In Kyoto, and in my body

[imomus]

Driving 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.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I realise that while I was away from the internet a whole lot of very interesting comparative religion debate went on here, and some people asked direct questions which I haven't answered. It would turn into a book if I got into my problems with Christianity. But I think the core of it is this.

I'm probably a much more privileged person than the people Christianity was devised to appeal to, thousands of years ago. Call me spoilt, but issues like appetite and play are very important to me, probably more so than the kind of prohibition and regulation that Christianity foregrounds (certainly in the Old Testament). Christianity tends to cast appetite in a negative light. We want that apple, we eat it, and trouble ensues. We lust after our neighbour's wife: more trouble. Even the good stuff in Christianity -- do as you would be done by, turn the other cheek, love your neighbour -- seems thin-blooded and abstract, even legalistic. It doesn't tell me why I should have an appetite for loving my neighbour, a motive. 'Your neighbour has great legs, so love him'. No, it's about 'love' as a sort of grudging impersonal etiquette, abstracted from all the reasons and motives I might have for love. Abstracted, in other words, from appetite, and from the body, and from instinct.

Christianity seems to want to insert itself into my personal life as a centralised, authoritarian moral system, but doesn't seem to understand people. Other religions tell us amusing stories (the Greek or Hindu gods, for instance) which show us a deep understanding of human appetite (projected onto deities). Other religions make a calendar tied into how we feel at various times of year, depending on what we're doing with our crops and what the weather's like. Christianity steals some of that stuff, but with a poor understanding of why it works (it works because of the specific, close relationship between us and our bodies, and us and our crops). Christianity's calendar is based on a ghoulish series of events in which a guerilla activist is defeated by authority, but wins after all by rising from the dead, and so on. Its aesthetic is one of revenge on the world, not one of harmonious co-existence with it. Its symbol is a torture device, and its iconography is all about damage to the body: scourging, crucifixion, flaying. It's no accident that the iconography of the Abu Ghraib torture photos looked so Christian.

So I very much see Christianity as something we have to abandon and move on from. I think Freud was right when he said that the major issue is how we reconcile instinct with society. Late Freud believed, pessimistically, that instinct could never be dovetailed with society sufficiently that humans would be happy. But Freud never visited Japan. He never flipped through erotic mangas in a combini, or checked into a love hotel, or bathed communally, or lay on an electronic vibro-massage chair. If he had, I think he'd have been a lot more cheerful. He might have seen an advanced civilisation that integrates appetite and play. He might have seen Eros eclipsing Thanatos.

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear, dear, Moanmus... how black and white is the world you construct. Both shadeless and shady.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Flip is your trip, Hatcher. There's more nuance in my epistle than your dismissal.

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Your sickly sweet propaganda and perfidious dogma (love the other, but hate the other other) grow dull. Perhaps you left your sense of humour in America?