Word: ieyasu
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...early 17th century this man was to Japanese culture roughly what Leonardo da Vinci or Benvenuto Cellini had been to Italy a century before: a wonderfully versatile master of many media, renowned equally as painter, calligrapher, potter, lacquer artist and, thanks to his close relationship with the great shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, the virtual "art director" of Buddhist Japan. No artist, Eastern or Western, was ever more authoritative within his own culture; and Koetsu's work was also identified with the tea ceremony, whose aesthetic principles--and even, to no small extent, subject matter--he helped form...
...both a place and a time frame. It was the old name of the city we call Tokyo, and "Edo period" denotes the 2 1/2 centuries during which an absolute regime, founded there in the early 17th century by the military lord, or shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, ruled over all Japan through 15 generations of his descendants. The symbolic moment at which the period began to close was 1853, when Commodore Perry's black ships, crewed by their blue-eyed, spindle-nosed, strange-smelling gaijin, the Americans, sailed into lower Edo Bay and broke the seal of isolation from the West...
Kurosawa undercuts the very idea of meaningful action by consistently cutting away from it. His camera looks over the sleeping army when Shingen is mortally wounded (shot, we later discover, by a tubby little sniper who simply into the dark). Before Ieyasu, Singen's snarling enemy, leaps onto a horse, Kurosawa cuts to the smirking face of his servant, and we only hear the man mount and gallop off. The vigorous sound-track, in fact, gives us amplified, overly heroic sounds--thundering hoofbeats, ringing shots, and a lush score by Shinichiro Ikebe that frequently reminds one of Star Wars...
...politics and culture of this time were dominated by three exquisitely discriminating and utterly ruthless daimyo, or warlords, who set out to unify the 200 squabbling fiefdoms of Japan: Oda Nobunaga and his successors, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Like the humanist condottieri of 15th century Italy, they built themselves impregnable and magnificent castles. "This room you see here," Hideyoshi would tell his guests as he gave them a tour of his seven-story castle at Osaka, "is full of gold, this one of silver; this other compartment is full of bales of silk and damask, that one with robes...
...Japanese who must put forth this supreme effort, however, have first to conquer their national schizophrenia, to achieve a union between the descendants of Hideyoshi and Ieyasu. Osaka and Nagoya must somehow be put together if Japan is to survive...