And in the Right Corner, Rikidozan, Representing ...

Rikidozan was within striking distance of the top three ranks in all of sumo—sekiwake (junior champion), ozeki (champion), and yokozuna (grand champion)—ranks which were awarded by the Japan Sumo Association, the supreme governing body of the sport. But then Japan surrendered and the sport of the Emperor went into a tailspin....

As he started to feel the financial strain from his sport not turning a profit, Riki quit sumo and took a job in construction. His new employer was a tattooed yakuza gambler from the Sumiyoshi gang and sumo fan named Shinsaku Nita, who had special connection inside the [MacArthur's] GHQ. Under Nita, Riki supervised construction projects at U.S. military camps, studied English in his spare time, and spent his evenings carousing on the Ginza, where one night he participated in a losing cabaret brawl that dramatically changed his life. His victorious opponent was a visiting Japanese-American Olympic weight lifting medalist and All-Hawaiian Body Building champion named Harold Sakata, who would later gain fame playing the steel-top-hat-flinging villain Oddjob in the James Bond movie Goldfinger.

In the wake of the altercation, the two men became friends and Sakata introduced Riki to a group of American professional wrestlers who were in Japan to promote growth of their "sport" in Japan. One thing led to another, and soon Rikidozan was training and wrestling in the States, where he proved to be more successful than anyone anticipated. Too unsophisticated to do anything more than fight all out, he combined karate chop attack with sumo thrusting techniques to compile a 295-5 record in a year's worth of competition. Boxing Magazine ranked him in its annual list of the top ten pro wrestlers in the world.

Before departing for the United States in February 1952, Rikidozan had acquired Japanese citizenship and legally changed his name to Mitsuhiro Momota [from Kim Sin Rak]. The government family register now listed the Momotas of Nagasaki as his lawful parents and Omura his officially recognized birthplace. The move was necessary, in part, because his real country of birth was now known as the Communist People's Republic of North Korea [sic] and was an avowed enemy of the United States. The only way he could get a visa to the United States was to have a Japanese passport. The only way he could get either one was to bury any trace of his true identity. But, as he discovered while wrestling in Honolulu, his first stop, there were other reasons to keep up the charade.

Billed as the "Japanese Tiger," he found his every move cheered by an audience of almost exclusively Japanese-Americans, waving Rising Run flags and lustily yelling banzai.... For the man known as "Garlic Breath," that must have indeed been hard to swallow. As were the taunts about Pearl harbor when he wrestled on the mainland, where the matches were racially charged in reverse. There, he found himself appearing alongside assorted Asians passing themselves off as Japanese with names like "Tojo" or "Mr. Moto," wearing goatees and mustaches and exotic "Oriental" garb of red silk robes with high getas.... Demeaning as it may have been, the fans loved it and the economic lessons were obvious.

Thus, at the end of his U.S. hegira, Rikidozan returned to Japan and solicited support from Nita and others, including the ubiquitous [ultranationalist and head of the Japan Pro Wrestling Association Yoshio] Kodama, and launched his storybook career. It only worked, as Rikidozan well knew, because everyone viewed him as "Japanese."...

The great Rikidozan deception reached its apogee in January 1963, when Rikidozan was sent to South Korea on a goodwill tour at the request of Kodama and the LDP to help break the ice that still existed between the ROK and Japan and thereby pave the way for the normalization treaty that so many interested parties wanted.

Despite intense anti-Japanese feelings in the ROK, where bitter memories of the long, brutal Japanese occupation and wartime atrocities remained, Rikidozan was a huge hero there. In fact, many Koreans had naturally assumed he was one of them because the Chinese ideographs for Rikidozan [力道山], although pronounced differently, represented the name of a mountain in Korea—a fact most people in Japan remained blissfully unaware of. (The name was subtle way by which Rikidozan could hang onto his identity.)

SOURCE: Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan, by Robert Whiting (Vintage, 2000), pp. 103-106

BTW, the names in this book are handled very sloppily. The index lists "Niita, Shinsaku, 104, 105" for what first appears as "Shinsasku Nita" on 104, and then "Nita" on 105 (and should have been "Shinsaku Nitta" and then "Nitta"). The index lists a trading company name as "Nishho Iwai, 182" for what first appears as "Nishho Iwai" on 182, then correctly as "Nissho Iwai" later in the same paragraph! In contrast, Jesse Kuhaulua's name is consistently misspelled both on p. 212 and in the index as Jesse Kualahula. I'm sure there are many more such errors in my copy, the 5th reprint of a new paperback edition published in 2000. I suppose Random House feels it's good enough for the work of a journalist like Whiting.

UPDATE: Yikes. It gets worse. The index shows "Pyonyang, 107, 295" for what appears once on 107 as "Pyonyang" (where Rikidozan had an elder brother living at one time) and then appears once as "Pyonyang" at the top of 295, followed immediately by a coreferential "Pyongyang" in four successive sentences. The latter placename was apparently too obscure to rate its own spot in the index.

Gangster Democracy in Postwar Japan

During World War II, gangster-owned construction firms under government contract built and repaired airfields, dug tunnels, and constructed subterranean factories, earning a nice profit while kicking back a healthy percentage to their contractors. As the strain of a losing war intensified, gangsters helped run the POW camps and supervised imported Korean slave labor in domestic coal mines. The Tokyo Assembly even allowed tekiya [peddler, racketeer] bosses to take over as municipal tax agents, granting them legal authority to control pricing and distribution as well as the power to punish disobedience. The Metropolitan Police Board, getting into the spirit of the times, forced all stall keepers to join a tradesmen's union that was run by the mob.

At war's end, millions of demobilized soldiers, war widows, and other displaced persons began to make their way back into the cities and, as virtually all moral and government restraints subsequently collapsed, the mob strengthened its grip on the municipal economy. Open-air markets sprang into operation at every commuter line train station almost before the arriving Americans had a chance to unpack their duffel bags. The largest were at the major hubs on the Yamate Line that circled the city—Ueno, Tokyo, Shimbashi, Shibuya and Shinjuku. Within weeks, there would be an astonishing 45,000 stalls in the city, many of them under the control of the leathery-faced Ozu-gumi boss Kinosuke Ozu, and they provided jobs for half a million people.

The outdoor black markets were, incidentally, Japan's first experiment in democracy. Japanese society had for hundreds of years been divided into castes, socially and legally. The nobility and landed aristocracy were at the top; below them, the samurai warriors, farmers, townsmen, and eta (outcasts), in descending order. Status was rigidly fixed and every Japanese knew his proper rank and position in the community at large.

Centuries of feudal serfdom and national isolation under the Tokugawa Shogunate were followed by the domineering rule of military, bureaucratic, and financial cliques, starting in 1868 with the Meiji Revolution, which restored the emperor to the throne. In all, it had served to create a highly restrictive society where the arrogance of superiors was as ingrained as their subordinates' fawning obeisance.

In the Ozu and other markets, however, social rank no longer mattered. No questions were asked of applicants about their status, family origin, educational background, or nationality. Everyone was welcome, from high-ranking military officers to lowly privates, landed nobles to tenant farmers, college professors to unemployed gamblers. They all started out equally, spreading a mat on the street or setting up shop on top of a box to sell their goods. They all wore the same ragged clothes, lived in similar jury-rigged barracks of corrugated tin, and bathed out of the same oil drums. As journalist Kenji Ino later wrote, "For a feudal country like Japan which had a long history of class and ethnic discrimination, this was indeed an unprecedented event."

SOURCE: Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan, by Robert Whiting (Vintage, 2000), pp. 10-11

Wordcatcher Tales: Akagane, Shinsui, Kougai

Two Saturdays ago, the Outliers rode the full length of the Watarase Ravine/Valley Railway (渡良瀬渓谷鉄道) in order to hike to the headwaters of the Watarase River (渡良瀬川), which runs right past our apartment in Ashikaga on its way to join the Tone River (利根川) and eventually the Edo River (江戸川) above Tokyo. We had long been impressed by the combination of public parks, levees, and other flood control measures along the river, and were aware of the devastating floods caused by Typhoon Catherine in 1947 (followed by Ion in 1948 and Kitty in 1949). But we were blissfully unaware of the river's earlier, manmade disasters.

Our destination was the Akagane Water Control Park (銅親水公園 Akagane Shinsui Kouen)—billed as Japan's "Grand Canyon"—about a one-hour walk from the end of the tracks, which start from Kiryuu (桐生 < kiri 'paulownia' + u birth'?) along the eastern edge of Gunma Prefecture, and end at Matou (間藤 'room wisteria'?) in the Ashio (足尾 'leg tail') region of what was once Tochigi Prefecture's wild west (its Butte, Montana, in fact), but has just been incorporated into Nikko City, renowned for its tourist industry, not for its copper mines.

First the tale of the words, then the tale of the tailings.

銅 akagane (lit. 'red metal') 'copper, bronze' is more commonly read in its Sino-Japanese pronunciation dou, as in 銅山 douzan 'copper lode (= mountain)', 銅線 dousen 'copper wire', or 銅器時代 doukijidai 'Bronze (Utensil) Age'. Nevertheless, tourist maps almost always either spell the name in hiragana or gloss the Chinese character with its native Japanese reading—in both cases: あかがね.

親水 shinsui (lit. 'parent water') would seem a pretty good match for English 'headwaters', but I couldn't find the compound in my New Nelson kanji dictionary. Worse yet, my Canon Wordtank Daijirin defines it as 'affinity (親和性 shinwasei) or intimacy (親しみ shitashimi) with water', but then offers the prosaic 疎水 sosui 'drainage canal' as an alternate. A Japanese ecology word site gives a whole plethora of usage ranging from 'water encounter' to 'drainage ditch' to 'water projects'.

公害 kougai (lit. 'public damage') 'industrial pollution' is a more historically justifiable head noun for this compound than 公園 kouen 'public park'.

Kichiro Shoji and Masuro Sugai, two researchers at UN University in Japan, have published a detailed account of the rise and fall of the Ashio Copper Mine, parts of which are excerpted below to mark the 50th anniversary of the official recognition of Minamata mercury-poisoning disease, Japan's worst case of postwar 公害.

In 1868, the newly established Meiji government of Japan made the modernization of the country by increasing military strength and expanding industrial production its first national priority. The government established a Department of Industry in 1870 and came to control all industries other than the military. On the basis of land taxes, this new department took the initiative in starting new industries, and looking after private enterprise until the department was disbanded in 1885. The work that the department had done was to introduce new technologies and machines from the advanced capitalist countries and also to invite technicians to Japan to provide new industrial production models and technologies.

Related industrial laws were established and, by 1877, mining, financed by private capital, had grown rapidly. Copper was especially important for the new government, because its exports brought in much-needed foreign money. The demand for copper overseas supported the copper industry in Japan. As table 1.1 indicates, most of the copper produced in Japan was exported. Copper earned 9.5 per cent of Japan's export earnings in 1890 and through this Japan became established as a world-level copper producer. The earnings were used to purchase mining equipment, military weapons, and other industrial machinery. Copper played an important role in the development of Japan's capitalism, and the main domestic copper producer was the Ashio copper mine.

The Ashio copper mine had been the property of the Tokugawa shogunate, and as such had produced 1,500 tons annually, which was the maximum possible output in the 1600s. However, this high output level had been dropping gradually. The mine was temporarily closed in 1800, but in 1871 it became a private operation, and finally in 1877 it came to be owned by Ichibei Furukawa. In 1881 a new but small lode of ore was discovered, followed by a much larger one in 1884, and, as indicated in table 1.2, copper production rose very rapidly as a result of these discoveries. In 1884, the production stood at 2,286 tons per year. Thus Ashio became the mine with the highest output in Japan, producing 68 per cent of the total output of Furukawa mines and 26 per cent of Japan's production....

As indicated in figure 1.1, the discovery of the large copper ore lode caused all the trees surrounding it to die by the end of 1884. In August 1885. the use of a rock-crushing machine and a steam-operated pump in the Ani mine greatly increased production but led to massive fish kills in the Watarase River. In August 1890, when all modern technology systems had been installed, [a] flood occurred in the Watarase river basin, and 1,600 hectares of farmland and 28 towns and villages in Tochigi and Gunma prefectures were heavily damaged by the floodwater, which contained poisons from the Ashio mine.

In October 1890, Chugo Hayakawa led a movement against the mine and asked the prefectural hospital to do some tests for water-borne poisons. In December, the residents of Azuma Village, Tochigi Prefecture, appealed to the governor of the prefecture to call a halt to the mining operations at Ashio. This was the first of such appeals and of the movements against Ashio....

Essential to waging the Sino-Japanese War was an increase in iron and steel production. However, Japan's smelting techniques were still immature. From 1896 to 1900, Japan could meet only about 50 per cent of its demand for iron, and one-twentieth of that for steel. As a result, it was absolutely essential that Japan import iron and steel. In this context, the importation of refining equipment, weapons, and other steel-fabricating machinery was greatly increased, and the foreign money earned by the copper-mine output played an important role in paying for these foreign goods....

In September 1896 a massive flood, larger than the one visited on the area in July of the same year, was caused by torrential rains, and the Watarase, the Tone, and the Edo overflowed their banks. One large city, five prefectures, twelve provinces, and 136 towns and villages over a total area of 46,723 hectares were damaged by the water-borne mine poisons. The loss sustained was about 23 million yen, which was eight times the annual income of the Ashio copper mine.

Because of the seriousness of the mine-related damage to the natural environment, [Tochigi Prefecture Diet member] Shozo Tanaka set up a mining damage office in the Unryu Temple of Watarase Village in Gunma Prefecture, and with other volunteers began to take action to end operations at the mine. He started by organizing people in the areas most heavily destroyed, suggesting to them that the farmlands in the flooded areas be exempted from national taxes.

This was the beginning of one of Japan's first mass-based citizens' movements....

The flood of 1898 did even worse damage to the surrounding areas because massive amounts of slag had been released from the sedimentation pond built by the mining company. In extreme anger and frustration, over 11,001) farmers started out for Tokyo 26 September for the third mass demonstration, with demands for reinforcement of the river banks, for the sparing of the poisoned areas from further insult and for a policy of support for the bankrupt local governments. They were confronted on the way by the police and military forces. However, some 2,500 succeeded in getting to Hogima Village, Minami Adachi Province, Tokyo.

Although Shozo Tanaka had been sick at the time, he went to meet the farmers and advised them to leave 50 representatives with him and go back to their villages. Tanaka pledged that if their demands were not met, he would fight to the death for their cause. In this manner Tanaka became the leader of the struggle against the copper mine and began to organize the farmers....

The Mainichi shimbun published a series of articles, written by women journalists, on the miseries brought about by the copper-mine poisonings. Related news articles on the struggles of the people were also printed, and the editorials took up the cause. On 30 November, Tameko Furukawa, the wife of Ichibei Furukawa, took her own life by drowning under the Kanda Bridge.

On the morning of 10 December 1901, when, after presiding at the opening of the sixteenth National Diet Upper House session, Emperor Meiji was going to his carriage, Tanaka came up to him, a written appeal in hand, shouting to him. By this action Tanaka had planned to bring the scandal of the mine poisonings into public view, hoping that one of the imperial guards would either kill or injure him. But in fact, the sergeant-at-arms fell from his horse, which had reared up in surprise, and Tanaka also stumbled and fell on his face, so he was neither killed nor injured. He was arrested on the spot and taken into custody by the police....

Tanaka's appeal did not work as planned. but it astounded the public at large. Many people from different walks of life began to involve themselves in attempts to improve the terrible situation caused by the mine poisonings. On 27 December 1901, a trip to the poisoned areas was planned and about 800 students from 40 colleges, universities, and high schools joined it. They were deeply moved by the damage done to the environment, and so they organized movements designed to spread the news about the grim reality of the destruction and the need to help the farmers. This was the first of the numerous student movements that were to come.

Tomorrow Later, we'll continue with more on the environmental effects of copper-mining.

Who Are the Best Custodians of Shinto?

A major problem for Shinto today is that [existential and essentialist] forms of spirituality exist alongside each other without much clarity about their precise relation. It is as if there were two separate spiritual traditions known as Shinto. One Shinto has the existential emphasis and is functional, either consciously or subconsciously, in the daily lives of almost all Japanese. The other Shinto is driven by essentialist assumptions and is much more limited in its following. Yet whenever Shinto is conceived as an organized spiritual tradition, its essentialist forms come to the fore because this is the spirituality connected with most major Shinto institutions. After all, who can speak for existential Shinto? ...

If a Japanese really wants to deepen her or his existential Shinto spirituality, therefore, the place to go may not be the bookstore. The true experts in existential Shinto spirituality are not the scholars and priests who write books but Mom and Pop, Grandma and Grandpa. They carry the heritage of Shinto praxis in its existential form. Of course, in answer to many questions, especially those about the "real meaning" of this ritual behavior or that Shinto term, their answers may often be "I don't know." But this may be the best answer. It tells us three things. First, it is sincere: the true answer is in the mindful heart, not the analytic mind. The elders may not be able to explain it, but perhaps they express it in how they think, act, and feel. Sometimes a poet can express or evoke what the philosopher can never quite articulate in rational analysis. The same may be true of the existentially spiritual person. Second, their answer implies that the question asked has not come up in their own experience of "feeling Shinto" and "being Shinto" in an existential way. The question may be legitimate, but this does not mean its answer is crucial to spiritual growth. And third, some kinds of questioning are not just beside the point but actually counterproductive. This was [Motoori] Norinaga's theme in critiquing what he called the "Chinese mentality." If he were alive today, he might have called it the "scientific" or "scholarly" mentality: any approach that thinks "I don't know" can only be the beginning, not the appropriate end, of an investigation. The scientist's "I don't know" triggers a research grant proposal. For the professor to say "I don't know" is a confession, not a profession. This mentality, as Norinaga argued, cannot accept the wondrous, the marvelous, and the awesome for being just what they are. Because this mentality cannot accept such phenomena at face value, it never really comes face-to-face with the wondrous awe. Such experiences get peripheralized, filed away as something odd to talk about at the tavern on a cold winter night with friends, but not to be taken seriously in one's "real life."

Having such existential Shinto sensibilities, many Japanese today are wary of politicians and Shinto leaders who display a normative, prescriptive, or essentialist bias. Their essentialist Shinto spirituality is often so thoroughly interwoven with a nationalist, right-wing political agenda that many Japanese hold them in disdain for "trying to refight the war." They hope that as the decades pass, the old essentialist Shinto of the foreign war years will die out as the people of that generation pass away. As the Yasukuni controversy indicates, however, this does not seem to be happening.

SOURCE: Shinto: The Way Home, by Thomas P. Kasulis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 148-151

By coincidence, Japundit notes a recent Mainichi Shimbun report of at least one prominent Shinto priest with his heart in the right place.

The late Fujimaro Tsukuba, who served as the head priest at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine until 1978, deliberately avoided the enshrinement of class-A war criminals, sources close to him have revealed.

Tsukuba had expressed concern that enshrinement of the criminals of World War II could hinder visits by emperors, which were still continuing at the time. The former priest's stance was revealed by a former public relations official at the shrine and others close to him.

Tsukuba died in March 1978, and the class-A war criminals were enshrined at Yasukuni soon afterwards....

Visits by Emperor Showa to the shrine were performed eight times since 1945, but they stopped from 1975. It has been suggested in some circles that this change was due to the enshrinement of the class-A war criminals.

Kasulis on How Not to Translate Kokutai

[State-sponsored] Shrine Shinto affirmed a national quintessence for the Japanese—a spiritual essence even more fundamental than any "religion." To criticize this essence was itself proof that one was not of the "body [or essence] of our (Japanese) state," the literal meaning of kokutai　[国体]. Originally emphasized by the Mito school thinkers, kokutai became a favored term among political thinkers during the foreign war years. The term referred ... to both the empire and the emperor. Loyalty to the emperor was not a choice but a recognition and expression of one's own Japaneseness....

It has become commonplace, incidentally, to translate kokutai into English as "national polity," but this rendering is linguistically and philosophically inappropriate. Linguistically one can say in English that virtually every civilized country has some kind of "national polity," but in Japanese kokutai applies specifically to the purportedly unique form of Japan's political/spiritual/imperial structure. In fact, technically speaking, kokutai is not a political structure at all but a metaphysical ideology legitimating a certain form of polity. Furthermore, it is linguistically peculiar to translate kokutai as "polity" when the word "polity" is not translated into Japanese as kokutai unless it is applying specifically and uniquely to Japan. And philosophically there is the history of the idea of polity itself in the West going back through medieval thought to the ancient Greeks. In this intellectual development, the Western assumption has usually been that people or societies fashion their particular polity. The Japanese idea, by contrast, is that the organization is a sacred unit going back to the time of creation, a unit that resonates affectively, intellectually, and uniquely in the soul of every Japanese. In this respect, to translate kokutai simply as "national polity" is to despiritualize, obscure, and defang the distinctive force of the Japanese term.

SOURCE: Shinto: The Way Home, by Thomas P. Kasulis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 139-140

I've wondered about this from the time I took my first Japanese history class in high school. I don't think I've ever heard the term "polity" used except in the Japanese context.

Moldova's Drastic Population Drop

Since it became independent in 1989, Moldova's population has dropped by about one quarter, due mostly to mass emigration, according to a report by Randy McDonald on demography.matters.blog. Why might this concern anyone outside Moldova?

Moldovan emigration is important on its own terms, not only for the effects of this massive emigration on Moldova but for the effect that it has on receiving countries. Moldova represents a sure pool of potential migrants for central European countries suffering population decline; already, something like one percent of the population of Romanian citizens are Moldovans. Moldova also should be studied as a prototype for rapid population decline in peripheral states; the Moldovan example has been echoed in the independent South Caucasus, arguably also in an East Germany where the population has shrunk by a quarter since reunification. Moldova's example demonstrates that, when economic conditions become sufficiently bad and/or when the benefits accuring to emigrants become sufficiently great, regional and national populations can contract at speeds more reminiscent of wartime depopulation than anything else. Where Moldova goes now, perhaps any number of relatively small and relatively impoverished states (Serbia, Paraguay, Cuba, Laos, Lesotho) in the future, perhaps--who knows?--even much larger countries.

Nyazi v. Gatsby in Tehran

"This book preaches illicit relations between a man and woman. First we have Tom and his mistress, the scene in her apartment—even the narrator, Nick, is implicated. He doesn't like their lies, but he has no objections to their fornicating and sitting on each other's laps, and, and, those parties at Gatsby's ... remember, ladies and gentlemen, this Gatsby is the hero of the book—and who is he? He is a charlatan, he is an adulterer, he is a liar ... this is a man Nick celebrates and feels sorry for, this man, this destroyer of homes!" Mr. Nyazi was clearly agitated as he conjured the fornicators, liars and adulterers roaming freely in Fitzgerald's luminous world, immune from his wrath and from prosecution. "The only sympathetic person here is the cuckolded husband, Mr. Wilson," Mr. Nyazi boomed. "When he kills Gatsby, it is the hand of God. He is the only victim. He is the genuine symbol of the oppressed, in the land of, of, of the Great Satan!" ...

"Gatsby is dishonest," he cried out, his voice now shrill. "He earns his money by illegal means and tries to buy the love of a married woman. This book is supposed to be about the American dream, but what sort of dream is this? Does the author mean to suggest that we should all be adulterers and bandits? Americans are decadent and in decline because this is their dream. They are going down! This is the last hiccup of a dead culture!" he concluded triumphantly.

SOURCE: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi (Random House, 2004), pp. 126-127

Sam Harris on Religious Moderates

While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God's law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know that he wants from us—religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.

SOURCE: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris (Free Press, 2005), pp. 20-21. The beginning of of chapter 1, Reason in Exile, is available online.

Religious Trends in Tokugawa Japan

Religion was a particularly thorny issue that Ieyasu's two military predecessors, Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, had already begun to address. Collectively the policies of the three successive generalissimos led to the following situation. First, the upstart religion from the West, Christianity, was banned. The small numbers of Christians who refused to renounce their faith had to go underground. The squelching of the Christian movement in Japan was the precursor of closing Japan off from almost all contact with the outside world. This policy was initiated in 1639 and officially continued through 1854. Second, the Tendai Buddhist main temple on Kyoto's Mount Hiei had grown to be the most powerful religious institution in Japan. In 1571 Nobunaga burned down the complex, destroying its three thousand buildings and its army of ten thousand warrior monks. Third, the most populist Buddhist religion of the time, the Shin Buddhist Honganji sect, had assembled a huge peasant army of its own that Nobunaga defeated in 1580. The sect then underwent a schism in 1603, breaking into Eastern and Western Honganji, thereby dividing the unity of this Buddhist group. And fourth, under Ieyasu the shogunate began to monitor the philosophical-religious schools of scholars, hoping to maintain at least some control over new developments and ideologies. Accompanying these four political events were intellectual circumstances equally important to the future of Shinto.

The key factors of intellectual change came to a head in the late sixteenth century when something philosophically new took hold in Japan. Throughout Japanese history there had been periods when Japanese groups (mainly religious or diplomatic) made the dangerous journey across the stormy Sea of Japan to the mainland, bringing back home cultural innovations and artifacts. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries especially, groups of Japanese Buddhist monks, mainly from the Zen tradition, went to the mainland to study. When they returned, they brought with them not only further materials related to Buddhism but also books from other philosophical traditions popular in China at the time. For our present concerns, the most significant items in their cargo were works of Chinese Neo-Confucianism. Although Zen Buddhist monastic scholars were studying the texts and introducing them to Japan, the books contained a philosophical system that would ultimately undermine the intellectual hegemony of Buddhism in the country. Neo-Confucianism was a sophisticated syncretistic philosophical movement in China that enriched traditional Confucian teachings with ideas from Buddhism and Daoism. By incorporating key ideas from these traditions into its own, Neo-Confucianism had disarmed the most powerful Buddhist and Daoist criticisms against Confucianism. As a result, from about the twelfth century up to the early twentieth century, Neo-Confucian philosophy (in various forms) generally dominated the Chinese intellectual scene.

These Neo-Confucian arguments against Buddhism entered Japan just before Tokugawa stability and peace brought rapid urbanization. The growth of city life supported schools of learning outside the traditional Buddhist temple complexes that had trained monk-scholars. The samurai (who needed job retraining to find a useful place in the peacetime society of the Tokugawa bureaucracy) and the aspiring merchant class (who needed to acquire culture fast) frequented such urban schools. Furthermore, the increasingly literate urbanites created a demand for widely distributed, printed publications. By the late seventeenth century, literary culture, including philosophy, was thriving in the cities.

SOURCE: Shinto: The Way Home, by Thomas P. Kasulis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 106-107

Imelda's Still Imelda, 20 Years Later

Sunday's Japan Times carries an exclusive profile by David McNeill of Imelda Marcos, who seems to have changed very little since she and her husband were ousted from power twenty years ago.

By the time the brilliant ex-lawyer and his beauty-queen wife boarded a U.S. helicopter on Feb. 25, 1986, they had become synonymous with the corruption and cronyism that made the Philippines one of the poorest nations on the planet. To his eternal credit, Marcos ordered his army not to fire on Manila crowds before he left, but then he expected to be back within days. Instead, he was to die in Hawaii three years later, leaving Imelda to carry on the Marcos legacy.

Today, astonishingly, Imelda is back in Manila and again a force in Philippine politics. Many believe the beautiful young country girl who caught the eye of the ambitious Marcos and helped him win a million votes in 1965 was the real power behind the throne by the end of their reign, when Ferdinand was desperately ill. Her political survival "makes a mockery" of the 1986 revolution, according to one of her biographers.

Now living on the 34th-floor suite in one of Manila's most exclusive apartment blocks, the former first lady seldom gives interviews because she is invariably skewered by incredulous journalists when she brandishes her innocence and new poverty. She was, after all, once one of the 10 richest women in the world....

When Ferdinand died in 1989, aged 72, Imelda had to fight U.S. federal grand jury charges alone: principally that the couple stole over $200 million from the Philippine treasury and spent it on a real-estate spree in New York. After enjoying the backing of five U.S. presidents, and the close friendship of Ronald and Nancy Reagan (with whom she shared an interest in astrology), the shock of America turning on her was profound.

"They did this to me when I was alone, widowed and orphaned," she says, on the verge of tears. "Even the Bible says there are special places reserved in hell for those who persecute widows and orphans. And it was not individuals who did me in, it was governments and superpowers."

Though acquitted, few expected Imelda to survive the humiliation of being ditched by the White House, lampooned in the media and chased across the world by prosecutors who accused the pair of plundering the Philippines of $ 10 billion or more. But showing the irrepressible energy and brazenness that made her a legendary force in Philippine politics, Imelda bounced back, returned to Manila in 1992 and won a senator's seat in 1995 after a failed bid for the presidency.

Today, she is again the matriarch of a minor political dynasty. Her son, Ferdinand Jr., is governor of Ilocos Norte Province in the north of the country, where daughter Imee is a congresswoman. Her nephew, Alfred Romualdez, sits in the congressional seat she vacated, and her brother is mayor of Tacloban City. She has been acquitted several times on domestic charges of corruption and extortion and, of the 901 separate cases she claims were filed against her family, she is now down to the last three. Considering her regime was recently ranked as the second-most corrupt (after Suharto's Indonesia) of the late-20th century, it is not a bad end to a life. "I am still standing up at 76, fighting superpowers."...

It is not difficult at times like this to imagine the young, naive, fun-loving Visayas beauty dazzled by the ambitious senator Ferdinand Marcos and the jet-set life he promised; much harder to put this tearful, almost childish woman together with the picture painted of her in many biographies. Did she really offer her archrival Benigno Aquino $1 million to stay in U.S. exile, then order his 1983 assassination in broad daylight and in front of the world's press when he returned? Would the money she and her husband embezzled really, as many say, pay off the Philippines foreign debt?

And the biggest mystery of all: why have the people who threw her out accepted her back?

"Some people look at the chaos now and think things were probably better then under Marcos," says taxi driver Mike Avila. "He was strong and kept people in line. Things don't seem to have improved much since they left."

An interesting profile, despite the always irritating deus ex imagina taxi-driver quote at the end.

Shinto-Buddhist Syncretism in Heian Japan

Esotericism was central to both Buddhist traditions ascendant in the Heian period (794–1185): Shingon and Tendai. Shingon is an exclusively esoteric school founded in Japan by Kukai (774–835) whereas Tendai, founded in Japan by Saicho (766–835), includes esotericism as part of its grand synthesis of many Buddhist perspectives. Although several Buddhist schools had entered Japan by the end of the Nara period, for the most part none had developed into fully independent, religious establishments in their own right. That is: Shingon and Tendai were the first to flourish and develop as distinctively Japanese independent schools. Furthermore, both schools developed forms of Buddhist-Shinto synthesis. Both Shingon and Tendai arose about the time the capital moved from Nara to Kyoto (called "Heian" at the time). Their success was due in part to the fact that Buddhist esotericism shares central assumptions with early Japanese spirituality. With its centuries of doctrinal and practical development on the mainland, esoteric Buddhism was uniquely positioned to give early Shinto spirituality a full-blown philosophical justification, albeit admittedly a justification in Buddhist garb. Let us consider three points where the worldviews of ancient Shinto and esoteric Buddhism intersected—areas of similarity on which Shingon and Tendai Buddhism were able to capitalize.

First, for both early Shinto and Buddhist esotericism, the world was alive with spirituality, as there is no sharp divide between spirit and matter....

Second, Buddhism and early Shinto both stressed the purely mindful heart....

There is, as well, a third commonality: both esoteric Buddhism and early Shinto assume the sacred can be in the form of celestial deities (in Shinto, the kami deities; in esoteric Buddhism, the celestial buddhas and boddhisattvas)....

Not surprisingly, then, with syncretism as the norm, the term "Shinto" had no popular use in Japan until the development of state ideology in the middle of the nineteenth century. In that era, an essentialist Shinto spirituality was on the rise and the agenda was to separate "real" Shinto from its Buddhist "distortions." Because of Buddhist-Shinto syncretism, however, it seems that for a thousand years of Japanese history most people did not ordinarily find it useful to distinguish "Shinto" from "Buddhist." These people did all along refer to kami, of course, but they knew that on some level (perhaps understood only by intellectuals) kami were just alternative forms of buddhas.

SOURCE: Shinto: The Way Home, by Thomas P. Kasulis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 95-102

Letters of a True Believer, 1937

During the Great Terror, Lev [Knipper], like hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, was clearly going through a personal and political crisis. He was desperately trying to convince himself of the rightness of the Stalinist purges, even when surrounded by the madness of arrests and denunciations all around him....

In early April 1937, not long after the second wave of show trials, Lev wrote a striking letter to Aunt Olya [Knipper-Chekhova]. 'My life has become a lot more complicated, confused, and harder than it was before, when I still had many illusions of youth, self-importance, young unspent strength and boiling energy which covered up for everything else. And now the time has come to pay the bills. And it's turned out that I've accumulated next to no interest on my capital, and that I will have to pay from the reserve.

'When I was twenty-three, a new life began for me, thanks to you ... I was somehow careless about everything – like a bird which knows nothing of tomorrow, like a creature who, it seemed to me, was "lucky" in its life. And really, I'd soared over dozens of my colleagues, like a rocket. I won't even say it was undeserved. My talent isn't a minor one, I possess a huge supply of energy, and my will for life is also not small ... Selfishness and a somewhat exaggerated self-assurance are the reasons for my loneliness. And now, thirty-nine years old, I am facing myself, absolutely alone in all senses. And this is the most terrible of all. With all the force of my brain, I desire to be a true Bolshevik, and for this I lack knowledge. This has impeded my development as a composer in the last three to four years ... Nothing can ever remove my feeling of guilt towards the party and the Soviet regime about the years of the civil war. "White Guardist" in my presence, it's like a knife in my flesh, and I always think they've said it about me. This is the hardest trauma in my life, and there're only two ways to cure it – either the party would accept me in its ranks, or death will get me. I am not afraid of it, and I've thought of it frequently in the last five to six years.' ...

You see, my dearest Aunt Olya, politics is one of the reasons which make the two of us unable to talk to each other from soul to soul. And the reason for this is that for me politics is something deeply personal, lyrical, exciting. I am fighting for the Soviet regime (and therefore love it, and mistakes are painful for me).' The 'mistakes' he referred to were presumably the millions of false accusations of the Great Terror. But Lev was unrepentant. 'For me, my personal life, my creative work, absolutely everything is intertwined with the issues of the party life. You don't want to believe in this, you think that I want to "be this way", rather than I already am this way.'

He went on to reject 'absolute' human values, dismissing them as 'intelligentsia ethics'. Lev had imbibed the essential ruthlessness of Leninism. 'More than anything else, I can't stand people who use "intelligentsia principles" and "humanity" to justify a general, deeply anti-Soviet behaviour.

'I need to learn what sort of a person one has to be to become, in this decisive moment of the fight, part of the millions giving all of themselves (not from the brain, but from the heart) to the future of humankind.'

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), pp. 144-147

Model Japanese Entrepreneur in Cambodia

The Asahi Shimbun carried a story on 19 April about a model Japanese business entrepreneur in Cambodia.

SIEM REAP, Cambodia--Two years ago, a savvy Japanese tour guide saw her chance to fill a business niche here.

Sachiko Kojima opened a cookie factory. She was soon supplying foreign tourists from Japan and around the globe with souvenir confections from this northern Cambodia city, the gateway to the Angkor Wat Khmer ruins.

Her "Madam Sachiko" cookies, shaped like the ancient ruins, are now the must-buy souvenir for tourists visiting the city.

Kojima, 33, who grew up in Gunma Prefecture, runs her business with Japanese management finesse. But her company, Khmer Angkor Foods Co., procures all its ingredients from Cambodian suppliers. The factory includes a bakery, sales shop and head office....

In the shop and bakery, Kojima follows a Japanese business style. The shop's interior is attractive and inviting. The factory is clean and sanitary. Her employees follow rules similar to workers in Japan: No sitting down and no eating or drinking while on duty in the shop.

Foreigners in Cambodia rarely start businesses outside of travel agencies and restaurants. Kojima had the choice of starting up as a non-governmental organization (NGO), which would have received tax breaks and other advantages.

However, she was determined to form a privately owned, for-profit company.

"I think the people here need to see examples of basic business ideas, such as how to make a profit and how to pay taxes," she said.

via Colby Cosh

Aussie Troops Back to the Solomons

Australian troops are heading back to the Solomon Islands to quell another outbreak of violence after the latest elections, the BBC reports.

Some 180 Australian soldiers and police have begun arriving in the country to try to impose order after a written request from the Solomons government. A smaller contingent of additional New Zealand peacekeepers are set to arrive on Thursday.

But the BBC's Phil Mercer says there are concerns that the presence of more foreign troops could inflame the situation in the troubled city.

About 280 Australian police were already in the country as part of a regional force sent to restore peace in 2003, after violence stirred up by local warlords left hundreds dead and 20,000 displaced.

Wednesday's rioting came after newly-elected MPs met in secret to elect a new prime minister.

'Chinese connections'

Mr Rini, 56, beat off two main rivals in Tuesday's secret ballot for the leadership - former Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and Job Dudley Tausinga, leader of the new Rural Advancement Party.

He is accused of being too closely linked to former Prime Minister Allan Kemakeza's administration, which was tainted by corruption allegations.

As usual, the Head Heeb is already on the case.

Japanese Straggler in Ukraine

BBC News reports on yet another long-lost Japanese soldier finding his way back to Japan.

A Japanese ex-soldier who disappeared after World War II and was officially declared dead in 2000 has turned up alive in Ukraine.

Ishinosuke Uwano [上野石之助] was serving with the Japanese Imperial Army in Russia's Sakhalin Island when the war ended. He was last reported seen there in 1958.

The 83-year-old has now reappeared, in Ukraine, where he is married and has a family, Japanese officials say.

Mr Uwano is due to visit Japan for the first time in six decades on Wednesday.

He is expected to visit his surviving family members and friends in Iwate, 290 miles (467　km) northeast of Tokyo, with his son before returning to Ukraine on 28 April, the AFP news agency reported.

The family's last reported sighting of him was on Sakhalin in 1958; after that they lost all contact with him.

He'll arrive in Iwate just in time to see the cherry blossoms he has expressed a desire to see. Uwano has pretty much forgotten his Japanese, but speaks Russian quite fluently, it seems.

Speaking German in Moscow, 1941

Vova must have been frightened, bearing a German name [Knipper] at this moment of pitiless struggle [as the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow]. Daily bulletins from Informburo were attached to trees and walls. On one of them he was shaken to see an excerpt from a letter taken off the body of a German soldier called Hans Knipper. And a schoolfriend of his, a Volga German about to be transported to Siberia, came to see them in despair. Vova's father, Vladimir, advised him to volunteer for the army to save himself from an exile of forced labour which would be as bad as the Gulag, but Vova's friend replied that the description 'German' was stamped on his papers and they would not accept him in the army. Those of German origin were implicitly categorized as potential enemies of the state. The NKVD had not wasted time assembling records on every Soviet citizen of German descent, some 1.5 million people. Local NKVD departments 'from Leningrad to the Far East' began a programme of arrests immediately after the Wehrmacht invasion. Yet no member of the Knipper family was touched [presumably because Vova's cousin Lev Knipper worked for the NKVD].

Other Germans in Moscow were also in a strange position, but for different reasons. In the same building as the Knippers lived the family of Friedrich Wolf, the famous German Communist playwright, who had left Germany soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. They were part of the so-called 'Moscow emigration' of foreign Communists seeking sanctuary and would have faced instant execution at Nazi hands if the city fell. Vova used to act a roof-top fire-watcher, ready to deal with incendiary bombs, along with Wolf's two sons, Markus and Koni. Markus later became the chief of East German intelligence and the original of Karla in John Le Carré's novels, and his younger brother, Koni, became a film-maker, writer and the president of East Germany's academy of arts. During air raids, Vladimir Knipper and Friedrich Wolf sat in the cellar, chatting together in German. 'People sitting around us,' wrote Vova, 'turned to look at the two of them with anger and fear. There they were in the centre of Moscow arguing about something in the enemy's language.'

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), pp. 173-174

Barber for the Lubyanka Night Shift, 1930s

Lev's first cousin Vova Knipper had a friend who was a barber in the proezd Serova near the Lubyanka [during the Soviet Great Terror of the 1930s]. Most of his clients were NKVD officers. When the barber's shop opened at eight in the morning, NKVD interrogators, in a nervous state with heavy stubble, turned up in either military uniform or civilian clothes. They wanted a shave and a face massage to freshen up after a hard night's work beating confessions out of their prisoners. They asked for bloodstains to be daubed from their tunics and trousers with eau-de-Cologne. Some were so exhausted that they would fall asleep in the chair, and the barber found it hard to wake them up afterwards. But those who stayed awake talked compulsively about their work. The hairdresser warned Vova about the need to keep his mouth shut at all times. 'We're in a trap,' he warned.

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), p. 148

Mound Tombs in Northern Japan

Before spending time in Ashikaga, I had not been aware how widespread in Japan were the mound tombs known as 古墳 kofun lit. 'ancient grave'. When we walked over to Ashikaga Park to see the cherry blossoms there two weeks ago, we found that the hillside park includes 12 kofun, two of which have small, blocked-off, stone passageways facing east. (You would enter facing west.) I had always associated kofun with western Japan, where the largest imperial tombs were built, but an article on the Kofun Period (A.D. 300–700) by Sophia University archaeology professor Charles T. Keally set me straight.

• The first excavation of a mound tomb in Japan was conducted my Mito (Tokugawa) Mitsukuni in 1692, the 5th year of the Genroku era. Mitsukuni (1628-1701) was the grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The tomb he excavated is called the Samuraizuka Kofun, located in Ohtawara City, Tochigi Prefecture, just north of Tokyo. This excavation is considered the first academic, or scientific, excavation conducted in Japan.

Origins:
The origins of the Kofun Period mound tombs is clearly in the Yayoi Period, although ultimately continental influence might well be a factor, too. The most common Yayoi burials were in the ground in a square area delimited by a ditch or moat. The burial in the middle had a low mound over it. Toward the end of Yayoi, some of these ditches or moats became round. With higher mounds, these were the most common kofun tomb in the Kofun Period, but the burial was on top of the mound instead of under it. The square mounds, too, continued from Yayoi into Kofun, but these later ones also had the burial in the top of the mound instead of under it.

Forms:
The most distinctive mounds of the Kofun Period are the keyhole-shaped mounds, thought to be associated with the Imperial Family. This shape is uniquely Japanese and its origins are unknown. But Korean archaeologists recently have identified a few contemporary mound tombs in southeastern Korea that they say are also keyhole-shaped. Some people try to use these recent Korean finds to argue for a Korean origin of the keyhole-shaped mound tombs. But this fails to explain why this shape is rare in Korea and only recently recognized there through excavation, whereas this shape is common in Japan, obvious without excavation, and has been known for centuries....

Regions:
Mound tombs, especially the larger ones, tend to be located in clearly defined regions. Mound tombs are common in Kyushu only in the northwest, especially in the Chikugo River plain in Saga and southern Fukuoka prefectures. There is another such concentration of tombs in the eastern part of the Inland Sea in Okayama Prefecture on Honshu island and just across the water in Kagawa and Tokushima prefectures on Shikoku island. Similar concentrations are found in eastern Shimane Prefecture from Izumo to Matsue City on the Sea of Japan, in Nara and Kyoto prefectures, along the shores of Ise Bay from Nagoya to Ise, in Ishikawa Prefecture on the Sea of Japan, on the Kanto Plain in eastern Japan (especially in North Kanto), and on the Sendai Plain in northern Japan. There are smaller concentrations of tombs in Shizuoka Prefecture, and in the intermontane basins around Nagano, Yamagata and Kofu cities.

Archaeologists identify these concentrations with regional power centers, and they identify small clusters of tombs within these concentrations with the various clans known from later documents. In the north, keyhole-shaped mounds appeared in the Sendai Plain as early as the 5th century; the northern-most such tomb is in southern Iwate Prefecture. But most tombs in the northern regions are later. This northern region was the frontier with the Emishi barbarians who lived in northern Tohoku. Keyhole-shaped mound tombs are extremely rare in southern Kyushu, the home of the Hayato barbarians.

Ashikaga has always struck me as a city of Old Money, but I never thought it went back quite that far.

Wordcatcher Tales: Udo no Taiboku

うどの大木 udo no taiboku 'all hat, no cattle' - We tried out a new restaurant in Ashikaga the other night, after a long circuit to view the many lovely shidare-zakura 'weeping cherry trees' that line a long, curving, landscaped ditch that borders the city's huge civic center athletic complex.

The seafood restaurant Yanagi-ya [柳屋 'willow shop'] turned out to be a haven for Hanshin Tiger and sumo fans in the area. It caught my eye last month when it advertised the sumo wrestler's special chanko nabe on the first day of the Osaka Grand Sumo Tournament. Unfortunately, the chanko nabe season is over now that the weather has started to get warmer, but the various dishes we ordered were all nicely presented, and tasty to boot. Each glass of sake had the name of a sumo wrestler on it.

At one point, the waitress brought over a complimentary dish of tempura vegetables that looked like celery tops, but tasted less bitter than celery, more like asparagus. She identified it as うど, which my electronic dictionary identified only as 'an udo (a plant of the ginseng family cultivated for its edible shoots)'. The University of Virginia Library's Japanese Haiku Topical Dictionary page for spring plants is more helpful.

独活 【うど】 udo, udo [a wild asparagus-like plant, Aralia cordata, sometimes cultivated and noted for its edible young shoots] (late spring).
山独活 【やまうど】 yamaudo, mountain udo [a wild variety, noted for its pungency]
深山独活 【みやまうど】 miyama-udo, high-mountain udo [Aralia glabra, rare]
芽独活 【めうど】 meudo, sprouting udo / udo shoots

The Anime Companion Supplement U offers a different context.

udo うど or 独活 Aralia cordata. The leaves and stalks of this plant are eaten either raw or cooked. The flavor is similar to asparagus. The cultivated type is grown in the dark to blanch it. Wild udo is used in sansai ryôri (mountain vegetable cooking), as the flavor is stronger it must be blanched before it is used in dishes.
Anime:
Udo salad is one of the foods cherry mentions in the Urusei Yatsura TV series (Episode 36 story 59)
Maho buys udo from Tachikawa in MahoRomatic (ep.3) and pickles it.

Wikipedia includes udo in its surprisingly long list of English words of Japanese origin, defining it as 'an edible plant found on the slopes of wooded embankments, also known as the Japanese Spikenard'.

Well, "Japanese spikenard" is not likely to be any more intelligible to most English speakers than the term "udo" itself, but here's a derivative expression that has more familiar English parallels: うどの大木 udo no taiboku lit. 'huge tree of udo'. (I had expected the pronunciation for 大木 to be daimoku but it seems to be taiboku in all contexts.) The Hoita Kokoro Center in Canada explains its meaning:

Just big man with nothing (lit. A huge udo tree) All bark and no bite or All hat and no cattle in English

Wikipedia explains further.

Despite its size, it is not a woody plant, as demonstrated in the popular saying Udo no taiboku (独活の大木), literally "great wood of udo", meaning roughly useless as udo has a very soft stem.

Japanese Zen's Return to Shinto Aesthetics

Many commentators associate the Japanese emphasis on naturalness and simplicity with Zen Buddhism rather than Shinto. In such books as Zen and Japanese Culture, D. T. Suzuki popularized this view in Japan as well as in the West. Suzuki was correct to point out that many arts associated with Japan have a close association with Zen Buddhism, especially through the tea ceremony and all its accoutrements including ikebana, calligraphy, poetry, gardens, and pottery. Suzuki accurately portrayed Zen's historical significance in the development and institutionalization of these arts. At times, though, he seemed to imply more—namely, that Zen Buddhism introduced the aesthetic of simplicity and naturalness to Japan. This claim, if he indeed meant to make it, is wrong.

Simplicity and naturalness were part of Japanese culture and represented in Shinto practices centuries before Zen's emergence in the thirteenth century. The kind of grand simplicity found in many Shinto shrines such as that of the sun kami at Ise is an obvious example. Zen prospered through its connection with the Japanese arts, not so much because it was introducing something totally new to the culture, but because it resonated with something old. The so-called Zen simplicity in many drinking bowls used in the tea ceremony, for example, can also be seen as far back as some of the unglazed pottery of the Yayoi period, a millennium before Japanese Zen developed and tea plants were cultivated in Japan.

One can argue, therefore, that the Zen aesthetic was similarly a return to a simplicity predating the Heian court's aesthetic of elegance. This aesthetic of courtly elegance predominated among the aristocrats of the Heian period (794–1185) and reflected the high arts from China, including those from esoteric Buddhism, rather than Shinto. The power of the nobles had waned, however, by the time Zen blossomed in Japan. Zen melded the Kamakura period's (1185–1333) tendency to go back to the ideals of a simpler, less refined, sometimes even rustic, lifestyle. This aesthetic fit the military mentality of the new political leaders, many of whom had come from the outlands distant from the cultural capital of Kyoto [like Ashikaga]. By this process, Zen values and practices became the center of aesthetic development in the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries [during the Ashikaga shogunate].

SOURCE: Shinto: The Way Home, by Thomas P. Kasulis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 45-46