Word: priestly
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Hirohito now seems to relish his restricted but ritualized duties. Each year, he symbolically plants seedlings of rice on the 284-acre palace grounds; at least 20 times annually he dons flowing traditional costume as the nation's highest-ranking Shinto priest. In addition, each weekday he diligently repairs to his office to rubber-stamp government appointments, welcome foreign envoys and brushstroke his signature on an annual flood of 2,000 state papers. In return, the state devotes $41.1 million a year to the upkeep of palace property, including a taxable stipend of $936,000 for the Emperor...
...Kenji Ekuan, 52, a former Buddhist priest who founded GK Industrial Design Associates, Japan's largest and most innovative design firm, the matter is partly a philosophical one. "We Japanese," he says, "are the most avaricious people. Infinite desires but infinite time and space." To Ekuan the traditional bento-bako - the stacked lunch box packed with its careful array of distinct morsels - is the true ancestor of that emblem of modern Japan, the box full of microchips. Both represent a culture of linear flow: the processing of information, sensuous or electronic, through standardized components that can modulate content rapidly...
...between the Chinese and Japanese ideals of exalted beauty: the former based on symmetry and minute gradations of fixed etiquette, the latter on irregularity and "natural" grace. Sen No Rikyu (1521-91), greatest of the tea masters, established chanoyu as a kind of psychic enclave in which warlord, samurai, priest and scholar could shed the burdens of rank and power by refreshing themselves at the well of nature. A developed Japanese form of Rousseau's "natural man," living in harmony with a world he has not made, is to be found in the teahouse and the culture it epitomizes...
Bundled in colorful silks, the newborn Keiko Shirato was taken by her parents to a neighborhood Shinto shrine, where a white-gowned priest pronounced blessings for a long and healthy life. On three childhood birthdays she also visited Shinto shrines, clapping her hands and clanging bells to awaken the gods so she could pray to them. In 1980 Keiko used Buddhist omens to select a propitious wedding day. But she exchanged Christian vows with her fiancé in a small chapel at one of Tokyo's elegant hotels. Keiko, now 26 and a mother, expects that some...
...metamorphose into Gumby, the '50s cartoon character who has somehow aged into a carping Catskills comic; or a late-show pitchman, peddling Galactic Prophylactics and the Funeral in a Cab; or a suburban dandy, with attitudes and accent straight off the Main Line; or even an Irish priest, his brogue as thick as a County Clare mist...