On the Singular Strangeness of Japan

"Listen. God only exists in people's minds. Especially, in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person."
- Haruki Murakami, "Kafka On the Shore"

A couple weeks ago, during the Atlanta ice storm, L. and I watched a DVD of Miyazaki's anime fantasy "Spirited Away." The movie is strange and wonderful, and evokes a world where ghosts and spirits, gods and monsters are not only accepted, but expected. The Radish Spirit, Noh Face and other supernatural beings come and go throughout the film to the surprise of no one, and certainly without the fear or even horror associated with supernatural beings in the West (can you imagine "Poltergeist," or even "Ghostbusters," with no one particularly interested in the fact that ghosts share the house with people?).

Much in "Spirited Away" seems very strange to Americans, just as much of Zen also seems rather strange. Where does this strangeness in Zen in particular and Japanese culture in general come from?

Much has been written about how Buddhism, when it arrived in China, encountered Taoism and eventually produced a kind of uniquely Chinese variant of Buddhism, called chan. Chan Buddhism later emigrated to Japan, where it became Zen. However, for all of the talk on how Buddhism incorporated the previously existing Chinese culture, I've read very little on how Chan adopted to Japanese culture when it came to the island, or even of the nature of that original Japanese culture.

So, with that in mind, I found the following passages of John Updike's review in a recent New Yorker of Haruki Murakami's new novel, "Kafka On the Shore," particularly interesting:

"The religious history of Japan since the introduction of Chinese culture in the fifth century A.D. and the arrival of Buddhism in the sixth has been a long lesson in the stubborn resilience and adaptability of the native cult of polytheistic nature worship called, to distinguish it from Buddhism, Shinto. Shinto, to quote the Encyclopedia Britannica, 'has no founder, no official sacred scriptures, in the strict sense, and no fixed dogma.' Nor does it offer, as atypically surviving kamikaze pilots have pointed out, an afterlife. It is based on kami, a ubiquitous word sometimes translated as 'gods' or 'spirits' but meaning, finally, anything felt worthy of reverence. One of Shinto's belated theorists, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), defined kami as 'anything whatsoever which was out of the ordinary.'

"A tenacious adherence to Shinto in the Japanese countryside and among the masses has enabled it to coexist for a millennium and a half with Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, and to be subject to repeated revivals, most recently, from 1871 to 1945, as the official spiritual weapon in Japan's imperialist wars. After Japan's defeat in the Second World War, Shinto, under the direction of the Allied occupation force, was disestablished, its holidays were curtailed, and the emperor's divinity - based on the first emperor's purported descent from the sun goddess - was renounced. But Shinto shrines remain, in the imperial precincts and in the countryside; its rites are performed, its paper wish-slips tied to bushes, its amulets sold to tourists Asian and Western. Shinto's strong aesthetic component, a reverence toward materials and processes, continues to permeate the crafts and the arts. Kami exists not only in heavenly and earthly forces but in animals, birds, plants, and stones."

And there you have much of what is unique to Zen Buddhism - the devotion to the arts, the reverence of nature, and even the casual references Dogen makes to demons, to gods, and to hungry ghosts.

The "Spirited Away" DVD has been long since returned, but Friday night, L. came over with the DVD of "Donnie Darko," another rather fantastical, although very Western, movie. We watched the movie on my new sofa with a nice fire burning in the fireplace after we had enjoyed a good steak dinner at Bone's. For those keeping score at home, we got along fine on our first date following our breakup of last week.