Word: shinto
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Incidents of this sort are commonplace in Japan. Perhaps because the society is so straitlaced and hierarchic, drinking as a social release has become notoriously pervasive, with the result that alcoholism is now approaching epidemic proportions. Time was when Japanese restricted their drinking to Shinto festivals, viewing cherry blossoms or the celebrations of births and marriages. Not so today. A majority of habitual drunks are businessmen. A new survey reveals that in Japan there are more than 3 million alcoholics and problem drinkers-6% of the adult population. This is a fourfold jump since World...
...unconsciously guided by early traumas-and apply it to the concept of reincarnation. Although the treatment has had a following in the U.S. and Europe for at least 15 years, more and more Americans are experimenting with the notion that their psychological problems arose during previous existences as, say, Shinto priests, Roman guards, citizens of Atlantis or even another planet...
...made in China late in the Eastern Chou dynasty, some 2,200 years ago; the more recent works include a scholar's writing box and an incised sign from a sake shop in 19th century Japan. The works are predominantly Buddhist, although there are two or three exceptional Shinto cult objects. The stylistic range is also very broad. Some of the pieces are, in essence, conventional religious decoration -like the spectacular head of a horned dragon (see color page), its jaws rippling like the blade of a Malay kris, which was carried on a lance to repel evil spirits...
...such a tree, there would be insuperable problems of technique. Wood is grainy. It favors continuous, compressed shapes with a strong axis along the grain. Anything that sticks sideways from the block-an arm, say-is weak and splits off. Hence the elongated, torpedo-like form of a Shinto deity from Japan's Kamakura period (12th-14th centuries)-a courtier, oddly clownlike in his peaked cap and baggy pants, but carved with a reductive formal elegance that might have inspired Brancusi seven centuries later. All its shapes are circumscribed by the block; one could roll it downhill...
...story goes, and cut clean through its barrel and water jacket with one swipe of his tachi. But the art swords in this show were not meant for such ends. Their unblemished state testifies that they can rarely, if ever, have seen battle. Kept in a Shinto shrine or an armory, polished no more often than a Rembrandt is cleaned, they are among the best-preserved artifacts of their...