Show Notes

This week, we review and analyze Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (機動戦士ガンダムΖΖ) episode 2 - "The Boy From Shangri La"/シャングリラの少年 - discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on some aspects of the Japanese economy on 1986: laborforce participation by youth and women, educational attainment, tanshinfunin, migrant labor, and... orange imports. Plus - another Japanese poem.

- Chart of youth unemployment rate in Japan, 1970-2020.

- Youth employment rate in Japan, 1979-1986.

- Wikipedia page on the Japanese education system.

- Wikipedia page on Japan in the 1980s.

- Paper on labor force participation from the Bank of Japan Review.

- Study on how tanshinfunin fathers affect children’s socioemotional development, from Hokkaido University.

- Wikipedia page about migrant labor.

- Page about migrant workers in Japan, from the Asia-Pacific Human Rights Information Center (based in Osaka).

- Discussion and definition of the “natural” unemployment rate.

- Paper on “Migrant Workers in the Post-War History of Japan” by Yasuo Kuwahara of Dokkyo University.

- Paper on “Development of Immigration Policy in Japan” by Atsushi Kondo of Kyushu Sangyo University.

- Unesco Institute for Statistic page (source for 1980 upper-secondary school completion rate).

- “Education in Japan: Past and Present” (source for enrollment rates in upper-secondary school in 1980).

- Text used for information on internal migration in Japan:

Ishikawa, Yoshitaka. “Internal Migration in Japan.” Internal Migration in the Countries of Asia: a Cross-National Comparison, by Martin Bell, Springer, 2020, pp. 113-136.

- Industry overview of the Japanese fruit-imports market (with historical background).

- 1987 article from the South Florida Sun Sentinel about Japan lifting import quotas on American oranges in 1988 (I misspoke in the episode and said 1998).

- Paper from the USDA’s Economic Research Service, “The Japanese Market for Oranges.”

- 1983 paper from the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, “Japan’s Quantitative Restrictions on the Importation of Agricultural Products.”

- About the decline of the orange market in Japan since 1990s.

- Paper on decline in orange consumption since mid-1990s:

Mori, Hiroshi & Clason, Dennis L. & Ishibashi, Kimiko & Gorman, William D. & Dyck, John H., 2009. "Declining Orange Consumption in Japan: Generational Changes or Something Else?," Economic Research Report 55836, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. <https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/uersrr/55836.html>

- Online reference for the poem used in Saegusa's memorial, taken from the Hyakkunin Isshu poetry collection (百人一首), by Semimaru (蝉丸), a Heian era poet and musician.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

You can learn more about Lenapehoking, the Lenape people, and ongoing efforts to honor the relationship between the land and indigenous peoples by visiting the websites of the Delaware Tribe and the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. Listeners in the Americas and Oceania can learn more about the indigenous people of your area at https://native-land.ca/. We would like to thank The Lenape Center for guiding us in creating this living land acknowledgment.

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