Word: samurai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...taxi drivers bustle, sweeping huge feather dusters over their cars, flicking specks from the bright metal. The ritual, a writer once remarked, makes them look like chambermaids in the first act of a French farce. But it is utterly Japanese, a set piece: the drivers handle their dusters like samurai. The scene is a sort of cartoon of the busy, fastidious superego that is supposed to preside in the Japanese psyche. The drivers even wear white gloves. There is probably not a dirty taxicab in Japan...
...Japanese businessmen have led the way. They have traveled the world and studied its languages. They have worked its trade routes with single-minded energy and curiosity, selling their wares, studying everything, plundering the remotest cultures and factories for information. They are Oriental Vikings armed with cameras and a samurai's resistance to jet lag. Prime Minister Nakasone has displayed a newly extraverted international style for a Japanese leader. He has, among other things, awakened what is for the Japanese the painful subject of their rearming, or at any rate contributing a greater share to the defense...
...release: the violence done to oneself. Japan's suicide rate, about 15 per 100,000, is higher than that of the U.S., though lower than those of most North or East European countries. Suicide in Japan was long surrounded by a romantic and aesthetic aura that arose from the samurai tradition. Now it seems an especially unhappy and unheroic spectacle. A group called the Japan Association for the Prevention of Parent-Child Suicide has been established to try to discourage such tragedies. Some 400 occur every year. In recent weeks a man threw himself and his two children into...
BORN. To Toshiro Mifune, 62, ruggedly handsome film actor often referred to as the John Wayne of Japan (Rashomon, 1950; The Seven Samurai, 1954; and the TV movie Shōgun, 1980); and Mika Kitagawa, 33, his longtime girlfriend and sometime movie actress: his third child, her first (he is still married to his first wife); a girl; in Tokyo. Name: Mika...
...sister, as well as his brother, killed themselves in the face of deteriorating health. After five operations this year to stave off leg amputations from diabetes-induced circulatory problems, Leicester shot himself in the head. Two decades earlier he wrote of his brother's suicide: "Like a samurai who felt dishonored by the word or deed of another, Ernest felt his own body had betrayed...