Help You Understand Japan

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source : www.npr.org

Reading List:
Books To Help You Understand Japan

Japan continues to struggle with the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people are living in emergency shelters, while many others remain missing. Meanwhile, there is widespread concern over the ongoing radiation leaks from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.

But Japan is no stranger to major disasters. Over the past century, Japan has experienced several, including nuclear attacks, earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons.

Cases of great tragedy and trauma have been a driving creative force behind much of Japan's classic and modern literature — writing that reveals insights into the nation's people and character.

Japanese literature scholar Donald Keene of Columbia University and Japanese-American poet Kimiko Hahn, distinguished professor of English at Queens College of The City University of New York, have the following recommendations for readers who would like to learn about Japan through its literature.

Recommended by Donald Keene
Man'yoshu, the oldest existing anthology of Japanese poetry, collected some time after A.D. 759.

The Tale of Genji, the 11th century Japanese classic written by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu
The Narrow Roads to Oku, haiku by Matsuo Basho

Chushingura, originally a puppet play by Takeda Izumo, Miyoshi Shoraku and Namiki Senryu
The Makioka Sisters, a modern Japanese novel written by Junichiro Tanizaki

Recommended by Kimiko HahnAnthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Donald Keene
Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day, Donald Keene
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, translated by Donald Keene
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated by Ivan Morris
Japanese Poetic Diaries, translated by Earl Miner

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio

NEAL CONAN, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington.

In Japan, hundreds of thousands remain in emergency shelters. Many continue to search for the missing and for any remnants of their former lives in the ruins along the Northeastern coast. And the entire country worries about radiation leaks that seem to get worse every day, with no solution yet in sight. But Japan is no stranger to disaster: earthquakes and tsunamis, typhoons, volcanic eruptions and near total devastation in the Second World War.

What can we read to better understand Japan in this crisis? If there's poetry, fiction or non-fiction you've turned to these past few weeks, give us a call

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Prof. KEENE: In Japanese literature, the subject of earthquakes or tsunami is not very abundant. They exist. But I think that the excerpt I've heard from the translation of the work of Kamo No Chomei - a Buddhist priest who lived in the 13th century - which described the change of the world, the uncertainty of the world.

These are fundamental Buddhist beliefs, and they're given their most beautiful expression in his account of his hut, where he lived for some time, thinking about the changes he had seen in his life.

...

Prof. KEENE: He is a person who had been acclaimed as a poet, was very well known in court circles. And he gave this all up to live in a tiny hut, and he lived in great solitude, with no particular comforts at all. But he was - he believed that this was the nature of the world. The world was a place which you couldn't trust, and one could only trust the world to come, the world which was prophesized by Buddha, can be found in the Buddhist writings.

He believed in the impermanence of all things, and yet impermanence for the Japanese was not only a bad thing, but it was a source of beauty. Things that lasted forever, that didn't change at all were not thought to be beautiful. The Japanese have always loved things that show their age rather than things that looked sparkling and new.

This feeling of long time passing before these objects were visible - we in the West are more common to think of old buildings, Greek temples, as looking remarkable fresh, if they hadn't been exploded in the 17th century, the Parthenon buildings would look as fresh today as they did at the time of Pericles. We'd like to think that.

But the Japanese prefer to think of things showing their age, showing that time has passed, that many people have seen these treasures, many people have had this experience. I think that's the other side of - the sad part of impermanence, you can't trust things to last forever. But the good part is one feels that one is part of a stream of people who've seen the same things, loved the same things and recognized beauty in the same things.

CONAN: I've been told of a shrine on an island off Japan, I guess not too far from where this earthquake happened, which is a wooden shrine, and is destroyed every 20 years and rebuilt.

Prof. KEENE: Yes. I'm sure you're thinking of the shrine at Ise. It is the practice to destroy the old building and build a new one. This, to us, seems very strange. But it is - the Japanese have two religions. One of them is Buddhism, a world religion, began in India, spread to China, Korea and then to Japan. The other religion is Shinto.

Now, Shinto is a religion, above all, of purity, of cleanliness. And so the Japanese delight in the newness of wooden building, the smell of a new building, a building that has not been dirtied by any human foot or insect or whatever. And so after 20 years, the old building, it is torn down. It's not completely destroyed. It is sent in parts to other shrines in Japan. But it is a feeling of renewal. This is the new clean, pure world of the Shinto gods, as opposed to the Buddhist gods, who - Buddha, himself, who thought in terms of longevity and the opposite, short-live-ness.

CONAN: You spoke of a relative paucity of material about hurricane - excuse me, about earthquake and tsunami. There is a relatively much shorter time since the radiological horrors that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Is there something, though, that you think you might reflect on and read in a new light and gain wisdom from at this time on that subject?

Prof. KEENE: I think that for many people, the old Japan, the Japan of the wartime, and particularly the post-war period when the Japanese suffered so much, almost every city in Japan was destroyed. Almost every facility was deliberately destroyed by the American occupation, if not by the Japanese themselves. This time, it is totally unexpected. Of course, there have been earthquakes before.

The great earthquake of 1923, which affected particularly Tokyo and Yokohama, was very well described by people of the time. But this time was something much more terrible, much more frightening, and it was particularly so because people had somehow come to think that the new kind of architecture that was being built was immune to such disasters as a typhoon, or even an earthquake, that the Japanese engineers had so constructed buildings that there was no particular danger.

I often thought, when I was in some tall Japanese building in Tokyo, what would happen if there were an earthquake. But I was told that the new buildings were able to sway with the earthquake, and there was nothing to be afraid of. I think people now have come to feel a greater uncertainty. What is really as strong as an earthquake or a tsunami? The tsunami, in particular, I think I've never seen anything more horrifying than the television shots of the tsunami, this great, black wave crushing everything in sight. Nobody has ever written any horror story that equaled it.

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http://www.npr.org/2011/03/28/134927143/what-americans-should-read-to-understand-japan






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