Word: meiji
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...kids who gather on sunny afternoons on a concrete plaza at the corner of hip boulevards Meiji and Omotesando seem to be taking their cultural cues from myriad psychedelic compass points: Ibiza, Goa, San Francisco. Hopping trains into the city from all over Japan, these teens and twentysomethings flock for the express purpose of flaunting some of the wackiest Mad Hatter outfits east of Fillmore West. They get gussied up in sidewalk dragging, patchwork skirts under military jackets, or blood red, cropped kimonos paired with platforms and body piercings. The kids tote tom-toms, shopping bags, vinyl purses shaped like...
...Part of the struggle to catch up with Western powers was a strategy of defensive mimicry. This was in a sense a Japanese tradition. At various stages in its history, Japan took on the colors of the powers it respected or feared most. So it was in the early Meiji period, especially the 1870s and 1880s...
...public occasions and sometimes in private, too, members of the Meiji Elite discarded their traditional dress, once modeled after the undergarments of Tang dynasty Chinese robes, and began to wear European army uniforms, morning coats, ball gowns and top hats. Courtiers and other grandees adopted European-style aristocratic titles. Rococo, neo-Renaissance and neoclassicist buildings were erected. Concerts of European classical music were performed. A Prussian-style constitution was promulgated, a British-style navy built, a French-style bureaucracy developed and the Emperor, whose forebears had dedicated themselves to culture and ritual in the palatial seclusion of Kyoto, was boosted...
...over, Japanese became intensely interested again in the outside world and also in what the outside world thought of them. Once again, the Japanese cast themselves as eager pupils of a more powerful civilization. Some postwar efforts to incorporate Western fashions were as extreme as anything seen in the Meiji period. Hollywood movies were remade with local stars, made up to resemble their American models. Japanese pop music was often a form of superior mimicry. Intellectuals, sporting dark glasses and black berets, philosophizing in Shinjuku coffeehouses, sometimes looked as if they were acting out a Parisian fantasy. An exhibition...
...Etat. Mishima was thoroughly steeped in the traditions of Western literature - his early work shows the imprint of Oscar Wilde and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is wholly Dostoyevskian - but he was obsessed with the notion of purifying the national character and returning Japan to its pre-Meiji era values. What is perhaps most surprising about Mishima is that his increasing political fanaticism barely tainted his artistic vision and judgment. The final novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, for my money his greatest work, was finished the week before he sliced open his belly with a sword. Mishima...