Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present

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Even after discovering the truth Ogiwara missed Otsuyu desperately. After some time, he could no longer bear his sadness and returned to the temple where Otsuyu lay buried. At the temple gates, Otsuyu appeared before him once more. Reaching out her hand, she asked Ogiwara to accompany her home. Without hesitation, Ogiwara took her hand, walking with her into the darkness. What unites these two figures, he explains, is that “they share an interest in ministering to failed stories.” Woken by a Fire Bell The advent of the Yayoi people from the Asian mainland brought fundamental transformations to the Japanese archipelago. The millennial achievements of the Neolithic Revolution took hold of the islands in a relatively short span of centuries, particularly with the development of rice cultivation [14] and metallurgy. Until recently, the onset of this wave of cultural and technological changes was thought to have begun around 400 BC. [15] Radio-carbon evidence now suggests that the new phase started some 500 years earlier, between 1,000 and 800 BC. [16] [17] Endowed with bronze and iron weapons and tools initially imported from China and the Korean peninsula, the Yayoi radiated out from northern Kyūshū, gradually supplanting the Jōmon. [18] They also introduced weaving and silk production, [19] new woodworking methods, [16] glassmaking technology, [16] and new architectural styles. [20] The expansion of the Yayoi appears to have brought about a fusion with the indigenous Jōmon, resulting in a small genetic admixture. [21] A Yayoi period bronze bell ( dōtaku) of the 3rd century AD While Shiver may be filled with comics rather than prose, it is still a Japanese short story collection through and through. This is also the finest sample of Junji Ito stories you can find. If you’ve had a morbid interest in Ito’s are and stories for a while, Shiver is where you should start. Upon the consolidation of power, Minamoto no Yoritomo chose to rule in concert with the Imperial Court in Kyoto. Though Yoritomo set up his own government in Kamakura in the Kantō region located in eastern Japan, its power was legally authorized by the Imperial court in Kyoto in several occasions. In 1192, the emperor declared Yoritomo seii tai-shōgun ( 征夷大将軍; Eastern Barbarian Subduing Great General), abbreviated as shōgun. [70] Yoritomo's government was called the bakufu ( 幕府 ("tent government")), referring to the tents where his soldiers encamped. The English term shogunate refers to the bakufu. [71] Japan remained largely under military rule until 1868. [72]

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But these rapid changes caused as much upheaval to Japan’s mental landscape as to its economic and political worlds. Harding mentions how the novelist Natsume Sōseki likened Japan’s experience of modernization to “a person who is awakened by a fire bell and jumps out of bed.”

From luxury snow holidays on the northern most island, and alternative adventure destinations to immersive Japanese cultural experiences in special settings, we cover all the territories of Japan, wherever we can provide a unique memorable experience. No especially elaborate rites of burial evolved, and the dead were buried in a small pit dug near the dwelling. Sometimes the body was buried with its knees drawn up or with a stone clasped to its chest, a procedure that probably had some religious or magical significance. A large number of clay figurines have been found, many representing female forms that were probably magical objects associated with primitive fertility cults. Japan Story Travel cover the fields of Leisure FIT, Group & MICE. We mainly serve the mid-end to high-end market. We are a quality-oriented team, and our strength is in providing bespoke travel service for connoisseurs. We are also a Culture & Experience oriented team, proudly offering the opportunity for our guests to access the hidden gems of Japan and Japanese Culture. This is a collection of ten tales, all of which sensitively and deftly explore the relationship between time, history, place, and people. Moving across the spectrum of 20th Century Japanese history, these stories have a way of going straight for your heart. After Yoritomo's death in 1199, the office of shogun weakened. Behind the scenes, Yoritomo's wife Hōjō Masako became the true power behind the government. In 1203, her father, Hōjō Tokimasa, was appointed regent to the shogun, Yoritomo's son Minamoto no Sanetomo. Henceforth, the Minamoto shoguns became puppets of the Hōjō regents, who wielded actual power. [75]

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The title of Christopher Harding’s new history is Japan Story, but in fact the book contains numerous stories—many perhaps unfamiliar even to long-time students of Japan. The first human inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago have been traced to the Paleolithic, around 38-39,000 years ago. [1] The Jōmon period, named after its cord-marked pottery, was followed by the Yayoi period in the first millennium BC when new inventions were introduced from Asia. During this period, the first known written reference to Japan was recorded in the Chinese Book of Han in the first century AD. The arrival in 1853 of a fleet of American ships commanded by Commodore MatthewC. Perry threw Japan into turmoil. The US government aimed to end Japan's isolationist policies. The shogunate had no defense against Perry's gunboats and had to agree to his demands that American ships be permitted to acquire provisions and trade at Japanese ports. [151] The Western powers imposed what became known as " unequal treaties" on Japan which stipulated that Japan must allow citizens of these countries to visit or reside on Japanese territory and must not levy tariffs on their imports or try them in Japanese courts. [158]Whatever happens the country will be divided for some time,” he notes—a very different image when compared to the national confidence in evidence at the time of the 2012 London Olympics. Unity in Diversity During the Meiji period, Japan underwent a rapid transition towards an industrial economy. [194] Both the Japanese government and private entrepreneurs adopted Western technology and knowledge to create factories capable of producing a wide range of goods. [195] During the second half of the 16th century, Japan gradually reunified under two powerful warlords: Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The period takes its name from Nobunaga's headquarters, Azuchi Castle, and Hideyoshi's headquarters, Momoyama Castle. [71] Japan in 1582, showing territory conquered by Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi in gray Takauji set up his shogunate in the Muromachi district of Kyoto. However, the shogunate was faced with the twin challenges of fighting the Southern Court and of maintaining its authority over its own subordinate governors. [87] Like the Kamakura shogunate, the Muromachi shogunate appointed its allies to rule in the provinces, but these men increasingly styled themselves as feudal lords—called daimyōs—of their domains and often refused to obey the shogun. [88] The Ashikaga shogun who was most successful at bringing the country together was Takauji's grandson Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who came to power in 1368 and remained influential until his death in 1408. Yoshimitsu expanded the power of the shogunate and in 1392, brokered a deal to bring the Northern and Southern Courts together and end the civil war. Henceforth, the shogunate kept the emperor and his court under tight control. [87] Kinkaku-ji was built in 1397 by Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. Map showing the territories of major daimyō families around 1570 CE These are radical, punk sci-fi tales by one of the best authors of the Japanese short story format. Izumi Suzuki was a true gift to the art of Japanese short story writing. Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki

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Emperor Hirohito's sixty-three-year reign from 1926 to 1989 is the longest in recorded Japanese history. [216] The first twenty years were characterized by the rise of During the early Heian period, the imperial court successfully consolidated its control over the Emishi people of northern Honshu. [58] Ōtomo no Otomaro was the first man the court granted the title of seii tai-shōgun ("Great Barbarian Subduing General"). [59] In 802, seii tai-shōgun Sakanoue no Tamuramaro subjugated the Emishi people, who were led by Aterui. [58] By 1051, members of the Abe clan, who occupied key posts in the regional government, were openly defying the central authority. The court requested the Minamoto clan to engage the Abe clan, whom they defeated in the Former Nine Years' War. [60] The court thus temporarily reasserted its authority in northern Japan. Following another civil war–the Later Three-Year War– Fujiwara no Kiyohira took full power; his family, the Northern Fujiwara, controlled northern Honshu for the next century from their capital Hiraizumi. [61] The second story, Pregnancy Diary, details the feelings and experiences of a young woman as she watches her sister (and sister’s husband) go through a pregnancy. It’s unnerving and discomfiting at times, as all three tales in this Japanese story story collection are. Picnic in the Storm by Yukiko Motoya Covering the period from 1850 to 2018, the work features a diverse cast of Buddhists and activists, feminists and terrorists, psychotherapists and jazz pianists, and surrealists and avant-garde artists. Initially intended to be about resistance and protest in Japan, Harding says, it ultimately evolved into a modern history.A notoriously difficult genre … Toshiro Mifuner and Richard Chamberlain in the 1980 TV adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd These stories are about what Japan has been in the past and what it should be in the future. My sense is that the public thinks that Japanese identity is quite fixed and uniform. But you have all these creative radical visions for what Japan could become that end up getting squeezed out.” Where the Wild Ladies Are never forgets how wonderfully weird the tales of yokai are, and it uses them to offer us a stream of witty, biting, eccentric, and dark tales of feminism in modern Japan. Longing and Other Stories by Junichiro Tanizaki Yet diversity is at odds with a second story that has been told throughout Japan’s modern history, and that also Harding examines in his book. It is the story of Japanese exceptionalism: a nation that is special, uniquely blessed by the gods, with the emperor at its head. Closely linked is the narrative of racial homogeneity.

Japanese Short Story Collections to Read 10 Contemporary Japanese Short Story Collections to Read

It was a clash between old and new that has arguably beset the Japanese psyche until today. Psychiatrists and psychotherapists like Kozawa encountered this distress at first hand. The people of the Jōmon period lived mainly by hunting and fishing and by gathering edible nuts and roots. The appearance of large settlements from the Middle period onward has been interpreted by some scholars as implying the cultivation of certain types of crop—a hypothesis seemingly supported by the fact that the chipped-stone axes of this period are not sharp but seem to have been used for digging soil. Doubtless there was some form of cultivation: starchy yams and taro, probably originating from the continent, were raised, the starch from them formed into a type of bread. This incipient agriculture seems related to a cultural florescence in mid-Jōmon times that lasted about 1,000 years. The titular Hit Parade of Tears is set in a fascist future reminiscent of modern-day North Korea, and slowly drip-feeds us the context for how such a world could blossom out of contemporary Japan. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa This is a beautiful and immaculate Japanese short story collection from one of Japan’s greatest writers. Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami What’s more, at the time of writing, amid Brexit upheaval, Britain has itself been forced to reassess its own national stories.A UK writer himself, Harding expresses surprise at “the speed at which national identity has unraveled” since the Brexit referendum.Historians agree that there was a big struggle between the Yamato federation and the Izumo Federation centuries before written records. [29] Classical Japan [ edit ] Asuka period (538–710) [ edit ] Buddhist temple of Hōryū-ji is the oldest wooden structure in the world. It was commissioned by Prince Shotoku and represents the beginning of Buddhism in Japan. The protagonist of this story is a teenage girl whose Christian parents run an orphanage, and she has grown up with a foster brother from this orphanage. As she has developed, however, she has harbored an increasingly intense obsession with him. Better known as Lafcadio Hearn, Koizumi Yakumo was to the Japanese ghost story what the Grimm Brothers were to European fairytales: a pioneering collector and publisher of long-lost folklore. After settling in Matsue, a castle town on Japan’s western coast, in the late 1800s, he married the daughter of a declassee samurai family, became enraptured by Japanese ghost stories, or kaidan (thanks in part to his deeply troubled childhood), and was eventually anointed as a Japanese subject under the name Koizumi Yakumo. Though he was more a recounter of supernatural fiction than a creator, he believed deeply in the power of these age-old narratives and portrayed them in startling prose that remains just as gripping well over a century later. His collection, Japanese Ghost Stories, is the gold-standard of the genre. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the shogunate showed signs of weakening. [151] The dramatic growth of agriculture that had characterized the early Edo period had ended, [133] and the government handled the devastating Tenpō famines poorly. [151] Peasant unrest grew and government revenues fell. [152] The shogunate cut the pay of the already financially distressed samurai, many of whom worked side jobs to make a living. [153] Discontented samurai were soon to play a major role in engineering the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate. [154] In 858, Fujiwara no Yoshifusa had himself declared sesshō ("regent") to the underage emperor. His son Fujiwara no Mototsune created the office of kampaku, which could rule in the place of an adult reigning emperor. Fujiwara no Michinaga, an exceptional statesman who became kampaku in 996, governed during the height of the Fujiwara clan's power [52] and married four of his daughters to emperors, current and future. [50] The Fujiwara clan held on to power until 1086, when Emperor Shirakawa ceded the throne to his son Emperor Horikawa but continued to exercise political power, establishing the practice of cloistered rule, [53] by which the reigning emperor would function as a figurehead while the real authority was held by a retired predecessor behind the scenes. [52]