Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Japan's Hikone Castle: A National Treasure You Can Drive Into

Hikone Castle & the Old Guard 
Japan used to have lots of castles. Several thousand of them, actually. Many were built in the 15th and 16th Centuries during Japan’s Sengoku-jidai – the 150 years or so when everyone was fighting with everyone over land and rice and who got to use what title.

The vast majority of those castles are gone, destroyed during the fighting, lost to natural disaster (fire and earthquake being the usual suspects), or purposefully demolished when, with the onset of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan decided they didn’t want to see any more castles (or use any more of those titles).

Today there are only about 50 castles in Japan. Most of those are either reconstructions or mere ruins. Only a dozen of Japan’s extant castles are originals, meaning they are the real thing, built when the Japanese were all fighting to keep each other off their land and their precious little titles.

Of these twelve still-standing castles, only four – Himeji, Matsumoto, Inuyama and Hikone – are on Japan’s list of Registered National Treasures.

Put another way, eight of Japan’s 400-year-old castles are not officially treasured. Meanwhile parents in the US are throwing their kids elaborate parties for making it to sixteen.

Monday, February 10, 2020

This Scheming World: Money and the Masses in 17th Century Japan

Short Story Titles from This Scheming World
I recently read a book. I should have been working but someone once said great writers are proficient readers. If I don’t make rent this month I blame the scoundrel who said that.

Now finished with the book, I’m still not finished with my work but I’m going to write about the book.

Thank you for reading. You are justifying my not working.

I Had No Idea Who Saikaku Ihara Was. I Just Liked the Title.

Three words – This Scheming World – describe perfectly the stories Ihara has to tell. Savvy marketing too, for a guy from the 17th Century. The connotations certainly compelled me to pick up the book. (Let's ignore the possible psychological machinations involved.)

Ihara has been called “the first spokesman for the Japanese masses.” Murasaki Shikibu wrote the Tale of Genji, the world’s oldest novel, in the late 10th Century. It was, in the words of Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, “the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature.” From then on down through Japan’s Warring States Period, when the lords and samurai ruled the land, the printed word was limited to the realm of the country’s nobility.

This changed at the beginning of the 17th Century, with the onset of the relative peace of the Edo Era. No longer were the nobility lords over all; not in the sense they were before, because the economy was becoming heavily reliant on the merchant class. You wanted something, you had to buy it, no one cared who your father once was. How this translated into a sudden wave of interest in literature among the commoners I don’t know, but it did.