| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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There is a wooden device on a pivot and it is maybe ten feet in diameter. People come in, grab a spoke, and walk it around in a circle. One turn equals one prayer. If you are mute you can still pray. Still it gives a new meaning to mechanical repetition of prayer. There is also a cave of 1000 Buddhas, mostly small, but there quite probably are 1000 in there. Through most of that walk you must be stooped down to avoid the low ceiling. (For those who follow such things, the choice of our chachka, our cheap souvenir that a local would buy for himself, was really easy in Japan. I was planning to get statues of the Seven Happy Gods, but they are not as commonly sold as they once were, I guess. We got a prayer plaque of the sort people buy, write a prayer on, they tie up at a temple. Most of the local temples seem to have them and the plaques are popular, though they are not bought to be kept the way we are.)
It felt like a long walk back to the train and it felt good to sit down and rest our feet. We had one more temple to find, but that was in Tokyo. This we only had a map reference for and finding it was difficult. When we did it was already dark and the temple was locked up. There were souvenir shops, but no English anywhere. The Japanese probably thought that it would be meaningful to the Japanese but not to tourists. Most Japanese would need to hear only one number and know which temple it was and what its significance was. The number is 47. At this temple 47 Ronin committed suicide in a historical event chronicled in a book called Chushingura.
Before I can write about Chushingura I should write about Samurais and Bushido. This is a good place then to have a discussion of Bushido.
The Japanese seem very peculiar to Americans. I have to say that I do not find the Japanese peculiar at all. But I look at the Japanese from the point of view that everything is explained by Bushido. The problem with trying to understand the Japanese without Bushido is that they make no sense at all. The problem with using Bushido is that that it is too powerful. Suddenly the Japanese become too straightforward. It has to be an over-simplification. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. When all you have is Bushido to explain the Japanese character, everything looks like a straightforward manifestation of Bushido. How can the Japanese have committed such cruelty in W.W.II and still feel they have done no wrong? By Bushido they really have done no wrong. The soldiers were the Samurai of the 40s. How can the Japanese make such a big thing of the Salaryman, this huge class of people who dress all alike? The Salaryman is the new Samurai. They dress all alike because there is a right way for the Salaryman to dress just like the Samurai had a right way to dress and everything else was wrong. The code of Bushido, as long as we are simplifying, is simply this. Loyalty is not just important to a Samurai, it is the ONLY thing that is important. It is the ONLY virtue. Besides someone of nobility, the highest rank you can achieve in society is to be a Samurai. A Samurai is the muscle of the master. And the master was put in place by Divine Will. If a commoner does not get out of the way of a Samurai, the Samurai can kill him with impunity. There is nothing disloyal to the master in killing a commoner. And certainly nothing bad you can do to an enemy that is in itself disloyalty to the master. If the master has told you to be kind to the enemy, for whatever reason, then it would be wrong. But lacking such orders from the master you can do what you want with the enemy.
How can the Japanese have been so cruel to their captives in the Pacific War? Their leaders wanted them to win and do everything they could to achieve that end. That was the only virtue. That was the right thing to do. And many Japanese still feel they did no wrong in W.W.II. Why? Because by Bushido they did exactly what they were supposed to do. Far more than the Germans, they still believe they were just following orders and that was the right thing to do. So of course some are indignant that for doing the right thing they had the atomic bomb dropped on them. But that is mostly civilians and the lower ranks. Ask the higher military if Japan had had the Bomb would they have used it and the response (and this is a quote, as well as I can remember it, from a New York Times article last year) 'Of course, it was wartime and that is what you do in a war.' The Japanese actually were working to create their own super-weapons including biological warfare experiments in Manchuria. (All this was from the same article.)
There is a tremendous nostalgia for the simplicity of following a Master. That is a neat and uncomplicated lifestyle and it is one of austere virtue. Yukio Mishima was one of the most famous advocates of this romantic and simple lifestyle.
And the real shocker is that Western Society has its own Bushido. We had it long before the Japanese and it still is powerful today. But instead of serving a human master we say we serve God. And the only virtue is obeying God. If God tells us to rise up and retake the Holy Land, that is exactly where virtue lies. If we kill a lot of people along the way, well, it is still virtue. We are obeying God. The big difference is that in Bushido the master is a human and can clarify what his wishes are. In the West and in the Middle East Westerners and the Moslems need religious people to tell us what God really meant and the clerics wield incredible power in doing that. Anyone who fights for his religion is a Samurai. Suicide bombers are cut from the same cloth as the Kamikaze and the Samurai who dies for his master. We have our own Yukio Mishimas wanting to return to less complicated time when a master rules. In our society it is Christ or Mohammed or the Chief Rabbinate. And we have our Samurais willing to die for that ideal.
The classic story of Bushido and studies of kinds of loyalty is CHUSHINGURA or THE 47 RONIN. This is a classic study of kinds of loyalty. Asano is coming to court and has to know the proper rules of etiquette and manners. It is Kira's responsibility to teach these to Asano. But Kira has a conflict of interest. He really does not want to see Asano succeed at court so intentionally is derelict. Asano is a horrible failure and commits suicide. Asano's samurai now could be masterless, but they think that an injustice has been done to their master and decide they must be loyal to him even in death. But the time is not yet right. Led by the noble Oishi, they go into other professions and bide their time until the time is right to take their revenge. When the time comes one very cold winter day there are 47 of them left. Kira has long since stopped expecting any retaliation. Suddenly he has 47 angry samurai breaking down his door with a huge mallet (a very popular theme for Japanese art). Unprepared, Kira's guard is quickly dispatched. Next Kira is killed for his killing of Asano by dereliction of duty. Now the 47 samurai have discharged their duty to their master and really are masterless. They go to Shenga-Kuji temple and, proud of themselves, commit seppuku. This was Shenga-Kuji.
Totally washed out from walking we went back to the Ryokan, picking up sushi at the grocery.
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10/11/96 Tokyo: Stores, Offices, Entertainment; Japan's Economy
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I have to say as far as weather, this one is starting out the nicest day so far. No sun, but there are patches of blue. There is a potential for sunshine. We were somewhat washed out from yesterday so we stayed late in the room, until about 10. They came to change the linens, which they must do about once a week.
The first thing we did was get a JapanRail pass for the next Monday to Sunday.
Today for the second time when we went to the train station someone was handing out packages of facial tissue with an advertisement on the wrapper. This is actually very commonly done in Japan, in large part because many of the bathrooms do not have towels. It is a cheap way to get people to carry around your ad in their pocket. Of course the ad is mostly in Japanese. Some people handing out tissues will not hand them to gaijin. Some will hand two packs. It depends on if they are trying to get rid of them. Also it has to do with loyalty. They probably should not be handing to people who cannot read the ads.
The problem with tissue products is that they tend to fall apart in use. Facial tissue is not where it is the biggest problem, however.
We wanted to see the food department in the basement of Tobu, the local department store. They had individually wrapped pieces of sushi and if we were interpreting the prices correctly it was even considerably cheaper than we had been getting at the grocery. After looking all over the floor and finding many delicacies we decided that sushi was still what we wanted. This was quite a selection of sushi, all terrific, and we paid under 1300 yen and had a meal that would have cost at least twice that at home. I think our days of grocery store sushi are over at least while we stay at the Kimi. The Japanese consider beef to be something of a gourmet product and they charge pretty heavily for it. At home we feel the same about sushi. Here go to a good sushi restaurant here and you can lay down a lot of money, but you can also get it very economically if you want to serve it yourself. It also is not the highbrow food we think of it in the U.S.. If we were looking for an equivalent degree of highbrow-ness of American food with a hot dog as low and oysters Rockefeller as high, the Japanese would probably put sushi about where we would put pastrami.
Next we walked the streets of Ikebekuro just looking at shops and shopping. There was a huge poster for THE ROCK. It showed an obvious Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage and a third person who looked like a balding Carl Malden. It was entirely in Japanese and I was trying to think who the third actor was. I told Evelyn I thought it was Ed Harris, who was much younger than the man in the picture. Well, it turned out it was just an absolutely terrible rendering of Ed Harris. Other posters looked more like him but this one was ridiculously bad. Films are a little cheaper here, 1200-1500 yen for a film. That is still pretty steep.
We went to a department store to see what it was like. I ended up looking at film posters, hopefully for some Toho science fiction films. We saw a really nice poster on the street for the upcoming film MOSURA or as we will rename it MOTHRA. They have posters for U.S. and British films but no Japanese films. That seems peculiar. I guess there is sort of a mystique over foreign films.
One of the stops recommended in this area is the Toyota Amlux. This is a lot like a permanent World's Fair pavilion. Sure it is an ad, but it is an entertaining ad. They have a movie that you enter by climbing into what looks like a big spherical mirrored spaceship. The movie is not great, but it is not just an ad for Toyota. It is an entertaining little film which has a lot of product placement. It could be worse. It is supposed to have aroma control as well as stereo, etc. I did not notice any special aromas. They also take you through a section that explains how a car in made. You move among the chapters. One will be on a video wall, one will use 3D models, one will be photographed in 3D. Of course they have you go through several floor where you see Toyota's new models. Evelyn was very interested to see a floor demonstrating handicap access. The very top floor has model cars and seems to have little to do with Toyotas.
We walked the streets for a little while, then headed out to see a computer exhibition we had heard about in the NS building in West Shinjuku. West Shinjuku is a very exclusive set of very fancy and formidable-looking business buildings. On the way we saw some students in uniforms. |
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