Living in a completely foreign culture is sometimes the best way to get insights into your own culture, to be able to see things that are so obvious they’re hiding in plain sight, thus require your looking at them from “the outside” to make them apparent.
On a lighter note, let me append to that how utterly amazed I am by my talent for coming up with genuinely stupid questions about Japan, its customs, its culture, its people.
The particular one I’m about to reveal isn’t really that bad . . . maybe only 4 or 5 on the cluelessness scale. Here it is . . .
A few years back I asked my wife Masumi — who displays monumental patience with me, probably because she knows I’m truly curious about Japan, not inclined to make nugatory small talk — about the architectural manifestations of “spiritual life” here. The question: “Why are there so many shrines and temples here in Japan, darling?” (Okay . . . I didn’t say ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’ or ‘lamb chop’ or ‘tofu burger’ to her. It’s just not my style.)
I don’t recall her exact words. But it went something like: “Have you ever looked around in America? There are churches everywhere you go.”
My God! She’s right!
From small and modest . . .
To majestic and sometimes garish . . .
There are churches everywhere!
To make things truly convoluted, while all these churches essentially promote Christian beliefs, there are so many denominations of Christianity, it’s impossible to keep track of them all. Lutheran, Baptist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Church of Christ, 7th Day Adventist, Mormon, Presbyterian, Methodist, Christian Science, on and on.
Then to make things even more disorienting to anyone hailing from the East, in addition to the Christian churches, there are Jewish temples — also with an assortment of subtle shadings, e.g. Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Humanistic, Hasidic, Haredi, Chabad — and then in recent times mosques which serve as the spiritual centers for the flocks who adhere to Islam.
What a menagerie!
It makes Japan look like it’s just at the early stages of ramping up its institutionalization of theology, though in point of fact, the two dominant religions here — Buddhism and Shinto — actually go back respectively about fifteen and thirty centuries. Maybe Japan can’t hold a candle — or stick of incense — in sheer numbers to America, or a country like Thailand, which has over 40,000 Buddhist temples alone, but I can speak from experience: There are still plenty of holy sites, temples and shrines here. Even some Christian churches.
Anyone who’s traveled the globe will tell you that this is the case just about everywhere there are people living in some organized fashion.
The obvious conclusion is that humans like to build places of worship, and to varying degrees visit these places of worship to do whatever it is they do in places of worship.
Yes, there’s worship. But while some people are kowtowing to some statue, idol, entity, ghost, relic, concept, abstraction, surrogate or whatever, others are doing something else. Wishing. Meditating. Fantasizing. Maybe scoping out what others are doing or wearing. What car they drove, what camel they rode in on, who they’re with. These days peaking at their smart phones. Checking their email. Their text messages. Tweeting or looking at their Facebook news feed. Discreetly taking selfies.
Though it’s been quite a while since I attended Catholic services, when I was a boy I had to go to Mass six days a week, thus had more than ample time to observe the devout in their Sunday best or Saturday khakis. And frankly, even back then I don’t remember much real worshipping going on. Yes, a small faction followed along in their prayer books, mouthing the incantations of the priest. But the vast majority were marking time, minds elsewhere, checking their watches. God didn’t seem to mind, or notice. No bolts of lightning ripped thought the ceiling and struck down the inattentive. God is infinitely patient, I’m told by my Bible-toting friends. (Tell that to the victims of Sodom and Gomorrah!)
I occasionally attend services here. Usually at our local shrine which I can walk to in about five minutes. A celebration typically associated with a holiday. It’s mostly a social thing.
People do pray. We each make appeals to invisible higher powers, for the things most of us on the planet desire: Happiness, health, wealth, good fortune, love, maybe marriage, harmonious relationships. There’s that universality again: concerns and values we all seem to share as human beings, regardless of where we have settled down to make a life. Concerns and values expressed in places which we designate for whatever you want to call that “quiet time” we all seem to embrace for addressing something inside us that is outside of us … greater than us … or maybe representing the us we wish we could be. Whether we worship this other or just like to sidle up to it now and then, it’s convenient to have some special designated place — a temple, a mount, a church, mosque, cathedral — to set the mood and provide the proper environment.
Here are just a few shrines and temples within easy bike-riding distance of my house.
Yes, houses of worship are everywhere here in Japan too, but at a much more modest level of ‘everywhere’ than in the U.S., and most certainly not in the over-abundance I now can see is a defining characteristic of my homeland.
It makes me wonder . . .
What exactly are they trying to prove over there? Are they maybe trying a little too hard? To be blunt, it appears all that praying and worshipping isn’t really working very well.
Why would I think that?
Americans like to say: “God is on our side.”
Really? If God truly is, then He must have a very strange sense of humor.
Or a serious mean streak.
Life In Japan: Vegetable Gardens
Gardens are the thing here in Japan, especially vegetable gardens.
Growing food for personal consumption is such a part of Japanese culture, even in Tokyo, by population the largest city in the world, there are plot-share farms, rooftop gardens, and at least one major company that devotes a significant amount of its office floor space to growing an impressive variety of fruits and vegetables.
It’s commonly known that land use by the Japanese is extremely efficient, meticulous, ingenious. Everything I’ve experienced here over 12 years, substantiates that. Even out here in the sticks where I live, hardly under the pressures associated with the population density of cities, every patch of terra firma is treated as a valuable asset.
It’s entirely obvious why this is the case. Compare Japan with the United States.
While both are highly-industrialized, complex and extremely modern societies, with very mobile populations, large cities, vast swaths of land allocated to industrial-service sectors and for housing millions of people, Japan comes up short from the get go. The total area of the U.S. is 3,531,905 square miles (9,147,592 square km). Japan is only 145,925 square miles (377,944 square km). Meaning it’s just over 4% of the size of the U.S. — Japan is about the size of Montana, just one of the 50 U.S. states.
Yes, Japan has fewer people. The U.S. now has just over 330 million people, Japan just under 127 million. It’s still vastly disproportionate: Japan’s 38% of the U.S. population must use land that is at best about 4% the size of America, a continental landmass which stretches sea to shining sea, embracing vast undeveloped, underdeveloped and natural tracts in between. Visit states like Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Texas, and you’ll see what I mean.
Moreover, a considerable amount of land in Japan consists of mountainous terrain. Japan was formed in ancient times by volcanoes. While this offers beautiful landscapes and good trekking, the short of it is that there’s much less usable land in Japan. Much less! Only 12% of the land in Japan is arable, compared to 20% for the U.S.
So Japanese put every square meter they do have to good use, and make it work for them.
Add to that the nutritional benefits of eating food that’s not produced by factory farming, but grown in small amounts without machinery and a minimum — sometimes none at all — of chemicals. The result is in Japan, vegetable gardens are ubiquitous. Here in my own community of Sasayama, it seems like everyone has a vegetable garden.
Even yours truly gets in on the action from time to time. As a city-boy born and raised in the industrial heartland of Detroit, Michigan I have to confess to a bit of awe when a seed or two actually sprouts, grows, and I end up with the fruits and vegetables of my personal labor on the dinner table. Here is the naked American getting things ready to plant some seedlings.
That was last season, working our vegetable row, a single strip my wife and I rent from a neighbor. We ended up with tomatoes, bell peppers, zucchini, eggplant, onions, garlic, a couple melons which got stolen by some local monkeys, then late in the season soybeans.
Credit where it’s due: Masumi actually knows what she’s doing. I pretty much defer to her on anything agricultural. On the other hand, she doesn’t know how to rebuild a Ford V-8 engine. We each have our specialties.