Word: meiji
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Giving up on trying to comprehend the wondrous age of the Meiji restoration Wednesday, I decided to use my notebook as a pillow...
Perhaps it was natural that Japanese artists should return the compliment; anyhow it was inevitable, once the traditional isolation of Japan was broken by the Emperor Meiji's decree, in 1868, that "knowledge shall be sought throughout the world." As J. Thomas Rimer points out in a fascinating catalog essay to this show, the teaching of Western art in Meiji Tokyo began in 1876 mainly as a "scientific" discipline. But before long the bizarre techniques of the mysterious Occident developed their own momentum for Japanese artists, and particularly the Western way of depicting forms by smearing a kind of sticky...
...long tradition of thrift comparable to the Puritan ethic, which for centuries conferred upon Europeans (and, subsequently, Americans) a sense of moral rectitude for every penny saved. A dedication to saving became ingrained in the Japanese psyche only in the late 19th century, when the government, under Emperor Meiji, began cajoling the people into saving to supply capital for industrial modernization and, later...
Under Japan's old Confucian and Meiji codes, the role of the Japanese woman was well defined and faithfully followed: to obey her father, then her husband and finally, in old age, her sons. Even those women who make up roughly one- third of the Japanese work force have been treated as a species apart. They have been banned by law from working more than two hours of overtime in any day or, with a few exceptions, past 10 at night, and allowed monthly menstrual leave with full pay in certain strenuous jobs. All that changed last week when, after...
Indeed, the diminutive (5-ft. 3-in., 135-lb.) Uemura had been facing outsize dangers for nearly two decades. The unassuming farmer's son took up mountain climbing while studying agriculture at Tokyo's Meiji University. He became a national hero in 1970 when, as a member of the first Japanese team to successfully climb Mount Everest, he was the first to reach the 29,028-ft. peak. But his most rewarding feats were those performed, as he once put it, "in all the splendor of solitude." He explained, "It is a test of myself, and one thing...