Word: japanism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their roots, while his Japanese mates tended to denigrate their own culture and idolize anything foreign. Ogata couldn't understand the impulse. Yes, he had traveled the world and had majored in international business. But Ogata had a black belt in karate. He loved the exquisite craftsmanship of Japan's artisans. So when he returned to Tokyo and started his own clothing line, Ogata took his fashion cues from the rich traditions of local design, not from some Parisian or New York City atelier. Today, instead of a hip-hop hoodie, Ogata wears a sleek hooded jacket that zips...
...Made in Japan" is getting a makeover. No longer are Japanese products simply equated with technological wizardry or muted expressions of international modernism. Instead, Japan's new exports draw inspiration from the country's abundant artistic heritage. Fashion designers are updating the kimono, while centuries-old sake distillers are proving that the rice-based spirit can be just as complex as a good Bordeaux. Movie directors are winning international awards for films that celebrate Japan's divine bond with nature, just as interior designers are fusing organic materials with industrial chic in a distinctively Japanese way. Instead of marketing...
...Cool What a change from the Toyota sedans and Sony stereos that have long defined Japan Inc. Sleek as those products may be, there is something culturally anonymous about them. It's as if these brands - along with a certain animated, mouthless cat that was introduced in 1974 - were scrubbed clean of ethnic markings and sold instead as prototypes of a postnational world. The cultural distancing is understandable. Japan's wartime defeat equated nationalism with suffering. The occupying Americans discouraged indigenous martial arts like karate and kendo from Japanese schools, just as an Emperor whose name was used to justify...
...decades, Japan learned to love things foreign. By the 1980s, housewives chatted knowledgably about Cezanne or osso bucco. Novelist Haruki Murakami riffed on the cultural alienation many Japanese feel by filling his books with meditations on jazz and the Beatles. Top Japanese fashion designers decamped to Europe, while those back home emblazoned T shirts with phrases in broken English. Some chefs even abandoned traditional cuisine for the glories of beef stew or the potato croquette. "For my parents' generation, cool meant something was from the West," recalls fashion designer Ogata. "The subtext was that Japan wasn't cool...
...English-speaking countries have been simplifying their spelling for centuries: Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Norway, Ireland, Indonesia and Japan, among others, have all instituted such reforms; Portugal in May amended its spelling to follow the simpler Brazilian rules. Since 1755, when the English language was standardized in Samuel Johnson's aptly named Dictionary of the English Language, many variant spellings have become widely accepted on both sides of the pond. In 1864, for instance, the U.S. government officially changed the spelling of words like centre and timbre to end in the variant -er; more recently, at the beginning...