Commodore Perry and Carthage 1

I finally finished the book, Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun. The most amazing thing to me was that the Americans must have seemed incredibly rude to the Japanese, entering shops without removing their shoes, and I can't even imagine how they ate with chopsticks. It's also amusing to imagine their reaction to Japanese food, which has a very particular and non-European taste. Oh, I was also surprised to read that they thought westerners were barbarians for eating beef, because the Japanese themselves only used cows for farmwork until the late 19th century. The Japanese who dealt with them really tried hard to avoid granting concessions, giving them the minimum, and yet in the end the caution of the Japanese was rendered irrelevant, and people flowed into Japan freely. Obviously it helped that the new emperor embraced European culture. It was amazing to me that after 1881(?) the emperor started wearing Western clothes.

Next I started "Carthage must be destroyed". So far it has given me a bad taste, despite being well-written. Carthage and its history is primarily defined in opposition to the significantly more famous Roman history. I didn't even know where Carthage was, despite having heard the name (apparently it's in Tunisia). Ah, actually I guess I did know because some people from college went on an archaeological trip there. Anyway, a lot of the history about Carthage is only available via quotations of quotations of the original historian's work. That's a lot of filter there. Granted, it's quite an old story. Carthage was destroyed in 146 BC, signalling the end of the third Punic war. Finally, I learned about the phrase "fides punica"--faith of the Carthaginians, meaning very much untrustworthy.