The masters of multiculti

IN a recent post, I mentioned a survey which broke down the national population by religious affiliation and found that the statistically average Japanese would consider himself a believer in 2.7 religions. While religious purists might find that appalling, the Japanese, perhaps the most naturally syncretic people on earth, wouldn’t even blink at the news. For example, I once worked with a young Japanese woman who was a such a serious Roman Catholic that she kept an illustration of Christ under the clear vinyl covering on her desk. Yet, for extra income (and probably because she enjoyed it), she also served as a miko, or Shinto shrine maiden, on weekends to assist priests during wedding ceremonies. No one thought this was unusual at all, including, I suspect, the Shinto priests.

One reason for the laissez-faire approach is the partial syncretism that has existed between the proto-religion of Shinto and the latecomer Buddhism, which showed up in the archipelago in the sixth century. The partnership got off to a rough start in 698 when a Shingon sect established a temple near the Ise shrines because they thought the Shinto deities required the Buddha’s spiritual guidance. That demonstrated some serious Shingon sack, because one of the enshrined deities at Ise is Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun and the universe and the progenitrix of the Imperial line.

They paid for the blasphemy, however, as the damage from a typhoon in 772 caused the shrine to be temporarily dismantled. The typhoon was said to be a sign of divine displeasure at the presence of Buddhist symbols so close to the most important Shinto place of worship.

But proselytizers everywhere are relentless, and the Japanese Buddhists kept plugging away throughout the Heian period (794-1185) to promote a synthesis. Their efforts culminated with the development of the Ryobu Shinto (Dual Shinto) school, one of the main tenets of which held that Amaterasu was the manifestation of Dainichi Nyorai (Mahavairocana), or the Great Sun Buddha. Ryobu Shinto lasted for centuries, influenced straight Shinto thought, and allowed Buddhist temples to take control of Shinto shrines. Sites with both temples and shrines were common in Japan for close to a millennium. That arrangement ended in 1868 when the government ordered their separation as part of the program to establish State Shinto.

Exceptions remain, however, as can be seen in the photograph, which shows a Shinto shrine in front of Nigatsu-do at the Buddhist temple Todai-ji in Nara. That temple is known for housing the largest bronze statue of the Buddha in Japan, as well as being the largest wooden building in the world. It dates from the 8th century, but is affiliated with the Kegon sect rather than Shingon.

An estimated 99.39 million of the 127 million Japanese visited a shrine or temple (usually the former) during the three-day New Year period in 2009, so the Nara collocation makes it a convenient holiday stop.

In fact, ceremonies from the two traditions are combined here at an annual Buddhist rite called the Shunie, which is a gathering of priests for prayer and purification in February under the old calendar. (Nigatsu-do translates as February Hall.) Nowadays it starts on 1 March and continues for 14 days. The ritual at Todai-ji is one astonishing combination of elements that could happen only in Japan: disease-curing water magically traveling 175 kilometers, an archery demonstration, sake drinking, frenzied dancing with torches lit by sacred fire by Buddhist priests on retreat for exorcism and to pray for world peace while eating only one partial meal a day, and thousands of people who come to watch and hope that the sacred sparks fall on them. It was started by a Buddhist priest in 752 out of atonement for going fishing instead of going to a prayer meeting. (Read all about it at this previous post.)

Before the priestly procession holes up at Nigatsu-do, they stop off at the Shinto shrine and say a prayer to the tutelary deity. The procession is then blessed and purified with a gohei, a wooden wand with cloth streamers called shide that is used in Shinto rituals. (Here’s a Japanese site with a simple video and diagrams of how to make ‘em, including a photo of the finished product.)

Some of the too-cool-for-school rational secularists out there could learn a few things from the Japanese.

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Here’s a 30-second commercial for JR Nara showing Todai-ji and featuring scenes of the torch ceremony. The background music is Stranger in Paradise.

See what I mean?

Holy mother

MOTHERHOOD is an integral part of the narrative that religions present, whether the mother is the Aztec earth goddess, Mary in the Roman Catholic tradition, or Kim Jong-suk in the religion of Juche. For you unbelievers, Kim Jong-suk was Kim Il-sung’s wife and Kim Jong-il’s sainted mother. Her portrait is placed on walls in the home and worshipped in the same way as those of her husband and son.

Sheela na Gig --- The Maternal

Jong-suk died at the age of 31 while giving birth to a stillborn daughter. She is officially known as “The Heroine of the Anti-Japanese Revolution”, and was given the posthumous title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on 21 September 1972. Even though Jong-suk died while quite young, she is also cited as the founder of the Workers’ Party of Korea auxiliary organizations, the Korean Children’s Union, and the Korean Democratic Women’s Union. Verily, she must have been possessed by the divine spirit.

It’s natural, therefore, for theologians to turn their attention to the mother of Kim Jong-eun, the latest blessed event in that country’s continuing stream of miracles. Her name was Ko Yong-hui, and she died in 2004 after having brought forth Second Son Kim Jong-cheul (AKA The Girly Man) and Kim Jong-eun, who was known in his younger days as the “Morning Star General”. Perhaps his manger was strategically placed as part of Providence’s plan to guide the Wise Men to Pyeongyang.

Ko was one of Kim Jong-il’s mistresses rather than his wife. He had another concubine when they met, but she quickly became his favorite. Shortly before her death, the propagandists got to work and proclaimed her “The Respected Mother who is the Most Faithful and Loyal Subject to the Dear Leader Comrade Supreme Commander”. (It’s good to be king, eh?) They seem to have started the process of elevating her to the Pantheon too, but that project has now ended.

In fact, she’s lately become something of a non-person, despite being a literal non-person for seven years. The North Korean People Urgent Action Network (RENK) a Japan-based NPO, reported on the 23rd that Ko’s name has not appeared in any of the local media reports about her son following the death of The Son earlier this month. The Respected Mother, etc., no longer seems to be worthy of veneration.

That’s probably because she was born in Osaka.

RENK also reports that the mention of her birthplace and place of residence for the first 11 years of her life has been classified top secret, the mere mention of which will result in severe punishment. (RENK thinks that means concentration camps.) Thus, North Korean heretics face the real risk of Hell on Earth, even if the heresy is said to be an open secret in the country.

Juche Tower --- The Paternal

Ko was a member of a zainichi family; i.e., Japanese-born ethnic Koreans who choose to retain Korean citizenship. Her family repatriated when she was 11 under a program that was conducted from 1950 to 1984. She later became a member of a dance troupe that entertained His Holiness, who saw the light after seeing her righteous moves on the dance floor.

RENK speculates this situation might cause problems with Chongryun, the association of North Korean citizens in Japan (some members of which have seats in the North Korean national assembly). Chongryun knows all the facts too, so from the regime’s perspective, they know too much. Will that cause Pyeongyang to place some distance between themselves, despite the financial assistance the group provides? A controversy such as this could cause the Mother of all Schisms.

Here’s the problem: Though her family was ethnically Korean, Ko was born in an unclean place rather than the Pure Land, and the North Koreans are nothing if not purists. Worse, one of the principle tenets of the Church of Juche is that everyone in Japan has cloven hooves and forked tongues. Finally, it doesn’t help that her Korean ancestors were from Jeju Island, which is now part of South Korea. (The location of the family seat is a big deal in Korean culture.)

All of this brings to mind another question: When Kim Jong-eun and his brother Jong-chul visited Japan in 1991, did they swing by Osaka to see their mother’s hometown?

Kim Jong-nam at the Gates of Hell (Kitamura Toshifumi/AFP/Getty Images)

That’s right: Officials in both Japan and South Korea have confirmed that the two brothers entered the country on 12 May 1991 and stayed for 11 days. Kim Jong-eun, then eight years old, was carrying a Brazilian passport in the name of Joseph Park, and he obtained a Japanese visa in Vienna. The Japanese were tipped off that he was in the country illegally and investigated, but he had already left.

They traced a credit card used by an adult member of the traveling party and discovered that one of the places they visited was Tokyo Disneyland. That’s a favorite destination of the Kim brothers — Number One Son Kim Jong-nam was caught with his wife and kids in Tokyo on 1 May 2001 traveling on a Dominican passport. Before their deporation, he told authorities that he was taking the family to see Disneyland. It was later revealed that Jong-nam had been a frequent visitor to Tokyo. Rumor has it that he stayed in the same Shinbashi hotel and that he especially liked the public baths.

Really, Japan and the Disney Corporation should be proud of themselves. Christians make pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Lourdes, Moslems try to visit Mecca at least once in their lifetimes, and the Kim Brothers bowed at the Tokyo shrine of Mickey and Minnie.

And that brings to mind the final question: Did Kim Jong-nam and Kim Jong-eun feel a special kinship with the Dumbo the Flying Elephant ride when they swung by Fantasyland?

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Update: There’s a report now in Japan from two sources, one of whom is a Chongryun official, that a crisis could erupt in North Korea as soon as February. The party and the military are trying to establish Jong-eun’s position, but any unhappiness over the division of spoils could touch off an old-fashioned Joseon dynastic struggle, they say. Battles of this sort between two sons of the king with different mothers are an old story in other parts of the world as well.

These sources suggest that Number One Son Jong-nam (who has gotten fatter since the above picture was taken) is still a factor to be accounted for. The Chongryun source says he is very personable and has maintained ties with people in the party and the military his own age. He goes so far as to say he is even quite popular among this group. The source also notes that he was the heir apparent before he got caught with his proverbial pants down in Japan.

Finally, Jong-nam himself says he urged his father to open the country and adopt reforms, and got exiled for his opinion. There is, say the sources, a reform wing of sorts in North Korea, and it is not out of the question the reformers would unite behind him.

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The Sheela na Gig photo was taken by John Harding
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The Kims are consecrated boys, every last one of them.

Matsuri da! (122): The air’s apparent

THIS is going to stump everybody, including the Japanese readers: What is the object shown in the following photograph?

Here’s a hint, but it won’t help at all: Those are five-meter-square stainless steel sheets.

The answer? It’s a Shinto shrine in Asahi-machi, Yamagata.

In fact, that’s a photograph of the Kuki shrine’s main sanctuary, the site in all shrines which houses the shintai, the sacred object in which the spirit of the deity resides. The deity in Shinto is described as the yaoyorozu no kami, or the 800 myriads of divinities, which some (but not all) interpret as being different aspects of the One. Therefore, the presence of the divinity is manifest in every aspect of life.

Some deities are divinized ancestors or famous figures of the past. (That’s the point behind the often misunderstood concept of the Emperor as a “living god” until 1945, or the enshrinement of the spirits of the war dead in Yasukuni.) Natural phenomena are deities: the wind, sun, moon, water, mountains, trees, and rocks (including those that are phallic- and yonic-shaped). Man-made objects can be divinities: mirrors, swords, polished stones (tama), bells, clothes, dishes, and, after Buddhism began to exert an influence, paintings and statues. Mirrors have been used in Shinto worship since ancient times, so the creation of what is essentially a large mirror isn’t as odd as it might seem at first glance.

The deity worshipped at this shrine is air. That’s why it’s called the Air Shrine (unless you can think of a better translation for 空気神社).

On the approach to this site, one passes through monuments to earth, fire, wood, metal, and water, the five elements that created the cosmos.

As you might expect, Asahi-machi is located in a glorious natural setting — the somewhere in what city slickers would call the middle of nowhere — and the primary occupation of the residents is rice and fruit cultivation. Before he died in 1986, Shirakawa Chiyo, one of the older Asahi-machi natives, offered the opinion that the town should build a shrine in which air was the tutelary deity as a way to give thanks for the clean air that was a blessing to them all.

Nothing came of Mr. Shirakawa’s idea when he was alive, but it began to get serious consideration a year after he died in 1987, when the town launched a municipal development campaign. Because this is a religious institution, the money to build it had to come from private citizen/sector donations. Even though the Japanese are extraordinarily ecumenical, that wasn’t an easy sell. Still, they collected the money they needed and finished the shrine the following year.

Yeah, they pray there.

The idea behind the use of stainless steel for the air shrine was that it would reflect natural views of the surrounding area throughout the year from different perspectives. This would help people reflect on the existence of air.

Yeah, they have festivals there too.

The townsfolk designated 5 June as the local Air Day, which coincides with World Environment Day. They hold the Air Festival every year on the Saturday closest to Air Day. The main sanctuary is open to the public for viewing the divinity and pausing for reflections suitable for the spirit of the occasion. There’s also a performance by the miko of kagura, or Shinto Dance, which is traditional at shrine festivals. That’s shown in the photo above.

Oh yeah, there’s even a video:

And to conclude here’s a question theological but not rhetorical — Is the sound of the wind on that video the voice of the divinity?

Exquisite music

MORE than 800 years ago, in 1196, the Buddhist priest Hozan Kengyo was sent from the Myo-on-ji Jorakuin temple in what is now Shiga to attend the opening of a new temple in today’s Hioki, Kagoshima. Hozan was proficient in the biwa, and he taught 12 pieces of religious music to the local priests. It was performed with eight instruments, including the biwa, flute, taiko drum, and shell horns.

The name of the new temple was the Nakashima Jorakuin, and the music Hozan brought with him was known as Myo-on Junigaku (myo-on means exquisite music). The Japanese biwa is derived from the lute by way of the Chinese pipa, but several different types have been developed in Japan since then. This temple is said to be the origin of the Satsuma biwa, which was used not only for performing music, but also for the mental and moral training of the local samurai. In the past, only blind priests could serve at this temple, and many of the chief priests were renowned for their musical talent.

Nakashima Jorakuin is affiliated with the Tendai sect, at one time the mainstream Buddhist sect in Japan and at its zenith when the temple was founded. Tendai was once associated with the Imperial court, and the Jodo and Nichiren sects are derived from it. A class of warrior-monks emerged from the sect after the 12th century, which applied pressure to the Imperial court and took sides in military and political disputes to defend what it considered to be temple interests. That ended when the warlord Oda Nobunaga almost completely destroyed their headquarters in 1571.

The main temple of Nakashima Jorakuin was moved to a location near the Kagoshima Castle in 1619. With the early Meiji-period anti-Buddhist movement to disestablish Buddhism and replace it with Shinto, and the damage suffered during American bombing missions in World War II, the temple was again moved, this time to Miyazaki. What remains on the original site in Hioki was the subsidiary temple, which has been reduced to one building and the graves of the chief priests. Kagoshima has designated it a prefectural historical site.

Kagoshima also designated the 12 pieces of myo-on junigaku music as an intangible cultural treasure of the prefecture in 1971. The repertoire was once performed by blind priests throughout southern Kyushu, but it is now heard only once a year and only at Nakashima Jorakuin, accompanied by readings of sutras unique to the temple.

That performance always falls on 12 October. Ten musician-priests came from Kagoshima and Miyazaki this year to play. Said a sixth-grade boy who attended:

“I think it’s amazing when I wonder how the people of the past, who couldn’t record music, were able to memorize a performance of nearly an hour.”

Here’s a two-minute YouTube clip from last year’s performance of music that has changed little, if at all, from a millennium ago.

Tea party

TO outsiders, the Japanese tea ceremony can be a stiff and starchy affair that leaves some wondering why it’s been such a big deal for so long. To insiders, however, it integrates the appreciation of green tea (a fine beverage) with aspects of traditional architecture, gardening, ceramics, calligraphy, and religion. Its history is closely linked with that of Buddhism in Japan, particularly Zen.

The appreciation of tea was not always conducted in such an elegant atmosphere, however. For example, tea tournaments became popular among the aristocracy during the Muromachi period (1333 to 1568). The nominal objective of these contests was to distinguish which of the teas served was the “true tea”, i.e., that grown from seeds brought from China in the 12th century, and which were derived from newer strains. Extravagant prizes were awarded, more sake than tea was consumed, and the government banned them after they became an excuse for rowdiness.

The early master Sen no Rikyu founded his own school for the tea ceremony that branched off into three schools that survive to the present. He eventually became the tea guru for the warlords Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, receiving extensive land holdings from the latter and officiating at tea ceremonies for both, as well as for the Emperor Ogimachi. Rikyu became too successful for his own good, however; he irritated Hideyoshi for reasons that remain unclear and was forced by him to commit suicide in 1591. (Among the theories: he had a life-size statue of himself built, he refused to give his daughter to Hideyoshi as a concubine, and he charged too much money for his tea utensils.)

While the tea ceremony has become more sedate in the intervening centuries, it is still possible to catch glimpses of the past funkiness. One example is the annual Ochamori ceremony at Saidai-ji, a Buddhist temple in Nara, held this year on the 9th.

Those who visit the temple for the ceremony drink the same matcha that is consumed at other tea ceremonies. Matcha is a finely-ground, powdered, high quality form of the tea that is shade-grown. On this day, however, it is drunk not from the small, individual tea cups esteemed for their artistic value, but motherbruisers that are 40 centimeters in diameter, weigh from five to 10 kilograms, and are passed around to five or six people. In fact, the cups are so large the drinker needs help from the people on either side to handle them. (That’s where the “O” in Ochamori comes from. It isn’t the honorific but the character that means “big”.) They sometimes wind up with matcha-covered faces, which is an unlikely spectacle at a conventional tea ceremony.

The Ochamori originated more than 750 years ago in the Kamakura era with Eison, a high priest of the Shingon sect. In those days, tea was still a luxury item. During the January convocation of the monthly meeting for Buddhist instruction, he first offered the tea to the divinity, and then made sure it was passed to the parishioners and townspeople, most of whom wouldn’t have been able to afford it. The story goes that everyone wanted to drink sake instead — this is Japan, after all — but religious precepts prohibited it.

Reported a 15-year-old high school girl who came over from Hyogo for the event this year:

“It’s the first time I’ve ever drunk from a teacup this big. It was heavy!”

And to see just how heavy it was, try this brief clip from an Ochamori of the past.

Steamin’

EVERYONE associates saunas with the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, particularly Finland, and the bathing culture with the Japanese. But when baths in private dwellings became commonplace in Japan after in the postwar period, many of the sento, or bathhouses, installed saunas to attract customers. Now a good public bath in Japan combines the best of both worlds.

Less well known, however, is that the Japanese have had saunas of their own for quite some time — in fact, since at least the 8th century. That’s when the Empress Komyo, a devout Buddhist, had the Hokkei-ji temple built in Nara as a convent with a bath and a steam sauna. It’s a big enough deal to have been designated an important tangible cultural asset of the nation.

The sauna in its current form dates from the Edo period, and consists of two chambers of 2.5 square meters walled with Japanese cypress. Water is boiled in an adjoining room and passed through the floor. After the temple was repaired in 2003, the priests have opened the temple’s sauna to the public once a year. This summer, 30 people showed up to sweat out the sinfulness. No temperature readings were provided for the interior heat, but the 30-minute limit for individual bathers is about twice as long as I stay in a modern sauna. Then again, a young female grad student from Kyoto compared her perspiration volume to the flow after a hot yoga practice (such as Bikram yoga), so it must get steamy enough.

The Empress Komyo had several temples built, including at least three others in Nara. She is also said to have employed the same sauna mechanism for 1,000 people in a bath. Hey, cleanliness is next to godliness, right?

Special Buddhist memorial services are held every 50 years on the anniversary of a person’s death, and here’s a video of bugaku (Court music and dance) being performed at Hokke-ji in May 2010 to commemorate the 1,250th year of the empress’s death. Because it is associated with the Imperial Court, bugaku is more closely connected with Shinto than with Buddhism, but this is Japan — the world champs at mixing and matching.

Death be not proud

JAPANESE festivals can be more fun that a barrel of monkeys ripped on fermented fruit, but a Taiwanese folk custom, explained by anthropologist Marc Moskowitz, outdoes them all. The website Digital Dying interviewed the professor, and here’s the first question and answer:

What does a Taiwan stripper funeral look like?

Women sing and dance as a truck with blinking neon lights follows a funeral procession through the streets. The trucks are called Electric Flower Cars, or EFCs. Vendors sell things alongside and there is some really fabulous singing and a whole range of performances, taking off clothes is just one part. Often there’s a host, a middle aged man or woman who tells jokes and interviews performers between events. Usually the strippers wear bikinis, or an outfit like you might see at a nightclub.

Usually, but not always, as he explains in the interview.

Now that’s my idea of a going away party!

Of course it’s on You Tube. One caveat — the actual scenes from the documentary were filmed at a temple rather than a funeral. But as one of the commenters notes (Taiwan resident Dan Bloom, who knows what he’s talking about), the performances are the same.

Heck, if that’s what goes on at Taiwanese temples, I think I might have found religion.

There’s a more detailed interview at the io9 site with another trailer from the film. (It’s worth watching for the song’s subtitles alone.) And here’s Prof. Moskowitz’s site.

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The plant party

THE Nagata-cho Deep Throat column in the 13 August edition of the weekly Shukan Gendai reports that Prime Minister Kan Naoto spoke at a meeting with the bureaucrats from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in late July and said the following:

By all means, I will see through the cleanup of the nuclear accident and the recovery. I also want to form a new political party. It will be called the Plant Party. (植物党)

That story’s got to be true if only because no one would dare make something like that up and try to fob it off on anybody. One staff member in the Kantei said no one had any idea what the Plant Party was about, but suggested the concept might be based on coexistence with nature and sustainable energy.

The anonymous author of the column (there are probably several) speculated that Mr. Kan was spinning a scenario in which he would leave the DPJ after they ousted him from the party presidency and supported a successful no-confidence motion to remove him from the premiership. The idea seems to be that he would then dissolve the Diet and call a general election. Mr. Kan assumed he would have to form a new party because the DPJ might not officially support him in that election.

One DPJ Diet member affiliated with the Hatoyama group told the magazine the following:

The prime minister has recently immersed himself in the books of environmental activist C.W. Nicol (originally Welsh but now a Japanese citizen). He’s also been spending a lot of time talking to Tama University Professor Tasaka Hiroshi, a Cabinet Secretariat advisor who is somehow involved with religion. The idea for a Plant Party probably came from that.

The columnist concludes the article by suggesting that the prime minister’s animal instincts function only during a political crisis when his position is at stake.

I’ve been comparing Kan Naoto with Barack Obama lately, but perhaps Al Gore is the better comp after factoring in the element of the whacked-out sidewalk preacher warning that the end of the world is nigh.

If anyone thought I was off base with The Barstool Philosopher post, maybe it’s time you thought again.

Incidentally, Prof. Tasaka’s academic specialty is something called social entrepreneurship, and I’m sure you can identify the contours of that UFO long before it enters earth orbit. A social entrepreneur is defined on the Web as “someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change…(they) assess their success in terms of the impact they have on society. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors.”

Yes, he has a blog. Yes, I looked at it. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away.

Prof. Tasaka likes to write in short sentences that he probably thinks are poetic. I translated one of his entries and kept as many of the original line breaks as possible.

On the evening of 27 March
A turning point came in my life.

The Fukushima nuclear accident
Was caused by the Tohoku earthquake.

I was asked to give advice to the government
As a nuclear power specialist, for measures to deal with the accident.

When I received the prime minister’s request to be an advisor to the Cabinet Secretariat
What I heard, as always
Was “The Voice of Heaven”.

If that doesn’t go a long way toward explaining the dysfunction of the Kan Cabinet and their inability to get cracking on the Tohoku cleanup, you can dip me in chocolate and feed me to the hyenas.

And speaking of plants, where are all those killer tomatoes now that we really need them?

What to do with the gods

THE SURVIVORS of the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami, as well as those residents near the Fukushima power plant forced to evacuate, must deal with the most basic of problems: securing food, clothing, and shelter. The immediate but temporary short-term solution to those problems is a matter of logistics. Resolving those problems will be difficult, but the difficulties lie in execution rather than conception.

The disaster has also created more subtle problems that do not admit of easy answers. The degree of logistical efficiency is irrelevant, and there are no satisfactory short-term solutions, either temporary or permanent. Those problems are not one of the physical survival of people, but rather the survival of the physical symbols of cultural identity.

Residents within a 30-kilometer radius of the Fukushima power plant have been evacuated from the area for an indefinite time. The people affiliated with and responsible for Shinto shrines in the evacuation zone are unsure whether they should take with them the physical objects representing the divinities in the shrines, known as shintai.

This isn’t a trivial issue for the people involved. They believe the spirit of the divinity at the shrine resides in the physical object, and they also think those divinities have protected the area for many years. In the Japanese perspective, “many years” usually means “several centuries” and often means more than a millennium.

The Association of Shinto Shrines, which represents more than 8,000 institutions, said:

“Shrines have been protected by the people of the community for many years. When the people who have been evacuated return, shrines, if they function, will become the spiritual center of life in the community through ceremonies and events.”

The association would prefer that the shintai not be moved. They understand that the evacuation could be for a long time, however, so say that preference must be given to local circumstances.

Another factor is Article 81 of the law governing religious corporations, which applies to the entities responsible for both Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. That law states the corporations are subject to dissolution if their facilities have been destroyed and they are unable to replace them for more than two years, unless there are extenuating circumstances.

Common sense says that the extenuating circumstances are as plain as the nose on your face, but government bureaucracies are filled with people who develop visual impairments as a means to justify their existence. The Agency of Cultural Affairs, which has jurisdiction in the matter, says the extenuating circumstances clause could apply, but want to wait to make a final determination until after they conduct a survey. The local people say that’s unreasonable, and they want their institutions to be removed from consideration for dissolution now.

The ramifications of this law could have an effect not only on the shrines and temples in the evacuation zone near Fukushima, but also on those in Iwate and Miyagi unaffected by the radiation because they (and the priests) disappeared in the tsunami.

The problem at hand for the shrines near Fukushima involves the shintai, however. Some people think it would be best to have them stay and keep watch over the land while they’re away (they use the phrase rusuban in Japanese), but others think they should be evacuated with the population for use in festivals and other ceremonies. In some cases, the priests have taken custody of the physical objects themselves, but that’s not always possible. Some shintai are large, heavy rocks that can’t be moved without equipment.

There are 14 Shinto shrines within a 20-kilometer radius of the Fukushima plant and four more in the 20-30 kilometer belt. The situation is more difficult for those in the former group. Some priests left with just the clothes on their back, so they have no idea what shape the shrine itself is in, and some of them died or are still missing in the tsunami. Even those who were allowed to briefly return to their homes can’t go to the shrines because entry is restricted to residences.

Okada Masashi is the chief priest at the Naraha Hachiman shrine within the 20-kilometer radius. He said:

“All the officers among the parishioners at all the shrines will discuss whether to evacuate the objects before making a decision, but everyone is troubled by the options.”

The tutelary deity at the Naraha Hachiman shrine is the spirit of the Ojin Tenno, an emperor whose reign is said to have lasted from the late 3rd to the early 4th century. (He may or may not have existed, and it’s possible he has been confused with a different tenno now generally considered to have been a real person instead of a legend.) About 1,000 families are in the shrine’s district, but people from only 50 have stayed, all of whom are working at the plant. So has Mr. Okada:

“My role is to protect the tradition that has been handed down in this place. I will continue to wait until everyone returns.”

The shrine’s spring festival was held on April 19, but he was the only person to celebrate it. He said he prayed for everyone to return as quickly as possible.

Let’s hope his prayers are answered.

Naraha Hachiman Shrine

Eco-torii

COMING to Japan from the United States, it sometimes seems as if the people of the former have a more relaxed approach to their many traditions than do the people of the latter about their fewer traditions. That’s to the extent that people in either country take an active interest in tradition at all.

Here’s another example I discovered recently. Nakashima Biniiru Kako in Hitachi, Ibaraki, manufactures torii for Shinto shrines using polyvinyl chloride pipe. That’s a good idea when you think about it—the material is cheap, durable, light, easy to replace, impervious to water or ultraviolet rays, and if it’s red, most people won’t notice the difference anyway.

Company President Nakashima Masayoshi came up with the idea to use PVC pipe as a replacement for the usual stone, steel, or wood about 17 years ago. (There are also a few made of porcelain, including one at a shrine in the ceramics center of Arita.) Mr. Nakashima says he receives orders for about 20 in a good month, so there might be more of them around than anyone realizes. In fact, he does well enough to have a website for them, which you can see here. (Japanese only, of course) His company has another clever product, by the way: folding, portable storage containers for garbage. Keeping the magpies away until the garbage trucks show up can be a problem.

No one has come up with a satisfactory theory on the origin of torii, which mark the entrances to the shrine’s sacred space, and have become the symbol of shrines themselves. A few of the oldest ones have doors, including those at secondary shrines at Ise, so they probably were real gates at one time. Now the gates are all doorless, which means anyone can come and go as they please. “Straight is the gate and narrow is the path” isn’t an idea that would have originated in Shinto, but then the Japanese have a relaxed approach to religion, too. Try this torii and shrine combo in Okayama City for another example.

None of this should be surprising. After all, no one is able to agree whether Shinto is a “religion” to begin with.

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Here’s something that is a bit of a surprise, however: Eighteen-year-old Terakubo Erena holding her own with some very heavy hitters.

Good news, bad news, and no news at all

HERE’S SOME good news: More South Koreans are ignoring their jingoist news media and taking the initiative to forge positive ties with Japan. The latest example is the Daejeon Development Research Institute, which signed a research exchange agreement with the Fukuoka Asia Urban Research Center in January. That’s not news for the Fukuoka center, however—it’s their third agreement with an institution from another country. Both cities are located on high-speed rail lines, and the institute in Daegeon wants to conduct joint studies of the use of high-speed rail to promote industry and urban development.

Speaking of high-speed rail, the Kyushu leg of the Shinkansen will be fully operational in a fortnight, and the Kyushuans are getting ready for an influx of tourists from both South Korea and China. Folks everywhere like the hot springs and the potential for year-round golf. The Nishinippon Shimbun of Fukuoka and the Tokyo Chizu Publishing Co. recently published a guidebook of Kyushu tourist destinations in Korean and Chinese for distribution at local airports and hotels throughout the region and at travel agencies overseas. The first print run was 100,000 copies each.

To make sure that those guidebooks get read, the mayors of Fukuoka City, Kagoshima City, and Kumamoto City visited Seoul last month to talk up their cities as tourist destinations. The three mayors spoke at a conference at which about 100 people in the Seoul travel industry attended.

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Here’s more good news, if the premise is correct: Eamonn Fingleton uses his own site and borrows James Fallows’s blog space to claim that the conventional wisdom of Japan’s lost decades is a myth and to challenge 10 public intellectuals pushing the stagnant Japan line to debate that subject. While Mr. Fingleton’s posts offer a couple of dubious assertions to go with some excellent points, it’s always good news to see someone challenge conventional wisdom, especially since wisdom is seldom present when the Western bien pensants hold forth on Japan.

What he says that people need to know:

* “(M)uch of what is reported (about Japan) in America’s major newspapers — and even more so on American television — is appalling.”

Repeat play city! If what you know about Japan you learned from the English-language media, then everything you know is wrong.

* “Japan’s surplus is up more than five-fold since 1990, and the Japanese yen has actually boasted the strongest rise of any major currency in the last two decades.”

* “Since the 1980s…the Japanese people have enjoyed one of the biggest improvements in living standards of any major First World nation in the interim.”

* “A story of extraordinary progress by Japanese manufacturing”:

“The reason you don’t hear much about Japanese manufacturers these days is that the best of them have moved from making consumer goods to concentrate on so-called producers’ goods — items that though invisible to the consumer happen to be critical to the world economy. Such goods include the highly miniaturized components, advanced materials, and super-precise machines that less sophisticated nations such as China need to make final consumer goods. The label on everything from cell phones to laptop computers may say “Made in China” but actually, via producers’ goods, highly capital-intensive and knowhow-intensive manufacturers in Japan have quietly done much of the most technologically demanding work.

“America’s current account deficit multiplied five-fold in the 20 years to 2010 and the reason in large measure is because American corporations have exited the producers’ goods business.”

He doesn’t mention that Americans have also abandoned the robotics sector, while the Japanese are one of the world’s leaders, if not the world’s leader in that industry. The only thing most Americans know about Japan and robots is that the Japanese love ‘em and Japanese robot stories provide snicker filler for their newspapers and blogs.

Mr. Fingleton shouldn’t be holding his breath waiting for the Japan hands to accept the challenge of a debate. For one thing, they’re Somebodies and he’s not. For another, having to defend themselves in a debate would expose their ignorance on the subject.

Still, give the man credit for treating them with deference. For example, on his own site he writes:

“I appeal to you — in the interests…of your own reputation for intellectual honesty…”

One of the men he’s calling out is Paul Krugman. The suggestion that Krugman retains any intellectual honesty should result in thick mucous dripping from computer monitors worldwide after the explosion of derisive snorts.

Mr. Fingleton’s post has begotten more good news. Economics professor Mark Perry has two posts with charts on his blog. In one, he notes:

“(W)ith economic growth in Germany and Italy and many other European countries that is comparable to Japan’s growth, we never hear about the “lost decades” in Germany or Italy or the U.K.”

In the other, he writes:

“Compared to 1980, Japan’s real GDP per capita in 2010 was nearly 70% higher, vs. a 66% increase for US real GDP per capita over the last 30 years. Japan had higher economic growth than the U.S. during the 1980s, slightly lower growth during the 1990s, about the same growth during the 2000s, and slightly higher overall growth during the entire 30-year period from 1980 to 2010.”

And here’s some late-breaking good news from the United States:

Consumer Reports has named Honda Motor Co., Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. (Subaru) and Toyota Motors Corp. as the best all-around automakers for the third year in a row in its annual auto issue…Chrysler Group LLC had the worst ranking. Mercedes-Benz, BMW and General Motors were also near the bottom…Toyota, which has dealt with massive safety recalls, fared well in the magazine’s top picks for 2011 across 10 different vehicle segments. Toyota had the most with three picks (the RAV4 small sport utility vehicle, Sienna minivan and Prius hybrid).

Chrysler and GM at the bottom, and Toyota near the top? If you can’t lick ‘em, slime ‘em in the media and sit on government reports absolving them of any blame.

Be that as it may, Mr. Fingleton should be careful about treading on thin ice himself. First, he tends to talk about “Japan” as if it were a monolithic entity. While that’s unavoidable to a certain extent, it only works if one is discussing international diplomacy. In every other context, however, this thing people call “Japan” doesn’t exist. That’s too facile a formulation for the breadth of diversity on these islands, and someone who’s been here as long as he has should know that.

More serious, however is his suggestion that the Japanese government is deliberately underestimating national economic growth to avoid foreign retribution for their trade surpluses. Worse, he offers no concrete evidence—it’s just a feeling he has.

If his assertion is true, it means that everyone in the Japanese government and media are party to history’s largest conspiratorial deception. Not only have they fooled overseas governments—whose experts can analyze economic and production statistics as well as Prof. Perry—they’ve also fooled the rest of the Japanese nation. The entire range of public debate among government officials, the political class, and the commentariat inside media and out is based on the premise of lost decades of low growth. His idea contains echoes of the Western conspiracists of the 80s and 90s who warned that the samurai Japanese businessmen were going to wreak economic revenge on the world for having been defeated in the war.

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Speaking of what passes for reporting on Japan and East Asia, Michael Turton at The View from Taiwan takes the AFP news agency to task for its “ethnocentric crap”.

“Superstition Still Widespread Across High-tech Asia, AFP reported today in article appearing in the Taipei Times. This tiresome feature reporting has been around ever since westerners first reported on Asia”:

(Quoting the article)
The services of witch doctors remain popular in multicultural Malaysia, while in hi-tech Japan, Shinto priests hold purification rites for new bullet trains and many entrepreneurs are said to seek the advice of palm readers and star gazers.

“Why is this a load of ethnocentric crap? Because you will never ever see a piece from AFP that writes about the west in a vein similar to the paragraph above:

The services of Christian faith healers remain popular in multicultural America, while in hi-tech Britain, Anglican priests bless new stadiums and many movie stars and politicians in both countries are said to seek the advice of astrologers.”

Mr. Turton’s observation is on the mark, but I’ll take it one step further. The F in AFP stands for France, where the news agency is headquartered. We’ll never see the AFP, or any other Western news outlet for that matter, write with such casual disparagement about the beliefs of the Muslims in that country, including the Shari’a punishments for theft, homosexuality, and (for the victim and not the offenders) for rape. Those media outlets won’t even say that Muslims are responsible for what has become an annual automotive auto-da-fe in France. They’ll only go so far as to call the perpetrators “youths”.

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Now for the bad news—Foreign Minister Maehara Seiji held forth in Tokyo for some institutional investors, and everything that came out of his mouth should have stayed inside it.

According to the Kyodo report:

“Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara vowed Monday that Japan will carry out fundamental agricultural reforms modeled after the European system of direct payments to farmers to help strengthen the local farm sector’s competitiveness and promote trade liberalization.”

What is this use of the word “reform” to describe pork (or a wealth redistribution scheme) for farmers? Were he serious about improving competitiveness and promoting trade liberalization, he would instead encourage agribusiness to replace the country’s dwindling number of people who farm exclusively for a living.

But then he couldn’t do that—when the LDP took a step in that direction with the Koizumi/Abe reforms, Mr. Maehara’s DPJ used as an election weapon the excessive representation given to rural areas in the Diet by promising to repeal those measures and provide subsidies to individual farming households instead.

What will he propose next—subsidies for every exporting manufacturer in the country to facilitate the import of competing overseas products?

“He pointed out that the direct payment system in the 27-nation regional bloc has “succeeded in achieving two goals at once: bringing benefits to the consumer by reducing high tariffs and making producers more competitive.””

Ben Franklin should have added a third certainty in life to go with death and taxes—a perpetual stream of drivel from politicos. Farm subsidies make farmers less competitive, not more. That system allows farmers to stay in business, but at the cost of reducing the purchasing power of every non-farming taxpayer, which is most of us. Imported agricultural products may be cheaper, but lavishing public funds on farmers means the city consumers will be able to buy fewer of them. As we’ve seen before, the companies in Japan who would operate agribusinesses believe they can be competitive internationally.

“Maehara said Japan needs to study accepting more foreign nurses and caregivers under free trade agreements.

More than a thousand Indonesian and Filipino nurses and caregivers have come to Japan since 2008 under bilateral FTAs, but only a few of them have passed the Japanese national qualification examinations to continue working beyond the initially set length of stay.”

Mr. Maehara seems to think Japan needs healthcare personnel incapable of effective communication with either physicians or the patients in their care, in places where the patients’ lives or quality of life are at stake.

As for a nursing shortage, that isn’t a problem in “Japan”, but rather in a few big cities in Japan. That’s the claim of my family physician, who should know. He’s the chairman of the prefectural medical association this year.

If Mr. Maehara is so concerned about a nursing shortage in the cities and so anxious to use public funds to fix it, he might take a hint from the ROTC program in the United States. The American government foots the bill for the university education of qualified high school students if they spend four years as a military officer after graduation.

Other than a lack of common sense, what’s to prevent the Japanese government from offering free rides to Japanese high school graduates for nursing school on the condition that they work for a certain number of years in medical institutions after finishing school? Everybody wins, and no one has to worry about the language barrier causing a medical accident.

The worst part of the news story is the implication that Mr. Maehara is presenting himself as a future prime minister. That won’t be news to the Japanese: He’s a failed former president of the DPJ, and the failed former Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito is thought to be grooming him for the job to succeed the failed Prime Minister Kan Naoto. If the party continues to mimic the worst aspects of the old LDP without its redeeming qualities and has Mr. Maehara replace Mr. Kan without an election, it would represent another failure of the DPJ to bring about the change in the conduct of politics they promised.

It also isn’t news that a political party which is doing its damndest to turn itself into a fictional entity would install another lightweight in the Kantei doomed to failure as prime minister.

*****
More bad news: Japan’s lower house passed the FY 2011 budget this morning, albeit with a few defections from the ruling party. That makes two years in power, two record-high budgets for the DPJ.

What happened to all those journos who kept telling us that Mr. Kan was a “fiscal hawk”?

Speaking of Mr. Kan, it will be no news to people who pay attention that he loosed on the public yet another absurdity that calls into question his daytime sobriety. This time he said he’d always doubted the feasibility of what passes for his party’s signature accomplishment—the removal of tax deductions for families with children from 0-15 and their replacement with direct cash subsidies from the government.

After all, a month or so ago he claimed that the adoption of the same policy was “epochal”. A year or so ago, Mr. Fiscal Hawk argued in the Diet as Finance Minister for the inclusion of that budget buster—JPY 5.5 trillion this year alone–in what was then Japan’s highest-ever budget. It was obvious to everyone they couldn’t find the money to pay for it when they stole the idea from New Komeito, and that finally seems to have dawned on even them. DPJ Secretary-General Okada Katsuya on the 28th said the allowance, which expires at the end of the current fiscal year, wasn’t permanent, and that the party might give it up altogether.

Now that’s good news.

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Finally, here’s the best news of all: I’ve gotten a handle on a post that I’ve been working on for two weeks. Look for it soon!

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This might be good news for beginning and intermediate students of Japanese. I received a note asking that I bring to your attention a website presenting Japanese-language study aids, as well as other observations. Here it is.

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There’s no better way to celebrate the circulation of all this good news than by putting the party in the hands of Chico Trujillo, Mr. Popular Music of Chile. Who knew that horn band cumbia and surf guitar would go together as well as green tea and ice cream? Chico knew!

And just wait until you see the man dance!

Women in the priesthood–of Shinto

AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT in Shinto is the insistence on purity and cleanliness. The divinities will not descend into an impure space.

That’s one of the reasons Moriyama Mayumi, the first female chief cabinet secretary, was asked to refrain from presenting the Prime Minister’s Cup to a sumo tournament winner inside the ring in 1990—an incident that sparked a national debate. A decade later, then-Osaka Governor Ota Fusae, Japan’s first female governor, was eventually talked out of her request to make the same presentation after the annual official tournament there.

Shinto and sumo are closely linked, and the ring is purified to allow the descent of the divinities. (That’s why the rikishi toss salt into the ring before they enter during a match.) The belief that women were impure was not uncommon in proto-religions throughout the world, and it was grounded in the biological fact of menstruation. One might logically assume, therefore, that Shinto has no female priests—but that assumption would be wrong. That was the case for several decades during the State Shinto period, but it wasn’t true before that, and it isn’t true today. Females were again allowed to enter the Shinto priesthood in 1948, and as of the end of December 2008, 2,899 of the country’s 21,674 priests were women–13% of the total.

Odaira Mika, a priest at the Tenso Shinto shrine in Tokyo’s Itabashi Ward, wondered how it was decided that women were not pure enough to be priests, as reported by the vernacular edition of the Mainichi Shimbun. Mrs. Odaira is also a part-time lecturer at her alma mater, Gakushuin University, formerly a school for children of the Imperial court, later for bluebloods, and now for anyone. She is the author of Josei Shinshoku no Kindai (Female Priests in the Modern Era), and has received an award from an association for Shinto religious studies.

An 1871 government decree prohibited woment from entering the priesthood, and State Shinto (different from the original Shrine Shinto) became the established religion a few years later. Female priests disappeared in just three years, except for a few in Okinawa, where there has been a long tradition of female shamans.

Mrs. Odaira’s university degree is in philosophy, but she has the instincts of a historian. She knew that women had an important role in Shinto until the Meiji Era, so she began researching how their status came to be changed. She examined contemporary public documents and finally discovered the one that contained an explanation of the reason. It read:

“Shinto priests are public officials. Men serve as public officials. If female priests are recognized, it is possible that women will be allowed to become the heads of households, and husbands their spouses (haigusha). This would debase public morality.”

Mrs. Odaira observes:

“The interval from the Meiji Era until the end of the war was an exception. Female priests were inappropriate for the family system the government wanted to institute, in which males were the head of the household. It was an extremely political reason.”

As often happens in Japanese families, she’s a chip off the old block—her father and grandfather were also Shinto priests. After being graduated from Gakushuin, she worked as a clerk at a life insurance company and later returned to university to conduct research. Her father told her she didn’t have to continue the family tradition, but she still chose the Shinto priesthood. She has now attained the rank of negi. “I’ve helped dress miko (shrine maidens) since childhood. It certainly seems as if I’ve taken after my father.”

In her role as negi, Mrs. Odaira conducted the O-Harae (Great Purification Ritual) at the Tenso shrine on 30 December, with 50 parishioners from the neighborhood. (If women were really considered to be impure, how likely is it they’d be allowed to preside over that rite?)

She also performs on the wagon, a six-stringed zither, to accompany miko dances. One of the other musicians is her husband Toru, a bank employee, who plays the taiko drum. When they got married he said he would “absolutely not help” in her work, but he’s not the first man to have been changed by married life. He’s since become a qualified priest with the rank of gonnegi—a negi’s assistant—and plans to leave his job shortly to become a full-time priest.

A century ago, Mr. Odaira would have been considered a haigusha and a threat to public morality. Now he’s going to enter her world, and from a position subordinate to her. No one seems to have a problem with it, least of all Toru.

Concludes the female priest:

“How the Japanese have come into contact with the divinity is reflected in each of the ceremonies. It is a world of depth.”

Afterwords:

Her book 「女性神職の近代」（ぺりかん社）is available on Amazon Japan. It’s just the sort of thing I’d snap up, but it’s JPY 5,000 yen plus for a skoche more than 200 pages, so I’ll have to figure out how to fit it in my book-buying schedule.

The resistance to women entering the sumo ring seems at this point to be based entirely on tradition; i.e., this is how we’ve done it for centuries, so we can’t change now. The prohibition requires the maintenance of several logical fallacies, however, including the fact that according to belief the divinities will have departed the ring by the time a female politician enters to present a trophy. Another is that men are allowed to enter wearing business suits, though that clothing is not ritually pure. Also, the amateur sumo association has sponsored women’s matches for some years now.

Bagging beans to beat the devil

SOME AMERICAN TELEVANGELISTS want you believe you have to send in money—right away!—to beat the devil, but the Japanese have a more inexpensive way to send Beelzebub packing. They scatter beans at Shinto shrines and households once a year.

Today was the day the demons took it on the lam, as 3 February is known as setsubun in Japan. Several traditional ceremonies are held to dispatch Old Scratch, and the magical rite of scattering beans (usually roasted soybeans) is one of those.

After a process of cultural evolution, the practice of setsubun was applied to New Year’s Eve in the ancient solar calendar, which is the traditional beginning of spring. Note that Chinese New Year, which is a moveable holiday, falls around this time of year. In traditional Chinese culture, lichun—or risshun in Japanese—is a solar period or term marking the start of spring, which occurs around February 4.

The connection with New Year’s led to associations of the ritual purification and exorcism thought essential for the coming year and the spring planting season.

Yet another connection was made with the tsuina rite, or zhuinuo in Chinese, another ceremony for driving out demons that originated in the Zho dynasty (1027 BC-256 BC). In those days, when men were men, the Chinese wore bear skins and masks and carried sharp weapons when they stalked the evil spirits. The practice was later adopted in some form in Japan, became an annual Imperial court event by the 9th century (hence the association with shrines), and had turned into a bean scattering rite by the Muromachi period (1333-1568).

The ceremony can be conducted at home, but nowadays most folks head for a Shinto shrine to snatch a bean bag tossed by the priests. One incentive is that some of the bags contain gift certificates for items which can range from stationery to consumer electronics products. In addition, toshi otoko, men born under the Chinese zodiac sign for that year, help toss out the beans, and some shrines bring in the famous or celebrities from the area to juice up the PR value.

The visitors to the larger shrines can number in the thousands, and somebody’s got to put those beans into the lucky bags. When it comes to performing such menial chores at a shrine, the lot usually falls to miko, or shrine maidens, the Shinto equivalent of altar boys.

The first photo shows three miko at the Ikuta Shinto shrine in Kobe, Hyogo, using a masu, a traditional measuring box, to scoop up the beans and put them into the lucky bags. On one side of each is the kanji for kotobuki, which means long life, while the illustration on the side of the masu is of a cute little devil. They put about 120 grams of beans into each bag, making them quarter-pounders, and they filled 3,000 bags, which the shrine sold for JPY 300 (about $US 3.30) apiece. Send in your money to beat the devil!

Some shrines put in certificates for different sorts of gifts. One of them is the Kirishima-jingu in Kirishima, Kagoshima. This year, among the lucky slips were those for 240 bottles of shochu donated by 41 Kagoshima distillers.

The Japanese have no problem at all mixing hooch and holiness, and many Shinto festivals involve the brewing of sacred sake. The Kagoshimanians down south, however, much prefer shochu to sake, so while it’s unusual to offer booze in the bean bags, none of this staggers the imagination, either. The only staggering is done by the shochu drinkers.

The shrine asked the distillers for donations at the end of last year in a transaction that contains an element of the marketplace in addition to the mystical. In return for offering prayers for safety for the distillers, the Kirishima shrine put up labels of their product as PR on the shrine grounds. Each of the distillers ponied up six bottles each, as you can see from the second photo. Starting at 4:00 p.m. today, the priests started tossing about 5,000 beanbags, of which 1,000 contained gift certificates. Among the lucky recipients, 240 are going to get righteously high.

Here’s a setsubun scene from the Kirishima shrine in the past.

Afterwords:

The toshi otoko who was the main attraction at the Ikuta shrine in Kobe this year was Hasegawa Hozumi, the current WBC world bantamweight champion. He’s the only Japanese boxer to have defended a world bantamweight title more than four times.

This ESPN.com article on the fighters of the year for 2009 says Hasegawa “might be the best fighter boxing fans haven’t heard of”.

Less than zero

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW what’s happening in Japan, don’t go looking for the answers in the news media. Here’s yet another example, this time from CNN, which now–understandably–is the least watched of the four American cable TV news networks.

Their latest story on Japan starts with this headline:

“Japanese monks serve up alcohol and hip hop music to lure in followers”

How many monks? Read the story and you’ll find out they cite one who serves alcohol and one who performs sutra raps, for a total of two—the threshold needed to permit CNN’s use of the plural.

To put it another way, more men bit dogs in the greater Atlanta area last year.

“The Buddhist religion has largely remained the same over the past few centuries, but a group of monks in Japan are spicing things up by turning to alcohol and rap music to lure in followers.”

Suddenly, the number “two” has now taken on the meaning of a “group”.

Kansho Tagai…a Buddhist monk, believes it’s time to change for the future and doesn’t mind if it means dropping the chants and bringing on the rap music.
Tagai also prefers to go by his street name — Mr. Happiness.

Some questions for Mr. Tagai:

1. What will you do when rap music loses its image of hipness and becomes a thing of the past? It won’t be too much longer now.

2. Just what is this thing referred to as a “street name”, and how many people—if any—actually call you Mr. Happiness?

“Getting the young people back to religion is key to Buddhism’s survival,” Tagai told CNN. “In Japan, it’s a religion in crisis.”

What CNN doesn’t tell you is that you are unlikely to see any Japanese person at a traditional Buddhist temple, other than the monk or his family, for anything other than a funeral service. (When people have a religious or semi-religious wedding ceremony, they usually choose Shinto.)

All of my residences in Japan during the nearly 26 years I’ve been here have been across the street from a Buddhist temple. I could throw a rock from the front yard of my house into the graveyard of a Buddhist temple across the street, were I so inclined. I could also have pitched one underhand into the entrance of another temple from the front steps of my previous apartment. The only people I’ve seen visiting those temples for a reason other than to attend a memorial service were there to clean and pray at the family gravesite.

“Each year, hundreds of temples close in Japan and it’s a similar struggle seen by other religions around the world.”

What CNN doesn’t tell you is that Buddhist temples are even more neighborhood-based than churches in the U.S., and that temples sometimes close for reasons other than a lack of religious faith. Temples in rural areas that have lost population to the cities are not going to survive. Neither are some temples in urban areas that have become primarily business or commercial districts.

Nevertheless, there were roughly 76,000 Buddhist temples of all sects in Japan as of last year to serve a population of 127 million. Meanwhile, there were roughly 68,000 Christian churches of all denominations in the United States three years ago to serve a population of more than 300 million.

Of Japan’s 127 million people, 96 million identify as Buddhist. Those numbers, however, don’t translate into regular traditional religious practices, and haven’t for some time.

“Another idea that monks hope will help get more young people involved is mixing faith with fun at something called the Monk Bar. This modern day bar serves up alcoholic drinks while teaching the Buddhist mantra, according to Zenshin Fujioka. ‘This is closer to what Buddhism was intended to be,’ Zenshin said.”

One of the Five Moral Precepts of traditional Buddhism was the prohibition of intoxicants, so Mr. Fujioka’s conception of what Buddhism was intended to be may not be the consensus opinion. It might instead be just a clever way for Mr. Fujioka to indulge his favorite recreational pastime. I was once shown a very small, exclusive drinking establishment set back from the other shops on a narrow side street. My guide told me the prices were so high only doctors and Buddhist priests could afford to drink there.

“While many traditionalists may criticize both the Monk Bar and hip hop rapping styles, it seems their ideas are paying off. ‘Twice as many people, especially the young, are now visiting the temple,’ Tagai said.”

Zero doubled is still zero, though Mr. Tagai likely gets a few more visitors, if only out of curiosity to see a rapping monk once or twice.

Really, this is past the point of absurdity. The network is wasting its enormous resources to generate for its dwindling number of viewers a story that is a waste of time to watch. If anyone thinks they’re learning something about Japan by following any print or broadcast media outlet, I honestly feel sorry for them.

The tragedy in today’s Wiki-age is that such vapid ignorance is the standard rather than the exception.

For example, a Google search will occasionally throw up such detritus as the About.com website that claims to offer the general reader basic information. Here’s what it says about religion in Japan:

“In Japan, Shinto and Buddhist practices are combined into a single religion, with Buddhist temples being built at the sites of important Shinto shrines.”

Here’s what it should say:

“In Japan, Shinto and Buddhist practices are not combined into a single religion, and Buddhist temples have been prohibited from occupying the same building as Shinto shrines by government order since March 1868. The contiguity on some sites does not mean they are syncretic in function.”

The most puzzling aspect of these misleading news reports and websites peddling inanity instead of knowledge is why they exist at all. Discovering the truth is so easy to do.

But being this stupid is difficult. People have to go out of their way and work at it.

Afterwords: A Japanese woman in her mid-60s once told me that she was married in a Buddhist temple wearing a Western-style wedding dress, which is an unlikely combination even for this country. I asked her how that happened, and the other Japanese in the group were just as interested in her answer as I was. Unfortunately, she just laughed and said it was a long story. I’ll bet!

Beers in heaven

In Heaven there is no beer
That’s why we drink it here
And when we’re all gone from here
Our friends will be drinking all the beer.
- “In Heaven There Is No Beer”, Ernst Neubach and Ralph Maria Siegel (translated from the original German)

FRANKIE YANKOVIC and his Polka Kings once had a hit with the song, In Heaven There is No Beer, but he might have changed his tune had he known about the new microbrew on the market in Oita.

Showa-en, a Beppu, Oita-based company that operates ryokan (Japanese inns), is also involved in microbrewing. They’ve announced the sale of two new beers made with brown rice using a manufacturing method that attempts to utilize the yeast bouquet to the fullest extent possible. The method involves putting the yeast into a state of suspended animation through a three-step, low-temperature pasteurization process for which the brewer has received a patent. Company President Mochinaga (given name not confirmable) says, “Nowadays, everybody’s talking about costs, costs, and that’s why I wanted to make something authentic. I want to take this product nationwide.”

This is actually only one new beer brand with two varieties. The brand name is Namban Okoku Mugishu, which translates to “Barbarian Kingdom Beer”. In this case, however, namban means Christian—namban bungaku, or barbarian literature, was the term used for Christian literature centuries ago. The Christian appellation fits, as we’ll see in a second, but it’s not because Belgian monks are involved. Mugishu is what the Japanese used to call beer. The same Chinese characters for that word were used to create the Korean term mekju when the Japanese introduced Koreans to the delights of the beverage early last century. The word mugishu means “barley alcoholic beverage”, and yes, that is an odd name for a beer made with brown rice.

The first variety of the Namban Okoku Mugishi is named Don Otomo Sorin after a 16th Christian warlord who was the daimyo of the Bungo domain in what is now Oita. His original name was Otomo Yoshishige. Sorin was the name he took in 1562 when he became a Buddhist monk, which was after he met the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier in 1551 and before he converted to Christianity in 1578.

During his days as daimyo, Sorin controlled most of Kyushu and was referred to as the King of Bungo in Jesuit records. His wife rather disliked Christianity, and they divorced. She is known in the same Jesuit records as Jezebel, which will come as no surprise. To grab this post by the collar and get it back on track, platinum powder is added to the beer during the finishing process. It sells for JPY 670 (about $US 7.55) for a 330-milliliter bottle (0.7 pint) and JPY 870 for a 500-milliliter bottle.

The second variety is a dark beer named Don Xavier—after Francis, of course—to which gold powder is added during the finishing process. The two sizes cost JPY 650 and JPY 860 respectively.

President Mochinaga said he devised the suspended animation yeast method five years ago after taking over the operation of the Yamaga Kirara microbrewery, which, by the way, is a public-private sector partnership. In Japan, these are called third sector companies, and they were quite the rage among local governments for a time. Nationwide, roughly 70% of the third sector companies are in the red, which will also come as no surprise, but there I go digressing again.

Most beers are pasteurized at a temperature of 60º C (140º F) for 20 minutes, but that kills the yeast. If the yeast is kept alive, however, its aroma constantly changes, and it’s difficult to maintain that for long periods of time. Mr. Mochinaga’s idea was to divide the pasteurization into three periods: two minutes at 55º C, one minute at 40º C, and two minutes at 40º C again. When the beer is shipped, the yeast is in a state of suspended animation, but after it is opened and drunk, it is resurrected, as Francis Xavier might say, inside the consumer’s body. The brewer claims this provides the drinker with amino acids. How many other beverages do you know of that build you up and tear you down at the same time?

Brewmaster Fukuda Rikiya thinks this is the first time anyone anywhere has tried to brew a beer using this method, and I’m inclined to believe him. He added there were many failures before they got the production line operating the way they wanted. Said President Mochinaga, “There are countless microbrews around the world, but few are commercially successful. I didn’t want to imitate the big brewers. I thought it was essential to create a new method of brewing from scratch,” and you can say that again. He is willing to talk about technology-sharing deals if other companies in Oita want to make a similar beer.

Namban Okoku Mugishu is sold at department stores, ryokan, and the prefecture’s airport. In combination with its other four brands—I don’t want to know—the company expects to produce 300,000 bottles a year.

Now tell the truth: Did you ever expect to read some of these words, expressions, and concepts in the same place at the same time?

So, who’s up for a beer run to Oita?

Afterwords: I dare you to click on that link to the song title!