Word: shinto
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...tired hand, and finds himself returning to the world of his parents and his birth. Despite the title - and a cameo appearance by Colonel Sanders of KFC fame - 2002's Kafka on the Shore was Murakami's most overtly Japanese novel yet, delving into the florid mysteries of Shinto. He continues his homeward orientation in After Dark, a slip of a novella that explores a single night in and around Tokyo's sleepless Shinjuku district...
...change began with Abe's own surprise trip to Beijing last October, which established lines of communication that had been all but ruined by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated trips to the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto memorial to Japan's war dead viewed by many nations as an irredeemable symbol of Japanese imperialism. For Abe, who had a nationalist reputation as a legislator, the move assuaged worries that ties with China would further degrade under his administration. For the leaders in Beijing, Abe's visit was an opportunity to show that China could be forward thinking...
Were Wen Jiabao to visit Yasukuni in the course of his visit to Japan this week, he would find the Shinto shrine's cherry trees in late bloom, raining white petals with every breeze. But such serenity would quickly be disrupted by the contents of a shrine that honors Japanese war criminals, and of its adjacent Yushukan museum, which rewrites 20th century history to place much of the blame on China for its devastation by the Japanese military in the 1930s, describing the Nanking massacre simply as an "incident...
...official Japanese Meteorological Agency, which bases its forecasts on a databank of more than three decades of climate statistics, confidently predicted that the model tree in Tokyo - located in the Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto place of worship better known for the controversy over its enshrinement of Japan's war dead - would begin to blossom on March 18. But that forecast had to be hastily revised last week, when officials discovered that a computer glitch had thrown off the prediction. As programming errors go, this was just slightly less catastrophic than the NASA mistake that caused the $125 million Mars Climate...
...festivals are based on traditional Shinto purification rituals. In Inazawa, where this year's event will be held on March 2, one self-confident fellow is chosen to be the official streaker. He's shaved and then marched through the Kounomiya Shrine, where a throng of around 9,000 men wearing only loincloths attempt to lay their hands on him as thousands of spectators watch. The naked man is supposed to collect the bad luck and impurities of all who touch him. The crowd can get overly enthusiastic (sake is involved), so the man is protected by guards...