Happy St. Nikolaus!

Mt. Adams at 6 am from “the Lodge” living room last year.

Today is St. Nickolaus Day and the real beginning of the holiday season for me.  About a week ago, I put up my Santa flying over Mt. Fuji wall hanging, so my room is just about ready, but I will be going back to Oregon for the holiday and for New Year’s.  (That means, of course, that I miss yet another New Year in Kyoto.  We’ll have to remedy that maybe next year.)

In any case, to get the blog into the fun, I turned on the snow, although, of course, it is not actually snowing here in Japan. (My window is open for some fresh air on a sunny morning, but my feet are getting a bit cold.)  If, however, your computer has difficulties producing so much snow, you can be your own weather forecaster by turning it on and off here:

Stop snow.

Start snow.

Have a happy happy holiday season and enjoy all the festivities!  No matter what religion, family, sect, persuasion, feel the warmth!

Ylva and Kajsa II and a feminist look at the Japanese cultural arts

The lake at Arashiyama.  (Picture courtesy of Ylva)

A few days after the day in Arashiyama, I met again with Ylva and Kajsa for a morning of sight seeing.  We went to Fushimi Inari, the fox mountain a few stops south of Kyoto station on the train line to Uji.  The main buildings of the shrine give the appearance of order and decorum, their square structures almost uniformly painted with a fresh coat of vermilion.

The two foxes on either side of the main gate hold a jewel and a key to the storage room, symbols of financial success. Foxes are also famous, however, for trickery.  Behind the main shrine buildings, vermilion gates in various states of decay form a tunnel covering paths winding up the mountain.  We walked up a little way, passing miniature fox shrines made of stone and adorned with miniature red gates.

We climbed steep stone steps and came to a small lake with a dark shrine building at its shore.  There, under heavy eves hung with thick silk banners, fat white candles with wide flames more reminiscent of a fire than a candle flame illuminated stone fox statues with a yellow flickering light.  We prayed to the tricksters for respite from their tricks and turned to walk down the mountain again as rain began falling.

Empathy: from social neuroscience to the Kokinshu

Brain images from Decety and Jackson’s article. (For an explanation, see the pdf linked at the bottom.)

I’ve recently been spending quite a bit of time deliberating empathy.  Yes, empathy, feeling the same emotions as another person or setting yourself in someone else’s shoes.

All these popular ideas about the unbridgeable relationship between the subject and the object has made me feel a little alienated.  (I guess that’s normal, I guess.)  A story about Rousseau watching his “Maman” put a piece of food in her mouth and realizing he would never know how it must taste comes to mind, and that just sends shivers up my back telling me there’s something a little off.

Character Definition in Hagoromo

The pine tree at Mio.

Recently, I’ve begun writing a paper about Hagoromo, which I will be submitting for my application to the master’s program at the University of Tokyo. A lot of what I’ve written will be revised multiple times, especially when I translate it in Japanese, before I hand it in.  Following is just one section of my paper.  I would love everyone’s feedback on my ideas.

In this section, I’m writing about standard plot and character development patterns.  I have never written about this before, so please correct me if any of my statements are oversimplified or plainly wrong.

Character development in Hagoromo

First, a quick run through of the story line: The supporting actor, a fisherman, comes onstage and presents himself.  He finds a feather cloak hanging from a pine branch on Mio beach and takes it with him.  Thereupon, the owner of the cloak appears.  She is an angel from the moon and wants the cloak back to return to her home in the sky.  The fisherman refuses.  Here is the first and most obvious conflict of the play.  Eventually, the fisherman feels compassion for the angel and returns her cloak in exchange for a dance.  This dance takes up the majority of the play and might be said to represent a more psychological conflict between the two characters leading up to their parting ways again.

Please note that the focal character, the angel, is not a dynamic character.  She gets her own way in the conflict, therefore, does not undergo a change, and returns to her previous state of existence.  It is the lesser, supporting character, who undergoes development, but this development is understated.  Instead, the effect of the resolution on the main character is emphasized in the protracted dance at the end of the play.  Why might this be so?

International Exchange: Ylva and Kajsa I (revised)

Ylva, me, and Kajsa (in that order) on the Togetsukyo bridge in Arashiyama.  (Photo courtesy of Ylva Henrikson)

In the beginning of August, I got a surprise E-mail from two young women from Sweden, who were coming to Japan and wanting a guide into the world of noh.

I met them at the end of the month in Asakusa over a sushi meal.  Ylva and Kajsa are contemporary dance artists and were researching for a performance inspired by Mishima Yukio’s modernized version of the noh play Hanjo.  The story centers around a young woman, who has been left by her lover, who promised to come back after he finished some pressing business.  Waiting for him to return, she becomes distracted to the point of madness and wanders Japan looking for him.  In the noh play, she eventually meets him at a shrine in Kyoto.  In Mishima’s play, after spending every day in a train station in Tokyo, waiting for him to come, he comes to her home, but runs away when she doesn’t recognize him.

It seems to me in Mishima’s case that the young man doesn’t seem to understand the woman’s madness.  Is this perhaps indicative of something larger in our society?  Do we emphasize conformity so much that we cannot understand individual pain?

Hagoromo in 2010

A recital performance at the Kongo Noh Theater in Kyoto.  My teacher, Udaka Michishige, is the chorus leader just below my fan.

A long time ago on Mio cape, near present day Shizuoka, a man of low birth is cursed with the bad karma from taking the lives of animals for a living.  He is a fisherman in this life, but his name indicates a more glorious past.  White Dragon.

In the ancient Chinese collection of stories, “Garden of Tales” from the 1st century BC, is a story an adviser tells the king as a warning not to take on the guise of one of his own subjects.  The adviser tells about a white dragon who turned himself into a fish and lived in a pond on earth until one day a fisherman shot him in the eye with an arrow.  The dragon flew away to the king of heaven to complain, but the king of heaven replied that fishermen shoot fish for a living and there was nothing he could do.

And so, it is said by some that the dragon died and was reborn, this time as the object of his hatred, the fisherman.  Of course, the fisherman has no knowledge of his past life as a dragon and lives in ignorance of a greater good, except for a strange affinity for natural beauty.   This is the point in the story from which the play “Hagoromo” begins.

Orgy of Tolerance

(c)Frederik Heyman

In the 20th century, logic came to power.  That which was unnecessary was eliminated in Bauhaus, communist propaganda, American manufacturing, engineering, war, design. . .  Life was simplified to a minimum that could be logically understood.  Everything else was eliminated.  That is the world we still live in today.  Our scientific understanding abstracts from all emotion.  Subjectivity is set aside in search of a greater truth, but what is good for research is not necessarily good for life in general.  We lost our ability to understand ourselves.  We do not know how to deal with our desires except to satisfy them or to cry out in want and pain.  We abstract our emotions when sympathy is called for.  We are emotionally dead to violence when it is performed in the name of our own protection.  We are slaves to fear when violence draws near.  Hoping to escape from or at least deaden our fear and desires, we overcompensate with consumption.

Does Japan have philosophy?

I grew up with a philosopher and theologian for a father.  He taught me about Heiddegar, Plato, and Kant.  I would then argue metaphysics with my best friend in high school.  But by the time I entered college, I had come to the solid conclusion that my feeble capabilities of logic and reason could never lead me beyond a certain point along the path to the Truth. One thing only I knew and that was that I knew nothing, and I didn’t know how to proceed after that. It has taken me eight years since then to figure out how to move on, and the search, which led me to Japan, has questioned my assumptions about what philosophy is. 

My Corner of the Ethnosphere

Wade Davis from the National Geographic is an inspiration.  He says that humanity’s greatest legacy is the “ethnosphere,” the cultural counterpart to the biosphere and “the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, myths, ideas, inspiration, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.” An indicator that this richness of culture is dying out is the demise of languages, for “every language is an old-growth of the mind.” (see TED profile) This is very similar to what Goethe said about languages, “If you know one, you know none,” which can be applied as readily to culture.  However, Goethe’s quote also encourages the individual to explore a world that will challenge his or her unquestioned beliefs.

Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri

Shrine priestesses dance kagura to open the Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri dance performances.  The kagura piece pictured above is entitled Sensai or One Thousand Years.

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon in December, I took the trains to Nara, the capital of Japan from 710 to 784 and a center of Japanese religion ever since.

I had set my mind on seeing the Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri since I had first read the 1349 records of the shrine festival.  That year, a shrine priestess named Otozuru Gozen performed Okina, which in the contemporary repetoir of Noh is performed exclusively by men (see my previous entry about Okina here). In 1349, Okina was the first dance of the day’s performances.  Okina’s position at the beginning of the program shows the religious weight of the piece.  Even 650 years later, contemporary performances of Okina are always at the beginning of a program, and it is said that a god decends and inhabits the dancer during his performance.  Now Okina is not performed at the Onmatsuri, but priestesses dance kagura to open the day’s performances (see picture above). Kagura are shrine dances, and the titles of the four dances performed all indicate the celebratory nature of kagura.