Word: nara
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...city (a first-rate geisha party runs up to $60 per person) as any on earth. Yet a few miles outside, Japan goes back centuries to a bygone world of tiny, meticulously tilled farms, tranquil lotus ponds and brilliantly colored shrines and temples. The finest temples are at Kyoto, Nara, where the 1,349-year-old Horyuji Temple is said to be the world's oldest wooden building, and at Nikko, where the brilliant Toshogu Shrine is set in a fairyland of rugged mountains, waterfalls and virgin forests. Tourists also like to drive along the Izu Peninsula, with...
...sunshine over Tokyo, soliciting votes for the Democratic Party of Ichiro Hatoyama, the caretaker Premier who aspired to a longer lease on the job. The election was as orderly as any in the West, but with occasional trimmings that were made in Japan. In the templed city of Nara, officials rejected the request of eleven Buddhists who, engaged in a religious retreat, insisted that they needed absentee ballots. "Despite the fact that our bodies will be here on election day," they pleaded, "our souls will be in Nirvana." Some 38 million other Japanese, a remarkable 75.8% of the electorate,* clambered...
Many of the items on exhibit were glittering reminders of the Nara era (710-794 A.D.)-the golden age of Japanese art, when the Japanese were beginning to throw off the influences of India and China and to develop styles of their own. In those days, artists of every sort swarmed about the great Buddhist temples at Nara, 20 miles south of Kyoto. Some worked with stone, wood and metals. Others chose lacquer, mixing it with powdered incense, spreading it on linen strips over models of wood or plaster, and then painting their work in flaming vermilion, gold and blue...
Among the most striking statues in the exhibition was a Nara-period lacquer of the demigod Karura, one of the legendary protectors of Shakamuni Buddha. His unknown craftsman visualized him as looking a good deal like an ancient warrior, with stern glance, hanging jowls and a suit of mail-but distinguished from ordinary mortals by a belligerently bird-like beak...