Expo '70: Tower Of The Sun

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A Journey To The Tower Of The Sun

I had a vague idea to visit the sight of the 1970 Osaka World Expo while I was in Japan last month, but not much of plan before I went. On the express train it's almost a 2 hour journey from the in-laws place, so I took with me one of my favorite manga, 20th Century Boys by Naoki Urasawa. One the advantages of a month of holidays is the time to read and wander aimlessly. I was almost to the end of the series, so it was a good opportunity to finish the last two volumes.

There were posters advertising 40th Anniversary of the 1970 Osaka World Expo at the station when I arrived at Namba. After a quick bento I studied the station map and jumped on the subway to the North of the city and the monorail which connects Senri Chuo station with Expo Commemoration Park.

In Japanese Expo '70 is known as Ōsaka Banpaku (大阪万博). The theme was "Progress and Harmony for Mankind." This was the first World's Fair held in Japan and one of the most well attended world fairs in history with almost a third of Japan's population visiting it over a 6 month period.

There are only a few remants of the expo remaining, including Tarō Okamoto's remarkable Tower of The Sun, which dominates Senri hill. As you approach from the west the tower is visible from a great distance. Okamoto was member of the Paris avant garde in the 1930's and had a deep fascination with the occult. Perhaps you can see this in the totemic style of the three external faces of the tower.





On the front you see the present flanked by red thunder. The golden disk at the top represents the future. On the back is the black sun of the past. The interior was once open to the public, who could rise to the full heigh of 70 metres on an elevator and moving staircases. In the centre of the tower was another artwork callled the tree of life, and in the basement another face, the sun of the underworld.

The park was planned by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, and the structures contained within represented the peak of human engineering acheivement at the time. Highlights included early mobile phone prototypes, local area networking and maglev train technology.

Take for example the United States pavilion - extraordinary for not only the technical and architecural innovation it embodied, but for the low cost of construction - made from only four materials for less than half a million dollars. The long span cable stiffened pneumatic dome, the first of it's kind, became the model for the majority of sports domes in existence today. All that is left of the United States' pavilion is a plaque commemorating the place where it stood and the hugely popular moon rook that it housed.

The expo is situated in time between the uncertain post war years and boom years of the later part of the century. Embued with an optimism for the future, Expo '70 undoubtably had a lot to do with inspiring Japan to become the advanced technological nation it is today.

A brisk walk around the park takes two hours and is well worth it, with a wide variety of gardens and sculptures along the way. In July it was 32 degrees celcius in the shade, so not too many people were around. Though I probably wasn't allowed, I took the opportunity to cool off in a stream in the middle of a secluded forest.

Through the forest runs an elevated observation pathway, which at it's furthest end stands a massive observation tower. The tower is onstructed entirely of wood and reminded me of the traditional architecture found within Japanese castles, only without an exterior facade.


AR大阪万博 by GORIMON, on Flickr

For many people I imagine a trip to the Expo '70 commemorative park is either to remember their first visit or some retro-futurism tourist jaunt. I wasn't there for an architectural tour or nature walk however, I was there to take a trip through the world imagined by Naoki Urasawa in his epic manga 20th Century Boys. It was a bit of of a manga geek trip, manga tabi if you will.

Expo 70 was a central to the story of 20th Century boys. First in 1970 as the ruse used by a young Fukube while he was writing the book of prophecy that would herald the bloody new years eve 2000 and he coming of a global government at the end of the world.

On that bloody new years eve, Kenji scaled the robot that was bringing death and destruction to Tokyo and came face to face with the tomodachi who stood on top of a gruesome replica of the Tower of The Sun.

The Tower of The Sun featured during the last stages as the place where the tomodachi plotted the assaination of the pope. The tomodachi then staged his own resurrection in front of the masses, becoming immortal in the process.

It was place that Kanna brought the people together for one final concert before the end of the world, and where Kenji roused the people of Tokyo to revolution.

Urawasa's epic work pulls together a whole host of post modern themes, bio-terrorism, mateship and betrayal, in a coming of age story that spans three generations. To wander around the park, which is dominated by the Tower of The Sun at the centre was to put myself in the picture. When you are culturally aware, the world seems an altogether different place.

Whatever your goals are for reaching fluency in Japanese, they must be accompanied by vision and imagination. You really need to be able to see yourself doing the the things you dream. And really, the book is much better than the movie.

You might also want to read other posts on this blog about manga:

• How reading manga can be good for your Japanese
• How to begin learning Japanese with manga
• How to put the fun back into Japanese now the JLPT is over

If you really want to get into to manga, but don't know where to start read my free guide to manga. It'll show you how to get over the initial hurdles of reading in Japanese.

Thanks for reading, I mean that. You are what make this blog such fabulous place to learn about Japanese language and culture. Thank you for the support and the ongoing conversation on places like Facebook and Twitter.

Purging Prussia at War's End, 1945-

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From: Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, by Christopher Clark (Penguin, 2007), Kindle Loc. 12643-12695:

Among the Allies, only the Soviets remained aware of the tension between Prussian tradition and the National Socialist regime. While the July plot of 1944 evoked little positive comment among western politicians, the Soviet official media found words of praise for the conspirators. Soviet propaganda, by contrast with that of the western powers, consistently exploited Prussian themes – the National Committee for a Free Germany, established as a propaganda vehicle in 1943 and composed of captured German officers, appealed explicitly to the memory of the Prussian reformers, above all Gneisenau, Stein and Clausewitz, all of whom had resigned their Prussian commissions during the French occupation and joined the army of the Tsar. Yorck, the man who ignored the command of his sovereign to walk across the ice to the Russians in 1812, naturally held pride of place.

This was all eyewash, of course, yet it also reflected a specifically Russian perspective on Prussia’s history. The history of relations between the two states was no chronicle of unremitting mutual hatred. Stalin’s hero Peter the Great had been a warm admirer of the Prussia of the Great Elector, whose administrative innovations served as models for his own reforms. Russia and Prussia had cooperated closely in the partitioning of Poland and the Russian alliance was crucial to Prussia’s recovery against Napoleon after 1812. Relations remained warm after the Napoleonic Wars, when the diplomatic bond of the Holy Alliance was reinforced by the marriage of Frederick William III’s daughter Charlotte to Tsar Nicholas I. The Russians backed Austria in the dualist struggles of 1848–50, but favoured Prussia with a policy of benevolent neutrality during the war of 1866. The assistance rendered to the beleaguered Bolsheviks in 1917–18 and the close military collaboration between Reichswehr and Red Army during the Weimar years were more recent reminders of this long history of interaction and cooperation.

Yet none of this could preserve Prussia from dissolution at the hands of the victorious Allies. By the autumn of 1945, there was a consensus among the various British organs involved in the administration of occupied Germany that (in a tellingly redundant formulation) ‘this moribund corpse of Prussia’ must be ‘finally killed’. Its continued existence would constitute a ‘dangerous anachronism’. By the summer of 1946, this was a matter of firm policy for the British administration in Germany. A memorandum of 8 August 1946 by the British member of the Allied Control Authority in Berlin put the case against Prussia succinctly: I need not point out that Prussia has been a menace to European security for the last two hundred years. The survival of the Prussian State, even if only in name, would provide a basis for any irredentist claims which the German people may later seek to put forward, would strengthen German militarist ambitions, and would encourage the revival of an authoritarian, centralised Germany which in the interests of all it is vital to prevent.

The American and French delegations broadly supported this view; only the Soviets dragged their feet, mainly because Stalin still hoped to use Prussia as the hub of a unified Germany over which the Soviet Union might eventually be able to secure control. But by early February 1947, they too had fallen into step and the way was open for the legal termination of the Prussian state.

In the meanwhile, the extirpation of Prussia as a social milieu was already well advanced. The Central Committee of the German Communist Party in the Soviet zone of occupation announced in August 1945 that the ‘feudal estate-owners and the Junker caste’ had always been ‘the bearers of militarism and chauvinism’ (a formulation that would find its way into the text of Law No. 46 of the Allied Control Council). The removal of their ‘socio-economic power’ was thus the first and fundamental precondition for the ‘extirpation of Prussian militarism’. There followed a wave of expropriations. No account was taken of the political orientation of the owners, or of their role in resistance activity. Among those whose estates were confiscated was Ulrich-Wilhelm Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, who had been executed on 21 August 1944 for his role in the July conspiracy.

These transformations took place against the background of the greatest wave of migrations in the history of German settlement in Europe. During the last months of the war, millions of Prussians fled westwards from the eastern provinces to escape the advancing Red Army. Of those who remained, some committed suicide, others were killed or died of starvation, cold or illness. Germans were expelled from East Prussia, West Prussia, eastern Pomerania and Silesia, and hundreds of thousands perished in the process. The emigrations and resettlements continued into the 1950s and 1960s. The looting or burning of the great East-Elbian houses signalled the end not only of a socio-economic elite but also of a distinctive culture and way of life. Finckenstein, with its Napoleonic memorabilia, Beynuhnen with its collection of antiques, Waldburg with its rococo library, Blumberg and Gross Wohnsdorff with their memories of the liberal ministers von Schön and von Schroetter were among the many country seats to be plundered and gutted by an enemy bent on erasing every last trace of German settlement. So it was that the Prussians, or at least their mid-twentieth-century descendants, came to pay a heavy price for the war of extermination that Hitler’s Germany unleashed on Eastern Europe.

The scouring of Prussia from the collective awareness of the German population began before the end of the war with a massive aerial attack on the city of Potsdam. As a heritage site with little strategic or industrial significance, Potsdam was very low on the list of Allied targets and had been spared significant bombardment during the war. Late in the evening of Saturday 14 April 1945, however, 491 planes of British Bomber Command dropped their payloads over the city, transforming it into a sea of fire. Almost half the historical buildings of the old centre were obliterated in a bombing that lasted for only half an hour. When the fires had been extinguished and the smoke had cleared, the scorched 57-metre tower of the Garrison Church stood as the dominant landmark in a cityscape of ruins. Of the fabled carillon, famous for its automated renditions of the ‘Leuthen Chorale’, there remained only a lump of metal. The scouring continued after 1945, as entire districts of the old city were cleared to make way for socialist reconstruction. The imperatives of post-war city planning were reinforced by the anti-Prussian iconoclasm of the Communist authorities.

Reassessing Ferdinand and Isabella's Legacy

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From Imperial Spain: 1469-1716, by J. H. Elliott (Penguin, 2002), 2nd ed., Kindle Loc. 2181-2234:

The reign of Ferdinand and Isabella was called by Prescott ‘the most glorious epoch in the annals’ of Spain. Generations of Spaniards, contrasting their own times with those of the Catholic Kings, would look back upon them as the golden age of Castile. The conquest of Granada, the discovery of America, and the triumphant emergence of Spain on to the European political stage lent unparalleled lustre to the new State created by the Union of the Crowns, and set the seal of success on the political, religious, and economic reforms of the royal couple.

Against the conventional picture of a glorious spring-time under Ferdinand and Isabella, too soon to be turned to winter by the folly of their successors, there must, however, be set some of the less happy features of their reign. They had united two Crowns, but had not even tentatively embarked on the much more arduous task of uniting two peoples. They had destroyed the political power of the great nobility, but left its economic and social influence untouched. They had reorganized the Castilian economy, but at the price of reinforcing the system of latifundios and the predominance of grazing over tillage. They had introduced into Castile certain Aragonese economic institutions, monopolistic in spirit, while failing to bring the Castilian and Aragonese economies any closer together. They had restored order in Castile, but in the process had overthrown the fragile barriers that stood in the way of absolutism. They had reformed the Church, but set up the Inquisition. And they had expelled one of the most dynamic and resourceful sections of the community – the Jews. All this must darken a picture that is often painted excessively bright.

Yet nothing can alter the fact that Ferdinand and Isabella created Spain; that in their reign it acquired both an international existence and – under the impulse given by the creative exuberance of the Castilians and the organizing capacity of the Aragonese – the beginnings of a corporate identity. Out of their long experience, the Aragonese could provide the administrative methods which would give the new monarchy an institutional form. The Castilians, for their part, were to provide the dynamism which would impel the new State forward; and it was this dynamism which gave the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella its distinguishing character. The Spain of the Catholic Kings is essentially Castile: a Castile, overflowing with creative energy, which seemed suddenly to have discovered itself.
...

The Court was the natural center of Castile's cultural life; and since Spain still had no fixed capital it was a Court on the move, bringing new ideas and influences from one town to another as it travelled round the country. Since Isabella enjoyed a European reputation for her patronage of learning, she was able to attract to the Court distinguished foreign scholars like the Milanese Pietro Martire, the director of the palace school. Frequented by foreign scholars and by Spaniards who had returned from studying in Italy, the Court thus became an outpost of the new humanism, which was now beginning to establish itself in Spain.

One of the devotees of the new learning was Elio Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522), who returned home from Italy in 1473 – the year in which printing was introduced into Spain. Nebrija, who held the post of historiographer royal, was a grammarian and lexicographer, and an editor of classical texts in the best humanist tradition. But his interests, like those of many humanists, extended also to the vernacular, and he published in 1492 a Castilian grammar – the first grammar to be compiled of a modern European language. ‘What is it for?’ asked Isabella when it was presented to her. ‘Your Majesty,’ replied the Bishop of Avila on Nebrija's behalf, ‘language is the perfect instrument of empire.’

The Bishop's reply was prophetic. One of the secrets of Castilian domination of the Spanish Monarchy in the sixteenth century was to be found in the triumph of its language and culture over that of other parts of the peninsula and empire. The cultural and linguistic success of the Castilians was no doubt facilitated by the decline of Catalan culture in the sixteenth century, as it was also facilitated by the advantageous position of Castilian as the language of Court and bureaucracy. But, in the last analysis, Castile's cultural predominance derived from the innate vitality of its literature and language at the end of the fifteenth century. The language of the greatest work produced in the Castile of the Catholic Kings, the Celestina of the converso Fernando de Rojas, is at once vigorous, flexible, and authoritative: a language that was indeed ‘the perfect instrument of empire’.

Odessa's meshchane estate

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From Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, by Charles King (W. W. Norton, 2011), pp. 134-136:

From the perspective of the tsarist state, Russian society was divided into identifiable and highly regulated "estates," or sosloviya in Russian. Membership could be fluid, at least across several generations, and in many cases one's estate was never as predetermined or immutable as one's sex or eye color. But it was still a fundamental part of a Russian subject's social identity. In contrast to what Marxists would identify as "class," an individual's estate membership had little to do with his or her place in the hierarchy of economic production, much less with wealth or income. Like for the impoverished nobles in the works of Tolstoy or Chekhov, estate status was part of one's birthright, the genetic code of Russian society as a whole, not a reflection of economic power. When the state came to sort and categorize its own citizens, the labels that presented themselves in the late nineteenth century were clear: nobles, clergy, military, civil servants, and a group known as the meshchane—by far the largest estate in Odessa.

The meshchane—a word that might be translated as the petty bourgeoisie—were the large group of semi-skilled workers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, and Russian subjects caught between the castes of large-scale landowners and their former serfs living in grinding poverty in the close-in suburbs. They eked out a living on the fringes of Odessa's trading economy, vulnerable to the pendulum swings of commerce and the periodic blights afflicting agriculture. Unlike the wealthiest members of society, they had little recourse when times were hard, other than to join the day laborers hanging around the docks or hoping to pick up a job as a porter at one of the city's bazaars. Unlike their peasant neighbors, they had few real connections to the countryside that might allow them to weather economic fluctuations in town. Already by the middle of the nineteenth century, Odessa was largely a city of these vulnerable meshchane. In 1858 the nobility comprised 3 percent of the city's population, merchants nearly 5 percent, foreigners (that is, people who were not Russian subjects) just over 4 percent, peasants nearly 4 percent, and the military under 7 percent. The remainder—nearly 70 percent of the city's total—were meshchane.

With a transient foreign population and a constant stream of newcomers arriving by ship and overland carriage—far moire than in the empire's twin capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow—Odessa was ripe for the kind of swindles, trickery, and palm-greasing that helped ease the economic burden of the petty bourgeoisie. When visitors complained of the hotelier who charged extra for bedding, the cobbler who charged twice to repair the same shoe, or the droshky driver who charged different rates for the same ride, it was the city's huge estate of meshchane who were the makers of the city's reputation. They could be found in virtually any profession. In 1892 over half the city's 607 prostitutes reported that they were meshchane by estate.

"New Spain's Century of Depression"

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From Imperial Spain: 1469-1716, by J. H. Elliott (Penguin, 2002), 2nd ed., Kindle Loc. 4988-5028:

The imperialism of Philip II's reign had been based on a Spanish-Atlantic economy, in that it was financed out of the resources of America and of a Castile which itself received regular injections of silver from the silver-mines of the New World. During the last decade of the sixteenth century American silver was still reaching Spain in very large quantities, and the port of Seville had an undeniable air of prosperity; but the comforting appearances masked the beginning of a radical change in the structure of the entire Spanish-Atlantic system.

This change was, in part, a direct result of Spain's war with the Protestant powers of the north. In the first two decades after the outbreak of the Netherlands revolt, the Dutch had continued to trade with the Iberian peninsula. Spain was dependent on northern and eastern Europe for its supplies of grain, timber, and naval stores, a large proportion of which were transported in Dutch vessels. Irked by Spain's continuing dependence on the Dutch, and anxious to strike a blow at the Dutch economy, Philip II placed an embargo on Dutch ships in Spanish and Portuguese ports in 1585, and again in 1595. The Dutch appreciated as well as Philip II that any interference with their peninsular trade threatened them with disaster. They needed Spanish silver and colonial produce, just as they also needed the salt of Set̼bal for their herring industry. Faced with embargoes on their peninsular trade, they therefore reacted in the only possible way, by going direct to the producing areas for the goods they needed Рto the Caribbean and Spanish America. From 1594 they were making regular voyages to the Caribbean; in 1599 they seized the salt island of Araya. This intrusion of the Dutch into the Caribbean disrupted the pearl fisheries of Santa Margarita and dislocated the system of maritime communications between Spain's colonial possessions. For the first time, Spain found itself heavily on the defensive in the western hemisphere, its overseas monopoly threatened by increasingly audacious Dutch and English attacks.

The presence of northern interlopers in the American seas was a serious danger to the Spanish commercial system; but potentially even more serious was the simultaneous transformation in the character of the American economy. During the 1590s the boom conditions of the preceding decades came to an end. The principal reason for the change of economic climate is to be found in a demographic catastrophe. While the white and the mixed population of the New World had continued to grow, the Indian population of Mexico, scourged by terrible epidemics in 1545–6 and again in 1576–9, had shrunk from some 11,000,000 at the time of the conquest in 1519 to little more than 2,000,000 by the end of the century; and it is probable that a similar fate overtook the native population of Peru. The labour force on which the settlers depended was therefore dramatically reduced. In the absence of any significant technological advance, a contracting labour force meant a contracting economy. The great building projects were abruptly halted; it became increasingly difficult to find labour for the mines, especially as the negroes imported to replace the Indians proved to be vulnerable to the same diseases as those which had wiped out the native population; and the problem of feeding the cities could only be met by a drastic agrarian reorganization, which entailed the creation of vast latifundios where Indian labour could be more effectively exploited than in the dwindling Indian villages.

The century that followed the great Indian epidemic of 1576–9 has been called ‘New Spain's century of depression’ – a century of economic contraction, during the course of which the New World closed in on itself. During this century it had less to offer Europe: less silver, as it became increasingly expensive to work the mines, and fewer opportunities for the emigrants – the 800 or more men and women who were still arriving in the 1590s in each flota from Seville. At the same time, it also came to require less of Europe – or at least of Spain. European luxury products found themselves competing with the products of the Far East carried to America in the Manila galleon. But much more serious from the point of view of Spain was the establishment in its American possessions of an economy dangerously similar to its own. Mexico had developed a coarse cloth industry, and Peru was now producing grain, wine, and oil. These were exactly the products which had bulked so large in the cargoes from Seville during the preceding decades. In fact, the staple Spanish exports to America were ceasing to be indispensable to the settlers, and in 1597 Spanish merchants found it impossible to dispose of all their goods: the American market, the source of Andalusia's prosperity, was for the first time overstocked.

From the 1590s, therefore, the economies of Spain and of its American possessions began to move apart, while Dutch and English interlopers were squeezing themselves into a widening gap. It was true that Seville still retained its official monopoly of New World trade, and that Sevillan commerce with America reached an all-time record in 1608, to be followed by a further twelve years in which trade figures, while fluctuating, remained at a high level. But, as an index to national prosperity, the figures are deprived of much of their significance by the fact that the cargoes were increasingly of foreign provenance. The goods which Spain produced were not wanted by America; and the goods that America wanted were not produced by Spain.

Spanish Fears of Religious Encirclement, 1568-69

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From Imperial Spain: 1469-1716, by J. H. Elliott (Penguin, 2002), 2nd ed., Kindle Loc. 4015-4044:

In the Netherlands, in France, the forces of international Protestantism were on the march. That it was an international conspiracy, Philip had no doubt, for each passing year showed more conclusively that the Dutch rebels were not alone. Behind them were the Huguenots, and the Breton seamen who were now waging war on Spanish shipping in the gulf of Gascony, and who were to cut Spain's maritime communications with Flanders in the winter of 1568–9. Behind them, too, were English privateers like Sir John Hawkins, whose raid into the Spanish Caribbean in 1568 brought Spain and England a step nearer to open war.

Already by 1568 it was clear that the struggle was spreading – spreading in particular to the sea, where the Protestants were at their strongest and where Spain was still weak. The war between Spain and international Protestantism was essentially a naval war, fought in the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel, and even, increasingly, in the hitherto exclusive preserve of the Spanish Atlantic. Spain's American possessions could no longer be regarded as safe. But for that matter it was questionable whether any part of the King's dominions was now immune from attack. Indeed, Spain itself was threatened, both by pirate attacks on its coasts, and by armed incursions across its frontier with France.

The acute sensitivity of Philip to the dangers from heresy is suggested by his behaviour in the Principality of Catalonia. The Principality was undoubtedly one of the weaker sections of the Spanish bastions, both because of its exposed position on the French frontier, and because the extent of its privileges made it little amenable to royal control. It was well known that there were Huguenots among the bandit gangs that were constantly passing to and fro across the border, and there was every reason to suspect that heresy had found converts among that steady stream of Frenchmen which had for some years been crossing the Pyrenees into Catalonia in search of work. If heresy were to take root in Catalonia, the position would be extremely grave, since the Principality had all the makings of a second Netherlands: a strong tradition of independence, its own laws and privileges, and a hatred of Castile that was aćcentuated by linguistic and cultural differences. Consequently, as the pressure mounted against the Catalan frontier, the King's fears grew. The viceroys were instructed to show the greatest vigilance in guarding the frontier, and in 1568 the situation appeared so alarming that severe new measures were decreed: a fresh prohibition on natives of the Crown of Aragon studying abroad; a harsher censorship in Catalonia; and a ban on all teaching by Frenchmen in Catalan schools. Then, in 1569, the Catalans refused to pay the new tax known as the excusado, which had just been authorized by Pius V. Convinced by their refusal that they were on the verge of going over to Protestantism, Philip ordered the Inquisition and the Viceroy to take action, and had the Diputats and a number of nobles arrested.

The King's vigorous action against the Catalan authorities is an indication of his deep anxiety about the course of events. As he himself later realized, the action was unwarranted; there was no breath of heresy among the Catalan governing class. But the situation seemed sufficiently dangerous to make action essential. The Protestant peril was growing hourly, and it was growing at a moment when the danger from Islam seemed also to be mounting to a climax. For Catalonia was not the only region of Spain where revolt and heresy threatened. On Christmas night of that terrible year 1568 – the year of the danger in Catalonia, of the cutting of the sea-route through the Bay of Biscay, and of the arrest and death of Philip's son and heir, Don Carlos, a band of Morisco outlaws lead by a certain Farax Abenfarax broke into the city of Granada, bringing with them the news that the Alpujarras had risen in revolt. Although the rebels failed to seize the city, their incursion signalized the outbreak of rebellion throughout the kingdom of Granada. Spain, which had surrounded itself with such strong defences against the advance of Protestantism, now found itself endangered from within; and the threat came not, as was expected, from the Protestants, but from its old enemies, the Moors.

"New Spain's Century of Depression"

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From Imperial Spain: 1469-1716, by J. H. Elliott (Penguin, 2002), 2nd ed., Kindle Loc. 4988-5028:

The imperialism of Philip II's reign had been based on a Spanish-Atlantic economy, in that it was financed out of the resources of America and of a Castile which itself received regular injections of silver from the silver-mines of the New World. During the last decade of the sixteenth century American silver was still reaching Spain in very large quantities, and the port of Seville had an undeniable air of prosperity; but the comforting appearances masked the beginning of a radical change in the structure of the entire Spanish-Atlantic system.

This change was, in part, a direct result of Spain's war with the Protestant powers of the north. In the first two decades after the outbreak of the Netherlands revolt, the Dutch had continued to trade with the Iberian peninsula. Spain was dependent on northern and eastern Europe for its supplies of grain, timber, and naval stores, a large proportion of which were transported in Dutch vessels. Irked by Spain's continuing dependence on the Dutch, and anxious to strike a blow at the Dutch economy, Philip II placed an embargo on Dutch ships in Spanish and Portuguese ports in 1585, and again in 1595. The Dutch appreciated as well as Philip II that any interference with their peninsular trade threatened them with disaster. They needed Spanish silver and colonial produce, just as they also needed the salt of Set̼bal for their herring industry. Faced with embargoes on their peninsular trade, they therefore reacted in the only possible way, by going direct to the producing areas for the goods they needed Рto the Caribbean and Spanish America. From 1594 they were making regular voyages to the Caribbean; in 1599 they seized the salt island of Araya. This intrusion of the Dutch into the Caribbean disrupted the pearl fisheries of Santa Margarita and dislocated the system of maritime communications between Spain's colonial possessions. For the first time, Spain found itself heavily on the defensive in the western hemisphere, its overseas monopoly threatened by increasingly audacious Dutch and English attacks.

The presence of northern interlopers in the American seas was a serious danger to the Spanish commercial system; but potentially even more serious was the simultaneous transformation in the character of the American economy. During the 1590s the boom conditions of the preceding decades came to an end. The principal reason for the change of economic climate is to be found in a demographic catastrophe. While the white and the mixed population of the New World had continued to grow, the Indian population of Mexico, scourged by terrible epidemics in 1545–6 and again in 1576–9, had shrunk from some 11,000,000 at the time of the conquest in 1519 to little more than 2,000,000 by the end of the century; and it is probable that a similar fate overtook the native population of Peru. The labour force on which the settlers depended was therefore dramatically reduced. In the absence of any significant technological advance, a contracting labour force meant a contracting economy. The great building projects were abruptly halted; it became increasingly difficult to find labour for the mines, especially as the negroes imported to replace the Indians proved to be vulnerable to the same diseases as those which had wiped out the native population; and the problem of feeding the cities could only be met by a drastic agrarian reorganization, which entailed the creation of vast latifundios where Indian labour could be more effectively exploited than in the dwindling Indian villages.

The century that followed the great Indian epidemic of 1576–9 has been called ‘New Spain's century of depression’ – a century of economic contraction, during the course of which the New World closed in on itself. During this century it had less to offer Europe: less silver, as it became increasingly expensive to work the mines, and fewer opportunities for the emigrants – the 800 or more men and women who were still arriving in the 1590s in each flota from Seville. At the same time, it also came to require less of Europe – or at least of Spain. European luxury products found themselves competing with the products of the Far East carried to America in the Manila galleon. But much more serious from the point of view of Spain was the establishment in its American possessions of an economy dangerously similar to its own. Mexico had developed a coarse cloth industry, and Peru was now producing grain, wine, and oil. These were exactly the products which had bulked so large in the cargoes from Seville during the preceding decades. In fact, the staple Spanish exports to America were ceasing to be indispensable to the settlers, and in 1597 Spanish merchants found it impossible to dispose of all their goods: the American market, the source of Andalusia's prosperity, was for the first time overstocked.

From the 1590s, therefore, the economies of Spain and of its American possessions began to move apart, while Dutch and English interlopers were squeezing themselves into a widening gap. It was true that Seville still retained its official monopoly of New World trade, and that Sevillan commerce with America reached an all-time record in 1608, to be followed by a further twelve years in which trade figures, while fluctuating, remained at a high level. But, as an index to national prosperity, the figures are deprived of much of their significance by the fact that the cargoes were increasingly of foreign provenance. The goods which Spain produced were not wanted by America; and the goods that America wanted were not produced by Spain.

Just symmetry, it's introduction.

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Symmetryprice: ¥230($1.99)developer: gravity loves timeiTunes“Symmertry” make symmetric photo as app name says.After loading photo, symmetry processing starts automatically. Flicking to right (bottom) will move left (top) source image to its direction. It's very simple. Clicking bottom right axis rotating button or flicking vertical (horizontal) quickly changes processing axis.Tutorial and further information is developer's website "gravity loves time".Clicking multiply axis button bellow, Symmetry reproduces new process with using latest symmetry image. With using this reproducing process, you can make fantastic image like kaleidoscope.Simple symmetric photo made by this app may not be charming because duplicaded image tone is even in large part of photo, but strong composition is useful. I suggest re-touching with Photogene, ColorSplash or other your favorite image effect application after saving symmetric photo like below.Application interface is clear, stable and response is quick. These are important for image processing tool. If I request something for Symmetry, supporting undo, saving session and blured edge composition.Anyway, ¥230($1.99) is reasonable price for this small nifty application.

It's my URL! ServersMan

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ServersManprice: FREEdeveloper: FreeBit Co., Ltd.size: 3.3MBiTunesHow do you use web-server if you can bring to anywhere? ServersMan is tiny web-server hosts web site an WebDAV storage on iPhone.After activate your account, node name is set as reach-able URL to iPhone... The phrase before is not impressive then I'd want say again “URL on MY iPhone”. At first launch, I've got excited like the time to write first HTML tags.Activated ServersMan is stand alone web server ( in correct meaning, domain name is solved by developer FreeBit based on IPv6 technology named "Emotion Link"). The public_html directory hosts web contents to Internet after set "Public Web Access" on.Factory set HTML shows location data, images and audio files which you set to publish. ServersMan have function to host images captured by iPhone's camera on the fly. Setting "Save Same File Name" to on, latest image will shown in same URL as pseudo camera streaming. This interesting function is same with audio file. ServersMan have recording function and save on same file also.At the same time of launching ServersMan, Web DAV storage server works, and user can mount storage on computer's desktop with logging in. Mounted storage contains following directories. Node named directory contains editable html, images and other files hosted to WWW via ServersMan. You can edit html file on ServersMan application also.If you want send files to iPhone, it is able to move files to MyStorage directory via WebDAV. Uploaded files appears on ServersMan to edit or preview. Opposite side transfer is able with using ServersMan's "WebGadget" menu. With using WebGadget, iPhone's photo album images and recorded files are able to be hosted to WWW and WebDAV.Server transportation speed is rely on network where iPhone connected. Wi-Fi gives enough response and 3G network is not too slow.Current version has wrong path to get user id, sent e-mail from ServersMan expire after application is shut down. Then other computer is necessary in order to read pass-code to enter ServersMan activation text box.ServersMan has many weak-points. It is the most terrible battery eater ever I know. Even if I charging iPhone, ServersMan will eat battery out in 30 minutes. User interface is not clear. Web engineer can understand how it works but workflow is not streamlined. I think ServersMan's largest weak-point is html set by developer. Poor design html is not worth to publish from iPhone.ServersMan is not something special at this time, but the things opened by this tiny web server and iPhone seems to bring us harvestfull future, even if ServrsMan is not exist at there.I'm going to enjoy to think how ServersMan's concept work in future with modifying html on iPhone.

Impressive tool doesn't go behind Photoshop

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re:NancyKPHprice: FREE!developer: gravity loves timeiTunesPicturely effect app is popularity in AppStore. Today, cool stuff is shipped, “re:NancyKPH - woodcut/rubber plate print-” is impressive wood cut picture effect application.This strange name is from Japanese pop rubber print artist "Nancy Seki". Her likeness portrait prints are graved on eraser rubber and printed. She died but you can see her impressive prints on Google image. Application re:NancyKPH make picture like her print from photos on iPhone.re:NancyKPH name is built as Nancy + K(o -"ko" means small) + S(eki) and (Hirax --read below) means in literal "dedicated small app for Nancy Seki and Hirax".Developer gravity loves time serves well designed web site for re:NancyKPH and tutorial page "re:NacyKPH Tutorial".Launching re:NancyKPH, Tutorial baby picture is shown and automatically process works.Tapping screen shows menu button bar at bottom. Picture effect is able to be adjusted with tapping second left button. 3 sliders shown (pity! slider meaning is not shown. If the parameter names are shown below of sliders...). When you tap slider controls, parameter names appears on control panel. From top "Smooth", "Bold Edge", "Threshold" and "Paint". Effects don't work in real-time. Update button below panel shows effects after set parameters.Only I want developer make to implement on this cool app is real-time processing though it's not too slow. After set outline of your print, setting color from second right button shows ink color setting panel.This cool processing is based on Japanese famous geek engineer Hirax's one of huge archive. His humorous, informative and filled of deep wisdom blog impress many programmers in Japan. His blog “Dekirukana?(Can I do it?)” since 1998 is filled with fascinate toys for image processing engineers and programers. It's jewel box for our Japanese engineer.Developer gravity loves time seems to decide this cool app's price to be free from his respect to Nancy Seki and hirax.I'll keep in use NancyKPH for printing wood cut impressive picture on my hand.

Just symmetry, it's introduction.

To contact us Click HERE
Symmetryprice: ¥230($1.99)developer: gravity loves timeiTunes“Symmertry” make symmetric photo as app name says.After loading photo, symmetry processing starts automatically. Flicking to right (bottom) will move left (top) source image to its direction. It's very simple. Clicking bottom right axis rotating button or flicking vertical (horizontal) quickly changes processing axis.Tutorial and further information is developer's website "gravity loves time".Clicking multiply axis button bellow, Symmetry reproduces new process with using latest symmetry image. With using this reproducing process, you can make fantastic image like kaleidoscope.Simple symmetric photo made by this app may not be charming because duplicaded image tone is even in large part of photo, but strong composition is useful. I suggest re-touching with Photogene, ColorSplash or other your favorite image effect application after saving symmetric photo like below.Application interface is clear, stable and response is quick. These are important for image processing tool. If I request something for Symmetry, supporting undo, saving session and blured edge composition.Anyway, ¥230($1.99) is reasonable price for this small nifty application.

It's my URL! ServersMan

To contact us Click HERE
ServersManprice: FREEdeveloper: FreeBit Co., Ltd.size: 3.3MBiTunesHow do you use web-server if you can bring to anywhere? ServersMan is tiny web-server hosts web site an WebDAV storage on iPhone.After activate your account, node name is set as reach-able URL to iPhone... The phrase before is not impressive then I'd want say again “URL on MY iPhone”. At first launch, I've got excited like the time to write first HTML tags.Activated ServersMan is stand alone web server ( in correct meaning, domain name is solved by developer FreeBit based on IPv6 technology named "Emotion Link"). The public_html directory hosts web contents to Internet after set "Public Web Access" on.Factory set HTML shows location data, images and audio files which you set to publish. ServersMan have function to host images captured by iPhone's camera on the fly. Setting "Save Same File Name" to on, latest image will shown in same URL as pseudo camera streaming. This interesting function is same with audio file. ServersMan have recording function and save on same file also.At the same time of launching ServersMan, Web DAV storage server works, and user can mount storage on computer's desktop with logging in. Mounted storage contains following directories. Node named directory contains editable html, images and other files hosted to WWW via ServersMan. You can edit html file on ServersMan application also.If you want send files to iPhone, it is able to move files to MyStorage directory via WebDAV. Uploaded files appears on ServersMan to edit or preview. Opposite side transfer is able with using ServersMan's "WebGadget" menu. With using WebGadget, iPhone's photo album images and recorded files are able to be hosted to WWW and WebDAV.Server transportation speed is rely on network where iPhone connected. Wi-Fi gives enough response and 3G network is not too slow.Current version has wrong path to get user id, sent e-mail from ServersMan expire after application is shut down. Then other computer is necessary in order to read pass-code to enter ServersMan activation text box.ServersMan has many weak-points. It is the most terrible battery eater ever I know. Even if I charging iPhone, ServersMan will eat battery out in 30 minutes. User interface is not clear. Web engineer can understand how it works but workflow is not streamlined. I think ServersMan's largest weak-point is html set by developer. Poor design html is not worth to publish from iPhone.ServersMan is not something special at this time, but the things opened by this tiny web server and iPhone seems to bring us harvestfull future, even if ServrsMan is not exist at there.I'm going to enjoy to think how ServersMan's concept work in future with modifying html on iPhone.