Top all-time · #17721
Mutantfrog Travelogue
Personal blog · mutantfrog.comculturehistory
Mutantfrog Travelogue is a personal blog at mutantfrog.com about culture and history. Since 2010, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite this blog for historical and social detail about Japan, such as the history of Japanese text direction and the logic of Japanese lifetime employment and consensus decision-making.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
The emphasis in Japan on teamwork and consensus decision-making also helps prevent the accumulation of valuable proprietary knowledge inside any one head, which would then have excessive leverage to extract wealth ... Lifetime employment also gives companies an incentive to invest in giving their workers expensive technical training, since they know the workers won’t just jump to a competitor once they have it. Sinc…
Comment linking /2009/07/16/is-a-national-lack-of-english-skills-japans-berlin-wall/
on “Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism”Submitted Beef Bowl Capitalism (how deflation leads to social problems in Japan) as a story · 21 points
HN discussionWhen written top to bottom, the columns are read from right to left. This is the most common format for printed text, especially in Hokusai's time. Also, when text was horizontal, it was frequently written right to left until the mid-1940s.[1] [1] https://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/08/08/the-history-of-japanes...
Comment linking /2009/08/08/the-history-of-japanese-text-direction/
on “1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave"”Submitted Patriotism by Yukio Mishima as a story · 2 points
HN discussion