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.

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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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The Virtue of Virtues

Some of the 72 disciples of Confucius at Koshi-byo in Nagasaki

Sharon Begley writes in Science Journal in 2004:

The task was to practice "compassion" meditation, generating a feeling of loving kindness toward all beings.

"We tried to generate a mental state in which compassion permeates the whole mind with no other thoughts," says Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Nepal, who holds a Ph.D. in genetics.

In a striking difference between novices and monks, the latter showed a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves during compassion meditation. Thought to be the signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, gamma waves underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators "showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature," says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.

Not since David Hume has virtue ethics found a place in the mainstream philosophy community, despite the fact that - more than any other moral framework - virtue ethics serves as the basic moral framework for all of the world's major religions and cultures.

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Fukushima, "Floral Paradise"

the top of Mt. AzumaI came across this tourist video on YouTube for my Japanese prefecture of residence, Fukushima, while searching for video of a crazy moth/ant attack from ten or twenty years ago near one of the schools at which I work.  I couldn't find what I was looking for, but the tourist video, discovered accidentally, is sufficiently corny, campy, trite, whathaveyou, and with kool muzak, so please enjoy.  

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Flash Tourism in Kyoto - Part IV

at the southern end of Kyoto Imperial Gardens

Immediately, I decided it was time to leave Ryouanji and move on to other sites.  This time I took the path straight out of the main hall: elegant stone steps brought me through more peak foliage, and I made my way to the main gate, where I thanked the man with the clipboard and turned left towards the road.  The stop for the bus back to Kyoto was a bit beyond where I had disembarked earlier.  This allowed me to walk past a dark, dense Buddhist cemetery hidden behind a fence on my left.  I wondered how old the graves were, if this cemetery was even part of Ryouanji, and if so, was this obscure, modest place where the seven Hosokawa Emperors were buried?  While I waited for the bus, I pushed my face up to the fence and cupped my hands around my eyes to block out the sun, but still, I couldn’t see much.  There were a few nondescript gravestones, some altars and miniature shrines for burning incense, and what I can only describe as a moai, among thick forest, like some scene from a Miyazaki Hayao film.

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Flash Tourism in Kyoto - Part III

A salaryman contemplates the Zen sand gardens at Ryouanji.

The land that is now Ryouanji was originally an estate of the Fujiwara clan, which married into the imperial line and dominated Japanese politics from roughly 794 to 1185.  Hosokawa Katsumoto controlled the property during the Ounin Civil War from 1467 to 1477, which ushered in the Japanese Warring-States Period that eventually ended in the Tokugawa Shogunate around 1600.  The Fujiwara estate was destroyed in the Ounin War, and Hosokawa Katsumoto declared in his will that it be converted to a Zen Buddhist temple.  Seven Hosokawa emperors are buried on the property.

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Flash Tourism in Kyoto - Part II

roof of the entrace to Ryouanji

I boarded the night bus for Kyoto at 19:30 in Sendai, an hour north of my residence in Fukushima: one-way cost 7,800 yen, a major improvement over the 10,500 yen fare from Fukushima.  I noticed immediately there was no bathroom on the bus, which ruled-out massive consumption of coffee or beer to stave off the boredom of an eleven-hour ride.  Accordingly, the bus was kept hot and dry, like the cabin for an international flight: customers who don’t use the bathroom are good customers, but they’re also customers who wake up with heat stroke and solidified green boogers stuck to their faces.

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Flash Tourism in Kyoto - Part I

Beyond those trees lies Kyoto's Imperial PalaceInternational air travel is a totally mind-fucking experience without cause or mercy, for which the human psyche has evolved nothing to cope: drive a few hours to the airport, sit in a chair in a cramped room at ten-thousand feet, be served a mediocre meal, watch a few movies to fight the boredom and restlessness, look out your window occasionally to see nondescript white masses of clouds or nameless mountain ranges, take a nap, and wake up at the center of an another civilization.

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Iino: 4,000 Year Old Ruins, Period Houses, Temples, and UFOs

4000-year-old Jomon Period pottery from the Wadai siteYesterday, I went on a bus tour of Iino in the east of Fukushima Prefecture in the Abukuma Mountain Range.  Despite being a small town, Iino has a variety of very interesting attractions.  The first stop was an archeological site dating from the Japanese Jomon Period (about 4,000 years ago). 

The Jomon Period is so called because the pottery of this era is marked by cord-made patterns.  It predates the Yayoi Period, which saw the southern Yayoi people exploit Chinese innovations of the potter's wheel, writing, rice cultivation, and iron tools and weapons to displace the Jomon people over a period of about 1200 years from 800 B.C. to 400 A.D.  The Yayoi came from the Korean penninsula, spread through southern Japan and gradually over the mountains of the north to Hokkaidou, as is typical of Japanese historical migration patterns.  The Yamato Japanese, founders of the Imperial House of Japan, would follow the same pattern starting at about 250 A.D.

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