Word: kyoto
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These taxis in the old capital city of Kyoto wait outside the doors of the ineffable, of another Japan entirely. The Ryoanji temple's Zen rock garden?five austerely abstract boulder mounds set in a sea of curried sand pebbles?is a celebrated spiritual masterpiece. The garden is absolutely still, and yet tense with an obscurely bullying profundity. A guide whispers the sermons in the stones, the allegories: the rocks are, maybe, tigers swimming across the sea. Or they are whales rocking in the deep. Or perhaps they are these mysterious islands themselves: Japan. The abbot of Ryoanji...
...turmoil of the industrial revolution was all but unknown to them. The shogun's court at Edo received various dispatches from pairs of strong-legged runners, one of whom carried state documents in a lacquered box while the other bore a lantern marked "official business." In imperial Kyoto, the Empress and her ladies followed a custom of blackening their teeth...
...Satsuma in southwestern Japan. Young, ambitious, aggressive, these clan leaders had no intention of really restoring imperial rule, and they themselves were to govern as a new oligarchy for the next half-century. To symbolize the change, though, they decided to move the young Emperor, Mutsuhito, out of Kyoto and into the shogun's castle at Edo, which they renamed "eastern capital": Tokyo. A British infantry unit, on 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...
...obsession with younger architects at Tokyo University. In 1954 Walter Gropius came to Japan to give a series of lectures, only to discover that an extraordinary loop of adaptation had taken place. What Gropius liked in Japan was its traditional architecture, epitomized by the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. The kind of modernism he stood for was heavily indebted to Japanese sources, transmitted to Germany nearly 50 years before by Frank Lloyd Wright, not just in details or quotations of carpentry, but in fundamentals, such as the open plan and the design of furniture. Thus a German brought Japan back...
...artistic, technological, social, political, and religious--which spawn major monuments in civilization. This approach has the advantage of controlling a potentially vast body of material, much of it written about with exotic, difficult terminology, by selecting exemplary temples, shrines, castles, villas and even townhouses such as the eighteenth century Kyoto residence now at the Children's Museum in Boston...