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Tokyo Tech faculty members are combining their
expertise in engineering and the humanities through the university's
newly launched Large-Scale
Knowledge Resources Project.
The goal is to gain new insights into human activity by reexamining
a host of subjects from the joint perspectives of literature,
linguistics, psychology, computer science, and information technology,
including speech recognition and data mining.
An early achievement of the project has been a finding gleaned
through statistical analysis of Japanese literature. Project
participants have documented remarkably consistent syllable distributions
in three definitive works of the 8th to 14th centuries: the Manyoshu
anthology of verse, The Tale of Genji, and The
Tale of the Heike.
The seven-five metric rhythm of Japanese narration and verse
underlies a temporal organization of eight and five morae—the
units of metrical time in quantitative verse—which closely approximates
the golden proportion.
The golden proportion, familiar in art and architecture, also
turns up in the temporal and spatial aspects of cinematic works
by the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Researchers in the
Large-Scale Knowledge Resources Project have verified that Ozu
used the golden proportion ratio in the lengths of his shots
and in the composition of his screen framing. |
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A scene from The Tale
of Genji. The seven-five metric of
traditional Japanese verse underlies an eight-five pattern
of mora lengths, which is consistent with the golden proportion.
Dr. Hirokazu Sato, a professor in Tokyo Tech's Graduate School
of Information Science and Engineering, offers this finding
as explication of the oft-noted appeal of asymmetrical structures
to the Japanese.
Illustrated scroll: The Tale of Genji, “Azumaya I,” courtesy
of the Tokugawa Art Museum |
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