Why do western audiences like anime? One reason is precisely because anime doesn't pander to western audiences. Or rather, anime in general does not make a concerted effort to appeal to modern audiences outside Japan.

The Critical Drinker deserves the credit for turning that expression into a pejorative. To be sure, any trending social and political movement will inevitably show up in Japanese popular culture (often using the same English terminology). But in almost every case, it is an ephemeral surf that leaves the deeper societal currents undisturbed.

Dating back at least 2500 years, Confucianism is the common cultural cornerstone of the Sinosphere. In particular, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam share a worldview with deep roots in Confucianism. Especially in South Korea, that worldview "shapes the moral system, the way of life, social relations between old and young, high culture, and much of the legal system."

It's easy to spot an almost identical postmodern veneer around the developed world and assume that all such societies are essentially the same. But no matter how contemporary a society may appear on the surface, the bedrock culture remains. If only for the sake of verisimilitude, it must constitute an inextricable part of any story being told in that context.

The payoff is that understanding and respecting the immutable nature of the culture makes for a reliable source of tension and conflict and narrative depth.

Challenging traditional values is one thing. Eliminating them entirely is quite another. That's what China did during the Cultural Revolution. The result was the wholesale destruction of an entire generation. It comes as no surprise that those very same communists are now hawking the ancient cultural heritage and Confucian teachings they once vilified.

China learned the hard way the value of Chesterton's Fence.

Granted, aside from a handful of trending topics and popular political slogans, most people would have a hard time identifying what those cultural values are. But they do recognize their absence. Like a living organism deprived of a necessary nutrient, though its absence may go unnoticed at first, its loss will inevitably exact a toll.

Regardless of the genre, anime is deeply rooted in Japanese culture. Even when seemingly lost in translation, it shores up the story being told. From the hierarchal language to the education system, to food, fashion, architecture, and a myriad of other customs that are centuries old and very much alive.

A great example of this is Dragon Pilot, that starts at a modern JSDF air force base, and then tosses dragons, miko (Shinto shrine maidens), and ancient religious rites into the mix. Dragon Pilot introduces the shrine maidens in the last third of the story, while Otaku Elf takes place entirely in the shrine maiden genre.

The Japanese title for the latter is Edomae Elf and Elda has been hanging around Takamimi Shrine since the dawn of the Edo period. More recently in the early twentieth century, the Taisho period has become the go-to setting for Japan's fantasy steam punk era, as in My Happy Marriage and Demon Slayer.
In an interview posted on Anime News Network, My Happy Marriage director Takehiro Kubota was asked if he was concerned about how viewers outside Japan would enjoy and interpret the anime.

"Not really," was his reassuring answer.

In fact, I never imagined that it would be seen so widely in so many different countries, so I was grateful when I heard that it had been watched by so many people overseas and had such a positive response. Perhaps due to Miyo's uniquely Japanese character? It's somewhat hard to express the nuance, but Miyo is a quite modest person who clearly doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve. I found it very interesting that her character was accepted in other cultures where being able to assert one's own opinion is a highly valued character trait.

A big part of what draws western audiences to anime is precisely because it is not made for western audiences. The aesthetics of anime create an additional level of remove that paradoxically makes reality all the more real. So as it turns out, then, I do like the isekai genre very much, because watching anime takes me on a voyage to another world.

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Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, culture, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, politics, streaming, thinking about writing

The ghost has been a stock character in spooky stories from around the world since forever. For the sake of this argument, I'm more interested in people who can see ghosts, and not because the ghost—Marley, for example—makes himself visible to a particular person with a particular purpose in mind.

I mean people who can see specters and spirits whether they want to or not. And given the choice, would often rather not.


The Sixth Sense set the contemporary Hollywood standard for seeing dead people. Its popularity spawned series like Ghost Whisperer and Saving Hope, which established the trope of dead people with "issues," who can't "move on" or "into the light" until they resolve whatever mortal problem is plaguing them.

This is "second sight" that requires a degree in psychiatry. (I'd love to see Niles and Frasier Crane tackle the job.) Now, in Kate's paranormal detective series, Donna can see the dead, but the dead have little interest in the living unless the living express an interest in them.

Yet despite being a trope so ubiquitous that it can be dropped into a story with little more than a hand-wave of an explanation, the Hollywood implementation is remarkably constrained in its scope and reach, both in terms of what sort of beings the unseen are and what they can do.

Even series like Buffy and Lucifer stick closely to Judeo-Christian folk theology and established mythological prototypes. This in marked contrast to Japan, where the genre is one of the most popular and expansive in Japanese fantasy, producing many identifiable genres and genres within genres.

My straightforward explanation is that, in Japan, there is so much more for those with "second sight" to see. That is thanks to a two-millennia long collision between Shinto and Buddhism, resulting in the theological school of shinbutsu shugo (神仏習合), the syncretism of Buddhist and Shinto belief.

This syncretism spawned several competing schools of thought. To grossly simplify, honji suijaku (本地垂迹) argues that the Shinto kami are manifestations of Buddhist deities. The contrary "inverted" honji suijaku (反本地垂迹) holds that the primal natural forces of Shinto gave rise to Buddhism and Confucianism.

And then there is a kind of compromise that recognizes the autonomy of the Shinto kami and logically asserts that they are thus in need of Buddhist salvation too.

The latter doctrine is favored in the Spirit World Warrior genre, according to which corrupt souls and delinquent kami require a swift kick in the keister to move them on down the road to reincarnation. Forget about talk therapy. Take off the gloves and blast them into another dimension. For their own good, of course.

To be sure, there are those like Inari in Inari Kon Kon and Yurie in Kamichu who take a kinder, gentler approach. But these exegeses aside, the wide-ranging taxonomy of the kami is what gives the trope so much creative depth. As manifestations of the "interconnecting energy of the universe," the kami

can be elements of the landscape, forces of nature, as well as beings and the qualities that these beings express; they can also be the spirits of venerated dead persons. Kami are not separate from nature, but are of nature, possessing positive and negative, and good and evil characteristics.

In platonistic terms, those with second sight can see what is casting the images on the cave wall. Every metaphysical thing has a physical manifestation, as in Princess Mononoke, in which corruption and pollution reveal themselves as slimy creatures and mad boars and infectious diseases.


One rule I would stipulate is that the magical world and the "normal" world must overlap. Narnia and Harry Potter mostly belong to the isekai ("different world") genre, as do anime like Kakuriyo. Even though Aoi has second sight in this world, the story takes place almost entirely in the "Hidden Realm."

By contrast, Lewis's That Hideous Strength takes place in this world. The Ancient Magus Bride is also set in the contemporary English countryside, where the old magic still thrives and Chise can see the sprites and spirits all around her.

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Labels: anime, culture, japanese culture, pop culture, religion

Think you deserve a little more time off? Feast Days were a big thing back in medieval times, basically holidays for your favorite saints and noted Biblical events. And there were a lot of them. Alas, only a few, like Easter and St. Patrick's day, are remembered and celebrated today.

The feast of Saint Crispian was memorialized by Shakespeare in Henry V. The battle of Agincourt took place on 25 October 1415, which coincided with the feast of the Crispin and Crispinian, the patron saints of "cobblers, curriers, tanners, and leather workers."

Rallying the troops, Shakespeare has King Henry pay homage to what had turned out to be very much a "working holiday."

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

Secular governments do the same thing today in a different guise. Hence "World Plumbing Day" (that was March 11, 2012, so you missed your chance to celebrate). In fact, the resolutions identifying these modern feast days for our modern saints and their causes are no less ubiquitous.

The record so far is held by the The 99th Congress (1985-86), that cranked out 275 (!) of these day/week/month/year resolutions, accounting for almost 40 percent (!!) of the "lawmaking" performed. Why? Well, opines Senate Historian Donald Ritchie,

There's also some political benefit to the members. [The resolutions] show that they have been paying attention to good causes in their districts that their constituents are concerned about.

A big waste of time, countered some killjoys, and 104th Congress (1995-96) officially stepped on the brakes, trimming the resolution-making business a good 90 percent. By the 112th Congress, though, they were back in business, with 156 passed.

That's just Congress. Though somewhat more measured in their application, presidential proclamations have typically had more staying power. Though why not make them all paid holidays? Toss in the special "week" and "month" commemorations and we'd never have to work again!

Labels: culture, history, politics, pop culture, religion

In his review of An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America by Joseph Bottum, David Goldman agrees with the Bottum that "today's secular liberals are the direct descendants of the past century's Puritans and Protestants."

The big difference is, these "post-Protestants" now define

good and evil not primarily in terms of personal behavior but as states of mind about the social condition. Sin, in other words, appears as a social fact, and the redeemed personality becomes confident of its own salvation by being aware of that fact.

Note that salvation is achieved by "being aware of that fact" (and feeling bad about it), not doing anything constructive other than loudly protesting (forget about the beam in your own eye, the problem is the mote in the other guy's). Oh, and pinning scarlet letters on the sinners.

As if purposely written to illustrate this thesis, one Randa Jarrar has penned a comically aggrieved screed in Salon ("whose usual stock in trade is exotic identity-based grievances," as James Taranto puts it). To whit:

Whether they know it or not, white women who practice belly dance are engaging in [cultural] appropriation.

Frankly, were the author describing "cultural appropriation" done badly, I could have ginned up some sympathy for the argument. But judging from the comments, there comes a point at which the Inquisition has burned one witch too many, even in this sanctuary of self-righteousness.

I certainly won't hesitate to saddle up my high horse when confronted with corny depictions of Japanese culture in U.S. media (and corny depictions of American culture in Japanese media). Though the proper human reaction, as Peter Payne confesses, is to laugh at it.

Once I was watching an episode of Alias with my [Japanese] wife, and there was a horrid scene in which some female spy went to "Japan" (which appeared to be shot in a sushi restaurant about ten minutes from West Hollywood), painted her face white like a "geisha" and proceeded to extract information from her target despite not knowing his language. I was livid that in the 21st century TV producers couldn't even come close to getting basic imagery right, but my wife was enthralled with it, laughing at each new hilarious plot twist.

And why not? After all, Japan has been "appropriating" foreign culture for the past two thousand years, beginning with Chinese religion, architecture, food, language (kanji), and political philosophy.

During the early Meiji period (1868-1912), while preaching "Western technology, Japanese spirit," Japan's ruling class went on a culture borrowing binge that earned it mockery from both Japanese conservatives and western commentators.


And yet some things not only stuck but became deeply ingrained, like the waishatsu or white dress shirt. The English morning coat became the preferred formal wear for politicians. Western-style wedding gowns, along with the Christian ceremony, are becoming well-nigh ubiquitous.

But getting back to dancing girls, one of Japan's most successful themed resorts is Spa Resort Hawaiians, started in an effort to save the local economy after the Joban coal mine in Northern Japan shut down. The story is dramatized in the cute movie Hula Girls (click to enlarge).

Courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

In another cute kid's film, I Wish, the mom and grandma quite incidentally belong to the local hula dancing club (it has nothing to do with the plot). Over the past quarter-century, hula dancing has become a popular club activity for women in Japan.

But turnabout is fair play too, and infotainment shows in Japan love featuring foreigners (the more "foreign" the better) who have embraced and even perfected some uniquely Japanese aspect of their culture.

Such as Egyptian Abdelrahman Shalan (Oosuna-arashi), the first professional sumo wrestler from the African continent and a rising star. His wonderful sumo name is "Great Sandstorm" (大砂嵐). It's no surprise to any Japan watcher that he is immensely popular in Japan.

The "pyramid" illustrates the ranks in professional sumo.

To be sure, the sport has become accustomed to non-Japanese sumo champions. Over the past decade (at six tournaments a year), only two championships went to native Japanese. One was won by an Estonian, one by a Bulgarian, and the rest by Mongolians.

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Labels: culture, japanese culture, politics, pop culture, religion, social studies

When you think of municipal support for the arts, a manhole cover is probably the last thing that would ever spring to mind. But "nearly 95 percent of the 1,780 municipalities in Japan sport their own specially-designed manhole covers." Explore the art of Japanese manhole covers here and here.

Labels: art, culture, japan, photo tour, politics

That line from Hamlet actually refers to death. And speaking of Star Trek titles, the year 2012 again had Japan boldly going where no man has gone before. Literally, as it turns out. Where it's going, there's nobody there. Because they died.

Japan's population fell by over 200,000 in absolute terms. Near-term projections have it falling from 127.5 million to 116.6 million in 2030 and 97 million in 2050.

As Spock would put it: "Fascinating." Though hardly catastrophic, not for overpopulated Japan. That doesn't stop the Chicken Littles. Over at The Diplomat, John Traphagan flips a coin between calling it "Japan's Demographic Nightmare" and "Japan's Demographic Disaster."

For some truly disastrous numbers, The Economist gets the heart of the matter with these projections of the net labor force demographics:


But they remain projections. After perusing popular projections about the shrinking length of the Mississippi River, Mark Twain calculated that

Seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.

"There is something fascinating about science," Twain wryly concludes. "One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

A century later, apocalyptic group think, once the province of the crackpot right, has come to dominate the intellectual left: "If we don't do X right away we're doomed! Doomed! Take rising sea levels: it's not as if the ocean's going to save it all up and surprise us one morning.

In The Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders coined the appropriate term in this case: "We have entered the age of fertility panic."

Journalism long ago abandoned actual reporting and now functions as the official teller of ghost stories around the campfire. Except we're supposed to believe them. Hence the mindless repetition of the supposed solution to this supposed disaster: immigration!

In the case of Japan, that's a cure worse than the disease, which is why it's never going to happen. Besides, if labor availability is the problem, it's a lot easier to move to where the labor already is. That's why most Toyotas and Hondas come from factories here in the U.S.

Although some Japanese are choosing to retire to Thailand the same way Americans do to Mexico, the elderly can't be exported like cars. Here I think Michael Cucek has ferreted out the real reason for Japan's recent forays into government-sponsored daycare:

How then is the government to allocate resources in carrying out this project, where Japan has no models to follow because it in the vanguard, the leader because it has the most aged society on the planet? It turns out that the Japanese government has been running a pilot project for the coming eldercare explosion--its child daycare program.

People adapt and muddle through. Japan is the third richest country in the world. Sectors of its economy--agriculture, in particular--remain incredibly inefficient. There's a considerable amount of low-hanging economic fruit to be plucked before donning the sackcloth and ashes.

Already curious counter-trends can be observed. Coco Masters reports in Foreign Policy that

A poll conducted by the Japanese government last December shows that 51 percent of respondents think women should be stay-at-home mothers. That figure is up 10 percent since 2009--with the increase most notable among people in their 20s [emphasis added].

And in a New York Magazine article, Lisa Miller documents a similar trend in the U.S.:

The number of stay-at-home mothers rose incrementally between 2010 and 2011, for the first time since the downturn of 2008. While staying home with children remains largely a privilege of the affluent (incomes of $100,000 a year or more), some of the biggest increases have been among younger mothers, ages 25 to 35, and those whose family incomes range from $75,000 to $100,000 a year [emphasis added].

So maybe the problem is getting ready to correct itself, the same way the population was once going to explode us all out of existence--right up until it didn't.

Labels: culture, demographics, economics, japan

Taken offense takes many forms. Japanese very often simply do not get the English concept of "vulgarity" as it relates to language, hilariously illustrated here. And for reasons other than meanings getting lost in translation.

Take the ubiquitous kuso. It translates as "(bull)crap" or "(bull)shit," depending on whether it's uttered by a kid or a gangster. Why, a Japanese might logically ask, have two words that mean exactly the same thing?

Though if you're referring to what bears do in the woods, it's fun (rhymes with "spoon").

As Peter Payne points out, only the "c" word is guaranteed to be bleeped. Widely self-censored is the old word (穢多) for Japan's feudal outcasts, which has since gone through a rigorous "euphemism treadmill."

(A fascinating parenthetical about the evolution of the latter can be found here.)

I saw a interview with Brad Pitt on NHK, accompanied by an excerpt from Moneyball that included several expletives the FCC would frown upon. Nothing was bleeped. (Often true of foreign coverage involving bleep-worthy expletives.)

Why should they be? There's nothing intrinsically offensive about a collection of phonemes (as opposed to certain bodily noises). Japanese are drawn to them for the same reason NBA stars tattoo kanji on their forearms.

Because it's cool!

In this case, the phonemes were intended as an (all things considered, pretty clever) alliterative pun on fukubukuro ("lucky bag"). A fukubukuro is a grab bag of overstocked items sold at a steep discount on New Year's Day.

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Labels: culture, honorifics, japanese, language, pronouns, social studies

Before and After (not a translation) on ABC (Asahi Broadcasting) is like This Old House, except they do one house an episode. That means they race through the interesting stuff--the foundations and framing and plumbing--and spend more time on the boring stuff like interior decor.

Enough attention is paid to the nuts and bolts to make it clear that while ferroconcrete structures in Japan are the most solidly built in the world, and residential building codes have improved since the Great Hanshin earthquake, they still aren't as strict as building codes in the U.S.

One week on This Old House, while tearing down an old floor, Tom Silva pointed out all the once-standard construction methods that were no longer code. That same week on Before and After, there was an army of carpenters busily repeating pretty much every single one of them.

One of the big challenges on This Old House is retrofitting old structures for modern plumbing, heating and AC. The biggest plumbing challenge on Before and After is allowing the o-furo water heater to be turned on from inside the bathroom, instead of leaning out the window.

As I noted previously, south of Hokkaido, Japanese houses aren't likely to have central HVAC, high pressure hot water, or insulation. In my apartment in Port Town, the hot water in the bathroom and kitchen sinks ran off the heater attached to the o-furo, but only one faucet could be on at a time.

Another thing that becomes clear is that, as Alex Kerr laments, Japanese are pretty unsentimental about ordinary old stuff. The debut episode involved restoring a century old house. In the U.S., historical preservationists would have been crawling all over it. Break out the jackhammers!

To be sure, the idea of buying a house as an investment is a foreign one in Japan. The only worthwhile investment is in the property it sits on. You build a house in Japan knowing that the next earthquake may knock it down, and the next tsunami may wash it away. But there are exceptions.

The laundromat I used in Osaka was off a street crowded with old, two-story residences. Over the span of six months, I watched one get torn down to the ground--leaving a gap in the street like a missing tooth--and then rebuilt exactly the same, but using a frame of steel I-beams.

That's one house that isn't going anywhere, come hell or high water.

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Labels: culture, geology, japan, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, technology, television reviews

Listening to the 9/11 ceremonies on NPR, the spare amounts of speechifying and the moments of silence reminded me of what is called mokutou (黙祷) in Japanese, or "silent prayer."

Although religious in origin, mokutou is unadorned by religious trappings. When it comes to memorials, the sparer the better (Bloomberg was also right to keep the ceremonies mostly secular).

In a strange, cosmic coincidence, 9/11 was the sixth month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Northern Japan on 3/11. Here is a clip of a first month mokutou.


The "mokutou" is always announced, though it's usually preceded by a chime, not a siren. (The reason for the press attention in this particular case is ex-Prime Minister Hatoyama, third from right).

A simple ritual can displace a lot of empty rhetoric. The basic form of kiritsu (stand) and rei (bow) permeates Japanese society, and sort of substitutes for the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

The timing of memorial services in Japan, however, is horribly complex.

Labels: culture, earthquake, japan, politics, tohoku earthquake

How propriety easily gets confused with morality is amusingly illustrated by a pair of anecdotes from Michael Hoffman's historical overview of Japan-U.S. relations, written for the Japan Times (an informative and entertaining read).

First we have U.S. Consul Townsend Harris remarking in 1856 on the cleanliness of the Japanese people and the fact that staying clean involves, you know, bathing. Together. In a public bath. "In a state of perfect nudity."

I cannot account for so indelicate a proceeding on the part of a people so generally correct.

A few years later, a Japanese delegation at a state function was equally shocked to see American women "nude from shoulders to arms," and was offended by the "insufferable" sight of "men and women, both young and old, mixed in the dance."

Japanese men and women have always danced together at festivals, but these resemble line dances (no touching involved). In any case, ballroom dancing has since become perfectly acceptable, as illustrated in the wonderful film, Shall We Dance?

Mixed bathing (kon'yoku) was frowned upon mightily during the U.S. Occupation (1945-1952) and persists only at a handful of hot springs resorts, certainly not at local public baths (sentô), which are still prevalent though not as ubiquitous as before.

"B-list celebrity visits local hot springs resort" (not of the mixed bathing sort) is a favorite travel program genre on Japanese television. Japan has no shortage of local hot springs resorts (onsen) with long histories and quaint local customs to explore.

Anytime an anime series needs a lame excuse for a bunch of gratuitous nudity or low-brow humor (or both), it sends the characters to a hot springs resort. The onsen episode of Full Metal Panic FUMOFFU (episode 9) is one good example.

Labels: anime, culture, history, japan, onsen, social studies

One fascinating fact about female fashion in Japan is that the yukata and kimono have remained almost unchanged for 400 years. Young women still wear kimono on Seijin no Hi (Coming of Age Day) and yukata to the summer matsuri.

Yukata remain de rigueur for men and woman at any hot springs resort or traditional Japanese inn.

One odd exception is the adoption of the English morning coat as formal male dress, especially favored by politicians. And western-style wedding gowns (along with faux Christian wedding ceremonies) have become very popular.

But sumo refs and judges wear kimono and hakama. Sumo wrestlers must travel to competitions wearing kimono.

What has changed--for women and men--are hair styles. Nothing pins down the time period of a Japanese melodrama faster than the chonmage (丁髷). And again, sumo wrestlers sport a version (that doesn't involve shaving the pate).


Get past the awful bell-bottom stage (and the entire 70s) and this holds for the last fifty years in the U.S. The hair styles of the students in Caltech's Mechanical Universe series, more than the antiquated PCs, pinpoint its 1985 origins.

The lecturer in the series, Professor David Goodstein, looks as conservatively and consistently unhip as a geek from last week. Just as the uncool military haircuts in 2001 (made in 1968) are truly timeless. Ditto if you're Audrey Hepburn.

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Labels: culture, fashion, japan

My thoughts on the World Cup after enduring the tedium of watching the U.S. playing the U.K. to a 1-1 tie (by "watching" I mean that the television was on while I did more interesting stuff). I consider myself an objective observer, as my general interest in all sports is minimal at best.

In short: soccer is an art house movie without a plot. You know it's over because it says "Fin" on the screen. (Hockey is an action movie without a plot, and is similarly pointless.) Soccer is what basketball would look like if basketball allowed goaltending and had an offside rule.

The solution (for hockey too) is to eliminate the goalie. "Offsides" would only mean being inside the goal box ahead of the ball (both defense and offense).

Americans being Americans, any sport that penalizes the fast break and the Hail Mary will forever be doomed to the sidelines. Though the real underlying difference is that Americans demand from their sports clear evidence of premeditated thought and a means of incremental evaluation.

A bunch of talented athletes improvising however brilliantly on the spur of the moment is not enough. Like improvisational jazz. Yeah, everybody "admires" improvisational jazz. Nobody actually listens to it.

An overall strategy revealed through well-planned and executed plays is the essence of American football. Americans want to see the generals directing those armies on the "playing fields of Eton," and will judge them by the wars they win. This it is true of baseball, golf, and even NASCAR.

This ability follow the deliberations and judge incremental outcomes is why boring sports like golf and baseball get so much network television coverage. Steve Sailer is spot on that golf courses "look like happy hunting grounds—a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands."

Unlike tennis, which stupidly bans the coach to the bleachers. This is why tennis, aside from Grand Slam tournaments, doesn't get much network television coverage. The other being that tennis is a "fast-twitch" sport that depends largely on the other guy screwing up to score. Like soccer.

Basketball hovers halfway between both worlds, which may be why it is the one international "crossover" sport that America shares with the world—fast-twitch but offense-intensive. Plays are expected. Like the double play in baseball, "Stockton to Malone" was a beautiful thing to watch.

And you could expect to see it more than once.

In evolutionary-psych terms, Americans want to see a group of individuals acting as a single team. It's the heart and soul of every classic war movie, the platoon of rugged individualists coming together for the common good. Hence the most cutting criticism of all: "He's not a team player."

Because controlling actual "team play" is impossible in soccer (and hockey), these sports are necessarily about a team acting as a collection of talented individuals. Think of soccer as a way of subverting socialism. And sublimating collectivized religious and nationalistic passions.

Americans are shamelessly patriotic and openly religious (though are more Jeffersonian about it that they'll admit), and so don't really require another weekly groupthink where nothing happens and "all the fun is in getting there" (because there's no actual "there" there).

Getting caught up in the same-only-different drama of the competitive moment is enough. The only true American national theater is the sports stadium, and the one true national imperative is to "Win one for the Gipper."

Labels: baseball, culture, deep thoughts, politics, soccer, sports

If you're a foreign head of state. Say what you will about his abilities to conduct free and fair elections, but Hamid Karzai knows him his diplomatic protocols. Besides, as Billy Crystal would put it, he looks marvelous.


As I recount here, once he got all that war stuff behind him, even Emperor Hirohito wasn't a very uptight guy.

Labels: culture, japan, politics

"A Connecticut Yankee in Lord Toranaga's Court"
The Anachronistic Splendor of The Last Samurai
The Last Samurai is a thoroughly enjoyable, big-budget theatrical extravaganza, if less than original in plot and theme. It looks gorgeous, sounds gorgeous, is executed competently in most respects. Tom Cruise even correctly conjugates "to be" in Japanese (something Richard Chamberlain never managed). True, there are a few tense moments when you fear you might have to start taking the whole thing seriously.

But not to worry! Because that's when the ninjas show up! What Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was to back-lot Hong Kong wuxia actioners, The Last Samurai is to chambara eiga, the samurai sword fight genre Akira Kurosawa retooled from John Ford and Howard Hawks westerns, and that Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood reinvented yet again. It's a heroically self-important morality tale, so stunningly anachronistic and historically inaccurate that it qualifies more as fantasy.

Peter Jackson I'm sure would tell you, there's nothing wrong with fantasy. As long as you don't mistake it for the real thing.

The last time Hollywood made a big deal about an epic event in Japanese history (prior to 1941, that is), the aforementioned Richard Chamberlain was helping Toshiro Mifune establish the Tokugawa Shogunate and unify Japan under a single authoritarian regime. A quarter century and 250 years later, we find Tom Cruise alongside Saigo Takamori, the man largely responsible for overthrowing the Shogunate and ushering in Japan's modern age.

Now, Mifune's character in Shogun is called Toranaga, not Tokugawa Ieyasu. And in The Last Samurai, Ken Watanabe's character is called Katsumoto, not Saigo. Yeah, sure, whatever. Except that, back in 1600, there simply weren't that many shipwrecked English pilots hanging about the Edo court bending Ieyasu's ear. Unlike Cruise's Algren, a pure fiction, Chamberlain's Blackthorn was based on the real Will Adams.

And following the Meiji Restoration there was only one Satsuma Rebellion. And definitely only one Saigo Takamori. It's sort of like making a movie about Valley Forge and calling General Washington General Smith, you know, lest anyone object to your ahistorical deviations. Clavell mostly avoids meddling in verifiable history, mentioning the decisive Battle of Sekigahara only in an afterword. His 16th century Englishman would have been exchanging one barely post-medieval society for another.

Thus, the expectation that men (aside from himself, naturally) should know their station in life and act accordingly would hardly have been a foreign concept to Will Adams. What is more difficult to swallow is that such an enlightened U.S. Army veteran of the Indian Wars as Cruise's Algren would find his redemption amongst the passionate followers of an unegalitarian feudal order. (And, incidentally, the Imperial army's advisers ⁽¹⁾ were French and Prussian, not American.)

Okay, feudalism isn't slavery, but it's awfully dang close. Tokugawa-era feudalism concentrated enormous power in the hands of a few, who perpetuated their power from generation to generation through a rigidly-policed caste system. But absolute power corrupts absolutely, and by the mid 19th century the regime had rotted out at the core. The arrival of Admiral Perry's "Black Ships" in 1853 alone nearly felled it.

But, hey, if you're going to embrace feudalism you might as well start at the top, and Cruise's Captain Algren gets to cut to the head of the line. Edward Said is worth listening to here. What he terms the "Orientalist" impulse to depict the cultural grass as exotically greener elsewhere has the tendency to inure one to the faults of all other cultures but one's own. As Slate's David Edelstein observes, "Movies can manipulate you to root for just about anyone, anytime."

Thus biased by Noble Savage silliness, and the ball and chain of Occidental self-loathing, we have come to believe that any culture observably different from our own must be, ipso facto, better. The more different, the more superior. Here, Cruise is channeling another burdened white man, Kevin Costner and his Lieutenant Dunbar from Dances with Wolves (gee, also a U.S. Army veteran ready to help out the natives with his superior military training ). "Dances with Samurai," let's call it, then. So Dunbar's noble warrior, Kicking Bird (Graham Greene), becomes Algren's Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe); Dunbar's girl, Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell), Algren's Taka (Koyuki). And etcetera.

Okay, tell me the same story, only different. Except we're not dealing here with the latest politically-correct mythologies of the American West, but with well-documented history. The melodramatic demands of director Edward Zwick's well-intended Orientalism have instead produced a hagiographic account of the Battle of the Southwest (as it is called in Japan), that provides American audiences no good idea, other than the repeated mantra about samurai "honor," what it was really about.

What makes it doubly unfortunate is that the real Saigo Takamori was such a fascinating person. While he was a physical and intellectual giant of a man, we see nothing in Zwick's earnest screenplay or Watanabe's earnest portrayal that hints at the complexities of a person who attempted suicide once, was exiled three times, married at least three times, and carried on a long-term affair with a plump Kyoto geisha his close friends described as "comically round."

Or that in this final instance the Meiji government was right and Saigo was wrong. As Mark Ravina, author of The Last Samurai (a biography of Saigo Takamori) briefly notes in a History Channel documentary on the DVD, the soldiers mowing down Katsumoto and his troops in the end were in fact "the good guys," representing the ninety percent of the population fighting for a share of the rights and privileges that hitherto had been granted only to a small elite.

Saigo himself was born a low-ranked Satsuma samurai in the domain/daimyo system. Growing up he absorbed the totality of the bushido ideology. This aspect of his personality Zwick gets right. Katsumoto's fascination with General Custer is a nice (fictional) touch. Throughout his life Saigo waxed eloquent about the hope of dying a glorious death in battle. Two years before ending his life on a hilltop in Shiroyama, he summed up his beliefs in a poem that vividly begins, "The burden of death is light."

During the initial engagements of the war against the Shogunate (called Boshin, or "the year of the dragon"), Saigo successfully led his troops against much larger Shogunate armies, all the while bemoaning that he could only command, and not join in the front-line fighting. He did personally lead the assault on a hold-out brigade of Shogunate dead-enders at Ueno, where his statue famously stands today.

The Boshin War began with a sweep north from Satsuma, at the southern tip of Kyushu, and ended with the Battle of Hakodate, on the northernmost island of Hokkaido. However, Saigo was delayed mobilizing the troops under his command out of Tokyo, and Hakodate capitulated before he could arrive. The war was definitely over, and this bad timing Saigo regretted for the rest of his life.

But while Saigo-the-warrior represented the ideals of the traditional samurai ethos, Saigo-the-revolutionary could not ignore the vast social and political corruption Tokugawa-era feudalism had produced. Not only was Japanese society divided by caste, but the haves and have-nots within the castes had by then separated like oil and water, reducing many samurai families like his own to poverty. Yoji Yamada's Twilight Samurai well depicts the trap in which low-ranked samurai found themselves, with the impoverished protagonist longing to shed his status and become a mere farmer.

Saigo rose to prominence after internecine conflicts decimated the Satsuma leadership. Like Ito Hirobumi and Fukuzawa Yukichi and other leaders of the Meiji Restoration, the "creative destruction" of the Shogunate's fall presented opportunities for travel, education and political involvement that would have been otherwise impossible for a minor samurai from a tozama (outsider) domain to contemplate.

You'd never know it from The Last Samurai, but some of Saigo's most notable accomplishments were his diplomatic efforts. The first was the alliance with Choshu, Satsuma's bitter rival and one-time enemy. Choshu and Satsuma, together with the Tosa domain, formed the core of the Restoration movement.

The second was the surrender of the Shogunate army, including an amnesty for many in the Tokugawa leadership whom Saigo deeply despised. These negotiations prevented a reprise of the bloody power struggles that preceded the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603, and perhaps more than any other single act cemented the legitimacy of the Meiji Restoration.

After the fighting was over, Saigo helped push through radical reforms of the decrepit feudal system, including the conversion of samurai stipends to bonds, and the replacement of the domain/daimyo system with the contemporary prefecture/governor system. Both spelled the end of the samurai as protected social class, even before the edicts on carrying weapons were promulgated.

In fact, many of these reforms Saigo had already implemented in Satsuma. Moreover, the Meiji government had expressed a grudging willingness to make exceptions on Satsuma's behalf in regards to samurai privileges, and a man of Saigo's stature could easily have bargained for more. So why did he then start the Satsuma Rebellion?

The simple answer is: he didn't.

Zwick's screenplay asserts that Saigo/Katsumoto began a war over a fashion statement. It is impossible to imagine a man of his stature and political maturity carrying on in such a silly manner, especially in the presence of the Emperor. Perhaps Zwick was thinking of The Forty-Seven Ronin, the classic story of bushido honor and revenge, an oldie-but-goodie even in 1877.

Saigo had plenty of criticisms of Meiji policies, to be sure, starting with its Korea policy. Like all good samurai, once the fighting was over in Japan, he believed it was time to invade Korea. Again. He was rightly rebuffed. (Unfortunately, three decades later this is exactly what Japan did, aggressively moving against China, Korea and Russia with a degree of military overconfidence that eventually led to Pearl Harbor.)

After resigning from the government, Saigo spent his time hunting and running a military school devoted to the Confucian classics. Anecdotal accounts have it that when the revolt first broke out, he despaired at the pointlessness of it all, but became enraged at the government's heavy-handed treatment of the Satsuma upstarts, many of whom were his students and disciples. After provoking Tokyo governments for 300 years, Satsuma just couldn't stop itself.

Like Robert E. Lee, only after the shooting started was Saigo approached by the Satsuma rebels to lead the revolt, and Meiji officials to suppress it. And like Lee, he chose his "country" (Satsuma) over his nation. But one suspects as well that Saigo was seizing upon the opportunity for that great and glorious final battle that had escaped him at Hakodate.

It does not help that Zwick's "insights" into the samurai mind and his depictions of the Battle of the Southwest consist of throwing every cliche in the book at the cinematic wall, such as having Katsumoto and his troops dressed up in period costumes. Imagine General Pickett at Gettysburg outfitting his men like medieval knights and charging the Union line sporting lances instead of guns. Hey, I'm not saying it wouldn't look totally cool. But Saigo's 25,000 man army was equipped with western military hardware. To demonstrate his loyalty to the Emperor, Saigo dressed in an Imperial Army uniform.

The rebellion itself began with raids on government arsenals in Kagoshima and Iso. The rebel samurai who joined up along the way did so with any number of motives and allegiances. Military tactics were similarly confused. Soon after Saigo joined the effort his forces blundered badly at the siege of Kumamoto Castle. By the time they had regrouped and started a long retreat, a larger conscript army commanded by Aritomo Yamagata (who would become the first prime minister under the Meiji Constitution), equipped with better weapons and supported by much better logistics, had caught up with them.

It was all over except for the wasteful killing and heroic dying. Still, Saigo managed to drag the fighting out for six months. There was no charge of the "Noble six hundred," as Tennyson immortalized the similar fate of 13th Light Brigade at Balaclava. Popular accounts had Saigo committing seppuku and being beheaded by one of his retainers before their positions were overrun on Shiroyama. A subsequent autopsy concluded that he was too injured to carry through with the first part of the ritual.

Paradoxically, as the movie does accurately indicate, Saigo Takamori's reputation emerged from the conflict not only intact, but enhanced. This was in large part due to his extraordinary contributions to the Restoration before the Satsuma Rebellion, but also because the poetic finality of his revolt. The goal of the rebellion leaders had been to drive north to Tokyo and present their complaints to the Meiji leadership. But they never even made it off the southern island of Kyushu. It exhausted the nascent national budget and resulted in over 30,000 killed and wounded on both sides. But the last land battle fought on the Japanese "mainland" (Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu) was resolved without a return to the devastating civil wars depicted in Kurosawa films such as Kagemusha and Ran.

Which brings us back to the appeal of The Forty-Seven Ronin. To review, a young daimyo is provoked by a haughty court official into drawing his sword within Edo Castle. As punishment, the daimyo is ordered to commit seppuku, his lands are confiscated and his samurai disenfranchised. A year later, these forty-seven ronin (masterless samurai) carry out a carefully-planned revenge, and then gave themselves up to the authorities.

At the time, Confucian scholars hotly debated the rights and wrongs of what they did. Bushido ideology itself had been largely invented to justify the existence of a warrior class with no wars to fight. They weighed the specific responsibilities of the principal actors in the affair, and whether such a well-planned revenge was really in keeping with the spirit of bushido, and whether they should have committed seppuku and not surrendered.

The Shogunate found itself in a tight spot. They couldn't openly condone such actions. Like cowboys slinging guns, it was fine for samurai to carry swords as long as they didn't use them very often, if at all. Yet, they couldn't well be seen to disparage such a spirited execution of bushido ideals. Similar political conflicts, arising out of this surfeit, not paucity, of martial "honor" did not end until the final devastation of the Second World War.

So the Forty-Seven were ordered to commit seppuku. And by complying, cut graphically through the Gordian knot. The Shogunate could celebrate the noble exceptionalism of the ruling samurai class while warning that, take that exceptionalism too seriously and you may have to nobly die for it. It provided a politically tidy conclusion to the affair, and the general public with a dramatically satisfactory ending to a great 17th century reality show.

As did the final days of Saigo Takamori. And the Meiji government did not let slip such a golden opportunity. In 1889, Saigo was posthumously pardoned and promoted. He was declared a national hero, if a tragic national hero, and those are often the best kind. According to the mythic historical account that later arose, as described by Mark Ravina,

[Yamagata Aritomo] turned to the assembled commanders and spoke of Saigo's glorious death. He called the attention to Saigo's calm countenance, unchanged even in death. Then, holding Saigo's head, Yamagata wept for his fallen comrade. This was a death befitting the last samurai.

Zwick gets the myth about half right. Unfortunately, embracing a tragic hero is no longer enough. We must be constantly reminded what lousy people our ancestors were. And so Zwick has to toss in the requisite wicked white men in black hats. The character of Omura, based on Saigo's far more pragmatic and realistic Satsuma compatriot, Okubo Toshimichi, whom historian Masakazu Iwata praises as the "architect of the modern [Japanese] state," practically twirls a vaudevillian mustache whilst carrying out his evil deeds.

Granted, it's only one man's opinion, and a relatively benign one at that. Japanese film makers have plenty of experience fictionalizing their history as well. Consider Samurai X, based on the popular Rurouni Kenshin anime series.

The movie begins with a flashback of Kenshin standing guard at the critical meeting between Saigo Takamori and the Choshu clan's Kido Koin, and driving off an attack by the Shinsengumi, a fanatical group of Shogunate loyalists. It was this meeting that marked the beginning of the end of Shogunate rule, and the rise of Saigo as one of the great leaders of the Restoration.

The story resumes shortly after Saigo's death. It follows Kenshin's investigation of one of the many minor coup attempts that would erupt during the Meiji period. The coup plotters include a motley crew of naive idealists, honestly dismayed at the government's politics and policies, remnants of the Shogitai (the brigade Saigo wiped out at Ueno), Shinsengumi dead-enders, plus assorted carpet-baggers and opportunists.

The movie's Japanese title, "Requiem for the Meiji Revolutionaries," makes clear the director's message and intent. And along the way, Samurai X much better explores the inflamed passions that also led Satsuma to revolt against the very thing it had created. Samurai X is a cartoon, to be sure, but ultimately less cartoonish than The Last Samurai.

Buried as well in the surprisingly accurate historical detail of Samurai X is the the real story Zwick was trying to tell but missed completely: the Shinsengumi. The Shinsengumi was a guerilla organization based in Kyoto, charged by the Shogun to confront advancing Satsuma and Choshu forces and disrupt and frustrate anti-Shogunate activities. For the Shinsengumi, plain old bushido wasn't good enough. They lived by the Taliban version of the samurai code, called gohatto (literally, "forbidden").

Following the collapse of the Tokugawa regime, the Shinsengumi were routed and killed. According to the gohatto code, a quarter of the original 200 committed seppuku. If you want to be Byronesque about it, they were band of brothers sacrificing themselves for a lost cause. Or you could conclude, as John Dougill quips in his review of the NHK television series, "They were a bunch of hit-men hired by a repressive regime."

Saigo deployed similar insurgency forces in Tokyo prior to the surrender of the capital. But the Shinsengumi came far closer to Cruise's and Zwick's romanticized notions of the "old" samurai ways. They even eschewed firearms and fought with swords and bows and arrows! In the forward to his manga, Rurouni Kenshin creator Nobuhiro Watsuki admits to a sneaking admiration for the Shinsengumi, his protagonist's sworn enemy.

The same year as The Last Samurai also saw the release of When the Last Sword Is Drawn, a romanticized account of the downfall of the Shinsengumi. Not to be outdone by Hollywood in the "dying for your self-destructive but admirable beliefs" genre, NHK made the Shinsengumi the subject of its 2004 historical drama series. NHK hired writer Mitani Koki (who penned the hilarious Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald) to do the screenplay, cast pop idol Katori Shingo in the lead, tossed its heralded devotion to historical accuracy out the window, and has been pulling in buffo ratings all year.

---

1. Cruise's Algren does have a historical precedent, and in an unexpected quarter. Japan had, for the time, a highly literate population, but nothing like a national or even state education system. Japanese diplomats traveling abroad were impressed by what they saw in the United States.

Our prototype in this case was also a Civil War veteran, one Captain L. L. Janes, hired to set up a school for "western learning" in Kumamoto. But as Marius B. Jansen wryly notes in The Making of Modern Japan, Janes's employers got more in the bargain than they had counted on:

Under [his] influence, the first class produced the "Kumamoto band," or fellowship, of earnest young Christians who dedicated their lives to spiritual rather than martial modernization.

Spiritual "enlightenment," apparently, goes both ways. [return]

Labels: culture, history, japan, movie reviews, movies about japan, nhk, taiga drama

Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan is the latest in a series of polemics that began most prominently with Karel van Wolferen's The Enigma of Japanese Power. Unabashedly iconoclastic, the revisionist themes common to these critiques hearken back to earlier academic criticisms of Ruth Benedict's landmark anthropological survey, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

Written during Second World War on behalf of the Office of War Information, Benedict's work continues to be one of the most influential, if not the most inaccurate, studies of Japanese society ever published.

Even if the Japanese immigrants Benedict interviewed during her field research did represent the greater Japanese population at the time (the war foreclosed any access to the latter), lacking in the data she gathered was the context of Japanese political history since Meiji (or even Sekigahara). She limited the scope of her research to such narrow and predetermined objectives that in order to justify her conclusions she found it necessary to integrate the substance of a civilization reaching back two thousand years into the product of a man-made ideology less than a century old.

Benedict's work was undoubtedly a major reason why SCAP bought so completely into the emperor system that in fact had only existed since 1868. The whitewashing of imperial involvement in the war continues to this day to be at the root of diplomatic tensions between Japan and her Asian neighbors.

According to Douglas Lummis, professor of political philosophy at Tsuda University, Benedict's underlying error was that of recognizing among her Japanese subjects a set of publicly acknowledged and condoned behaviors and relationships, and then concluding, in a gross fallacy of generalization, that the repression endemic in Japan both before and during the Second World War was "voluntarily embraced." ⁽¹⁾

In Benedict's eyes, "to be totalitarian and to be Japanese [were] the same thing."

Machiavelli argued that the founder of a political state could create institutions that allowed the founder to instill fundamental changes in society while at the same time "mak[ing] [the] new prince seem ancient, and render[ing] him at one more secure and firmer in the state than if he had been established there of old." Likewise, the much heralded Meiji Restoration that thrust a 17th century agrarian society into the 20th century in less that fifty years did not occur without careful planning—few "restorations" or "revolutions" ever do. ⁽²⁾

In this case, along with the resurrection of bushido and the imperial emperor was the introduction of the pseudo-theology of the kokutai, or the polity of a singular, unified, genetic "family-state" (an essentialist approach that came to typify the entire Nihonjinron school of thought). And where, asks Daikichi Irokawa, professor of Japanese history at Tokyo University, did it come from? "It appeared to have been created by the Meiji idealogues for the purpose of solidifying the Emperor system." ⁽³⁾ Agrees Gluck, "From the time Japan began its deliberate pursuit of civilization in the mid-nineteenth century, ideology appeared as a conscious enterprise, a perpetual civic concern, an affair, indeed, of state." ⁽⁴⁾

Lummis puts it more bluntly: Benedict's interviewees all reflected the totalitarian patterns she anticipated because those patterns "had been pounded into them by a modern, highly organized, state-controlled school system, and by all the other 20th century techniques of indoctrination which the government had available to it." ⁽⁵⁾

The revisionist school of Japanese studies, exemplified most recently by Kerr and Patrick Smith (Japan: A Reinterpretation), similarly portrays the common man as the oppressed tool of a fascistic state. Except that the modern Japanese aren't oppressed and don't live in a fascistic state. The neo-Marxist indictments of the admittedly imperfect institutions of democratic capitalism as in some way analogous to 20th totalitarianism are as miguided and tired as Benedict's attempts to conflate a political behavior of the moment with the cultural heritage of the past.

But another striking, and forgiving, difference between Kerr and Benedict is the unapologetically subjective nature of the commentary. Kerr's less-than-academic tone often reminds you of a disappointed parent scolding a stubbornly misbehaving child that refuses to heed his wisdom and follow his advise. The hurt here is personally felt. And the corresponding absence of the typical set of academic imprimaturs allows to you take his rhetoric at face value, without the sense of having your arm intellectually twisted behind your back.

Besides, I can understand where the author is coming from. Kerr grew up in Japan, has lived there for three decades—in a suburb of Kyoto, not Tokyo—and is fluent enough in the language to have edited the translation of his book. A rare thing for a westerner. It's easy to imagine him perusing the work of popular "experts" such as James Fallows, who spend the entirety of their two or three-year tenure "inside the Yamanote" (the rail line that encircles Tokyo), and just seething.

Even T. R. Reid, a veteran of the Tokyo Press Corps, produced as his last book on the subject (before he up and transferred to London) an embarrassingly fawning account that spoke more to a comfortable life schmoozing among the internationalized upper middle-class than anything relevant to the lives of the average Japanese.

So Mr. Kerr feels it incumbent upon himself to set the record straight, and relates his account in the tone of taken insult. He's particularly pissed off at the destruction of "old" Kyoto, and devotes a chapter and copious anecdotes to the subject. But the bulk of the book concerns itself with corruption, á la Upton Sinclair (á la Junzo Itami). The first couple of chapters—about graft, corruption and Keynesian economics-gone-mad in the construction industry—pretty much sums it all up (it gets a little redundant after that). Another reason why van Wolferen's remains the more relevant analysis: it is a story of political institutions sinning against culture and society, not the other way around.

(And more relevant to China, as well. By blaming culture and not politics, Benedict's approach only confirms comforting ethnic stereotypes, and does not illuminate the true source of the current conflicts between China and Japan in the grubby, prosaic world of diplomatic gamesmanship and manipulation of public opinion.)

Working through an inbred and unaudited system of "government" and "public" corporations (with no open bidding), the Japanese construction industry, spending twice the percent of GDP as the U.S. in a country not much larger than California, manufacturing more raw tonnage of cement than the entire United States, and laying thirty times as much concrete per square foot, has locked sixty percent of the shoreline behind artificial breakwaters, built 2800 dams with five hundred in planning, completely diked all but three of Japan's rivers, and drained every costal wetland in the process. Along the way it replanted almost half of all native woodlands with industrial cedar and carved out 280,000 kilometers of mountain roads in order to access the lumber, most of which, it turns out, is not economical to even harvest.

This is make-work on a scale the administrators of the WPA never dreamed of: ten percent of the workforce directly employed by the construction industry, and another ten percent in supporting and peripheral industries; entire rural communities that do nothing but pour concrete.

This is all paid for by massive off-budget borrowing from Japan's Postal Savings Accounts, essentially a trillion-dollar piggy bank run by the postal service. It's a bad habit that has spread to the private sector, and now seventy percent of corporations can't cover their pension obligations; 800,000 companies have simply stopped paying the equivalent of social security taxes. Banks have resorted to an accounting trick called tobashi to write off bad debts: the non-performing asset is sold to a subsidiary; the bank then lends the subsidiary funds sufficient to cover the interest payments. The debt is thus considered "retired."

Combined with another trick, called "latent value"—a property is kept on the books at its purchase price, not at its market value—and this, combined with zero percent effective interest rates, means that banks have no incentive to write off their real debts. The total real debt could amount to as much as twenty-five percent of GDP. Brokerages play this game, too, listing a company's capitalization based on the stock's IPO value, rather than on its market value. (Not a few dot-coms would go for that kind of accounting.)

And Kerr is just getting warmed up. His account is grim, to be sure, but he not a nihilist. Japan is simply too big to fail, he admits, and at some point it will have to go through the equivalent of a massive S&L bailout. Indeed, Japan should provide an interesting test case of what happens when a country borrows past the limits of its ability to lend. He concludes, "Tobashi is a form of make-believe in which Japan's banks pretend to having hundreds of billions of dollars they don't have. But, after all, money is a sort of fiction. If the world banking community agrees to believe that Japan has these billions, then it essentially does."

A more dangerous experiment taking place on a national scale is the lack of enforcement of environmental protection directives. Japan provides for a test case of industry—almost without oversight—setting the agenda, from dioxin levels to zoning to logging on public lands. And as frightening as Kerr's account is—frightening even for an environmental agnostic such as myself—even taking into account such notable disasters such as the Minamata mercury poisoning incident and the occasional nuclear plant malfunction, the Japanese just keep living longer and longer.

I remain divided on Kerr's analysis of the why, that is, his analysis of the problem on a cultural/psychic level. I agree with his dismissal of the "occidental contamination" theory, that Japan was "true to itself" until the arrival of Perry's "black ships" in 1853. The problem, Kerr argues, is that Japan is being true to itself. He offers as a metaphor the bonsai tree, nature bound and manipulated so as to conform to the artist's sense of what nature should be, rather than what it is. He cleverly identifies the post-modern, post-apocalyptic world depicted in much of anime as an honest artistic rendering of the popularly perceived state of affairs.

But then he contradicts himself with a poetic conclusion embracing the "traditional" and what he terms jitsu, the Platonic ideal that a country represents, what it should be "true to." Mom, baseball, and apple pie, that sort of thing. The problem is, to identify a set of "traditional values" one must pick an equally artificial point in history from which those traditions are imagined to have sprung. Speaking of the "traditional" one more often communicates instead a sentimentality for a certain era, in the case of Japan the late 17th century "Genroku" period, during which all the unemployed samurai, with nothing else better to do, began busily inventing the modern image of the samurai—much in the way that modern conception of the medieval knight and the western cowboy have long been the products of Hollywood producers.

This is not to say that society should automatically yield to the modern and the new without caution and reflection. This is Kerr's biggest cultural complaint: Japanese simply are not sentimental enough for his tastes. And I suspect later generations will prove him right, just as so many city planners in the U.S. came to regret the destruction, in the name of "urban renewal," of their traditional and historic city centers during the 1960s and 1970s. True, being old is not a value in and of itself: great art and architecture should stand on their own merits; but I can empathize with Kerr's anguish at runaway urban planning doing to Kyoto exactly what the WWII didn't.

But Japan will come around. I've come to believe that all societies must go through the same stages of evolution, in periodic, sinusoidal iterations. Having arrived at the top of the post-industrial, navel-gazing, tree-hugging ladder first, Americans too impatiently fret that the rest of the developing world isn't scampering up into the branches with us. It's a lot like the notion that with cloning you'll be able to hatch a complete and socially acclimated adult out of the shell. None of that fussy toilet training and adolescence to struggle through.

Actually, the more worrisome topic Kerr covers is the rise of ethnocentrism in an almost ethnocentrically-pure country. It's reminiscent of know-nothing and isolationist attitudes the U.S. suffered during recent and historical recessions, and is no doubt spurred on by the same forces (and Japan's disturbingly Huxleyan government). But I believe it too shall pass, once people are given more appropriate targets for their frustrations—namely, politicians.

In terms of environmentalism, for example, you start out with the industrial revolution and the exploitations of nature, then people notice how ugly and unhealthy it is and you move into the subduing nature stage (the Colorado River and Tennessee Valley Authority being prime examples), and then you start to figure out that just leaving nature alone is not such a bad thing. Japan is still in the process of seeing every example of imperfect or threatening nature as a candidate for another TVA project. And unlike the U.S. during the 1930s, Japan has a whole lot more money to get carried away with.

But the process takes about a century, and Japan has been a functioning free-market democracy for only fifty years, while the United States, in 1776, had been hard at work at both capitalism and democracy for two centuries already, and had the legacy of the transcendentalists and naturalists and politicians like Teddy Roosevelt to draw on when the movement did get underway.

Similarly, it doesn't surprise me that the current generation in China is so much more nationalistic and less reactionary—life, for them and their parents, is better than they could have ever possibly imagined. (The same was said of the baby boom generation in Japan.) But let the alloy of capitalism and democracy slowly work its magic. Call it the Consumer Reports syndrome. Once you have come to expect a certain quality and satisfaction in the goods and services you consume on a regular basis, and to expect an inevitable increase in the standard of living, it's a small step to cast about and begin to expect the same of political and social institutions as well.

You eventually get to point we have reached in U.S. politics, when every generation is convinced that the environment is more polluted, the politics more corrupt, than the last. When, in fact, the truth is the opposite. The result, though, is an incessant pressure to "save the Earth" for each upcoming crop of children, which, while generating unappetizing streams of hand-wringing and angst in the process, does serve to motivate the society as a whole in the direction of constant improvement. So, paradoxically, the less we believe that things are getting better, the more likely they will. Japan, I believe, is proving itself no exception to this rule.

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1. C. Douglas Lummis, A New Look at the Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Tokyo: Shohakusha, 1982), p. 76; Roger W. Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 312: "The farmers of the 1880s had learned that imperial absolutism was absolute and that they were not going to change the political system by armed rebellion. But that does not mean they ceased rebelling." [return]

2. Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 39-41; Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 81-86. [return]

3. Daikichi Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 280. [return]

4. Gluck, p. 3. [return]

5. Lummis, p. 75; Gluck, p. 3. [return]

Labels: book reviews, culture, environmentalism, japan

Seemingly quite different religions, established in completely different parts of the world, evangelical in nature and structured upon well-established belief systems, often follow similar patterns of convergent social evolution. To take the metaphor a step further, like biological organisms, disparate religions expanding into new environments will diversify and adapt in predictable and similar ways according to predictable and similar timetables.

Consider the parallels between doctrinal changes introduced into the practice of Buddhism in Japan and concordant changes in 16th century Christianity, and specifically the compelling similarities between both the theological and political substance of the Protestant Reformation in the mid-1500s and the emergence of a reformed Pure Land Buddhism two centuries before, along with its counter-reformation counterpart, Nichiren.

According to the theory, the approximate 200 year head start that Japanese Buddhism enjoys is simply the result of chronology. The Emperor Asoka converted to Buddhism and established the first Buddhist State in the 3rd century BC. However, analogous in some ways to Christianity, Buddhism faltered in the land of its birth and was overtaken by Hinduism. Mahayana, the "Greater Vehicle" of Buddhism, emerged in the 1st century BC and eventually spread to China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Central Asia, Vietnam, and Taiwan.

When Saichou (767–822) and Kuukai (774–835), the two great patriarchs of Japanese Buddhism, returned to Japan from China in the early 9th century, they brought with them a fully-developed Mahayana Buddhism as then widely practiced in China. The Tendai and Shingon sects they founded contain elements of Esoteric Buddhism, and in outward appearance bear no small resemblance to Catholicism. Esoteric Buddhism relies on ritual and temple observances, on the tutelage of priests, on a tradition of monasticism.

During the first millennium the imperial court embraced the new religion as had Constantine, for reasons of both spiritual and political expediency. The Confucian philosophies that had become entwined with Buddhism during its maturation in China provided an essential rationalization of imperial rule. Moreover, the religion was ideally suited to the aristocracy. At the end of their careers, emperors and warriors could retire to a temple or monastery and work out their salvation before death.

In the early years of the second millennium, the Fujiwara regents were displaced and then their military overseers—the Taira—were overthrown. When the capital shifted to Kamakura in 1192 the resultant political upheaval triggered a rich outburst of religious diversification that saw the emergence of the three great, enduring sects of Japanese Buddhism and what could be called a Buddhist "Protestant Reformation."

The most familiar to western observers is Zen, especially the Rinzai sect established by Eisai (1141–1215). Eisai began his studies at the Tendai temple on Mt. Hiei. During the second of his pilgrimages to China he was ordained into the Rinzai Zen sect. (Eisai is also credited for introducing tea agriculture to Japan.) His proselytizing was not kindly received by Kyoto's Tendai and Shingon communities, but with the founding of the Kamakura government Eisai found a patron in the shogun himself.

Shogun Minamoto Yoriie subsequently appointed Eisei Chief Priest of Kennin Temple in Kyoto. At Kennin-ji Eisei went out of his way to accommodate Tendai and Shingon rituals and practices, thus diffusing some of the animosity directed towards the upstart religion.

Dougen (1200–1253) studied at Kennin-ji under Eisei's disciple, Myouzen, and went onto found the Soutou school, which today is immediately (and perhaps stereotypically) recognizable for its focus on Zazen meditation, exemplified by the circular dialectic of the koan and the concept of "the Way" (Dou) to perfection as rooted in "no-mind" or unconscious action and satori. Zen became the Buddhist sect most closely associated with the psychology and the purely aesthetic sense of "being Japanese."

Zen's adoption by the secular powers-that-be paradoxically precluded it from the entanglements of king-making. With its protected status, its infusion over ten centuries into all aspects of Japanese culture transmuted Zen into as much an ethos as a religion, akin to the "Protestant work ethic" and code of "rugged individualism" that Americans claim as defining of their character. Zen's almost transparent absorption into the "collective unconsciousness" makes it a less significant factor in this discussion.

The Tendai and Shingon sects and their powerful monasteries, however, struggled hard to bolster their failing influence. The patronage of the movers and shakers of the Nara and Kyoto courts had indeed established Buddhism as the de facto state religion. But power corrupts, and petty differences among Shingon and Tendai adherents vying for say over the affairs of state often degraded into pitched battles.

Hounen (1133–1212) was a Tendai priest at Enryaku-ji, the temple headquarters of the sect. Disillusioned with the decadence and corruption he saw around him, he turned to the Pure Land sect. Pure Land Buddhism was defined in its modern form by the 5th century Chinese monk Hui-yuan (334–417), who presaged Luther by promulgating a doctrine of salvation based not on effort and ritual, but on faith in the grace of the Amida Buddha and his infinite power and compassion.

The Pure Land Sutras (scriptures) were brought to China from India in the second century AD. According to these sutras, Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, had in a previous life rejected Buddhahood. In this prior incarnation, as the transcendent Amida Buddha, he vowed to forestall his own enlightenment until it became possible to bestow eternal happiness in the Pure Land up all beings (including, importantly, women) who with faith would call upon his name.

In his reinterpretation of Joudo (Japanese for Pure Land), Hounen further simplified the nenbutsu, essentially the Buddhism version of a crossing oneself and saying the Lord's Prayer. By de-emphasizing karma and rejecting the "works" associated with traditional Buddhist practice—asceticism, meditation and study—Hounen created a religion that could be comprehended and practiced by the laity, that held out a hope of salvation to the common man in his own lifetime.

Hounen's disciple, Shinran (1173–1262), simplified Joudo further. Joudoshin, or New Pure Land Buddhism, held that reciting the nenbutsu just once would suffice, much in the same way that Christian evangelical preachers call on their listeners to "confess Christ." Shinran, like Luther, also rejected monasticism and a celibate priesthood. Today, the majority of Buddhist priests in Japan follow Pure Land traditions, marry and participate actively in their local communities.

In his biographical sketch of Shinran, Pier Del Campana describes these evolved Pure Land doctrines in terms that with the barest of alterations could be attributed to Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell:

Amida vowed that after his enlightenment all his followers would be saved provided they had faith in him and recited his name. The fact that he has attained supreme enlightenment is proof that men can be saved through faith in him. On the other hand, men are so corrupt that they cannot merit salvation and rebirth in the Pure Land through their own efforts. No matter how much a person practices austerities and performs good deeds, he cannot save himself; salvation comes only through faith in Amida (Great Historical Figures of Japan, p. 105).

These doctrines were taken in a quite different direction by Shinran's fiery and independently-minded contemporary, Nichiren (1222–1282). Like Hounen he was a Tendai priest dismayed by the decayed state of the world. He went on to found a uniquely "Japanese" and uniquely contentious sect of Buddhism, whose best-known branch is Soka Gakkai.

True to his Tendai roots, Nichiren based his theology on a new reading of the Lotus Sutra. But Nichiren rejected the Esoteric path offered by Kuukai and the "easy" path offered by the Pure Land disciples. He lashed out at Hounen for slighting the historical Shakyamuni Buddha (Gautama) in favor of the abstract Amida Buddha, accusing him of being a "sworn enemy of the Law," meaning, the law of causality, the universal principle underlying all phenomena and events in daily life.

Nichiren, to be sure, was no Pelagian (an adjective perhaps more appropriate to Zen). He might actually have agreed with Hounen's strikingly similar restatement of James 2:14: "Without deeds, faith is dead, and without faith, deeds are dead." Wrote Nichiren in On Attaining Buddhahood:

Whether you chant the Buddha's name, recite the sutra or merely offer flowers and incense, all your virtuous acts will implant benefits in your life. With this conviction you should put your faith into practice . . . . Even a tarnished mirror will shine like a jewel if it is polished. A mind which presently is clouded by illusions originating from the innate darkness of life is like a tarnished mirror, but once it is polished it will become clear, reflecting the enlightenment of immutable truth.

And what is the polishing tool? Soka Gakkai's famed Namu-myou-houren-gekyou nenbutsu, a ritual, prayer, and sacrament rolled into one. This nenbutsu Nichiren derived from the Lotus Sutra, but unlike Shinran he further defined the nenbutsu as part and parcel of an "assiduous practice" to be exercised morning and night, and supplemented by additional acts of faith, study and missionary work.

I don't think it too far a reach here to compare Nichiren's Buddhist counter-reformation to Joseph Smith's efforts at bridging the Catholic/Protestant chasm between works and grace. Like Smith, in contrast to the prevailing grace-centered faith, Nichiren essentially preached that salvation comes by grace only "after all we can do" (2 Nephi 25:23). And as with Mormons, to followers of Nichiren "all we can do" means much effort. No free ride to heaven here.

Also paralleling Smith, Nichiren separated himself from the mainstream religions by declaring his to be the one true Buddhism. All others were false, misguided and heretical. In tones that would sound familiar to observers of modern, politically-active religious movements, Nichiren proclaimed that things were going to hell in a handbasket precisely because the people were following after the wrong Gods and the nation's leaders weren't hearkening to his message.

The government begged to differ and sent him into exile. It might have been for his own good, for on several occasions he was set upon by mobs and almost killed. He was pardoned three years later, but stirred up trouble again and was exiled a second time. This time he escaped on his own accord and consequently avoided re-arrest precisely because things were going to hell in a handbasket.

Nichiren had proved uncannily prescient in prophesying the Mongol invasion of Japan in 1274 and the government thought it best not to tempt fate. It was not only his confrontational character that made him so many enemies ("I am certainty the most intractable person of all Japan," he wrote shortly before his death), it was his redefinition of the relationship between church and state.

Unlike the Shinran, Saichou and Kuukai, Nichiren had no familial connections to the aristocracy. This fact he took advantage of, rejecting the hierarchal leanings of Tendai and Shingon and styling himself a low-born commoner, a "man of the people." He couched his arguments in terms of national exceptionalism while proclaiming the imminent threat of apocalyptic doom and a utopian vision of a perfectible society to be established in the here and now.

This populist appeal served and was strengthened by the more pragmatic elements of his religious philosophy. A primary purpose of the church, he insisted, was not to secure happiness in some future life, but in the here and now. Writes Pier Del Campana,

For [Nichiren] religious ideals were inseparable from society and had to be realized in society. Salvation could not be achieved only at the level of individual meditation, because, first, no individual exists by himself, and secondly, because a living being can only realize itself through action and not by mere spiritual activity (Great Historical Figures of Japan, p. 112).

But while all the same ingredients were there, this 13th century Buddhist "reformation" did not directly threaten the existing political order. To be sure, Nichiren's stridency inflamed passions and raised the hackles of secular and religious leaders. And half a century earlier, in 1207, Hounen and Shinran had been defrocked and exiled and the Pure Land sect banned. However, only four years later the ban was repealed and they were both pardoned.

Ever since the founding of the Japanese state in Nara there had certainly been no separation of church and state, but the upper hand had always been held firmly by the state. The only ceremonial imprimatur a warlord ever sought was that of the emperor, and emperors were easily replaced. Add to this the fractioning of Buddhist belief into competing sects from before the time of Kuukai and Saichou and it was simple politics to play one side off against the other.

As a result, with the exception of the Tokugawa anti-Christian purges (confined mostly to Kyushu but lasting a quarter-century) and the post-Meiji anti-Buddhist purges (lasting less than a decade but nationwide), the notable incidents of religious conflict in Japanese history were short-lived and regional in scope, in no way comparable to Europe's continental-wide Thirty Years' War. Which is not to say that they were not at times extremely bloody.

The most horrific examples of religious violence arose when a shogun or military leader perceived that a particular sect was giving aid and comfort to a secular enemy. In the mid-12th century, Taira no Kiyomori ordered a military assault on the monks of Nara, whom he felt were showing undue partiality to his implacable foe, the Minamoto. What followed was the infamous "Burning of Nara," a conflagration that killed 3000 and destroyed most of the city's temples and monasteries.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, during the Warring States period, the collapse of central authority again allowed a number of prominent Buddhist sects to enter the political arena, in some cases governing entire provinces, as did a Ikkou (Pure Land) sect in Kaga prefecture, from 1488 to 1531.

For four years during the 1530s, in what is known as the Hokke Ikki (Lotus Uprising), followers of Nichiren took over the city of Kyoto. The uprising ended in 1536 when Enryaku-ji Tendai warrior monks descended from Mt. Hiei and leveled all 21 Nichiren temples, burning a good portion of Kyoto in the process.

The tables were turned in 1571 after Enryaku-ji allied itself with the warlord Takeda Shingen, who opposed Oda Nobunaga's Napoleonic campaign to unify the country. In retaliation Nobunaga razed the temple complex to the ground. The death toll at Enryaku-ji alone is estimated at 20,000. Then in 1579, in a demonstration of his brutal ecclesiastical neutrality, Nobunaga had three prominent Nichiren clerics executed and forbid Nichiren Buddhism from being proselyted in Kyoto.

In ironic contrast to the Nobunaga's merciless battles against the Tendai temple on Mt. Hiei and the Pure Land temple at Ishiyama Hongan was his partiality to the recently-arrived Jesuit monks. This was in part motivated by a sincere curiosity in things foreign. But he also saw Christianity as a check on the militant Buddhism, and Nobunaga learned to deploy the modern weaponry supplied by Portuguese traders with devastating effectiveness.

His sympathies toward Christianity was in no way shared by his successors. Of Nobunaga's religious pogroms Billy J. Cody notes that, "His purpose was not the extermination of their religion, but only [their] political and military role" (Great Historical Figures of Japan, p. 165). But beginning with Hideyoshi and culminating with the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate the goal of the government was the literal extermination of Christianity from Japanese soil.

However, again, it is difficult to tease out of this extreme antipathy towards Christianity any kind of interest in or dispute over doctrine. It was a simple matter of geopolitics. The Jesuits had had their greatest success in the provinces of Kyushu and southern Honshu, claiming among their passionate converts a number of prominent daimyo, or military governors. After the turning-point battle of Sekigahara, many of these Christian samurai ended up on the wrong side of history.

One fear familiar to European politics was that Catholics were ultimately beholding to Rome, that they could call upon Spain and Portugal for arms and material support in resisting the unification of the country under a "pagan" banner. For the increasingly xenophobic Tokugawa, after a century of civil war the mere possibility was an intolerable one. That Ieyasu's principal foreign advisor was Will Adams, a Protestant Englishman, surely did not help.

The brutal campaign against the Catholic community ended at the siege of Hara Castle, 40 miles east of Nagasaki on the Shimabara peninsula (during which a Dutch warship offered token support to the shogunate). When, in 1638, the castle fell after a three month siege, some 37,000 Christians, along with their allies and sympathizers, were killed or executed.

The Tokugawa government restricted all foreign trade to a single port in Nagasaki manned by a single Dutch envoy, and then embarked on the most successful gun control program in history. The last thing a feudal regime desires is the "great equalizer" in the hands of an overtaxed peasantry. It was not all misplaced paranoia. Two-and-a-half centuries later the Tokugawa government would be overthrown by Nagasaki's neighbors, the Satsuma and Choshu clans, well-armed with western military hardware.

A small Christian diaspora survived Shimabara, practicing in secret, not to emerge until the 1868 Meiji Restoration. The Meiji Restoration also saw the last incidence of state-condoned religion-on-religion violence, this time between Shinto and Buddhism.

The Tokugawa regime had adopted Neo-Confucianism as its governing ideology, which itself drew on a philosophical foundation of Buddhist metaphysics. Following Kuukai's original formulation the native Shinto religion, upon which Japan's imperial system was founded, was subsumed into the Buddhist ecclesiastical order. In Confucian terms, this was necessary to compensate for the fact that, unlike in China, the emperor reigned but did not rule, an oversight the Meiji Restoration intended to rectify.

But with the de jure restoration of the Chrysanthemum Throne Buddhism was disestablished, the two religions were disentangled, and Shinto was elevated in its place. Not only had "outsider" provinces such as Satsuma and Choshu chafed under the long "dictatorial peace" of Tokugawa rule, followers of Shinto had also deeply resented their subordinated status. With the acquiesce and often the cooperation of the nascent government they took revenge.

During the rampage that followed (the Haibutsu Kishaku), thousands of Buddhist temples and monasteries were looted, vandalized and burned. Over 18,000 temples were closed, their lands confiscated. Shinto shrines were removed from Buddhist temple grounds. "Blue laws" prohibiting the eating of meat by Buddhist clerics and marriage among monks and nuns were overturned. Clergy supported by the state were forcibly laicized. Unlike previous anti-Buddhist purges the violence was mostly limited to property damage and it had spent itself by the mid-1870s.

The role of state Shinto was strengthened during the first half of the 20th century and became closely entwined with Japan's war effort. In 1945 it was Shinto's turn to be disestablished. Today, aside from controversial state visits to Yasukuni, the Shinto shrine where Japan's war dead are interred, and the very occasional coronation ceremony, the relationship between church and state in Japan resembles that between the Church of England and the British throne—symbolic, not theological, in execution.

In sectarian terms, 1945 marked for Japan what Francis Fukuyama has termed the "end of history," the end of social evolution rising out of marked ideological conflict. At this point, "genetic drift" (or perhaps "meme drift") takes over and a regression to the mean begins. With a vengeance.

An international survey conducted in 2002 found that in the United States, 59 percent of poll respondents claimed that religion was "very important" in their lives. For Japan it was 12 percent. More revealing was a 1996 Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs survey that reported declared church membership as 194 million, 54 percent higher than the total population, meaning that a significant proportion were claiming simultaneous membership in two or three quite different religions.

Shinto and Buddhism have achieved a balance of practice and belief that almost suggests careful negotiation by a higher power. Coming-of-age ceremonies from birth until marriage are oriented in Shinto rites, while Buddhism continues until death and the hereafter. This can be seen in the two biggest national holidays: Hatsumode, the New Year's visit to the local Shinto shrine, and the August Obon, the Festival for the Dead, with its roots in the Urabon Sutra.

Christianity has brought widespread (commercial) recognition to holidays such as Valentine's Day and Christmas. Wedding ceremonies are often conducted according to Shinto rites, with a generic "Christian" reception following. This laissez-faire approach can cause spiritual dilemmas, leading Dean Gilliland of the Fuller Theological Seminary to ponder whether Christians who participate in Hatsumode are possibly "flirting with spiritual danger" and committing idolatry.

Dean Gilliland suggests a compromise, that the celebrant "participates with his family in the act of going to the shrine and enjoying in the festival atmosphere, but does not participate in anything with more religious connotations." A nice solution, though I must confess that, as Mormon missionaries, my companions and I attended Hatsumode, pitched a few coins into the box, took lots of pictures of the cute girls in gorgeous kimono, and didn't give it a second thought. We found a cultural mean to regress to purely by reflex.

Consider what was once the radical religious fringe, Nichiren Buddhism. Soka Gakkai's political arm, the Koumeito, or Clean Government Party, holds 34 seats in Japan's lower house, third behind the Liberal Democratic Party and Democratic Party of Japan (who together hold 368 seats). Though it generally stands in opposition to the LDP, it is considered "centrist" in political orientation. Not a wild-eyed bunch of intolerant, religious fanatics.

Likewise, the Mormon church, America's one, new, "native" religion, has of late steered toward middle waters, stashing its historical baggage deep in the hold (except when it can play up its status as a historical victim), while insisting on its exceptionality. It still suffers slings and arrows from the mainstream. But Christianity has at least two hundred more years to evolve. Due to the pace and interconnectedness of things we will likely get there sooner than later.

The same could be said of Islam, arriving on the world stage five hundred years after Christianity, a thousand years after Buddhism. The model places Islam in the turbulent midst of its own reformation, with all the confusion between church and state and faith and violence. Yet social evolution averages the collective behavior of individuals over spans of time, making it difficult to point to statistical outliers as harbingers of change when one is immersed in the stream of history.

The question remains whether this or that socio-cultural mutation has set a trend or is a self-correcting error. Two contemporaneous examples of religious belief in extremis in Japan and the United States, the Branch Davidians and Aum Shinri Kyou, suggest not a widespread return to religious conflict, but rather exemplify the efficient social centrifuges that post-modern societies have become, spinning the heavy radicals off into extinction.

So perhaps Yeats was wrong after all. Things fall apart, and as a consequence the center holds all the stronger. Though one is left to wonder, when all is spun away, what of a passionate, sectarian nature will be left behind.

Labels: buddhism, culture, history, japan, lds, religion, shinto