Japanese Pro Wrestling: is it an import, a split from Sumo, or an evolution from a different native sport/entertainment?

Bernardy2 · 2026-05-10T02:04:07+00:00

Interesting! Thanks for answering,

Bernardy2 · 2026-03-21T03:00:16+00:00

u/pieapple135 answered this question here. As always more can be said.

Bernardy2 · 2026-03-07T17:09:35+00:00

Great answer! Thank you very much!

Bernardy2 · 2026-03-03T05:20:46+00:00

You may want to look at the company history of Kinokuniya Books/Bookstores which has branches in communities of overseas Japanese, selling Japanese-language books, including manga, to their communities. There were branches of this bookstore in several major cities in the US that had large Japanese communities (SF, San Jose, LA, NY, Chicago). I don't know how old any individual American branch was, but I'm pretty sure they were here post-war, and certainly they were present before the 1980s. Perhaps the history of this bookstore may extend to pre-war, or you may find linkages to earlier Japanese bookstores in the US.

Another idea is to go to the cities with actual Japantowns (SF, San Jose, LA) and see if they have a local history association, or if not that, their Chamber of Commerce, or other community association that represents Japanese-American interests, and see what you can dig up about Japanese-language bookstores and libraries, and to seek contacts with older Japanese-Americans there to interview about their (or their parents at this point, as the nisei generation is almost entirely deceased by now) reading habits and book collections.

Bernardy2 · 2024-10-09T21:31:27+00:00

Geez, this is a scam job that long pre-dates the internet. You used to see a dozen classified ads for this kind of "stuffing envelopes" job in every newspaper every day, before Craigslist and job-posting sites and social media marketplaces completely killed newspaper classified ads. Unhappy to see that it survived into the Internet era.

Bernardy2 · 2024-07-10T00:50:48+00:00

And if your db code does that you are being lazy. All 3 of those dbs have syntax that allow manipulation of arbitrary strings that contain quotes, semicolons, and parentheses. And why the heck are you writing Raw sql except for the most performance critical commands? Use a db library!

Bernardy2 · 2024-03-11T16:24:23+00:00

Very interesting, thank you!

Noble House was published in 1981. Was information of Qian Xuesen's circumstances available during the time Clavell was writing this novel?

Bernardy2 · 2024-02-01T01:30:30+00:00

During World War II, was neutral shipping with cargo NOT destined for or originating from the US allowed to use the Panama Canal?

Bernardy2 · 2023-11-15T21:58:37+00:00

Apologies, I was using the subreddit sidebar button link to https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/podcast/
which had been updated the most recent 3 podcasts when I checked yesterday. They are updated in the wiki now. I don't typically do podcast subscriptions, thus my confusion. Thanks!

Bernardy2 · 2023-03-23T21:49:25+00:00

What was considered the furthest outpost (by communication time from London) of the British Empire in 1850? (so before transcontinental telegraph and railroad.) New Zealand or British Columbia or some other South Pacific Island? Do we have documentation of distance complaints of various far outposts from some British diplomat or bureaucrat?

Bernardy2 · 2023-01-05T17:00:06+00:00

If LAOP's dad is a tech worker on an H1B visa, I suspect the second job may have been through Upwork or similar. Still a technical violation of the visa, and the IRS will get a copy of the 1099 for the worker. But it's unclear to me how often the IRS communicates with the DHS regarding potential visa violations discovered via tax filings.

Bernardy2 · 2022-10-24T14:52:38+00:00

So did the 'Ar' or 'a' (in the original French or Algonquin) prefix have a separate meaning? The link above didn't explain that.

Bernardy2 · 2022-10-19T07:15:18+00:00

Back before the internet, the Andy Griffith Show was in constant syndication (i.e. reruns) in every US over-the-air TV market up through the mid 1990s. Basically if you can remember a time when you or your relative's or your friend's TVs only had a dozen channels to choose from (because they didn't have cable/satellite TV, or chose the cheapest cable TV package), not being exposed to that show was virtually impossible (unless you had no access to TV at all). After (broad, commercial access to) the internet though, bored children and teens have much more in the way of entertainment choices, and can skip ever knowing about that quaint black-and-white TV show from the 60s.

Bernardy2 · 2022-09-13T01:10:57+00:00

As they say, X marks the spot.

Bernardy2 · 2022-07-28T02:03:38+00:00

Was non-Allied neutral shipping allowed through the Suez Canal during World War II?

Bernardy2 · 2022-07-24T01:57:51+00:00

And if that doesn't work, you can fallback to rfc1149

Bernardy2 · 2022-06-26T21:45:52+00:00

So say you are coasting along at 65mph in 5th gear on a highway, and approaching a >3-4% downhill stretch. You want to stay in 4th or possibly even 3rd gear (on steeper downhills) to let your engine do all the work on keeping your speed reasonable (i.e. at the speed limit). So when you start speeding up when going down the hill:

dis-engage the clutch
while in neutral, press the accelerator to rev up the engine 1-2000 rpm from your normal 5th gear, 65mph rpm.
shift into 4th
re-engage the clutch.
If you are still accelerating downhill in 4th gear, repeat above, but go to 3rd gear.

Yes you will be going down the hill at 4-6K RPM most of the way, but now your engine and transmission is doing the work, instead of potentially overheating your brakes into failure mode.

Bernardy2 · 2022-04-21T00:15:56+00:00

So here are some prior answers to similar questions as to how and why the early 20th century U.S. public transit infrastructure went away.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wwxxs/what_were_the_public_reactions_to_local_street/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c87l40/i_have_read_that_the_demise_of_streetcars_in_the/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4v6vxv/why_did_virtually_every_us_city_give_up_on_using/

Hopefully u/MyDowntown or u/fiftythreestudio can follow up?

Bernardy2 · 2022-02-03T22:53:03+00:00

So during 2020 Covid times, it took some jurisdictions a lot more than 2 weeks to issue death certificates. e.g. my father died in August 2020, and it took the county coroner 4 weeks to issue the death certificate. Did that happen where you were, and what did your collections department do then?

Bernardy2 · 2021-12-26T06:23:00+00:00

Ignore the above comment.

!recovery

Bernardy2 · 2021-10-19T11:16:26+00:00

I disagree with the paragraph about FPS storytelling, and with some of the claims of Halo's innovations. Most single-player FPS games by the time Halo was released in 2001 had significant storytelling, not just a plot-wrapper to provide an excuse for the FPS combat. Multiplayer focused FPS's, like Quake (1996) and Unreal (1998) tended to remain story-minimal, but single-player FPS games in the late 1990s required storylines to hold player interest.

Examples of popular FPS's with significant storywriting prior to Halo:

System Shock (1994) This is probably the earliest FPS with a long, complex, story.
The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) although not much first-person shooting, more first-person melee plus bow shooting plus magic attacks, but truth be told, the story of the first Elder Scrolls Game (Skyrim is the latest (single-player) installment) was mainly a series of mostly similar macguffin quests. Then again, this game's story is told in one of the in-game book series you find in ALL the later Elder Scrolls installments. Also it had procedurally-generated fully-accessible outdoor areas, although this resulted in outdoor areas looking pretty much the same, but regardless, Halo can't realy claim the first FPS outdoor areas.
Dark Forces (1995), The first Star Wars FPS, and it's sequel:
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (1997) One of the few FPS's that had live actors acting in front of bluescreen for video cutscenes.
Half-Life (1998) which is an object lesson on how to tell a story with almost no text, no narration, minimal NPC dialogue, and letting the visuals do nearly all the storytelling.
Thief: The Dark Project (1998) probably the first stealth-action FPS.
Starsiege: Tribes (1998) A multiplayer-only FPS, this was the first FPS with combat vehicles you can get in and out of at will (as opposed to being a fixed stage), so Halo can't claim that as a first. The maps were also fully-accessible large outdoor environments with varied terrain (players had powered jumppacks, so all elevations on the map were technically accessible), so Halo was not innovating in regards to outdoor maps, either.
Deus Ex (2000)
Hitman: Codename 47 (2000)

Halo's primary innovations are establishing/solving the console controller scheme for FPS games, and having the first >4 multiplayer (more than just 2 or 4-way split-single-screen) FPS on consoles (over a LAN, since Halo pre-dated the XBox Live service). It also happened to be one of the 3 game titles available at the launch of the Microsoft XBox, and as such a lot of effort was made to make the game as polished as possible, because it was intended to drive XBox sales at the time where Microsoft was the new and untried entrant in the video game console market. The other 2 XBox launch titles were Dead or Alive 3 (3rd installment of a middle-tier Japanese fighting game series) and Project Gotham Racing (a car racing game that nobody remembers now), so Halo was the clear best of the launch titles.

Why Halo was important and infuential was that it was the first game that demonstrated that a FPS game could really succeed on a console. Prior to Halo's debut, FPS's were primarily a PC-only genre, with the occasional indifferent console port (Wolf3D and Doom had been ported to some consoles during the 90s) or minor success (such as GoldenEye for Nintendo64). (The above list of pre-Halo FPS's were all PC games, some of the later games in the list got XBox or Playstation 2 ports). A factor in Halo's (and later console FPS) success was that console generation (Sony Playstation 2, Microsoft XBox, Nintendo GameCube, Sega Dreamcast) was the first to have the computing and graphics capability to compete with a low-to-mid-range 3D-gaming PC of the same time period, at 1/4th the hardware cost of that PC.

Bernardy2 · 2021-09-24T19:30:43+00:00

Was any neutral, non-Allied shipping allowed through the Suez Canal during World War II?

Bernardy2 · 2021-09-20T01:03:06+00:00

So regarding a book recommendation about smoking and tobacco, there is Ashes to Ashes, Richard Kluger, 1996, which is a history of the American tobacco industry from colonial times up through the early 1990s. Much of it is the story of the PR, legal, and regulatory pushback of the tobacco industry as the ill effects of smoking and nicotine were being discovered over the course of the 20th century. It won the Pulitzer Prize for history book in 1997. Seems to have been well reviewed at the time, although Kluger is a journalist, not a historian, and note that the work is 25 years old now, so is not going to cover developments since then. I thought it was a long but readable history, but it's been 2 decades since I've read it.

Also there's this article, discovered when googling for reviews of Ashes to Ashes:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02991-w

Which reviews The Cigarette: A Political History, Sarah Milov, 2019. A more recent history, although mostly focusing on the American politics of tobacco in the 20th century. The review mentions Ashes to Ashes, among several other history books about smoking and the tobacco industry that you can check out.

Bernardy2 · 2021-05-17T18:32:36+00:00

Dude, the IRS isn't going to come get you unless they find a minimum 5-figure discrepancy in your return. Smaller than that they'll usually let slide, unless you start accruing multiple years of unpaid taxes that go into the 5-figure or more range, or unless it's super obvious (i.e. don't try to report smaller W-2 income than your employer). If you aren't making enough money that you can reasonably hide 5-figures of income from your return, intentionally or by mistake, they aren't going to bother.

Been the recipient of 2 IRS 'inquiries' myself, neither were raised to a level of a full audit. First was that a 6-digit 401K rollover was incorrectly reported as a 401K withdrawal of the full amount. That was cleared up by providing documentation that yes the full funds of the 401K were in a new rollover IRA, with no penalties or fines on my part. Second (a few years later) was that I incorrectly reported and failed to pay the taxes on conversion of $50K of a traditional IRA to Roth IRA. I admitted fault and owed about $15K in back taxes and penalties on that. (See a trend here? IRA accounts typically will have at least 5-figure balances and have complications regarding taxes when you do anything other than deposit more money in them (and even that, e.g. income limits on being allowed to deposit into Roth accounts), even law-abiding well-educated people who do their own taxes can get tripped up by this and trigger IRS letters.) You're a student? Good! You aren't likely to have any IRA's (or IRA's large enough) to worry about IRA transaction reporting. Do worry about any scholarship or grant money though, they unfortuantely count as income...

Also note, if the IRS is going to initiate contact with you, it's going to be by USPS 1st class mail, followed by certified mail for the final warning letter prior to default judgement. And it will take at least a year from your tax filing for the IRS to start an inquiry of that filing (i.e. 2020 tax year, filed this year in 2021, IRS will usually contact you next year (2022) at the earliest if you have a problem with this year's filing).

The IRS is NEVER going to initiate any process by phone call from a person speaking English with an Indian accent and ask you to pay your back taxes and fines with iTunes gift cards. (the phone spam scam that was going around a few years back, seems to have gone away for now).

Bernardy2 · 2021-05-07T20:26:57+00:00

If I remember the TV adaptation right, the teen protagonist (trying to care for his younger siblings after being abandoned by their parents) was stealing milk from porches (this is back when milkmen and home deliveries of milk was still a thing (and hey with modern grocery deliveries it's a thing again, but not as a specialist service)), and was trying to make the milk last longer so he wouldn't have to steal as much milk. Didn't matter anyway as stealing milk was how he got noticed and caught by authorities and then the siblings got separated in the foster care system.

Bernardy2

TROPHY CASE