Word: feudality
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...Japanese have been known in the past for being able to turn their civilization on a dime. After 215 years of deliberate feudal isolation during the Tokugawa period, Japan threw itself open in 1854. It was, wrote Arthur Koestler, like breaking the window of a pressurized cabin: the Japanese crashed out into the world devouring everything that had been done or thought in the rest of the planet during their long encapsulation (the late Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution). Rarely has there been an ingestion of foreign influence so smoothly accomplished. The Japanese did something of the same thing...
...guard in a new European settlement, piped the Emperor to his new home to the tune of The British Grenadiers. The Emperor took for his reign the name Meiji (enlightened rule), and so in 1868 began the Meiji Restoration. It dedicated itself to the overnight transformation of a feudal anachronism into a world power...
...history, and particularly the nation's Aztec origins, form the subject matter and supply much of the imagery for Fuentes's novels. The Aztec god Quetzlcoati is a character in Terra Nostra, a fictionalized account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico that deals with events in eras ranging from feudal Spain to present-day Mexico...
That almost feudal interest makes it natural for the University to choose a utopian scheme for the structure's rehabilitation. Tenant activists argue correctly that the project could be done for less, but it would require HRE to continue to manage the building and revenues from the resulting rents might never reach the level of those of a lease on a luxury development. What is important, though, is that the outcome would be the same: Harvard would control the land at 122 Mt. Auburn St. for some unstated future...
...Gothic-style buildings are topped by battlements and covered with ivy. Faculty and honors students stroll along arched walkways in black academic gowns. The bell in Breslin Tower, modeled after Oxford's Magdalen, strikes each hour. The school's 10,000-acre "domain" is something of a feudal fief. In addition to the campus, quadrangle, bluffs and forests, Sewanee owns the town (pop. 1,900). The university's vice chancellor and president serves as mayor and city manager, overseeing municipal services. The students run the volunteer fire department...