Equality is a meeting with your life at stake

LIVING QUESTIONS

Lately the voices of children have vanished from the parks in summer. I walk around my neighborhood and hear nothing. In fact, there is no one there at all.

By my own reckoning, brutal heat has been normal for three years now, and in that short time people have suddenly stopped going outdoors. It is the summer holidays and the schools are closed. Even so, the children stay in, and only the hours spent indoors keep piling up.

If we dismiss this scene with the single phrase "climate change," I think we miss what we really need to see. Climate change in the broad sense is happening. But set the industrial causes aside, and it is only natural that the earth, and the universe, change. Before any of that, we need to ask how we design "the places where people live."

Japan is an island country and a land of earthquakes. Last month, on 28 July, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto, the third time in ten years that the prefecture has recorded the highest intensity on the Japanese scale, shindo 7. Between yesterday and today a typhoon passed from the Kanto region across the north of Kansai, and the full typhoon season is still to come. Great earthquakes, floods, typhoons, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are ordinary in Japan. That is exactly why our ancestors thought hard about how to live with this environment as a given. Not to think about it meant death. And what they found, as a piece of wisdom, was ki, or qi (気).

Under Chinese influence, Japanese uses the word ki in many ways. Written with the character 気, it appears in countless words: kuki (空気), the air; tenki (天気), the weather; kehai (気配), a sense of presence; kibun (気分), mood; kakki (活気), vitality; kimochi (気持ち), feeling. Some point to the atmosphere, like air and weather; others to a person's state, like mood and vitality. Japanese did not separate the two.

What matters is that the word was not divided but undivided. This is a little difficult, but ki does not roam about freely with a will of its own as a subject. It acts of itself, at the threshold of movement and stillness. And what generates ki is place. Place keeps ki from being divided and holds it undivided. Place, which generates that undivided relation, enfolds nature and human beings, and there ki acts and gives rise to working force.

Because they did not divide it, they did not divide the design of places either. The wisdom of ancient China is beautifully inherited here. Where wind does not pass, the ancestors of the Japanese believed, people's ki stagnates too. There is simply no procedure here of first cutting nature and humans apart and then tying them back together.

Ieyasu Tokugawa, who founded the Edo shogunate, also laid the foundations of Edo according to shijin soo (四神相応), an idea from ancient China: asking whether the land answers to the four guardian gods. Mountains to the north, a river to the east, the sea to the south, a great road to the west. What was weighed most carefully there was in fact the flow of ki. Do not let ki stagnate. Stagnation was believed to coarsen the lives of the people who lived there and to be the root of calamity. If ki was allowed to stagnate, it would in time bring down the hegemony of the Tokugawa shoguns. Because this awareness, cultivated in ancient China, existed in Japan, Japanese city design became highly theorized while still carrying an older Japanese sensibility.

A city, then, was a reflection of thought. And those who led the city designed its places themselves, using ancient wisdom. The same thinking runs down without a break from the scale of the city to the inside of a single house.

Sadly, the Second World War turned cities across Japan into burnt-out ruins, and no trace of the old ways survived. But in Kyoto, which escaped large-scale bombing, this wisdom is still carried on in the houses where people live.

A friend of mine was born and raised in a machiya (町家), a Kyoto townhouse designated as a cultural property. Visit, and naturally there is no air conditioning or heating. But because the house was designed on the idea of circulating ki, the wind passes through, and even in midsummer it is cool and comfortable. The fine timber and tatami of the time surely play a part too.

But a single house cannot make wind. A machiya is cool because the street it stands on, and the town those streets make up, were built on the same idea. What we lost was not the technique of the house. It was the idea of letting ki flow at the scale of the town.

It seems to me that people today, shut inside air-conditioned rooms, have been destroying their own lives with their own hands. That is why the question we should ask is whether ki is flowing in this place. Our ancestors spent thousands of years thinking about that one point. They saw nature as neither enemy nor ally. They simply watched, every day, where ki came from and where it went.

Today, too, it is quiet outside. The trees in the park are swaying, and there is no one beneath them.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

We have passed risshu, the first day of autumn by the calendar, and since yesterday Japan has been on its Obon holiday. Since long ago this period has been a time for welcoming the spirits of the ancestors, spending a few days with them and then sending them off. For these few days we are no longer the masters of our houses, for the masters are the ones returning, and the living take on the role of welcoming, making offerings and seeing them off. But this view is itself a folkloric way of thinking from the modern era on, and our ancestors did not see it that way. Above all, for a long time in Japan, life and death were not separated as they are today.

Let me begin by tracing the history of Obon. According to the Nihon Shoki, in 606 every temple was to hold a sai, a meal offering, on the eighth day of the fourth month and the fifteenth day of the seventh, both dates in the old lunar calendar. "Holding a sai" means, simply put, inviting monks and offering them a meal. What the first record tells us, then, is not the splendor of a ceremony but the single fact that monks were fed. Behind this, the fifteenth day of the seventh month was the last day of the period when monks shut themselves away to practice through the rainy season, and it was held to be the day when the virtue of the community reached its height.

This was the reign of Empress Suiko, an age when Chinese culture poured into the Japanese archipelago all at once. Mixed into that Chinese culture, though, were many cultures of the continent. And real power at the time lay not with the throne but with Soga no Umako, head of the Soga clan, which had won the fierce struggles among the clans, and with Prince Umayado, the imperial prince who was in effect the spiritual leader of Buddhism's expansion. That the source of Obon was set up in this age as an institution, and only within Buddhist temples, shows where it came from.

About half a century later, in 657, the record says that an image of Mount Sumeru was built west of Asukadera and an urabon'e (盂蘭盆会) was held. Mount Sumeru is the mountain that towers at the center of the world in Buddhist cosmology. A stone model of it was built, and in the evening of the same day the court entertained people called the "Tohara" who had drifted ashore at Tsukushi, on the coast of what is now Fukuoka. The Tohara were people with origins in what is now northern Afghanistan, and their landing in 657 is on record. The first urabon'e in the state's records, in other words, was not a household rite for welcoming ancestors. It was a day for welcoming and entertaining people who had drifted in from a distant foreign land. This is the skeleton of what I want to say here.

The emperor of the day had this image built again and again, and two years later received in the same way the Emishi of the north, and three years later the Mishihase, from further north still. Emishi and Mishihase were the court's names for peoples who lived mainly across eastern Japan at the time.

Then, on the fifteenth day of the seventh month of 659, monks in the temples of the capital expounded the Ullambana Sutra and had people give thanks to their ancestors back to the seventh generation. What is interesting is that, where two years earlier the event had been held in one place, this was held everywhere at once, by imperial command. It was the moment the state first decided to whom people should pray. The command, however, was addressed to the aristocracy and did not reach ordinary people.

The decisive year was 733. Under Emperor Shomu, the urabon offering was assigned to the Daizenshiki, the office in charge of the court's meals. Until then, urabon had been only an order an emperor issued when it occurred to him; now it became the routine work of a government office. A religious event had turned into an item of budget and staff.

Becoming an annual court observance also meant that the emperor himself took the seat of host at the rite for the ancestors. An emperor's legitimacy rests on his continuity with the ancestors. From here a current arose that spread from the aristocracy to the warrior houses and, in the Edo period, to ordinary people. Today people say not urabon but Obon, or simply Bon, and in modern Japan it has become a nationwide holiday, a few days when many city dwellers go back to their home towns. Obon, in a sense, is a legacy shaped over 1,400 years.

Obon is a rite in which ancient Japanese ancestor worship fused with Buddhism, and it came to be called Bon by shortening the Buddhist term urabon'e. Urabon itself is the Chinese transcription, in characters chosen for their sound, of the Sanskrit ullambana. Its meaning is "the suffering of hanging upside down," and it is based on a Buddhist story.

Maudgalyayana, a disciple of the Buddha, saw his dead mother hanging upside down in hell, suffering. To save her, he offered food and gifts to the monks as the Buddhist precepts prescribed, and through the merit of that act he was able to free her. This act of offering became a Buddhist ritual, urabon'e, which reached Japan by way of China and grew into Obon, a custom of Japan's own.

Trace it further, though, and the story goes beyond Buddhism itself. The word's origin lies not in Sanskrit but in ancient Iranian. Its source is urvan, a word used in the Zoroastrian scriptures for the soul of the dead. A festival of souls carried to China along with trade by the Sogdians, an Iranian people, was joined there to a harvest festival and then laid over the last day of the monks' practice, and so the prototype of urabon'e was made. A festival for welcoming the spirits of the dead in ancient Iran, in other words, was carried east by Central Asian merchants, joined with Indian Buddhism, took the form of Chinese characters in China, and in time drifted, by way of the Korean peninsula, to the Japanese archipelago.

Interestingly, the character for bon records this ancient shape. In ancient China, the character 盆, which combines "dividing" (分) with "a dish" (皿), was used in imitation of the way offerings were laid out for the festival. The word bon itself originally meant a vessel for holding food or offerings, but at some point part of "urabon" was dropped, and the short form "bon" took hold. Within a single vessel, Iran, Central Asia, India, China, Korea and Japan are folded together. The span of history it holds is beyond our imagining.

Obon remains one of the most important traditional observances in Japan today, held every year around the middle of August throughout the country, except in Okinawa, which still follows the old calendar. It is a sacred time when the spirits of the ancestors are believed to return to their families. This custom, in which families gather and carry out many rites to honor the spirits of their ancestors, goes beyond mere religious ritual and has served as a symbol of Japanese spiritual culture and social cohesion.

But Japan's Obon is now an entirely new creation. Above all, it is hard to believe that religious reasons alone, the ones usually given, could have kept it rooted in Japan for 1,400 years. Here I want to turn my gaze to the time before Buddhism came.

For I believe that a sensibility for welcoming the spirits of the ancestors already existed in Japan before urabon arrived. The essence of urabon's arrival, in other words, is that a foreign vessel scooped water from a spring that was already full. What I attend to here is not the content of the doctrine but the acts our ancestors repeated.

Obon was once a custom in which, at the same time every year, people lit fires to welcome the spirits of the ancestors, entertained them, and lit fires to send them off. It is a fact that this was repeated house by house, village by village, for more than a thousand years. What was imprinted on people over that time was not Buddhist doctrine but a bodily sense that "we are not the subject."

In a sense, the coming and going of the ancestors at a particular season made their living descendants repeat that bodily sense again and again. The modern subject called "I" believes it stands alone, but we are only one part, at this moment, of a band woven of the ancestors. Through ancient ancestor worship and the Obon that flowed into it, this sensibility poured the sense of "not being the subject" into the bodies of the Japanese over thousands of years.

At a particular season, in urabon, the spirits of the ancestors return to the house and to their descendants. The master of the house lights a fire at the gate so that the spirits can find their way home without getting lost. Then he spends time with the returned spirits and in the end sends them off. Watching this custom, one god comes to my mind: the marebito (まれびと), whom the folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi once brought to light. Here the Japanese origin of urabon I described above crosses with the memory of welcoming, entertaining and sending off people who were different.

The marebito is a visiting god, in ancient Japan a god who appeared from the sea at fixed seasons. It becomes clear that for the marebito to visit, there must be a village. For settled farming people, the marebito who appeared from beyond the sea was a god itself and, at the same time, an unknown presence, because whether that god would bring a festival or a calamity could not be known until it was welcomed in. If they welcomed a god who brought calamity, the village would perish.

Every time a marebito visited, the village made a decision with its survival at stake. In fact, villages once held rites in which the master of the house judged whether the marebito who appeared at the gate would bring a festival or a calamity, and only then was it welcomed into the house or driven away. Here is where it gets interesting.

A marebito once welcomed in is entertained by the people of the house, but it always leaves. No one decided this, and it is not an institution. The sense that a visiting god always leaves was cultivated as a bodily feeling from ancient Japan on. What was done at Asuka in 657 has the same structure. Strangers who drifted in on the sea are welcomed before a mountain modeled on the center of the Buddhist world, feasted and sent off. At first glance it looks like a new custom the court created, but in truth it is what each village had been doing since far antiquity. Here it is entering the stage of being taken over by the state.

In time the marebito divided into beings who appear from the sea and beings who appear from the mountains, and later came to be thought of, in the abstract, as beings who appear from the heavens. Yet the essence of the relation between the village and the marebito did not change, and it took shape over thousands of years. The essence of that relation is a confrontation with life at stake.

To face what is absolutely different as different. What lies there is not tolerance, love or harmony but extreme tension. For that relation to arise, you must know your own roots deeply. When I look at the marebito and at the customs of Obon, what I see them truly telling us is that the relation between person and person is, at its core, a confrontation staked on one's life. Today's diversity and multiculturalism are beautiful as ideals. No one can find a reason to oppose them, and they are hard to criticize. But a beautiful ideal is, after all, only an ideal.

It is not that they are empty. It is that I cannot feel in them the face of anyone who lives there. That is why I believe in no beautiful ideal and no ism. Given the history Japan has followed since the modern era, I know in my skin that true equality cannot come from them. Equality, I believe, lies in the host and the guest, in other words the one who visits and the one who receives, each conscious of their own roots, looking at the other's face, and facing each other with their lives at stake. Only because they face each other in earnest does equality first arise. And that equal relation does not exist in today's world. Above all, there is no subject in this relation.

This sensibility, which the Japanese once knew as a normal part of their lives, was wiped out by modernity. Yet it survives, barely, in village rites and in the custom of Obon. Though the vessel has become an empty shell, a faint residue still remains. What can we learn from it?

Something carried from ancient Iran, across Central Asia, joined with Indian Buddhism, given the character "bon" in China, and soaked into Japanese bodies over 1,400 years. Today, just as cities around the world have become uniform, customs are disappearing one after another. Modern Japan is only 160 years old. In so short a span, a country, a people, can be destroyed. No: it can be erased.

Every time Obon comes, what returns to my heart is this fact, almost too heavy to bear.