Every picture tells a story

The great East Asian scholar Edwin O. Reischauer said in his introduction to Yoshikawa Eiji's classic novel Musashi, that the stories a country reveres gives an accurate picture of their self-image.

To get a window into current Japanese zeitgeist go to mysoju.com, a site that acts as a portal to Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese dramas and movies. They have an interesting model of aggregating and organizing links to videos from sources like Google, Dailymotion and Yahoo without actually hosting any of the videos themselves.

Though most of the dramas are romances about 20 somethings finding love in Tokyo, I actually found several that were interesting. One is Nippon OL, which has as its backdrop the dread in Japanese offices of the outsourcing of jobs to China.

NHKs dramatization of Musashi several years ago is also there by the way. The story is so feminized and modernized that it bears no resemblance to the novel, the excellent movie by Inagaki Hiroshi or historical fact. It should really have been titled "Love in the time of Ieyesu".