Word: samurais
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...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...
...their own cultural superiority despite repeated European humiliations, the Japanese decided early to learn the barbarians' ways. They sent inquiring envoys abroad and hired many foreign experts. Some of the lessons were basic. The Meiji rulers abolished feudalism in 1871, and all fiefs reverted to the Emperor. The samurai, warriors who had formed a ruling caste under the shogunate, were pensioned off. They were forbidden to carry swords or even to wear their traditional topknots. When the samurai rose in revolt, they were suppressed by new armies of conscripts (whom the French were training). With conscription came the French...
...difference 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...