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In Kyoto, and in my body
Aug. 16th, 2004 11:37 pmDriving in Japan is just like driving anywhere else, except more expensive. This afternoon Hisae and I jumped into the Daihatsu Naked (we were wearing clothes) and pointed it in the direction of Kyoto. Osaka suburbs seemed to go on forever. I snapped a cassette into the deck; an evangelical tape in Korean (Hisae's mum is a Korean Christian).
It was odd to hear the words 'Abraham' and 'Israel' popping up in the Korean spiel. What right does this Middle Eastern religion have to be as far from its home territory as Korea? Then again, what right do I have to be 'Japanising' the world?
I do feel evangelical about Japanese values, and I do feel they're universally applicable. This morning there was a news story on the BBC about an alarming increase in brain diseases in all developed countries -- except Japan. Japan is almost always the exception to such trends, and it seems to me to be related to the Japanese attitude to the body.
I give Hisae my big anti-Christian speech as we drive towards Kyoto. Christianity is worse than what came before it (various animistic folk religions revolving around plantation, vegetation, incantation) and what came after it (pragmatic materialism). It's a religion which invests everything in the metaphysical instead of the physical. The thing about the metaphysical is that it's about what's absent rather than what's present. Of what's absent, we can only make assertions. Whereas what's present can be tested and tasted. Christianity is one of those religions that pulls back from life and forces people to make untestable assertions. If you disagree with my assertion about the ultimate values in life, and there's no way to settle the matter by testing what's tangible, we'll probably come to blows. That's why Christianity has engendered such violence.
We got to Kyoto and the atmosphere lifted as we ascended little roads towards Ohara. There, in the gathering dusk, we climbed a temple path through the forest to the 'mute waterfall'. It wasn't mute; it made the rushing, crashing sound of all waterfalls. But Hisae explained that a Buddhist monk had come here to play music, and one day had noticed that the sound of the music and the sound of the waterfall had become one sound. Therefore, he said, there was no longer any separate waterfall sound. It was 'mute'. All was music. Now that's a religion for me!
We drove back into town, stopping to eat and watch the annual illumination by fire of the huge Chinese character on the mountain overlooking the town -- apparently the character just says 'BIG', which is what it is. (Tonight is the Daimonji Okuribi Festival, or Farewell Fire Festival; a shinto ritual designed to send the ancestral spirits back to the other world. Five fires, shaped as kanji characters and symbols, are set on five mountainsides. The fires burn from east to west in the shape of the characters, "dai" (large) , "myo", "ho", boat, and a torii gate.)
Now I'm at a place called Club Ichi Maru Maru in central Kyoto. It's something we don't have in the West: a huge complex where you can walk in off the street, have a sauna, surf the net, read mangas, relax in a vibro-massage chair, play video games, watch TV, even go fishing in an artificial rockpool... A place you can take your body and your mind, and know they'll both come out refreshed. I just had a scorching sauna and a shower, and I feel totally embodied. I feel I'm in a non-Western, non-Christian society which sees body and mind as one and the same thing, and truth as something completely tied up with the here and now. No wonder kids in yukatas by the banks of the river seem relaxed and happy. No wonder Japanese people live longer than anybody else in the world, and get fewer brain diseases. Christianity may have reached nearby Korea, but -- thank God -- it doesn't yet seem to have made much of a dent in Japan.
It was odd to hear the words 'Abraham' and 'Israel' popping up in the Korean spiel. What right does this Middle Eastern religion have to be as far from its home territory as Korea? Then again, what right do I have to be 'Japanising' the world?
I do feel evangelical about Japanese values, and I do feel they're universally applicable. This morning there was a news story on the BBC about an alarming increase in brain diseases in all developed countries -- except Japan. Japan is almost always the exception to such trends, and it seems to me to be related to the Japanese attitude to the body.
I give Hisae my big anti-Christian speech as we drive towards Kyoto. Christianity is worse than what came before it (various animistic folk religions revolving around plantation, vegetation, incantation) and what came after it (pragmatic materialism). It's a religion which invests everything in the metaphysical instead of the physical. The thing about the metaphysical is that it's about what's absent rather than what's present. Of what's absent, we can only make assertions. Whereas what's present can be tested and tasted. Christianity is one of those religions that pulls back from life and forces people to make untestable assertions. If you disagree with my assertion about the ultimate values in life, and there's no way to settle the matter by testing what's tangible, we'll probably come to blows. That's why Christianity has engendered such violence.
We got to Kyoto and the atmosphere lifted as we ascended little roads towards Ohara. There, in the gathering dusk, we climbed a temple path through the forest to the 'mute waterfall'. It wasn't mute; it made the rushing, crashing sound of all waterfalls. But Hisae explained that a Buddhist monk had come here to play music, and one day had noticed that the sound of the music and the sound of the waterfall had become one sound. Therefore, he said, there was no longer any separate waterfall sound. It was 'mute'. All was music. Now that's a religion for me!
We drove back into town, stopping to eat and watch the annual illumination by fire of the huge Chinese character on the mountain overlooking the town -- apparently the character just says 'BIG', which is what it is. (Tonight is the Daimonji Okuribi Festival, or Farewell Fire Festival; a shinto ritual designed to send the ancestral spirits back to the other world. Five fires, shaped as kanji characters and symbols, are set on five mountainsides. The fires burn from east to west in the shape of the characters, "dai" (large) , "myo", "ho", boat, and a torii gate.)
Now I'm at a place called Club Ichi Maru Maru in central Kyoto. It's something we don't have in the West: a huge complex where you can walk in off the street, have a sauna, surf the net, read mangas, relax in a vibro-massage chair, play video games, watch TV, even go fishing in an artificial rockpool... A place you can take your body and your mind, and know they'll both come out refreshed. I just had a scorching sauna and a shower, and I feel totally embodied. I feel I'm in a non-Western, non-Christian society which sees body and mind as one and the same thing, and truth as something completely tied up with the here and now. No wonder kids in yukatas by the banks of the river seem relaxed and happy. No wonder Japanese people live longer than anybody else in the world, and get fewer brain diseases. Christianity may have reached nearby Korea, but -- thank God -- it doesn't yet seem to have made much of a dent in Japan.