Had I a companion at the locale I am about to describe, I would have made the scenery my Wordless Book for the day, to relate a lesson about strength and weakness, vitality and age. A tree is never as healthy as in its days as a green seedling, for the development and growth of the trunk, out from which its leaves may reach over the canopy and best collect sunlight, decays from within as the tree becomes old, engendering a weakness often the cause of the organism's death. The same truth holds for human beings and their political communities.

Sonnet CXLII The Wine Tree

A hilltop hospital espies below
A forest inbetween a road and town.
The trees are verde, the hunglimbs sand-root brown.
They join in stems, share nutrients, and grow.
The leaves are life, the browns decay and age.
With age grows reverence and memory,
But sapwood dries to heartwood in the tree,
Enfeebling corpora that are grown sage.

The viney cwms that buttress mountainsides
Are sawdust bare from here, and sink into
The dipping dale, athirst for summer dew.
The wine tree, best of trees, rests there in shades,
Whose leaves and bark are wine dark, mingling
The wise and vibrant in a single thing.

What tree is the wine tree? No connoisseur in these things, only later did I learn that the tree is a Japanese maple, sadly ironic, for the tree's land of origin have taken exactly the opposite course, and not just in such appearances as the metaphor uses. Although, as I have attempted to document (to the point of your nausea), my beloved anime and manga are really more conservative and less nihilistic than the close-equivalent American television programs (with which I became thoroughly re-disgusted after watching one horrendous episode of 24, a program which somehow counts many conservative fans) and "graphic novels" (socialism illustrated), the Japanese obsession with youth is undeniable. Despite said obsession, Japan is, as Catholics know, demographically moribund. Beneficial influence of and aesthetic affection for it's traditions or not, Japan is probably the modern society whose decay is furthest advanced. Unless the Japanese are converted, they will not renounce the Culture of Death, and will expire in the mantle of a false youth.