Yoroku

When he was 5 years old, his artist father gave a certain little boy a woodcut print by Hiroshige Ando of people walking beneath pine trees on the seashore. He put it on his bed, and decorated the print with Japanese dolls and miniature furniture. After that, every time he got good marks in school, he was given another ukiyoe print.

Drawn into the world of Hokusai, Toyokuni, Kunisada and Kuniyoshi, in his late teens this boy began collecting katana swords and sword guards. The boy was Claude Levi-Strauss.

"When I was a boy, and in my youth, as far as my thoughts and feelings went, a part of me lived about as much in Japan as in France," the great anthropologist once reflected.

"In Japan, even the landscape is calligraphy," Levi-Strauss wrote on his first trip to Japan, full of wonder at the scenery that he had until then thought came only from the imaginations of ukiyoe artists.

Levi-Strauss can be credited with starting the fundamental altering of the hitherto Eurocentric 20th century intellectual world view -- prizing "progress" from primitivism to civilization -- with his observations that primitive societies had their own unique systems and structures. This great intellectual passed away Friday at the age of 100.

In the first half of Levi-Strauss's life, non-Western civilizations were still considered savage. However, by the time of his passing, we are in an era when each of the civilizations on our planet can be expected to respect the originality of all others. This great change can be traced to the life's work of Levi-Strauss.

"While it may be true (that the scenery in ukiyoe really existed), that there is symbolism and philosophical meaning does not change," he said, words that sound like a last will and testament to Japanese culture. ("Yoroku," front-page column in the Mainichi Shimbun)