At the moment, I`m reading a little manga book on the Heian Era in Japan. There was also a bit in the book about the genji monogatari. The story looks interesting, I`ll have to make another attempt to find it.

In the Heian era they lived in big walled cities, there was a complicated class structure, and there were lots of princesses who wore layered kimonos.

Lately I've been reading a book based on coloured-in black and white photographs of Kyoto around the Meiji Era. I only just found out through it that Japan's flag used to look different, it was a bigger red circle off-centre with red rays coming out of it on a white background. It looks more original and more clearly shows that it's a sun, although it looks less like a flag. I think they changed it after the war.

My Japanese teacher told us about the Genji Monogatari which is a 1000 year old story written by a woman in the Heian era, I got a book with little pictures from it from the library. The real version is something like 50 volumes long, but there are lots of shortened versions of it.

Japanese History

I'm interested in learning more about Japanese history so I've decided to create a blog on this, too.