Kamikaze of the Sea: Otsushima Kaiten Memorial Museum

<Alexis Bonari is currently a resident blogger at College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching both the Ford scholarship as well as football scholarships of all kinds. Whenever she gets some free time, she enjoys watching a funny movie or curling up with a good book.>

The first time anyone in the United States asked me where I was originally from, I was buying a pair of socks in rural North Carolina and surrounded by at least three other customers.  When I responded, “Hiroshima,” everyone grew hushed, and the inquirer preferred the awkward silence to following through the conversation.

The first time anyone outside of family asked me what kind of novel I was writing (or trying to), I was at a friend’s dinner party.  When I replied, “About World War II kamikaze pilots,” everyone fell so quiet that I heard someone’s belly complaining over the shrimp appetizers.

Admittedly, both topics can make some Americans a little uncomfortable.  They might have made me feel uncomfortable, too, at least until halfway through my college career when my father—an American former Marine working in Japan—offered to introduce me to one of his friends, a former kamikaze pilot. 

Click to read more ...

The Shamisen Redemption

One of my students is the curator of an art museum in my city.  We were talking the other day about the idea of Western art as subtraction stories as opposed to the idea of Japanese art as functional.  As Japanese society changed in response to contact with the West and people stopped using swords or wearing kimono (because it is so expensive), much of Japanese art also "died" - or was at least frozen in carbonite.  This works as a general overview to Japanese art history.  

Due to the nature of traditional Japanese arts as functional, there was never any concept of art as aesthetics until that idea was introduced by Westerners.  Japanese visual artists today have to walk a thin tightrope between the absurdity of producing traditionally Japanese, functional works of art for revisionist aesthetic reasons (since "art" has been de facto defined as aethetics) and appearing to do little more than copy Western modern artists.  Accordingly, creating good modern art is more difficult for Japan than it is for the West, since everything Japan's artists produce will ultimately be seen through a lens of Japaneseness.

What I mean by Western art as a subtraction story is that Western art has a history of the gradual removal of constraints - the opposite of Japanese art as necessarily bound to the constraints of function.  If we look at the history of Western poetry, for instance, we still see with Shakespeare and Marlowe a general reliance on the iambic pentameter and rhyming patterns of the ancients (even though those standard rhyme patterns and meters emerged from another language and culture entirely).

Fast forward to Walt Whitman and poetry becomes all about breaking "suffocating" rules of rhyme and meter whilst yawping barbarically.  This idea of directionless rule-breaking would find its most absurd expression in E.E. Cummings, who wrote about extremely conventional subjects in extremely unconventional ways.  

Click to read more ...

Twelve Facts about Mt. Shinobu

Fukushima City from Mt. Shinobu

1.  Mt. Shinobu is a large hill (about 275 meters tall) in the north-central area of Fukushima City.  It is surrounded by homes and office buildings.

2.  It is slightly smaller than Uluru/Ayers Rock in Australia and no less interesting.

3.  Mt. Shinobu has four peaks, stretching from west-southwest to east-northeast: on the first peak is a round, concrete platform usually covered with cigarette butts and high school kids/DQNs necking; on the second peak is a Buddhist temple with a bell dedicated to world peace which anyone is free to ring, so long as they wait until the reverberations can no longer be heard before leaving; on the third peak is a Shinto shrine featuring a giant sandal made for the giant feet of the Gods which is paraded through the center of the city on people's shoulders every year at Fukushima's biggest summer festival, Waraji; on the fourth and highest peak is an ordinary tree.

Click to read more ...

The Way of the Gods - Part I

It's fortuitous that Kevin wrote about love rules in Japan vis-a-vis Valentine's Day, because I attended a wedding over the weekend that I have been meaning to write about all week.  This wedding was one of if not the most profound cultural experience I have had in Japan.  I will try in vain to convey some of this profundity in the words that follow.  This post is the first of a meandering and exhaustive three-part series on the event.

Kevin used the word "neo-tradition" at the beginning of his post.  Perhaps because I am familiar with the pejorative usage of the terms "neo-liberal" and "neo-conservative", I immediately perceive the destructive power of the term "neo-tradition".  In the metaphorical parlor rooms of the blogosphere that I haunt, the term "postmodern conservative" is used to denote the conscious choice to revive lost tradition - the rational judgment that blind adherence to tradition is essentially superior to the cerebral uncertainties of fractured modernity's all-consuming void of purposelessness.  

I for one see such a dichotomy as false; tradition is necessarily a yoke - whether benevolent or malevolent - and it is for this reason that neo-traditions will ultimately be nothing but baseless human attempts at coercion.  I wrote in the comments to Kevin's post:

..."neo-tradition" embodies all the scorn I think hiding behind the word "tradition" to force unfounded and absurd obligation on other people really, really deserves...I have no problem with "neo-traditions" that everyone agrees on observing; nor do I have much of a problem with restrictive "paleo-traditions". It's obligatory neo-traditions that must be destroyed. These are like nationwide hazing.

For all the goofy neo-tradition one encounters in Japan (Don't think the U.S. is exempt from widely-observed neo-tradition.), paleo-tradition still abounds.  It is trying to understand some of this paleo-tradition and to filter it from vulgar neo-tradition that gives purpose to the expatriate intellectual mission.  For me, the most interesting, most difficult to understand, darkest (in a good way), and most quintessentially Japanese tradition is Shinto.

Shinto torii at the summit of Mt. ZaōDepending on one's definition of the word "religion", Shinto may or may not qualify.  Shinto is best described as an aggregate of received practices; it is not necessarily a belief system.  Shinto is the indigenous cultural system of Japan, and was likely practiced in some form when Jomon peoples were first cultivating chestnuts.  In the Shinto cosmos, kami (essences) exist in all things, and humans and other animals become kami after they die.  Shrines, unusual natural elements, and other designated places are interfaces to the world of the kami; shrines, artifacts, and amulets act as conduits to the spirit realm.  Shinto has been described as an optimistic system: people are good, and evil is caused by only evil kami.  Protection from evil requires diligent adherence to correct ritual, the logistics of which have been handed down as cultural treasure through the generations.  These rituals connect modern Japan to its prehistoric past, to the vague darkness which pervaded all existence before the intellectual upheaval which accompanied the light of letters that came from the continent.

Click to read more ...

ESL American History

the Eastern Wild Turkey, perhaps a national symbol superior to the Bald EagleRecently my Saturday night class of Japanese students has taken a keen interest in American History, and last week I lectured about the roles of various immigrant communities in creating the current demographics of the United States.  This week, one of my students asked me about whether American states, cities, and towns had holidays unique to themselves, as is common in Japan.  After waxing about Boston's Evacuation Day and St. Patrick's Day being both on March 17th, I mentioned that Thanksgiving was originally a local celebration, but had spread to the rest of the United States as homesteaders from New England made their ways to the midwest, mountain states, and west coast.

In a way, I realized, the history of Thanksgiving serves as a metaphor for the entire history of the United States.

Click to read more ...

The Billion-Year War

There were good reasons for this sense of priority and urgency. First, influenza viruses mutate constantly and are notoriously unpredictable. Second, influenza was known to cause both seasonal epidemics of disease, and on occasion, much larger global outbreaks of disease, known as pandemics. Influenza pandemics occur when a new influenza virus appears and spreads around the world in populations which previously have not been exposed to the virus. History has shown that influenza pandemics can range enormously in their impact but that it is impossible to accurately predict the eventual impact at the beginning. What is seen early may be very different from what has been experienced by the end. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, started with relatively mild waves of illness and then evolved into the most severe influenza pandemic in history.

- Dr. Keiji Fukuda on behalf of WHO at the January 26, 2010 Council of Europe hearing on pandemic (H1N1) 2009

Click to read more ...

The End of (the) War

Last week, on August 6^th and 9^th respectively, citizens of the world observed the 64^th anniversaries of the only nuclear attacks in world history, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These events forever changed the face of international relations and raised the stakes of warfare to a point which, to this date, has undoubtedly forced the world’s major powers to seek more creative and peaceful solutions to their disagreements. But was the cost in innocent human lives destroyed by both atomic bombs worth the Pax Americana today’s citizens are lucky enough to enjoy?

61% of Americans say “yes”, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. It’s worth noting that the percentage of Americans saying “yes” increases dramatically with age, meaning that those who were alive at the time of the bombing, born shortly after World War II, or who grew up during the imminent nuclear holocaust and paranoia of the Cold War, are far more likely to support the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki than their younger counterparts, many of whom consider the nuclear attacks to have been acts of “State Terrorism.”

Before deciding for myself, I wanted to look at the relevant facts:

Click to read more ...