If advertising is, as George Orwell said, "the rattling of a stick inside a swill pail," then most blogs and bulletin boards that focus primarily on Japan are the rattling of a stick inside...I dunno, a hollow concrete tetrapod, or Ryoko Hirosue's head, so solipsistic and echo-chamber-ish are they. Here's an amusing example. I like to see pretty pix of rebuilt war-destroyed buildings in Poland and Germany, so I check this forum once in a while:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=192
I wondered if there might be a thread somewhere about the concrete Tokyo Sky Shit-Tree, and by golly there is:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=346504&page=174
It's a (less-pompous) MutantFrogTravelogue-universe all in a single thread, replete with the ubiquitous Chrysanthemum kissers of various species and a couple of fractured-English-speaking, hyper-vigilant Japanese. It gets a bit interesting on the page to which I link. Someone asks why Japan doesn't have more skyscrapers, and the alpha CK responds,
"Japan doesn't need to show of that it's a modern country, the economics of a building is more important then the height."
Another poster, not a regular, then asks,
"When they set the goal the have the second tallest tower in the world they want that goal to come true and therefore they made it higher? Right? But that still doesn't answer my question, if they are so not-boasting-around why would they want to have the highest than?"
Heh.
-catone
-Japan: we're too cool to care about competing (except when we're ahead)
-Japan: we can build really tall radio towers just like the East Germans