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 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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Love Rules in Japan

I managed to get this post written on Monday despite the tidewaters of passion rising all around me. But as the afternoon gave way to evening I was subsumed by the tsunami of emotion that is Valentine’s Day in Japan and I am only now recovered enough to put forth (as a warning for anyone wrapped up in the throes of this love-loving land come next February 14^th) this thesis on the many layers of Japan’s amorous neo-traditions. 

It's the start of another English class; I'm pretending to jot something in my notebook when I toss the question out. ‘What day is it, guys?...’

My students enjoy the easy back-and-forth, to get their minds and mouths into English mode. For me, it’s nice they play along since I usually don’t know what day it is. As far as I’m concerned, that we’ve shown up on the same day at the same time at all is cause enough to celebrate, by cancelling class and going out for ramen and beer I always say - to no avail as I’ve yet to be blessed with a student who doesn’t see this as a breach of some vague rule system.

This morning too I asked, then found myself squinting at the calendar across the room trying to figure it out before my student did. ‘Oh!’ she says, in an authentic show of surprise; this starts me thinking that maybe she forgot about a hair appointment and is going to cancel class on the spot, or at least step out into the hall for ten minutes to apologize profusely into her cell phone, which will allow me to hang out and down an extra cup of coffee while I figure out what day it is.

But instead she turned to me, wide-eyed. And then it hit me too. And a wave of guilt washed through me, knowing what was going through my now equally guilt-ridden student's head.

In Japan, where passion ranks on the common social agenda just below understanding football, there is only one possible explanation for why Valentine’s Day is met with such enthusiasm: it is because a thorough set of guidelines has been established so everyone knows exactly how they are supposed to express their unbridled love.

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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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