GUNSLINGERS

Portuguese traders took guns to Japan in 1543, but 100 years later the government banned them. The traditional sword became the sole weapon of the warrior, or samurai. Ordinary citizens were forbidden to carry any weapons at all. Only in 1853, when U.S. warships under Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open its ports to foreign traders, were guns allowed into the country again.

ATISHOO

Paper tissues have been used by the Japanese for more than 300 years. An English traveler in 1637 wrote,”The Japanese blow their noses with a certain soft and tough kind of paper which they carry about them in small pieces, which, having used, they fling away as a filthy thing.”

WINDS OF DEATH

World War II suicide pilots who crashed their bombladen planes into enemy ships named themselves kamikaze, meaning “divine wind”. The namehad been given first to sudden, providential typhoons that helped to destroy  the seaborne invading forces of Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, in 1274 and again in 1281. The 1281 storm wrecked the enemy fleet after almost 2 months of fighting, and the stranded invaders were massacred. Not until 1945 did another invading army set foot on Japanese soil.

ROCKS OF AGES

One of the world’s oldest stone gardens was laid out at the Zen temple of Ryoanji in Kyoto in 1490. The garden contains just 15 large stones, set apparently at random in a walled area about 70 feet by 30 feet on fine gray-white  gravel.The garden is designed to represent nature in the abstract: the stones symbolize islands or mountains; the gravel stands for the sea or trees. The garden contains no plants at all, but the gravel is raked each day.

ANCIENT AND MODERN

The 220 sacred wooden buildings at Japan’s ancient Shinto shrine at Ise have been pulled down and replaced by identical buildings every 20 years since they were first put up in the 5th century A.D. Only unpainted cypress wood is used, and no nails- just dowels and joints. It is thought that the buildings are rebuilt every two decades to symbolize the coming of a new generations. The last rebuilding was in 1973.

DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR

Hara-kiri, or ritual suicide, was a custom of the feudal samurai warriors – and later, of officers in Japan’s imperial army- to avoid dishonour or capture by an enemy. Sometimes hara-kiri was committed to show loyalty to a dead or disgraced lord.

The term hara-kiri means, literally, “belly-cutting.” The victim first cut open his own stomach with a short sword or dagger and disemboweled himself. Then he was beheaded by a companion. The ceremony, known formally in Japan as seppuku, is still occasionally used as an extreme form of protest. The Japanese novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima committed hara-kiri in 1970 in protest against what he saw as the weakness of Japan as a nation.

Japan: people of the rising sun

CHARACTER REFERENCE

Japan’s oldest book, the Kojiki (completed in A.D. 712), describes the nation’s history from its mythic origins to about A.D. 600. The book was written to substantiate the imperial family’s claim to be descended from the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu, the source of Japan’s national symbol: the rising sun.

The Kojiki  marked a turning point in Japanese culture, because it was the first book to use Japanese charaters (the script known as kana). Before the 8th century Japan made use of Chinese characters.

TEA BREAK

Zen monks in Japan acquired the habit of drinking tea in the 12th century as a “cure ” for a variety of ailments and also to keep themselves awake while meditating. Actually the monks imported the custom from China. It later became a stylized ceremony  used to teach courtesy and tranquillity.

Guests enter the ceremonial room on their knees through a low door and sip green tea from bowls. The precisely defined protocol extends even to the room in which the ceremony takes place: by tradition, the room is square and only about 9 feet across.

THE TOWER OF BABEL

The book of Genesis tells how the descendants of Noah started to build a tower “with its top in the heavens”. Some scholars believe that the foundations of the tower – the Tower of Babel- can still be seen on teh site of ancient Babylon in southern Iraq.

The tower was not a straight-sided building like a church tower. It was a ziggurat, a stepped pyramid, about 300 feet high. It was built during the reign of  Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled Babylon between about 605 and 562 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar also built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The Babylonians called the tower Etemenanki (”House of teh Foundations of Heaven and Earth”). According to the Greek historian Herodotus, it consisted of eight levels, topped by a temple to the city’s paramount god, Marduk.Herodotus reported that a room in the temple contained a bed that was used for fertility rites. The room may also have been an astrological observatory.

KING’S PREROGATIVE Only royalty was allowed to kill lions in Assyria. When Assurbanipal (who ruled from 668 to about 627 B.C.) built a new palace at Nineveh in about 645, he commissioned a series of stone reliefs showing his prowess in the lion while behind him a wounded lion attacks his spare horse

OLD ALE

babylon garden

Beer may well have been the most popular drink in Mesopotamia. It was being made from malted barely before 6000 B.C., and the Sumerians even had a goddess of intoxicating drink called Ninkasi. Clay tablets found in Babylonia record the words of a hymn to Ninkasi, as well as the words of a drinking song. The tablets also suggest thattippling Mesopotamians enjoyed variety; there is a list of 19 different brews.

MIDDLE EAST OIL

Mesopotamians  were exploiting the Middle East’s best-known natural asset, oil, thousand of years before the birth of Christ. They probably used natural petroleum, which seeped from the ground in palaces,as fuel for lamps. They also used the heavier bitumen, or pitch, for bonding brickwork in buildings and for waterproffing boats. The great city of Ur was discovered  in the 19th century under mound, one of which the Arabs called Tall al-Muqayyar, which  means “mound of pitch”. And the Bible record of the founding  of Babylon describes how the builders “used bricks for stone and bitumen for mortar”.