Download or read book Taiheiki Warriors written by Utagawa Yoshiiku and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2013-07-17 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Taiheiki, a 14th-century war epic presenting scenes from the Nanboku-cho period (1334-1392), is one of the key works of early Japanese literature. The book was first popularized in Japanese art by musha-e (“warrior picture”) prints during the 19th century, in particular by Kuniyoshi’s series Taiheiki Eiyu-den ("Taiheiki Heroes") of 1847-49, and Yoshiiku’s imitative but expanded series Taiheiki Eiyu-den of 1867-69. Both series depicted a range of samurai in battle, with kinetic framing and numerous images of bloody carnage. Yoshiiku in particular took this aspect to an extreme, with severed heads and blood liberally strewn about his designs. This special ebook selection of Taiheiki Warriors includes 25 of the most vivid and dynamic designs from each series, making a total of 50 classic warrior prints by Kuniyoshi and Yoshiiku, two of the most renowned and accomplished of all ukiyo-e artists.
Download or read book The Taiheiki written by Taiheiki and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Sovereign to Symbol written by Thomas Donald Conlan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteenth-century Japan witnessed a conflict about the nature of power that was expressed through the rituals and institutions of two rival courts. Ultimately, political authority came to be asserted through the language of esoteric Buddhist rituals, which determined the parameters of political possibility in Japan.
Download or read book Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century written by Akihiro Odanaka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bunraku has fascinated theatre practitioners through its particular forms of staging, such as highly elaborated manipulation of puppets and exquisite coordination of chanters and shamisen players. However, Bunraku lacks scholarship dedicated to translating not only the language but also cultural barriers of this work. In this book, Odanaka and Iwai tackle the wealth of bunraku plays underrepresented in English through rexamining their siginifcance on a global scale. Little is written on the fact that bunraku theatre, despites its elegant figures of puppets and exotic stories, was often made as a place to manifest the political concerns of playwrights in the 18th century, hence a reflection of the audience's expectation that could not have materialized outside the theatre. Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century aims to make bunraku texts readable for those who are interested in the political and cultural implications of this revered theatre tradition.
Download or read book Warriors of Japan as Portrayed in the War Tales written by Paul Varley and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1994-07-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading cultural historian of premodern Japan draws a rich portrait of the emerging samurai culture as it is portrayed in gunki-mono, or war tales, examining eight major works spanning the mid-tenth to late fourteenth centuries. Although many of the major war tales have been translated into English, Warriors of Japan is the first book-length study of the tales and their place in Japanese history. The war tales are one of the most important sources of knowledge about Japan's premodern warriors, revealing much about the medieval psyche and the evolving perceptions of warriors, warfare, and warrior customs.
Download or read book A Book of Five Swords and a Scroll written by Stanford D. Carman and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2007-02 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Book of Five Swords and a Scroll, is about five Japanese swords that came to the United States after W.W.II and a Japanese hanging scroll of a 'Seated Samurai. The book is richly illustrated with over 110 photographs of these swords, map segments, and other associated materials. There are three original short stories centered around three of the swords. The book also contains sections regarding Medieval Japan, the Samurai, Japanese Sword Smiths, and Japanese Sword Care and Cleaning; Detail Technical Data of these swords is included, and there is a short biography of artist of the scroll. The chapter about the scroll, regards a person famous in 14th Century Japanese History. Two of these swords are over 450 years old. n addition there is a short biography of a unique US Marine that fought at Wake Island, Dec 8, 1941 - Dec 23, 1941 in WWII and taken as a Prisiner Of War by the Japanese. He spent a total of 1350 Days as a POW in Camps in China and Japan. This version of the book is in Color.
Download or read book The Gates of Power written by Mikael S. Adolphson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2000-07-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political influence of temples in premodern Japan, most clearly manifested in divine demonstrations—where rowdy monks and shrine servants brought holy symbols to the capital to exert pressure on courtiers—has traditionally been condemned and is poorly understood. In an impressive examination of this intriguing aspect of medieval Japan, the author employs a wide range of previously neglected sources to argue that religious protest was a symptom of political factionalism in the capital rather than its cause. It is his contention that religious violence can be traced primarily to attempts by secular leaders to rearrange religious and political hierarchies to their own advantage, thereby leaving disfavored religious institutions to fend for their accustomed rights and status. In this context, divine demonstrations became the preferred negotiating tool for monastic complexes. For almost three centuries, such strategies allowed a handful of elite temples to maintain enough of an equilibrium to sustain and defend the old style of rulership even against the efforts of the Ashikaga Shogunate in the mid-fourteenth century. By acknowledging temples and monks as legitimate co-rulers, The Gates of Power provides a new synthesis of Japanese rulership from the late Heian (794–1185) to the early Muromachi (1336–1573) eras, offering a unique and comprehensive analysis that brings together the spheres of art, religion, ideas, and politics in medieval Japan.
Download or read book Daily Life in Japan written by Louis Frederic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the tenth century onwards the emperors of Japan gradually lost power. The local lords or clan chiefs waged ceaseless war against each other, while the court, wholly steeped in Chinese culture, seemed to take no further interest in the affairs of the nation. In 1191 the Minamoto clan mastered the disturbances and finally imposed its rule. Hard work, respect for the hierarchy, the cult of nationalism, a sense of self-sacrifice and duty – such was the new trend. The Buddhist doctrine of Zen made its appearance. It gave mystical support to the samurai, and the Japanese spirit was henceforth directed towards a political and religious asceticism which had an enormous influence on all aspects of art, thought and daily life. An acknowledged authority on the ‘classical’ period of Japanese history, the author reveals what the life of the Japanese people was like during these five centuries, and shows how a transformation of heart and mind produced a civilization as original as it was profound.
Download or read book Heroes of the Grand Pacification written by Elena Varshavskaya and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book introduces the print-series Taiheiki eiyū den or Heroic Biographies from the 'Tale of Grand Pacification', designed by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861), who is considered the founder of the heroic genre in Japanese prints. The series is devoted to the final years of the sixteenth century civil wars and the key figure of the day, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536?–98). All fifty prints of the series are reproduced in full color. Each print is accompanied by a translation of the extensive texts incorporated into the composition and detailed historical and cultural commentaries. The introductory essay reviews the peculiarities of Kuniyoshi’s warrior images, explores the roots of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s popularity and discusses the texts in the prints as a source of information on the late medieval warriors’ outlook and battlefield practices.
Download or read book Seeds in the Heart written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 1284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Keene, a noted authority in the field, offers a guide through the first 900 years of Japanese literature. This period not only defined the unique properties of Japanese prose and prosody, but also produced some of its greatest works.
Download or read book Not Seeing Snow Mus Soseki and Medieval Japanese Zen written by Molly Vallor and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-08-26 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not Seeing Snow: Musō Soseki and Medieval Japanese Zen offers a detailed look at a crucial yet sorely neglected figure in medieval Japan. It clarifies Musō’s far-reaching significance as a Buddhist leader, waka poet, landscape designer, and political figure. In doing so, it sheds light on how elite Zen culture was formed through a complex interplay of politics, religious pedagogy and praxis, poetry, landscape design, and the concerns of institution building. The appendix contains the first complete English translation of Musō’s personal waka anthology, Shōgaku Kokushishū.
Download or read book The Search for the Beautiful Woman written by Kyō Chō and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, Japanese culture, including ideals of feminine beauty, was profoundly shaped by China. In this first full comparative history on the subject, Cho Kyo explores changing standards of beauty in China and Japan, ranging from plumpness to bound feet to blackened teeth. Drawing on a rich array of sources gathered over a decade of research, he considers which Chinese representations were rejected or accepted and transformed in Japan. He then traces the introduction of Western aesthetics into Japan starting in the Meiji era, leading to slowly developing but radical changes in the repres.
Download or read book Pleasure in Profit written by Laura Moretti and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-22 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publishers released vast numbers of titles in response to readers’ hunger for books that promised them potent knowledge. However, traditional literary histories of this period position the writings of Ihara Saikaku at center stage, largely neglecting the breadth of popular prose. In the first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, Laura Moretti investigates the vibrant world of vernacular popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres. Moretti explores how booksellers sparked interest among readers across the spectrum of literacies and demonstrates how they tantalized consumers with vital ethical, religious, societal, and interpersonal knowledge. She recasts books as tools for knowledge making, arguing that popular prose engaged its audience cognitively as well as aesthetically and emotionally to satisfy a burgeoning curiosity about the world. Crucially, Moretti shows, readers experienced entertainment within the didactic, finding pleasure in the profit gained from acquiring knowledge by interacting with transformative literature. Drawing on a rich variety of archival materials to present a vivid portrait of seventeenth-century Japanese publishing, Pleasure in Profit also speaks to broader conversations about the category of the literary by offering a new view of popular prose that celebrates plurality.
Download or read book The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha written by Mikael S. Adolphson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan’s monastic warriors have fared poorly in comparison to the samurai, both in terms of historical reputation and representations in popular culture. Often maligned and criticized for their involvement in politics and other secular matters, they have been seen as figures separate from the larger military class. However, as Mikael Adolphson reveals in his comprehensive and authoritative examination of the social origins of the monastic forces, political conditions, and warfare practices of the Heian (794–1185) and Kamakura (1185–1333) eras, these "monk-warriors"(sôhei) were in reality inseparable from the warrior class. Their negative image, Adolphson argues, is a construct that grew out of artistic sources critical of the established temples from the fourteenth century on. In deconstructing the sôhei image and looking for clues as to the characteristics, role, and meaning of the monastic forces, The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha highlights the importance of historical circumstances; it also points to the fallacies of allowing later, especially modern, notions of religion to exert undue influence on interpretations of the past. It further suggests that, rather than constituting a separate category of violence, religious violence needs to be understood in its political, social, military, and ideological contexts.
Download or read book Akut and Rural Conflict in Medieval Japan written by Morten Oxenboell and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the first in-depth analysis in English of an understudied phenomenon in medieval Japanese history: the so-called akutō (literally, “evil bands”). Employing chronicles, laws, and legal documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as recent Japanese scholarship, Morten Oxenboell examines the significance of akutō in legal proceedings to provide a nuanced understanding of how rural communities organized for and engaged in violent conflicts. He deconstructs the image of akutō as instigators of violence by underlining the significance of the term as a rhetorical device used by litigants to voice their grievances in Kamakura legal proceedings. The many instances in which akutō appear offer a clear example of the ways in which the new legal vocabulary concealed realities behind rhetorical flourishes and narratives of violence and predation. Violence was certainly a part of the negotiation for rights and privileges in the estate system, and Oxenboell demonstrates how conflicts developed and were untangled by local actors, who were rarely given a voice in sources from this period. By peeling away the rhetoric, he presents us a unique view of rural populations organizing their communities in the face of violence, whether as victims of outside aggression or as aggressors themselves against landlords or neighbors. The book therefore goes beyond the usual focus on elites in medieval Japanese history by concentrating on local mobilization schemes and strategies, which were often framed and defamed by central elites. Rural residents, who could not rely on the authorities for protection, handled their own security concerns via complex social mechanisms that tied together locals and absentee landlords in an uneasy relationship of mutual dependency. By examining the fissures in this relationship—in the form of akutō complaints—Oxenboell shows that violent activism was part of the daily management of estates and that such conflicts do not indicate an absence of order but rather a system of checks and balances that helped create a vibrant society.
Download or read book Listen Copy Read written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Listen, Copy, Read: Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan endeavors to elucidate the mechanisms by which a growing number of men and women of all social strata became involved in acquiring knowledge and skills during the Tokugawa period. It offers an overview of the communication media and tools that teachers, booksellers, and authors elaborated to make such knowledge more accessible to a large audience. Schools, public lectures, private academies or hand-copied or printed manuals devoted to a great variety of topics, from epistolary etiquette or personal ethics to calculation, divination or painting, are here invoked to illustrate the vitality of Tokugawa Japan’s ‘knowledge market’, and to show how popular learning relied on three types of activities: listening, copying and reading. With contributions by: W.J. Boot, Matthias Hayek, Annick Horiuchi, Michael Kinski, Koizumi Yoshinaga, Peter Kornicki, Machi Senjūrō, Christophe Marquet, Markus Rüttermann, Tsujimoto Masashi, and Wakao Masaki.
Download or read book Sukeroku s Double Identity written by Barbara Thornbury and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to show that seemingly illogical double identity of the townsman, Sukeroku, and the samurai, Soga Goro, in the play Sukeroku is a surviving element of what was once a complex and coherent structure based on a traditional performance calendar. To show how the calendar function and what Sukeroku's double identity signifies, the book is divided into two parts. Part One studies the structure of Edo kabuki. The first chapter, which outlines that structure, is based for the most part on writings of the Tokugawa period. The second chapter then looks at the concepts of sekai, "tradition," and shuko, "innovation." Kabuki was the product of material that had become a familiar part of Japanese culture by repeated use and dramatization over long periods of time, starting before kabuki began, and material that was relatively new and was used to transform the older, set material. The double identity in Sukeroku came about as a result of this interplay between what was received by way of traditional and what was added by way of innovation. Part Two considers the significance of the double identity. The author concludes that Sukeroku's double identity gave Edo audiences a hero who was an idealization of the contemporary Tokugawa townsman and at the same time a transformation of a samurai god-hero of the past. The first chapter of Part Two traces the development of Sukeroku's Soga Goro/samurai identity, from its origins in the early dramatic forms of no, kowaka, and ko-joruri, to the representation of Soga Goro in kabuki by Ichikawa Danjuro I. The seconds then looks at the transformation of Soga Gorointo Sukeroku by discussing the origins of Sukeroku and its introductions to Edo kabuki by Ichikawa Danjuro I and his son, Danjuro II, since their work was the basis of all later developments.
