Word: samurai
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Running, bounding, diving, vaulting, cartwheeling and somersaulting, a dozen bare-chested male dancers in royal-blue tights flung themselves across the stage like beanbags. Crazed clowns attacked a plastic bubble, which, inflating like a Zeppelin, devoured them alive. Minstrels strutted, samurai cut curlicues in the air. And while filmed images slithered across a billowing screen, a man and a woman simulated lovemaking as strobe lights flickered, spotlights raked the audience, and a raga-rock band screamed bloody murder...
...Originally, wandering, masterless samurai of feudal Japan...
...much of Japan's exported celluloid is allocated to films of the nation's vanished grandeur-to the gaudy excesses of feudal overlords, the violent, formalized courage of the Samurai. She and He is one of a handful of recent exceptions...
...samurai-turned-sakebrewer, Sato was born in the somnolent town of Tabuse, on Honshu's far eastern coast, just 100 miles from the Straits of Tsushima, where in Sato's fifth year Admiral Heihachiro Togo destroyed the Russian fleet. That was the year of Japan's greatest military success, but little of it rubbed off on Eisaku. Sato's older brother, Nobusuke Kishi,* was the star of the family, graduated second in his class at Tokyo University law school (Sato was much lower). In 1941, Kishi became one of the youngest Cabinet ministers in Japanese history...
...ambivalence and his constant concern with consensus, Sato is an irritating leader to the more Westernized of Japan's interi (intellectuals). Today, at 65, he is a ponderous speaker but a man of steadying weight in a nation ready to take off in many directions. He reads "middlebrow" samurai novels (the Japanese equivalent of westerns), and watches with benevolence the careers of his two sons, Ryutaro, 38, an oil-company executive, and Shinji, 34, who works for the Nippon Kokan steel company. To the looks of a Kabuki actor, Sato adds a very calculating eye for his own position...