The Way of the Gods - Part III

tsubaki flowersThis is part three of a three-part series.  Part one can be found here.  Part two can be found here.

A shrine official told us five friends of the bride that we had to wait in the chrysanthemum lobby again, as the shrine would be sponsoring family pictures.  My wife and I thought it was an appropriate time to put the required monetary gift in the pink, frilly envelope that I had bought at a twenty-four hour convenience store for 310 yen at 5:45 that morning after I had finished my hellish night-bus ride to Yokohama.  Before making the trip down to Kanto, we had scoured the Internet for guidelines on how much to give as this was the first time we had been to a wedding as a couple.  

Just as I was about to stick the correct amount of money in the envelope, the rest of the procession returned to the room with the pink carpet where we were waiting, which made us look like assholes; I panicked, and the envelope and cash fell to the floor and flew around comically in the wind created by the door opening.  I had to scramble around on all fours to grab all the cash and put it in the envelope - and I had to do this without creasing the bills (Money with wrinkles is considered in poor taste for a wedding gift, and appropriate for a funerary offering.) - before any more people came into the room.  

Maybe five or six relatives of the groom witnessed me rolling around on the floor grasping for loose cash before I managed to conceal my activity under one of the many brown, industrial folding tables and surreptitiously hand the envelope and cash to my wife so she could go to the bathroom and prepare everything in polite privacy.  

While she was in the bathroom, the shrine baba came and told everybody to head outside and start boarding the microbus.  I obviously couldn't go yet, since I was waiting for my wife.  There was an awkward moment where the shrine baba visibly wondered whether or not to approach me and ask why I wasn't boarding the microbus, but then she decided that the risk was too great for her - me being a foreigner and common knowledge being that Japanese is too difficult for foreigners to understand; she instead just pretended I didn't exist.  After about ten minutes, my wife came out of the bathroom and whispered, "you would not believe how small that envelope is!"  The shrine baba informed her - of course - about the microbus waiting for us outside.  We put on the airs of embarrassment that etiquette demands for taking so long, and pretended to kind-of-run all the way to the microbus parked twenty feet away.

The reception was at another facility, Meiji Kinenkan, which was where the Imperial Constitution of Japan had been hammered out some one hundred and forty years before in the presence of the Meiji Emperor himself.  After a ten-minute, meandering microbus ride through the crowded streets around Harajuku Station, we entered the drive of a very ostentatious building which managed to retain the general architectural theme of Meiji Jingu while simultaneously looking thoroughly Modernist.

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The Way of the Gods - Part II

This is part two of a three-part series.  Part one can be found here.

After fighting through crowds of tourists laughing childishly at the "Takeshita Street" sign, Nigerians hawking hip-hop wear and shouting "Yo! Genki!?" at passersby, and the strangely-coiffed, various in-groups of pre-teens clustered around Harajuku Station, my be-dressed wife and a be-suited I made our way past scattered, camera-wielding foreigners and Japanese alike down the long, wide paths beginning at the quiet and stately entrance to Meiji Jingu.  Fifteen minutes later we arrived at a boring administrative building near the honden (main hall) of Japan's largest shrine.  

We entered a lobby of sorts that would have been indistinguishable from a hotel reception area but for the giant chrysanthemum seals ostentatiously displayed everywhere.  After simmering for fifteen minutes or so, we were escorted by a high shrine baba to a modern-looking, pink-carpeted room with ordinary chairs placed flush against all four walls.  Shallow, white china teacups were arranged on brown industrial folding tables set in front of these chairs; a gold-leaf folded screen lay auspiciously at the far end of the room.  At a table in front of the gilded screen sat the couple to be married, with the groom's guests trailing off to the left and the bride's guests stretching to the right.  My wife and I sat at the terminus next to the door in the exact middle of the far wall directly facing the couple.

There were about forty people in the room altogether, almost all of whom were family members, including the younger sister of the bride, who was also our friend and had recently given birth to an apparently quiet, well-behaved baby.  Of the forty allowed to attend the ceremony, there were five non-Shinto priest non-family members: my wife, me, and three other friends of the bride.  The groom, who grew up at Yasukuni Shrine, had no friends who were not also Shinto priests. 

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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.

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A Modest Proposal for Marriage

This is based on a comment of mine at a comment of mine at LoOG:

I’m one of two 26-year olds I know who has any children. I have two beautiful little girls with the same woman, and we’re unmarried. The reason we’re unmarried is not because we’re uncommited to each other. It is simply because we find the very concept of marriage to be absurd as it relates to our unique situation as members of two diferent cultures.

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Minipost: North's Comment on LoOG

Commenter "North" on League of Ordinary Gentlemen thread about gay marriage succinctly summarizes the only sane position on the issue:

To quickly fill in a hole that Jason skipped Bob, the accepted “librul” position as I understand it on both interspecies marriage, furniture marriage and child marriage is that one of the two entities married in such unions is inherently unable to give informed consent. Thus any of those aforementioned unions would be inherently acts of either despicable violence or meaninglessness (in the case of inert objects) perpetuated on the non-consenting entity.

Japan Hates Babies

The internets are divided on whether Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin said, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  Either way, Huffington Post reports on a batshit insane way Japanese researchers are trying to smite the infamously low birthrate of of that nation's citizens:

Can a robotic baby encourage couples to reproduce--and help Japan boost its low birth rate?

Researchers, who have created a cooing, crying, sneezing baby simulator named "Yotaro," hope so.

They hope that the infant-like machine will "trigger human emotions" that make couples "want to have their own baby," CNN reports.

In an effort to increase the birth rate, Japan's government is offering to pay families a monthly stipend per child, but the leaders of the Yotaro project believe the "robotic encouragement" may be more effective.

What's keeping Japan's birthrate so low is (1) the cancerous nature of its work culture, (2) the disdain with which employers treat employees who want to take time off to care for children, and (3) youth resentment fed by the government throwing money at any warm body that has a baby.  

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Preventing Teen Violence Before it Starts

by Murray BarnesFor years, gun, gang, and youth violence have plagued Chicago, but the city has been particularly hit hard this spring. Last week, Chicago experienced more than 30 shootings and seven Chicagoans were shot to death in one night. Many of those killed were teenagers.  This comes on the heels of Chicago teen Derrion Albert’s brutal killing last fall where Albert was beaten to death by peers while walking home from school. The incident was captured on cell phone video by witnesses and garnered national attention.  Overall crime and homicide rates have gone down in Chicago over the past several years, but teen murder rates are still high. A record 36 Chicago Public School students were killed in 2009, up from 31 in 2008.

In trying to understand the myriad reasons behind Chicago’s violence, I came across Heather MacDonald’s controversial article on why community organizing and government intervention have been ineffective in curbing the violence.

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Why Youth Leads the Recovery

source: Justice DepartmentThis week's Featured Find, an excellent Atlantic article by Dan Peck examining the long-run social costs of persistent unemployment, contains an embedded series of glourified vlogs blasting the youth of the nation for being "Followers, Not Leaders" and entitled basterds.  Au contraire, stuffy old people, WE, the youth, will lead the economic recovery, for several reasons:

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The Silent Good Times Roll

If you listen to the mood of cultural zeitgeist right now, you'd think the world was slipping inevitably towards calamitous anarchy.  The economy is in decline, our cultural values are eroding and America's place in the world is in doubt even as we are confronted with a multitude of problems: two wars, climate change, pandemic disease, Islamic terrorism, the rise of China and a looming deficit, debt and entitlement problem.  While this analysis contains some of substance, this granular reality obscures a larger truth: things in the world and in America are better than at any time in history, perhaps excepting five years ago when we had all of this plus a housing bubble.  This relatively brief moment of crisis has not weakened the core strength of American society, culture and economy and the arc of history continues to bend towards increasing societal welfare.

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A Response to Jonathan Chait

For years now, people far less libertarian than I have been recommending I read Ayn Rand.  While I admit I have no interest in reading her books, I know enough about the author to find her distasteful, iconoclastic, and hypocritical.  Libertarianism is an ideal which treasures self-governance - that is, personal responsibility for one's actions and the freedom to make really bad mistakes as well as the freedom to believe something stupid.  I was excited when I heard about Jonathan Chait's New Republic trashing of Rand, but after I read the article, I couldn't help but feel angry and offended.

Chait, like many, many political commentators from the left, assumes that libertarianism is a simple, unnuanced ideal, that libertarians are incapable of breaking with dogma, and, in general, are a group of elitists who seek to control the world via some sort of perceived innate ability to be better than everyone else at almost anything.  This is an absurd caricature.  Libertarianism is motivated by different factors for different people, despite the fact that Chait suggests it is a psychological disease resulting from abusive parents!

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Brookings Goes Rogue

Education level versus births outside of marriageBrookings is often described as a liberal thinktank, the other side of the coin to the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute.  However, while they certainly were pressed into the opposition during the Bush years, this article on their website is enjoyably heterodox and non-partisan- a point of view we hardly endorse.  It lays out five myths about America:

1. Americans enjoy more economic opportunity than people in other countries.

 Actually, there is relatively more economic mobility by poorer people in Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, though America does provide excellent opportunities for immigrants.

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A Diamond is Forever (from 1947)

American artist Lee Gainer has created a variety of images of engagement rings that can be bought by for three-months's salary. This synopsis is for a truck driver.Anyone who's seen the excellent HBO series, Rome, knows that the Romans were the first to give rings as a sign of engagement: at the beginning of Season 2, badass Titus Pullo, in proposing to his long-unrequited love, shy Eirene, because he spent all of his money on drinking and gambling, ties a blade of grass around her finger.  The Romans also smeared dirt on each other's faces. 

In the Middle Ages, as diamonds were seen to withstand both fire and steel, a platinum diamond engagement ring was given by princes to princesses as a sign of the unbreakable vows of marriage.  It wasn't until the discovery, in 1870, of the Kimberley Diamond Mine, that diamonds became "not so rare a gem after all."  The price of diamonds fell rapidly, and, as anyone with a really old grandmother knows (mine's 93), the birthstones phenomenon started.  At this time, it was far more common to give a potential wife an engagement ring with her birthstone as opposed to a diamond ring, because diamonds were seen as cheap and vulgur.

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Hello? Will You Marry Me?

I'm often home during the day, since my work is both scalable and irregular.  Three or four times a week, we'll receive a phone call from a large company in Osaka looking to buy trucks from my father-in-law.  He runs a shipping company, and is not interested in selling any trucks, but this doesn't stop the Osakans from calling regularly. 

The phone rang today while I was eating lunch, and my wife and I thought it would be totally hilarious if I answered it in English.  "Hello?" I said.  We do this often, and usually whoever calls just hangs up while we giggle, but this time, the party on the other end of the phone line was unvexed.  I handed the phone to my wife, and she said she wasn't interested and that was it.

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Is Marriage a Good Economic Strategy?

This idea entirely belongs to my Microeconomics professor, Dr. Siddiq Abdullah, but it’s so good I have to post it.

Elasticity is the responsiveness of one thing to another, with the most common example being the responsiveness of quantity of a good demanded to price.  From a consumer’s stand point, and that means you, elasticity is a good thing because it keeps prices low.  So in general, it pays to avoid getting in a situation where you have to keep buying a good, even if the price goes up (think of being a taxi driver when gas prices are high).

Which brings us to the subject of marriage. Marriage is expensive!  Imagine what you could get for signing this contract: exclusive use of your person, fifty-fifty revenue sharing of everything you make for the rest of your life, the certainty of new responsibilities as the contract evolves, and worst of all, the contract lasts until death with an extremely expensive opt-out clause.  This price is far too high for nearly any good, but marriage is the price for the least elastic good of all, love.  The most important factors for determining elasticity are the availability of substitute goods and the necessity of consumption and once you fall in love there is only one thing and you must have it.  So we pay.

But then once a person gets married, the incentives are all backwards.  Before the wedding, both people have to be on their best behavior to ensure that no one gets sticker shock, but after the wedding the contract last forever and there are prohibitive barriers to exit so that previously suppressed idiosyncrasies come to the fore.  In game theory, this is the sort of contest where everyone always loses because of the tragedy of the commons – namely, the costs of cheating (not that good kind of cheating that would make marriage less expensive) are borne collectively while the benefits of cheating are accrued personally.  People go through years of misery because, without needing a contract year push, their partners never remember to take out the trash, find the clothes hamper, or always have headaches when they are in the mood.

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