Hopalong Ginsberg Ping List
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Hopalong Ginsberg Ping List
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Good to see and hear your latest audio/video. And it's great to see a FReeper producing music and giving us a little diversion from the tension of politics-watching.
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I'm curious to hear what you think of the introductory audio/video (2:45 minutes long) being played before each weekly episode of NHK's 2024 epic docu-drama on free television across Japan.
These Taiga Drama epics ("taiga" means Big River as in following the stream of a person's life) have been produced every year since 1963 and the production values are impressive.
Consider their huge annual cost. Each epic runs for 50 weekly episodes of the year on Sundays at 8:00 PM. The episodes run 45 minutes with no commercial interruption. Plus scores of Japan's finest actors and actresses participate.
About half the epics are about a person in the samurai age. The rest feature other famous historical people (or a relative/friend of the famous person.)
This year's Taiga Drama is called Dear Radiance and is a story of nobility in Kyoto around the year 1000 AD. It's based on Japan's first novel, The Tale of Genji, written in that time. Japan had only about 7 million people then, and its scholarly heritage and writing derived from China with its Kanji-based language.
One of the innovations of this ancient Kyoto period was the invention of a new, uniquely Japanese syllabary and cursive alphabet, Hiragana.
The ladies of the Kyoto played a key role in developing Hiragana as they sent calligraphic personal letters back and forth to each other. And apparently a lot of romance was part of the era.
The AV clip I linked to above plays up the artistic culture of the Heian Period of Japan which Kyoto led. Interested to hear your perspective on it, Hopalong. Cheers.