Understanding Japanese culture is like peeling an onion. There are three layers. At first glance, the Japanese appear to be very different. They do everything in groups, take off their shoes indoors, eat strange things, and smile in all the wrong places. After awhile, they seem to be just like us. There is Elvis and Mickey and baseball. Oscar Wilde described them as ‘not unlike the general run of English people… extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.’
But then you realize, you were right the first time. The food that isn’t strange is strange. The garbage trucks back up to Beethoven. The love hotels have boxing ring beds decorated with playboy bunnies and muppets. They have faux Christian weddings, with rubber cakes and choirs that sing What a Friend we Have in Jesus, and company jingles at the receptions. I Feel Coke. Japanese cowboys, in neighbourhood Japanese cowboy bars sing Take this jov and showve it. They tell you that riding a train to work is kind of like riding a horse and their office is kind of like a ranch, and roping in customers is how they make a living, and how they think that teamwork, not rugged individualism, won the West. Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.
Like the onion layers, and the mastery of Zen, the ancient Japanese warriors were encouraged to pursue the ‘real samurai spirit’ by studying ‘until they understand all the secrets and only then return to their former simplicity and live a quiet life.’ I wanted to do that. And so I did.
Robyn and I were going to the land of larger-than-life warriors and tiny tweetable poems and monster lizards and miniature trees. We were headed down the Samurai Road.
‘Thank you for visiting the official website of the
Museum of Soy Sauce Art. We cannot hide our
feelings of joy and cannot help but impressed
by your spiritual nobility of actively learning for
the sake of your own cultivation.’
Sanuki Museum of Soy Sauce Art
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