#252: PURSUING JAPAN. In Karen Armstrong’s book Fields of Blood, she writes: “In the West we see ‘religion’ as a coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions and rituals, centering on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all ‘secular’ activities. But words in other languages that we translate as ‘religion’ almost invariably refer to something larger, vaguer, and more encompassing.” What struck me most in that description was the word “vaguer.” One of the aspects that drew my interest, years ago, to Asian philosophy and religion was the large number of empty spaces which Western theology is so eager to pin down. We have Lao-tse: if you can speak of, define, the Tao, it is not the eternal Tao. Even Buddhism and its vast canonical literature, which complicated the Buddha’s original enlightenment into the minute pickings of the Abhidharma, eventually compacts itself back down into the few lines of the Heart Sutra and the silences of Zen. As the great sumi-e painters and the haiku poets understood, loquacity is not always required.
Nothing is likely to seem as vague to Westerners, at least at first, as the Japanese practice of Shinto. It is usually reported as the ancient and indigenous religion of Japan; beyond that, everything gets a bit slippery. In the preface to Sokyo Ono’s charming and venerable classic Shinto: The Kami Way (Tuttle, 1962), the editor says that readers may feel “that more questions have been raised than answered,” and the author writes, “It is impossible to make explicit and clear that which fundamentally by its very nature is vague.”
That term kami, the object of worship in Shinto, is multifarious and individual enough for many scholars to beg for its inclusion, sans definition, into English. For years it was rendered as “deities” (or deity: the term, in Japanese, may be singular or plural), and Shinto has an amply populated pantheon of deities; but it has also been rendered as “spirits,” meaning not just surnatural entities but the indwelling spirit that animates every pebble and blade of grass, every natural object. The kami are invisible to us and live in their own dimension, next to our own. The Shinto world is not just inhabited but extrahabited.
With the increasing nationalism of the Meiji period, there was some attempt to isolate Shinto from Buddhism, which had been quietly grafting onto each other for centuries. (Centuries earlier, when Buddhism appeared in India, challenging some of the basic Hindu beliefs, Hinduism simply declared the Buddha the ninth of Vishnu’s reincarnations, and all but swallowed Buddhism whole.) The effort of division failed, and to this day smaller Shinto shrines are common on the grounds of Japanese monasteries, as well as in every city, virtually every neighborhood.
My own experience of Shinto began with a recent visit to Japan. On my first full day there we visited the Meiji Shrine, in Tokyo, a beautiful and quiet wooded area. We were taught to bow before passing the Torii gateway that demarks the special area of the shrine. Going up, people walk on either side of the path; the center is for the kami to come and go. We were doubly lucky: we got to witness a wedding procession, in full regalia and gravity; and it was the weekend of the Shichi-go-san, when children aged seven, five and three are celebrated, dressed up (a little boy of five wearing the most beautiful kimono I’d ever seen, which he had picked out himself), and made much of. It was a perfect combination of the sacral and the sociable, and gave me some sense of how Shinto belongs to the people of Japan. At any given time of day—at full noontide at the Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto, with the booths hawking all sorts foods and tchotchkes leading into the quiet park-like grounds, with their smaller shrines scattered about, to the lantern-lit Yohashira Shrine, which we stumbled onto one evening off a market street in Masumoto—you are going to see people, visiting casually, and hear the double clap of hands which accompany a prayer. This is a momentary view, an outsider’s experience, superficial enough. It takes no reckoning of Shinto’s complexities, its pantheon of mythic figures, or its darker history, as when during World War II it succumbed (with the Buddhist establishment right there with it) to the mania of war. But it was a lucky experience which lifted Shinto off the page and gave me, maybe, some sense of its everyday existence.
Pico Iyer’s splendid book A Beginner’s Guide to Japan (Vintage, 2019) similarly makes no attempt to define, pin down, quantify its subject. It arrived too late to bring with me on my trip, but reading it afterwards, it rang endless number of little delightful bells of recognition: the convenience stores, the elaborate courtesy, the incomparable gardens, but mostly just small, telling stories of his thirty-two years of living in Japan and Japan’s constant refusal to be consistent, summed up or explicable. The meaning of each anecdote twists like a fish in the context of what follows; every country must be irreducible, but Japan, with its circus-mirror contrasts to America, seems insistently so. What Iyer brings to the party—in addition to his intelligence and the Astaire-like nonchalance of his prose—is something he says in the preface: “Being in Japan has taught me to say ‘I wonder,’ more often than ‘I think.’” That conditions the book throughout, which is something of a modest wonder itself.
In March of 2011, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded erupted forty miles off the northeast coast of Honshu, the largest island of the Japanese archipelago. The tsunami it triggered caused waves of 130 feet to strike the shoreline of the Tohoku region, whose inhabitants had at best ten minutes of warning to evacuate; thousands were killed. The resulting electrical failure caused three of the reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to explode, releasing a flood of contaminants and requiring thousands more evacuations—the worst nuclear incident since Chernobyl. Attempts at repair and reparation made this the costliest natural disaster in history. 3.11 is still a referent date for Japanese people, as 9.11 is for Americans.
As this was happening, the novelist Marie Mutsuki Mockett was attempting to shake off the grief for the death of her American father, as well as of her Japanese grandparents. In her memoir, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye (Norton, 2015), Mockett integrates these two subjects—private grief and public disaster—with remarkable modesty, observation, and tact. Encountering the Tohoku people in the wake of the tsunami, we are given accounts of how the Japanese deal with death, via their inherited culture and in contemporary specific; these in turn shade into the background continuo of her dealing with her personal loss. Her scenes have the shape and point of a well-created novel; she observes as both foreigner (American born to a Japanese mother) and familiar, having spent time in Japan and with her Japanese relatives (her uncle is the head priest of a Zen temple in Tohoku; her grandfather had not yet been buried because of the irradiated topsoil in the area). It would be easy, in the megatropolis burly of Tokyo, for instance, to miss the consistent presence of the supernatural and religious elements of the Japanese experience; secular modernity is a very thin veneer in Japan. After the tsunami, Buddhist priests and counselors were swamped with reports of people being visited by the spirits of the recently dead; at Osorezan—whose name translates at Mount Doom—you can go to an Autumn festival and for thirty dollars you can confer with an itako—traditionally, a blind medium—to receive messages from the dead. Writing out of her own grief, Mockett doesn’t have the luxury of distance, and, reading her, neither do we. Seeing a pile of the lost children’s toys near the disaster point piled carefully where they might be found, she writes, “I thought of all the tender bonds that were torn by the tsunami, and of how we humans try and try again to knit ourselves together, and how we are at our best and our happiest when we do.” Her immensely moving stories of the losses and deaths and visitations we will all come to know finally seem, paradoxically, a kind of lifeline: a way out, and a way in. “People are not actually alone,” she writes. “Whether they are alive or dead, they are not alone.”
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