Glimpses of Japan

I visited the Japan Folk Craft Museum, Osaka (Nippon Mingeikan), located in the Banpaku Memorial Park. I've been into Japanese folk craft so much lately. I like the idea of Mingei which Soetsu Yanagi advocated. The concept of mingei (民芸), variously translated into English as "folk craft", "folk art" or "popular art", was developed from the mid-1920s in Japan by a philosopher and aesthete, Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961), together with a group of craftsmen, including the potters Hamada Shōji (1894–1978) and Kawai Kanjirō (1890–1966). As such, it was a conscious attempt to distinguish ordinary crafts and functional utensils (pottery, lacquerware, textiles, and so on) from "higher" forms of art – at the time much admired by people during a period when Japan was going through rapid westernisation, industrialisation, and urban growth. In some ways, therefore, mingei may be seen as a reaction to Japan's rapid modernisation processes. Mingei Wikipedia...

I visited the National Museum of Japanese History on November 28, 2020. It's a huge museum of Japanese history that houses and displays 200,000 artifacts focused on history and culture in Japan. The most interesting part about this museum is that it's focused on culture (folklore) in Japan; I feel some cultural anthropological viewpoint here.  The huge museum consists of 6 galleries, each having different themes. I visited the museum for the first time to see their special exhibition, " Gender in Japanese History ."  The special exhibition focused on different times in history and explained how female was presented in each time. It might be surprising to some people to learn that women had quite a power in the Japanese culture in political, financial, family, etc., point of views. Many females had power in feudal times, supporting her husband samurais to govern their areas. Females had taken a lot of part in farming, too. They lost much power after the Meiji Period, a...