Japan

The beauty of Basho’s prose, however, took the negative aspects of old age, loneliness, and death and imbued them with a serene sense of beauty.

While the shoguns and wealthy nobility often favored gold and other ostentatious colors, the Zen monks and the tea masters preferred the more mundane colors such as browns, greens, and grays.

In Heidi, we had started showing characters walking in different ways, with shortened steps, or with a quick pace, or in a way that seems to go on forever. But in most traditional cartoon movies, the characters reach the horizon in about three steps. For example, I love the cartoon character Farmer Alfalfa who practically comes bounding at us. It’s

Japanese people have been excellent in perfecting technologies. The standard example was the way they improved on the Chinese abacus which has seven beads, two above, five below, rounded and noisy. The Japanese reduced the seven beads to five, one above, four below, with sharp edges, silent and fast. So too Japanese chopsticks. The pointed ends