We're Not Alone!!!

Now I have two (count 'em -- 2!!) Friends In Blog. A veritable army. We could take on the world, if it was smaller and had less people on it. In it?

Not much else to say, really. Read Rob's shit. It's funny. Kinda. And all those pictures he talks about?? They're real. Really.

I'm planning to buy a digital projector this week. Am I getting too home-theatery? I'm studying my ass off for the level 2 Japanese test. My girlfriend, who is a native speaker of the language, struggles to answer the questions on this fucker.

Started an play-by-mail Call of Cthulhu campaign with a bunch of friends scattered across the globe. Momma I'm scared! I play a 42 year-old Morrocan truckie/former gun-runner and I look like Harry Dean Stanton from Paris, Texas. That's the scary bit.

On another note, my friend Wendy in Italy was recently told to be careful of people claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary because some of the stories are not actually true.

Unlike THIS, which is totally genuine (they guarantee it, see!)

Splattered rice and a drift to the Right...

A little while since the last post here.

Work has begun again full swing, but my Uni classes have gone into their exam period so I get to play World of Warcraft instead. Tauren druids are fun.

Last weekend I made Mochi with Mizuki and a bunch of her friends from the mountain climbing club of her college. Event organised by the always supergenki Emiko. It was fun beating little rice grains to a pasty death on a clearblue icy day.

Damn it's cold.

OK - Rant Mode On

I am reading Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan and it's fascinating. The complexities of what the Americans did here during the occupation astounds me. The way they 'set up' the Emperor as a British-style powerless figurehead as a way of manipulating the hearts and minds of the Japanese people...I am constantly reminded how 'set up' this entire country is.

But things are really changing. Everything from Koizumi's Yasukuni visits to the SDF's forays into Iraq...this year is the 60th anniversary of the end of WW2 and the demilitarization of Japan, and it seems the country is on the verge of some kind of major seachange. I was talking to an old lady today who had seen Michael Moore's film Farenheit 911 and I guess wanted to talk to a foreigner about it. She said with a pained expression on her face "It seems old men like to make wars for young men to die in." The phrase really stuck with me all day.

Just today a minor scandal broke in the papers about a government minister interfering with a national broadcaster and attempting to censor a documentary on the war crimes of the Showa Emperor. Everywhere I go I hear stuff about how Japan must "regain it's sense of national pride" or "reassert itself as a major international power" and this kind of rhetoric. To me this kind of talk is disturbing and a little saddening. But people will deny that any kind of right-wing shift is taking place, despite the clear warning signs. This shift I think is occurring at a global level.

As a teacher who sometimes works in public schools, I have to deal with another hot topic: the Tokyo state governments introduction of compulsory singing of the National Anthem and bowing to the Rising Sun flag at the beginning of each school day. Large numbers of teachers protested this and even striked last year, leading to retributive punishment from the Ministry of Education in the form of pay cuts and even terminations. The big twist came near the end of the year when a conservative politician asked the current Emperor at a press conference what he thought about it and the Emperor said he thought it was a bad idea to force students to be patriotic. This kind of threw the right-wingers (who continue to worship the Emperor as a divine being) for a spin.

Whatever...Rant Mode Off

Chichibu

The snow was deep yesterday. Thought I'd write about my Christmas trip to the mountains.

Mizuki and I took an early express train to Chichibu on the morning of the 24th. Chichibu is a town in western Saitama prefecture, about 1.5 hours north-westish of Tokyo. Saitama is often known as "the New Jersey of Japan." It's close to a great city. It's a suburban commuter area. And it's profoundly unfashionable. Adding the syllable Da- to its name gives you Dasai-tama, or Unfashionable Ball. Don't ever mention this to people who live there, though. The only cool thing about Saitama is the Saitama Super Arena, where major sporting events are held (including the year-ending Otoko Matsuri (Man Festival) on Dec. 31 where lots of big scary dudes from around the world beat the living bejeezus out of eachother in a square-shaped ring. Oh yeah and the Urawa Reds, who are apparently a good football team (don't ask me; I just teach them English.)

So anyway, we went Inaka (Beyond the Black Stump.) Out in the sticks in the uncoolest place in the country. Why, you may ask? Why oh why oh why?

Two reasons, and good ones:
God and Hot Springs.

Goddess in fact. In Chichibu there are a series of 34 temples dedicated to the Buddhist deity Kannon (Kwan Yin in Mandarin Chinese.) There used to be 33, which is a holy number, the soul spending 33 years in limbo before transmigrating to a new incarnation, but then this group hooked up with two others (in Kyoto and Wakayama, I believe) and added an extra to give a total of 100. Thems a lotta temples. Kannon is a Bodhisattva, an enlightened soul who has forgone the bliss of ascending to nirvana in order to help all other souls find their way thenceward. She is the goddess of Mercy and Childbirth. One of the temples we visited (perhaps number 6 or 7; I can't recall) actually has a strikingly out-of-place and Madonna-like statue of her holding a small child to her breast. It is thought that this statue, donated by a rich noble in the Edo period, was secretly crafted by an underground Christian group and surrepetitiously 'smuggled in.' Christianity was outlawed by the Shogunate of the time. Kannon is quite beautiful. She has a serene face, and sad eyes, filled with compassion for the sufferings of the world. But my deepest and most lasting impression of Kannon comes from the Sakai Masaaki TV show from the 70s: Monkey! She saves his hairy pink ass on many an occasion.



So we hiked around to all these temples, and our feet got REALLY sore. Up mountains and down valleys, past schoolyards and cement factories, disused warehouses, quaint cottages, gutters full of toxic slime, railyards, traditional inns, decorative glass-blowing manufacturers, five hundred year-old olive trees, maples, a forest of cedars and soba restaurant after soba restaurant (a local specialty, apparently.) At each temple we entered, we stopped to make an small offering and a prayer, surveyed the grounds and architecture, then had a chat with the monk on duty. While we talked he would, in beautiful ink-brush calligraphy, inscribe our books with the temple name, date, and a poem.



The days were short, so we retired early as soon as the sun dropped behind the looming peaks to the west. And then onto the onsennatural hot springs, the only other reason to come to Chichibu in winter. The hot springs were hot and springy, which is to say, just the way they're supposed to be. Which is a good thing. Really. And anyway, greatly relaxing after a day-long pilgrimage in the freezing December air. Scalding hot milky white water and steam so thick it feels like you're drinking when you breathe. We had roast chicken and salad and vodka for Christmas dinner (no turkeys out in rural Japan I'm afraid,) surveying the mountains and icy river below our hilltop ryokan inn.



One last thing about this town. It is dominated by a mountain. Buko-san. Quite an impressive monster. It looms so hugely on the sky that you cannot help but feel its presence at all times. It casts a long shadow over the valley. In times past the people of the Chichibu valley had two major gods: the god of the mountain, a male spirit; and the god of the dark wood in the center of the valley, a female deity. At the famous Yomatsuri (Night Festival) on Dec. 2nd each year the god of Buko-san would descend from his mountain seat in the form of the head priest's ceremonial staff, make a procession to the shrine in the center of the sacred wood, and meet his bride. The staff would be ritually placed in a hollow on the back of a turtle-statue to complete the symbolic union. This ritual continues to be practiced today, and the staff and the turtle are still there.

However....

Buko-san is destroyed. After the 2nd World War Chichibu, like all small communities in Japan, was pressed to find some kind of industry to help the economic recovery of the nation. It was found that Buko-san, the seat of the god, was largely made from limestone and stone perfect for the manufacture of cement, so prized by the state-supported (to this day) construction industry. So the mountain was cut down. I shit you not. I have never seen anything like it before in my life. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the top of the mountain is gone. Just cut out. The scar is quite plain to see. Most of the mountain is stripped bare of trees. Great tiers of grey stone can be seen from tens of kilometres away. It is a vast ugliness, a scar beyond reckoning.

So the question I have is: how does this psychologically affect the people who live in the shadow of this mountain, their own god whom they ravaged and destroyed in the name of industrialization? Every day, every minute, the corpse of this decapitated god looms on the edge of the valley, his body broken and torn. Shinto is a religion deeply connected with nature, and the Japanese people will tell you that they are deeply respectful of the gods of the natural world. I fear the shadow that lies over this valley. The murder of a god is not without consequences.