At 09:53 PM 10/15/98 EDT, Alan Harnum wrote:

    Akane closed her eyes and sank down into the water of the
crowded tub, trying not to bump legs with Shampoo or Rouge as
she rested her head back on the edge.  Shampoo's house in the
village had been a shock; rich and luxurious, it was at least as
big as the Tendo home, beautifully decorated with ancient
antiques and carefully-carved wooden furniture.  There was
running water, and electricity.  The village of the Joketsuzoku
was turning out, in some ways, to be very different from what she
had expected.

WHAT?!  How DARE you mess with our stereotypical view of the tribe (and
many poor Chinese villages to boot) by giving them electricity and 

water and other small privledges!  Seriously though, this little bit came as 

a pleasurable shock because seemingly everything else that I can remember
reading has delt with the Joketsuzoku as a technologically-backwards
group.  Of course, this brings to light questions as to where the water
filtration buildings are...  what?  Oh, right, this is just a fanfic.
Ne'er mind...

About the Joketsuzoku and technology though... the common fanfic 
perspective is that they're fairly primitive.  However, we already know 

>from the Pink and Link storyline that they have the technological 

capacity to produce a village newspaper... from this, we can construe 
that they at least have access to modern technology.  

	Pardon me, but who says you _must_ have access to modern technology to have 
a technological lifestyle? As the pro authors S. M. Sterling and Leo 
Frankowski point out in their books about the Draka and the Crosstime 
Engineer, it take only a very primitive level of technology to have a soft 
and comfortable life. 

	With his books on the Draka, an unpleasant group of bad guys, they're given 
a leg up over the rest of the world with nothing more important than 
American farm windmills provided to South Africans by refuges from the 
American Confederacy. IIRC, they simply used them to develope a technology 
based (in the beginning) on compressed air.

	In his Crosstime Engineer series, Mr Frankowski gives his hero nothing more 
than the memory of what man has done in the past, the knowledge of any good 
engineer, and the disposition of a jack of all trades. Example? To reinvent 
_simple_ firearms without putting up with the annoyances of a flintlock (it 
misfires a lot and is useless in wet weather) his character simply starts 
children to collecting pieces of quartz. He cuts them to a shape that causes 
them to spit out an electrical spark when struck firmly with a hammer. 
Ta-dah! A muzzle-loader that uses a SPARK-PLUG to ignite! Fairly waterproof, 
simple to make with primitive tools, and a triumph of cunning over high tech.

	For all we know, someone brought a copy of the Mother Earth news to the 
Amazon village. Or any of it's 19th or 18th century predecessors to them.

	After all, it WAS the Chinese who invented the self-cocking, repeating 
crossbow. Another little example of cunning simplicity.

	Come to think on it, there's a real potential for several fanfics here. How 
do you maintain a fairly comfortable lifestyle without the political 
commisar of the local branch of the Communist Party sticking his/her nose 
into it, wanting to know why YOU have a soft life and other villages don't? 
There were incidents where villages were striped all everything so that 
their 'profits' could be distributed 'fairly'.

	Cologne isn't stupid, just desperately determined to defend the traditions 
of her village to the death against a world that is rapidly dumping 
tradition as a useless, annoying drag that slows down what's REALLY 
important in life, ie., technological progress.

	If the other Elders of the Joketsuzoku are even HALF as sharp as the old 
gal is, that village would SCARE me. After all, they've been practicing 
their own, admittedly biased, form of eugenics for quite a while now, always 
trying to bring better bloodlines into the village. After a few centuries of 
that, they've got to be better than the average bear, to coin a phrase. ^_^

	But you say the young of the village don't SEEM that sharp? That happens in 
a lot of tribal societies. Wisdom comes LATER in life. The young are for 
warriors and servants. The elders run the show, and the elders are the ones 
who NEED to be smart. The young have time to dare to be (relatively) stupid. 
^_^ An oversimplification of the situation, perhaps, but this is a letter, 
not a dissertation on social dynamics in a tribal society.

	So I suspect that the Joketsuzoku village has just as much technology as it 
needs to survive in comfort, without any more to create pollution, or any of 
the other problems extreme progress brings to the "first world".

	Just a little philosophy on my part that I hope inspires a few ideas in the 
minds of the better authors of our little group.

	Ed Becerra


	"Dreamers may die, but the Dream is eternal.."