Basil Hall Chamberlain Bücher

<p>One of the first westerners to write about Japan, Chamberlain lived there for over thirty five years, and was proficient in ancient and modern Japanese. Chamberlain's resided in Japan during a time of transition when, as he put it, old things passed away between a night and a morning. To record some things before they vanished, but also to show how old and new coexisted in Japan, he wrote this guide. Instead of places, like a travel guide, he writes about subjects, in alphabetical order beginning with abacus and ending with the zoology of Japan. In between he discusses, among other subjects, acupuncture, Japanese chess, music, fashionable crazes, foreign employees, tattooing, silk, the Japanese use of English, the navy, embroidery, and the traditional Japanese system of time. </p>

Armchair travelers beware!Japanese Things will lure you out of your cozy, comfy home and chair to an unusual country with bewitching manners and customsand once you have succumbed to its spell you will never be the same. Here in one neat package you will meet the flavor, charm, and piquancy of old Japana revised reprint of one of the indispensable books on Japan, by the late Prof. Basil Hall Chamberlain,eminent British scholar who in the latter part of the 19th century "taught Japanese and Japan to the Japanese." Many books in one, this monumental compilation contains such diversified subjects as Art and Abacus; Botany and Buddhism; Charms and Cherry Blossoms; Daimyos and Divination; Fairy Tales and Flowers; Gardens and Government; History and Hara-kiri; Law and Language; Marriage and Music; Poetry and Pottery; Shinto and Singing Girls (Geisha); Tea and Theater, and Writing and Wood Engraving. In this long-awaited reprint, in which the title has been changed from Things Japanese, the reader will encounter exquisite objects of daily Japanese life, the gardens and cultures of the fields, the harmony and balance in the fundamentals of day-by-day existence.

Basil Hall Chamberlain was an early British expert on Japan. However, despite his expertise on all things Japanese he wrote on a number of other, diverse subjects and also published a volume of poetry in French.