Word: samurais
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...happy time to admit this, I have particularly enjoyed some of the bloodier ones. I've sat many an afternoon at the PlayStation, blowing enemy warplanes out of the sky in Ace Combat 2. I find it relaxing, almost meditative. I love fighting games, such as the Samurai-slashing Bushido Blade or the kung fu-ish Tekken 2. They work out my twitchy reflexes. I've become lost for days on end in strategic battle simulations, like Age of Empires, a game that lets you play God and create legions of workers and armies--and then lay waste to rival...
...hardly free from being influential. He is one of the few individuals in the world (perhaps along with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan) who can determine the entire fate of economies with a few choice words. A man so influential and powerful cannot be accepting a $16,000 Samurai sword from Nagano or a $300,000 international peace prize from Olympic affiliates in Seoul. And he cannot do so without expecting the IOC rank-and-file to follow his example. The Barcelona gentleman should do what many have been calling on him to do: step down and accept responsibility...
These, like the doings of sumo wrestlers and high-class prostitutes, gave a rich subject matter to 18th century graphic artists like Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro and the theater caricaturist Toshusai Sharaku, whose image of the actor Otani Oniji III playing a samurai's manservant, all red-rimmed eyes and stylish snarl, is a deliciously succinct expression of fictive bloody-mindedness. Through the medium of prints, the range of things that could be depicted widened to take in all Japan. Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Ando Hiroshige's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido...
Meanwhile, the upper samurai class, now that Japan was politically unified, had less butchery to do and more time to spend on matters of high culture, especially the observance of form in such areas as calligraphy, the "way" of tea and the artifacts that were tied into it, ceremonial dress, and brush painting linked to the imported cult of Zen Buddhism. Some of the most memorable samurai objects in this show could not have had much military use; they are kawari kabuto, spectacular parade helmets--the ancestors of Darth Vader's mask--worn to impress the living daylights...
...helmet's role as a sign of authority was backed up by other samurai artifacts: body armor, which turned its wearer into a bizarrely plated red lobster, and, of course, the weapons, the long sword known as a katana and the shorter wakizashi, together with their elaborate hilts, scabbards and other fittings, to which a large body of lore and connoisseurship attached. The figure who most vividly expressed the relation between culture and the samurai ethos remained a legend long after his death. He was Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645), who wrote a famous text on swordplay (A Book of Five...