Anyone who knows anything about Japan has heard of seppuku or seen it in a samurai film. Seppuku was a ritualized form of suicide and a judicial sentence handed down to men and women of the samurai class. The ritual began on the battlefield with the first recorded case performed by Minamoto Tametomo after his…
Category: History
Japanese Winter Poems
I love winter. The cold may be uncomfortable, but it is the night of the year. It calls us to stop and rest and reflect. Although, as the climate shifts, I’ve seen less of winter than I had in the past. Winter used to begin as early as late October in my hometown. Now winter…
Understanding the Fairy Tale “The Lady Who Loved Insects”
The Lady Who Loved Insects is a charming short story set in the Heian period. The story follows a young noble woman who has intellectual interests, such as studying insects, in a society where women were supposed to be wives and sometimes poets. The Lady Who Loved Insects can be found in The Riverside Middle…
Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure District
Geishas and the Floating World by Stephen and Ethel Longstreet examines the history and development of Tokyo’s red-light district of Yoshiwara. The name of the book misleads a little. Most of the book focuses upon the prostitutes that worked Yoshiwara. The authors note that geisha weren’t sex workers, but geisha did blur the line as…
Sketching Taoism’s Influence on Japan
Taoism, or Daoism depending on which transliteration system you want to use, like many Chinese imports, mixed with Japan’s culture and the native religion Shinto. Although calling Shinto a unified religion is an oversimplification, let’s just go with it for now. Like Taoism’s venture into the West, the philosophy took root in Japan more than…
No More Wars: the Edo Period’s Final Rebellions
After Japan was unified under Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and finished with Tokugawa Ieyasu, the Tokugawa government declared there would be no more wars. The final war is a two-part rebellion of Christian samurai, farmers, and other impoverished people. The second part of the rebellion remains the best remembered because of how it ended in…