Word: samurais
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...TIME: Some personal questions. What is the last book you've read? Koizumi: Revenge, a historical novel about revenge killings (among samurai), by Akira Yoshimura...
...fate to that of Christ on the cross - an odd comparison coming from an ultranationalist Japanese who advocated an alliance with Hitler. It was, of course, around that time that the Western image of Japan began to darken; no longer comical copycats waltzing in evening clothes, but modern samurai bent on brutal conquest...
Critics say Japan's hidebound feudal practices have finally caught up with it. Ever since Americans introduced the game in 1871, Japan has imbued besuboru with its own philosophy: a Zen samurai emphasis on discipline, spirit and selflessness reflected in the modern-day professional system, which began in 1935. The 12 teams of the Central and Pacific leagues draw more than 22 million fans a year. But because of a compliant union, which refuses to strike (that would disrupt social harmony, or wa), and restrictions that keep neutral salary arbiters and sports agents at arm's length, players are underpaid...
...artist embodied the tortured contradictions of contemporary Japan as completely as Mishima, the homosexual who worried about Japan's effeminate image, the sickly aesthete who turned himself into a modern-day samurai and in 1970 finally committed seppuku, the ancient samurai ritual suicide, after failing to inspire a coup d'Etat. Mishima was thoroughly steeped in the traditions of Western literature - his early work shows the imprint of Oscar Wilde and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is wholly Dostoyevskian - but he was obsessed with the notion of purifying the national character and returning Japan to its pre-Meiji...
...Christian, Shusako Endo was literally a man caught between Japanese and Western values. His early novels tended to be overly symbolic - volcanoes were always poised to rain down judgment on the unrighteous, but later works like Silence and The Samurai are superb accounts of East failing to meet West. Because of his Christian preoccupations, Endo has become one of Japan's best-known writers overseas. The most underrated of the great Japanese modernists in the West is Junichiro Tanizaki, whose portrait of a prewar Osaka family, The Makioka Sisters, is one of the landmarks of 20th century literature...