Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Sakura Quest
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zrnzle500
 Posts: 3767 |
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No, building stuff in a city is more expensive and harder in ways. Considering the higher cost of living and greater unionization, wages for the workers will be higher. Given their density, getting materials to the site and storing them will be more difficult and expensive, and the amount of work they can do in a day will be more limited to minimize disruption of traffic and disturbance of neighboring residents/businesses, which will cost more money. There is also less space for such things, limiting how much can be built, even beyond what zoning laws allow, which is limited in some cities. You reach more people, but more people will complain about construction, both in regards to nuisance and inconvenience and removing something to replace it with something new or even just changing things in the neighborhood. Things change a bit if you change urban centers for the metropolitan areas. You also seem to underestimate the costs of shutting down small towns in a controlled manner. Retraining will be necessary whether you try to revitalize the town or shut it down. Subsidies for moving costs will be necessary, as moving especially if it is far isn't cheap (I spent all of my savings to move where I am now). Trying to encourage people to move where the jobs are will speed the collapse of such communities, as the opposite of those network effects occurs (Less people->Less spending->Less jobs->Less people) even in places that were managing to hold on. Plus any decisions to shut down a town would be fought tooth and nail by at least some of the residents and doesn't look great PR wise. Things would be cheaper if the chips were allowed to fall as they may, but given what that has led to (higher drug use and suicides in the affected areas in the US, among other things) that doesn't seem desirable. ---------------------------------------------------- If one has the idea that the reviewers just trash the shows they review, daily or in the preview guide, one has a very incomplete knowledge of their reviews, even if you just look at SoL, CGDCT, iyashikei etc. Even focusing just on recent titles in those categories, Natsume -which features highschoolers, though usually set away from school-has been well received by its reviewer and New Game was pretty positively reviewed. Even just looking at Hinako Note, the reviews were either that it is a perfectly competent genre piece of a genre that isn't for them ("I have absolutely zero legitimate complaints about Hinako Note outside of the fact that it's not a show for me." as one reviewer started their review) or criticizing it not for being a one of those shows, but an unremarkable one. Doesn't seem like just trashing the genre and being blind to how their tastes affect their opinion of the genre. ------------------------------------------------------ As to the show itself, I've enjoyed it so far. There have been some very thoughtful moments and developments (her speech in the last episode and allowing them to fail as the reviewer mentioned) and the humor has been nice. I do like the outfits they use, which are nicely varied and seem like something people would wear, though it helps for the former that it doesn't feature highschoolers, who have to be in uniform much of the time. It remains to be seen whether this will be the Shirobako of small town revitalization, but it seems to be a good show either way. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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I never said it was cheaper to build something in a city, I said it was essentially cheaper and gave a very clear example of why, tis apply to building too. Build one hospital in Tokyo and it'll be useful to millions of people, to replicate this effect in rural area you'd need to build dozen if not hundreds of hospitals, the small increase due to land cost is negligible compared to having to build many of them. Also I don't quite know how it works in japan, but where I live rural hospital in far away places have to pay a large premium to attract skilled employed like doctor to those far away places.
Distance is also incredibly important when you come to things like hospital, being able to rush someone to the ER in a timely manner literally saves lives. It's also very important to people who are in situation where it's hard to move around (infirm and elderly) or parents who have to make arrangement for the kids since they'll be out of towns for hours rather than just bringing them along. And this is also important for mundanes things, going to the banks (or things renewing official paperwork) go from something you do while coming back from work to something you need to use your entire afternoon for. You also ignore that many rural area don't have the proper infrastructure, so new sewage, water pipe, power line and road have to be built and due to the remoteness of some location just shipping the material (to say nothing of shipping w/e the building require) can be quite a bit more expansive. Shutting down town cost a large amount upfront, but clear huge saving over time and recoup the cost in very little time. You also don't strictly have to fight the citizen, you just offer to compensate them and simply cut off all support to the town after a certain time. They can choose to stay after that, but that's strictly there decision. It is impopular, but that doesn't means it's a bad idea and anyway it's happens on its own. The other possibility is to just do nothing and let the town die on there own, but then that really suck for the resident left behind since then they get no compensation. |
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Megiddo
 Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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New Game is not in school and as you mentioned Natsume isn't in school for the most part (and it's not iyashikei). Sure, I read the reviews, but did you see the scores? 2s and 2.5s pretty much all around. That's not the score to give if you have "zero legitimate complaints about it" or "there is nothing actually wrong" with it.
It was hilarious to see the scores, be upset, then read the commentary and try and figure how the hell they came up with those scores since there was very little actual detractions listed other than it's not for them and the scarecrow gag is overplayed (which I fully agree with). Somehow though in the magic of a few years between high school and the adult world, shows which use the exact same setups and types of jokes (New Game) are favored quite well. It amuses me a good deal. |
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zrnzle500
Posts: 3767 |
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^Actually there were higher scores (3 and 3.5) and both came from those who admitted that it isn't their thing, including the review I mentioned (which was the 3). As to the scoring, it would depend on how one weighs personal enjoyment. I don't think it is unreasonable to rate something which has nothing in it for you that low, especially when the execution is merely competent (though on that front I hear episode three will have some staff formerly of Shaft doing storyboarding and animation direction so maybe there will be some good stuff coming). Overall it wasn't wildly out of line with viewer opinion (3.2). I could probably dig up some fitting shows (Nick holds K-On in high regard and Paul's episode reviews of Non Non Biyori are quite positive for example) but I think we are getting off topic here.
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chaccide
Posts: 295 |
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Why are we even discussing shutting down towns? Who was even heard of such a thing? There are rural communities all over the place where I've lived much of my life, and at most they fade away to next to nothing. I have never, ever seen a community purposely shut down, so why even argue this point?
As for the benefits of living in a city (or suburbs}, the biggest to me is access to high-speed internet. Without high-speed internet I can't work remotely which I do several times a week. Perhaps if I did a job like writing, the internet speed wouldn't matter. But with video conferencing (which really can handle any face-time I need), VPN, and data transfer issues you absolutely must have it and rural areas around here are sometimes still stuck with dial-in. You can use Amazon with dial-in modems but I wouldn't recommend it. But even if I could get high-speed internet in a more rural area, and get to work from home full-time, I'd miss restaurants that were within 30 minutes or that deliver. I'd miss easy access to healthcare and all the places that you go to everyday that you don't think about that are a lot more convenient when you're 5 minutes away then 30. Small towns can be charming but more often than not they appear that way in fiction and not in real life. Most of the time they're exactly the way they are in this series and I appreciate that. But it might be nice to see one story where one of these towns manages to come back to life. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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My point is that if tourism was to save the town, the show would consider it a "win" for the town but it would actually be a loss for the country, and I hope but doubt that the show will cover this aspect. This small scale tourism doesn't create additional tourist, it only divert them away from other small town, which the government is also subsidizing. So the government is throwing away money (running the kingdom probably cost over half a millions dollar per year) at something that's only taking away tourist from other project that the government is also subsidizing. In other word, the government is it's own business rival. Now repeat that for every small town that tries to have it's own struggling tourist industry and you quickly realize how much money is being wasted. As for shutting down town, it's also a question of money, keeping every small town alive is a huge expense (infrastructure, service and so on) and they're already failing and, like you said, will fade into nothingness. The less people are in town, the more expensive each and every one of them are and you eventually get to a point where the government is essentially spending more per person in small town than hundred of peoples in big towns (which doubly unfair since the people in big town most likely pay more tax than the one in small town). That's why shutting them down is a really good idea, but it's political suicide since people in small town generally have a huge voting power and nothing drive them to vote like threatening there town. So instead politician do the opposite and try to revive town (even trough they know full well it'll never work) because they want to buy the citizen vote. And this is why the kingdom is, a giant bribe to the population of the town to vote for whoever is in power. |
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TasteyCookie
 Posts: 421 |
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Meiam what you're forgetting with your whole argument is that small towns provide resources that large cities do not. There is a reason why every country in the world with massive cities also has rural cities as well. They are responsible for the VAST majority of farming and other resource extraction. You can't do oil fracking in a big city. You can't do mass crop farming in a big city. You can't have a coal plants, solar panel arrays, wind turbines, hell even Nuclear plants (due to regulatory codes) in a metropolitan area.
That is why rural towns are usually subsidized by governments to some degree. The majority of your people will live in a large city, yes, but you cannot just get rid of your rural towns because there are less people there. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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But this is specifically about subsidizing the tourist industry in a town without any worthwhile tourism spot, i.e. trying to create resource (worthwhile tourist attraction) instead of exploiting locale resource (say a nearby town with an historically important temple or a large forest or something). The story would be quite different if they were at a spot that people already want to visit without needing to drum up business with a fake kingdom. And also, that's why I was saying that they don't need to shut down all the small towns, just most of them and concentrate the people who do have a reason to live in rural area into larger small town close to resource. Most resources operation in rural area takes less and less people because they are becoming more automated. Take the town, combine all the farmer into one large mostly automated farm (which is happening by itself), remove all the people who don't have to be there and shift them into city or at least larger rural town and you're left with very few peoples, too little for the local school, shops, police, bus and so on. So these too will eventually leave (meaning even less people in the town) and at that point it's clear that it makes far more economic sense to just have the worker who do need to be there shift to a larger town and travel to there destination (or stay close to where they work and move to the city for anything they need). All of this is happening by itself, that's why there's a lot of talk about shutting down small town in a controlled fashion because it's happening no matter what people do. It's just that instead of managing it in a intelligent manners to take advantages of this huge opportunity (incredible saving to be made for governement) and limit any potential damage to the resident, most local government waste resource fighting an inevitable shift, which is just making things worse for everyone in the long run. |
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Yttrbio
 Posts: 3653 |
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Sure, but unlike Stalin, the Japanese government recognizes basic freedom of its citizens, and can't arbitrarily pick them up and move them to wherever they would best suit the centralized government's idea of prosperity.
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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You don't have to forcefully move them, just stop wasting money on them, spend the same money on them you would if they were living in a city (i.e. not enough to get all utility functional). Ultimately they can choose to stay that's fine, but it doesn't mean you have to keep paying for them. At the bare minimum, don't spend money trying to prop up dying tourism industry. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9861 Location: Virginia |
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@meiam
You seem to be ignoring the fact that these are almost all farming or fishing communities. Farming communities by their nature tend to be small and spread apart. That doesn't mean they don't need essential utilities. It is well within the best interests of the central government to encourage the in-country production of food. It makes Japan less dependent on the rest of the world for food. Further there are undoubtedly Japanese specialty foods that are produced only in Japan. Providing such communities with some sort of local industry including tourism decreases the subsidies necessary to support government services. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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These tourism industries are the subsidies, they don't create any resource and they don't help the government in any way. Here's an example: Town A has a big temple for tourist attraction, Town B has nothing. You have 100 tourist, 90 decide to go to town A because of the temple and only 10 go to B. Town B ask the government for money to bolster there tourist industry, they successful create a hook. Now 40 tourist go to town B and 60 go to town A. Town A start to struggle because of this lost revenue and ask the government for help, the government give them more resource to create more tourist attraction. Now 85 tourist go to town A and 15 go to town B, so town B struggle and ask for more resource from the government. And so on, money just get tossed around, the tourist just shift but they don't grow in number (people first decide they want a vacation and they find a location, not the other way around and this micro tourism industry don't attract foreign tourist). And this is the rosy situation, it's ignoring town B, C, D... and so on that all tries to setup there own tourist industry but fail. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9861 Location: Virginia |
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@meiam
You are assuming that tourism is a zero sum game. Proper promotion should engage people who were not looking to travel at all, take people from badly overcrowded theme parks and attract foreign visitors. The problem is that the Japanese government really doesn't know how to promote anything and judging from the anime the local governments are even worse. It doesn't hurt that with Japanese rail and bus transportation most of the country is accessible for a long weekend instead of an entire vacation. A good example is the success of anime tourism. While unplanned it has been a boon to several small localities in Japan. The problem is finding the right hook. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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I want to clear up an apparent misconception. There is nothing AFAIK in there about subsidizing the tourist industry. This is a small town spending their OWN budget on an effort to attract more visitors to the town in an effort to stimulate the economy. This isn't the national government spending millions or even thousands trying to prop up a small town, this is a small town trying to increase its own economic activity. Or, if you prefer, it is the LOCAL "marketing" branch putting in effort to do THEIR JOB. If it was a story about the National Board of "regional townships" or something, you'd have a point. But this is the people OF the town trying to bring more people TO their town, that's no worse than owners of an unpopular restaurant trying to get customers to their restaurant. As for "real world" dynamics, I'm done clogging the thread for this show with that. EDIT: After reading the 1 episode preview guide stuff, I expected this to feel a lot like Shirobako, instead it feels a LOT like "Amagi Brilliant Park", which is about people trying to bring customers to a older, less popular amusement park. |
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Merida
 Posts: 1945 |
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^While the premise might be reminicent of Amagi Brilliant Park, the show feels a lot more like Shirobako to me. We've got a bunch of young women trying to find their place in the working world (and life), a vast cast of quirky adult supporting characters and everybody is (more or less enthusiastically) working on a common project.
I've been enjoying this anime a lot so far, the characters are likeable and i want to get to know them better (and i really want to find out who that elusive blond guy ist!) and even though i'm not a big fan of the small town life, i want them to succeed in some way or another. |
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