June 28, 1575: Japanese samurai Yonekura Shigetsugu died at the Battle of Nagashino when he rushed the Takeda flank singlehandedly before he was killed by gunfire. His corpse was later impaled on a pike by Odo Nobunaga’s forces. A retainer of Takeda Shingen and servant of Amari Haruyoshi, he was part of the crucial Nagashino cavalry counter, which (quite obviously) failed in its directive. His death poem is often performed in Noh plays to this day and is a prime example of the Haiku form in death poems.
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Woww, so amazing!. They certainly install noise-proofing walls and flooring to not hardly affect business inside the Gate Tower Building.
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Undoubtedly one of the most advanced nations in the world!
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Expanding on the previous post:
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Samurai helmet made by famous Japanese metal smith Myochin Nobuie, Dai-ei era 1525.
Most of my tattoos are Japanese inspired, I love the colours, the history, the tradition.
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That’s bad ass.
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A gifted poet who died young, crushed by a cruel and unfaithful husband, who legally had total power over their child, was rediscovered by a poet: "The poem had been written many decades earlier by a young forgotten poet named Misuzu Kaneko (April 11, 1903–March 10, 1930). Yazaki hungered to know more about her life and work, but was met with a near-total vacuum. The only known copy of her poems had been destroyed during the bombing of Tokyo in WWII. The bookstore where she once worked was long gone. No one seemed to know if she had any surviving family.
"Her poems have something of Whitman in their empathetic reverence for the splendor of the earth and its creatures, something of Blake in their precision of insight into the nature of things, and something of Plath in both the largehearted appetite for loving the world and the poet’s heartbreaking death. Her short life is a rare reminder that the tragic and the transcendent can coexist, and that the barely bearable emotional porousness with which some people are endowed is the common root of both their sorrowful sensitivity and their uncommon capacity for compassion.
"Yazaki set about enchanting the popular imagination with the grounding and elevating power of the lost poems he had found. Over the years that followed, as he published these forgotten treasures, Kaneko was resurrected as Japan’s foremost poet for young readers. Children in public schools could recite her verses by heart. Her gentle face adorns a national postage stamp. When a tsunami devastated Japan in 2011, television companies stopped commercials and instead played her poem “Are You an Echo?” as a public service announcement that adrenalized nearly one million volunteers to flock to the site of the disaster.
"Kaneko was born at the dawn of the twentieth century in a small fishing village. Her mother, who became a single parent after the girl’s father died when she was three, ran a bookstore and felt strongly about reading and education. Unlike most Japanese girls in that era, whose formal education ended after sixth grade, Misuzu remained in school until the age of seventeen. A precocious child, she read voraciously about faraway lands and was animated by a sympathetic curiosity about the natural world. Like Oliver Sacks, who would lie in the garden and wonder what it’s like to be a rose, young Misuzu would puzzle over what it’s like to be snow and how orphaned whale calves grieve their parents after a whale hunt.
"In her early twenties, Kaneko began writing short poems for children based on vivid memories from her own childhood. She submitted some of them to five magazines that held regular competitions for young writers. To her amazement, four of the five accepted her poems and printed them in the same month of 1923. Soon, her poems began appearing in magazines all over the country. Barely in her twenties, she became a literary celebrity.
"Yazaki spent sixteen years trying to track down this ghostly genius. In 1982, by then in his mid-thirties, he finally made a breakthrough — he found and met with Kaneko’s 77-year-old younger brother, who brought her three worn pocket diaries containing the only extant record of the 512 children’s poems she had written in her blink of a lifetime, most never published.
"But while the public shone its adoring attention on Kaneko, darkness was brewing in her private life. The man she had married — a clerk in her family bookstore — turned out to be a terrible, unfaithful husband. As Jacobson tactfully puts it, she “contracted a disease from her husband that caused her great pain.” To compound the physical agony, he forced her to stop writing.
"The little girl they had together was the light of Kaneko’s life, but when she finally decided to rise from the pit of unhappiness by leaving her husband, she collided with further heartbreak: Japanese law automatically granted the father indisputable custody and Kaneko’s husband didn’t hesitate to use it — he declared that he was to take their daughter away. Bedeviled by debilitating bodily pain and anguished by the loss of her daughter, Kaneko sank into further despair.
"One evening, after bathing her daughter and sharing with her their favorite desert — sakuramochi, a pink ball of sweet sticky-rice wrapped in a salty cherry tree leaf — Kaneko went into her study, wrote a letter to her husband asking that he let her mother raise the girl, and took her own life a month before her twenty-seventh birthday. The grandmother eventually did get to raise the little girl. Jacobson offers a touching ending to a tragic story:
'Every year on the anniversary of Misuzu’s death, grandmother and granddaughter would share a sakuramochi. Together, they remembered Misuzu’s kind and gentle soul.'"
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How beautiful and cruel nature is at the same time!
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sounds like a fairly chill yoaki!
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The oldest hotel in the world is the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Japan and has been in business since 705AD. It’s still a family business, for 52 generations.
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