Interesting Things I Learned Last Week

I'll try and post some interesting nuggets gleaned from my renewed education each week. This is the first post of such nuggets.

• Ironic: The American whaling industry is partly responsible for encouraging America to engage in trade with Japan--having drained the Atlantic of whales, Americans wanted access to Pacific oceans and the oil within them. Now, American whale protectors lambast Japan for its whaling practices and even ram their boats into whaling vessels.
  
  
• In German, they call Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally and other such mnemonic devices Eselsbrücke or a "donkey-bridge." Such a more colorful expression than "mnemonic device."
  
  
• Japanese Noh theatre is 600 years old. It is called by some "the art of walking." I understand this completely: the way the actors walk is slow, methodical, and really beautiful. I wish this picture of mine did it justice:
  

• As for Kabuki, the guy with red makeup is the hero, the guy with indigo makeup the villain. Color-coded.
  
  
• I found out it's easy to rent Japanese VHS tapes from Daruma Market in Bethesda, but you need to pay $10 to get a member's card. I feel like I'm betraying Hinata, though...

I guess I'll need to keep a list of interesting things I learn, so as not to overwhelm my poor readers with Japanese trivia.

Things Change

I made a small mistake in my previous post about karate. "Karate" in Japanese is written "空手", which means "empty hand." But this is misleading, because originally the word "karate" was written with an old character for China: 唐手. Thus, the name itself once showed clearly that karate had its roots in China, despite being a very Japanese art form.

Things change. History is whitewashed. The roots of an art form are obscured by language. And a grisly story is forgotten (by the victors). I read the following tale in Japan: A Modern History, and was struck at the brutal forgetfulness of it.

In the last decade of the 1500s, Toyotomi Hideyoshi had conquered Japan and united all the regions militarily. Then, with this huge army on his hands, he decided to send them offshore, to Korea. Initially, he'd just aimed to conquer China (!), and he'd thought that Korea would be cool with letting his troops attack from their peninsula. The Koreans said no, that would not be cool. So Hideyoshi made war on the Koreans.

It didn't go well. The Korean military was terrible on dry land, but in the wetlands and on the sea, the Koreans were formidable. Korean boats cut Hideyoshi's armies off from their supplies. Then China swooped in and beat the Japanese back away from Seoul. The Japanese surged once more, but they never even got to Seoul the second time. Hideyoshi died before there was a third surge.

But the Japanese were pretty much disastrous to Koreans. They burned Seoul, they killed (on Hideyoshi's orders) civilians, women, and children, and they cut off each killed Korean's nose. They pickled the noses, tens of thousands of them, in jars and brought them back to Japan. Hideyoshi dumped all these noses into a pile near his own future tomb. The pile became a large hill.

The hill is now called "Mound of Ears." It's a popular place for picnics and cherry-blossom viewing.