Word: bonsai
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chris' chief antagonist. Peter Weller plays Sam with scary perfection. Weller, who most recently portrayed the brain suergon-rqckstar-world hero in Buckaroo Bonsai, switches easily but believably from a dreamy drifter to a dangerous madman, with much of the same charge seen in last year's Star...
...also of mass conformity. It rewards dogged rote learning, but not the kind of daring involved in making creative and unorthodox intellectual connections. "Every Japanese child," says one writer, "has a kind of invisible wire rack inserted into its body and mind," like flowers in an arrangement, like a bonsai tree. The Japanese examination system subjects the young to purgatories of cramming. It is one more symptom of a densely determined and obligated life, and some of the young these days are escaping into a sort of minor league anarchy...
This has been going on since the 6th century, with the result that few of the accumulated images that spell "typical Japan" to a foreigner were invented by the Japanese themselves. Zen Buddhism was an import, and pagodas and brush calligraphy and bonsai trees (originally known to the Chinese as penjing). Likewise the microchip and the small, inexpensive car. Tempura, the name of one of the Japanese dishes most popular among foreigners, is a mangled Latin word that refers to the Portuguese Catholic propensity to eat fish on Fridays as penance, as distinct from the Japanese practice of eating...