Feudal Era Research Articles

A 2000-year record of copper pollution in South China Sea derived from seabird excrements: a potential indicator for copper production and civilization of China

In the Chinese feudal era, copper was widely used in coinage and weapons, and its production was coupled with political stability and economic prosperity. In the smelting process, copper was released into the environment and accumulated in the food web, and it became enriched in animal tissues and in seabird droppings. Here we report a 2000-year record of copper in red-footed booby excrement from Dongdao Island, South China Sea. There exists a striking correlation between the copper content in the seabird excrements and the ancient copper production of China for past two millennia. The increased Cu content corresponds to the flourishing times of dynasties, such as the Tang and Sung Dynasties, and declines in Cu content correspond with dynastic declines. Even some brief (decadal) wars and calamities, such as the Anshi Rebellion in AD 755–763 and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in AD 1851–1864, were recorded in the copper content profile. We established an approximate function to model the quantitative relationship between the copper content in the seabird excrement and the ancient copper production. We estimate that a total of ~14 million tons of copper was produced during the past two millennia in China. Among the 14 million tons of copper, about 0.65 million tons was released into the atmosphere.

Putting Modernity in its Place(s)

Jack Goody’s work on the origins, spatial extent and defining characteristics of modernity has vigorously questioned claims that only European history led to assorted modern characteristics: capitalism, science, democracy, romantic love, and inwardly-motivated personal restraint. He argues that many societies which experienced the Bronze Age urban revolution share certain important material similarities (and some differences) which set them apart from others, and are best understood by constructing an analytical grid rather than categorical stages. With respect to alleged affective differences, Goody takes a more strongly relativist stance, rejecting any developmental divide in the prevalence of romantic love, internalized self-discipline, etc. These useful steps nonetheless generate new problems. One concerns the relationship between material/technical changes, which seem to suggest a few very general historical periods (one marked by early metallurgy, writing, etc., and another by the modern energy revolution), and affective traits, which have no history in this schema. A second concerns periodization itself; while agreeing that periods defined by the experience of one region (e.g. a feudal era) are usually unhelpful, some general terms (such as early modern) do seem essential for conceptualizing developments that, though less epochal than writing or fossil fuels, are nonetheless important.

Tameshi-Giri (and Suemono-Giri) As a Sub-Cultural Custom and Social Structure in Feudal Era Japan: A Socio-Cultural Analysis of Transformation of Its Symbolic Meanings and Functions.

“Tameshi-giri” (or “suemono-giri”), in which corpses were used as mediums to test the quality of swords or the skill of swordsmen, was an unusual cultural practice of the samurai (i.e., warrior) class in feudal era Japan. Although tameshi-giri as a modern martial art jargon referring to “a method of training in the use of a sword by cutting conventional mediums” has already been imported to the Western world, the original socio-cultural meanings it symbolized as a sub-cultural custom and its societal functions as a social structure of pre-modern Japan are rarely discussed in the context of social science. Given this, the purpose of this paper is to offer a social-historical analysis of the old tameshi-giri custom as a social structure by focusing on the transformation of its manifest and latent functions. In doing so, it also aims to clarify some of the misconceptions and confusions associated with it.

La naissance du contrat de travail comme concept juridique: Max Weber et Hugo Sinzheimer, critiques de Philipp Lotmar

RésuméAu contraire de ce que suggère l'historiographie traditionnelle, le contrat de travail au sens moderne du terme n'est pas apparu ipso facto, en quelque sorte par génération spontanée, lors de la Révolution industrielle. En fait, des formes prémodernes datant de l'époque féodale ont subsisté durant tout le dix-neuvième siècle et même au-delà, laissant certaines catégories de travailleurs entièrement à la merci des employeurs. Autrement dit, les voies de la rationalisation juridique qui conduisent au contrat moderne de travail se révèlent hautement complexes. C'est ce que met bien en relief, en contexte allemand, l'ouvrage mȯnumental de Philippe Lotmar sur le contrat de travail [Der Arbeitsvertrag], paru en deux tomes, en 1902 et 1908: d'un point de vue «droit et société», ce traité vaut sans aucun doute toujours la peine d'être lu, notamment pour sa recherche exemplaire des «faits sociaux du droit». Cela est d'autant le cas si l'on prend en considération la longue recension de l'étude de Lotmar réalisée par Max Weber en 1902, ainsi que les commentaires sur l'œuvre de Lotmar publiés ultérieurement par Hugo Sinzheimer, le fondateur de la science européenne du droit du travail, lui-même un sociologue du droit réputé. Dans ce qui suit, l'auteur insiste sur l'intérêt que présenters les vues critiques de Weber et Sinzheimer sur Lotmar, en particulier du point de vue des rapports entre droit et économie, de l'intérêt qu'offre le pluralisme juridique pour l'analyse du droit du travail, enfin de l'interaction entre la dogmatique juridique et la sociologie du droit.

Interview with Two Ladies of the Ōoku

THE COLLECTION of interviews with former bakufu officials known as Kyuji shimonroku or Furukikoto tazuneshi kiroku (Record of Inquiries into Bygone Days) was the indirect result of an article that appeared in Shigakkai zasshi (Journal of the Historical Association of Japan) in November 1890.1 In the article the association’s secretary, Ogawa Ginjiro , called on historians not to ridicule the feudal era but to make an effort to understand its spirit. To that end, he said, researchers should utilize the knowledge of people with firsthand experience of bakufu institutions and practices, before such knowledge was lost forever. The response was prompt, and within a few months a research group devoted to interviewing former bakufu officials had been formed. The group came to be known as the Kyuji Shimonkai (Society for Inquiring into Bygone Days). The first interview (with two gentlemen who had served among the shogun’s personal attendants) took place on 31 January 1891. The fourteenth and last interview was held in November 1892. Transcripts of the interviews were published as a supplement to Shigakkai zasshi. Modern editions of these transcripts, however, contain only the first to eleventh interviews. What happened to the other three is uncertain. Shinji Yoshimoto , who wrote the introduction to the 1986 Iwanami bunkobon

Honorifics of the Samurai Class at the Close of the Feudal Era, as Seen in Kuwana Nikki

Honorifics of the Samurai Class at the Close of the Feudal Era, as Seen in Kuwana Nikki

Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective by Stephen s> Lovell Birgit Menzel (review)

340 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 'azure and mother-of-pearl'of his S,Jean Holabird has done a great service. Her interpretationof Nabokov's alphabet offers for the first time a pictorial realization(inwatercolour)of the very exact tonal qualityof the letters,as well as a depiction of their visual character. The letters are not given in their alphabetic sequence but are ordered, rather, in Nabokov's groupings, from black which includesA, G and R, the 'sooty rag being ripped' (pp. ii and 36) through the colours which form Nabokov's own very unique rainbow spectrum white, blue, green,yellow, brown and red. These appeartogether in a final concludingimage to make up what he describedas his 'primary,but decidedly muddy rainbow' and the 'hardly pronounceable: kzspygv' (pp. 35 and 36). In his foreword, Brian Boyd dextrously explores the implications of Nabokov's 'auditioncoloree', emphasizingthe fusion of science and art that it encapsulates,and its manifestationin the multiple and various rainbowsthat feature throughoutNabokov's work. These range from the images that recur throughout Speak,Memoy to the fanciful rainbow-hued butterflies that he sketched in the margins of his manuscripts,to the themes that connect this distinctivespectrumof colours so intriguinglywith the most vital elements of his art:language, imagination and memory. School of Slavonic andEastEuropean Studies Bm~BARA WYLLIE, University College London Lovell, Stephen and Menzel, Birgit (eds).Readingfor Entertainment in ContemporagyRussia :Post-Soviet PopularLiterature in HistoricalPerspective. Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik, 78. Otto Sagner, Munich, 2005. 206 pp. Notes. Bibliography.?32.00 (paperback). WITH the increasing marginalization of 'serious' literature, shifting reader preferences,and a commerciallydrivenpublishingindustry,popularliterature continues to grow rapidlyin significancein Russia.This timelyvolume examines the expansion of popular literaturein Russia in the post-Soviet period, surveyingthe most prominentgenres of contemporaryRussianpopularfiction with respect to their literary roots and social, historical and economic influences. At first glance, entertainment seems to be antithetical to the goals of Russian literature as traditionallyperceived. However, by tracing the commercialelements of Russianliteraryhistoryfrom the nineteenthcenturyto the present and demonstratingthe links between popular and mainstreamliterature ,Lovell and Menzel arguethat popularor entertainmentliteraturedoes in fact 'belong in the mainstreamhistory of Russian culture' (p. I2). In an introductorychapter entitled 'Reading the Russian Popular', Lovell classifiespopular genres in Russia and examines their production and reception . Two of the problems in addressingthe role and evolution of Russian popular fiction include the relativenewness of a term for popularcultureand a relatively thin body of critical literature. Lovell differentiatesSoviet mass REVIEWS 34I fictionfrom its Westerncounterpartby virtueof the former'smoraland philosophical dimension, but he also notes that post-Soviet mass fiction has begun to approximateWestern models. Menzel's chapter on 'Writing, Reading and Selling Literaturein Russia I986-2004' focuseson fourmajorchanges in Russiancultureand theirimpact on literature,including the 'erosion of the intelligentsia;the dissolutionof all the state institutions that had ruled literary life since 19I7; the commercialisation of culture since I99I; and the changing impact of new/mass media' (p. 39). She identifiesa correspondingshiftin the 'new Russianwriter',who is characterized by professionalization, 'an orientation towards commercial success', and a 'playfuland parodic authorialpersona' (p. 47). Five essayson currentgenres of Russianpopularliteraturefollow the three introductorychapters.The chapter on Russian detective fiction, or detektivy, is written by Marina Koreneva. Though she notes the absence of a detailed historyof the genre, Koreneva locates some of the genre'srootsin folkloreand providessix examplesrangingfrom the seventeenthcenturyto the presentday to illustratethe genesis and development of the detective novel in the Russian context. The current form of Russian detective fiction emerged in I996-97, and the authorial persona became a significantelement of the reception of these works. Koreneva identifies two distinct types of detective fiction based on the gender of the authorand the protagonist;considerablespace is devoted to women's detective fiction because of its innovativeness. In his chapter on the boevik, a genre with roots in the Soviet spy novel and political detective novel, Boris Dubin analyses the hero as loner, his key qualities of 'invulnerability,invisibility, [and] orphanhood', and the ways in which these qualitieslink to the hero's autonomy (p. I04). He findsmodels for the boevik in 'the feudal era and ... .] in popular novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' (p. io6). Dubin also analyses the temporal and spatial structuresgoverningthe formulaof the boevik and...

The history of psychology in Japan

The history of psychology in Japan

Vassals No More: Feudalism and Post-feudalism in Scotland

Abstract: At the very time when the feudal system of land tenure was being abolished in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it was enjoying an unexpected revival in Scotland as a means of controlling urban development. Land which was sold under the feudal system could be subjected to permanent conditions, known as “real burdens”, which regulated its future use; and in this way planning control was achieved by a mechanism of private law. Real burdens could (and can) also be used in a non-feudal context, in which case they resemble praedial servitudes. But, unlike servitudes, real burdens can impose affirmative obligations, such as an obligation to construct and maintain a building. Today Scotland is one of the last jurisdictions in the world to have an operational feudal system. That will shortly change. Legislation passed in 2000 abolishes the feudal system with effect from 28 November 2004. At the same time the law of real burdens is reformed and codified. The continued existence, and importance, of real burdens was the greatest obstacle to feudal abolition. For if feudal lords (“superiors”) were to disappear, who was to enforce the burdens? The legislation tackles the difficulty with various improvisations, in some cases reallocating enforcement rights to neighbours (including former superiors), and in others allowing the burdens to lapse altogether. Affirmative burdens will be a permanent legacy of the feudal era, but in other respects its continuing influence on land law is likely to be slight.

"Unnatural Unions:" Picturesque Travel, Sexual Politics, and Working-Class Representation in "A Night Under Ground" and "Life in the Iron-Mills"

On December 19, 1860, the Atlantic Monthly arrived in Rebecca Harding Davis's hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia, including among its offerings a story entitled A Night Under Ground an erotically charged picturesque travel narrative detailing one woman's liberating descent into the Cornish copper-mines of Michigan. A Night Under Ground like most picturesque narratives routinely offered to readers in magazines like Harper's, the Atlantic, and Putnam's Monthly, only nominally concerns itself with working-class miners, instead using a site of working-class labor to provide a remarkable fantasy of escape for middle-class readers. Soon after the publication of A Night Under Ground, Davis sent her own story of the Cornish industrial working class to the Atlantic Monthly. Though A Night Under Ground and Life in the Iron-Mills share many strikingly similar element-- both narratives portray five members of the upper-class traveling to an industrial site for business and amusement, both narratives have these travelers encounter and become briefly fascinated with one separate and unique working-class Cornish man, both narratives begin by employing elaborate metaphors of rivers as slaves, and both conclude with striking images of the dawn--the narratives could not be further apart as investigations of working-class sites and subjectivities. While A Night Under Ground embodies the subjective and ahistorical concerns of the mid-nineteenth-century picturesque, Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills represents one of the first American critiques of the picturesque, arguing against the romanticization--and increasing eroticization--of the poor in picturesque narratives, contrasting upper-class tourists' mobility with the immobility of the working-class poor, and finally offering a new picturesque aesthetic that envisions a world in which the poor, rather than the rich, get to experience the newly moral edification of picturesque travel. The picturesque, a loosely defined genre that first emerged in eighteenth-century landscape painting and was quickly popularized by hordes of middle-class tourists, has exerted a continuous influence upon literature, tourism, public parks and social reform policies since its birth in the desultory writings of landscape aesthetes in eighteenth-century England. That tourists still dutifully seek out ruined castles and collapsing barns, still delight in snapping photographs of quaintly decayed older urban vistas, and still continue to seek refuge from over-developed urban areas by traveling to seemingly wild open parks like Atlanta's Piedmont Park or New York's Central Park is a testament to the largely invisible influence of the picturesque. In the more than two hundred years since its birth, definitions of the picturesque have been as polymorphous as its influence. First embraced by a variety of landscape aesthetes and tourists in eighteenth-century England, the picturesque aesthetic arose in opposition to the uniform compositional elements that contribute to the aesthetic pleasures of the Burkean sublime. Picturesque theorists argued that aesthetes and tourists should seek out aesthetic irregularity or ruggedness, refusing overarching displays of unified compositional authority, and allowing the spectator's eye instead to revel in the ironically playful associations of unlike and often fragmented elements. Rather than touring the continent in search of expansive, awe-inspiring vistas supplied by mountains, oceans, of meticulously ordered palatial gardens, the picturesque tourist turned to England's ruined abbeys, hill-top huts, and unenclosed parks for aesthetic inspiration. (1) Produced by the leisured middle and upper classes in an increasingly industrialized Europe, the eighteenth-century picturesque studiously avoids squalid scenes of urban poverty and newly enclosed agrarian country-sides, returning its audiences to the pleasurable wild vistas and romanticized poverty of an earlier feudal era unmarked by modernization. …

Interview with a Bakumatsu Official: A Translation from Kyuji Shimonroku

IN November 1890 an article appeared in Shigakkai zasshi , the journal of the Historical Association (Shigakkai ), stressing the significance of the study of unofficial documents and the preservation of oral testimony. The author, Ogawa Ginjiro II$, the secretary of the association, called on historians not to ridicule the feudal era but to make an effort to understand its spirit. To that end, he noted, researchers should utilize the knowledge of people with firsthand experience of bakufu institutions and practices, before such knowledge was lost forever.' Ogawa's article signaled the establishment of a research group devoted to interviewing former bakufu officials. Among the most ardent promoters of this project was the famous historian Shigeno Yasutsugu l Mt#W (1827-1910), founder of the Department of National History of the Imperial University of Tokyo. Others included the historians Konakamura Kiyonori 4I1UPF (1821-1895), Kume Kunitake NA1 (1839-1931), and Mikami Sanji EL (1865-1939), and the legal scholar Miyazaki Michisaburo 9WR ?Jl (1855-1928). The participants in the project, which from March 1891 adopted the name Kyuji Shimonkai IHEI:PA (Association for Inquiring into Bygone Days), themselves provided substantial financial support for its realization. The first interview was held on 31 January 1891 and the fourteenth and last on 28 November 1892. Transcripts of the interviews were published in a supplement to Shigakkai zasshi as Kyuji shimonroku IHE ivii. The members of Kyuji Shimonkai conducted interviews with a wide range of figures. Testimony from a supervisor of the corps of pages (kosho todori /i\at4 R) and a lady-in-waiting from the interior (oku A, the shogun's private quarters) provides an impression of shogunal daily life. Information on more official

Traditional management of communal-property resources: the practice of the Sasi system

Throughout the feudal era up until the early 1970s a traditional management system was in effect in eastern Indonesian areas. However, this system was steadily replaced by centralized government control. This transformation had two impacts: (1) it resulted in conflicts among fishers regarding resource use; and (2) overexploitation of fisheries occurred in some fishing grounds. Recently, however, there has been a growing interest in reconsidering the adoption of the traditional system of fisheries resources management, with a slight modification towards a co-management system. Based on case study data this article describes the practice of traditional management of communal-property fisheries resources with particular reference to the Sasi system. The Sasi system is considered as effective in protecting and conserving fisheries resources in the coastal waters of a community. The continued existence of the system is supported by three elements: (1) a well-established traditional community organization; (2) an informal government endorsement of the Petuanan territory as a communal-property right; and (3) an attitude of compliance and cultural value attributed to the familial relationships existing among fishers.

Sterling Brown and the "Vestiges" of the Blues: The Role of Race in English Verse Structure

Although poets continue to discuss the significance of particular forms or verse schemes, literary critics less frequently examine the constitutive nature of such structures.(1) We usually comment on large structures like the sonnet or small ones like metrical variations only in order to drive home a point that originated elsewhere, in some other textual, biographical, historical, or cultural inquiry. Less often do we begin with versification as a way of understanding history or ideology, even though it is frequently the starting place for poets. This trivialization of prosody in literary criticism has as much to do with the dominance of the field by linguists as with the desire of literary critics to move beyond the formalism of the New Criticism and embrace psychoanalysis, marxism, feminism, new historicism, and other extratextual literary theories. The scientific density of linguistic analyses of versification make prosody seem stuffy and pointless, while the New Criticism has made verse structure difficult to imagine as anything but a closed, coherent linguistic universe outside history. The most successful attempt to break these habits has been Antony Easthope's 1983 study, Poetry As Discourse. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, Easthope first approaches poetry as verse structure and then finds in that structure history, psychology, and materialism. In short, he finds in formalism what others have tried to find beyond it. Looking at the most common structure in English verse, Easthope describes iambic pentameter as epochal form, co-terminous with the capitalist mode of production and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class (24) and explains not only how it differs from the hegemonic discourse of the feudal era, but also how it developed from the Renaissance to the Augustan and Romantic periods to unravel during Modernism. Easthope's work thus lays a foundation for a truly literary history by arguing that verse scheme--the very materiality of poetry--is a discourse, fully embedded in a dialectical history. With this important step made, we can now examine how the intersection of poetic discourse with other discourses, like race, produces poetry. Easthope tells the story of the emergence, consolidation, and disintegration of iambic pentameter as a hegemonic discourse, but of necessity he focuses on the poets who made that history--Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, and Pound--not the poets who resisted that history even while they were constituted by it. I will examine Challenge, a sonnet from Sterling Brown's 1932 volume Southern Road, because it offers a particularly dramatic example of how Easthope's terms produce a partial reading of the poem that requires the insights of African American literary theory to produce a fuller and more satisfying account. The result will be a union of linguistic and literary theory that begins in an analysis of verse schemes. I hope to show that a better formalism will yield a better material and cultural analysis. 1 I said, in drunken pride of youth and you, That mischief-making Time would never dare Play his ill-humored tricks upon us two, Strange and defiant lovers that we were. I said that even Death, Highwayman Death, 5 Could never master lovers such as we, That even when his clutch had throttled breath, My hymns would float in praise, undauntedly. I did not think such words were bravado. Oh, I think honestly we knew no fear, 10 Of Time or Death. We loved each other so. And thus, with you believing me, I made My prophecies, rebellious, unafraid.... And that was foolish, wasn't it, my dear? Challenge exhibits many of the features Easthope discerns in William Shakespeare's sonnet 73 (97-109). Sonnet 73 serves Easthope as an example of the founding moment of bourgeois discourse, and he contrasts its prosodic effects with those of the feudal ballad. …

Development of a Community-Based Fishery Management System in Japan

The development of Japan's community-based fishery management system is described. Over the past 250 years, three fishery laws were in effect. These fishery laws commonly adopted a fishing rights system as a tool for coastal fisheries management. During the feudal era until 1867, the fishing right system was used mainly to collect a fishery tax. The fishing right system established by the Old Fishery Law (1901-1947) helped to reduce conflicts between fishermen exploiting the same resources with different gears. The Current Fishery Law, enacted in 1949, has led to Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries by limiting its coverage to sedentary resources and non-mobile gear. At the same time, the Current Fishery Law created a system to establish coastal fishery management plans through fishing rights and licenses. These innovations have motivated fishermen to create the community-based coastal fisheries management system. Since the inception of the Current Fishery Law in 1949, the number of fishery management or...

Body and ParadoxMonstres: Histoire du corps et de ses defauts. Jean-Louis FischerThe Jew's Body. Sander GilmanMaking Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Thomas LaqueurBody Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Barbara Maria Stafford

The human body, and hence the historical study of it, contains a series of paradoxes. It is at once the site of truth and of concealment; at once the most private and the most public of objects; at once the most ineluctable of human experiences and the one whose historical presence is the most difficult to describe. In another paradox, the history of the body began to emerge as a separate historical field in the years immediately preceding and just after the Holocaust, which had tried to establish the ultimate meaninglessness of all bodies. In 1930, Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents pointed out the important role that man's struggle to repress and control physical desires and responses had played in the shaping of civilization. This description of the civilizing process was related to the growth of physical civility from the feudal era to the Enlightenment in a pathbreaking study published in 1939 by Norbert Elias, which reached cult status on its republication in 1978. By the 1970s, from a different angle, the rebirth of feminism had focused attention on the body as part of the history of the oppression of women. Simultaneously, Michel Foucault pointed out the historical importance of the way the body has been subjected to various disciplines in order to make it more amenable to subjection, first by the absolutist states of Enlightenment Europe and then by the bureaucratic democracies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This statement of the centrality of the history of the body to the understanding of state formation, which endorsed the much older perspective of Freud and Elias, was given an even grander sweep by Gregory Bateson, who pinpointed the dualism of mind and body established by Des-

Les «droits sociaux»: De la divine providence à l'État Providence

RésuméLe discours sur les droits sociaux n'intègre pas la prise en charge par l'Église des besoins sociaux à l'époque féodale, car cette prise en charge relève de l'obligation morale. Le présent article a pour but de montrer qu'il y a lieu de rechercher les fondements des droits sociaux actuels dans les institutions sociales féodales. Pour ce faire, l'auteur aborde le discours religieux qui a conduit à l'institutionnalisation de l'entraide et propose un regard sur les institutions féodales qui ne découle pas de la conception moderne du droit.

International Law and Self-Determination: The Case of Eritrea

Writing about the Eritrean conflict in the Horn of Africa is a difficult task, because it involves the issue of dismembership of a state. From the Greek Empire to the Roman, from the feudal era to the colonial times, and now in the post-colonial era, dismembership of the state has been a highly controversial and emotional issue. From the colonial era to decolonization, Africans did not have to face this problem. In fact, not only did they applaud the dismembership of the colonial empire, they worked hard to insure the disintegration of the colonies. In their optimism for the future of Africa, they developed a rhetoric that went beyond cooperation among future independent states to continental political unity. “Africa must unite” said the vibrant and dynamic leader of Ghana, Nkrumah.

O. Wakita (ed.), "Historical Analysis of Osaka District in Later Feudal Era"

O. Wakita (ed.), "Historical Analysis of Osaka District in Later Feudal Era"

Lumber Shops in Urban Area

Many lumber shops in urban area, which have no urban appearance compared with neighbouring retail shops, offices or residences, are going to cause public nuisance such as noise and others.Present distribution of lumber shops in many cities is concerned to the city planning in feudal era, and some of which are newly located in the neighbourhood of the railroad station where urban renewal has not come. There are few lumber shops in the recently developed residential area.New lumber shops in urban area are changing their character to the dealer of miscellaneous construction materials, and the shops look to adapt to various kinds of function.

Japanese Swordfighters and American Gunfighters

Like so many Japanese critical terms, gendai-geki and jidai-geki are simultaneously precise and loose categorizations for the two major megagenres of Japanese films. Gendai-geki generally refers to motion pictures which have a setting contemporaneous with the time of filming. Jidai-geki is not the Japanese equivalent of such general English language terms as historical drama, costume drama, or period drama. It primarily refers to films set in the latter part of the Tokugawa era, from the early 1600's to 1867. Stories with earlier historical settings are also jidai-geki but these are rare. The proper period of the jidai-geki ends with the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Jidai-geki plots usually center on swordsmen of fictional, legendary, or actual historical origin. These same heroes often appear in the popular printed fiction of the Tokugawa and Meiji periods. This kind of adventure story still has many readers in Japan. In addition to these literary sources, naniwabushi, kodan, and other kinds of oral narrative transmitted by individual storytellers are other major jidai-geki sources. Unlike the Kabuki theater which moved from its popular origins to become an aesthetic entertainment, these balladmongers today remain common entertainers without any aura of fine culture. Kabuki furnishes almost no film stories but many of its plot elements reoccur in jidai-geki. These same plot elements are equally common to traditional ballads, popular fiction, and Shinkokigeki (New National Drama) which took heroic tales set in the late feudal era and staged them with representational realistic techniques borrowed from Shimpa and Shingeki. Shinkokugeki did not try to rework Kabuki plays into its realistic style. Instead its playwrights fashioned their scripts from the more violent stories of the oral narrative traditions. The emphasis was on maximum melodramatic thrills. The highlights of Shinkokugeki performances are elaborate athletic swordfights that exploit all possible gory variations in a manner that suggests berserk Grand Guignol. In contrast, Kabuki swordfights-not nearly as numerous as those of Shinkokugeki-are a form of dance called tachimawari. In classic tachima-