Word: meiji
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...metalwork-were made after 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Edo Bay like some astronaut landing on an unvisited planet. This marked the beginning of Japan's cultural infatuation with things Western and, by no coincidence, of the decline of traditional Japanese taste. The aesthetic slippage of the Meiji period could not be more vividly illustrated than by the objects chosen for this show. To take an English simile, if Queen Elizabeth II authorized an exhibition from the royal collections, half made up of Renaissance drawings by Leonardo, Michelangelo and others, the rest of cairngorms, antlers and Landseer spaniels...
However they express their appreciation, the Japanese are now saturated with Occidental sound. It was during the reign of the actively Westernizing Emperor Meiji (1868-1912) that European music was adopted by the Japanese school system. But as recently as World War II, the country had only one major orchestra, the then state-sponsored NHK Symphony, and only one basic source of non-Asian music, Germany. Today Tokyo alone has seven full-time orchestras, and Ludwig van Beethoven of Bonn remains Japan's favorite composer. Roughly 15% of all symphonic music played in Japan was written by him. Last...
...weighty numerical achievements Japan's writers have not maintained a favorable balance of trade: while about 1000 foreign books were translated into Japanese in 1973, less than fifty Japanese books were translated into English. Commenting on this state of affairs, Gibney writes, "Unlike the outgoing cultural explorer of the Meiji Era, the modern Japanese is like a man living in a house with one-way windows, quite clear from within, but opaque to the outside viewer...
Takeo Miki may be the least likely of Japan's twelve postwar Premiers. Unlike nearly all his predecessors, he did not attend a prestige, elitist school, but graduated from Tokyo's mediocre Meiji University (class of '37). Instead of working his way up through a government bureaucracy before entering Cabinet-level politics as most other Premiers did, Miki has spent his entire career as a legislator. Since 1937, he has won 14 consecutive elections to the Diet, in which he has represented his native Shikoku where he grew up as the only child of a moderately wealthy...
Liang was a reformer rather than a revolutionary and he favored retention of important elements of China's tradition. He felt that the filial piety present in traditional Chinese family life could be put to good use by the state-- as had been achieved in Meiji Japan. Liang also saw no need for social transformation in China...