Word: emperor
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...appear on the map. But these details were well known in China by the time the map was supposedly drawn in the 18th century, argue critics such as Li Xiaocong, a cartography expert at Peking University. "It's simply not logical," says Li, "to use a map drawn in [Emperor] Qianlong's time to prove the existence of a map that might have been drawn during the reign of Yongle"?some three centuries earlier, in the Ming era. Li adds: "We don't even know if that Ming map existed...
MARCH OF THE PENGUINS LUC JACQUET Last year's top movie love story? Not Brangelina, nor Naomi Watts and her cybergorilla, but this true fable of domestic devotion among Antarctica's emperor penguins. For months, while the mother forages for food, the father struggles to keep the egg safe in a -80°F chill. This French documentary, for which its heroic makers deserve the Légion d'Honneur and cups of steaming cocoa, became a $77 million sleeper hit in North America. Now that it's winter, watch the film again on DVD, and be warmed...
...most striking pieces in "End of Time," the career retrospective of legendary Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto now running at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, is a portrait of Japan's controversial World War II and postwar Emperor, Hirohito. The black-and-white, 1.5 m by 1.2 m print is astonishing in its crisp detail. Hirohito is seated and wearing full morning dress, and every crease of his jowl, every fold of his trousers, every line on the knuckles of his fingers is finely articulated. It is almost as if the Emperor is sitting there, in the museum, 17 years...
...brilliance of the work rests not just upon the quality of the print's resolution, however, but also upon this conceptual turn: the photo is not really of the Emperor, but of his wax figure at Madame Tussaud's museum in London. Wax statues look almost laughably fake in person, but Sugimoto exploits the power (or perhaps the weakness) of the camera's single eye to flatten perspective and encourage illusion, thereby creating an image that looks more real, more human than the wax object he is photographing. In the next room are similar shots of King Henry VIII...
...During Japan's time as a colonial power, the shrine was a focal point of the country's native religion, used by political leaders to help justify national conquests. They proclaimed that the souls of those who sacrificed their lives at war for Japan and its Emperor would live forever, venerated as gods, at Yasukuni. Soldiers, pilots and seamen heading into battle would frequently bid farewell to each other by saying, "See you at Yasukuni." Since 1945, Yasukuni has remained a quiet but potent and enduring symbol for the country's die-hard nationalists. Since 1959, priests at Yasukuni have...