Spirits

Japan is a country of spirits. I saw them everywhere: in temples, in homes and small street-side shrines, even in the guise of little cartoon-like creatures that are so pervasive. Though I have immersed myself in Japanese culture since a teenager, I do not think I would have come away with this feeling had I not lately traveled to Japan.

What differentiates spirits in the West from spirits in Japan is that most Westerners considered spirits malevolent. They are the things that go bump in the night and we are taught very early on in life, to run from them. As far as I can tell, even horrific demons in the East receive respect.

This recently came to mind while watching Miyazaki's Spirited Away. I sat in amazement at how a cute little girl bowed to one monster after another while I recoiled in fright. She refused to be intimidated and carried on with her mission.

There is a spirit in Japan, for lack of a better word, that I could not quite grasp. I felt it in my soul, but not in words; it is another world, an under current in the general culture. Not hidden like the occult in the West, but exposed. A part of the Japanese soul that is visible for all to see. The spirits live comfortably, just part of everyday life, as members of the family.

In the West our relationships with spirits are on more formal terms. Just think of the biennial sightings of the Virgin Mary in Chicago, once discovered the images are treated with a mixture of awe and disbelief. Communing with spirits is extraordinary here rather than ordinary.

That said my mother-in-law, Tillie, has recounted stories of a friendly ghost that resided in her house as a little girl growing up in Sumter, South Carolina. This being was just there, walking the halls and is spoken fondly of, as if it were the family cat coming and going as it pleased.

The veneer of Western civilization slowly lifted during my two weeks traveling in Japan. l began to see, maybe sense is a better word, layer upon layer of culture. This is palpable for me. I do not have to intellectualize it. In 1973 after vowing not to return to college until I acquired the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, I spent six months in another ancient land with the trappings of the West obscuring the underlying culture.

Traveling the length and breath of Israel, from the Golan Heights to Ras Muhammed at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, I sensed the presence of spirits. Once in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall I walked into a passage surrounded by Orthodox Jews bedeck in tefillin, bowing back and forth as they offered up their Sabbath prayer.

As I made my way through this morass, feeling out of place amongst the faithful, I peered down a meter-square floodlit hole excavated in the temple floor, at artifacts crushed into thin layers like a fine Bavarian tort. The strong light faded before the bottom was revealed, but even then I appreciated that this represented ages and ages of the previous inhabitant's life work, now reduced to dust.

The layered deposits remind me of my first view of the Grand Canyon from Mather Point. Gazing across the canyon at the strata exposed by the cutting action of the Colorado River on the slowly rising land, I find myself awe struck. In Jerusalem the layers represent a continuum of thousands of years of civilization, in the Grand Canyon millions of years of nature.

Though most of the historic and geologic details are lost on me, this heritage is an intrinsic part of each and every person in the East. The knowledge, though not schooled in many cases, is a very comfortable part of every day existence in the Middle East and Japan.

I make a mistake by separating culture and nature. This is why, despite all my study, spirits do not come easily to me. Ideally Japan commingles its spiritual life with it intellect. Maybe this is the answer to my question why spirits are embraced in Japan rather than exorcized.

Before I landed, after ten hours traveling East across the Pacific, plans for a return trip were forming in my mind. The desire to immerse my soul and intellect in Japan is driven by my need to translate feelings into words.

Frugality

In over twenty years of participating in Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony, I have had the pleasure of meeting many inspirational people. Amongst the most memorable was Minnie Kubose. Minnie Kubose devoted her life to her students, to her study and to the teaching of Chado, the Way of Tea.

If it were not such a cliché I would say she and her husband, Rev. Kubose, lived like church mice. Sitting in their kitchen I noticed how every morsel of food was savored. The most telling was how the overcooked rice on the bottom of the pan was cherished and saved for the next meal. It occurs to me this may be the Japanese equivalent of cracklings.

For my generation, who grew up with an abundance of food and some extra income to “feed” as the initiation of fast food took hold of the country, this frugality is hard to fathom. Thinking in terms of today, where much of the population is so bloated with junk food that we were forced to purchase a larger scale in my office to accommodate them, it becomes even more implausible.

Growing up in my house the battle cry at each meal was waste not - want not. If that plea went unheeded and the vegetable-du-jour was left uneaten, the less fortunate children of China were invoked to help guilt me into compliance. It seldom worked. I had trouble understanding frugality until I matured and began to realize the sacrifices my parents made to provide me with such a larder.

They had been born in America to parents displaced from Italy due to the deep-seated cycle of war and poverty. Though they would never admit to poverty, their lifestyle reflected their experience as children during the depression, as adults helping win WW II and later working in demanding low-paying industrial jobs.

I wrongly confused their frugality as stinginess. I now understand it stemmed from a respect for hard work and the privileges it provided us. Waste was unacceptable for them considering the long hours they spent laboring.

The concept of frugality presupposes respect for an individuals work. It could be the creation of fine art or the sowing and harvesting of rice. It is the notion that every grain of rice grown should be considered a miracle. That the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, along with the trace elements that make up this complex carbohydrate, gives each grain its own distinct identity and taste.

To get very far a field, all the constituents of rice are derived from cosmic dust, as are we. What could be weirder or more wondrous to contemplate than that? I think this is the wider meaning of phrases like universe in a grain of sand or on the head of a pin. Each structure, no matter how inconsequential, contains within it the elemental nature of the universe just waiting to be unlocked.

Natural beings are the epitome of frugality. As I sit and watch the goings on around my bird feeder this becomes apparent. It is filled with tiny thistle seed to help keep squirrels and larger birds away, but nonetheless the feeder collects a menagerie of critters. Sleek gold finches and matronly house finches scuffle to find a perch, while dark-eyed juncos and mourning doves show more cooperation feeding on the tailings from above.

All this activity unfortunately attracts the sinister black cat from across the alley. Despite our best efforts to dissuade this pest from our garden, a lawn full of feathers greets us several times a year.

We have tried wire fences, noxious chemicals, high powered water guns that have more in common with military assault rifles than squirt guns and contemplated murder in darker moments. But nature exploits every niche and sees to it that nothing goes to waste. I realize this is the natural order even if the drama played out in my backyard is by a well-fed cat.

So where am I going with this notion of frugality. Nature itself turns out to be the ultimate miser: the laws of thermo-dynamic state that matter cannot be created or destroyed but only transformed, Einstein’s equation E=mc2 defines an unimaginable economy, high-energy particle physics demonstrates the infinitesimal character of every particle of dust.

Japanese Tea culture instinctively came to understand these fundamental truths. Sen no Rikyu, the founder of the tea ceremony in the 16th century, changed Chanoyu from an ostentatious pursuit to the personification of frugality. Tea bowls molded of rough clay, huts constructed of straw, mud and reeds, ladles and scoops fashioned from strips of bamboo; the irony is that frugality is taken and turned into treasure.