Word: priesting
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...luminous gold?and declares that this was the place where he decided to become an artist. Growing up in Kotohira, a backwater town on Shikoku island in southern Japan, he rarely gave any thought to art. But one of his best friends was the son of the head priest of Kotohira-gu, commonly called Konpira, an important Shinto shrine that is the town's great pride and that is said to date back more than 2,000 years. So Takubo spent a lot of time on the shrine's grounds, climbing up and down the complex's infamously forbidding...
...however, when Takubo was about 15, his friend took him inside the okushoin, an area of one of the main buildings that had been the head priest's residence for centuries but was now virtually abandoned. Inside the dark building, every room was filled with seemingly forgotten artistic treasures, including the flowers by legendary 18th century painter Jakuchu Ito, which cover every wall of the room that was once the priest's private study. It was unlike anything Takubo had ever laid eyes upon. Unlike much of Japanese art, in which seasonal coherence and the balanced composition of complete landscapes...
...been seen by the public in 125 years. Takubo says it is fate that he should return to liberate the works he loves more than all others by offering them to everybody. It all came about when his childhood friend, Yasutsugu Kotooka, who is the shrine's 22nd head priest, asked him a few years ago what special events could be held in 2004 to coincide with Senza-Sai, a festival the shrine holds only once every 33 years. "For a long time, he has wanted to make the art available," Takubo says, "but it was hard to find...
...Perhaps the most influential priest in the shrine's history was Yuzon, an avid painter and powerful art patron who lived there in the late 1700s and whose portrait is among the shown works. He commissioned not just Jakuchu's flowers but also the fine mid-Edo-style door screens in the building's more public areas, where the priest would receive guests. Painted in the late 18th century by Okyo Maruyama, each screen has a different theme, such as cranes, tigers, wise men and waterfalls. Okyo was an important transitional figure in Japanese art, as painting moved toward...
...DIED. RICHARD G. BUTLER, 86, founder of the white-supremacist group Aryan Nations; in Hayden, Idaho. Butler, who developed his racist ideology after witnessing the caste system while in India during World War II, became a high priest of white hate, preaching that blacks were inferior and Jews evil. His movement spawned chapters in a dozen states and contacts around the globe but was effectively bankrupted by a $6.3 million lawsuit in 2001 filed by a woman and her son who were assaulted by Aryan Nations guards outside Butler's Idaho compound...