Word: arsonists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...crazed theology student dynamiting Chartres Cathedral would be an approximate Western equivalent of a crime that shocked all Japan in 1950. It was the burning of the 14th century Zen temple of Kinkakuji ("Golden Pavilion") by a Zen Buddhist acolyte. The arsonist intended to die in the blaze, but he lost his nerve. At his trial he said, "I hate myself, my evil, ugly, stammering self." But he had no regrets about burning down the Kinkakuji. He envied the Golden Temple its beauty, and he was possessed with "a strong desire for hurting and destroying anything that was beautiful...
Sake & Geishas. As Mizoguchi, the future arsonist, is born to know it, life is a visitation of plagues. His face is ugly. He stammers. His best way of expressing an early-teen-age love is to jump out of a bamboo thicket in the path of his girl's bicycle and scare her half to death. One terrible night, he witnesses his mother in the act of adultery. It is typical of Author Mishima's gift for powerful indirection that this entire episode is conveyed in terms of a ripple of mosquito netting...
Fireman or Arsonist...
Then, in a series of spectacular flashes, the overheated Middle East took fire: pro-Nasser army officers overthrew Iraq's pro-Western monarchy, and within 40 hours U.S. marines moved into Lebanon. The absentee arsonist looked with an appraising eye on international wind and weather; given an unexpected change, his own house might be in danger of going up in the conflagration. For 72 hours the world assumed Nasser was still aboard the yacht, but not a word was heard from him. Then his official Middle East News Agency put out a terse summary of his surprising change...
Spaniel in the Lions' Den. In Chicago, Arsonist Isaac Wilson completely destroyed the Christ Temple Church of the Pentecostal Assembly of the World, later offered the explanation that he had been refused permission to take his dog to Sunday services...