Word: rituals
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...celebrity arriving at Narita airport is required to answer, as though it matters what Brad Pitt or Britney Spears thinks of Japan, as though a mere glimpse of Narita's airport lounge would elicit any interesting thoughts at all. But interest is not the point here; it is a ritual, a formula. Foreign guests express their admiration, and their hosts accept these verbal tributes gracefully...
...What do you think of Japan?" is also how ritual exchanges between less celebrated Westerners and Japanese taxi drivers begin. The required answer is as bound by ritual as the question. Certain stock phrases are to be avoided. Admiration of samurai, kimono, Mount Fuji or geisha is, on the whole, not well received. For, like those wrong-headed textbooks, this might suggest that modern, international, metropolitan Japan is not sufficiently appreciated...
...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 as a kind of Wilhelmine military monarch...
...artist embodied the tortured contradictions of contemporary Japan as completely as Mishima, the homosexual who worried about Japan's effeminate image, the sickly aesthete who turned himself into a modern-day samurai and in 1970 finally committed seppuku, the ancient samurai ritual suicide, after failing to inspire a coup d'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...
...weeks back, writers across the country welcomed the start of springtime with the advent of baseball season. Especially in Boston, the American ritual of opening day is linked directly with the renewal associated with the warming of the weather. The question rings throughout Beantown: "Can the Sox finally do it this year...