Culture
As Nobunaga conquered Japan and amassed a great amount of wealth, he progressively supported the arts for which he always had an interest, but which he later and gradually more importantly used as a display of his power and prestige. He built extensive gardens and castles which were themselves great works of art. Azuchi Castle on the shores of Lake Biwa is said to have been the greatest castle in the history of Japan, covered with gold and statues on the outside and decorated with standing screen, sliding door, wall, and ceiling paintings made by his subject Kanō Eitoku on the inside. During this time, Nobunaga's subject and tea master Sen no Rikyū established the Japanese tea ceremony which Nobunaga popularized and used originally as a way to talk politics and business. The beginnings of modern kabuki were started and later fully developed in the early Edo period.
Additionally, Nobunaga was very interested in European culture which was still very new to Japan. He collected pieces of Western art as well as arms and armor, and he is considered to be among the first Japanese people in recorded history to wear European clothes. He also became the patron of the Jesuit missionaries in Japan and supported the establishment of the first Christian church in Kyoto in 1576, although he remained an adamant atheist and never converted to Christianity. During a visit by the Jesuits in March 1581, Nobunaga's interest was piqued by a slave in the service of a Jesuit inspector of missions, and it was requested that he be left in Nobunaga's service. This slave, later called by the Japanese name Yasuke, was highly favored by Nobunaga and fought in the final battle at Honnō-ji. During that time, the persecution of Buddhists was motivated mostly by separating politics from religion. Though it was not fully realized under Nobunaga's rule, he attempted to create a public, rational political authority. The concepts brought up during this change had the potential to radically change society in Japan. The new ideas that came forth were either incorporated into common discourses without changing it fundamentally, built upon at a later time, or opened up new options in the later Tokugawa era that were expanded on.
Read more about this topic: Oda Nobunaga
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)