Word: meiji
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...shrines across Japan last week, sober-faced girls in white robes and vermilion skirts practiced the stately postures of the ritualistic Kagura dance. Musicians wearing eboshi (ceremonial headgear) thumped out an accompaniment on wooden drums, played the ancient ceremonial songs on reedy bamboo flutes. At Tokyo's huge Meiji shrine, the 190 fulltime staff members and 100 temporary helpers put in twelve-hour days cleaning up the building and consecrating tiny religious symbols for sale to worshipers. The week-long New Year's festival-Japan's most important religious event-was coming, and Shinto was gearing...
This New Year an estimated 45 million Japanese will flock to Shinto shrines to watch the Kagura dancing. As they approach the altars, worshipers will clap their hands (a sign of rejoicing), silently pray for divine protection, and drop some coins into the waiting coffers as they leave. Meiji shrine alone expects a minimum of 2.000,000 visitors-which is also "the physical maximum we can accommodate." says Hiroshi Taniguchi. the shrine's leading ritualist...
...fights with bigger and older boys," a habit he has not yet outgrown. In middle school, Nobusuke wrote an essay praising the suicide of General Maresuke Nogi, the hero who captured Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War and later disemboweled himself on the death of his beloved Emperor Meiji in 1912. The act had shocked the West and produced a critical editorial in the London Times, but Nobusuke hailed it as an example of virtuous idealism...
...women, and the atom bomb to set it going again. The 1923 temblor destroyed 60% of the city, killed 143,000 people and ruined many of Tokyo's upper and middle classes. In its aftermath, the educated daughters of these families (education for women dates from the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century) discarded their kimonos, bobbed their hair, donned Western dress and became sales clerks, elevator operators, bus conductors, teachers, journalists, lawyers, even company presidents. Bluestocking females campaigned furiously for women's suffrage and human rights...
...Japanese traditions that dropped out of sight during the occupation, none seemed to disappear more completely than the zaibatsu, the huge cartels controlled since the Meiji Era (1868-1912) by a handful of great Japanese families. To shatter the economic foundation of Japanese militarism, U.S. authorities split such prominent family combines-Mitsubishi, Mitsui and all the rest -into hundreds of small firms, and the Japanese government itself adopted Western-inspired antitrust laws. But zaibatsu, like many another Japanese tradition, proved tougher than reform. Last week the influence and power of the zaibatsu sprawled once more across the length and breadth...