The Dalai Lama has been on a speaking tour through Japan this past week. He was engaged in Tibetan Buddhist teachings in the west, where he said, “Buddhism is a science of the mind,” and then moved through Hiroshima, where he added his own appeals for nuclear abolition. On Friday, November 10, he was in Tokyo. On that day, somewhere in Shinjuku, just an hour or so by bicycle away from me, was the fourteenth in a successive lineage that is traced back to the 14th century of Buddhism’s highest spiritual leader.

More than 70 years old, the current Dalai Lama, “spiritual teacher,” is Tenzin Gyatso. He is known the world over and in the West, he is always associated with peace, spirituality and tradition. However, that tradition, like so many, has come crashing into the political world.

Tibet’s official status is a region of the People’s Republic of China, which, despite its secular stance, has reserved the right to approve the nominations of all high-ranking Tibetan officials, spiritual and otherwise. The current Dalai Lama has stated publicly that his successor would not be born within Chinese territory, if, as he has suggested, he is reincarnated at all. In the tradition, the Dalai Lama would cease its cycle of rebirth when his mission was complete, when the people of Tibet were secure or when he lost influence in the pursuit of his quest.

With each successive death of a Dalai Lama, his monks begin the search for his reincarnation, a search that has typically taken a few years, in the 14 changes of power that have been made. The most promising sign of the search's completion is the discovery of a young child who recognizes the possessions of the previous Dalai Lama, which were traditionally carried throughout the Tibetan region. Just that happened nearly six decades ago when the current Dalai Lama was found. However, it seems the world might have seen the last of this search.

Since his exile in 1959, the current Dalai Lama has lived in northern India, home to some Tibetan refugees, many of whom clamor for an independent Tibetan state. His Holiness is understood to be the reincarnation of the Buddha’s compassion and, before 1959, was the leader of the Tibetan government.

For those of us who aren’t well-versed in Tibetan history, perhaps we should review. In March of 1959, the Chinese military entered Tibetan territory to answer what the Chinese government called a violent uprising earlier in the month. More than 2,000 people died during the three days of fighting between the Tibetans and Chinese forces. In one day, the Chinese army fired nearly 800 artillery shells at the Dalai Lama’s Summer Palace, destroying the ancient building and over 300 civilian homes, according to a BBC News article.

By that time though, the Dalai Lama had already begun, with an entourage of 20 men, a 15-day journey on foot over the Himalayan Mountains to northern India where he was eventually granted asylum and still resides today. All Tibetan men who managed to survive the violence were deported, many adding to the number of 80,000 Tibetans who settled near the Dalai Lama in India.

Those left in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa claimed the Chinese army remained for an additional 12 hours, burning corpses and completing their destruction of that March of 1959. This divide between the region's traditional leader and its officially recognized government remains today and has been a source of some contentious debate between India and China.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his controversial stature according to some,The Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his attempts to establish Tibetan independence. In the 1980s the Chinese government offered the Dalai Lama the opportunity for Tibet to have effective autonomy as a Chinese region, but he declined. The offer has since been revoked, and Tibet remains under Chinese control, in an area with a number of territories disputed between India and China.

Here on the other side of the world, I am exposed to this, different perspectives and regular experiences with new portions of history. I’ll be sure to say hello to the Dalai Lama for everyone.
Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here is another quick Japanese culture lesson for you. If you know someone who grew up in the country, ask his him who his sempai and kouhai are. Almost without question, he will have an answer.

[sem-PIE] and [co-HIGH]

Japan is, people like to say, a country of obedience and community, without the independence of the West. One of the clearest examples of this, and one of best ways this structure is passed on is through this mentor-like system. While it might refer to seniority in a business or some organization, most usually every person grew up under the tutelage of someone just older, his sempai [sem-PIE]. It is the responsibility of the sempai to guide and advise his younger half, his kouhai [co-HIGH], the best he can. In return, it is generally understood that the kouhai must respect and follow his sempai. Just a few days ago I went out to a bar with a group of Japanese college students I had befriended. While, I believe, it more common to find a group of American friends all similarly aged, the sempai/kouhai dynamic changes things.

I was there, drinking Suntory and eating tonkatsu and fried potatoes with the group’s grand sempai, a 33-year-old, whose kouhai was 26-years-old, who was sempai to a 25-year-old, who was sempai to a 23-year-old, who was sempai to a 22-year-old, who was sempai to a 21-year-old, who was sempai to a 15-year-old. If they got into arguments, the sempai would always make the peace, and there was a genuine respect for one’s sempai. Granted, normal social skills skew the presence. The 22-year-old was clearly the most popular, most athletic and most out-going of the group, but he knew his place and didn’t question it. It is this, the sempai and kouhai system that might be one of the clearest ways to describe how much of Japanese society is structured and remains. It is surprisingly refreshing to find such a tradition still so active.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 03:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes you stumble upon some of your finest moments abroad. I was sweeping down Meguro Dori, pumping my legs and keeping a song at my lips, as passed what appeared to be a small sidewalk festival, with forty or fifty stalls with foods and small games. Without hesitation, I parked my bicycle and split the crowds, eyeing the takoyaki, soba, rice dishes, chocolate-covered bananas, fish, pork on a stick and plenty more. After circling around and around, I thought about monjo, but finally settled on its more solid cousin, okonomiyaki, a fatty Japanese dish often reserved for carnivals, which features a pancake base covered with lettuce, fish, crab and other seafood, vegetables, often pickled, and topped with spices, mayonnaise and sour-ish soy sauce, for 500 yen ($4.25 USD). I poured into it, and, nearly finished, I realized I had the linguistic ability to tell the chef that his wares were “delicious.” Feeling the need to assure myself that I could be understood, I bought a small dessert cake, which tasted like a waffle surrounding a creamy melted cheese, and, after grabbing a quick bite, I turned to the woman who took my 100 yen and exclaimed, “Oishii!” She smiled and replied with “dozo,” another Japanese conversation, small as it was, completed. I finished my foods and climbed back on my bicycle, satisfied with another few hard-to-forget memories.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 02:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The usual lecture of my thrice-weekly Modern Japanese History class was interrupted the other day. My professor decided he would share with us a slice of the World War II era American perceptions of Japanese society.

Enmeshed in brutal and racially-infused Pacific-based war with the Japanese, the American government took to one of the great political tools, one that hit its most flagrant peak in the twentieth century: propaganda.

Towards the end of 1944, the U.S. government contracted famed director Frank Capra to put together a film that could introduce the American people to the Japanese, who, at the time, were even less known and understood to most Americans than they are now.

The result was "Know Your Enemy," a 63 minute collection of Japanese newsreels and U.S. military films narrated by American actor John Huston, leaving the audience with nuanced half-truths, implicating assumptions and poorly researched declarations leading my Japanese classmates to wild laughter. The Japanese were involved in similarly heinous anti-American, self-aggrandizing racial superiority, but it always stings a bit to see the foolishness of U.S. mistakes of the past.

Watching the film made by Capra, yes, the Frank Capra that directed It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was fairly troubling. Probably for the best, in the end, the film was not released in American movie theaters, as, upon completion, the war was in its final stages and Capra’s negative portrayal of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito did not fit the U.S. military’s decision to offer Hirohito clemency from war crimes.

It was, in the end, released as an academic tool and acknowledgement of past foolishness, excused by wartime, but it certainly made me, as so much can, think about the Truth, yes, Truth, in the information I find and news I absorb. For anyone who has followed my writing, you know that is often impenetrable, stuffed with facts and figures, historical data and future projections. I try to imagine being an American moviegoer in the 1940s and deciding to see Capra’s “Know Your Enemy.” In the end I would watch an hour of innocuous video, altered by the constant narration labeling the Japanese people as “sinister” and hopeless in their “obedience for their emperor’s command.”

It portrayed the 12,000 mile-long, 120 mile-wide mainland Japan as a home to a subhuman animal of ferocious expansionism. Now, the film’s focus on “Hakko Ichiu,” the Japanese slogan of imperialism in the 1930s was, perhaps rightly, viciously condemning. There is no hiding the evils of Imperial Japan, but how arbitrary and overhanded Capra’s film became, clearly showing writing from a man who had never been to the country. Today, most Americans under 60-years-old, I would guess, might think of the Japanese as a peaceful people. How worrisome the power indoctrination is. I will avoid falling into any blind and formulaic blathering of the wonders and importance of education. Just think about what you’re being told and, for goodness sake, cite your sources! I can’t imagine where Frank Capra was getting some of his information.

Jaa mata,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 03:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I was left trying to make a comparison yesterday. It is moments like that, when I feel more versed in something Japanese than its American counterpart, that I feel I have been in Japan for too long.

The Bento. It might be best translated as a ‘boxed lunch,’ but boxed lunches in the United States died generations ago. They are so common that I have become so familiar with their name and their use, that I have neglected to ever mention them.

I suppose with the accessibility of trains and mass transportation throughout Japan, particularly Honshu (and most especially in the Kanto region), people are prone to day trips that don’t involve sitting behind the wheel of a car. So, rather than stop at a restaurant, many Japanese will bring along a bento, a single portion takeout meal almost always featuring rice, fish or meat and some cooked or pickled vegetables. In that way, while American boxed lunches were popular before automobiles and then died, Japanese bentos are said to have developed in the twelfth century and blossom still today.

With their adoration of convenience stores, konbinis, the Japanese can walk into any of the 50,000 Sunkus, Family Mart, or Lawson’s stores and buy a disposable mass produced bento for 300 to 800 yen ($2.50 to $7 USD). Still, despite their commercialization, the tradition of an ornately packed and thoughtfully balanced bento in a lacquerware box is a staple of the Japanese housewife.

So, yesterday trying to remember what would be today’s American version of the bento. The best I could think of would be the “brown-bagged lunch,” which is always prepared at home. I can’t recall stores commonly selling set-lunches, beyond a hoagie sandwich with potato chips and a soda, or something to that effect. I haven’t been gone that long, have I?

I was disturbed by my suddenly vague idea of American convenience stores and common practices for day trips. Let me know if anyone has any thoughts of the American version of the bento!

Jaa mata,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 11:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Japan is for the Japanese, no? When I interviewed Donald Richie for my fourth episode, he described Tokyo as being one of the world’s most diverse cities. Clearly, the capital of Japan is one of the world’s largest, bringing business, political, entertainment and social group members together from around the world. But, what about the country as a whole? According to CIA statistics, Japanese territory is peopled by a population of 127 million, 99 percent of whom are ethnically Japanese. Is there diversity in that? Well, there are certainly subsets of that group with personal distinctions.

The AINU – Though since the modern Ainu movement began, Japan’s indigenous people have preferred to be called the Utari (“comrade” in their native language), they are widely known, almost exclusively, as the Ainu. Anthropologists largely suggest that the Ainu are of Siberian or even Polynesian descent, though these original inhabitants of Honshu, the main Japanese island, are known to be light-skinned with wavy hair covering much of their body, like Caucasians the world over. Archeological digs have shown Ainu communities with roots 20,000 years ago in Tohoku, northern Honshu. Excluding modern intermarriage, the Ainu are entirely unrelated to the Japanese people, who drove the Ainu northward in the early portion of modern history, relegating the Ainu almost exclusively to Hokkaido, a large northern Japanese island, by the ninth century. In the way that much of the American West is still considered wild, perhaps tied to the American Indian populations pushed there, so, too, Hokkaido is today considered Japan’s untamed frontier, an island that boasts a full quarter of Japanese territory but only four percent of the Japanese population. The Ainu culture is synonymous with carving and woodcraft and respected for vivid textiles and epic songs with no near relative. According to the Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu culture, or FRPAC, today the Ainu are thought to number roughly 24,000, a statistically meaningless portion of the Japanese population. Even more troubling is that, with generations of intermarriage between the Ainu and the Japanese, recent surveys have suggested that perhaps only 200 purely Ainu people are alive today.

The BURAKUMAN – If the Ainu are the American Indians of Japanese society, than the Burakuman might be an even more struggling form of black America in Japan. Legally liberated in 1871 with the abolition of Japan’s millennia old feudal caste system, the Burakuman, Japanese people socially segregated for even more arbitrary reasons than race, are still fighting social discrimination and poor living standards, despite active governmental action in the past 20 years. The Shinto and Japanese Buddhism that took hold into even secular society dictated that many necessary tasks were unfit for citizens, from manual labor and cleaning services to some food preparation and even leather-tending. The result was a segment of society that filled these roles, but, as having entered an unclean world, was considered outside normal Japanese culture. There was no escape, as with its successive generation came a mandate to remain a Burakuman, “hamlet people,” as they lived outside of towns. While other names like binin, “nonhuman,” and the once popular eta, “much filth,” have been banished from everyday discourse since the 1960s, which was a decade that began social change in Japan as it did in the United States, even today equality hasn’t been met. Nineteenth century family registers, which allowed for people to be labeled as ancestral Burakuman, were closed to the public and nearly two-thirds of self-labeled Burakumin say in opinion polls that they have never encountered discrimination, it remains insidious undergrowth in some Japanese minds and a troubled truth in other uncomfortable hearts. A professor of mine told me he was helping with interviews for a Japanese business and watched a well-spoken, experienced candidate meet rejection. After a great deal of insistence, he was told that, as could be seen by the candidate’s family name, he was a Burakumin and would become a distraction to the business’s social dynamic. Similar opinion polls suggest that nearly 75 percent of Burakumin marry into mainstream Japanese society, but the injustice lingers. According to the last widespread study by the Japanese government, finished in 1993, there were nearly 900,000 residents living in 4,500 “assimilation districts,” subsidized living for Burakumin, nearly three-quarter of which are in rural communities, none recognized in Tokyo. Some sources have put the total as high as 2 million, but whatever the number, the reality is that names and homes are startlingly harmful for future success in too many cases.

The ZAINICHI – The Zainichi Koreans are the largest ethnic minority group in Japan, with numbers well over 500,000, according to the CIA World Factbook. Barely half a percent of the population, but because of the group’s relative size and the impact it has had on Japanese society, the term Zainichi, literally “staying in Japan,” has come to refer to these permanent Japanese residents who have retained their Korean ethnicity. The harsh Japanese colonialism of the Korean peninsula and Japanese economic prosperity post-Pacific War have caused a great deal of cultural and population transferal, and the Zainichi are perhaps the clearest example of this. Some Zainichi have quietly taken Japanese names and been entirely absorbed into the culture through the generations, while many others proudly retain their Korean names, practices and define themselves through being non-Japanese.

OTHER – Japan has had a thirty year reign as Asia’s most powerful economic center and so, by virtue of its close proximity to many countries with populations in search of opportunity, it has developed vibrant communities of different ethnic groups, from the 250,000 Chinese to the nearly 90,000 Filipinos. Perhaps less readily sensible is the population of 180,000 Brazilians. Interestingly, the Japanese government recognized a problem of filling holes in lesser skilled positions of the economy, so during the 1990s, they invited nearly a quarter of a million Brazilians of Japanese origin to work in Japanese industries. While some have since returned to Brazil, many remain.

Any questions? Ask them!

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 10:46 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Tonight is one of the clearest nights I have ever found while in Japan. From my balcony, overlooking a well-kept garden, I can see twenty or more stars and a brilliant full moon, brightly lit and open to intruding glares.

It is November in temperate Tokyo and the nightly temperatures are falling. I stood on that balcony and took in one of the great smells of this world, the smell of a chilly autumn night. The smell of the cold. A smell crisp enough to burn my nostrils upon entry, but too appealing to keep me from breathing deeper again. It is simple and clean. The air is clear enough tonight to make me forget I am in smoggy Tokyo, if only for a moment. The sky has chosen purple for its color tonight, though it is deep enough for the casual observer to miss that. I didn’t miss it. I stood outside long enough to see it was not blue or black or gray, no, the cold November night was as purple as it was clear.

Still, there is nothing particularly Japanese about this clear night, but it feels different. Despite the goose bumps on my arms, I am warmed by the cold air in my lungs and the clear sky in my eyes. I am warmed just as I am when Nat King Cole’s crackling version of ‘The Christmas Song’ begins to play from my computer. There is only one place in the world I am meant to be at this moment, where cold November nights and clear skies are common place and I can play all the holiday music a month before December I want without being labeled just an American.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)