Word: unknown
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Deliberately self-isolated for more than two centuries from the upheavals of the "barbarian" outside world, they lived in an almost medieval state. The turmoil of the industrial revolution was all but unknown to them. The shogun's court at Edo received various dispatches from pairs of strong-legged runners, one of whom carried state documents in a lacquered box while the other bore a lantern marked "official business." In imperial Kyoto, the Empress and her ladies followed a custom of blackening their teeth...
...gives almost no bylines. Editorial Board Chairman Tsuneo Watanabe explains, "I would want to develop star reporters, but the Japanese tradition of anonymity among writers dies hard." If any one thing would make Japanese newspapering seem utterly alien to U.S. reporters, that is it: journalists who prefer to be unknown and who nonetheless ride in limousines. -By William A. Henry...
...depended upon spellbinding narrators called benshi to interpret the on-screen action; many were more popular than the country's movie stars. Though Japanese cinema was a strong force in Asia (so much so that in Thailand the word nippon came to mean movies), its films were virtually unknown in the West. Haifa century later it would take an alliance of television, video games and indifferent product to reduce Japan to the status of also-ran among national cinemas. As Film Historian Joseph Anderson wrote last year, "The Japanese film industry, in contrast to so many other Japanese manufacturers...
After nearly two decades of depression, the Japanese art film has returned to the status of a cottage industry. But it has not seized the world imagination as it did in the 1950s, when the Western success of Kurosawa's Rashomon unlocked a trove of tantalizing, hitherto unknown masterpieces. Part of the appeal of these films lay in their strangeness: Japan seemed not just another country but a different world, full of mystery, elegance, violence, surprise...
...turned out that the Reagan team had acquired other Carter papers of unknown significance. Then the atmosphere turned ugly. Aides to the President contradicted one another. Reagan was hammered at a press conference because he would not condemn an event that he sincerely if unwisely labeled "much ado about nothing." As criticism of his ethical fumbling mounted, the President sensibly yielded to demands that his private campaign records be handed over to investigators from the FBI. Zealous accusers exulted that they might have unearthed another Watergate...