Vanishing Japan
Описание книги
This classic text of Japanese culture contains a wealth of information about traditional Japan and Japanese customs.Pawnshops and handmade paper, shoe shiners and Shinto jugglers, money rakes and mosquito netting—all these were once a familiar part of daily life in Japan. Many elements of that daily life, like the Obon dances and oreiboko apprenticeships, have no counterpart in any other culture: they are purely unique to Japan.But with the tremendous changes of the modern age, most traces of traditional life in Japan are fast disappearing, soon to be gone forever. Still, there are a few holdouts, especially in Japan's shitamachi, or working-class neighborhoods, where many of the survivors of Japanese crafts, art forms, and festivals are making their last stand.Vanishing Japan is a must-read for tourists, historians, architects, or artists who are interested in Japanese culture.
Отрывок из книги
Vanishing Japan
Old Japan is vanishing. Traditional homes are being torn down, the public baths are closing; children no longer hopscotch among their chalked lozenges, their parents no longer sit on the stoop in the evening cool; the kimono has all but vanished, and tatami-mat rooms are no longer found in the newer apartments: even the food—such traditional fare as kiji donburi (pheasant over rice— deliciously faked, really chicken) and hayashi raisu (an Edwardian favorite, hashed rice)—must now be searched for. And in the place of all of this.- the home shower, the chair and table, the TV set, and victuals known as finger-licking-good from the local corner shop.
.....
Finally—another reason for Japan's particularly poignant reaction to change—is that it is acknowledged ("a world of dew") in the same breath as it is regretted ("but even so"). Though there are resigned repetitions of that national slogan, shikata ga nai (can't be helped), there is at the same time an acknowledged sadness, a public admission of the essentially tragic nature of life.
The officially optimistic West ("no use crying over spilt milk") has never understood this. Things over there always change for the better, in the long run, for the most people—and it is only the romantics at best, the old fogies at worst, who would think otherwise.
.....