douglang - 06 February 2009 12:10 PM
I’m beginning to think that Bandito is a Shogun priest, trying to trace his roots.
That’s “shaolin” priest and it’s Chinese Buddhist, not Japanese Zen; secular title “shogun” is a sort of military overlord who officially governed Japan since 1192 AD until the Meiji restoration beginning in 1868 when this singular nation undertook its historic path to Western-style modernization.
LukeJavan8 - 08 February 2009 11:45 AM
You know what they say about making assumptions????
douglang - 08 February 2009 12:09 PM
Like mistaking Bandito Quixote for a Shogun warlord ? 悪七平衛景清【あくしちびょうえ・かげきよ】 - are you trying to show us the Shogun path Bandito, or have you been misquixoted?
Hardly, for it would indeed appear Japanese stage persona 悪七平衛景清【あくしちびょうえ・かげきよ】 Akushichibyōe Kagekiyo can only be sometimes found here & there in said highly traditional dramatic context and modern cinematic title 悪七兵衛景清【あくしちべい・かげきよ】 Akushichibei Kagekiyo 1912 remains exclusive to rather demeaning, though exceedingly more popular “manga” art form.
n.b. Torii Fumiko in declaring taxonomic category “Kensei Drama” [v. my antecedent post further back supra] thereby calls for some historical perspective from Richard von Glahn “An East Asian Early Modernity? Kinsei in Japanese Scholarship on Japanese and Chinese History” UCLA n.d. as follows:
“Already by the beginning of the twentieth century historians in China and Japan had adopted Western scholars’ tripartite stadial conception of history divided into ancient, medieval, and modern eras and applied it to their own histories. . . In 1903 Uchida Ginzō adapted the term kinsei 近世 (‘recent age’) as a fourth period, distinctive to Japanese history, interposed between the medieval (chūsei 中世) and modern (kindai 近代) eras. In Uchida’s view, Japan’s kinsei era—which he identified with the uncontested rule of the Tokugawa shoguns from 1616 to 1853—was marked by rapid advances in industry, commerce, and intellectual and cultural life that promoted ‘citizens’ life’ (what historians today might call ‘civil society’) and provided the necessary foundation for Japan’s rapid transition to modernity.
“While many historians (especially in the immediate postwar era) rejected Uchida’s sunny assessment of the Tokugawa era, the four-part division of Japanese history incorporating a kinsei era extending from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century became a permanent feature of Japanese historical consciousness. . .
“In the last fifteen years the concept of kinsei has undergone fundamental revision both within scholarship on Japanese history and in Japanese scholarship on East Asian history. A new trend toward situating Japanese history in larger Asian/world-historical contexts has renewed debate over the meaning and significance of kinsei and broached the question of whether we can speak of an East Asian kinsei era. . . proponents of an East Asian kinsei have stressed cross-cultural interactions and parallel developments among East Asian societies, Southeast Asia, and other parts of Asia (such as the ‘gunpowder empires’ of West, Central, and South Asia), relegating the encounter with the West to a secondary level of stimulus. Most recently, we also see a shift among historians of Japan toward a more expansive view of kinsei in two respects: on the one hand there is greater recognition of Japan as part of a pan-East Asian kinsei, and on the other hand a new emphasis on continuities rather than discontinuities in the transition between medieval Japan and subsequent kinsei epoch. With few exceptions, though, Japanese historians continue to eschew ‘early modern,’ a category deemed too deeply tinged by Eurocentrism.”
brian_costello - 01 December 2005 07:29 PM
Tokyo (Older English spelling Tokio) - The name of this famous metropolitan city and capital of Japan since 1869 appears to be of Chinese origin. A Chinese friend of mine, Dr. Lai, told me once that the Chinese name for the city is Tong King meaning ‘east capital” or “eastern capital” if you will. In ancient times, Tokyo was called “Edo” which might be native Japanese (Knock on wood!) and the Japanese capital was actually Kyoto instead. It was here that the emperor resided. 
Flaminius - 01 December 2005 10:25 PM
They are not even pronounced the same. To in Kyoto is short whereas that in Tokyo is long.
Lacking my favourite macron in this board, I would transcribe the two as Tookyoo and Kyooto.
And kyoo or king means city or capital, not gate. FLam
Feudal “Edo” for the central metropolis, located on what must surely have been Yokohama Bay—with its ancient port that lay open, greeting the vast mare Oceanum toward sunrise, only to play reluctant host to the American explorer, Commodore Matthew Perry, and his successive “gunboat” embassies thereto in the nineteenth century—probably fell out of use not long after the last Tokugawa shogun, Yoshinobu in 1867: a sidereal change, and verily so, which at once foretold the end of splendid isolation for this pastoral nation of maritime lore, as well as the onset of Meiji reform in the meantime, thus proving to be Japan’s disastrous entry in the postmodern era of capitalist industrialism & syncretic forms of worship, a much too sceptical world that we all see everywhere today.
