

Maybe Holmberg didn't think it was worth saying explicitly -- like, "Yeah, of course the Japanese creation myth is identical to the Mongolian one, where else do you think the Continental Asian part of the Japanese comes from -- Beringia? China? Malaysia? Their languages are not even remotely like Japanese. No, it comes from a fellow Altaic culture, where the Yayoi must have originated from." At any rate, it is worth saying so explicitly now, as cOnTrOvErSiAl as it may be in 21st-century America.

Rather than add further examples in the comments section as usual, I'm going to try going back to writing a series of standalone posts. The comments section this time will be for less important stuff, open thread, etc. I'd like these to be easier to find by search engines, and they can't see into the comments section.

Gawr Gura memorial song: "In the Real World" by the Little Vir-maid

The virtual shark-girl streamer who took the world by storm officially graduates today. I have a whole backlog of tribute songs I'll be posting here. This "in memoriam" song is set to the tune of "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid (lyrics, music).

As I said with Mumei's memorial song, Millennials and especially Zoomers' native habitat is online, so IRL is this strange exotic territory that they're alternately fascinated and frightened by. Growing up, maturing, leaving the nest -- these all have to do with finding their place in meatspace, and navigating relations with the perplexing creatures called "other people" (as opposed to, "other accounts").

In Goob's case, she got pulled out into IRL without intending to. Fandom taboos aside, it's pretty clear that she became a mommy -- like the time she came back and while casually chatting with Ame, asked out of nowhere if she had ever lactated, totally matter of factly, as if to compare notes with her own experience.

Details like that are important, not as gossip about e-celebs, but to make it clear that she has a perfectly respectable and noble reason for having largely left behind her turboposting memelord career for the past couple years. And to emphasize that IRL still has a powerful attractive pull, yes even on terminally online, algo-poisoned Zoomer brains.

And that's what this memorial song is about -- her feeling restless after living and doing so much online, and wanting to escape out into a normie IRL existence (notwithstanding the occasional visit / reunion). For the veterans of irony-poisoned toxic content wars, IRL normie life is not "settling" or "retiring" -- it's liberating and rejuvenating! ^_^

(Atypical stress patterns: CARE-ee-oh-KEY, ee-MOTES, meat-STAN, tar-ZAN. And "nendie" is short for Nendoroid. Also, do Millennials and Zoomers realize that "cut the cord" is an allusion to cutting the umbilical cord? That's where the phrase came from relating to devices that we have become dependent on -- if it were literal, you wouldn't cut that kind of cord, but simply unplug it.)

* * *

Look at these subs, all at tier 3
Breaking the 'net during karaoke
Wouldn't you think I'm the girl
The girl who sets trendy things?

Custom emotes, membership gold
How many fan-arts can one hard drive hold?
Lurking around /here/ you'd think
"She's the trending thing"

I've got ad rev and anime nendies
Several spots 'top the meme leaderboard
A million followers? I've got twenty
But fresh air, can't be streamed -- cut the cord

I wanna be, in the greenest yard
I wanna breathe, all the flowers they're planting
Grilling their ribs with that -- what do ya call it?
Oh, mesquite

Clicking your keys, you don't bond too hard
Hands are required for shaking, planting
Climbing your way through a -- what's that word again?
Tree

Out where they talk
And call you by "hon"
Out where they're face to face, one on one
Shooting the breeze
Wish I could be
In the real world

Trade all my clips, to trade some quips
Not just spam "poggers"
Pay 'em top rate, to elongate
My attention span
Bet in Meatstan, Jane finds Tarzan
Bet they don't shadowban mom bloggers
Online women, sick of simpin'
Won't trust the plan

I'm ready to grow where the green grass grows
Ask 'em my questions and get some answers
What are tires and why do they -- what's the word?
Turn
New routes to learn
It'd be such a buff
Forevermore live outdoors, off the cuff

Off the PC
Climb out the screen
To the real world

Memorial song, "IRL-mei" by Moomlan

Now that Hololive's owl-girl Mumei has left the nest, here's one last tribute song to memorialize her, in case she's still lurking (she does like to watch, y'know...).

Set to the tune of "Reflection" from Mulan (lyrics, music). Her fandom uses "-mei" to refer to various personas of hers, like "lolimei" for when she talks about her school days. So IRL-mei is who she is in real life.

I really had a think about this, which way should it be framed? -- her online persona is the real, primary one, and her IRL persona is a disguise? Or the other way around?

For Gen X-ers and earlier, our IRL selves are the real thing, and we adopt masks or disguises online.

For Millennials and Zoomers, though, they live and grew up so online, that's their primary unmediated self -- strange as it may seem, given that it is technologically mediated. But in the sense of not disguised -- not very much anyway. And their IRL persona is the more heavily guarded, disguised, not so recognizable version of their true online self.

Moom, in her role as a paranoid schizo conspiracy theory Disney princess, always kept her online persona heavily guarded from her family and friends. And although she shared lots of personal details with her audience, she still kept her IRL life at some distance. Leading two lives, or trying to live in two worlds at the same time.

But I think her online persona was/is the real one -- whether as Nanashi Mumei from Hololive-English Council, or in her earlier online existence(s), she used her cyber-persona to confide in people, vent, open up, express herself, and in general be her true self. Her IRL persona, as she shared many times with us, was mostly a blurry cloud to those around her, a ghost in a black hoodie (or something like that), as one of her schoolmates described it to her.

So I wrote this from the perspective of her online persona being the deep-down true one, and her IRL persona being a secondary, shadowy projection of it.

Recently she mentioned that she's going to open up to her family about what her vtuber persona and experience were, to some degree anyway. That's the story of character growth and maturity for raised-online Millennials and Zoomers -- being able to discuss your username, avatar, posting history, content archive, and so on. That's the *real* you, and you don't just share it with any ol' group of people from IRL!

It took getting such a fascinated welcoming reception from online audiences, to convince Moom that she really is talented, lovable, and... interesting! She would never want us to call her "cool". ^_^

We're glad we could play a role in giving you the confidence necessary to Just Be Yourself (TM) with those close to you IRL, you sweet schizo songbird, you. ^_^

* * *

Look at me
I could never last out in normie life
Or sail normie waters
Can it be
I was meant to spark fan-art?
Now I see
If I talked to them through my live2D
Their view of me would press restart

Who is that owl on screen
Singing proud in worldwide streams?

Why is IRL-mei someone I won't post?

Somehow I cannot priv
The girl who lives in my archive

When will IRL-mei share
Who I am online?

When will IRL-mei share
Who I am online?