Photo Dump: Religions Field Trip

That's Eric and I in front of the unused site at Ise, where the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu no mikoto oomikami, is housed. The shrine alternates between two neighbouring plots of land, and is relocated from one to the other every twenty years so as to avoid the pollution that comes with habitation. You're not allowed to take pictures of the actual shrine.

Not last weekend but last last weekend I went to Ise, Tenri and Nara. Prof. Hermansen, who teaches a history class and the religions class I'm enrolled in, guided a fieldtrip to some holy places in Japan. Some important, some merely interesting.


These giant barrels are full of holy sake for the gods. These particular drums are outside Geiku, the lesser shrine at Ise, where the god who serves Amaterasu her meals is enshrined.


When we went the shrine had beguin a six-year process of collecting wood in order to relocate. These worshippers halp to collect and deliver it. This is still Geiku, the lesser of the two shrines.

This is the sacred river that surrounds Naiyu, where Amaterasu herself is enshrined. In olden times, people used to wade across in order to enter the shrine grounds, purifying themselves in the process. Nowadays there's a bridge.

Professor Hermansen translated for our Japanese guide (on the left). At the moment, he's explaining how the humongous boulder he's gesturing at (not pictured) is a kami, a god or spirit.

This is Tenri, a city built entirely around the new religion of the same name. It dates its foundation to the early 1800s, when its female founder came to be inhabited by the true creator deity, who had been away for some time and returned to find the world corrupt and filled with evil.

This is the building that houses the Jiba. Followers of Tenri believe that the first humans were created here, almost a billion years ago. The Jiba is a statue consisting of 13 slabs of stone, symbolizing this in some esoteric fashion. We stayed the night in Tenri, in one of their dorms. It was really cheap.

In the morning we went to Nara. This is a pagoda there.

Gemma, one of the new exchange students from Oxford, who absolutely fell in love with all the deer.

A prayer is written on a piece of paper which is then plastered over the openings of these lanterns.

A maiko, the daughters (or wives) of the kami at a shrine. Way back when they would have to be virgins. These days, it's just a part time job. This one asked us (very politely) to stop lazing about in front of the shrine.

Prof. Hermansen and one of the Oxfordites tried to figure out if people were still donating these big lanterns. Turns out the one they're looking at is from 1993.

An Anglican church in Nara. Among my weirder experiences while in Japan - saying the Apostles Creed in Japanese.
I sort of wonder how Anglican it really is. When the Tokugawa-era anti-Christian policies were lifted at the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868) a small number of secret Christians came out of hiding. The Pope sent some missionaries to test if their beliefs had remained pure after 250 years of persecution and isolation. Finally, they were declared non-Christian.

Some things I've done and some things I've don't.

Haven't had a lot of pictures on the 'ol blog in a while now. 'Bout time to go siftin' through some archived pictures. Saddle up.

Around the end of March I went to Kyushu with my (old) homestay family. It was a Japanese-style vacation, which means we spent one night at a hotpsring (Western-style room) and raced from one scenic spot to another for most of the day. We spent about 20 minutes in Huis Ten Bosch, a manufactured 17th century Dutch city on the Kyushu coast. (and yes I had to double-check the spelling) This is the hotel there, a prime spot for the increasingly-popular Western-style weddings.

We were travelling with Kazumi's parents (my homestay father) who live in, or perhaps just near, the city of Kumamoto, also Kyushu. This is the family shot I took. From left to right: Mom, Kenta, Dad, his Mom, his Dad. They're very nice, but I had some trouble understanding Kyushu dialect.

Koi no bori. Little cloth carp that Japanese people hang outside their houses like streamers for Children's Day, the 5th of May. Also sometimes, and confusingly, known as the Boy's Festival. In Japan carp are a symbol for strength and power; they are said to leap over waterfalls; there is a fairy tale, a strange one, where a carp swims up a waterfall and when it reaches the top is transformed into a dragon. There are normally three carp - a family with a small boy-carp - but this particular set, seen in front of a house a few doors up the hill from my new homestay, had a fourth, a black one, bigger than the others. With unknown meaning, even when I asked my homestay mother.

We went to the beach. Soccer was played, friends were made, heads were shaved. Nuff 'bout that.

We had a triple-birthday-smorgasbord of fun at an All-You-Can-Play-Park in Kobe. The intrepid duo pictured were among those who aged recently. That's John on the left, of Hotlanta, Georgia, and Michi, of way the hell middle of nowehere, Japan.

Jason, who you see with his best game face on, was the third. He was, shall we say, somewhat inebriated. He may have tried to lift me a few times. Jason is very strong. Jason succeeded.

The train back. One sleeping Jason not pictured. I think everybody's too funned-out to smile. And Mandy, on the left, is of course texting. That's Pat in the middle, whom we have met before.

Dog in the Night

A terrifying bit of news from Japan, that should not by any means be taken out of proportion.

Japanese police arrested a 17-year-old boy on Tuesday on suspicion of murdering his mother after he turned up at a police station carrying a severed human head in a bag.

[...]

The boy had not been attending school recently and was being treated by a psychiatrist, Kyodo said, adding that he had told investigators: “It would be
good if terrorism and war were gone from this world. I didn’t care who I killed.”

Kyodo [News Agency] said Tuesday was the mother’s birthday and she would have turned 47.

Every time I see a piece like this I think back to some of the things that Michael Moore talks about in Bowling for Columbine - how American violence is a direct result of American television, and that a culture of fear creates a culture of guns which in turn develops into a culture of murder. It's the sort of thing that makes sense.

But then I go off to safe Japan and see a murder on the news every night. Sometimes, if an especially intrepid reporter arrives early at the scene of an especially gruesome murder, they replay crimson clips of bloodstains and black garbage bags as I eat dinner. And I look at news about shootings in Toronto and gang-violence in Vancouver and I think "it would be good if hatred and violence were gone from this world."

And then I look at the statistics. And it's the same everywhere.

While government statistics show that overall juvenile crime and murder by minors -- those under 20 -- have declined in recent years, a number of sensational crimes has led to calls for harsher punishment of young offenders.

Matt and Funny Words

I have a new favourite phrase!

The phrase: 江戸の敵を長崎で討つ。

Pronounciation: Edo no kataki o nagasaki de utsu.

Translation: To enact revenge on someone in an unlikely place.

Literal translation: To attack your Edo enemy in Nagasaki.

What fun!

The more I think about it...

...the more I feel that the entirety of the difference between North American and modern Japanese culture can be understood by watching one episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire from each country.

The Makioka Sisters

I finished The Makioka Sisters this afternoon, sitting on the banks of the Nigawa River as the sun went down. (I was half tanning the top of my head) Having devoured Norwegian Wood in a day and a half, I'd been slogging my way through the Makioka Sisters for upwards of two weeks. It's a dense, dense book, mostly dialogue and long, sinuous contemplation. Very little actually happens in terms of plot, but it's a fair task trying to keep track of what everybody is thinking, which, ends up being more important than the plot anyway.

It's a kind of plutocratic family drama, set in Kobe and Osaka, the kind of thing Jane Austen would have written if her name had been Tanizaki Jun'ichiro. Its themes are about what you would expect - declining fortunes, pride, face, irresponsible younger daughters, scandal, dashing young scapegraces, and a good deal of visiting and being visited by friends and acquaintances. In typical Japanese fashion the whole book is suffused with a sublime melancholy, which paints a thin lacquer of nostalgia over the entire piece and makes the scarce moments of serenity more pregnant. The characters are skillfully evoked, and a complex web of social relationships and past social relationships along with them.

But it's dreadfully slow, more so than Jane Austen, less so than Murakami Shikibu. This is partially due to the aforementioned viscosity, which belies swallowing the whole thing, let alone several chapters, in one sitting, but really it has more to do with the ponderous pace of aristocratic life in Taisho-era Japan. The sisters, there are four of them, often take an entire morning simply to get dressed, two or three days to make a decision, and several weeks to a month to write a letter. It is dolorous reading, though perhaps this is more a blessing than a curse, given the amount of time it takes to require merely two or three chapters.

In the final analysis it's difficult reading. I enjoyed it, and have gained an immense amount of respect for Tanizaki as an author. It is unfortunate, however, that we were given only two weeks to read it, and that there were not enough copies to go around to all the students.

The Kishis

This past seven days was Golden Week, a time in the Japanese calendar when non-festive holidays accumulate like nobody's business. I had school only on Tuesday and Wednesday, and have generally spent my time avoiding studying, seeing friends, and spending way more money than I have any right to. Last night was especially bad. I saw Babel, which is like $15 WITH the student discount, and ate out twice, and went to an arcade/fun-park/bowling-alley. We'd been planning to see Spiderman III, but it sold out while we were queueing, and I somewhat thoughtlessly recommended that we see a movie about language confusion of which only a quarter is English. The rest was Arabic, Spanish, JSL, and conveniently, Japanese itself, all with Japanese subtitles. We were with some Japanese students who could follow most of it, but maybe got less out of it since the Tower of Babel is a little outside their eidos. Jo(h?)nathan, a new exchange student, basically gave up trying to follow the story. As for me, I spent most of my time being perfectly in tune with the motif, less so the plot. I don't know if that means I understood the movie better, or worse.

It occured to me that I haven't actually posted any pictures of my new homestay family, and that maybe introductions were in order. It also seemed like a good chance to take advantage of some pictures I had taken last week when I made Mexican food for everybody. So without further ado, the Kishis (pronounced like the plural of Quiche!).

This is Eiji, he works in something related to welding, I don't entirely understand what it is. He spends a lot of his free time fishing with his friends. He drinks a lot of sake and shochu when he's home. These days he's building a deck in the backyard, but it's raining today so instead he's spent the entire time in bed. Not that I blame him for that - Japanese men really do spend way too much time in the office.

This is Yoko, my homestay mother and a devoted housewife. I am incredibly indebted to her for agreeing to make me vegetarian food while I'm here, since it's kind of a nuisance. She spends a lot of her time asking me questions about English, which she is studying. This probably would have annoyed me, more than it does, if it was the beginning of the year, but because I already have opportunities to speak Japanese I'm trying to be helpful where I can. She also makes a lot of assumptions about foreigners, by which I mean Westerners, that I am trying to correct. (we had a conversation, not 20 seconds ago, about how not all foreigners eat french fries all the time) This is generally a problem I have with Japanese people, but more so with her than usual.

This is Junko, and if she knew how to find my blog she would totally beat me up for posting this picture of her. She's my homestay sister, currently working at an international kindergarten or pre-school a little east of Nishinomiya. Like Kenta, she speaks good English, and is very "foreign" sometimes in the way she thinks. She has a good number of rich Indian friends who buy her clothes and food. She is older than me, but wouldn't want me to tell you by how much. (which maybe is indicative)

There's also another daughter, Yuko, who graduated recently and is working at a trading company in Tokyo. I've only met her the one time when she came back for Golden Week, and she left this morning on the bullet train. She was sick the whole time she was here, and not photo-ready. She spends a lot of her time reading fashion magazines.

Photo Dump: Camping in Nagano Prefecture

I went camping last weekend with Pat and his homestay family. (and their dog) I haven't been camping in a long time. It was 懐かしい. I spent a good deal of time thinking about Georgian Bay, and blaming Japanese urbanism for blotting out the stars. We spent the days touring the area and visiting hot springs, and the nights roasting konyaku and agedofu over a portable campfire. We went hiking on the top of a volcano.

We were in Nagano Prefecture, which is where everybody goes skiing in winter. Most of the snow had melted by now, but it was pretty high up so it was still pretty cold. Our first night it went down to below zero. Our third day, I came back to Nishinomiya with a cold. Go figure.

A Kind of Weird Story

I had one of my strangest experiences in Japan last night. One of my best experiences, but still, very strange.

I'd been nicking for real Indian food for a while. My new homestay mother has been fantastic about making me veggie food, but I could have really gone for some paneer or authentic naan. So Junko has these rich Indian friends that work part time with her at her kindergarten. They were all going out Sunday night and I was invited along.

They took me to a club. I don't mean like a dance club, I mean like an English gentleman's country club but in downtown Kobe and instead of white owners and brown servants it was brown owners and yellow servers. I felt like I was viewing some bizarre version of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, as through a glass, darkly. Truly strange it was.

But delicious. I ate so much I almost burst this morning. Amazing.

Norwegian Wood

I went book shopping with Pat on Friday afternoon, first Nishikita then Umeda. We're both in the Japanese novels class. I bought Norwegian Wood and three other books. Started reading it on the train when I accidentally got on the wrong one and Pat proved more clever than I. I finished it just now. That's 2 am Sunday morning. I haven't read a book that quickly since I devoured Michael Chrichton's Sphere in one night in second year.

I'm not sure I liked it that much either. It sort of feels like a Tokyo-an Catcher in the Rye but with all the sexual stirrings of a Pat Barker book. It's a kind of brutal eroticism that pumps the entire work forward but proves pointless and ultimately self-destructive. There's a point near the end when the protagonist begins to take on some responsibility for the plot, but mostly he exists as a shadow to the soliloquies of others.

Or maybe I just haven't read anything but the Tale of Genji in a really long time. I wonder what my writing looks like? My English, these days, is in truancy.

Hikikomori and Others

I wasn't really planning on talking about what happened at Virginia Tech. I've watched the news in Japan, of course, and followed the story a little online, read Matt Good's take on it, got into a big discussion with Texas on the nature of Terrorism. (capitals added) But I wasn't planning on mentioning it here until I came across this article by Michael Zielenziger about Cho Seung-Hui.

Clearly, some of the evidence suggest that Cho was both enraged and very much socially isolated.We do know that some hikikomori are able to conduct themselves, from time-to-time, in the ‘real world’ while also retreating to their rooms…going to classes, or to work, then shutting themselves off. That is to say, they can have days and weeks of “normal’ behavior…and then have to seclude themselves. We also know that some social isolates grow so frustrated as to become very angry and frustrated as Cho was.

Hikikomori is a Japanese word. It refers to a pheonomenon, and the people afflicted with it, wherein a young adult, usually a student, locks themselves in their room away from stress, social, familial, and school-related. They don't go to school, or see friends. Their parents feed them, and they only leave their room for the bathroom. Sometimes it's not quite that bad. Sometimes I imagine it's worse.

It's a problem that in Japan is taken fairly serious, the Ministry of Education has a definition for it, but more and more it's being suggested that hikikomori is hardly a Japanese phenomena. Zielenziger continues.

Yet in many ways, the high-stress, high-pressure environment that Korean Confucian culture imposes on its youth…mirrors the stress Japanese young adults endure…and it is not unreasonable to suggest a young Korean, detached from his childhood environment, would retreat…or suffer some sort of traumatic incident after coming to the US.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that we're really not all that different.

Assassins!

Every now and again I run into something that reminds me just how much Japan still resembles a third world country. Sometimes it's the little rickshaws. Sometimes its opinions on homosexuality. Sometimes it's political assassinations.

Take for instance the shooting of Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito Tuesday evening.

Ito, who was campaigning for Sunday's mayoral election, was shot twice in the back at about 7:52 p.m. by a man police identified as Tetsuya Shiroo, 59.

Shiroo is second in command of the local gang Suishin-kai, which is affiliated with the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, the nation's largest criminal syndicate with 40,000 members, police said. (The Japan Times)

That the gangsters are accepted as a natural part of Japanese society is tautological. But the rhetoric usually goes that Japanese gangsters are more like businessmen, with a couple shady cards up their sleeves. More and more it's looking like this whole pre-meditated affair has more to do with extremist right-wing politics than it does with "land deals, construction work and other development projects".

It is not the first time a mayor has been shot in Nagasaki. Hitoshi Motoshima was shot and seriously injured in January 1990 by a rightwing extremist after he refused to retract remarks that Emperor Hirohito, known posthumously as Showa, was partially responsible for World War II.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima are the only two cities ever hit by nuclear weapons. Their mayors have traditionally been pacifists who have appealed for world peace.

[...]

The National Police Agency said in its annual report last year that the country's estimated 10,000 hardcore rightists have become increasingly violent in recent years.

Nigawa Homestay a Success: Sources

Moved in to Nigawa homestay on Saturday. Forgot only one thing back with the Nakagawas, my cell phone, but I realized I'd forgotten it when we were only about 5 minutes driving away, so we went back and picked it up.

The Kishis, my new family, are fantastic. They are: Eiji, the father, who works in something like the welding industry?: Yoko, the mother (I fear I have her name wrong, since I always call her お母さん) who is very energetic and tends her own herb and mushroom garden; and Junko, my elder sister, who works as a kindergarten teacher. I have another elder sister who works in Tokyo at the moment, so I've never met her and I don't know her name.

It's weird because now I feel like I have too many families. It was hard enough when I had to distinguish between my Canadian family and my Japanese family. I need to work out some sort of code.

Nigawa, the area I'm in now, is quite close to school. I biked here today, which is great because I really miss biking. It's funny that nobody in Japan wears bicycle helmets, especially given that the roads are so narrow. One day, when the rainy season approaches, I will have to master the art of biking while holding an umbrella in one hand, something that Japanese people apparently have a genetic advantage in.

Mmkay, off to the gym.

Moving House

I change homestays tomorrow. Spent some of last night packing up all my worldly possessions, discovered that they have grown too numerous for my two suitcases. Not entirely sure what I'm going to do about that. I may need a box of some sort.

Decisions decisions.

Little yellow crescent moons.

The blogosphere has been having a bad run of it recently. A number of clever, older bloggers have taken it upon themselves to highlight the missing scale on the underbelly of the beast. I mentioned two articles yesterday, but the conversation has snowballed. Terry Glavin connected me with Oliver Kamm's commentary ("The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate.") which connects to the disastrous debate between blogger Guido Fawkes and veteran Guardian editor Michael White. ("It's all commentary.")

Which of course I wouldn't feel so bad about if I hadn't checked into China Confidential this morning and had my stubborn optimism dashed against the rocky shores of 'Fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts', more specifically that last one. I have an immense amount of respect for the Reporter - his content and his rhetoric, seperately - but recently he's begun mutating into something horrible, horrible. Commenting on the recent, peaceful, Moqtada al-Sadr-instigated demonstrations in Iraq.

The Islamist scum chanted: "Get out occupier!" They waved Iraqi flags and banners saying "Down with Bush, Down with America."

By midday their wannabe Iraqi fuhrer--a piece of human filth that should have been exterminated years ago--had not made an appearance at the rally.

And later, reviewing developments of the Iranian nuclear program.

Iranian monster-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the announcement with
pomp and ceremony at the heart of the regime's nuclear program, the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.

Question: Why is he still alive?

Another question: Why are the Shiite and Sunni Islamist scum of Iraq still alive?

I mean, seriously, how can you condemn the holocaust and incite racial hatred in the same article? There was a day when China Confidential was about China. Those were fiery days, bold days, interesting days. But there's a certain lack of maturity being displayed here that I don't feel I need to elaborate on.

Maybe there's something to what Oliver Kamm was saying. "The great innovation of web-based commentary is that readers may select minutely the material they are exposed to. The corollary is that they may filter out views they find uncongenial." I mean, it's not like there's a lack of news concerning Asian involvement in the Middle East. It's the kind of news that keeps us out of the hyena pen.

Take for instance monday's visit by Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki to Japanese PM Shinzo Abe's residence, and the reassurances from Japan that support for the Iraqi reconstruction will continue.

Maliki said Iraq is making a new start for the future, having overcome many problems already. He indicated the country hoped for further support from Japan.

Japan's contribution to the reconstruction of Iraq has been both financial assistance and Self-Defense Forces activities.

Ground SDF troops were based in Samawah in southern Iraq for two years.

In addition, Japan has extended yen loans of up to $3.5 billion (417 billion yen) and grants of more than $1.5 billion. The financial assistance has gone toward improving infrastructure, such as electric power facilities, officials said.

In Monday's meeting, Abe also told Maliki that Japan will offer yen loans to rebuild water supply systems in Basra, southern Iraq. (Asahi Shimbun)

Now there's an uplifting story. Cheer up Reporter. It's not all yellow-stars and car-bombs and knocking off Philistines.

Quit being such a damn Fuhrer.

The Lucky Strike Problem (also, Hanami Photodump)

I have a pack of cigarettes in my front pocket. I haven't started smoking, mind you. I've just run into an interesting moral dilemma.

It started near the end of a 花見 (hanami, flower-viewing party) I threw last night on the banks of the Shukugawa near my home. Like 20 people came and it was a ton of fun and when it got late and we started to clean up there was a pack of Lucky Strikes that somebody had left on the tarp. There were only a few of us left, and nobody wanted them. Now somebody had paid good money for these, and moreover, the pack was practically full. By giving them to somebody I could reduce waste and increase somebody's utility. It was, apparently, an economic problem.

But of course I don't really like cigarettes. The other option was that I could simply throw them away. It would be a waste, true, but not much of one since ultimately it'd be like throwing away a pill of cyanide. I feel like this is what I should do. But at the same time, why throw away something perfectly good?

I guess it's sort of a weird moral dilemma. Maybe I shouldn't think so much about it.

Here are pictures from the hanami. Enjoy.