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I also recalled the Chief Inspector saying that the Japanese were killing Jews to appease the German---and I think gays too. When dude was being interrogated and his sister and her kids were poisoned, the guy in the cell next door was held for being a 'degenerate'---thats what they called gays I think.
Also the Chief Inspector suggested that they would haved his sister and her kids if they had cleared him in time...and they let him go free...
Anyhow as a gay person of color, this fictional NYC would have been out of the question for me.
The book was written in the 1960s and is supposed to take place in 1962 (at the same time as the real life Cuban Missile Crisis), but I did do a bit of digging on the populations of the Bay Area and Greater LA
Greater Los Angeles: 3,252,720
San Francisco Bay Area: 1,734,308
Even during WW2, LA still had nearly twice the population of SF so that can't be the explanation.
I did look up the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick) and found out he went to high school and college at Berkeley. That's probably why SF was more of a focal point than LA in the book.
Hmm interesting. I guess maybe it could be the author's NorCal bias then if LA was that much larger already. I know its real boom didn't come until after WWII, but didn't realize the size difference already. I think on top of some little bit of bias would maybe be the Asian influence on the Bay Area being much stronger at the time too?
Lol..we have seen some crazy city data debates over the years. But people debating over who would have it worse in a dystopian fictional universe probably takes the cake.
Fwiw, I thought SF looked more visually interesting in the series. But, of course I would never want to live in either.
Lol..we have seen some crazy city data debates over the years. But people debating over who would have it worse in a dystopian fictional universe probably takes the cake.
Fwiw, I thought SF looked more visually interesting in the series. But, of course I would never want to live in either.
We're running out of topics lol. I just liked the show. And FWIW, I thought the rendition of SF in the show was cool too especially since the city looks like it was adorned in Japanese and Chinese writing and architecture. Not that real life San Francisco doesn't have that, but not to that extent.
I thought they could've done a better job with New York - it was kinda lazy. It was real life NYC with swastikas everywhere.
Hmm interesting. I guess maybe it could be the author's NorCal bias then if LA was that much larger already. I know its real boom didn't come until after WWII, but didn't realize the size difference already. I think on top of some little bit of bias would maybe be the Asian influence on the Bay Area being much stronger at the time too?
Hmm, larger Chinese population at the time, maybe. I googled it and it looks like there were 37,000 peoole of Japanese Ancestry in LA in 1940, vs just over 5,000 in San Francisco. By 1960 it was 77,000 in LA vs just under 10,000 in SF. I'm guessing the setting is just the author.
Oh I forgot about the genetic testing and development of technology to determine homosexuality. The Japanese weren't too fond of anyone that wasn't Japanese, but quality>quantity I guess for me. Live a few good years as a straight white Christian male before I was discovered and executed, rather than live a long meager life in the shadows of what seems like a less developed city in the show, with the possibility of still dying young anyway.
The Nazis would've ruined whatever made the quality of life great in New York. Look at their taste in art, music, etc. If your definition of "quality" lean suburban then I guess there'd be more of it in New York, but people don't move to New York because it's clean, safe or convenient anyway.
Something interesting I found about The Man in the High Castle - the Nazi officials never bothered to learn English, even to speak to the Americans. All their American counterparts (like John Smith or Joe Blake) all learned German. The Japanese officials who were all stationed in America all learned English, and it seemed that most of the Americans only knew a few words in Japanese. Even when Juliana, Frank and Joe ran into the elementary school in San Francisco, everyone was still being taught English while the High School in New York had a much more German focus.
Of course, its a lot easier for an English speaker to learn German than Japanese given that German is not only in the same language family, but in the same sub-language family. But it goes to show the different attitudes they both had in administering America.
Of course, its a lot easier for an English speaker to learn German than Japanese given that German is not only in the same language family, but in the same sub-language family. But it goes to show the different attitudes they both had in administering America.
There is also just the real world practically is that is a lot easier to teach German to US actors than it is to teach Japanese. Fortunately we have no way of truely knowing what would have been real and what was simply artistic license.
I just became addicted to this series and have watched a bunch already. I find NYC very depressing and industrial looking, except for Long Island where the collaborators live. SF looks like Chinatown all the time, but the hills and sunshine look nice and the downtown, but with loads of I guess re-settled Japanese everywhere.
The inspiration for the original 1962 book was a book titled "Bring The Jubilee" which had an alternative history where the Confederacy defeated the Union Army at Gettysburg and went on to occupy the Western US and all of South America, and aligned themselves with the Nazis of course.
After watching like 6 episodes last night, I can only say thank god for FDR and the greatest generation, as historians believed this could have very well happened. Historians believe that in fact, if Britain had made peace with Germany after France fell, and stayed out(which was a very real possibility if not for Churchill), eventually Hitler would have developed the hydrogen bomb before 1945 with intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Allies would have surely lost.
I had to cleanse my soul after watching last night by viewing a bunch of you tube videos of a devastated and destroyed Japan and Germany in 1945.
The US destroyed pretty much every urban center in Japan killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and killing almost 2M Japanese soldiers.
You need Presidents like this to save us from a fate shown in the tv series.
Wiki: In a widely broadcast speech picked up by Japanese news agencies, President Truman warned that if Japan failed to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration it could "expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth".
Thank god he gave it to them!!
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