…and, at the time of his death, he was one of the most hated people in the USA.
The FBI sent him a letter trying to convince him to commit suicide. Don’t let this revisionist bullshit slide. The things they say now about protests, kneeling, etc, are the same things they said about the sit-ins and marches.
respectability politics is a trap.
respectability politics is a trap.
respectability politics is a trap.
Look at this vintage political cartoon. Reactions to MLK and BLM are near identical.
His own kids are telling yall not to fall for the bullshit
Taking a moment to thank Nathaniel Baldwin, inventor of headphones.
There is something so divine and transcendent about listening to music on headphones, with your eyes closed. Somewhere far away, just you and the music.
So this is a copy of Adultery for Fun & Profit, a 1971 X-rated film. It won the Grand Prize at the Amsterdam Adult Film Festival, for the year 1970-1971!
BUT it’s on Cartrivision.
Cartrivision was an early home videotape format announced in 1970, released in June 1972, and dead by July 1973.
It has some “fun” features, like not selling VCRs for it: you had to buy it build into a new console TV. Which were huge, because it was the 70s.
There’s also issue of Red Tapes (of which this is one!)
See, early on the movie industry hated the idea of home movies. They made all their money on movie tickets, right? People watching movies at home, that’s gonna seriously cut into their market. This is why they later sued Sony for the introduction of Beta, arguing that it could be used to pirate movies by recording them off TV. (They lost)
So when Cartridge Television started selling Cartrivision in 1972, none of the movie studios really wanted to start selling their films on home tapes, that idea sounded scary. What if someone had a copy of all their favorite films and could watch them forever at home, and never went to the theaters ever again? The movie studios would go out of business!
So along with releasing a bunch of older B&W movies (the only ones they could license), sporting events, and shows from PBS, Cartridge Television came up with a compromise that worked for the movie studios:
Red Tapes.
So, Cartrivision tapes came in two formats: Black Tapes and Red Tapes. Black tapes you’d buy at the store like any other product, but for Red Tapes (which were relatively recent movies), you instead would go to the store and place an order from a catalog. The store would have it delivered by mail, then you’d come back in and get the tape. You’d take it home, watch it, and then return it back to the store. So… Video rental (like Blockbuster!), except they didn’t have any stock on hand, and only got the tapes on-demand by mail? Seems annoying.
BUT OH NO: it’s far more annoying than that. See… Red Tapes aren’t mechanically like Black Tapes.
You can’t rewind them.
You can play them and pause or stop them just like any other tape, but the rewind feature on your Cartrivison TV doesn’t work.
So once you start watching a film, you can only go forward from that point. You want to rewatch it? Too bad. Go back to the store and pay for it again.
Here’s that tape again. Note that it’s red: You can only watch this porn film once. Then you have to return it to the store… the stores that haven’t been doing this since JULY OF 1973.
But there’s another thing you can see on this picture (barely, because this is a blurry picture, thanks Past!Foone): The visible screws in the corners
So here’s the thing: The tape labels for Cartrivision hide the screws. A regular tape will look like this:
BUT when Cartrivision failed in July 1973, a bunch of stores sold off their unsold inventory, including watch-once Red Tapes. And people still had some of the players. But what’s the point of having a tape you can’t rewind? You’ve basically destroyed the tape now, since it’s stuck at the end and can’t be rewound!
So people bought some of those Red Tapes (cheaply, I hope) and then took them home and opened them up with a screwdriver, damaging the labels. They figured out how the no-rewinding mechanism worked, and removed it. So basically every Red Tape you will find for sale on ebay has visible screws, because someone modded it in the past.
Anyway, the format has been dead so long that it’s doubly-impossible to watch now. The players were only built into big heavy 1970s TVs, which were long ago thrown out. The tapes have gotten old and brittle. If you somehow DID have a player, and it somehow still worked after half a century, the tape will probably shatter as soon as you try to play it.
And the whole format only lasted 13 months, so there wasn’t that much inventory sold in the first place, so there wasn’t a huge number of these in existence anyway.
But a final fun fact: Someone HAS managed to get video off one of these tapes. And it was so hard that they made an award-winning documentary about it.
See, this was basically the first home video format for recording TV. The quality was terrible but it was better than nothing, and it turns out some fan with a Cartrivision recorded a copy of Game 5 of the 1973 NBA Finals game. ABC and both teams (LA Lakers & NY Knicks) had video copies of that game… and ALL THREE OF THEM LOST IT. But the fan copy survived, in a format no one could play, on a tape that would shatter if you tried to play it.
So DuArt Media Services got to work trying to rescue the tape. They had to dry it out, bake it, freeze it, soak it in alcohol, and rebuild a broken Cartrivision unit, then do a lot of manual fixups on the digital files they’d captured off the tape, but they finally managed to capture the recording of the game.
This was used for the MSG Network, who were doing a special on the 1973 championship, and had no footage of that pivotal game. With DuArt’s work, they had something to show.
DuArt then made a documentary about this, called “Lost and Found: The ’73 Knicks Championship Tape”. It won an Emmy.
The punchline? That documentary seems to be lost. I have been looking for years, and have not found a copy, other than a short excerpt on Vimeo.
So yeah. Cartrivision. I’m slightly obsessed with it, even though I’ve never actually been able to watch a single second of Cartrivison footage. Tapes occasionally show up on ebay, the odd technical manual or spare part, but players are rare, always broken, and probably would just shred the tapes even if they did somehow work. The tapes are just too old. ’
Cartrivision is just… dead and gone. Not yet forgotten, but it took media restoration experts a long time and a lot of work to even get a few minutes of footage off one tape. My chances of ever being able to play my Adultery for Fun & Profit tape are basically negative zero.
I cannot fucking believe how much I’m losing my mind right now over soy sauce history. I’ll tell all of you about it after I finish this essay because I need to un-distract myself enough to finish it but what the fuck? What the fuck is going on? I’m losing my fucking mind.
During World War 2 there was a push to industrialize the Japanese soy sauce industry to be better for mass-production. This innovated the chemical fermentation technique and the semichemical fermentation technique utilized by Kikkoman; rather than ferment for four years in gigantic cedar barrels, kioke, instead fermentation takes place for six months or a year in stainless steel barrels which utilize electrolysis to artificially speed up fermentation processes.
During Postwar occupation by Americans, Japan was experiencing massive shortages for the raw materials needed to make soy sauce nationwide, and was forced to rely on exported materials from America to make production. A single American woman named “Ms Appleton” was given total control of apportioning all American soy bean rations to companies, how much, and to who. She had no knowledge of soy sauce, allegedly.
She apparently had so much power over Japanese soy sauce production that she could singlehandedly shape its future by threatening to not give soy beans to any company, family, or factory which did not utilize her specific requirements of semichemical fermentation (reduced from chemical fermentation, since it was that abhorrent). These days, the term soy sauce is distinct from traditional shoyu, and requires distinguishment because of such a radical difference the two products are.
Here’s the problem, folks:
I can find absolutely no evidence that Ms Appleton ever existed. There are no sources about this specific period in Japanese history that I’m able to definitively confirm. All of the sources which reference Ms Appleton are referencing in circles with each other; there is no listed source for any of them. Kikkoman’s official English website is a veritable goldmine of information regarding this piece of history, with an entire 4 size 13 paragraphs. It not only gives me a first name, Blanche, but also tells me she worked for General Headquarters and that her policies and decisions shaped governmental policies heading into the future.
Except any variation of searching for Ms Appleton, Ms Blanche Appleton, and so on gives me absolutely no information about her ever existing. By appending keywords such as Ms Blanche Appleton+soy sauce, or Ms Blanche Appleton+GHQ, we can find the same couple of sources that are circling each other–or, in the case of the latter, only Kikkoman.
But there is NOTHING else. I’m getting pageantry from some minnesotan town; I’m getting world war 2 veteran records and obituaries when trying to follow that route; I’m getting k-12 teachers and a Titanic survivor named Charlotte. There is no fucking evidence of a Blanche Appleton to substantiate these claims.
And this is fucking massive. Because there should be way more information on her if this was the case; she was apparently powerful and influential enough during the occupation that she could singlehandedly enforce whatever arbitrary rules she wanted on the soy sauce industry and they had to comply or else have no product at all. That level of power is fucking insane. Imagine having so much raw influence over Japan that you could order them to completely renovate and change how they produce and make SOY SAUCE, literally one of if not THE most important thing in Japanese culinary history–and yet there’s absolutely zero reference to this outside of like, three specific sites, and none of them have sources, or if they do, they source those sites.
What the fuck is happening here? There shouldn’t be radio silence about this woman. There should be records of her policies, there should be legal documents in America which record how she apportioned out American exportation of soy beans to Japan, there should be sources talking about this woman’s ability to transform Japan’s soy sauce production so heavily that today only 1% of all soy sauce is made with pre-WW2 traditional techniques.
So if she’s that big a deal then why does she not exist?
I feel like I’m losing it. I can’t think about this too hard because it gives me a headache trying to comprehend any possible answer. There is so many levels to how this shouldn’t be happening that I can’t settle on just one. I don’t understand how some foreigner American could have an iron fist over soy beans so hard that she could apparently influence national policy heading into 2022 but I can only find a first name on the Kikkoman website.
I literally just sent in a Freedom of Information Act request to the national archives asking for any records of a Ms Blanche Appleton, her reports, census information, anything. I can’t believe that I’m having to use FOIA to try and ask the government to prove a woman existed because she was that big of a deal in SCAP/GHQ.
This is a translated page of Kikkoman’s .co.jp website, with an apparent picture of Ms Appleton.
But this says that she has an apparent good knowledge of soy sauce brewing–directly contradictory to the Kikkoman.com claim that she had “no experience”. And it also claims she was in charge of GHQ, which I’m going to assume is a mistranslation, but still.
Major General Murcutt doesn’t exist. Douglas MacArthur was appointed head of GHQ/SCAP during the occupation of Japan. This now just has more questions. How did this woman become so important to GHQ that she could directly speak with a Major General? Any level of power or public view she SHOULD have isn’t here. You don’t just get to be colleagues of a Major Damn General in Post World War 2 Japan. That isn’t given to any random housewife.
I just emailed a shoyu brewer family, Yamaroku, about this. The Yamaroku brewery was established 400 years ago; if the company/family were affected during the 1950 import rations and under the thumb of the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers, they’d have records and memory of Blanche Appleton or what it was like during that period as a brewery.
I am at the point where I am genuinely considering the possibility of Blanche Appleton never having existed. There is the chance that Kikkoman invented an ‘ambassador’-type person with high influence in the General Headquarters during the occupation to grant itself apparent influence/validity/power above the rest of the competition. “The woman who controls all soy materials coming into Japan visited our main factory and said she liked us :)”.
It’s incredibly fitting that my first act of serious investigative journalism is about soy sauce. Like, I’m a little annoyed at how on brand this is for me. Of course I’m overly invested in this weird little nitpick about soy sauce. Of course I’m making this the government’s problem.
Of course.
It’s currently 12:14AM. I have just learned that a private individual submitted a research query to the Japanese National Diet Library in 2008 regarding any information or proof of Blanche Appleton in relation to soy sauce production.
This information was told to me by a follower of mine–who asked to be anonymous. So right now we have evidence that Japan as an entity cannot find evidence of Blanche Appleton ever existing within relation to soy sauce production. And I can’t find evidence of Blanche Appleton existing in obituary records, nor any publicly available birth/deaths.
Right now there seems to be more and more evidence that Miss Blanche Appleton was a complete invention of the Kikkoman Company possibly dating back nearly a hundred years. But why?
If nothing comes back from my Freedom of Information Act request, I’m going to be contacting Kikkoman directly. I’m not going to just let this slide. People have been noticing this since at least 2008. Who is Miss Blanche Appleton? Why would she be faked by Kikkoman? What’s the point of this lie, and if it’s the truth, if she was real, why can’t I find any proof of that?
Who is Blanche Appleton?
Why is everything starting to point towards yakuza/organized crime Kikkoman origin story and why am I researching zaibatsu breakups of the GHQ and where assets from various clans got sent to.
[image: Tumblr tag: #dont dig too deep op]
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keep digging, please, this is fascinating and disturbing
