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Any folktale that begins with "so here's the formulas for relativistic time dilation" is probably not going to be a good time for any of the characters involved

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Fables and Folktales: Urashima-Tarō

Classic fairyland etiquette varies from story to story, but the nastiest ones always involve some kind of time funkiness. You know that joke about how, like, it's really bad to end up with a medical condition named after you? This is the namesake for the entire space of time dilation tropes in japanese literature. Tough break, buddy. PARTIAL TRACKLIST: Sky Becomes Water, The Crystal Chamber, Wind Queen, None Shall Live "Elevator" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up. PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transistor.fm/subscribe DISCORD: https://discord.gg/osp MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/osp OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com/ Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/ Want this video in another language? Check out our guide to contributing translated captions: https://www.overlysarcasticproductions.com/community-captions

Comments

Stephen Gillie

Is this the earliest usage of the concept of time as a plot point?

Jason Veevaert

Fun fact, this story was used as the basis for a story arc in Final Fantasy 4. One of the main party (Rydia I think) ends up in an underwater realm, and spends years learning magic and summons from the people there before making her way back to possibly avenge her friends (who she probably thinks are dead) only to find that only a few weeks had passed for the years she spent underwater.

Yvonne Hanafee

I had to translate a simplified version of this story for a Japanese class assignment once. I only remember because the story specified that the box was a particular style of origami box and the copier cut off the translation for that word (and also turtle, but that was easy to find online). And then I spent hours trying to make the box…

Eric Stovall

I've always heard this story as being called the "Japanese Rip van WInkle", but there is really only one connection to that story and this one. Like you mentioned in your video, it has more in common with European fairy stories than it does with anything American.