Word: tsuchiya
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sneers and jeers were caused by the worst scandal in the temple's 300-year history. Last June Photographer Mikio Tsuchiya got permission to record life in the temple, planned impressive exhibits in the U.S., where enthusiasm for Zen's ego-smashing techniques has become a semi-religious phenomenon (TIME, Feb. 4, 1957 et seg.). Tsuchiya expected to find the temple's 30 pate-shaven novices undergoing the most Spartan life imaginable, for Zen is the harshest branch of Buddhism, and Shofukuji itself has a reputation as one of Zen's most austere temples...
This month Photographer Tsuchiya published his pictures. Samples: loinclothed priests playing mah-jongg instead of sitting in immobile meditation, a priest drinking with a bar hostess, two novices staggering along a Kobe street late at night with a barmaid between them. Tsuchiya quoted one priest as saying: "By listening to good music and gazing on ikibosatu [the living Buddha], I feel I can understand the teachings." This wisdom was Tsuchiya's caption for a photograph of the same priest happily gaping at pictures of virtually naked women...
...week's end the embarrassed temple council set about saving face in the best Japanese tradition. Photographer Tsuchiya agreed to apologize publicly and destroy all his negatives. The two novices pictured most revealingly agreed to expulsion-and then reinstatement. Head Priest Mumon Yamada blamed it all on an influx of university-trained novices who lack moral fiber. Lamented Yamada: It was not so in the old days, when novices were poor boys without education or appetite for soft living...
...valley is its hero and its theme. Loud are the wails of its inhabitants when a farmer who has overheard some bandits plotting on the hill comes down to tell the village that it will be raided as soon as the rice is cut. But one man, Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya), whose wife was carried off in the last raid, does not wail; he resolves to fight. And the wise old man who lives in the mill reveals to the vil lagers a way to fight: hire soldiers to fight for you. But how can poor farmers possibly afford...