Introducing Japan [antikvár]

FOREWORDJapan is a remarkable country and the Japanese an extraordinary people. Their lifestyles are a fascinating blend of ancient traditions with the most advanced technologies and modes of contemporary urban life. Their land is small but varied and beautiful. Man and nature have conspired to make it a visual wonderland. On the one hand there are rugged mountains, majestic coastlines and a rich pervading verdure. But mixed with these are the neat and pleasing patterns of a gardenlike agriculture, the stately monuments of a rich cultural past and the dynamic sprawl of a vigorous industrial society.Although nature has left Japan poor in resources and ill provided with land suitable for either cities or agriculture, it has endowed it with rich scenic beauty. Great ranges of mountains or seas of broken hills cover most of the land. Peerless Fuji rises directly from the ocean to 12,389 feet. The land is broken into four main islands and thousands more of lesser size. Everywhere rugged hills plunge down to the sea, where the agelong battle of waves against rock has created its own grand sculpture. Plentiful rainfall makes the whole country a wondrous green, while thousands of years of loving cultivation of the soil have given it a soft, man-made patina.But however beautiful Japan may be, it is the achievements of its people that have made it so outstanding. They have had a remarkable history, off in their isolated islands on the eastern fringes of what was once the known world. An agricultural civilization possessing both bronze and iron began to spread into these islands from the nearby continent well over two thousand years ago and by the sixth century had produced a more or less unified state covering the western two-thirds of the land.Then an extraordinary change took place. Between the seventh and ninth centuries the Japanese made an amazingly ambitious effort to adopt all of the advanced institutions and arts of China, which at the time was probably the leading nation in the world. One result was to make Japan a truly unified countryprobably next to China the second oldest of all existing nations to attain its present shape with the same people and language it has today. Another result was the borrowing of the Chinese writing system, an extraordinarily difficult system most ill suited to Japan's very different type of language. But it brought with it a highly developed aesthetic of its own and a huge and rich literature, both of which have had profound influence on Japanese culture ever since. The Japanese also mastered the Chinese arts. The seventh- and eighth-century Buddhist monasteries which remain from that age are not only the oldest wooden buildings in the world but perhaps the most beautiful. They are also crammed with great sculptures and other works of art from that distant time.