Word: shoguns
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Over the centuries, there have been two kinds of theater, the elitist and the vulgarian. In Aristophanic comedies, male characters were endowed with huge prop phalli with which they thwacked each other. Early forms of the Kabuki theater were closed down by the shogun in 17th century Japan for encouraging prostitution and inciting lewd homosexual byplay on and off stage. Italy's commedia dell'arte was frequently obscene in word and gesture...
...Lady Kaoyo, the wife of Hangan, one of Moronao's deputies. She rebuffs him. Moronao is furious and showers abuse on the unsuspecting and inoffensive Hangan. Pushed beyond sense and patience, Hangan draws his sword and strikes at Moronao. But he is in the sacred precincts of the shogun's palace, where even to draw a sword is a crime. The shogun orders Hangan to commit harakiri. He does so, but not before his chief retainer swears to avenge his cruel death. That is what the next seven acts are about, making Hamlet seem like a speed demon...
...with five tarts, and the dialogue is suitably arch: "Oh, come a little closer to me!" "I say, I say, it seems you've had too much and can't stand up!" Japanese casualness about sex convinced Perry that they were "a lewd people." When the shogun's commissioners complained that a U.S. naval officer had left some religious books in one of the temples, Perry responded by protesting against "the obscene books which the Japanese had given the sailors." But after a desperate effort on both sides to understand each other, this first encounter between...
Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress is a true folk epic. It has a cast of thousands, plenty of fighting, a mute princess, Misa Uehara, a fire ritual and a noble hero (Toshiro Mifune). In fact, it contains all the ingredients of a first-rate western except a Shogun wedding. In addition, Kurosawa shores up his extravaganza with dramatically effective photography and he has directed his actors to move and speak in a style derived from Japan's traditional Kabuki Theater...
...verse form so old that its origin vanishes in the mists of antiquity, the haiku is distinctly Japanese, like the no drama, where crossed planks do for a shogun's litter. No occasion passes, among haiku composers, without hundreds of commemorative haiku, frequently written on the spot. A thief, about to be hanged for his crime, couched his last words in the haiku form: "As for the end -/ that I'll hear in the next world./ cuckoo, my friend." For the lower-brows there are even earthy haiku, called senryu in honor of their creator, who died more...