Word: yoshimasa
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...project is the brainchild of Tokai University Professor Yoshimasa Hayashi, a former top automotive engineer with Nissan Motor and author of the Japanese book To Make the World's Best Race Car. In 2001, Hayashi decided to spice up the school's drab curricula with a little real-world engineering project: a competitive endurance racer, designed and built by his students. "Studying a race car is a great way to learn a variety of advanced technologies," says Hayashi. "And, of course, it's appealing to young students...
...After retiring from public life and entering the Zen Buddhist order as a monk, Yoshimasa freely indulged his passions for architecture, gardening, literature and fine art. Early in his reign, he gained notoriety for building lavish palaces, even during times of terrible hardship for most of his people; in retirement, he turned to a more discreet, muted style. The highest expression of this restrained aesthetic was the Silver Pavilion, a superbly balanced temple made entirely of wood and paper at Yoshimasa's place of retreat in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto. Architectural historians consider the Ginkaku...
...important place in the nation's soul, as we know from The Tale of Genji and other early court fiction of the Heian period. At that time, however, gardens were seasonal, emphasizing spring and autumn to illustrate the perishability of beauty, the concept of the "pity of things." In Yoshimasa's era, however, gardens moved toward a Zen aesthetic, becoming more serene places of contemplation that favored the use of symbols of eternity such as rocks and sand over the transient beauty of flowers...
...rooms of the Silver Pavilion were designed to frame views of the gardens as much as to be beautiful in their own right. Here, Yoshimasa and a group of like-minded aesthetes would meet to compose poetry and perform that most quintessentially Japanese of arts, the tea ceremony. (Today, any object of the tea ritual from that time, even the humblest bamboo ladle, fetches a fabulous sum at auction if an association with Yoshimasa can be established.) An accomplished poet and great patron of Noh theater, Yoshimasa explored every artistic field known in his day and even created...
...Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion is a dense little book, packed almost to overflowing with information, and one that richly rewards the careful reader. Keene is a graceful, entertaining companion, writing with a refreshing lack of pomposity. "The alliances and disputes of the warrior families at this time are hard to remember," he confesses, "because the sides changed so often and the names of the participants were so similar." (Just what I was thinking, says the reader.) Yet the book is always authoritative and lucid. Anyone curious about the development of the legendary style of Japan will find...