ukiyoe The Japanese word usually translates as "pictures of the floating world", to indicate the kind of art prints obtained from blocks of wood that is widely used in Japan since the seventeenth century.
It The Floating World, and his images the 'Orientalist Gian Carlo Calza writes: "In medieval times the term ukiyo , derived from Buddhist, indicating the condition of impermanence is thrown from the everyday world with its attachments from which the essay should not be taken as a source of constant suffering. But in the seventeenth century the meaning was completely reversed and the word valued its fleeting pleasures of parties, fashion, show business, love, mercenary, of clandestine passion, of 'ephemeral, in a word attachments, against which the Buddhist doctrine warned against being overwhelmed. In this society reflected the new aspirations and new tastes developed around the kabuki theater and the "city without night." The districts where the great courtesans of pleasure created new gestures and behaviors and striking elegance and opulent, based on entertainment, on being fashionable, on attracting and repel at the same time. Where the houses of pleasure, as well as being a meeting place for party animals in search of entertainment, were transformed into real living rooms. There they met merchants, actors, writers, artists, publishers and aristocrats in disguise free of the formal rigor of their daily existence. There, in the environment that revolved around the Oiran , the famous air, the label of seduction was expressed through a formal canon of the highest perfection, but at the same time naturally. Women could improvise verses in response to other launch their challenge in, master of calligraphic styles with which to send a witty response, teachers in the composition of the flowers as the secrets of love that can sustain or destroy the career of a worldly actor or a publisher, these " ruined castles, they were also dubbed, determines the laws of fashion and behavior à la page".
The On 19 November, at the Institut Franco-Japonais in Fukuoka, Agnès Giard, a journalist for Libération , presented his book Dictionnaire de l'amour et du plaisir au Japon . According to Giard, Japanese culture tends to exorcise all that is terrifying in real life (monstrous sea creatures, natural disasters, suffering and death) by giving a performance aesthetic that transforms the violence into something that is , however, bringer of pleasure. That is the reason why the Buddhist concept of impermanence, originally intended to cause pain and, therefore, be rejected in the pursuit of enlightenment, was used to reach the opposite end, the search for the aesthetic pleasure in its most ephemeral aspects of human life and nature.
"... live for the moment, paying full attention to the pleasures of the moon, snow, cherry blossoms and maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine and taking pleasure only in the float, float more dangerous poverty that cries in the face and refuse to be caught by melancholy, floating along the river current like a dry gourd here is what we mean by ukiyo " (Ryoi Asai, who died in 1691, Ukiyo Monogatari: Tales of the floating world).
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The video was shot at Fukuoka Yusentei Garden, built in 1754 by the feudal lord Tsugutaka Kuroda. The name means "place where a source is a friend and apparently derives from the verse of the Minamoto Kusesanmi Michiko:" I built this summer shelter next to a spring whose waters flow even when the heat is unbearable. "
