title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The Council was run by the Labour party from the first election in 1973 until an alliance between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives took control after the 2006 election. Labour regained a majority at the 2010 election and as of the 2014 election the council was composed of the following councillors:


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: St Helens is also served by several parish councils. Their activity is much reduced in the modern borough, but are still active in the communities and are recognised by the Borough Council as they may "undertake many duties such as street lighting, managing cemeteries, allotments, commons, village halls, war memorials and markets etc".


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Christianity is the main religion in St Helens Borough. At the 2001 census this was reported at around 87%. This made St Helens the "most Christian town in Britain" at that time. St Helens also had second fewest people (out of 376 local authorities) that actively described themselves as having no religion at all.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: There is very little ethnic minority representation in St Helens, amongst the lowest levels in the country. 98.84% of the St Helens population described itself as White British in 2001. The largest ethnic minority in St Helens in 2001 was recorded as Indian with 409.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: By 2006, the otherwise transient gypsy and traveller community have overtaken that number and are now considered to "make up the largest identifiable ethnic minority group in St Helens".


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The Borough of St Helens has one nursery school, one infant school, one junior school and fifty-two primary schools. Performance in the Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 SATs has been consistently above national averages over the past 5 years.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The town has seven educational institutions offering post-16 education in: Cowley International College, Rainford High Technology College, Rainhill High School and Sixth Form Centre, The Sutton Academy, Hope Academy - (all 11-18 secondary schools), Carmel College (a sixth form college) and St Helens College (a general FE college). Carmel College is a leading college in the country with a value added score of 328. The college is an associate of the University of Liverpool. St Helens College, which has recently rebuilt its Town Centre Campus, offers a wide variety of Higher and Further Education courses including degree courses, foundation degrees, BTECs and professional qualifications at the college's Business School. The college has a growing reputation for its standards and achievements. Recently, St Helens College has opened a University Centre. Locals who stay in the area and go to university often take advantage of the surrounding universities such as: Edge Hill (Ormskirk), Liverpool, Manchester, Salford and Chester. St Helen's Chamber is a strong provider of school leaver and post-16 apprenticeships and courses too.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: There are two local weekly newspapers which are freely distributed. These are the "St Helens Star" and the "St Helens Reporter" with publication days of Thursday and Wednesday respectively.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: St Helens has no television broadcasters within the town itself. However Relax Radio an internet based community Radio broadcasts across the town based in St Helens and Greatest Hits Radio Wigan & St Helens (formerly Wish FM, which gave the second part of its name (sh) to St Helens while the first half goes to Wigan (Wi), representing the two reception areas). The radio station is based in Orrell, near Wigan, the transmitter site being at Billinge Hill, on the border of the two metropolitan areas.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: St Helens College has previously made temporary, limited service FM radio broadcasts from their Town Centre Campus. In December 2010, the St Helens College radio station re-commenced broadcasting under the banner 'Solar 1287 AM'.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Located in the town centre, The World of Glass Museum opened in 2000 incorporating the Pilkington Glass Museum and the St Helens Local Museum.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The North West Museum of Road Transport is another museum located in the town. The Smithy Heritage Centre is a small museum in Kiln Lane, Eccleston about the works of a local blacksmith.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The borough of St Helens has several major parks and open spaces. These include the Taylor Park, a listed Grade II Historic Park and Garden opened in 1893, as well as Victoria Park located near the town centre.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Sherdley Park is a modern park in Sutton which features a petting zoo and annually holds a funfair in the summer, usually in July, called the St Helens Festival (originally named the St Helens Show).


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Parr has Gaskell Park in addition to the reclaimed open space known as The Duckeries (or Ashtons Green), and shares a boundary with boggy heathland known as "The Moss" or "Colliers Moss" (traditionally associated with Bold and its power station), and the area known as the "Flash" (remnants of the canal tributary system and fishing ponds) with a nature walk along part of the route that makes up the Sankey Valley Country Park (part of the Trans Pennine trail).


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: A 20m tall sculpture, called "Dream", has been erected on a former colliery in Sutton Manor in St Helens.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Gaskell Park, Taylor Park and The Duckeries all received Green Flag Award status in 2009. King George V Park received a Green Flag Award in 2012.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The first Theatre Royal was built on Bridge Street, opening in 1847 and was a large wooden barn. This was open for several seasons until heavy snow caused the roof to collapse. It was replaced by a new Theatre Royal on Milk Street.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Revill built a new theatre on Corporation Street and transferred the Theatre Royal name to this instead.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The Milk Street theatre was then purchased by the Salvation Army where it was more or less completely re-built internally. It was renamed SA Citadel and was used for this purpose for nearly 90 years, until the Salvation Army moved to a newer site. It was then opened as The Citadel Arts Centre in 1988 and was refurbished in 2000.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: In 2019 it was announced that the Citadel Arts Centre would close on 30 June 2019 but that the Citadel Arts Charity would continue working with the support of a crowdfunding campaign.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The Theatre Royal opened by Revill on Corporation Street in 1889 was relatively short-lived as it was severely damaged by fire in 1901. It was then reconstructed by revered theatre architect Frank Matcham. The Matcham theatre was designed in a baroque style with ornate balconies, chandeliers and boxes. In the 1960s the theatre was purchased by Pilkingtons and was gutted internally. The auditorium was refurbished removing all traces of the original interior design, whilst the ornate frontage was replaced with a plain glass façade. This was subsequently heavily refurbished in 2001.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The theatre is today a venue with touring acts and annual Pantomime. There are performances by local amateur operatic and dramatic societies, schools and dancing academies.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: St Helens is home to St Helens R.F.C., known commonly in the sport as 'Saints', who play in British Super League. The club were founded in 1873, and were one of the founding teams of Rugby Football League in 1895. They played their home games at Knowsley Road in Eccleston from 1890, but in 2012 moved to a modern stadium at Langtree Park. The club has a historic rivalry with the Wigan Warriors. They have been one of the most successful teams of the modern Super League era.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The town is also home to a large number of amateur rugby league teams comprising senior and youth teams. Most notable of these are Blackbrook A.R.L.F.C., Bold Miners, Clock Face Miners, Haresfinch Hawks, Haydock Warriors, Pilkington Recs and Thatto Heath Crusaders. Most of these teams and others in the area compete in the BARLA North West Counties competition (Pilkingtons in the Premier League, Haydock and Blackbrook in Division 1, Thatto Heath and Clock Face in Division 2). Thatto Heath compete in the higher ranked National Conference League.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The Blackbrook Royals have contributed 26 Lancashire Cup winning sides across 8 age ranges from U12 to U18, with two in the Open Age category and 10 National Cups. Pilkington Recs has 17 wins (and 6 times runner up) and Thatto Heath, 10.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The St Helens R.F.C. Under 18s and 16s and St Helens R.F.C. Academy teams serve as official feeders to Saints.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: St Helens is home to several amateur rugby union teams. Liverpool St Helens F.C. are the most prominent union team in a town where the league code takes precedence. The team claims to be "the oldest open rugby club in the world" based on its origins in the formation of Liverpool Football Club (not to be confused with the later association football team of the same name) in 1857.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Liverpool St Helens operate, in addition to their first team, both multiple senior, colts and junior teams, and in addition have an U18 and U15 girls rugby team as part of their "open" and inclusive rugby approach. In 2008 the club announced an unveiling of its Centre of Excellence in coordination with Sportsmatch (a department of Sport England).


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Several local social, sports and leisure clubs host their own teams, including the most successful club in the town of recent history West Park St Helens (commonly referred to simply as West Park), that currently play in National League 3 North, and Ruskin Park R.F.C.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: St Helens Town FC is an amateur English football club, currently playing in the first division of the Liverpool County Premier League. The club formerly played their games at Knowsley Road they then moved to play at Ashton Athletic FC, and now play at Ruskin Drive Sports Ground. St Helens Town FC won the FA Vase in the 1986-87 season, defeating local rivals Warrington Town F.C. 3-2 in the final at Wembley Stadium.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: F.C. St Helens are in the Division One North of the North West Counties Football League. Pilkington F.C. are also in the first division of the North West Counties League.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The town previously had its own amateur football league, the St Helens & District Football Combination which ran from the 1917–18 season to 2016.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: In 2009, Brazilian Soccer Schools St Helens launched specialist soccer and futsal centres on the region to teach junior and youth players futsal.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: St Helens is home to several amateur cricket sides. St Helens Cricket Club, formed in 1843, was dissolved in 2012. St Helens Recreation Cricket Club formed in 1847 are now the most senior club in the town and play in the Liverpool and District Cricket Competition.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Sutton, Haydock, Rainhill and Newton le Willows also have their own local cricket clubs with representation from 11 to multiple senior teams.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The town was formerly home to the amateur American football team St Helens Cardinals. The Cardinals were active between 1984 and 1998, winning the UKAFL Championship in 1987 with a 28-26 win over the Ipswich Cardinals. In 2019 the St Helens Cardinals were reformed to play the 8-on-8 format of the game under the British Gridiron League.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: Greyhound racing took place at two venues; at the St Helens Greyhound Racing and Sports Stadium (1932-1993) and around the pitch at the Hoghton Road Stadium (1993-2001). The racing was independent (not affiliated to the sports governing body the National Greyhound Racing Club) and they were known as flapping tracks, which was the nickname given to independent tracks.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The Scout have been active in St Helens since 1907 and the movement has been active continuously since then. The first official Scout Troop opened at the YMCA in 1908. The Group was opened following a visit to St Helens in 1908 by Lord Baden Powell himself.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: In 2007, the District celebrated its Centenary of 100 Years of scouting across the town with a whole District Camp at the local Bispham Hall Scout Estate.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: In 2018, the District adopted the new Skills For Life strategy and branding for the UK Scout Movement.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: The District is Headquartered in Sutton Leach. The District owns a purpose built Scout Hut and surrounding land, open for all members of the District to use.


title: St Helens, Merseyside

text: A famous "Punch" cartoon based on the painting Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon, exhibited in 1880 by Sir William Quiller Orchardson, had the caption "He's utterly convinced that he's being exiled to St. HELEN'S, poor devil!". This was a pun on Saint Helena, the South Atlantic island to which Napoleon was exiled.


title: Peperoncino

text: Peperoncino (; plural peperoncini ) is the generic Italian name for hot chili peppers, specifically some regional cultivars of the species "Capsicum annuum" and "C. frutescens" (chili pepper and Tabasco pepper, respectively). The sweet pepper is called "peperone" (plural "peperoni") in Italian. Like most peppers, the fruit is green or yellowish-green when young, and ripens to a red color.


title: Peperoncino

text: In the United States, peperoncini are usually pickled, comparatively mild – most often the variety known in Italy as friggitelli, a fairly sweet cultivar of "C. annuum" – and commonly used (whole, sliced, or chopped) as a condiment on sandwiches, in salads, and in Italian-style or other Mediterranean-inspired dishes.


title: Peperoncino

text: The peperoncino probably came to Italy in the early 16th century, after Christopher Columbus took samples from the New World to Europe in 1492. Like the tomato, the peperoncino was first considered a decorative and possibly poisonous plant before it was adopted into Italian cuisine. It might have become popular as a food long before the cookbooks attest to its use. These cookbooks were written for the upper classes, while the peperoncino was a cheap and convenient food for the lower classes.


title: Peperoncino

text: Pietro Andrea Mattioli first described peperoncini in 1568 and mentioned how much hotter they were than other varieties of pepper from Asia. The earliest surviving published use of peperoncino in a recipe dates to a 1694 cookbook by the Italian chef Antonio Latini. In his recipe for , chopped peperoncini, tomatoes, and some onion are combined with peppermint, salt, and oil, to be served as a relish.


title: Peperoncino

text: In Italian cuisine peperoncini are used with moderation and the flavour is considered more important than the heat. As a consequence the Scoville rating serves only as a rough guide to the heat, which is quite varied among the different cultivars.


title: Peperoncino

text: The peperoncino is especially important in Calabrian cuisine. In late summer, peperoncini are stitched on wires and hung from buildings. They are left to dry in spots with sunlight and ventilation to conserve them, allowing their use in cooking until the next harvest. They are eaten whole, fried until crisp, crushed, pickled, powdered or as a paste. A typical peperoncino from Calabria rates 15,000 to 30,000 on the Scoville scale.


title: Peperoncino

text: Notable Calabrian dishes which use peperoncini are the condiments , chili oil and the spreadable pork sausage . It is also used in dishes of other regional cuisines of Southern and Central Italy, such as the Roman-style arrabbiata sauce and the Apulian "orecchiette alle cime di rapa" (orecchiette pasta with broccoli rabe).


title: Peperoncino

text: While most crushed red pepper (a common component of spicy Italian-style cuisine and frequently sprinkled on pizza and other dishes) in North America is today made from cayenne or jalapeño peppers common in that region, some specialty markets there supply imported Italian red peperoncino flakes.


title: Peperoncino

text: Since 1992 the annual Peperoncino Festival has been held in the town of Diamante in Calabria. Organized by the Accademia Italiana del Peperoncino, the festival now attracts tens of thousands of visitors. It is held for four days surrounding the first weekend of September on the town's seaside promenade. The festival has a large market where local food products made with peperoncini are sold, and hosts a peperoncino-eating contest. Calabrian chili oil is a popular international export.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.


title: Japanese grammar

text: The modern theory of constituent order ("word order"), usually attributed to Joseph Harold Greenberg, identifies several kinds of phrases. Each one has a head and possibly a modifier. The head of a phrase either precedes its modifier (head-initial) or follows it (head-final). Some of these phrase types, with the head marked in boldface, are:


title: Japanese grammar

text: Some languages are inconsistent in constituent order, having a mixture of head-initial phrase types and head-final phrase types. Looking at the preceding list, English for example is mostly head-initial, but nouns follow the adjectives which modify them. Moreover, genitive phrases can be either head-initial or head-final in English. By contrast, the Japanese language is consistently head-final:


title: Japanese grammar

text: Head-finality in Japanese sentence structure carries over to the building of sentences using other sentences. In sentences that have other sentences as constituents, the subordinated sentences (relative clauses, for example), always precede what they refer to, since they are modifiers and what they modify has the syntactic status of phrasal head. Translating the phrase "the man who was walking down the street" into Japanese word order would be "street down walking was man".


title: Japanese grammar

text: Head-finality prevails also when sentences are coordinated instead of subordinated. In the world's languages, it is common to avoid repetition between coordinated clauses by optionally deleting a constituent common to the two parts, as in "Bob bought his mother some flowers and his father a tie", where the second "bought" is omitted. In Japanese, such "gapping" must precede in the reverse order: "Bob mother for some flowers and father for tie bought". The reason for this is that in Japanese, sentences (other than occasional inverted sentences or sentences containing afterthoughts) always end in a verb (or other predicative words like adjectival verbs, adjectival nouns, auxiliary verbs)—the only exceptions being a few sentence-ending particles such as , , and . The particle turns a statement into a question, while the others express the speaker's attitude towards the statement.


title: Japanese grammar

text: More broadly, there are two classes: uninflectable (nouns, including verbal nouns and nominal adjectives) and inflectable (verbs, with adjectives as defective verbs). To be precise, a verbal noun is simply a noun to which can be appended, while an adjectival noun is like a noun but uses instead of when acting attributively. Adjectives (-adjectives) inflect identically to the negative form of verbs, which end in . Compare → and → .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Some scholars, such as Eleanor Harz Jorden, refer to adjectives instead as adjectivals, since they are grammatically distinct from adjectives: they can predicate a sentence. That is, is glossed as "hot" when modifying a noun phrase, as in , but as ""is" hot" when predicating, as in .


title: Japanese grammar

text: The two inflected classes, verb and adjective, are closed classes, meaning they do not readily gain new members. Instead, new and borrowed verbs and adjectives are conjugated periphrastically as verbal noun + (e.g. ) and adjectival noun + . This differs from Indo-European languages, where verbs and adjectives are open classes, though analogous "do" constructions exist, including English "do a favor", "do the twist" or French "faire un footing" (do a "footing", go for a jog), and periphrastic constructions are common for other senses, like "try climbing" (verbal noun) or "try parkour" (noun). Other languages where verbs are a closed class include Basque: new Basque verbs are only formed periphrastically. Conversely, pronouns are closed classes in Western languages but open classes in Japanese and some other East Asian languages.


title: Japanese grammar

text: In a few cases new verbs are created by appending suffix to a noun or using it to replace the end of a word. This is most often done with borrowed words, and results in a word written in a mixture of katakana (stem) and hiragana (inflectional ending), which is otherwise very rare. This is typically casual, with the most well-established example being (circa 1920), from , with other common examples including , from , and from . In cases where the borrowed word already ends with a , this may be punned to a , as in , from , and , from .


title: Japanese grammar

text: New adjectives are extremely rare; one example is , from adjectival noun , and a more casual recent example is , by contraction of . By contrast, in Old Japanese adjectives (precursors of present -adjectives ending in , formerly a different word class) were open, as reflected in words like , from the adjective , and , from the noun (with sound change). Japanese adjectives are unusual in being closed class but quite numerous – about 700 adjectives – while most languages with closed class adjectives have very few. Some believe this is due to a grammatical change of inflection from an aspect system to a tense system, with adjectives predating the change.


title: Japanese grammar

text: The conjugation of -adjectives has similarities to the conjugation of verbs, unlike Western languages where inflection of adjectives, where it exists, is more likely to have similarities to the declension of nouns. Verbs and adjectives being closely related is unusual from the perspective of English, but is a common case across languages generally, and one may consider Japanese adjectives as a kind of stative verb.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Japanese vocabulary has a large layer of Chinese loanwords, nearly all of which go back more than one thousand years, yet virtually none of them are verbs or "-adjectives" – they are all nouns, of which some are verbal nouns () and some are adjectival nouns (). In addition to the basic verbal noun + form, verbal nouns with a single-character root often experienced sound changes, such as → (rendaku) → , as in , and some cases where the stem underwent sound change, as in , from .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Verbal nouns are uncontroversially nouns, having only minor syntactic differences to distinguish them from pure nouns like 'mountain'. There are some minor distinctions within verbal nouns, most notably that some primarily conjugate as (with a particle), more like nouns, while others primarily conjugate as , and others are common either way. For example, is much more common than , while is much more common than . Nominal adjectives have more syntactic differences versus pure nouns, and traditionally were considered more separate, but they, too, are ultimately a subcategory of nouns.


title: Japanese grammar

text: There are a few minor word classes that are related to adjectival nouns, namely the adjectives and adjectives. Of these, adjectives are fossils of earlier forms of adjectives (the adjectives of Old Japanese), and are typically classed separately, while adjectives are a parallel class (formerly adjectives in Late Old Japanese), but are typically classed with adjectives.


title: Japanese grammar

text: In discourse pragmatics, the term "topic" refers to what a section of discourse is about. At the beginning of a section of discourse, the topic is usually unknown, in which case it is usually necessary to explicitly mention it. As the discourse carries on, the topic need not be the grammatical subject of each new sentence.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Starting with Middle Japanese, the grammar evolved so as to explicitly distinguish topics from nontopics. This is done by two distinct particles (short words which do not change form). Consider the following pair of sentences:


title: Japanese grammar

text: Both sentences translate as "the sun rises". In the first sentence is not a discourse topic—not yet; in the second sentence it is a discourse topic. In linguistics (specifically, in discourse pragmatics) a sentence such as the second one (with ) is termed a presentational sentence because its function in the discourse is to present "sun" as a topic, to "broach it for discussion". Once a referent has been established as the topic of the current monolog or dialog, then in (formal) modern Japanese its marking will change from to . To better explain the difference, the translation of the second sentence can be enlarged to "As for the sun, it rises" or "Speaking of the sun, it rises"; these renderings reflect a discourse fragment in which "the sun" is being established as the topic of an extended discussion.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Subjects are mentioned when a topic is introduced, or in situations where an ambiguity might result from their omission. The preceding example sentence would most likely be uttered in the middle of a discourse, where who it is that "went to Japan" will be clear from what has already been said (or written).


title: Japanese grammar

text: is composed of , which are in turn composed of , which are its smallest coherent components. Like Chinese and classical Korean, written Japanese does not typically demarcate words with spaces; its agglutinative nature further makes the concept of a "word" rather different from words in English. The reader identifies word divisions by semantic cues and a knowledge of phrase structure. Phrases have a "single" meaning-bearing word, followed by a string of suffixes, auxiliary verbs and particles to modify its meaning and designate its grammatical role.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Some scholars romanize Japanese sentences by inserting spaces only at phrase boundaries ("i.e.", ""), treating an entire phrase as a single word. This represents an almost purely phonological conception of where one word ends and the next begins. There is some validity in taking this approach: phonologically, the postpositional particles merge with the structural word that precedes them, and within a "phonological" phrase, the pitch can have at most one fall. Usually, however, grammarians adopt a more conventional concept of , one which invokes meaning and sentence structure.


title: Japanese grammar

text: In Japanese, phrasal constituents can be moved to the beginning or the end of the sentence. Leftward movement of a phrasal constituent is referred to as "scrambling".


title: Japanese grammar

text: In linguistics generally, words and affixes are often classified into two major word categories: lexical words, those that refer to the world outside of a discourse, and function words—also including fragments of words—which help to build the sentence in accordance with the grammar rules of the language. Lexical words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and sometimes prepositions and postpositions, while grammatical words or word parts include everything else. The native tradition in Japanese grammar scholarship seems to concur in this view of classification. This native Japanese tradition uses the terminology , for words having lexical meaning, and , for words having a grammatical function.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Classical Japanese had some auxiliary verbs (i.e., they were independent words) which have become grammaticized in modern Japanese as inflectional suffixes, such as the past tense suffix (which might have developed as a contraction of ).


title: Japanese grammar

text: Traditional scholarship proposes a system of word classes differing somewhat from the above-mentioned. The "independent" words have the following categories.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Ancillary words also divide into a nonconjugable class, containing and , and a conjugable class consisting of . There is not wide agreement among linguists as to the English translations of the above terms.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Uehara (1998) observes that Japanese grammarians have disagreed as to the criteria that make some words inflectional and others not; in particular, the nominal adjectives – or -adjectives. (It is not disputed that nouns like 'book' are non-inflectional and that verbs and -adjectives are inflectional.) The claim that nominal adjectives are inflectional rests on the claim that the element , regarded as a copula by proponents of non-inflectional nominal adjectives, is really a suffix—an inflection. That is, is a one-word sentence, not a two-word sentence, . However, numerous constructions show that is less bound to the roots of nouns and nominal adjectives than and are to the roots of -adjectives and verbs, respectively.


title: Japanese grammar

text: On the basis of such constructions, Uehara finds that the copula is not suffixal and that nominal adjectives pattern with nouns in being non-inflectional.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Similarly, Eleanor Jorden considers this class of words a kind of nominal, not adjective, and refers to them as -nominals in her textbook "".


title: Japanese grammar

text: Japanese has no grammatical gender, number, or articles; though the demonstrative , is often translatable as "the". Thus, linguists agree that Japanese nouns are noninflecting: can be translated as "cat", "cats", "a cat", "the cat", "some cats" and so forth, depending on context. However, as part of the extensive pair of grammatical systems that Japanese possesses for "honorification" (making discourse deferential to the addressee or even to a third party) and politeness, nouns too can be modified. Nouns take politeness prefixes (which have not been regarded as inflections): for native nouns, and for Sino-Japanese nouns. A few examples are given in the following table. In a few cases, there is suppletion, as with the first of the examples given below, 'rice'. (Note that while these prefixes are almost always written in hiragana as or , the kanji represents both and in formal writing.)


title: Japanese grammar

text: Lacking number, Japanese does not differentiate between count and mass nouns. A small number of nouns have collectives formed by reduplication (possibly accompanied by voicing and related processes (rendaku)); for example: and . Reduplication is not productive. Words in Japanese referring to more than one of something are collectives, not plurals. , for example, means "a lot of people" or "people in general"; it is never used to mean "two people". A phrase like would be taken to mean "the people of Edo", or "the population of Edo", not "two people from Edo" or even "a few people from Edo". Similarly, means "many mountains".


title: Japanese grammar

text: A limited number of nouns have collective forms that refer to groups of people. Examples include ; ; . One uncommon personal noun, , has a much more common reduplicative collective form: .


title: Japanese grammar

text: The suffixes and are by far the most common collectivizing suffixes. These are, again, not pluralizing suffixes: does not mean "some number of people named Taro", but instead indicates the group including Taro. Depending on context, might be translated into "Taro and his friends", "Taro and his siblings", "Taro and his family", or any other logical grouping that has Taro as the representative. Some words with collectives have become fixed phrases and (commonly) refer to one person. Specifically, and can be singular, even though and were originally collectivizing in these words; to unambiguously refer to groups of them, an additional collectivizing suffix is added: and , though is somewhat uncommon. is sometimes applied to inanimate objects, and , for example, but this usage is colloquial and indicates a high level of anthropomorphisation and childlikeness, and is not more generally accepted as standard.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Grammatical cases in Japanese are marked by particles placed after the nouns. A distinctive feature of Japanese is the presence of two cases which are roughly equivalent to the nominative case in other languages: one representing the sentence topic, other representing the subject. The most important case markers are the following:


title: Japanese grammar

text: Although many grammars and textbooks mention , Japanese lacks true pronouns. ( can be considered a subset of nouns.) Strictly speaking, linguistic pronouns do not take modifiers, but Japanese do. For example, is valid in Japanese. Also, unlike true pronouns, Japanese are not closed-class; new are introduced and old ones go out of use relatively quickly.


title: Japanese grammar

text: A large number of referring to people are translated as pronouns in their most common uses. Examples: ; ; ; see also the adjoining table or a longer list. Some of these "personal nouns" such as , or , also have second-person uses: in second-person is an extremely rude "you", and in second-person is a diminutive "you" used for young boys. and also mean "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" respectively, and this usage of the words is possibly more common than the use as pronouns.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Like other subjects, personal are seldom used and are de-emphasized in Japanese. This is partly because Japanese sentences do not always require explicit subjects, and partly because names or titles are often used where pronouns would appear in a translation:


title: Japanese grammar

text: The possible referents of are sometimes constrained depending on the order of occurrence. The following pair of examples from Bart Mathias illustrates one such constraint.


title: Japanese grammar

text: English has a reflexive form of each personal pronoun ("himself", "herself", "itself", "themselves", etc.); Japanese, in contrast, has one main reflexive , namely , which can also mean 'I'. The uses of the reflexive (pro)nouns in the two languages are very different, as demonstrated by the following literal translations (*=impossible, ??=ambiguous):


title: Japanese grammar

text: If the sentence has more than one grammatical or semantic subject, then the target of is the subject of the "primary" or "most prominent action"; thus in the following sentence refers unambiguously to Shizuko (even though Makoto is the grammatical subject) because the primary action is Shizuko's reading.


title: Japanese grammar

text: In practice the main action is not always discernible, in which case such sentences are ambiguous. The use of in complex sentences follows non-trivial rules.


title: Japanese grammar

text: There are also equivalents to such as . Other uses of the reflexive pronoun in English are covered by adverbs like which is used in the sense of "by oneself". For example,


title: Japanese grammar

text: Change in a verb's valency is not accomplished by use of reflexive pronouns (in this Japanese is like English but unlike many other European languages). Instead, separate (but usually related) intransitive verbs and transitive verbs are used. There is no longer any productive morphology to derive transitive verbs from intransitive ones, or vice versa.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Demonstratives occur in the , , and series. The (proximal) series refers to things closer to the speaker than the hearer, the (medial) series for things closer to the hearer, and the (distal) series for things distant to both the speaker and the hearer. With , demonstratives turn into the corresponding interrogative form. Demonstratives can also be used to refer to people, for example


title: Japanese grammar

text: Demonstratives limit, and therefore precede, nouns; thus for "this/my book", and for "that/your book".


title: Japanese grammar

text: When demonstratives are used to refer to things not visible to the speaker or the hearer, or to (abstract) concepts, they fulfill a related but different anaphoric role. The anaphoric distals are used for shared information between the speaker and the listener.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Again, is inappropriate here because Sato does not (did not) know Tanaka personally. The proximal demonstratives do not have clear anaphoric uses. They can be used in situations where the distal series sound too disconnected:


title: Japanese grammar

text: Conjugative suffixes and auxiliary verbs are attached to the stem forms of the affixee. In modern Japanese, there are six stem forms, ordered following from the endings that these forms have in verbs (according to the collation order of Japanese), where terminal and attributive forms are the same for verbs (hence only 5 surface forms), but differ for nominals, notably -nominals.


title: Japanese grammar

text: in Japanese are rigidly constrained to the end of a clause. This means that the "predicate position" is always located at the end of a sentence.


title: Japanese grammar

text: The subject and objects of the verb are indicated by means of "particles", and the grammatical functions of the verb (primarily tense and voice) are indicated by means of conjugation. When the subject and the dissertative topic coincide, the subject is often omitted; if the verb is intransitive, the entire sentence may consist of a single verb. Verbs have two tenses indicated by conjugation, past and non-past. The semantic difference between present and future is not indicated by means of conjugation. Usually there is no ambiguity as context makes it clear whether the speaker is referring to the present or future. Voice and aspect are also indicated by means of conjugation, and possibly agglutinating auxiliary verbs. For example, the continuative aspect is formed by means of the continuative conjugation known as the "gerundive" or "form", and the auxiliary verb ; to illustrate, → .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Lexically, nearly every verb in Japanese is a member of exactly one of the following three regular "conjugation groups" (see also Japanese godan and ichidan verbs).


title: Japanese grammar

text: The "row" in the above classification means a row in the gojūon table. "Upper 1-row" means the row that is one row above the center row (the -row) i.e. i-row. "Lower 1-row" means the row that is one row below the center row (the -row) i.e. -row. "5-row" means the conjugation runs through all 5 rows of the gojūon table. A conjugation is fully described by identifying both the row and the column in the gojūon table. For example, belongs to , belongs to , and belongs to .


title: Japanese grammar

text: One should avoid confusing verbs in with verbs in or . For example, belongs to , whereas its homophone belongs to . Likewise, belongs to , whereas its homophone belongs to .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Historically, Classical Japanese had , and a . The verbs became most of the verbs in modern Japanese (only a handful of verbs and a single verb existed in classical Japanese). The group was reclassified as the group during the post-WWII writing reform in 1946, to write Japanese as it is pronounced. Since verbs have migrated across groups in the history of the language, the conjugation of classical verbs cannot be ascertained from knowledge of modern Japanese alone.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Classical Japanese had two further irregular classes, the -group, which contained and , the -group, which included such verbs as , the equivalent of modern , as well as quite a number of extremely irregular verbs that cannot be classified.


title: Japanese grammar

text: The following table illustrates the stem forms of the above conjugation groups, with the root indicated with dots. For example, to find the hypothetical form of the group 1 verb , look in the second row to find its root, , then in the hypothetical row to get the ending , giving the stem form . When there are multiple possibilities, they are listed in the order of increasing rarity.


title: Japanese grammar

text: The above are only the stem forms of the verbs; to these one must add various verb endings in order to get the fully conjugated verb. The following table lists the most common conjugations. Note that in some cases the form is different depending on the conjugation group of the verb. See Japanese verb conjugations for a full list.


title: Japanese grammar

text: The polite ending conjugates as a group 1 verb, except that the negative imperfective and perfective forms are and respectively, and certain conjugations are in practice rarely if ever used. The passive and potential endings and , and the causative endings and all conjugate as group 2b verbs. Multiple verbal endings can therefore agglutinate. For example, a common formation is the "causative-passive" ending: .


title: Japanese grammar

text: As should be expected, the vast majority of theoretically possible combinations of conjugative endings are not semantically meaningful.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Japanese has a large variety of related pairs of transitive verbs (that take a direct object) and intransitive verbs (that do not usually take a direct object), such as the transitive , and the intransitive .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Note: Some intransitive verbs (usually verbs of motion) take what looks like a direct object, but is not. For example, :


title: Japanese grammar

text: Semantically speaking, words that denote attributes or properties are primarily distributed between two morphological classes (there are also a few other classes):


title: Japanese grammar

text: Unlike adjectives in languages like English, -adjectives in Japanese inflect for aspect and mood, like verbs. Japanese adjectives do not have comparative or superlative inflections; comparatives and superlatives have to be marked periphrastically using adverbs like and .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Every adjective in Japanese can be used in an attributive position, and nearly every Japanese adjective can be used in a predicative position. There are a few Japanese adjectives that cannot predicate, known as , which are derived from other word classes; examples include , , and which are all stylistic -type variants of normal -type adjectives.


title: Japanese grammar

text: All -adjectives except for have regular conjugations, and is irregular only in the fact that it is a changed form of the regular adjective permissible in the terminal and attributive forms. For all other forms it reverts to .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Common conjugations of adjectives are enumerated below. is not treated separately, because all conjugation forms are identical to those of .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Adjectives too are governed by euphonic rules in certain cases, as noted in the section on it below. For the polite negatives of -type adjectives, see also the section below on the copula .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Note that there are no potential, causative, or passive forms of the copula, just as with adjectives.


title: Japanese grammar

text: In continuative conjugations, is often contracted in speech to ; for some kinds of informal speech is preferable to , or is the only possibility.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Modern pronunciation is a result of a long history of phonemic drift that can be traced back to written records of the 13th century, and possibly earlier. However, it was only in 1946 that the Japanese ministry of education modified existing kana usage to conform to the . All earlier texts used the archaic orthography, now referred to as historical kana usage. The adjoining table is a nearly exhaustive list of these spelling changes.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Note that the palatalized morae and ( and ) combine with the initial consonant (if present) yielding a palatalized syllable. The most basic example of this is modern , which historically developed as → , via the → rule.


title: Japanese grammar

text: A few sound changes are not reflected in the spelling. Firstly, merged with , both being pronounced as a long . Secondly, the particles and are still written using historical kana usage, though these are pronounced as and respectively, rather than and .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Among Japanese speakers, it is not generally understood that the historical kana spellings were, at one point, reflective of pronunciation. For example, the modern reading (for ) arose from the historical . The latter was pronounced something like by the Japanese at the time it was borrowed (compare Middle Chinese ). However, a modern reader of a classical text would still read this as , the modern pronunciation.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Conjugations of some verbs and adjectives differ from the prescribed formation rules because of euphonic changes. Nearly all of these euphonic changes are themselves regular. For verbs the exceptions are all in the ending of the continuative form of group when the following auxiliary starts with a -sound (i.e. , , , etc.).


title: Japanese grammar

text: There is one other irregular change: , for which there is an exceptional continuative form: + → , + → , etc.


title: Japanese grammar

text: There are dialectical differences, which are also regular and generally occur in similar situations. For example, in Kansai dialect the + conjugations are instead changed to , as in instead of , as perfective of . In this example, this can combine with the preceding vowel via historical sound changes, as in ( → ) instead of standard .


title: Japanese grammar

text: The continuative form of proper adjectives, when followed by polite forms such as or , undergoes a transformation; this may be followed by historical sound changes, yielding a one-step or two-step sound change. Note that these verbs are almost invariably conjugated to polite form, as and (note the irregular conjugation of , discussed below), and that these verbs are preceded by the "continuative" form – – of adjectives, rather than the terminal form – – which is used before the more everyday .


title: Japanese grammar

text: The rule is → (dropping the ), possibly also combining with the previous syllable according to the spelling reform chart, which may also undergo palatalization in the case of .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Historically there were two classes of proper Old Japanese adjectives, and (" adjective" means "not preceded by "). This distinction collapsed during the evolution of Late Middle Japanese adjectives, and both are now considered adjectives. The sound change for adjectives follows the same rule as for other adjectives, notably that the preceding vowel also changes and the preceding mora undergoes palatalization, yielding → , though historically this was considered a separate but parallel rule.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Respectful verbs such as , , , , , etc. behave like group 1 verbs, except in the continuative and imperative forms.


title: Japanese grammar

text: In speech, common combinations of conjugation and auxiliary verbs are contracted in a fairly regular manner.


title: Japanese grammar

text: There are occasional others, such as → as in → and → – these are considered quite casual and are more common among the younger generation.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Contractions differ by dialect, but behave similarly to the standard ones given above. For example, in the Kansai dialect, → .


title: Japanese grammar

text: Adverbs in Japanese are not as tightly integrated into the morphology as in many other languages; adverbs are not an independent class of words, but the role of an adverb is played by other words. For example, every adjective in the continuative form can be used as an adverb; thus, → . The primary distinguishing characteristic of adverbs is that they cannot occur in a predicate position, just as it is in English. The following classification of adverbs is not intended to be authoritative or exhaustive.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Often, especially for sound symbolism, the particle is used. See the article on Japanese sound symbolism.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Although called "conjunctions", conjunctions in Japanese are – as their English translations show – actually a kind of adverb:


title: Japanese grammar

text: Particles in Japanese are postpositional, as they immediately follow the modified component. Both the pronunciation and spelling differs for the particles , and , and are romanized according to pronunciation rather than spelling. Only a few prominent particles are listed here.


title: Japanese grammar

text: The complex distinction between the so-called topic, , and subject, , particles has been the theme of many doctoral dissertations and scholarly disputes. The clause is well known for appearing to contain two subjects. It does not simply mean "the elephant's nose is long", as that can be translated as . Rather, a more literal translation would be "(speaking of) the elephant, its nose is long"; furthermore, as Japanese does not distinguish between singular and plural the way English does, it could also mean "as for elephants, their noses are long".


title: Japanese grammar

text: Two major scholarly surveys of Japanese linguistics in English, (Shibatani 1990) and (Kuno 1973), clarify the distinction. To simplify matters, the referents of and in this section are called the "topic" and "subject" respectively, with the understanding that if either is absent, the grammatical topic and subject may coincide.


title: Japanese grammar

text: As an abstract and rough approximation, the difference between and is a matter of focus: gives focus to the action of the sentence, i.e., to the verb or adjective, whereas gives focus to the subject of the action. However, when first being introduced to the topic and subject markers and , most are told that the difference between the two is simpler. The topic marker, , is used to declare or to make a statement. The subject marker, , is used for new information, or asking for new information.


title: Japanese grammar

text: The use of to introduce a new theme of discourse is directly linked to the notion of grammatical theme. Opinions differ on the structure of discourse theme, though it seems fairly uncontroversial to imagine a first-in-first-out hierarchy of themes that is threaded through the discourse. However, the usage of this understanding of themes can be limiting when speaking of their scope and depth, and the introduction of later themes may cause earlier themes to expire. In these sorts of sentences, the steadfast translation into English uses constructs like "speaking of X" or "on the topic of X", though such translations tend to be bulky as they fail to use the thematic mechanisms of English. For lack of a comprehensive strategy, many teachers of Japanese emphasize the "speaking of X" pattern without sufficient warning.


title: Japanese grammar

text: A common linguistic joke shows the insufficiency of rote translation with the sentence , which per the pattern would translate as "I am an eel." (or "(As of) me is eel"). Yet, in a restaurant this sentence can reasonably be used to say "My order is eel" (or "I would like to order an eel"), with no intended humour. This is because the sentence should be literally read, "As for me, it is an eel," with "it" referring to the speaker's order. The topic of the sentence is clearly not its subject.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Related to the role of in introducing themes is its use in contrasting the current topic and its aspects from other possible topics and their aspects. The suggestive pattern is "X, but…" or "as for X, …".


title: Japanese grammar

text: In practice, the distinction between thematic and contrastive is not that useful. There can be at most one thematic in a sentence, and it has to be the first if one exists, and the remaining s are contrastive. The following sentence illustrates the difference;


title: Japanese grammar

text: The first interpretation is the thematic , treating as the theme of the predicate . That is, if the speaker knows A, B, …, Z, then none of the people who came were A, B, …, Z. The second interpretation is the contrastive . If the likely attendees were A, B, …, Z, and of them the speaker knows P, Q and R, then the sentence says that P, Q and R did not come. The sentence says nothing about A', B', …, Z', all of whom the speaker knows, but none of whom were likely to come. In practice, the first interpretation is the likely one.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Unlike , the subject particle nominates its referent as the sole satisfier of the predicate. This distinction is famously illustrated by the following pair of sentences:


title: Japanese grammar

text: The distinction between each example sentence may be made easier to understand if thought of in terms of the question each statement could answer. The first example sentence could answer the question:


title: Japanese grammar

text: Similarly, in a restaurant, if asked by the waitstaff who has ordered the eels, the customer who ordered it could say:


title: Japanese grammar

text: There are various common expressions that use verbs in English, often transitive verbs, where the action happens to a specific object: "to be able to do something", "to want something", "to like something", "to dislike something". These same ideas are expressed in Japanese using adjectives and intransitive verbs that describe a subject, instead of actions that happen to an object: , , , . The equivalent of the English subject is instead the topic in Japanese and thus marked by , reflecting the topic-prominent nature of Japanese grammar.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Since these constructions in English describe an object, whereas the Japanese equivalents describe a subject marked with , some sources call this usage of the "objective "ga"". Strictly speaking, this label may be misleading, as there is no object in the Japanese constructions.


title: Japanese grammar

text: As an example, the Japanese verb is often glossed as transitive English verb "to understand". However, "wakaru" is an intransitive verb that describes a subject, so a more literal gloss would be "to be understandable".


title: Japanese grammar

text: Because indicates starting point or origin, it has a related use as "because", analogously to English "since" (in the sense of both "from" and "because"):


title: Japanese grammar

text: The particle and a related particle are used to indicate lowest extents: prices, business hours, etc.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Other sentence-final particles add emotional or emphatic impact to the sentence. The particle softens a declarative sentence, similar to English "you know?", "eh?", "I tell you!", "isn't it?", "aren't you?", etc.


title: Japanese grammar

text: A final is used in order to soften insistence, warning or command, which would sound very strong without any final particles.


title: Japanese grammar

text: There are many such emphatic particles; some examples: and usually used by males; a less formal form of ; used like by females (and males in the Kansai region), etc. They are essentially limited to speech or transcribed dialogue.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Compound particles are formed with at least one particle together with other words, including other particles. The commonly seen forms are:


title: Japanese grammar

text: All auxiliary verbs attach to a verbal or adjectival stem form and conjugate as verbs. In modern Japanese there are two distinct classes of auxiliary verbs:


title: Japanese grammar

text: In classical Japanese, which was more heavily agglutinating than modern Japanese, the category of "auxiliary verb" included every verbal ending after the stem form, and most of these endings were themselves inflected. In modern Japanese, however, some of them have stopped being productive. The prime example is the classical auxiliary , whose modern forms and are no longer viewed as inflections of the same suffix, and can take no further affixes.


title: Japanese grammar

text: Much of the agglutinative flavour of Japanese stems from helper auxiliaries, however. The following table contains a small selection of many such auxiliary verbs.


title: Eraserheads

text: Eraserheads (sometimes stylized as ERASƎRHEADS or ƎRASƎRHƎADS) are a Filipino alternative rock band formed in 1989. With a line-up comprising Ely Buendia, Buddy Zabala, Marcus Adoro, and Raimund Marasigan, the band became one of the most influential and successful in the history of Filipino music. Often dubbed as "The Beatles of the Philippines", they are credited for spearheading a second wave of Manila band invasions, paving the way for a host of Filipino alternative rock bands like Rivermaya.


title: Eraserheads

text: The band released several singles, albums, and EPs. They achieved commercial success with their third album "Cutterpillow" (1995), which achieved platinum status several times. They also received the Viewer's Choice Award at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards in New York, the only Filipino artist to have received the award before the conception of the MTV Asia Awards.


title: Eraserheads

text: In 1989, two college bands from the University of the Philippines Diliman were both in search of new members for a new group. Curfew, which consisted of Buddy Zabala on bass, Raimund Marasigan on drums, and Marcus Adoro on guitars met up with Sunday School, which consisted of Ely Buendia on vocals and Raimund Marasigan as session drummer in December of the same year. Ely's first two college bands, Bluidie Tryste and Sunday School, were too unstable, so he posted an audition notice on a university message board. Only Raimund, Buddy, and Marcus showed up at the audition. According to an interview with myx, Raimund said that he first auditioned as a bassist, while Buddy auditioned as the drummer. After deciding that they weren't fit for their respective instruments, they switched.


title: Eraserheads

text: The four formed a new group and called themselves Eraserheads, taking inspiration from the film "Eraserhead" by surrealist director David Lynch. They played mostly covers, doing gigs in schools, and playing at Manila's rock club circuit, achieving little success.


title: Eraserheads

text: The band found that they were not good at playing covers, so they concentrated on writing their own material. Their new, original songs, played live, soon earned them a cult following in the university, which gradually spread outside the campus. One of the songs, a pop song entitled, "Pare Ko", became popular, partly because of lyrics that included a few obscenities.


title: Eraserheads

text: The band recorded a nine-song demo tape in the garage of Marasigan's provincial home (in Candelaria, Quezon) on January 26, 1991. They then shopped the demo cassette around record labels, clubs, and radio stations, hoping to have their songs reach the public. However, they were rejected at every turn, with one recording label deeming that their demo was "not pop enough". In May 1991, a professor-friend teaching Humanities, Robin Rivera, helped them re-record and mix better versions of the demo songs on a four-track DAT recorder. The new demo was named "Pop-U!", titled as an irreverent response to those who turned them down.


title: Eraserheads

text: Meanwhile, Buendia became employed as a student copywriter by BMG Records (Pilipinas) Inc. (now part of Sony BMG Music Entertainment). He worked with BMG during the day and wrote songs with the band during the night. Eventually, the songs of Buendia and the band caught the attention of BMG A&R director Vic Valenciano. Valenciano listened to the songs and then commented that they were very raw technically, but that there was something promising in them. Subsequently, BMG gave Eraserheads' songs a try. In 1992, BMG signed up the band for a three-year record deal.


title: Eraserheads

text: In July 1993, Eraserheads started recording their debut album called "Ultraelectromagneticpop!". The album featured "Pare Ko" (My Friend), "Toyang" and "Tindahan ni Aling Nena" (The Store of Aling Nena), all of which were also present in "Pop-U!". The album also featured a sanitized version of "Pare Ko" called "Walang Hiyang Pare Ko". Later in the same year, BMG initially released 5,000 copies of the album. The album became a smash hit, with the songs "Ligaya", "Pare Ko" and "Toyang" topping the charts that, by the end of the year, BMG sold 300,000 copies, and "Ultraelectromagneticpop!" turned sextuple platinum.


title: Eraserheads

text: The album met some opposition as the Philippine Association of the Record Industry (PARI) attempted to censor "Pare Ko" but without success. The public was said to have found its OPM Fab Four in Eraserheads, opening the second wave of band invasion, dubbed "Eraserheadsmania".


title: Eraserheads

text: In October 1994, Eraserheads released a follow-up album entitled "Circus". The band said that the album aptly described their life since their debut. The album was unpredictable and unconventional compared to the OPM ballads at that time, and established the band members as songwriters and musicians. The songs varied in style and mood, ranging from euphoric and hilarious to tender and somber. In the same year, Eraserheads played during the Miss Universe Pageant which was held in Manila. On November 24, the band held their first major concert, titled "Eraserheads Jamboree," at the Folk Arts Theater (now the Tanghalang Francisco Balagtas) in Malate, Manila.


title: Eraserheads

text: Four of the songs became successive hits: "Kailan" (When), "Magasin" (Magazine), "Alapaap" (High Clouds) and "With a Smile". "Circus" turned gold in just 30 days with 20,000 copies sold. Eventually, it turned quintuple platinum with 200,000 copies sold. But like "ultraelectromagneticpop!", it too had its share of controversy. In August 1995, Senator Tito Sotto, who was involved in an anti-drug campaign at that time, called for a ban on the airplay and sales of "Alapaap" over an alleged promotion of drug abuse in the lyrics of the song. In response, Eraserheads denied the allegation, saying that it was just a misinterpretation, and that the song was the band's "ode to freedom", not an "ode to drug abuse".


title: Eraserheads

text: The group's third studio album "Cutterpillow", was launched an open-air concert attended by fans and followers. With Christmas barely a month over, Eraserheads opened 1996 by making history in the Philippine music scene once more. "Cutterpillow" turned gold, even before it hit the record stores, as a result of the pre-selling promo campaign. Soon, the band shot the music video for the song "Ang Huling El Bimbo" (The Last El Bimbo) from the album.


title: Eraserheads

text: Later that year, the band came up with a conceptual Christmas album "Fruitcake". The album is notable in that it is the first and only album of the band recorded entirely in English. This was shortly followed by a release of a companion storybook of the same title.


title: Eraserheads

text: Also in 1995 the band was given a shot at acting when they co-starred with comedian Joey De Leon of "Eat Bulaga" in the comedy film "Run Barbi Run" produced by GMA Network's Cinemax Studios (now GMA Films).


title: Eraserheads

text: The year 1998 was marked with a series of gigs outside of the Philippines. Eraserheads' first-ever overseas gig was at BMG Records' "Sentosa Pop Festival" in Singapore in March 1997. It was then followed by a mini U.S. tour in May. They played at the Palace in Hollywood on May 2, 1997. Then, four months later in September, they were at the Radio City Music Hall in New York to receive the coveted "Moon Man" trophy for winning the 1997 MTV Asia Viewer's Choice Award, which made Eraserheads the first-ever Filipino artists to win the award.


title: Eraserheads

text: The promotional CD versions of "Milk and Money", "Hard to Believe" and "Andalusian Dog", was recorded in Manila and mixed at the Electric Lady Studios, New York City in September 1997. Electric Lady Studios was built by the rock legend Jimi Hendrix. The tracks soon became a part of their fifth album, "Sticker Happy", released a few days after the MTV Awards. A month later, they were back in Singapore for a series of shows and appearances for MTV Asia.


title: Eraserheads

text: In February 1998, they represented the Philippines at the annual "Asia Live Dream '98" for NHK Broadcasting in Tokyo, Japan. Then in May, they embarked on another U.S. tour, taking them from Oakland to Los Angeles and to New York. The band toured the U.S. under the Happy Box production outfit, which was formed by brothers Haro De Guzman and Levan "Schizo" De Guzman and some other friends.


title: Eraserheads

text: August 1998 saw the release of the album "Aloha Milkyway" in the Asian region, and finally in the Philippines two months later. The album contains chart-topping songs that have been re-mastered, as well as five new songs.


title: Eraserheads

text: In early 1999, they had sold-out shows in Hong Kong, Sydney, and Dubai. Their next album, "Natin99", was released in May.


title: Eraserheads

text: Between May and June 2000, they did another tour of America dubbed, "The Pop Machine Tour – USA2000", playing in locations from New York to Chicago and to California. During their tours, they also had Noel Garcia of The Pin-Ups as an addition to their expanded line-up, who played guitars, keyboards and sometimes drums. After almost two years, the much-awaited studio album, "Carbon Stereoxide", was released in March 2001, featuring the tracks, "Maskara", "Playground", "Hula" and "Palamig".


title: Eraserheads

text: After weeks of speculation, it was confirmed that the main songwriter and lead singer, Ely Buendia, had left the band in mid-March 2002 for "reasons unknown". However, in subsequent interviews, Buendia pointed to business matters as the cause of the band's break-up. In 2021 however, Buendia later revealed that lack of friendship with the three other members was the reason for the band's demise.


title: Eraserheads

text: In PULP Magazine, Buendia's wife and manager, Diane Ventura, claimed that the breakup started with a miscommunication between Buendia and the band's roadie, the result being that Buendia and Ventura turned up late at a mall gig. This upset the roadie who snidely referred to the couple as "unprofessional". Buendia's band colleagues and crew at the gig gave Buendia "a cold shoulder", related Ventura, being under the impression that Buendia had come late deliberately. The next day, Buendia brought the incident to the attention of the band's management boss, Butch Dans, to which he allegedly reverted the blame to the roadie's "unprofessionalism". Dans, however, allegedly chose to consider the roadie's account over Buendia's without much deliberation. Dans allegedly quipped that Buendia and Ventura were "probably too high on drugs" to remember the gig's schedule. Ventura stepped in to dispute the allegation and vehemently denied that she and Buendia were even told of the schedule. The other three Eraserheads also believed the roadie's story, which disturbed Buendia because he felt betrayed by their longstanding friendship. Buendia later announced to his mates through SMS that he was quitting the group.


title: Eraserheads

text: In another interview, Marasigan said he was eating in SM Megamall, a local shopping mall when he heard of the news. He said he was "semi-surprised" and wondered if Zabala already knew about it. Adoro told of the story now famous among Eraserheads fans about Buendia's cryptic text message. He said Buendia stated in the text message that he had already "graduated." Adoro quipped in the same interview that it was natural for Buendia to graduate first, since he was in batch '87 of their college (UP Diliman), while the rest were in batch '88.


title: Eraserheads

text: Zabala confessed in an interview that disbanding had not been that far away from the members' minds. He said that there were many occasions when they could have disbanded but did not.


title: Eraserheads

text: Adoro expressed the belief of some people that the band was getting too old, and that it was "selfish" for the band to continue, likely referring to comments about how it's time for other bands, besides Eraserheads, to shine. The band made it clear, though, that Buendia's departure from the band wasn't in any way violent and that there was no shouting ("sigawan") or any confrontation involved.


title: Eraserheads

text: The three remaining Eraserheads decided to continue. Within a few weeks, the "new" Eheads debuted at Hard Rock Cafe in Makati on April 19, featuring a female singer-guitarist, Kris Gorra-Dancel, from the band, Fatal Posporos. However, after a few months, Adoro had quit the band as well. The remaining members of the Eheads added Diego Mapa and Ebe Dancel to their lineup and renamed their band, "Cambio".


title: Eraserheads

text: Many questioned whether the time was right for a tribute to a group that had just disbanded four years earlier and its former members still active in the music industry. Buendia had mixed feelings about the tribute album, saying that "It’s too early to be taking part in it and I don’t see myself being part of it "kasi" (because) I’m still doing something here...To be part of it is like acknowledging "na tapos na ako" (that I am finished); "isa na lang akong trophy na itatago na" (I'm just a trophy to be shelved). "Siguro kung uugud-ugud na ako" (Maybe when I'm really old), that’s the time I’m gonna look back." Ironically though, he does guest vocals in one of the tracks, "Superproxy 2k6" by the late Master Rapper Francis M.


title: Eraserheads

text: On May 9, 2012, Star Records and Star Cinema released "", a tribute album of their own that accompanies the film "The Reunion".


title: Eraserheads

text: On February 28, 2007, the official launch of the book "Tikman ang Langit: An Anthology on the Eraserheads" (2007) was held at the second level of Powerbooks bookstore in Greenbelt 3, Makati. The launch was accompanied by acoustic performances by Cambio (whose members include Raimund Marasigan, Buddy Zabala and Kris Gorra-Dancel), Markus Highway (Marcus Adoro's band), and Lei Bautista of Prettier Than Pink. The performers covered Eraserheads songs such as "Ligaya" (performed by Lei Bautista), "With a Smile" (also performed by Bautista) and "Magasin" (performed by Cambio with Marcus Adoro). The event was dubbed a mini-reunion of Eraserheads, with Marasigan, Zabala and Adoro performing together for the first time in four years. Buendia did not attend because of a scheduled meeting with his surgeon and the manufacturers of the stents in his heart.


title: Eraserheads

text: "Tikman ang Langit" is a collection of essays about Eraserheads written by fourteen journalists who are mostly fans of the band. The book itself was compiled by Melvin Calimag and Jing Garcia, with a foreword by Eraserheads producer Robin Rivera.


title: Eraserheads

text: Another mini-reunion happened in Saguijo on July 26, 2007. Visitors were startled as the venue's schedule listed "Eraserheads" as a performer along with Rivermaya and Teeth. Jugs Jugueta of Itchyworms and Kris Gorra-Dancel of Cambio played guitars, Zabala on bass, Marasigan on drums, Jett Pangan of The Dawn on vocals, and producer Robin Rivera played drums when Marasigan sang. They called themselves "Eraser X" during that night. Buendia and Adoro knew about the event but did not go there as they had other gigs as well. Pupil was in Hard Rock Cafe Makati, while Adoro had gigs with Markus Highway, although Pupil's bassist Dok Sergio was able to follow and played for Teeth.


title: Eraserheads

text: Adoro, Zabala, and Marasigan did an impromptu number at the Millennia Club called "Marooned", a production of UP bands from past and present. The song "Batch 88" from "Belma en Luis", was one of the songs that were jammed by the trio.


title: Eraserheads

text: In July 2008, it was confirmed by the members that they will be reuniting for a one-off concert to be held on August 30, 2008. Ely Buendia did affirm that the reunion will be for a night's performance only, to be sponsored by a multinational tobacco company. Buendia was quoted saying "I'm not doing this for the money but for the E-heads fans who remain loyal". The sponsors are expecting 35,000 attendees with free tickets distributed to online registrants in early August 2008. This highly awaited one-night concert was initially reported to be planned for staging at the Cultural Center of the Philippines open grounds, or alternatively, the Fort Bonifacio open grounds.


title: Eraserheads

text: On August 22, word had broken out that Philip Morris had pulled out of the concert and that the show had been "canceled".


title: Eraserheads

text: Anti-Tobacco forces, led by Dr. Maricar Limpin, had been active in a campaign to get Eraserheads to renounce the concert and the involvement of the tobacco giant, as Alicia Keys had done in her recent concert in Indonesia. Eraserheads never issued such an announcement. However, it was believed that the pressure exerted by the anti-tobacco forces had caused Philip Morris to end their participation in the concert.


title: Eraserheads

text: On the evening of August 24, Raimund Marasigan issued a response to this news. Posting on the Sandwich and Cambio mailing lists, Marasigan confirmed that while Philip Morris has pulled out of the production, the concert is "most definitely" pushing through on the original date, August 30, 2008, at the Fort Bonifacio open field.


title: Eraserheads

text: Philip Morris would no longer be involved, but the entire production had been turned over to a new producer. Furthermore, while it was previously made known through Philip Morris' announcement that the concert would be free to smokers who signed up through a promotional website known as The Red List at , the change in producers meant that tickets would no longer be free but made available to anyone who purchased them. It was later revealed that Radiohead Media Solutions, Inc., MTV Philippines, Fox International Channels Philippines, Smart Communications, Musiko Records, Greater East Asia Music & Sony BMG Music Entertainment (also known as Sony Music Philippines Inc. & BMG Rights Management) have taken over the event.


title: Eraserheads

text: Eraserheads went onstage for their reunion concert on August 30, 2008, at The Fort Open Field, Taguig. The concert, however, was cut short halfway through a planned 30-song setlist as Buendia was rushed to the Makati Medical Hospital after experiencing chest pains. He was reported to be in stable condition. Buddy Zabala had checked on Buendia in his tent right after they went to their planned 20-minute break and saw that he already was on an oxygen mask with paramedics checking his blood pressure. As he left and came back, paramedics were already taking Buendia on an ambulance. Bandmates Zabala, Marasigan and Adoro further said that they had no idea that Buendia was already having difficulty performing. In the spirit of the reunion, Marasigan, Zabala, and Adoro went to Saguijo after the concert and they continued their sets there. Kris Gorra-Dancel, Ebe Dancel, Aia De Leon, and many other OPM artists joined them as well. During the concert, Jazz Nicolas of the Itchyworms and a close friend of the band, also joined the band and played synths, keyboards, and other instruments.


title: Eraserheads

text: MTV Philippines President Francis Lumen stated: "He had a slight attack because of stress due to the recent passing of his mother (Lisette Buendia), and their sound check which lasted till 3 a.m. today (Saturday)." Buendia's mother died of cardiac arrest on August 28 after recovering from surgery to treat her intestinal cancer. Buendia was transferred to Philippine Heart Center 10:00 p.m. of August 31 after being treated at the critical care area of the Makati Medical Center emergency room. Sony BMG reported Buendia was "stable" after suffering hypokalemia a medical condition in which the concentration of potassium in the blood is low. Buendia had been administered with a potassium intravenous fluid.


title: Eraserheads

text: Buendia, 37, on September 1, 2008, underwent his third heart angioplasty surgery since his January 2007 heart attack. The blood vessel operated upon was "100 percent fully restored," and Buendia was recovering in "stable condition but still under observation." On September 5, 2008, Buendia was discharged from the hospital.


title: Eraserheads

text: On October 25 episode of "Startalk", Buendia said that the reunion concert was supposed to be a "one night only" Eraserheads reunion concert. He also said that there are no talks yet for a continuation of the said concert. However, he stated that he indeed felt "bitin" (literally translated, "not satisfied") with the uncompleted concert and is open to any sequels if it would have the proper production and venue. The other three members of the band, Adoro, Zabala, and Marasigan also expressed similar views in a follow-up interview by "Myx" and "Inquirer".


title: Eraserheads

text: Sony-BMG Philippines, Musiko Records & Greater East Asia Music released the concert movie of the band's reunion concert on November 26, 2008.


title: Eraserheads

text: On the January 10 edition of Supreme, a feature of "The Philippine Star", it was announced that the continuation of their previous reunion concert would happen on March 7, 2009.


title: Eraserheads

text: On January 11, this was confirmed by Marasigan through a message he posted on the Pedicab, Cambio, and Sandwich Mailing Lists.


title: Eraserheads

text: On February 27, the band was awarded as "Myx Magna Award 2009" in the recent 4th Myx Music Awards 2009, achieving their alternative music excellence.


title: Eraserheads

text: The band went on stage for their second reunion concert dubbed as "The Final Set" on March 7, 2009, at the SM Mall of Asia Concert Grounds, Pasay were approximately 100,000 people attended the sold-out concert. The concert went ahead despite the recent passing of their guest performer and friend Francis Magalona who died of acute myelogenous leukemia noon of the previous day.


title: Eraserheads

text: The band continued to perform on sporadic worldwide tours from 2012 to 2014. Eraserheads held another reunion concert in the United States (San Francisco, Los Angeles & New Jersey) and Canada (Toronto) from October 12 to 20, 2012.


title: Eraserheads

text: After their American Tour, the next show for the band was at the du Music Festival. Held at the Dubai Amphitheatre, UAE on April 4, 2013, the festival featured a diverse lineup of music stars including Guns N’ Roses, Train, Natalie Cole, Andrea Bocelli and other local acts. The band also featured a "fifth Eraserhead", Rommel 'Sancho' Sanchez on additional guitar duties. Rommel joined the band, too, during their 2012 North American tour. During the Dubai concert, Ely dedicated the song "Lightyears" to the OFWs.


title: Eraserheads

text: After four months, on August 10, 2013, Eraserheads played a show in another country, Singapore. On December 27, 2013, Eraserheads and Parokya ni Edgar performed at "High Impact Asia" Meydan Racecourse, Al Meydan Road, Nad Al Sheba, Dubai, UAE.


title: Eraserheads

text: Eraserheads performed their first major rock concert at the Eventim Apollo in London, England on April 4, 2014. This was produced by Marvin Guzman and Bernadith Marimon of Finest Workers UK Ltd in the US.


title: Eraserheads

text: In September 2014, the band released two new songs via "Esquire" (Philippines edition), titled "1995" and "Sabado". This was their first release of new material in more than a decade. The magazine cover mimics the Beatles' "Abbey Road" cover, which was shot during the band's tour in London.


title: Eraserheads

text: In June 2016, Eraserheads guested in the rebranding launch event, "A New Day", of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company, along with its subsidiary Smart Communications. The band performed 5 encore songs and 13 main setlist songs.


title: Eraserheads

text: In a tweet posted in January 2018, Buendia said: "Some people will never understand that people who don't get along don't work together." The statement was interpreted by "Philippine Daily Inquirer" and some fans as a response to calls for another reunion concert in the band's home country.


title: Eraserheads

text: A musical adaptation of Eraserheads' discography entitled "Ang Huling El Bimbo" ran from July 20 to September 2, 2018, at Resorts World Manila. A second run for the musical was set for March 2019.


title: Eraserheads

text: The band's first album was set to be rereleased in its first time on vinyl format, in November 2019. In December 2020, the band released a special edition photobook that features photos taken from the Final Set concert in 2009.


title: Eraserheads

text: The three band members, Marasigan, Zabala, and Adoro formed the band Ultracombo in 2019 and performed the songs of the Eraserheads. Adoro left the group on the following months after performing on a couple of gigs.


title: Eraserheads

text: On August 7, 2021, Offshore Music proudly announces the release of the Sabado/1995 EP of the Eraserheads on all digital streaming platforms. The EP was written during their UK Tour back in 2014.


title: Eraserheads

text: On September 17, 2022, all four members of the band posted on their social media an image of the band’s logo, the reversed letter E. Two days later, it was announced that a reunion concert titled "Eraserheads Huling El Bimbo 2022" will be held on December 22, 2022, at SMDC Festival Grounds in Parañaque, Metro Manila.


title: Korean mythology

text: Korean mythology ( ) is the group of myths told by historical and modern Koreans. There are two types: the written, literary mythology in traditional histories, mostly about the founding monarchs of various historical kingdoms, and the much larger and more diverse oral mythology, mostly narratives sung by shamans or priestesses (mansin) in rituals invoking the gods and which are still considered sacred today.


title: Korean mythology

text: The historicized state-foundation myths that represent the bulk of the literary mythology are preserved in Classical Chinese-language works such as "Samguk sagi" and "Samguk yusa". One state's foundation myth, that of Dan'gun, has come to be seen as the founding myth of the whole Korean nation. State-foundation myths are further divided into northern, such as that of the kingdom of Goguryeo and its founder Jumong, where the founder is the son of a celestial male figure and an earthly female figure, and southern, such as that of the kingdom of Silla and its founder Hyeokgeose, where the founder begins as an object descended from the heavens, and himself marries an earthly woman. Other literary myths include the origin myths of family lineages, recorded in genealogies.


title: Korean mythology

text: The narratives of Korean shamanism, the country's indigenous religion, feature a diverse array of both gods and humans. They are recited in ritual contexts both to please the gods and to entertain the human worshippers. As oral literature, the shamanic narrative is regularly revised with each performance, although a certain degree of consistency is required; new narratives have appeared since the 1960s. It has frequently been at odds with the official ideologies of Korean society, and its mythology is often characterized as subversive of traditional norms such as patriarchy.


title: Korean mythology

text: The shamanic mythology is divided into five regional traditions, with each region having original narratives, as well as distinctive versions of pan-Korean narratives. The mythological tradition of southern Jeju Island is especially divergent. The two narratives found in all and all but one region respectively are the "Jeseok bon-puri", featuring a girl who in most versions is impregnated by a supernaturally potent Buddhist priest—who was probably originally a sky god—and gives birth to triplets who themselves become gods; and the "Princess Bari", about a princess who is abandoned by her father for being a girl and who later resurrects her dead parents with the flower of life.


title: Korean mythology

text: Korean mythology comprises two distinct corpora of literature. The first is the literary mythology (Korean: , ) recorded in the traditional Korean histories, such as the thirteenth-century work "Samguk yusa". The myths contained in these volumes are heavily historicized, to the point that it is often difficult to differentiate between historical fact and mythology. The primary literary myths are the state-foundation myths (, ), which recount the story of how a particular kingdom or dynasty was founded, although the category also includes other supernatural stories found in the historical chronicles as well as the origin myths of non-royal lineages.


title: Korean mythology

text: The second corpus is the modern oral mythology (, ), which is "incomparably" richer than the literary tradition in both sheer quantity of material and the diversity of themes and content. The oral mythology primarily consists of the shamanic narratives (, ), which are sung by Korean shamans during "gut", religious ceremonies in which shamans invoke the gods. While also mythological in content, these narratives are very different in function and content from the literary myths. The state-foundation myths are preserved only in writing, deprived of their original ritual context, and have existed in written form for centuries. By contrast, the shamanic narratives are oral literature that is "living mythology," sacred religious truth to the participants of the "gut". They began to be published only in 1930, centuries after the first attestation of the literary myths. Unlike the historicized accounts of the literary myths, shamans's songs feature elements such as the primordial history of the world, the ascent of human individuals to divinity, and divine retribution upon impious mortals.


title: Korean mythology

text: The academic study of Korean mythology began with the literary myths, with historians such as Choe Nam-seon (1890—1957) and Yi Pyong-do (1896—1989) pioneering the first studies of state-foundation myths. But research into the much richer oral corpus was minimal until the 1960s, when the study of the shamanic narratives was spearheaded by scholars such as Kim Yeol-gyu (1932—2013), who applied structuralist, comparative, and myth-ritual approaches to the songs, Hyeon Yong-jun (1931—2016), who published a vast encyclopedia of Jeju ritual and mythology, and Seo Daeseok (born 1942), who established the literary study of the shamanic narratives and whose comprehensive work on the "Jeseok bon-puri" narrative proved a model for future researchers. Recent trends in the study of Korean mythology since the 1990s include a greater focus on comparisons with neighboring mythologies, new research into the hitherto neglected village-shrine myths (, ) that involve the patron god of one specific village, and feminist interpretations.


title: Korean mythology

text: The oral mythology is always religious, and must be distinguished from the broader corpus of Korean folklore, which might be secular. For instance, the "Woncheon'gang bon-puri", a Jeju shamanic narrative about a girl who goes in search for her parents and becomes a goddess, is either descended from or ancestral to a very similar mainland Korean folktale called the Fortune Quest. But because the "Woncheon'gang bon-puri" is a sacred story about a goddess, unlike the Fortune Quest, the former is a myth and the latter is not. Some Korean myths are mythicized folktales, while many Korean folktales are desacralized myths.


title: Korean mythology

text: State-foundation myths narrate the life of the first ruler of a new Korean kingdom or dynasty. They include the founder's supernatural birth, the story of how the founder came to create his kingdom, and his miraculous death or departure. They are often interpreted as euhemerized accounts of actual events that happened during the kingdom's founding.


title: Korean mythology

text: The oldest surviving accounts of the founding myths of the ancient Korean kingdoms—such as Gojoseon, Goguryeo, and Silla—are transcribed in Classical Chinese in Korean texts compiled during or after the twelfth century. Such texts include "Samguk sagi", "Samguk yusa", "Jewang ungi", "Eungje siju", and "Dongguk tonggam". These texts were compiled on the basis of earlier sources that are now lost. Several ancient Chinese texts are also important contemporaneous sources for myths; these include not only the official dynastic histories such as the third-century "Records of the Three Kingdoms" and the sixth-century "Book of Wei", but also more general texts such as the "Lunheng", written in 80 CE. In the case of Goguryeo, there are also five Chinese-language stelae narrating the kingdom's foundation myth from the perspective of the Goguryeo people themselves. The oldest of the five is the Gwanggaeto Stele, erected in 414 CE.


title: Korean mythology

text: The founding myth of the Goryeo dynasty, which ruled Korea from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, is recorded in "Goryeo-sa", the official dynastic history published in the fifteenth century. "Yongbieocheon'ga", a poem published around the same time as "Goryeo-sa" by the succeeding Joseon dynasty, is sometimes seen as the Joseon foundation myth, but it is debated whether "Yongbieocheon'ga" should be seen as having a narrative at all. As the Joseon were the final Korean dynasty, there are no newer founding myths.


title: Korean mythology

text: State foundation myths were once also narrated orally, perhaps by shamans. The poet Yi Gyu-bo (1168—1241) mentions that both written and spoken forms of the Goguryeo foundation myth were known during his lifetime, even though the kingdom itself had fallen more than five centuries earlier. The modern "Jeseok bon-puri" shamanic narrative has many structural parallels to the Goguryeo myth and may be a direct descendant of the ancient tale.


title: Korean mythology

text: The ancient (pre-Goryeo) state-foundation myths are classified into two major types, northern and southern, though both share the central motif of a king associated with the heavens. In the northern kingdoms of Gojoseon, Buyeo, and Goguryeo, the founding monarch is born from the coupling of a celestial male figure and an earthly woman. In the southern kingdoms of Silla and Geumgwan Gaya, the king is generated from a physical object that descends from heaven, and then marries an earthly woman himself. In the northern myths, the demigod king succeeds his heavenly father or creates a new kingdom himself. In the south, the celestial being is crowned by the consensus of local chieftains.


title: Korean mythology

text: The foundation myth of Gojoseon, the earliest Korean kingdom, is first recorded in two nearly contemporaneous works: "Samguk yusa", a history compiled by the Buddhist monk Iryeon around the late 1270s, and "Jewang ungi", a Chinese-language epic poem written in 1287.


title: Korean mythology

text: Iryeon's account is as follows. Hwanung, a younger son of the sky god Hwanin (who the monk identifies with the Buddhist god Indra), desires to rule the human world. Hwanin sees that his son could "broadly benefit the human world," and gives him three unspecified treasures to take with him to earth. Hwanung descends beneath a sacred tree on Mount Taebaek (), where he and his three thousand followers found the "Sacred City." With the gods of wind, rain, and cloud, Hwanin supervises various human affairs.


title: Korean mythology

text: A bear and a tiger then ask that Hwanung turn them into humans. The god gives the animals twenty pieces of garlic and a clump of sacred mugwort, and tells them that they will become humans if they eat them and do not see sunlight for a hundred days. The two animals then fast, and the bear becomes a woman on the twenty-first day. The tiger fails to fast and remains an animal. The bear-turned-woman prays for a child at the sacred tree, and Hwanung grants her wish by becoming a human to marry her. She gives birth to a boy named Dan'gun Wanggeom, who founds the kingdom of Gojoseon at the site of Pyongyang. Dan'gun rules for fifteen centuries, then departs from the kingdom when the Chinese King Wu of Zhou sends Jizi to rule over Korea. The king ultimately becomes a mountain god.


title: Korean mythology

text: The Dan'gun myth is of the northern type, featuring the founder's birth from a celestial father (Hwanung) and an earthly mother (the bear). It is often interpreted as a mythicized account of interactions between three clans whose totemic symbols or mythological ancestors were a sky god, a bear, and a tiger respectively. The tiger-associated clan was somehow eliminated, but the bear clan joined the dominant sky god clan in the establishment of the Gojoseon polity. Folklorist James H. Grayson draws connections to the Japanese foundation myth. Ninigi-no-Mikoto descends to earth with three treasures as well, and the first Japanese emperor Jinmu is a younger son like Hwanung. Grayson also notes Siberian myths where a bear is the mother of a tribal ancestor.


title: Korean mythology

text: Dan'gun appears to have been worshipped only locally in the Pyongyang area until the thirteenth century, when intellectuals attempted to bolster the legitimacy of the Korean state, then imperiled by Mongol invasion and domination, by establishing him as the ancestor of all Korean polities. By the twentieth century he had become accepted as the mythical founder of the Korean nation and plays an important role in the ideologies of both North and South Korea.


title: Korean mythology

text: The foundation myth of the northern kingdom of Goguryeo is recorded in detail in both the "Samguk sagi", the oldest surviving work of Korean history, compiled in 1145, and the "Dongmyeongwang-pyeon", a Chinese-language epic poem written by the poet Yi Gyu-bo in 1193. Yi's work is much longer and more detailed than the "Samguk sagi", but much of this may be due to the poet's own literary embellishment. The "Dongmyeongwang-pyeon" myth is summarized below.


title: Korean mythology

text: Haeburu, ruler of the kingdom of Buyeo, is childless. One day, he finds a boy in the shape of a golden frog (Korean pronunciation of Classical Chinese: ) and adopts him as his son. Some time later, Haeburu moves his court towards the Sea of Japan, where he founds the kingdom of Eastern Buyeo (Dong-Buyeo).


title: Korean mythology

text: Haemosu, son of the sky god, descends to Haeburu's former capital in 59 BCE on a chariot steered by five dragons and founds a new kingdom there. One day, Haemosu encounters the three beautiful daughters of the god of the Yalu River and abducts Yuhwa, the oldest. The outraged river god challenges him to a shapeshifting duel but is bested. The river god concedes his defeat and allows Haemosu to marry Yuhwa, but after the marriage the former returns to the heavens without his wife.


title: Korean mythology

text: The river god sends Yuhwa into exile. She is captured by a fisherman and brought to Geumwa the frog-king, who has succeeded his adopted father in Eastern Buyeo. He keeps her in an annex of the palace. One day, sunlight falls on Yuhwa from the heavens, impregnating her. She gives birth to an egg from her left armpit, and a boy hatches from the egg. The boy is supernaturally potent, including shooting down flies with a bow—for which he is named Jumong, "good archer." The king makes Jumong the stable-keeper, which offends him enough that he decides to found his own kingdom. With three companions, Jumong flees south, leaving his mother and wife behind. When they find an unfordable river, Jumong proclaims his divine descent, and the fish and turtles of the river allow them to cross on their backs. Jumong founds the kingdom of Goguryeo in 37 BCE. He is opposed by an established local chieftain named Songyang. After a series of confrontations between the two, Songyang ultimately surrenders when Jumong causes a great flood in his country.


title: Korean mythology

text: Yuri, Jumong's son by his wife he has left behind in Eastern Buyeo, asks his mother who his father is. When she tells him that he does not have any one father, he attempts to kill himself, forcing her to reveal the truth. After solving a riddle his father has left, Yuri finds his father's token, a half of a sword. He goes to Goguryeo and meets Jumong. Yuri and Jumong match their halves of the sword, and the sword becomes one while oozing blood. When Jumong asks his son to show his power, the boy rides atop sunlight. Jumong then makes Yuri his heir. In 19 BCE, the king ascends into heaven and does not return. Yuri holds a funeral for his father, using the king's whip in place of his missing body, and becomes Goguryeo's second king.