Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei
The Japanese have hardly had the most robust of economies over the past decade or so, yet here they are still running television programs about the excitement of space travel. While we have the occasional Star Trek, shows like those are set so far into the future that they are simply fantasies. What we do not have, at least as I far as I can see, are more realistic shows about actual space flight like this one.
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The first Japanese citizen in space was a middle-aged, chain-smoking journalist named Toyohiro Akiyama. He spent a week on the Mir space station, and is best remembered by the Russian space agency for having the worst case of space sickness they had ever seen. And yet, if you compare the way space and space travel are depicted in Japanese and American popular media, you'd think that Japan was the country that had gone to the moon and the USA was the country whose first space traveler was the barfing guy.
I've explored this point in talks I've given about
one of my books. I last gave this talk - which I call "Literary Resources for Teaching Math and Science" - about a month ago during a conference at Cal State Los Angeles, and
Space Brothers was one of the examples I used.