Word: feudality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...liberal goal of eradicating the squalor that breeds revolution is valid enough. Of course, all the money in the world would be a poor investment in corrupt, feudal economies. But the means that have been applied to easing poverty so far have been totally inadequate; whatever the failings of the U.S., it cannot be accused of profligacy toward Latin America. To its credit, the Reagan Administration came forward last year with the Caribbean Basin Initiative, a joint effort by the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Venezuela to promote trade, investment and aid to the region. It was conceived largely in response...
...subsidize their own development of textile mills, shipping, banking and other industries. Still broader results derived from the Meiji hope of renegotiating the treaties. The Westerners had insisted on extraterritoriality for their own citizens in Japan, for example, on the ground that Westerners could not be subject to antiquated feudal laws. Thus the modernized Japanese legal codes. (The concept of "rights" as contrasted to obligations was such a novelty that a new word, kenri, had to be invented...
Indeed, the police box, or koban, is an integral feature of Japanese existence. It traces its origin to the network of bansho (checkpoints) set up by samurai who protected the populace in feudal times. Today, throughout Japan, there are 15,600 boxes (actually tiny one-room offices set up on street corners), each serving about 10,000 residents. Tokyo alone has 1,244 and considers them so crucial to the public welfare that they are staffed by 15,000 officers, one-third of the city's police force. In addition to their traditional duties of patrolling neighborhoods and apprehending...
Today's Japanese women-urbanized, educated, middle class and seeking to reconcile traditional identities with present realities-sound like American women of ten years ago. The echoes from across the Pacific are recognizable, considering that until the 1860s Japan was a feudal patriarchy in which the harshness of women's inferior status was unrelieved by such Western niceties as the chivalric code. Until World War II women bowed to the authority of father, husband and son. Today, they bow for the same reasons that they take weekly lessons in wearing kimonos: out of attachment to cultural graces...
They are widely, wildly respected among the feudal states of fashion, and are beginning to be recognized in the big world outside. Even for people who may have trouble pronouncing the names on the labels in a boutique, there is a growing perception of the changes these designers are trying to make. Fabric sewed and folded into shapes that shift on the body like shadows. Colors that seem to come from the shaded, sun-dried underside of the spectrum. Clothes that reshape the body with the undulations of their fabric. Garments in which the space between the body...