Tensal Disagreement

I find it very interesting that tensal agreement, which is so important in the English language, often falls by the wayside in Japanese. What brings this on is the opening sequence to Macross Frontier's third episode, where they talk about "宇宙を旅している” present tense "[ships] travel through space" then the next sentence is "これはフォルドが齎した大航海時代だった” past tense. "This WAS the great diasporan period, brought about thanks to [interdimensional] Fold [technology]." Now naturally, were we to pair these two sentences up in English, it would be a travesty! Yet it's not even eyelash-battingly worthy when you hear it in the nihongo.

I was going to use this as a jumping-off platform for a whole rant about the MLA and stupid archaic English laws like not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with prepositions that are really just hold-overs from latin where they really WERE incorrect, but I don't think I'll get into that in any further detail. I don't want to bore you, and I would probably end up boring myself, in the process.