On this day in 1911, the Japanese government executed twelve anarchists, including radical journalists Kanno Sugako and Kōtoku Shūsui (shown), as part of a widespread crackdown on left-wing activism. Among those executed were Uchiyama Gudō, a Buddhist priest and socialist who spoke out against the Meiji government for its imperialism and advocated for conscripted soldiers to desert en masse.
The pretext for this crackdown was the "High Treason Incident", a plot to assassinate the Emperor of Japan. The incident began when police searched the room of Miyashita Takichi, a young lumbermill employee, and found materials which could be used to construct bombs, concluding that there was a broader conspiracy to harm the imperial family.
On the basis of this plot, the Japanese government rounded up leftist activists from all over the country. 24 of the 26 defendants actually brought to trial were sentenced to death, despite the evidence against nearly all of them being circumstantial.
Among those executed anarcha-feminist journalist Kanno Sugako (some sources say she was executed on January 25th). At the age of 29, Kanno became the first woman with the status of political prisoner to be executed in the history of modern Japan.
Prior to his execution, Kōtoku Shūsui etched this message on the wall of his cell: "How has it come about that I have committed this grave crime? Today my trial is hidden from outside observers and I have even less liberty than previously to speak about these events. Perhaps in 100 years someone will speak out about them on my behalf."
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On a related note to what I just posted: I think LotR and a lot of other media don't really get what makes spiders so creepy.
I owned pet tarantulas for a while so I have a lot of experience with big, spooky spiders. Imo what makes spiders so uniquely creepy compared to other crawlies is how just... strange and inhuman they are. Shelob is very agile, she looks at Sam, hisses at him and basically makes a mean and evil expression. But that doesn't capture the real horror aspect of spiders because real spiders (except jumping spiders but they're different) don't have faces. They do not move, they stand completely still 99% of the time, it is impossible to tell what they're about to do at any given moment or whether they even know you're there. A tarantula's eyes are not facing forward, they're facing upwards because tarantulas (and all spiders except, again, jumping spiders) aren't visual creatures, their eyes are pretty much only there so they know if its day or night. This means a tarantula will never look at you, it literally cannot.
This is subjective of course, but that always kinda freaked me out about them even after having them for years: How completely unreadable and unpredictable they are. Insects are generally more in motion, they're always crawling around, you can tell if they're agitated or not by how hectically they're moving. The tarantulas were always completely frozen, and when they did move it was very erratic.
This is not me complaining about spiders in media being portrayed "inaccurately" or "unrealistically", that's not the point of course. I think spiders have something uniquely creepy about them that sets them apart from other creepy crawlies and other classical horror creatures, and that aspect is not properly understood by many people who put spiders into horror movies/shows/games.
Spiders have no expression. They are completely anti-social creatures who cannot and do not want to communicate with anyone or anything. They perceive every other living thing as either prey or a threat, but because they stand completely still for 99,9% of the time you cannot know how they perceive you until they either attack you or run away. Like I said, it's impossible to tell if they even noticed you at all. That's what bothers me about depictions of spiders where they hiss threateningly or nonsense like that. A spider is completely motion- and expressionless until it suddenly lunges at you in the blink of an eye and kills you. If it lunges at you and misses, it will once again stop moving until it's ready to lunge again. I think the complete lack of anything "human" about spiders, their lack of emotion and expression even compared to insects, is what makes them so freaky and a lot of media fails to deliver that.
Shelob isn't a spider and is only mostly spider-shaped
She's spider-shaped because spiders are scary. The point stands. I'm not a real LotR nerd but the wiki describes her as "part spider part demon", for what it's worth.
Take the spider from Harry Potter as a different example if you want to.
The wiki is wrong. Ungoliant (who is not a demon but a totally unexplained creature that existed since or maybe before the start of the world) fucked 'foul beasts'and Shelob is a descendant of those offspring.
Tolkien says of Shelob, "Most like a spider she was," [emphasis added], and the offspring of Ungoliant differed from normal spiders in respects beyond their enormous size. Bilbo sees the Mirkwood spiders' eyes as "Insect eyes,"and Shelob's eyes are "clustered" and "many-windowed", with "a thousand facets", like insects' compound eyes. However, normal spiders do not have compound eyes. Tolkien may not have been over-concerned with the difference between spiders and insects, as in the same chapter of The Hobbit he refers to spiders as "hunting and spinning insects". Another difference is that when spiders grow, they moult their skins, but Shelob's hide was "ever thickened from within with layer on layer of evil growth". Shelob also had a stinger.
Aside from narrative similies and a metaphor about spiderwebs used by Gandalf in the council of Elrond that seems to imply the existence of small spiders in middle earth but the sentence is
"Yet even the most subtle spiders may leave a weak thread."
It feels like a small spider statement but no guarantee. All of what are referred as spiders in middle earth could very well be eight legged giant monsters with stingers that descend from ungoliant and are only share a name with what we call spiders. They're not taxanomically arachnids
This is a very good post, thanks for the insight
which begs the question why jumping spiders are so much more normal as creatures, like ik they've got two primary goggles that do depth perception for the jumping, but beyond that they genuinely seem to have personality maybe that's just major mammal bias or something though
We definitely perceive them as more normal because they have 2 big eyes which we can look at, just like humans have them. That makes them inherently less weird to us. I have no idea if they are actually more intelligent than other spiders (which wouldn't be difficult, other spiders are dumb as bricks) but it wouldn't surprise me.
Also jumping spiders behave in a manner consistent with predatory mammals which we often enjoy as pets for some reason. They are uncannily catlike in how they operate (terry Pratchett put it nicely with the phrase " a mind like a coiled spring" tbh) while many other spiders are either sit-and-wait predators or have active predatory lifestyles that are just different because of how long ago spiders carved out their niche compared to mammals and reptiles
I love a macro video of a jumping spider doing a little dance
Depictions of most "dangerous" animals in fiction (especially movies and games) always end up like this yeah, they are always roaring and emoting like social organisms and taking incredible risks to themselves to chase one actor they really hate.
People always forget that in general, animals do not want to fight and, for instance, risk a wound that could be infected, or get pulled from their territory that they might lose if they stop being vigilant. It's why there are so many videos of cats scaring off bears and other large animals, cats are psychos that seem to rely on their being able to sell the idea that they could fuck you up.