Land of the Rising Fun

The Japanese government's genius idea to save Japanese civilisation.

Sep 02, 2022

On the humble advice of Gandhi, I’ve waged a one-man campaign of civil disobedience against puritan rule.

“Be the change you wish to see,” said my spiritual guide. I’ve done just that. Since I was old enough to convince someone older than me to slink into the shop, and secure me some silly soup, I’ve fought a proxy war against the enemies of impropriety.

They’re everywhere, these types. They’re legion. They come in shapeshifting editions, from the health fanatic to the harm-preventer, to the peddlers of falafel. Worse yet, they have children. Their children have children.

Each generation spawns a new puritan preprogrammed with the desire to stop anyone, anywhere, from being happy.

That’s the problem with do-gooding: there’s always more do-gooding to do.

Until recently, this campaign of mine felt like that of Hiroo Onoda. The Japanese lieutenant spent decades in the jungle, fighting a war long over.

Now, I have allies. The Japanese government are fanatical readers of Oxford Sour.

Our friends in the Japanese government recently announced a campaign to increase boozing amongst the young—a key philosophical tenet of Oxford Sour!

For the first time in history, a magazine dedicated to the advancement of civilisation via cirrhosis and conviviality has completed a bloodless coup. Oxford Sour, I am proud to announce, now occupies a foreign government.

Concerned with the rise in the sober-curious, and the fall in alcohol taxes, the Japanese government launched a competition to encourage drinking amongst Japanese youth.

At first, I shuddered when reading of yet another alcohol campaign directed at ‘the youth.’ Similar campaigns here have infantilised our youth, culturing the most mentally brittle little ingrates to have ever canoed out of a urethra.

Perhaps the Japanese have witnessed the current state of Western civilisation, the peril of our Tik-Tok-tattled teens, and decided the time is ripe to take over the West.

They see our decadence. They see our malaise. Who can blame them? Not me. Reader, I’ll lay my cards out on the table: the Japanese have their priorities straight. A culture which mandates fun amongst the youth, a culture imbued with such obvious good sense, is of a serious, superior civilisation—an invading force to which I’d happily surrender. I’ll wave a bottle of sake right this moment.

Without booze, man would still be in the caves, indulging his pre-digested, tribal superstitions, his comforting falsehoods. Without booze, man would still divide himself into tribes warring with those people over there. Without booze, man would be irrational, angry, divided, and hostage to his basest desires.

Without booze, man would not have evolved into the rational, logical, empathetic, advanced creature he is today.

For drinking cultures built the modern world. Churchill and Stalin had a wooden relationship until Churchill, who often drank a little champagne with breakfast, arranged an all-night tête-à-tête in Moscow with Stalin and Molotov.

The result? The Russians and the British combined to destroy Hitler, a teetotaller amongst his other evil traits. Need I say more?

Without booze, civilisation itself would not be possible.

In his work, ‘Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled our Way to Civilization,’ Professor Edward Slingerland proves without doubt that alcohol, far from being the ruin of all that is pure, is indeed the lubricant of civilisation.

Professor Slingerland, a philosopher and Oxford Sour honorary Gentleman of the Swig, argues that booze caused man, ‘to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal.’

“Intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups,” he says. Ergo—without booze, civilisation would not be possible.

Slingerland siphons history, anthropology, cognitive science, social psychology, genetics, and literature, into a convincing thesis. By ‘taking the prefrontal cortex offline,’ Slingerland says we can access the ‘childlike state of mind,’ essential to innovation, creativity, and genius.

Back when existence was rational, man had Dionysus, the god of wine and conviviality.

The modern world may be a paltry one. Juvenal observed that man was declining even during Homer’s time. ‘Now the earth births such puny creatures the gods are moved to laughter and loathing.’

There is some hope. Portuguese researchers have discovered the antidote to our ugly and mechanistic world. Red wine, as Dionysus contended, was planted by the Gods to impart upon us fallen wretches the beauty and wonder of existence.

They found:

“Red wine increased pleasure and arousal, decreased the awareness of time, slowed the subjective passage of time, increased the attentional focus on the present moment, decreased body awareness, slowed thought speed, turned imagination more vivid, and made the environment become more fascinating.”
“Red wine increased insightfulness and originality of thoughts, increased sensations of oneness with the environment, spiritual feelings, all-encompassing love, and profound peace. All changes in consciousness occurred regardless of volunteers drinking alone, in dyad or in group.”

Alas, booze should not be merely legal nor merely encouraged. If we wish to land on Mars, if we wish to renew our great civilisation with great literature, great art, if we wish for beauty and wish for truth, if we wish and for symphony and wish for delight, booze must be mandatory.

That is an authoritarian dictum to which I am committed.

The conformity of our boring, sapless, teetotal youth will cement our malaise.

Our youth don’t drink because they ‘have better things to do,’ such as dissolve their brains on Tik Tok, and suffer a psychic meltdown when confronted with a real-live person with the temerity to appear outside of a screen. They’re too busy changing the world, or some tripe.

In our culture, age restrictions such as those on alcohol symbolise a rite of passage, the passing of which an endorsement of adulthood and of earning the right to do foolish and often wonderful things with one’s mind and one’s body.

Our youth are permanent children because they don’t pass these rites. The Japanese will soon overtake us via their superior and sozzled youth.

Our decline is down to our lack of fun. Great work like that of our forebears requires great rest and recreation.

The irony of our culture is this: as we take ourselves ever more seriously, little outside of ourselves can be taken seriously. From politics, to literature, to the arts to everything in between. We are little more than passengers of history. Mental children.

Recently, a friend of mine walked into a bar and ordered two pints of Peroni.

The Gen Z kid behind the bar replied: “Order it on the app. It’s much faster and better.”

Quite how downloading an app, and re-ordering the two pints my friend had already ordered would be faster, or better, is beyond comprehension.

Have you heard of this new app which does something you can do in real-life, but behind a screen? Precisely. Who bloody cares?

We’ve turned inward to the detriment of all that is outward. The decline in drinking drives our malaise.

Why? To drink alcohol is to surrender oneself to oneself. Not the version paraded on LinkedIn or Instagram. Temperance is for weak, unassured people scared of life and scared of themselves.

Taking oneself too seriously leads to personal and then societal decay. We must accept that one day we will die. Life is for living. This fear of letting go is the fear that one may reveal oneself. One may learn something about oneself one didn’t know.

Eccentrics and outsiders, routinely loathed by the crowd and by those who know best, created almost everything worth having. Some of the greatest men and women of history took both their work and their play seriously.

If ‘young people want to ‘change the world’ and ‘make a difference,’ they should start by letting go of themselves. Adding a decade to one’s carcass is not worth the bother.

Alcohol is essential. Alcohol is civilisation. Without it, we are little more than drones, boring ourselves, and everyone else, to death.

I don’t know, kids. It’s never done me any harm.