More Japonico (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill IWASHIRO WAY . " Cerchiamo la bonta, la virtu, l'entusiasmo, la passione che riempira la nostra anima, la fede che calmera le nostra inquietudine, l'idea che difenderemo con tutto il nostro coraggio l'opera a cui ci votere- mo, la causa per cui moriremo con gioia."?Romanzi della Rosa. Anyone who comes to Japan to surround himself with antiquity is doomed to grievous disappointment. If there is a country that has the stamp of external newness on it is " the Central land of Reed Plains." Not that there are lacking hoary monuments of antiquity, such as the temples at Nara, at Kamakura, the various Daibutsu, and even such evidences of a more remote past as dolmens. Ancient monuments are to be found to some extent, but they are lost in an oasis of wooden houses which have no mark of age on them but shabbiness. Much of Japanese antiquity as you see it is a gross fraud. Stones in the cemeteries take on a mouldy and moss-grown appearance in the lapse of twenty-five years. A new house or temple in a half a dozen years looks as weather-beaten as if it had stood there for a century. Places are indeed ancient and place names in some cases figure in the earliest of their chronicles dating from the eighth century, but nothing is left but the names. The present is its heir. The reason for this is fire. Even if structures for secular use, built of wood, could have stood the test of time, this element would probably have wiped them out, so widespread being its range that the average life of a house in Tokyo is put at less than a dozen years. Although there is plenty of building stone they make but little use of it, the usual explanation being the prevalence of earthquakes. It is noticeable however that such structures as were built of stone?Nagoya Castle for instance?admirably withsto...