Word: tatami
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After the Jaycees' session, Nohmura went on to his evening's business entertainment. He escorted a favored client and one of the client's associates to an elegant restaurant ($110 a person) where, seated on cushions on a tatami-covered floor, they dined on a twelve-course meal that included clear soup, sashimi and tempura. That contrasted with the group's next stop, a Western-style nightspot, where Cardin-clad hostesses poured liberal amounts of whisky and brandy. Cost for the after-dinner stop, which continued until well after...
...common fantasy of Westerners that there was once an Old Japan (samurais, geishas, moon watching from the tatami) that was destroyed after 1945 by the trauma of Westernization, so that the New Japan ceased in some basic way to be Japanese. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the Japanese do, and always have done, is much more subtle. They adapt what they need from other cultures. They seem always to be submitting-sometimes masochistically-to cultural colonizations, of which the American is only the most recent. But what they make of the acquired form is invariably Japanese...
This combination of cleverness, skill and shibusa, rather than originality, accounts for the excellence of Japanese design. Its continuity extends from the 17th century Katsura Imperial Villa, whose sparse, shoji-screened rooms influenced modern architecture, to the just completed Keio University library; from tatami mats to Sony's new Flamingo record players...
...spartan cell is no different from that of any ordinary inmate at the Tokyo House of Detention-a 6-ft. by 9-ft. concrete cubicle furnished with two tatami mats, a collapsible table and a toilet. Former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka's new quarters were a long way from the exquisitely landscaped home across town where he lived until his arrest last week. Yet the House of Detention was not wholly unfamiliar to "Kaku-san," as he was once affectionately nicknamed. In 1948, as a brash young member of the Japanese Diet, he spent three weeks there on charges...
...Kyoto, the next stop on the itinerary, classes were thrice weekly, as much for the security of having a mini-U.S.A. as for the discussions on the nature of the culture. Organized field trips explored various parts of the land from Kabuki theater to dawn fish markets. A tatami-mat coffee house near Ginkaku-ji temple that served saki and played early Dylan became an after-hours meeting place for many in the group, including the faculty...