2022/10/04

Attunement: Divine Stewardship – Tone of Life

Attunement: Divine Stewardship – Tone of Life


Attunement: Divine Stewardship
AUGUST 14, 2022

"The language of the familiar three earth dimensions may be said to be words. The language of the fourth level, the apex meeting point of below and above, is attunement."



by John Gray and Chris JorgensenListen to Audio

John Gray: All of us participating in this teleconference speak English, and some may speak other languages as well. Whatever the case, our mother tongue is the primary language our mothers and fathers taught us. As very young children we began to learn to talk by mimicking the vocal sounds of those closest to us. Gradually, we associated meanings with those sounds. Later, in school, we were acquainted with written symbols to represent sounds and words. We learned to read.

As a child our personal identities centered in our physical bodies and the physical world around us—the densest of the earth dimensions. As we grew up, our mental faculties developed and the focus of personal identity shifted to be more centered in our minds. We thought of ourselves and others as individual personalities, distinct and different and separate. We acquired great amounts of knowledge of various sorts and lived in our heads and to some extent, our emotions. The prepubescent self had passed away by then, and a postpubescent self was coming into his or her own—more worldly, more refined, more than just a physical body. We became, in our experience of ourselves, a complex creature describable by the word ego.

For countless human beings the natural experience of maturing stops here. People harden and become set in their ways. Embellishments are added over time, but personal identity remains stuck at a mental-emotional level. For many others, however, the refinement of experienced personal identity continues. At some point we began to notice other mother tongues—the languages of nature, of other human languages, perhaps, and of art, of mathematics, of music, for example. We learned to express ourselves through these. Some of us heard words spoken in a different way by others; words that drew us toward them. These were mostly word-forms we’d learned in our younger years, but they carried transcendent meaning. Something in us resonated with the sounds behind the words we heard or read and this began to guide our lifepath. Words imbued with spirit held us as we learned to speak them ourselves. We began to discover the origin of them, becoming more closely aligned with the spirit that gives birth to meaningful words.

For most if not all of us on this teleconference, this is all ancient personal history.

The transition of experienced identity from coarser to finer, from physical to mental to spiritual, has brought us to this point. I say “point” because it’s an apt symbol of the apex of this refining process. The vastness of the tone of life itself emerges from above, so to speak, into the dimensional world through this point in ourselves. It is where the apex of earthly identity is experienced as merging with the focus of the Presence of the One I am, the Eminent One. In this place I am whole. I am really, fully here.

We know words can embody the spiritual expression of the Eminent One to some considerable extent, provided there is sufficient connection of sufficient purity. Just as spoken words require air to be transmitted and heard, so do spiritual essences require spiritual substance as a medium of transference. Spiritual expression is a translation process from one language to another; we could think of it as the words from below being permeated with and by the tone from above. To translate literally means “to carry over.” The purpose of human beings is to carry over, to translate, the meaning of life into the world we think of as creation. To put it another way, our purpose is the translation of the ineffable—literally, “not able to be spoken”—into dimensional forms. In our full glory we are the Word of God made flesh.

The spoken language of the tri-dimensional earthly world utilizes words. The language at the actual apex point and above might be alluded to in words as the current of pure spirit. As this divine language is accurately translated through the crossover point in ourselves it is clothed and made visible and audible in an unlimited multitude of wonderful ways, including words. The point of true identity is the place of perfect attunement, the place of merger, of oneness.

The language of the familiar three earth dimensions may be said to be words. The language of the fourth level, the apex meeting point of below and above, is attunement.

Obviously, what I’m talking about here isn’t limited to us as individuals. The crossover point is a singular place, yes, and in a sense we’re each alone here, but also, being at this point, we figuratively look around and see others who are also at the same point themselves. Before long we realize we are a multitude. All together we compose the conscious focus of identity for humanity, prepared and able to serve the whole planet and beyond.

I invite my forever friend Chris to continue.

Chris Jorgensen: John described coming to the crossover point in words that I trust are recognizable and understandable. We each have lived on varied paths of life bringing us to this day with the invitation to live at the crossover point. The crossover point is the place of union of the Heaven and Earth dimensions. It is not some new level of school or education, nor is it a group where one can find an external “leader” that will instruct one how to live and behave. No! The crossover point is a dynamic and fluid point where we find ourselves utterly alone. In this point, you know your own radiation, your own divine name, your own purpose, your commission for the life-pattern that you created and continually enfold and love.

The vibration of the crossover point is the current phase of the world vibration. The world has moved through various levels of vibration as John described. The physical vibration was the easiest to connect to and now the crossover point is the most challenging. The crossover point is the sacred vibration where the Attunement Radiation, the Radiation of Being, is consciously known. It is Love made visible!

Let’s share Attunement and enfold our own life-patterns. There are a couple of ways to share this Attunement. You can hold the life-pattern of your human form between your hands and radiate your Love into it, or put your life-pattern in your left hand and radiate Love into the pattern with your right hand. Let the radiation of Being enfold, surround, and bring balance into the life-pattern. Let’s share Attunement. [Following Attunement:]

Okay, we can release the Attunement. This is our creation, our life-pattern through which we express our Presence into the earth dimension. So, let us continually love and enfold our creation.

I wish to speak today about pneumaplasm. For many on this call it is a topic that has been known for a long time. For others online it may be somewhat new. What is pneumaplasm?

In Attunement we use the word pneumaplasm as a name for living, atmospheric, energetic substance. The word pneumaplasm was originally coined by Richard Thompson, an Attunement Practitioner who shared Attunement in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, during the 1940s and 1950s. Pneumaplasm literally means “air or spirit substance.” Pneumaplasm is the connecting medium between the vibrational frequencies of Spirit/Being and the vibrational frequencies of Matter/Form.

All living things create an atmosphere, energy, and substance through their moments of living. A person’s atmosphere of living substance, pneumaplasm, is generated by the radiation of Being, Life, moving through the human form. Every act, thought, feeling, and spiritual expression counts towards the creation or the dissipation of one’s personal pneumaplasm. The right use of the body, mind, and heart creates the living substance that immediately has an effect on one’s physical well-being, mental understanding, and emotional serenity.

Over the centuries, and up to the current day, the generation of pneumaplasm through the physical, mental, and heart was designed to allow divine identity to emerge in one’s consciousness. Today, living at the crossover point with divine identity in place, the right use of consciousness helps generate newer ranges of pneumaplasm. These newer ranges of pneumaplasm allow for the perception of the higher vibrations and frequencies of the Planet, the Solar System, and even the Galactic essences or energies on our part so we may steward them into the Earth. It is our divine job! I recall a verse from the book of Job speaking to this responsibility.

Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? (Job: 38:33)

There are at least two challenges for anyone who comes to and lives at the crossover point. One is how to work with the intense feeling crosscurrents and mental vibrations in the world of today and yet not be distracted or lost in them. I have noted in myself that as there has been an increase in the quality and ampleness of pneumaplasm, there is a greater sensitivity and a fuller perception experienced. A second challenge is working with one’s own life-pattern, helping to handle the “somatic mutations” in one’s body and energetic field, from controlling and taking over. I recently read a research paper on the buildup of somatic mutations in the blood, starting in the ‘70s, which scientists are viewing as a large part of the aging process.

The answer to both of these challenges is Attunement! Let the Attunement radiation do the work of clearing and releasing oneself from the distortions in the currents and vibrations of the world, and as well letting the radiation help with sanctifying the somatic mutations in our human makeup. Keeping a sacred and holy space at the crossover point will influence perception and understanding, and put one in position to steward the divine vibrations and frequencies from the larger creative field above! The answers to the questions in the thirty-eighth chapter of Job are revealed. The flesh is renewed and even the mind can expand with the understanding and wisdom of Being. In today’s world, a full and sustained heaven of pneumaplasm will lead us to the right place, with the right people, doing the right activity, at the right time.

Something to take note of is a practice called Astrology. It is something which many people have dabbled in from time to time. The idea behind Astrology is that the Planets, Moon, Sun and other living elements in the Solar System transmit energy influences to Earth which affect each one of us. Astrology is an attempt to understand and predict these influences. Has anyone ever questioned what the energy is that the Earth is sending out to influence the other Planets, Moon, and Sun? A person living at the crossover point has this sensitivity!

The basic principles of Attunement and the generation of pneumaplasm are true for every life-pattern. Over the last few months I have been participating on the International Weather Attunement Team (IWAT). I appreciate Cliff Roberts who helped me create the Team and now coordinates it. We are discovering that sharing Attunement with unique patterns of the planet’s body is similar to sharing Attunement with a unique aspect of an individual’s body. So, holding the Pacific Tectonic Plate or the Ionosphere layer of the atmosphere in Attunement generates a quality of pneumaplasm, filling in the living substance of connection between Spirit/Being and Matter/Form, at the planetary level. This new planetary range of pneumaplasm is awakening and developing planetary consciousness in those who are open to it.

Planetary consciousness is opening our perception to new understandings. One is that the Earth is alive and it has its own endocrine gland system. A side note here: when consciousness “fell” awareness and living substance went down vibrationally and kept going down beyond the planet’s gonadal level, finally coming to a stop in the animal vibration. Hence, the current human form is an animal form. Restoration of consciousness is moving to a higher vibration. Second, Attunement with the planet’s life-patterns is helping to release and clear the somatic mutations that are present on the surface part of the planet. Third, Attunement does magnify the generation of pneumaplasm, creating a new heaven for our planet home. Fourth, those of us on the Team are understanding in a greater way the divine pattern of the number seven. Seven is reflected in the creation of the planet—seven Endocrine Glands, seven layers to the Atmosphere, seven major Seas, seven major Continents, and seven major Tectonic Plates. This wisdom does not come out of a book, rather it comes by living at the crossover point sharing Attunement with the planet.

Many years ago, I experienced my first Attunement with a Chiropractor named Joe Wilson. It was mind-altering. I could see light coming off my skin! It changed the vibration and frequency of my life. Do you remember your first Attunement experience? Especially at the close of that first Attunement, I felt like I was finally home – a home that I subsequently define as the sacred living substance of pneumaplasm. As I, and the other members of IWAT, share Attunement with the different life-patterns of the planet, and as well as the whole holy life-pattern of the Earth, I sense and perceive a similarity to my first Attunement. Finally, because there are some who are sharing planetary Attunement, there is a feeling perception that on the surface of the planet, home is present once again. In this sacred substance of home, there is a beginning awareness that the Earth has a specific purpose in the larger context of Creation, something which has been largely out of the sight of humanity until now.

To close I invite you to share Attunement with the planet. The Weather Attunement Team has been, as I noted, working with various life-patterns of Earth. One such pattern is the Pacific Ocean. It is interesting to note that Mikao Usui, who lived in Japan and founded the spiritual practice of Reiki, viewed the Pacific Ocean as a living form in the shape of a Goddess, somewhat similar to the indigenous people’s view that the Earth is the living Mother. Those of us on the Team noticed in working with the Pacific Ocean (we were working with the drought on the west coast of the North America Continent) there were hard spots where the Attunement current was reduced. Recently I read a NASA report on three blobs in the Pacific Ocean–a large one off Alaska, a smaller one off British Columbia and Washington, and a small one off of southern California and Mexico – that were areas of heated water and virtually no oxygen. Very few life forms live in these blobs! They appear to be human-made blobs. So, let’s share Attunement with the Pacific Ocean, sending the radiation of Love into that part of our celestial home. You can put the life-pattern of the Pacific Ocean in your left hand and send the Attunement radiation into it with your right hand. Or, you can put one hand near Japan, and the other hand near the west coast of the U.S. Let’s share Attunement for the next 3-4 minutes. [Following Attunement:] We can now release our Attunement.

John Gray: “Pacific” means peaceful. As we held the pattern-surround for the ocean, the words that sounded in my mind were, “Peace be unto you. Peace be unto you.”

Let’s never imagine that we don’t know the truth. We do know; let nothing ever convince us otherwise. This is assurance, the peaceful assurance of Being that Chris so capably demonstrated. Together, the somatic mutations of the world, to use Chris’s term, are dealt with—even the “blobs,” the seeming dead spots in the ocean, whatever they may mean. It’s a perception of something that is coming to change. They’re coming to pass. We welcome that. The world is purified because there are people, ourselves included, who are connectors of heaven and earth, living at the crossover point, providing the radiance of God that reunites the world in oneness with Him.

Following Comments…


John Gray: Thank you all who have spoken. Something has indeed changed in this time together, and it is good.

Chris Jorgensen: Thank you to all who contributed to this time of radiation. I observe different ranges and frequencies of pneumaplasm in the world. Each living form generates a unique quality and of living substance by reason of its life-pattern and function. The mineral-bacteria-virus Life, including crystals and gems, creates a range of pneumaplasm. Plant Life creates a range of pneumaplasm, as does animal Life. There are differences in the bio-pyramid of life forms on the planet. Plant substance has a band of vibrations/frequencies narrower than animal substance, while at the same time plant substance is larger than the range of mineral-bacteria-virus substance. Yet, in each band of Life’s pneumaplasmic substances, there is a rich diversity present. Taken all together there is a very large pneumaplasmic field surrounding the Earth, available as the perfect setting for the divine to appear. The only additional requirement is to have people consciously living at the crossover point.

My final words: Share Attunement. Bless the world. Let Love radiate!

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Attunement | Encyclopedia.com

Attunement | Encyclopedia.com

Attunement
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Attunement

Attunement is a spiritual healing technique developed in the early 1930s by Lloyd Meeker (d. 1954). It appears that in the 1920s he had come across some forms of magnetic healing which launched his own speculations concerning the nature of spiritual healing. He began working as a healer in 1929. Then in 1932 he had a profound spiritual experience during which he became aware of his higher self. He returned to this experience with the higher self repeatedly and soon felt that he had merged with it. He also adopted a new name, Uranda, under which he began to teach. He founded the Third Sacred School that was later incorporated as the Emissaries of Divine Light.

In the 1940s, Meeker met George Shears, a chiropractor who had developed a no-fee chiropractic practice based upon the donations of patients. He shared his ideas with his colleagues and many accepted his approach. He also began to include a form of spiritual healing in what became known as the God-Patient Chiropractor (or G.P.C.) system. Through the 1940s, Meeker used a mixed healing system that included both the laying on of hands with the idea of the radiation of healing power from the hands to specific parts of the body. Then, in 1949, a chiropractor who had worked with Meeker had an unusual experience. He was preparing to do an adjustment, but before he made it, the problem corrected itself. He intuited that the change had been made by spirit. This observation led to the separation of this specific form of healing, now taking the name Attunement, from Meeker's larger theological preachments.


The chiropractor, Albert Ackerly, eventually dropped his chiropractic practice and devoted himself full time to the development of Attunement. The practice is focused on the radiation of energy to the body, based upon the understanding that the endocrine glands are the principal portals through which spirit can enter the body. The endocrine glands are closely related to the traditional chakras. Following Ackerly's discovery, other chiropractors joined him in becoming full time Attunement healers.

In 1950, Meeker first addressed a group of G.P.C. chiropractors and soon afterward a convention of chiropractors was held at Sunrise Ranch, the headquarters of the Emissaries movement in Colorado. In 1952, a set of Emissary programs was regularly offered to chiropractic professionals through what was then known as the G.P.C. Servers Training School. The practice of Attunement was spread through the school.

In 1996, a number of Attunement practitioners gathered at Sunrise Ranch to found the Attunement Guild as a professional association to promote the practice. They use the Server's Code introduced by Meeker in 1953. There are currently several hundred Attunement practitioners found across North America, and in Israel, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and South Africa.

The Attunement Guild may be reached at the headquarters of the Emissaries at 5569 N. Country Rd. 29, Loveland, CO 80537. It has a website at http://www.attunement.org/.
Sources:

Jorgensen, Chris. Attunement, Love Made Visible. Kansas City, Mo.: The Author, 1996.

Layne, Laurence. Attunement: The Sacred Landscape. St Augustine, Fla.: The Florida School of Attunement and Natural Healing, 1998.


2022/10/03

서울을 떠나 여우숲으로 오길 참 잘했다 : 벗님글방 : 휴심정 : 뉴스 : 한겨레

서울을 떠나 여우숲으로 오길 참 잘했다 : 벗님글방 : 휴심정 : 뉴스 : 한겨레

서울을 떠나 여우숲으로 오길 참 잘했다

등록 :2022-09-29 

김용규 여우숲인문학교장. 김용규 제공숲을 터전으로 살아온 세월이 어느새 20년에 가깝다. 돌아보니 모험하는 삶이라면 당연히 마주해야 할 것들을 차곡차곡 마주하며 산 시간이었다. 설레는 날이 많았고 더러 서러운 날도 있었다. 아마 인간의 삶도 숲과 같아서일 것이다. 돋아나고 싶은 것들은 반드시 어두운 땅을 뚫고 일어서는 새싹처럼 돋아났고, 부러져야 할 것들은 세찬 바람에 무너지는 나뭇가지처럼 한사코 부러지고 말았다. 떠나야 할 것들은 변명을 두고 혹은 변명도 없이 떠나갔고, 다가와야 할 것들은 새로이 혹은 다시 다가오는 시간이었다.

서울에 살던 한때 높바람처럼 사나웠던 나는 숲과 함께한 세월을 거치며 가을 하늘 구름처럼 순해졌다. 내 삶이 가을 앞마당에 섰다. 가을은 확실히 풍요와 평화의 시절. 하지만 굴곡 없이 찾아오는 가을이 어디 있던가! 봄날에 돋운 잎은 눈부신 꽃을 피워내고 재빨리 열매로 맺지만, 기어코 가뭄과 폭우와 태풍의 고비들이 철따라 찾아오니, 겪어내야 할 것들을 다 겪으며 겨우 붙들어낸 것들만이 가을을 맞으며 익어간다. 그렇게 온갖 풍상을 견디고 나서야 찾아오는 가을은 비로소 평화의 시간이다. 물들어야 하는 자리는 모두 제 빛깔로 물들고, 가라앉아야 할 것들은 일제히 항복하듯 가라앉고, 또한 드러나야 할 것들이 드디어 소리 없이 드러나며 도처에서 가장 저다운 모습이 부끄러움 없이 드러나는 평화의 시간. 숲처럼 평화롭기에는 하염없이 멀지만 내 삶에도 소박한 가을이 찾아왔다. 삶의 가을을 맞으며 일어서는 한 생각이 있다. ‘숲으로 떠나오길 잘했다. 참 좋다.’

삶이 막 가을로 들어서는 오늘 나는 당신을 이 평화의 숲으로 초대하고 싶어졌다. 도처가 산이고 숲인 좁은 땅의 나라에서 고개만 돌리면 숲이거늘 ‘너 사는 숲은 무엇이 다르냐? 어째서 평화의 숲이냐?’ 당신은 캐묻고 싶을지도 모르겠다. 맞다! 내가 사는 숲이라고 달리 특별할 건 없다. 이곳 충북 괴산의 ‘여우숲’도 우리나라 중부지방의 산과 들, 계곡에서 아무렇지도 않게 살고 있는 생명 대다수의 그것처럼, 혹은 우리의 인생처럼 특별할 것 없는 듯 살아가고 있는 공간이다.

하지만 장담컨대 나와 함께 걷게 될 이 숲은 당신이 일생 한번도 마주한 적 없는 숲일 것이다. 마음을 열어 당신이 나의 초대를 받아들인다면 나는 당신과 함께 나란히 숲을 걷고 싶다. 늘 보던 것이라고 생각했던 그 평범한 흙과 풀과 나무와 바람과 구름과 비와 폭설과 햇살이 사실은 얼마나 새롭고 눈물겹고 신비로운 것들인지 보여주고 싶고 들려주고 싶다. 그래서 유혹한다. ‘Shall we walk?’

함께 걷기에 앞서 궁금하다. 당신이 얼마나 숲의 말을 잘 알아들을 수 있는 귀를 가졌는지, 그리고 어떤 가슴을 지키고 사는지. 당신의 일상이 마주하는 모든 장면에는 오늘도 아주 많은 신비가 흐르고 있다. 그대의 삶과 나란히 흐르고 있는 그 많은 신비를 당신의 가슴은 얼마나 잘 포착하며 살고 있는가? 또 당신의 하루는 얼마나 많은 감탄으로 채워지고 있는가? 떠올려 보라! 어린 시절에는 누구에게나 들렸던 말이 자연의 말이었고, 순간순간 넘쳐났던 것이 감탄 아니었던가!



충북 괴산 여우숲 전경. 여우숲 누리집 갈무리누군가의 삶이 감탄을 잃었다면, 그리고 더는 신비를 발견하기 어렵게 되었다면 그 삶은 메말라가고 있는 것이다. 아무리 많은 돈과 빛나는 외양, 화려한 명함을 가졌더라도 그 삶은 시들고 있는 것이다. 우리가 세상에 떠밀려 견디듯 하루하루를 살기 전까지는 우리에게도 넘쳐흘렀던 그 신비와 감탄의 날들이 지금은 혹시라도 사라진 지 아득하다면, 부탁이다. 잠시 마음을 내어 지금 당도한 이 숲으로의 초대장을 가만히 열어보시기 바란다. 숲 앞에 서면 당신의 귀에는 무엇이 들리는가? 내 귀에는 생명의 노래가 들려온다. 욕망하는 생명들, 그래서 부딪히고 뒤엉키며 살게 되고, 그 과정들이 빚어내게 되는 ‘살아있음의 박자와 리듬’이 두-둥둥 들려온다.

숲에 들면 당신에겐 무엇이 보이고 무엇이 느껴지는가? 당신은 숲에서 어떤 것들을 발견하고 느끼는가? 나의 몸뚱어리는 숲의 가장 낮은 바닥으로부터 하늘을 향해 솟구친 나무의 우듬지까지, 아니 우듬지 너머의 탁 트인 하늘에 이르기까지 촘촘히 채워져 있는 놀라운 신비들을 포착한다. 감히 표현하건대 나는 숲에서 날마다 신(神)의 입김을 느낀다. 무거운 땅을 극복하고 돋아나는 여린 새싹과 그것을 탐하여 꼬물꼬물 뜯어먹고 있는 애벌레의 움직임에서, 또한 그 긴장 관계를 넘어서며 아무 일도 없었다는 듯 마침내 피어난 한송이 꽃에서, 그리고 이파리를 뜯어먹던 애벌레가 이번에는 나풀대는 나비로 찾아와 그 꽃을 파고듦으로써 상처 견디고 피어난 꽃에게 열매로 가는 길을 선물로 안기며 꿀 한모금 머금고 떠나가는 기막힌 전환적 화해의 신비 속에서… 나는 신의 임재(臨在, presence)를 목격한다. 그러므로 나는 숲이 빚어내는 저 깊은 가르침을 더할 나위 없이 순한 귀로 가만가만 듣게 된다. 무자천서(無字天書), 옛사람들은 숲을 하늘이 지은 글자 없는 책이라 별명(別名)했다. 내게 저 말은 너무도 정확하고 놀라운 표현으로 다가온다. 눈 밝은 사람에게 숲은 그 자체로 깊이 있는 경전이다. 숲을 이루는 모든 존재들은 사시사철, 날마다 우리에게 말을 건네고 있다.


숲은 원형리정(元亨利貞), 생장수장(生長收藏), 춘하추동(春夏秋冬)의 리듬을 통해 하늘과 땅이 만나 빚어내는 아름다운 리듬을 사시사철, 날마다 보여주고 있다. 우주는 리듬이요, 삶 역시 그 리듬 위에 있어야 하는 것임을 여실히 보여주는 곳이 숲이다. 우리가 왜 태어났고 무엇을 위해 살며 어디로 가는지, 그 알기 어려운 질문에 대한 답을 넌지시 건네고 있는 공간이 바로 숲이다. 숲의 긴 역사와 하루하루 속에는 나고 자라고 무언가를 이루고 죽기까지, 기쁘고 버겁고 때로 다투고 상처주고 상처받으며 또 화해하고 꽃 피고 열매 맺고 아프고 죽어야만 하는, 우리 인간 실존의 문제에 대한 거의 모든 해답이 전사(mirroring)되어 있다. 바람에 눕는 풀이나 그 바닥을 지탱하며 사는 지렁이를 보다가, 혹은 땅속에서 굼벵이로 긴 세월의 어둠을 먹고 올라와 풀섶에 제 한때의 옷을 벗어 놓고 어느 나무에 기대어 한 여름 생을 노래한 뒤 먼 곳으로 떠나가는 매미의 가락을 듣다가. 이윽고 제 스스로의 삶을 들여다보고 알아채게 하는 공부! 생명과 생명 아닌 것들이 사방팔방으로 서로를 연결하며 빚어내는, 혹은 현재가 과거를 먹고 서서 다가오지 않은 날들로 향하고 있는, 쉬는 날 없이 윤회하고 있는 숲 공동체를 보면서 인간 공동체의 갈 길을 탐험하는 공부! 이것을 나는 ‘숲 인문학’이라 부른다. 요컨대 내가 말하는 ‘숲 인문학’은 숲을 통해 인간 실존의 문제와 인간 공동체의 방향을 탐색해가는 공부이다.



여우숲 인근에서 여우숲학교 참여자들이 숲 체험을 하고 있다. 여우숲 누리집 갈무리이곳 ‘휴심정’을 통해 내가 안내할 무자천서로서의 숲 인문학이 담을 핵심 주제를 한 문장으로 표현해보자면 그것은 ‘숲을 만나다, 삶을 사랑하다’ 정도로 요약할 수 있을 듯하다. 한 10년 정도 숲과 함께 산 뒤부터 내 대중강연의 주제는 하나의 지점으로 수렴하기 시작했다. 그것은 ‘숲을 만나는 일은 잃어버린 나를 되찾는 일을 넘어 마침내 자신과 타자를 사랑할 힘을 되찾는 길을 발견하는 것입니다’라는 점이었다. 고백하자면 내가 먼저 그렇게 되었다. 나는 숲의 가르침을 통해 비로소 무늬만 인간이었던 옷을 벗고 진짜 인간으로 다시 태어날 수 있었다. 이것은 마치 매미나 나비, 나방이 알과 애벌레와 번데기의 허물을 차례로 벗어내며 마침내 자신을 이루어내는 극적인 전환 같기도 했다. 나는 우선 자신의 삶과 불화했던 모든 지점을 받아들이고 화해할 수 있게 되었다. 아울러 스스로를 존중함을 넘어 나 아닌 존재 모두를 깊이 받들 수 있게 되었다. 은연중에 세계를 이해나 우열로, 아니면 좋거나 나쁜 것, 혹은 옳거나 그른 것들로 바라보고 있었던 관점이 속절없이 허물어지기 시작했다.



오랫동안 훈련받으며 나의 내면에 장착했던 저 이분법적 세계관을 숲은 마치 비가 먼지를 닦아내듯 닦아지게 했다. 숲을 통해 비로소 나는 더 순해졌고 자유로워졌다. 맞닥뜨린 가난 속에서도, 무시로 찾아오는 다채로운 곤경 속에서도 나는 나를 떠나지 않게 되었다. 그 모든 날들을 사랑하게 되었다. 높고 낮은 땅이 있고 크고 작은 나무와 풀이 있다지만, 또 마음껏 햇살을 받는 나무도 있고 빛 한 조각 받기도 어려운 풀이 있다지만, 숲 안에서 생명은 모두 대등하고 존엄한 존재로 서로 연결되어 하늘이 품부해둔 제 꽃을 화들짝 피움으로써 저마다 환하게 빛나는 세계를 창조하는 것이라는 소식을 알아채게 되면서부터 나는 온전히 나를 바라보게 되었고 마침내 스스로를 더욱 깊게 사랑할 수 있게 되었다.



사랑은 빛과 같아서 사방을 향해 자꾸 뻗어나가려 한다. 자신을 온전히 사랑하는 자는 그러니 이제 타자를 사랑하지 않을 수가 없게 된다. 나와 함께 긴 호흡으로 숲의 속살을 함께 걸었던 누군가도 그렇게 되었다고 고백했다. 어떤 이는 화해 불가능할 것 같았던 자신의 과거를 따뜻한 연민으로 품게 되었다고 했고, 어떤 이는 미워하는 마음 탓에 한 공간에 함께 지내는 것이 날마다 고역이 되어버린 남편을 마침내 품어 안을 수 있게 되었다고도 했다. 아버지가 집을 떠나버린 상태에서 엄마와 동생만 함께 살고 있다는 어느 초등학교 5학년의 아이는 나무와 풀들이 감당하면서 극복해내고 있는 삶의 고난과 역경을 알아보는 눈이 열리더니 이렇게 썼다. ‘나도 해낼 거예요. 나무와 풀처럼!’ 조현병을 앓고 있는 어느 잘생긴 청년은 ‘숲이 보여주는 신비가 자꾸 자기를 숲으로 부른다’고 표현하기도 했다. 그가 처한 상황이나 상태에 따라 정도의 차이는 있지만, 숲이라는 글자 없는 책을 뜨문뜨문 읽기 시작하면서부터 함께 걸었던 이들은 모두 최소한 잃어가던 생명성을 되찾는 것이 출발점임을 알아챘다.



나의 유혹어린 초대장에 마음이 끌리는가? 그렇다면 이제 산책에 나설 시간이다. 길을 나서기에 앞서 당신에게 드릴 정중한 부탁이 하나 있다. 다음을 기억하며 숲을 걷자는 것이다. 우리가 도착하고 싶은 장소는 지겹도록 듣는 “숲에서 ‘힐링’하고 왔어요” 수준의 숲이 아니다. “이건 이름이 뭐예요?” 수준의 숲이 아니다. 지금부터 당신과 내가 숲을 만나는 일은 잃어버린 생명성을 회복하는 산책이요, 스스로를 사랑할 힘을 회복하여 마침내 이웃과 세상을 사랑할 수 있는 힘을 되찾는 과정으로서의 숲 마주하기라는 점이다. 이것을 기억해두자!

거듭 밝히지만 ‘숲을 만나다 삶을 사랑하다’, 당신과 함께 나란히 걸으며 마침내 만나게 해주고 싶은 지점은 바로 저 문장 속에 있다. 당신이 진정 숲의 말을 듣게 된다면 당신은 틀림없이 당신의 삶을 사랑하게 될 것이다. 자신을 사랑할 수 있는 자만이 타자를 사랑할 수 있다. 그러니 숲의 노래를 제대로 들을 수 있게 된다면 당신은 자신 아닌 존재를 사랑하는 기쁨마저 누리며 살게 될 것이다. 우리의 산책이 설레지 않는가? 설레도 좋을 것이다. 지혜와 사랑의 숲을 깊은 곳까지 산책하기 위해서는 약간의 준비과정이 필요하다. 숲을 만남으로써 자신의 삶과 화해하고 마침내 사랑할 수 있는 숲을 만나기 위해서는 약간의 새로운 시선이 필요하다. 그리고 머리에 의존함으로써 차가워진 가슴이라는 채널을 다시 덥히고 개방해야 한다. 이어지는 몇 꼭지의 연재는 우선 그 워밍업의 시간이 될 것이다.

글 김용규(여우숲인문학교장)

충북 괴산군 사오랑 외딴 산골에 있는 숲학교와 숙박시설을 갖춘 복합숲문화공간인 ‘여우숲’ 설립자다. 금융회사와 이동통신회사에 다니다 벤처 붐이 일던 2000년대 초반에 벤처 시이오를 하던 중 껍데기를 추구하는 삶을 견딜 수 없어 숲으로 들어갔다. 지은 책으로 ’숲에게 길을 묻다’, ’숲으로 온 편지’, ’당신이 숲으로 와준다면’ 등이 있다. happyforest@empas.com


*이 시리즈는 대우재단 대우꿈동산과 함께합니다

연재[휴심정] 김용규의 숲과 지혜

2022/10/01

Life of the Author, The: Maya Angelou by Linda Wagner-Martin - Audiobook | Scribd

Life of the Author, The: Maya Angelou by Linda Wagner-Martin - Audiobook | Scribd

Life of the Author, The: Maya Angelou

Written by Linda Wagner-Martin

Narrated by Allyson Johnson

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About this audiobook

A comprehensive biographical and critical reading of the works of American poet and memoirist Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Linda Wagner-Martin covers all six of Angelou's autobiographies, as well as her essay and poetry collections, while also exploring Angelou's life as an African American in the United States, her career as stage and film performer, her thoughtful participation in the Civil Rights actions of the 1960s, and her travels abroad in Egypt, Africa, and Europe.



In her discussion of Angelou's methods of writing her stunning autobiography, which began with the 1970 publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wagner-Martin writes about the influences of the Harlem Writers Group (led by James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and John O. Killens) as well as Angelou's significant friendships with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders from both international and African American United States cultures. Crucial concepts throughout include the role of oral traditions, of song and dance, of the spiritualism of art based on religious belief, of Angelou's voiced rhythms and her polished use of dialogue to convey more abstract "meaning.” Wagner-Martin shows that, viewing herself as a global citizen, Angelou never lost her spirit of adventure and discovery as well as her ability to overcome.



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THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR MAYA ANGELOU

DISCOVER THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF MAYA ANGELOU WITH A HIGHLY PERSONAL AND DETAILED ACCOUNT OF HER CHALLENGES AND TRIUMPHS

The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou delivers an engaging and thorough retelling of the life and work of the celebrated and accomplished writer, director, and essayist. The book offers readers an engrossing retelling of Maya Angelou’s entire life, from her time as a child in the segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, to her death in 2014 in Winston-Salem.

Written with an emphasis on accessibility, the author avoids critical theory and focuses on Maya Angelou’s growth as a person and writer as well as the ways in which her life influenced her work. This new biography tells the story of a young black woman who overcomes poverty and endemic structural and personal obstacles to lead an accomplished life.

Readers will also enjoy:A thorough retelling of the time Maya Angelou spent in Africa and how it shaped her views and work
An exploration of the screenplays written by Maya Angelou
Discussions of Maya Angelou’s early life as a dancer, singer, and writer
Accounts of Maya Angelou’s writing and production of television shows
A fulsome treatment of Maya Angelou’s work, including her poems, autobiographies, films, music, and theatre

Perfect for undergraduate students in Contemporary Literature courses as well as general readers who love Maya Angelou and her work, The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou will also earn a place in the libraries of biography and literature enthusiasts who seek to improve their understanding of the life and story of Maya Angelou with a highly personal and accessible new book.
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Print length

220 pages
Language

English







Editorial Reviews

Review


“This book offers an accessible, clear biography of the highly acclaimed poet, essayist, memoirist, educator, and civil rights activist. Refreshingly unburdened by footnotes and theoretical digressions, the book applies a wide-angle lens to Angelou’s life and provides a sweeping view of the woman and her works. The approach is nonetheless scholarly: Wagner-Martin (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) frames her discussion of Angelou’s life with other critics’ viewpoints and emphasizes Angelou’s influence on the larger literary world. The book is as much a biography of Angelou’s writings as it is a biography of the woman. Wagner-Martin smartly anchors her study in Angelou’s six autobiographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings―thus highlighting for readers her subject's growth as an author. Wagner-Martin even posits that Angelou’s poetry gives insight into her love life. She also provides an analysis of some of Angelou’s essays and her important work as a civil rights activist. The book includes a useful bibliography of primary sources ―poems, autobiographies, essays, spoken-word albums, children’s books, screenplays, and so on―as well as a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.” -CHOICE

“Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit is a perfectly timed, must-have volume for any reader interested in the life and work of the writer, activist, campaigner and performer Maya Angelou. In a vivacious and accessible study, eminent scholar Linda Wagner-Martin combines biography and literary criticism, spanning Angelou's first book to her final publication in 2014 - a poem on the death of Nelson Mandela. Wagner-Martin considers Angelou's life as an African American in the US, her life as stage and film performer, her full involvement in the Civil Rights actions of the 1960s and her travels abroad in Egypt, Africa and Europe alongside her literary career, recognizing Angelou's dexterous maneuvering of genre. In a manner befitting its subject, Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit achieves that rare balance: incisive, scholarly, well-researched, but also immensely enjoyable to read.” ―Laura Rattray, Reader in American Literature, University of Glasgow, UK

“This engaging study brings much-needed scholarly attention to Maya Angelou's memoirs and poetry and shows how Angelou's political involvement and time in Africa inform her writing. Linda Wagner-Martin's interest in the use of language mirrors Angelou's own and highlights the unities in Angelou's wide-ranging career.” ―Kelly L. Reames, Associate Professor of English, Western Kentucky University, USA

“Kudos to Linda Wagner-Martin, one of our most esteemed literary critics, for her superb scholarship in Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit. This accessible and deeply engaging study launches a new era in the assessment of a very important author and world-changing woman.” ―Hilary Holladay, Author of Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Inside Flap


DISCOVER THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF MAYA ANGELOU WITH A HIGHLY PERSONAL AND DETAILED ACCOUNT OF HER CHALLENGES AND TRIUMPHS

The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou delivers an engaging and thorough retelling of the life and work of the celebrated and accomplished writer, director, and essayist. The book offers readers an engrossing retelling of Maya Angelou’s entire life, from her time as a child in the segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, to her death in 2014 in Winston-Salem.

Written with an emphasis on accessibility, the author avoids critical theory and focuses on Maya Angelou’s growth as a person and writer as well as the ways in which her life influenced her work. This new biography tells the story of a young black woman who overcomes poverty and endemic structural and personal obstacles to lead an accomplished life.

Readers will also enjoy:A thorough retelling of the time Maya Angelou spent in Africa and how it shaped her views and work
An exploration of the screenplays written by Maya Angelou
Discussions of Maya Angelou’s early life as a dancer, singer, and writer
Accounts of Maya Angelou’s writing and production of television shows
A fulsome treatment of Maya Angelou’s work, including her poems, autobiographies, films, music, and theatre

Perfect for undergraduate students in Contemporary Literature courses as well as general readers who love Maya Angelou and her work, The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou will also earn a place in the libraries of biography and literature enthusiasts who seek to improve their understanding of the life and story of Maya Angelou with a highly personal and accessible new book.





--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author
Linda Wagner-Martin is Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She was the 2011 recipient of the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service in American literature (sponsored by the MLA), and has received the Guggenheim fellowship, the senior National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, the Bunting Institute fellowship, and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Philosophical Association and others. She has published more than fifty-five books of criticism, some edited, including Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987) and “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (1995), as well as studies of Ernest Hemingway, Zelda Fitzgerald, Barbara Kingsolver, and others. Recent books are A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present (2013) and Toni Morrison and the Maternal (2014). --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Back Cover


DISCOVER THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF MAYA ANGELOU WITH A HIGHLY PERSONAL AND DETAILED ACCOUNT OF HER CHALLENGES AND TRIUMPHS

The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou delivers an engaging and thorough retelling of the life and work of the celebrated and accomplished writer, director, and essayist. The book offers readers an engrossing retelling of Maya Angelou's entire life, from her time as a child in the segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, to her death in 2014 in Winston-Salem.

Written with an emphasis on accessibility, the author avoids critical theory and focuses on Maya Angelou's growth as a person and writer as well as the ways in which her life influenced her work. This new biography tells the story of a young black woman who overcomes poverty and endemic structural and personal obstacles to lead an accomplished life.

Readers will also enjoy:A thorough retelling of the time Maya Angelou spent in Africa and how it shaped her views and work
An exploration of the screenplays written by Maya Angelou
Discussions of Maya Angelou's early life as a dancer, singer, and writer
Accounts of Maya Angelou's writing and production of television shows
A fulsome treatment of Maya Angelou's work, including her poems, autobiographies, films, music, and theatre

Perfect for undergraduate students in Contemporary Literature courses as well as general readers who love Maya Angelou and her work, The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou will also earn a place in the libraries of biography and literature enthusiasts who seek to improve their understanding of the life and story of Maya Angelou with a highly personal and accessible new book.





--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
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Product details
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B098ZF9FHM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wiley-Blackwell; 1st edition (July 7, 2021)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 7, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 11384 KB

Using The Social Engagement System | Psychology Today Ireland

Using The Social Engagement System | Psychology Today Ireland





Tom Bunn L.C.S.W.
Conquer Fear Of Flying

ANXIETY
Using The Social Engagement System
Control flight anxiety with your most powerful regulation system

Posted November 13, 2012



When it comes to flight anxiety, statistics don't help. It doesn't matter—at least emotionally—whether there is one crash in a million flights, or one crash in one-hundred million flights. No matter how remote the possibility, when an anxious flier contemplates an upcoming flight, images of disaster come to mind. The images may involve emotional disaster such as panic, or physical disaster such as a crash. Whichever is the case, the images release stress hormones that cause emotional distress.

When released, stress hormones activate the Mobilization System (MS. This system, being primitive, has just one way to deal with uncertainty. It produces an urge to escape. Some creatures, those with a tiny brain, do just that. But humans, with a bigger brain, look for other options. When stress hormones activate the MS, they also activate Executive Function (EF), our high level, conscious thinking. EF—at least temporarily—overrides the urge to escape and tries to figure out what is going on. Does this situation really call for escape, or is it a false alarm? If there is a problem, EF looks for a way to deal with it.


When it looks for a way to deal with problems, EF is in the prediction business. Healthy EF does not insist on a sure thing. It looks for the plan that is most likely to get good results. When healthy EF comes up with a plan that will probably work, it commits to carrying out that plan. At that moment, EF signals the amygdala to stop releasing stress hormones. Anxiety disappears.


Not so with the anxiety-prone person. Their EF requires certainty. Otherwise their EF finds it difficult—perhaps impossible—to commit. Since commitment to a plan is necessary to end stress hormone release, when EF can't decide and commit, stress hormone release continues. If stress hormones build up too high, EF collapses, and MS, the primitive escape-based system, takes over.


When a person panics, if escape is available, they can get relief. But when a person panics on a plane, there is no escape. Neither the person's sophisticated EF nor their primitive MS can stop anxiety.

What can control flight anxiety? There is another emotional control system, one we use it every day in social settings. When we are with other people, unexpected things are being said and done almost constantly. Each of these triggers the release of stress hormones. At the same time, a system researcher Stephen Porges says the Social Engagement System (SES) picks up signals from others, such as body language, voice quality, and facial expressions. If the SES likes what it sees and hears, it calms us. Since the SES operates unconsciously, we are not aware that it is calming us. We have no idea that the SES is overriding stress hormones that other people almost constantly trigger in us.
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Think of being in your car with one foot pressing on the accelerator and one foot firmly holding the brake. Though gas is revving up the engine, the car goes nowhere because of the brake. In your body, stress hormones are being released, but signals the SES picks up from others, can cause you—in spite of the hormones—to feel calm, using what Porges calls the Vagal Brake. Not only can the SES override stress hormones, it can prevent the release of stress hormones by increasing the level of oxytocin, a hormone that inhibits the amygdala.


Because it works unconsciously, the most powerful regulation system we have is the one we know little if anything about. And the system we know the most about, our high level cognition, is—when it comes to flying—our weakest one. We all know that when someone supportive is with us, we are less afraid. But what we don't know—because the SES works automatically—is that the "someones" who were supportive when we faced uncertainties during formative years are built inside us. Not only can a person physically present calm us, but a person psychologically present (because they are "objects" built inside our psyche) can also calm us.

If someone supportive is on a flight with you, they can respond and reassure you when a shot of stress hormones is released by a noise or a bump. But a "someone" supportive who is built inside you can override stress hormones or prevent stress hormone release.

For the fortunate child, links are established naturally between the face of a supportive person and the various uncertainties encountered. Since we are not aware of it when an established link calms us, a person who flies with no anxiety can't understand why others are fearful. Likewise, a person—lacking those links—is afraid when flying, and can't understand anyone isn't afraid.
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It all comes down to what was—or wasn't—built inside way back when we were facing uncertainties as little kids. If we were adequately responded to, links between uncertainty and mom's or dad's face unconsciously protect us from anxiety. If we were not adequately responded to, there are not enough links to protect us from anxiety now. To regulate anxiety, we try to control things. If unable to get enough control, we make sure we have a way to escape the situation.

When working with fearful fliers, I have them tap into the SES. It is incredibly powerful. We simply find a moment when signals from another person caused the SES to actively control anxiety. Then, we link that face of that person to the door of the plane being closed, to the engines starting, to the plane taking off, and to turbulence, and to landing. Once the various moments of flight are linked to vivid recall of the person's face and the signals it sent to the SES, anxiety is controlled.

About the Author



Captain Tom Bunn, LCSW, is an airline pilot and author who has dedicated 30 years to the development of effective methods for treating flight phobia.


Online: Fear of Flying, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Read Next

James Heckman - Wikipedia Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policy?

James Heckman - Wikipedia

Research[edit]

Heckman is noted for his contributions to selection bias and self-selection analysis, especially Heckman correction, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is also well known for his empirical research in labor economics, particularly regarding the efficacy of early childhood education programs.

His work has been devoted to the development of a scientific basis for economic policy evaluation, with special emphasis on models of individuals and disaggregated groups, and the problems and possibilities created by heterogeneity, diversity, and unobserved counterfactual states. He developed a body of new econometric tools that address these issues. His research has given policymakers important new insights into areas such as education, jobtraining, the importance of accounting for general equilibrium in the analysis of labor markets, anti-discrimination law, and civil rights. He demonstrated a strong causal effect of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in promoting African-American economic progress. He has recently demonstrated that the high school dropout rate is increasing in the US. He has studied the economic benefits of sorting in the labor market, the ineffectiveness of active labor market programs, and the economic returns to education.

His recent research focuses on inequality, human development and lifecycle skill formation, with a special emphasis on the economics of early childhood education. He is currently conducting new social experiments on early childhood interventions and reanalyzing old experiments. He is also studying the emergence of the underclass in the US and Western Europe. For example, he showed that a high IQ only improved an individual's chances of financial success by 1 or 2%.[12] Instead, "conscientiousness," or "diligence, perseverance and self-discipline," are what led to financial success.[12]

In the early 1990s, his pioneering research, on the outcomes of people who obtain the GED certificate, received national attention.

Heckman has published over 300 articles and several books. His books include Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policy? (with Alan Krueger); Evaluating Human Capital Policy, Law, and Employment: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean (with Carmen Pages); the Handbook of Econometrics, volumes 5, 6A, and 6B (edited with Edward Leamer); Global Perspectives on the Rule of Law, (edited with R. Nelson and L. Cabatingan); and The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life (with John Eric Humphries and Tim Kautz).

He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and the American Philosophical Society.[13] He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society (of which he is also former president), the Society of Labor Economics, the American Statistical Association, and the International Statistical Institute.

John Lie Japan, the Sustainable Society Ch 8 Ikigai

Japan, the Sustainable Society 

CONTENTS

Preface
1. From Japan as “Number One” to the Lost Decades
2. Growth Reconsidered
3. The Regime as a Concept
---
4. Ordinary Virtues
5. The Book of Sushi
6. The Artisanal Ethos in Japan: The Larger Context
7. The Book of Bathing
8. Ikigai : Reasons for Living

Postface
===
JAPAN, THE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY: The Artisanal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age of Limits | By John Lie
Oakland: University of California Press, 2021

John Lie, one of the most versatile and provocative writers we have on society in contemporary East Asia, offers in Japan, The Sustainable Society a proudly polemical argument about lessons that a troubled world might draw from Japan, rumours of Japan’s global irrelevance notwithstanding. Lie positions the book as a challenge to an overarching emphasis on growth, a broad political and intellectual preoccupation that has leapt beyond its key constituencies of economists and macroeconomic policy makers and become an all-encompassing, disciplining drive for many around the globe. With a surviving if perhaps fragile “artisanal ethos,” its practice of “ordinary virtues,” and the seeming acceptance by many that the country and its residents might still thrive even without a return to its heady promise of global economic leadership in the 1980s, Japan offers hints about how we might survive “the age of limits.”

After a brief preface, Lie opens with an account of Japan’s oft-overstated “decline” from its economic peak during the bubble years of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, then moving in chapter 2 to an extended critique of an ideology of growth that, while perhaps especially pronounced in postwar Japan, is global and tied to powerful academic, policy, and political institutions in the advanced industrial world. In doing so, he simultaneously undermines any rationale for depicting Japan as irrelevant to global debate because it is no longer the expansive economic dynamo of East Asia while also suggesting that the complex and sometimes heartening reactions of its people to supposed “decline” provide a powerful counter to the soul-crushing obsession with growth for growth’s sake. 

Lie turns next to the idea of a “regime,” which feels similar to Bourdieu’s conceptions of habitus and field, though perhaps longer in duration. This is important because Lie depicts postwar Japan as a kind of crystallization of elements of the Meiji regime: growth-as-modernization, other values be damned. He compares this, mostly unfavourably, to the varied ethical positions and ways of life that emerged during the Edo era, a period frequently depicted, he says, as merely backward rather than rich in social and cultural flexibility that might be useful guides for life today. Although Lie offers frequent caveats about the difficulty of drawing a straight line between the Tokugawa period and today, comments like “twenty-first-century Japan, in its acceptance of different sexual orientations and lifestyles, has returned to its Tokugawa roots” (201) seem to posit continuities that other researchers might question.

In chapter 5, “The Book of Sushi,” Lie takes readers through a concise history of sushi as a food, focusing on the “artisanal ethos” that drives many chefs to aim for the sublime even as low-cost options abound and many customers seem oblivious to the craft and care behind the food. Lie articulates the artisanal ethos his informants—from sushi chefs to hand-crafted goods makers—espouse, with transformative quality produced through creative and imperfect repetition as opposed to the more lucrative but unsatisfying routines of a salaryman’s life. They also drink a lot, several hasten to add. 

And in chapter 7, “The Book of Bathing,” Lie uses the comforting routines of Japanese bathing (from onsen hot springs through the sentо̄ public baths to personal ofuro bathtubs at home) to reflect on how people can find satisfaction from the repetition of ordinary virtues, like relaxation and personal cleanliness. 

His final chapter, “Ikigai,” examines how people can find meaning in their lives from these ethical commitments and practices that seem “unproductive” by the merciless standards of contemporary capitalism. A brief postscript explains the book’s unusual approach in part by noting that “sushi was great to think with, that onsen were great to think in, and that eating sushi or enjoying onsen is not a bad first step in the search for a sustainable future” (219).

Amen, of course, and it’s refreshing to see a social scientist extol the pleasures associated with these miracles of everyday life. Indeed, among the book’s many strengths is Lie’s willingness to move seamlessly between erudite command of French and German social theory and the precise details of a sushi chef’s work and even the physical sensations of stepping out of a hot bath. It offers no shortage of insights about alternative ways in which to draw meaning about our lives, with the possibility that these will offer more sustainable paths than does the road to economic growth for its own sake. He might have gone further, as he reflects only briefly on the relationship between sushi and declining maritime resources, and even less on the environmental footprint of Japan’s onsen industry. Neither would require a fundamental rethinking of the book, but everyday virtues and an artisanal ethos may in their own ways contribute to tightening limits on global capacity.

My own sensation in reading the book was similar to the one I’ve experienced in my rare foray into a high-end sushi bar: pleasure at the virtuosic craft on display, combined with deep and uncomfortable anxiety that the chef might consider me unworthy of the meal. Part of this sprouts from Lie’s faint praise for the institutional environment in which I myself work: “A Japanese university may not be the best in the world, but it is pleasant, convenient, and satisfactory” (92)—words I’ve learned to avoid in describing my own research in grant applications. But it also speaks as well to Lie’s approach, making few concessions to readers in his rapid-fire references to figures as diverse as Condorcet and Vespasian before one even gets to the Japanese material.

Lie need not be concerned about my own imposter syndrome, but this does raise questions about the book’s target audience. After all, his references to writers like Shiba Ryōtarō or Nakajima Atsushi come and go so quickly as to be likely bewildering to anyone educated outside of Japan. Scholars in Japanese studies, however, might be equally confused and even dismayed by Lie’s apparent decision to avoid much of the recent social-scientific work published about Japan in English. Quite aside from my sense that critiques of growth and of “Japan is in decline” discourses are more widespread than he indicates, Lie occasionally implies problems in the literature that seem misplaced. He writes, for example, “perhaps my having dwelled among academics—fond as they are of generalizations, such as that the Japanese are hierarchical or holistic, collectivistic or compulsive—made me resist the proverbial unum noris omnes (know one, know all), blanket generalizations that occlude more than they illuminate” (219). Here I wondered to whom he might be referring. Although these generalizations animated debates in the field decades ago, they are far to the periphery of leading work today in anthropology, political science, or sociology, let alone the humanities or cultural studies.

None of this undermines the book’s many insights, but it raises questions about how best to specify the book’s contributions to a field that has long debated growth, decline, and their cultural consequences. Few studies do so with the kind of learning and panache Lie brings to bear in Japan, The Sustainable Society, but they usually are careful to note how they build upon or challenge existing research on contemporary Japan. And for these reasons, I myself am struggling with how to use the book in my classes; I admire its ethical vision and its dazzling erudition, even as I worry it presents a misleading picture of the current state of scholarly debate. But I hope to find a pleasant, convenient, and satisfactory solution.

David Leheny

Waseda University, Shinjuku

Last Revised: August 31, 2022
Pacific Affairs

===

John Lie. 8. Ikigai.


Reasons for Living.


The polymath Hashimoto Osamu, born in 1947 and therefore a member of the postwar dankai generation, recalls his upbringing in Suginami Ward in west central Tokyo. His grandparents, from a modest background, lived in a house on a lot larger than 3,500 square feet. Today that would be a gargantuan estate. Half the lot was a vegetable garden, with potato flowers, strawberries, and corn. But this paradise vanished after Hashimoto and his parents moved in with his grandparents. First an expansion of the house eliminated the garden. Then Hashimoto’s father cut down the chestnut and fig trees to build a garage. The neighborhood finally disappeared altogether in the 1960s, when construction companies bulldozed small shops and independent houses and replaced them with paved roads and high-rise apartment buildings. In retrospect, Hashimoto realizes, he was happy at his grandparents’ house in the time before their neighborhood vanished, and he believes that the era of rapid economic growth actually lowered the quality of life.¹


It would be easy to make light of Hashimoto’s idyllic pastoral. After all, many people look back fondly on childhood. And aren’t Hashimoto’s fellow baby boomers swimming in collective nostalgia for the period of rapid economic growth? But this is precisely where Hashimoto differs—he is not celebrating economic growth but lamenting the destruction it wrought. The per capita GDP of Japan is clearly higher now than it was fifty years ago, but how can we be sure that the quality of life has also gone up? Are high-rise apartment buildings, with their overlapping and redundant security systems in what is perhaps one of the safest cities in the world, really an improvement over one- or two-story houses with yards and gardens? Air conditioning has brought relief from heat and humidity, and housing built from concrete and glass keeps pesky mosquitos and moths out (though pesticides and the built environment have reduced their numbers). But what about the environmental and energy burdens? Have paved roads made up in convenience for what they replaced—entire neighborhoods that were dismissed as vacant lots? Is it better to shop in a clean, well-lighted supermarket or in a neighborhood grocery store? Is it better to grow one’s own vegetables and fruits, with all the dirt and worms that come with them? The logic of growth says, “One more, then another,” and in contemporary Tokyo there’s no end in sight to the graying of the built environment. The achievement of affluence—defined by GDP figures or by the proliferation of glass-and-concrete skyscrapers—may or may not mean a good or better life.


But all is not lost. The artisanal ethos survives, as do ordinary virtues. Many Japanese people enjoy rest and relaxation, even idleness, and not just by way of onsen travel. Meaning and purpose can be found and cultivated in leisure activity. The sustainable society is ludic. And what underlies it is the search for ikigai—for meaning, for reasons to live—reasons that in turn sustain the artisanal ethos and ordinary virtues.


RELIGION AND ITS DEMISE.


For many human beings, the whole issue of reasons for living is moot. The self-evident character of the survival instinct—the will to live—requires no extended commentary, especially when food and security are of utmost concern. Yet the arrival of affluence, or at least of the potential for rest and reflection, and the lengthening of the life-span provoke incessant and irrepressible questions about the meaning of life, if not life in general, then surely life in this or that particular. Is my life worth living? Or, as the more usual formulation has it, is my life meaningful and significant? Basic curiosity about life’s meaning (not as a semantic question) is grist for the philosophical mill everywhere, and it evokes a number of generic responses. The most common of these is religion.


The Meiji regime propounded State Shintō, with the emperor at the apex, as the wellspring of spiritual and secular authority and answers.² The emperor system was the state-sanctioned ideology that turned Japan—and, over time, the Japanese empire—into the family-state, with the emperor as the ultimate patriarch and his subjects as his children.³


The emperor ruled from his appointed place in a singular lineage that had begun with the birth of Japan, as described in the oldest extant Japanese text, Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), compiled from oral tradition in 712. Thus the purpose of State Shintō and the emperor system was to eliminate, or control and contain, competing religious or spiritual authorities (including, among others, animism, Buddhism, and Christianity) as well as folk rituals and practices.⁴ In other words, the Meiji regime established a national belief system that sacralized political rule and instituted ideological control (and during the prewar regime, the fanatical articulation of this system became a proto-totalitarian war effort). Now every Japanese person had, in theory, all the answers to life’s basic questions about meaning and identity.


Needless to say, reality is much more complex and confusing. Not everyone had unquestioning faith in the emperor system or State Shintō. The deviants included Marxists and adherents of other faiths, and if many of them followed the dictates from above, especially during the final years of the Pacific War, they did so without much enthusiasm or apodictic certainty.⁵ Be that as it may, there was one focal point in modern Japanese life before 1945: the sacrosanct character of the emperor and the divine mission of the modern Japanese nation. This is to say that the Meiji regime provided a belief system, however creaky, and a source of both social solidarity and personal identity.


After the end of World War II, the extensive apparatus of the emperor system, including State Shintō, was either disestablished or disrupted. Almost overnight, the imperial project lay in ruins, and the central religious institution was shattered (though, again, I would not deny that there were some true believers and stragglers). Postwar Japan was now a nation without a national religion, a country bereft of a dominant belief system or a centralized religious institution. By the 1960s, to the extent that State Shintō survived at all, it was primarily as an object of opprobrium, criticized with equal intensity by pro-American politicians and anti-American student radicals.⁶ Except on New Year’s Day and some other special occasions, most people seemed to ignore Shintōism, though some right-wingers did rally around it in an effort to generate a new nationalist movement.⁷


After the war, a certain nullity threatened to rule the spiritual life of Japan. The Communist Party proffered a secular religion, but the party never came close to seizing power and, in any event, it maintained a secular face. Democratic and leftist intellectuals appeared to have become the unacknowledged legislators of postwar Japan, but they too never came close to assuming the mantle of prophets and pastors on behalf of the Western ideology of progress, democracy, and science. Moreover, their enthusiasm was decidedly tepid by comparison with the power and glory of the prewar emperor system, which they scorned after the fact. If some had been willing to give their lives for their country before 1945, almost no one now seemed ready to die for the sake of democracy or science.


Thus postwar Japan, with nothing like a national religion, remained staunchly secular. The end of the Meiji regime seems to have pulverized not just the emperor system but all adherence to any kind of transcendental belief system. As Joseph Kitagawa, a leading student of Japanese religious history, observed in the 1960s, “One of the basic problems of Japan is the rootlessness of the Japanese people. . . . The tragedy of postwar Japan is that the people have lost [any] fundamental religious orientation.”⁸


Surveys conducted since the 1950s have revealed that perhaps only 33 percent of the population claims any type of religious affiliation, and much Japanese religiosity is tepid in any case, which means that Japan is one of the most secular societies in the world.⁹ As Yamaori Tetsuo characterizes the postwar Japanese, they maintain a “nebulous atheism” as their central belief system.¹⁰ Adding to the sense of Japan’s being a predominantly atheist country is the fact that religion is a private matter for the Japanese.¹¹ Nevertheless, it would be problematic to call Japan a strictly secular, much less atheist, society. For one thing, there are visible populations of Shintōists, Buddhists, and Christians, along with various new religious groups.¹² For another, some argue that the real religion of Japan is the so-called Japanese Religion, that is, belief in Japaneseness.¹³ Even so, it remains true that, apart from a small minority, Japanese people do not look to organized religion or formal belief systems to find meaning in life.¹⁴


ROMANTIC PASSION, TAMED AND TEPID.


Especially in the modern West, the individual, emancipated from such ascriptive ties as the family, the community, and the faith into which he was born, seeks life’s fulfillment in romantic love. Indeed, there are few private passions as turbulent or as celebrated.¹⁵ In contemporary Japan, however, the abatement of ambition (see chapter 4) has its correlate in the sphere of intimate interpersonal relationships. That is, the tepid nihilism of everyday life seems to have dethroned romantic love in favor of ordinary feelings, however important interpersonal relationships continue to be. This disenchantment with grand passions has also diminished expectations with respect to intimate life. It was not always this way. The people of Tokugawa Japan were no strangers to sexual and romantic longing. But, given the predominance of arranged marriages among the samurai and the landlords, and the proscription on interstatus unions, depictions of romantic love in popular culture tended to focus on the forbidden and the transgressive (for example, an extramarital liaison between a patron and a courtesan that ends in double suicide). Such depictions contained little psychology. Death was the almost inevitable outcome of passionate hearts beating against an inflexible social structure.¹⁶


After the Meiji Restoration, despite the era’s puritanical mind-set, modern Japanese people avidly consumed Western cultural imports that idealized romantic love, from Romantic poetry to love songs.¹⁷ By the postwar period, in the wake of the prewar regulation of private emotions, many young urbanites were inclined to express their feelings by way of that most common phrase heard in popular music, “I love you,” using a Japanese rendition of the English-language utterance if not the Japanese equivalent (aishiteru) or its permutations. The phenomenal popularity of the radio drama Kimi no na wa (Your name), later made into a three-part film series, featured two lovers who, over and over, barely missed meeting each other.¹⁸ Somewhere, somehow, there surely would be someone—a true love. Sports manga dominated in the 1960s and 1970s, but manga for girls and boys alike featured tales of great passion, often between star-crossed lovers. The characters in these stories knew whom they loved and hated, and, as un-Japanese as this may have seemed, they expressed their loves and hatreds, if only via confessional missives. Ai to Makoto (Ai and Makoto) recounts the romantic passion of Ai, a bourgeois lady in the making, and Makoto, a poor delinquent. Everything is straightforward—her name means “love,” his means “sincerity.” Makoto tells Ai, “I would die for you!” The sheer number of obstacles thrown in the lovers’ path recalls the impediments of Wuthering Heights.¹⁹ In a more philosophical and literary vein, Fukunaga Takehiko’s 1956 novel, Ai no kokoromi (An attempt at love), captures the postwar idealization of romantic love: from existential loneliness, we strive to pass through and realize the divine mystery of romantic love, of love as burning passion and ultimate spiritual encounter.²⁰ Eurocentric though Fukunaga may have been, his exaltation of romantic love was not uncommon for a modern Japanese writer. Indeed, in the immediate postwar decades, Fukunaga’s existentialist ruminations on romantic love were anything but unique. In 1963, Ai to shi wo mitsumete (Facing love and death) became a phenomenal best seller, and in 1964 it was made into an equally popular television program.²¹ Based on some four hundred letters between its two authors, which were written and exchanged when they were both university students and while the female protagonist was hospitalized with a terminal illness, Ai to shi wo mitsumete ends with her death, but not before she loses half her face to a botched operation. Watching the television adaptation is one of my earliest memories; grisly though the experience was, Ai to shi wo mitsumete is a testament to the ideal of jun’ai (pure love), beyond disfigurement and the grave. Clearly, love is not for the faint of heart.²²


By the 1980s, the dominant tenor of romantic relationships had become one of yūjū fudan (indecision). Popular manga like Tonda kappuru (The jumping couple) and Mezon Ikkoku (Maison Ikkoku) depicted male protagonists who were decidedly indecisive.²³ In both works, a young man cannot choose between two young women, and the arc of the narrative swings back and forth as he is unable to decide or commit himself. There is passionate intensity but also Hamlet-like deliberation: Whom should I be with? Whom do I love? These protagonists are a universe away from the violence-loving delinquent Makoto, capable of declaring his willingness to die for his love. In the most popular romance of 1990, Tokyo rabusutōrī (Tokyo love story), there is a girl who can express her love openly, but once again there is a boy who cannot make up his mind, much less express his feelings.²⁴


The life of indecision took a gentler turn in the post-Bubble decades. No longer were there loud proclamations of love. Now there was only a whispered “Sukidesu” (“I like you”). Needless to say, this semantic drift may warrant translating the language of like (suki) as a declaration of love (ai). Regardless, the tepid expression of romantic passion came to mark the outer limit of what was permissible, or imaginable.


A casual foreign observer might take the Japanese for a people so taciturn that a narrow range of romantic expression should be expected. Yet Japanese culture is drenched with tears and emotion about falling in, falling out, and even staying in passionate, erotic love. You’ve got to hide your love away, but it’s all over the place. Sōseki Natsume, that colossus of modern Japanese literature, frequently holds forth on love. For example, the elder brother in Kōjin (The Wayfarer), has this to say: “What’s truly sacred is not the relationship between husband and wife, created by human beings, but romantic love, concocted by nature. . . . And so it’s not wrong to say that someone who subscribes to morality is a temporary winner, but a permanent loser. And someone who follows nature is a temporary loser, but a permanent winner.”²⁵ To take another example, in Natsume’s Sorekara (And Then), a male character, Daisuke, declares his love to a married woman, Michiyo. At first Michiyo calls Daisuke’s declaration “cruel,” but in time she decides to pursue an extramarital relationship with him, even unto death: “If you say die, I’ll die. . . . I don’t care when I get killed.”²⁶ The theme of Liebestod is not just for a Romeo and a Juliet who accidentally die in the throes of young love, or even for a Werther who shoots himself because of unrequited




love—though I hasten to add that both Shakespeare’s famous drama and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) were staples for the modern Japanese reading public. Rather, the course of modern Japanese love has often run to murder-suicide or to shinjū (double suicide). Thwarted love ending in double suicide is of course far from unique to Japan—consider only the 1889 Mayerling incident or its near contemporary, Tchaikovsky’s 1876 ballet Swan Lake. But shinjū, both in abstract rhetoric and in concrete action, has long been a major trope in the humid, sticky world of Japanese passion, with all its erotic vexations and outbursts. Western-style romantic love was yet another import, but it would be egregiously condescending to claim that premodern and modern Japanese people had not already been suffering almost all the sorrows and pangs, the exaltations and ecstasies, of romantic love.²⁷ If they were not entirely clear on the concept, they were not necessarily innocent of its substance.


By contrast, Japanese lovers in the twenty-first century seem sober and lacking in ardor. After 1997, the year that marked the publication of Watanabe Jun’ichi’s best-selling novel Shitsurakuen (A lost paradise) and the release of the film based on the novel, it has been difficult to find any major manifestations of Liebestod in Japanese culture.²⁸ Even in 1997, Watanabe, then in his sixties, seemed to appeal almost exclusively to his contemporaries and elders. Younger audiences were perplexed by the success of the novel and the film and regarded both as entertainments for ojisan (middle-aged men). For most Japanese people of the post-Bubble era, the coupling of love and death is unimaginable. For them, passion has largely been tamed, and love has become like. As Louise Bogan puts it, “What the wise doubt, the fool believes— / Who is it, then, that love deceives?”²⁹ Perhaps the best-known work of romantic love in contemporary Japanese literature—Haruki Murakami’s Norway no mori (Norwegian Wood), published in the same year as Watanabe’s Shitsurakuen—announces itself as a “100 percent romantic-love novel.”³⁰ The male protagonist, Watanabe (a common Japanese surname), is kind and gentle, ever solicitous. He seeks a relationship based on gender equality and is all but devoid of old-fashioned patriarchal attitudes and macho behavior. The novel is not without its carnal moments, but the climactic sex scene leaves Watanabe’s love, Naoko, unmoved. In the ups and downs of his romance, Watanabe is taciturn, with almost no wild swings of emotion. To be willing to die for one’s love is one thing, but the kinder, gentler version of love seems to smother, even come close to extinguishing, romance and passion. The popularity of Norway no mori is emblematic of contemporary Japanese norms regarding romantic love. Or take Okazaki Kyōko’s Ribāsuejji (River’s Edge), in which every romantic longing is thwarted and the only sustained relationship is between the young female protagonist and her gay male friend, a relationship transacted primarily through their looking at an abandoned human body on the banks of a river.³¹ There is death, but there’s no love. The post-Bubble Japanese, disenchanted with fairy tales, are reluctant to follow the palpitations of the heart or to set out over the terra incognita of an emotional whirlwind. Sobriety rules. It’s as if everyone can see the final stages of love—disenchantment and disbelief—and know that there is no transcendence.


Perhaps the most popular love story in the late 2010s was Nigeru wa haji daga yaku ni tatsu (We Got Married as a Job). Like so many other popular movies and television shows, it was originally a manga.³² Thirty-six-year-old Tsuzaki Hiramasa, an engineer and a self-identified professional single man, is still a virgin. He’s a softer version of an otaku (a geek or nerd). He needs someone to cook and clean for him, and Moriyama Mikuri applies for the job. Over time, their employer-employee relationship becomes a contractual marriage, an extension of their cash-basis connection into a long-term employment agreement. Because the story follows the conventions of romantic comedy, the two eventually develop a romantic attachment to each other, and the story concludes with substantive fulfillment of what had been their formal, empty contractual matrimony. There were feelings and passion somewhere, but they blossomed from the cold logic of the pair’s contract, as if the two had been parties to an arranged marriage.


At the same time, women writers were abandoning the heteronormative world of patriarchal romantic love. Matsuura Rieko explores lesbian relationships and experimental sexual acts in Nachuraru ūman (Natural woman), which seems downright conventional next to her subsequent Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (The training period of the big-toe P), in which the female protagonist’s big toe opens up new possibilities by metamorphosing into a penis.³³ And in Matsuura’s Kenshin (Dog body), a woman becomes a dog. A dog was the love object in Tawada Yōko’s earlier Inumukoiri (Dog marriage).³⁴ Mizumura Minae’s Honkaku shōsetsu (True novel), loosely based on Wuthering Heights, upsets the conventions of modern romantic love stories by starting off with a physically unattractive heroine, and the course of true love runs nowhere.³⁵ Needless to say, not all Japanese women writers have given up on traditional boy-meets-girl love stories, but one explanation for why South Korean television dramas are so popular among Japanese women may be that Japanese writers increasingly find it a challenge to narrate the received arc of romantic love, which may entail a rough journey, though all’s well that ends well.


As for realism, it reflected what people were actually doing. And in the postwar period, that meant getting married (“till death do us part”) and having children (at least two). In Haruki Murakami’s novel Kokkyō no minami, taiyō no nishi (South of the Border, West of the Sun), the protagonist-narrator recalls his unusual upbringing: “In the world I grew up in, a typical family had two or three children. . . . I was an only child. . . . What other people all had and took for granted I lacked.”³⁶ The narrator then goes on about how he hated his deviant existence, and about all the pejorative connotations of being an only child (most obviously, he was assumed to be spoiled). Normality, especially in one’s family situation, was a requirement of the postwar decades, when the family was a haven and a bulwark against the unpredictable, potentially cruel and heartless world. Yet even then the rampart was cracking, if it had not always already been cracked. Recall Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 film Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story), discussed in chapters 4 and 7. In the film, an elderly man and his wife visit their adult children and receive only a lukewarm welcome. Especially for viewers of a certain age, the film often evokes the asymmetrical character of love between parents and children, or it exemplifies the delusions of gerontocracy—elderly parents, far from reigning as paterfamilias and materfamilias, fade and then pass away. The ambitious dankai generation, which sought to replace patriarchy with modern family life, found that it was not only the extended family but also the nuclear family that was breaking down.³⁷ Although contemporary Japanese people may yearn for love and marriage, for cohabitation and children, there is no question that the institution of the family is under assault. And marriage? It is now subsumed under konkatsu (spouse hunting), just another of the many activities that Japanese people engage in.


The family remains the typical form of cohabitation, but it has fractured into distinct models of living together. Even in the postwar decades there was still a widespread sense of the premodern, extended family or household as the bedrock of Japanese life. But the truths of past generations are no more. And the modern nuclear family of the postwar decades is also in crisis. In this regard, Japan is no different from many other wealthy countries. There are now more single people and unmarried couples in Japan, and more homosexual and transgender couples live together. The postwar myth of the normative heterosexual nuclear family is all but dead, and the prevailing norm is social tolerance, at least in urban areas. Thus twenty-first-century Japan, in its acceptance of different sexual orientations and lifestyles, has returned to its Tokugawa roots. BL (boys’ love) manga has served as something of an avant-garde for alternative love relationships and lifestyles. What is curious about the genre is that it is written almost exclusively by and for women (the exceptions to the female readership are such occasional deviants as a curious researcher). It would be easy to see a projection of desire in BL manga’s plethora of dashing, emotionally sensitive characters, who seem never to populate the living or working environments of the readers. The manga Kinō nani tabeta? (What did you eat yesterday?) is exemplary. In this illustrated recipe book, two likable gay men—one a lawyer, the other a hairdresser—have ordinary, contented lives, with occasional problems and crises around which the issue of what to cook and eat is a central motif as well as a master solution.³⁸ It is not that there aren’t BL stories with suggestions of wild sex or turbulent relationships. After all, BL’s readers grew up with the likes of Ikeda Riyoko’s epic-heroic Berusaiyu no bara (Berubara, or The Rose of Versailles).³⁹ It is nevertheless striking, even in stories that depict the LGBTQ community, how passion has been tamed and how life has been routinized. This is not the world of Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester or Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff.


Many Japanese people have told me that they live in order to work—not just the sushi master discussed in chapter 5 but even some businessmen—yet no one has mentioned the notion of living in order to love. To be sure, a few people have identified a connection with a pet as their most important relationship and reason for living. And mothers do say that they find solace and significance in childrearing. It is common enough for mothers, and some fathers, to say that the births of their children have been the best moments of their lives. But that form of love, agapē, is distinct from romantic love between two adults. In other words, love is important to Japanese people, and worth living for, but romantic passion appears not to be. It may be that inequality and asymmetry between women and men—including the vast infrastructure of the sex industry, which doubles as an emotion industry—have cut off the possibility of passionate relationships based on equality.


It would be easy to deplore the diminished Japanese passion for romantic love, but it is also possible that the Romantic legacy of valorizing passionate love has already visited havoc on many relationships. This is a world from which transcendent sources of meaning and value have disappeared or are disappearing, whether we mean old-time religion or tightly knit communities. In the circumstances, expecting romantic love to stand as a pillar of ordinary, intimate life is tantamount to inviting a dragon to live in the bedroom. Reality is rife with small indignities as well as massive deviations from the impossible ideal of romantic love, and companionable, compatible intimate relationships involve many compromises. Some people forgo sexual relations altogether, whereas others find the absence of sex unbearable. Consider the popularity of the novel and manga Otto no chinpo ga hairanai (My Husband Won’t Fit).⁴⁰ The protagonist suffers from what is regarded as a devastating flaw in her marriage, not to mention from the couple’s inevitable failure to conceive a child, but eventually she comes to accept her imperfect, unrealized marriage as right for the two of them. The perfect romantic relationship is an abstraction, and beguiling though the ideal of romantic love has been for many people, romantic love is surely not a panacea for people who seek meaningful relationships or love in their lives. Again, it would be inaccurate to say that most Japanese people don’t seek romance, passion, and relationships, but romantic love is not seen as the solution to existential anguish or existential questions.


OTAKU.


If most contemporary Japanese people are ambivalent or wary about religion or romantic love—or, for that matter, in the nation or the family—what is left for building a meaningful life? Surely one answer is work. On that score, artisans provide a model for the well-lived life. But many people don’t find a personally satisfactory occupation, to say nothing of all the jobs from which almost no one could derive any meaning. And other people don’t like any kind of work at all. What hope is there for these people? A clue lies in a much-derided Japanese character type—the otaku, the nerd or geek encountered in earlier chapters.


The otaku belongs to the generations after the dankai generation. The term otaku, coined in 1983, is usually credited to Nakamori Akio, a manga critic. It denotes a young man or young men (the original otaku were almost always male) of a certain appearance—an unkempt mop of hair, casual clothing—considered to be not quite delinquent but somewhat strange. Otaku have poor social skills and an obsession with one or another aspect of pop culture, particularly manga and anime (though the actual range of human interests that an individual otaku pursues may be wider).⁴¹ Otaku, whose efflorescence is coeval with post-Bubble Japan, are closely associated with the rise of consumer society and the proliferation of youth subcultures. The received stereotype of the otaku is the relentlessly negative image of young adults (again, usually male) who are incapable of dealing with the world. “They’re no good,” a woman in her forties told me. “They’re socially unacceptable.”⁴² And the father of two otaku sons thundered, “They have no spirit, no will. They’re parasites!” What prompts much of the discussion about the otaku, apart from their obsession with manga and anime, is their antisocial character. They are said to avoid the complexities and complications of real-life relationships, including sexual or romantic relationships, and to seek regulated and controlled encounters, whether online or in person with professionals. The otaku are also easy targets for people seeking to discover the causes of Japanese ills, including the struggling economy (indolent youth are said to be taking the place of the nation’s corporate workers) and Japan’s declining fertility rates.⁴³ In any case, few have much that is positive to say about this character type. As one man in his thirties told me, “I’m an otaku myself, and even I don’t like the otaku.”


Akihabara.


The area in central Tokyo known as Akihabara, once a mecca of electronics shops, has been transformed into the capital and spiritual home of otaku culture. (It should be noted, however, that Akihabara increasingly attracts men older than the typical otaku, as well as some girls and women, not to mention foreign tourists.) Two notable cultural offerings are available there. The first (and dominant) of the two is what the otaku call “two-dimensional” products—primarily manga, anime, and video games. In this domain, the most prized type of female is a young and beautiful girl-woman described as dōgan kyonyū (having a baby face and big breasts). By contrast with three-dimensional (that is, real) girls and women, these two-dimensional representations preoccupy the imaginative and affective lives of many otaku boys and men, who are marked by Rorikon (a Lolita complex). The second offering is the meido kissa (maid cafés), featuring young women clad in French maid’s uniforms who greet and serve their customers (again, almost all men) as lords and masters and may also play card games, board games, and video games with them. The hapless otaku shells out the equivalent of about five US dollars to enter the café, another five






three-dimensional (that is, real) girls and women, these two-dimensional representations preoccupy the imaginative and affective lives of many otaku boys and men, who are marked by Rorikon (a Lolita complex). The second offering is the meido kissa (maid cafés), featuring young women clad in French maid’s uniforms who greet and serve their customers (again, almost all men) as lords and masters and may also play card games, board games, and video games with them. The hapless otaku shells out the equivalent of about five US dollars to enter the café, another five for each game he plays, and five more to take a photo with a maid. (The café’s food and drinks, usually of substandard quality, are priced at approximately the going rate.) There is almost never any physical contact between the maids and their otaku customers. It is as if the otaku are at play in a Barbie DreamHouse version of the hostess bars that their fathers and grandfathers frequented.⁴⁴


The all-female Japanese idol group known as AKB48 (AKB is the acronym for Akihabara) and its satellite groups, girl bands that represent the apotheosis of fan participation, provide insights into otaku culture. The annual AKB48 election, a nationally televised affair, was routinely one of the most watched programs of the year during the 2010s; it captured more attention and generated more excitement than the national legislative elections. AKB48’s membership is determined by music fans, who vote with their wallets by purchasing the CDs in order to vote—one CD, one vote. The performer with the most votes becomes AKB48’s lead singer, and the top twenty or so singers get to perform regularly in public. An uninformed foreigner might believe that this election rewards beauty or talent, but it almost always comes down to which performer best approximates the ideal of the girl next door. It is widely agreed by fans and nonfans alike that a beautiful (or tall or bright) young woman intimidates the otaku, who form the core of CD buyers (voters), which is why beautiful, tall, or bright contestants often fail to make it in the world of AKB48. Indeed, the mean height of AKB48’s members is lower than the national mean. Recall the language of suki (like) as opposed to the language of love. In this context, the chief aesthetic virtue is not to be beautiful but to be kawaii (cute). The exemplary kawaii figure, Hello Kitty, does not have a mouth or teeth, and the AKB48 stars are similarly nonthreatening. Here, communication and expression can flourish—kawaii culture, for the otaku, means never having to risk revealing anything personal, and never being menaced by the real world.⁴⁵ The otaku knows he is in control because he is the one who has chosen and created the stars.


It is true, of course, that in the postwar period there were many movie stars and singers who also became idols. Fans saw their films, bought their albums, and may have bought their posters, too. But these stars and singers were idols, sacred objects of passionate veneration. Consider only the fact that in English the title of Hiraoka Masaaki’s book about the 1970s teen singing sensation Yamaguchi Momoe would be Momoe Is Bodhisattva.⁴⁶ What Hiraoka sees in Yamaguchi’s hollow eyes is the look of the proletariat. In this respect, Yamaguchi embodied the spirit of supokon manga (sports manga; see chapter 4), that is, the struggle for upward mobility in postwar Japan. And the postwar idols’ fans did worship them, believing them incapable of entertaining a polluted thought or committing an irreverent act—an image clearly at odds with that of idols like the members of AKB48, who represent the utter secularization of pop culture idols. How could it be otherwise, when the top vote-getter in the 2016 AKB48 election had been a contestant in a televised farting contest held in a school library? Many of AKB48’s older fans do retain a spiritual orientation toward the group, but for the otaku these stars are not sacred figures.⁴⁷ Indeed, the otaku shows little overt passion. The figures who were icons for his parents are for the otaku mere dolls, material and disposable. The otaku, as a denizen of the world of the lukewarm bath (see “Ambition and Its Diminution,” in chapter 4), makes the necessary (and considerable) effort to indulge his private interests, but he is not about to sacrifice himself like a kamikaze pilot, nor is he disposed to enact a lover’s suicide


Beyond the Stereotype.


The stereotype of the otaku obfuscates more than it illuminates. Some self-described otaku—not unlike Tsuzaki Hiramasa, the fictional engineer in his thirties who is the protagonist of Nigeru wa haji daga yaku ni tatsu—hold prestigious jobs by day, and by night they gallivant about town, dine at expensive restaurants, visit kyabakura (cabaret clubs, that is, nightclubs), and generally behave more or less the way successful businessmen of their fathers’ generation behaved with Ginza hostesses. As another challenge to the stereotype, the best-selling 2004 novel Densha otoko (Train man) features an otaku protagonist who is courageous enough to stop a sexual harasser and thus becomes a romantic hero of sorts.⁴⁸ Furthermore, the idea of Cool Japan and the vitality of Japanese subcultural products abroad (manga, anime, and video games, most obviously) suggest that otaku-based industries are thriving export economies that also partake of the artisanal ethos.⁴⁹ In addition, more than a generation after the birth or invention of the otaku, it remains far from clear just who the otaku is. At times it is difficult to differentiate an otaku from a Yankī—this label has supplanted the archaic furyō (delinquent)—or, for that matter, to differentiate an otaku from any other young man (or woman). Therefore, some critics suggest that the otaku doesn’t exist except as a by-product of discrimination.⁵⁰ As in Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of anti-Semitism, it is anti-otaku discrimination that produces the otaku.




The contemporary Japanese, however covert their public displays of affection may be, are not quite at the point of saying, “Not to be born comes first by every reckoning.”⁵¹ Nor are they still at the point of never having fallen in love, and this is no less true of the otaku. It would be easy to mistake ostensible quietude for a soulless existence, but the beating human heart maintains its interest in and devotion to one aspect of the world or another, perhaps in the arts, perhaps in the natural environment. An amateur psychoanalyst, tempted to see the otaku’s behavior as a projection of thwarted human relationships onto transitional or permanent objects, would be mistaken to overlook the vibrant inner world of interests beneath the contemporary Japanese otaku’s apparent indifference. The otaku seek, in their idiosyncratic ways, to make life worth living, to find ikigai beyond the received verities of family, community, company, or nation. No bitter taste of the real has killed their appetite for a slice of life, however mediated, among other reportedly problematic and antisocial youth. The individual otaku, then, no exemplar of post-Bubble burnout, almost always has an enthusiasm or two. He (sometimes she) readily joins fan clubs and collects everything related to a favorite genre or object.


Contrary to the stereotype, the otaku may actually be less interested in consumption and collection than in experience and matters of the spirit. Indeed, the otaku is defined by that very pursuit.⁵² A moment’s conversation with an otaku almost always reveals an engagement and an erudition akin to those of a research academic. I know a historian who began subscribing in high school to the prestigious Journal of Modern History, and after four decades he has been unable to let go of his all-consuming interest in early modern European history. Generally rumpled, and indifferent to most luxuries, he is the very picture of the absent-minded professor; the otaku in contemporary Japan is precisely this type of character. The received stereotype of the otaku—that he is unkempt, dresses indifferently, has trouble communicating, and displays little affect—also holds for a sizable swath of research academics. The only difference is that a university-based historian is an eccentric but laudable professional, whereas a lifelong passionate enthusiast of anime about Gundam (sci-fi robots) doesn’t project the same status to most businessmen and bureaucrats.⁵³


Needless to say, the research academic’s mode of expression and dissemination is different from that of the otaku, but not qualitatively so. The research academic writes up and publishes his findings and his theses. The otaku writes his blog and perhaps even publishes a book. Both attend conventions to discuss matters of mutual interest with their colleagues. Here, though, one difference is that most academics at conventions and symposia eventually fall into discussing extra-academic matters (gossip about others, about who got what job, and so on), but otaku tend to talk shop most of the time, with the occasional digression into other common interests, such as B-kyū gurume (class B gourmet) restaurants.


Otaku also make their marks in different ways. For example, a manga otaku I met at Japan’s supreme research library, the National Diet Library, had been conducting a bibliographic analysis of a manga series. His project would have put the great philologists of the past to shame. He had examined variations across distinct issues, or compared the serial version to its book variants, and his work had been so painstaking that he was in a position to publish an editio cum notis variorum. It might be argued that Dryden, say, is more important than Kyojin no hoshi, but the latter surely has more active readers. As another example, my seatmate on a flight in 2015 was an airline otaku who talked for hours about every aspect of contemporary commercial flying. In the previous decade, he had flown more than three million miles. He knew all the ins and outs of several airlines’ frequent-flyer clubs, the details of airlines’ seating arrangements, the levels of service that applied to different classes of air travel on distinct routes, and so on. As yet another example, a railroad otaku, my fellow passenger on a train trip, exhibited encyclopedic knowledge about types of trains and compartments as well as about various routes and their historical variations. There are history otaku and other types of academic otaku. I even encountered an otaku of social theory (one of my own specialties) whose knowledge of Max Weber was astounding. I could easily have dismissed this autodidact—he had not earned a graduate degree. But he did earn my respect with his seriousness and his dedication to the study of Weber (how many Weber scholars own the Gesamtausgabe?). And, as suggested earlier, there are Gundam otaku, such as Suzuki Toshimi, a barber who constructed ten large-scale models of Gundam robots outside his shop. “Sure,” he says, “it’s a hobby. But instead of just living my life, I wanted to give people something to be excited about.”⁵⁴ Another Gundam otaku—this one in his forties, with hundreds of plastic models in his apartment—has amassed his own encyclopedia of model types and variations. “This is my life’s work,” he told me, in English.


THE LEISURE SOCIETY.




The genius of the contemporary economy lies in its transformation of leisure and idleness into consumption and activity.⁵⁵ After work, we keep on working, this time in our role as consumers. We even provide free advertising by way of the corporate logos on our clothing and in the presumably personal views we transmit over social media.


People in Japan, too, like people elsewhere, are enjoined to go out and spend money, or to spend money at home by clicking links on the smartphones that have entered the inner sanctum of personal privacy, the last redoubt of idleness. Indeed, picking up a smartphone is often the first action upon waking and the last before going to sleep. Instead of cultivating their gardens or soaking in a warm bath, Japanese people are glued to the small screen where the central drama is fame and fortune, getting and spending. And if the temptation to soak in a warm bath should break through the continuous injunction to busyness, the smartphone is equipped with a waterproof cover.


If it were possible to summarize, in a simple way, the life of a contemporary Japanese corporate employee, the summary would come down to a series of katsu (activities): studying to get into a college or a university, shūkatsu (looking for employment), konkatsu (looking for a spouse), and, finally, shūkatsu (dying). To the extent that leisure enters the picture at all, it is usually devoted to conspicuous consumption, which itself is a struggle to achieve social recognition, often by establishing invidious comparisons between oneself and others. Thus, as we saw in chapter 5, some people spend more time and energy taking photos of sushi than enjoying the sushi chef’s delectable concoctions. Leisure in Japan is certainly not devoted to sleep. On average, Japanese people don’t sleep much at all.⁵⁶ Moreover, Japanese workers of all kinds—almost all Japanese adults, for that matter—are expected to be other-directed, and the demands on their time can become onerous.


In the past, people managed to find moments of fun. As noted in chapter 5, executives and other businessmen often frequented nightclubs and kyabakura, as well as the less expensive sunakku (literally, “snacks”; the term derives from these establishments’ specialty of serving light meals and drinks).⁵⁷ There, they kept up a stream of banter and flirted, all the while drinking to excess. Not surprisingly, some people describe these establishments as having been fueling stations for businessmen. And there were games, played in the batting cages or on the driving ranges that cropped up in most postwar Japanese neighborhoods. There was also pachinko (Japanese pinball), with all its permutations, a game that probably consumed more of the average office worker’s leisure time than any other activity. What all these pursuits had in common was that they satisfied the desire for either physical pleasure or mindless amusement. Needless to say, people’s free time was not devoted entirely to pursuits like these. People also read books, went to movies, and played music. Still, as a self-described anime otaku in her thirties told me, “I have no idea what my father did in his free time. Sleep? My mother was always doing stuff around the house—cleaning, cooking—though I’m not really sure, since she never talked about it. Anyway, older Japanese people didn’t know how to have fun. They just worked all the time.”


That may or may not have been true. Perhaps office workers in the past were actually less busy than they wanted to appear. Today, though, thanks to the dissemination of otaku culture, it’s not just the young and the restless who are engrossed in a life-consuming hobby. More and more office workers now lead double lives as nocturnal, ostensibly antisocial otaku. The habits of the otaku have spread widely, and Japanese people are increasingly embracing their inner geek.⁵⁸ In fact, the extent of fascinatio nugacitatis—enchantment with triviality—is nothing short of impressive in Japan. In the face of the daily grind of meaningless work, people are finding meaning and purpose in leisure activity. Hobbies and similar obsessions are ubiquitous.


This plethora of hobbies pursued with diligence—a consequence of affluence and the advent of the leisure society—had already become a notable feature of Japanese life by the 1970s, but the explosion of leisure activity coincided with the emergence of the otaku.⁵⁹ The passionate engagement of the otaku represents the modest happiness discussed in chapter 4, a happiness that relies more on fulfillment and experience than on material possessions. Paradoxically, then, the allegedly antisocial, parasitical otaku have shown their elders possibilities for a life beyond the workplace.⁶⁰


The post-Bubble years were particularly important in the dissemination of serious leisure activities, and in some office workers’ transformation into otaku. One middle-aged corporate employee began taking piano lessons after reading a manga about a young woman’s struggle to become a great pianist. “I must have listened to classical music when I was in school,” he said, “but after reading a scene where the protagonist plays a Beethoven sonata, I went out and bought a CD. It was mesmerizing. I discovered a new world.” Another relates a similar story: “I happened to see an illustration by Itō Jakuchū. It was nothing like what I’d thought Edo-era art was like. I read some books, went to galleries and museums, and became an Edo art otaku.” Others simply took what they were already doing to a new level, one that looked fanatical to outsiders but meant, in practice, the sublime level of the otaku. For example, a retired executive said, “I always enjoyed drinking, and I began to enjoy drinking alone. At an izakaya [a tavern or pub-like restaurant], you don’t really drink alone anyway [but I began solo drinking]. I read books about drinking alone and searched for interesting izakaya all around Japan.”


Leisure activity, like life itself, is all about flow. The feeling of aimlessness—the sense of being buffeted by random, incomprehensible forces—can be overcome in part through the pursuit of something in which it is possible to become passionately engaged. As long as that engagement lasts, it can offer meaning and a sense of purpose. Yet there is a long-standing, often troubling (and troublesome) practice of condemning leisure activity. For example, a volatile mixture of resentment and envy was once brought to bear on housewives because they pursued hobbies while apparently enjoying the economic support of their hardworking husbands (some women were even said to devote their free time to extramarital affairs). That misogynistic discourse has faded with women’s reentry into the labor market, but it contained a grain of truth in the sense that Japanese women in general, and housewives in particular, have been less careerist than men, and therefore more inclined to pursue one hobby or another. Some of women’s hobbies have been traditionally female pursuits with a touch of cachet and sophistication, such as tea ceremony or flower arrangement. Others have been faddish, such as hula dancing in the postwar decades or, at the turn of the twenty-first century, listening to K-pop music and binge-watching South Korean television dramas. As an example of the latter obsession, I was seated next to a middle-aged Japanese woman on a flight from Tokyo to Seoul. Immediately after takeoff, she opened a portable DVD player and proceeded to watch a popular South Korean drama. When she noticed that I had a Korean-language newspaper, she began to speak to me in excellent Korean. I asked her how she had learned the language, and she said she had been immersing herself in popular South Korean TV dramas and wanted to understand what the characters were saying. She added that she had traveled to South Korea more than twenty times in the previous five years or so, and that she enjoyed nothing more than being able to talk with an ordinary South Korean about a drama they had both watched (her knowledge of those dramas was breathtaking, by the way). I met another middle-aged Japanese woman who was extremely enthusiastic and well informed about K-pop. Her deep knowledge and dazzling analyses of the genre were the equal of what might be expected from an academic expert. Both women were effectively otaku, and women like the two of them are everywhere now in Japan.


Aristotle, in contrast to almost all other philosophers, takes leisure activity seriously, not only as a means of recovering from fatigue and of preparing for another round of work, but also as something to be pursued for the sake of fulfilling one’s personal potential. Indeed, for Aristotle, leisure activity is “the fundamental principle”; thus leisure activity is not mere play or relaxation but has a purposive element in that it must incorporate such skills and learning as can be used to turn free time in the direction of “pleasure, happiness, and the good life.”⁶¹ (It is not for nothing that Greek skole and Latin scola, the etymological roots of English “school,” denote “leisure.”) Frivolous though an activity may be, there are meanings and purposes to be gained from its pursuit. And, if not everyone can find fulfillment in work by becoming a consummate artisan, there is also no reason to believe that a good society will be one in which everyone endeavors to find and pursue a professional career. This would be a society of diligence, probably an ascetic society. But another avenue is open to almost everyone in an affluent society, an avenue made all the richer because it is enjoyable, fulfilling, and uplifting, with no hangover and no emptiness at the end. As William Morris, echoing Aristotle, puts it, “What other blessings are there in life save . . . fearless rest and hopeful work? [T]o have space and freedom to gain such rest and such work is the end of politics; to learn how best to gain it is the end of education; to learn its inmost meaning is the end of religion.”⁶² I am not sure that we should expect everyone to hew to the two goals of work and leisure. There should be a place for believers as well as for lovers and others who take meaning and sustenance from different sources. In a postaffluent society, a society in which most people have abandoned the comforts of the traditional faiths and social collectivities, or have been through the whirlwind of egoistic hedonism or romantic passion, leisure activity seems the likeliest and most reliable goal.


Leisure activity is a necessary component of the good life, and of a good society. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, or so we believe (though we’re skeptical of those who play all the time). Yet there is a sense in which leisure activity has features in common with artisanal work. Both provide meaning and purpose in life, and both involve projects that enhance personal potential and self-worth.




IKIGAI.




What is thought to be the meaning or worth of an individual life has varied enormously across cultures and throughout history. To take one example, the reigning Western historiography stresses the salience of the Christian God, often omniscient and omnipotent, in order to endow an ephemeral, seemingly pointless life with significance and immortality. To take another, Japan’s wartime imperial-military ideology affirmed that the ultimate fulfillment of life’s purpose was self-sacrifice for the sake of the emperor.⁶³ In the immediate postwar decades, recovery and growth were posited as ultimate values, given the debacle of the war. The contraction of ambition and the curtailment of passion spelled the end of transcendence, including the ideology of rapid economic growth and materialism. Nevertheless, as Epicurus (who was far from the embodiment of what we call Epicurean) might have said, life must offer modest pleasures. But if infinite desire is a self-defeating proposition, aphanisis—the extinction of desire—offers no nirvana, for we would be anxious precisely because we had no desire. This would be the life of acedia about which the medieval scholastics were so exercised. More important, it would be hard to extinguish the quest for meaning and purpose—the will to be, the desire to carry on. Ordinary virtues are not without their rewards, of course, but people still seek deeper reasons for living. For anyone who has even a moment for repose and reflection, the hermeneutical urge is almost irrepressible. Abulia and sloth, emptiness and nothingness—these are dark holes from within which we struggle to instantiate the will to live.


Existential and spiritual questions become all the more urgent once people have escaped the world of dire necessity (that is, when they have acquired adequate means of satisfying basic needs for food and shelter) and moved beyond the universe of received answers (that is, when there are no longer any hegemonic belief systems, such as religion and its secular permutations). In the twenty-first century, grand narratives about God or emperor, nation or revolution, sound hollow to most Japanese people. Despite deep-seated suspicions that contemporary Japanese people remain collectivist and holistic in their orientation, they are usually acutely aware of their individuality as well as of their potential, or actual, loneliness.


We are thrust into the world, where our time is necessarily limited. Alcohol and drugs offer one practical, moderately effective answer to existential anxiety, as does immersion in one total institution or another, whether a “black” corporation (one of the superexploitative companies in contemporary Japan) or a cult, of which there is a wide selection. For most Japanese people, however, there is no immediately available transcendental recourse, no possibility of escape into a received traditional mind-set, and no relief (barring serious cognitive deficits) from existential questions about their personal place and significance in the world. The overwhelmingly worldly orientation of contemporary Japanese life makes the consolations of Christianity or Buddhism incredible and implausible. Without the promise of an afterlife, how do Japanese people find consolation for nothingness, for the apparently meaningless universe and the inevitability of death and extinction? The received answers are unsatisfactory, and the crumbling of the postwar regime can be seen in the inefficacy of the standard postwar bromides about what makes life worthwhile.⁶⁴ The unexamined life, pace philosophers, is worth living, but the ubiquity of the idea of ikigai makes reflection on one’s life (How should I live? What should I live for?) a common theme of thought and conversation in everyday Japanese life.⁶⁵


Kamiya Mieko, a psychiatrist, has written searchingly about ikigai. “For people to continue to live vivaciously,” she says, “there’s nothing more important than ikigai. Therefore, there’s nothing more cruel than to take away people’s ikigai, and there’s no greater love than to give people ikigai.” For Kamiya, ikigai is intimately intertwined with hariai (something worthwhile). “People find it intolerable to live alone, in a vacuum,” she says. In order to live well, people need validation—the sense that they exist and matter, that they have efficacy in and responses from the world. Kamiya goes on to say that the sense of having a life worth living entails an orientation toward the future and a sense of purpose—devotion to a cause, a pursuit. Ikigai, she writes, is not a matter of the usefulness one has developed and accumulated over time, nor of the sheer length of time one has lived. Rather, ikigai is all about mattering, about meaningful living, and it leads to a series of questions: What is the purpose of my life? What is my purpose in life? Is my life worth living? Is life worth living?⁶⁶ The answers are necessarily very idiosyncratic, and they differ from one individual to another. Ikigai is a general concept, but its individual articulation is particular—it is mine.


Ikigai overlaps with happiness, but there are important differences. Happiness, as studied by positive psychology and preached by the popular Japanese religious group Happy Science, tends to be conflated with pleasure, with what makes one feel good. The notion of happiness is subjective: to say that one is happy is to offer a descriptive statement, but the description includes no temporal dimension or values-oriented content. The idea of ikigai, by contrast, does include a temporal dimension, which links the past (through the faculty of memory) and the future (through the faculty of imagination and the shaping provided by a sense of purpose). In addition, ikigai’s purposive teleology closely conforms to the sense of self and entails a values orientation.⁶⁷ Happiness, in short, is desire fulfilled. Ikigai spiritualizes desire and locates it within one’s life span and life project.


For Kamiya, ikigai exists beyond biological needs and is not synonymous with sociological security. It cannot be cultivated in desperate times—during famine or war, for example—because the life force itself and the need to survive will preclude opportunities for sustained reflection on life’s purposes. Nor can ikigai be planned and implemented, because determinism, or outside forces, will squelch the sense of possibility required for ikigai. Without individual freedom, striving is meaningless; that is, without a sense of efficacy, of the power to produce effects in the world, there can be no sense of life that has been lived. The undermining and weakening of ikigai stem from the darkness of death, biological or sociological. Kamiya does not claim that people are completely free. The individual’s agency is limited. But the individual must believe in his personal agency before he can have reasons for living. As in Stoicism, there are areas of life that one can change and areas that one cannot change. The challenge, once basic needs have been met, is to strive to accomplish what one can but accept that there are things one cannot do, such as avoid mortality.


A classic reference point for thinking about ikigai is Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru (To Live). The movie opens with a voice-over narration describing an office worker: “Busy, always so very busy. But in fact this man does absolutely nothing at all. Other than protecting his own spot.” But this consummate bureaucrat has received a death sentence—a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Moved as he is to drain what is left of his life down to the dregs, he looks for consolation in alcohol and sex. But a young hostess asks him if there is anything he would like to make or to do, and his moment of epiphany comes concretely, in the form of his desire to build a park. In so doing, he finds his life’s purpose—his meaning. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 movie, Wandafuru raifu (After Life), offers a slightly different perspective. In the film’s version of purgatory, each person must come up with a memory of a defining moment, of something the person is most proud of or finds most striking, and around this memory a film will be made about his or her life. When I asked people in Japan to perform this exercise, it was interesting that nobody mentioned a memory of work. Central though work is, most corporate employees cited memories from childhood. One proudly recalled running a race at school and finishing first. Another remembered his first, unrequited romance. Several women talked with wonder about giving birth for the first time. In general, it seems, life’s significance lies in what one pursues with purpose, whether that means winning a playground race or becoming a mother. The discourse of ikigai occasions reflection and, necessarily, regret. One thinks of redoing or resetting one’s life (the childhood wasted on frivolity, the occupation not pursued, the love that was not to be).⁶⁸ Reflecting backward, living forward—ikigai makes a richer inner life possible, though perhaps it will be accompanied at times by pain and regret.


Among artisans and others for whom work is fulfilling in and of itself, the problem of ikigai is not a clear and present danger. Yet ikigai is a serious challenge for office workers who face mandatory retirement at the age of sixty or sixty-five.⁶⁹ As a septuagenarian retiree remarked, “If you have nothing going on in your life when you retire, it’s too late for you. Some of my colleagues died. Others became incapacitated. We need ikigai.” Many office workers—forced to overachieve or overwork, or having chosen to do so—have led lives devoted to their organizational roles and have built many major relationships around their work lives. For them, retirement comes as a rude shock. In other words, in an extended act of what Jean-Paul Sartre called mauvaise foi (bad faith), they have spent years turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the existential question of ikigai.


There are retirees who crash and implode. No one keeps statistics on those who die from a sense of obsolescence—from lack of ikigai—but it is not hard to get older people to name people they knew who died when they lost their place at work, and therefore in life. Some retirees suffer from loss of meaning, a loss intensified by having nowhere to go and nothing to do. Boredom and apathy are common outcomes for these retirees—idleness begets incapacity. Others, having lost their daily commute, decide to colonize the family home; they hijack the family’s life and place undue stress on their wives to serve them during the day, or they make demands for more efficient household management.⁷⁰ In Yōji Yamada’s 2016 film, Kazoku wa tsuraiyo (What a Wonderful Family!), one of many twenty-first-century representations of the postretirement blues, the protagonist, an office worker who has been put out to pasture, finds all his hopes for his golden years dashed when his wife of fifty years demands a divorce. The film ends well for this protagonist, but the same cannot be said for many white-collar retirees, whose wives and grown children call them (and treat them like) sodai gomi (bulky trash), unattractive and with no apparent purpose in life. Some of these men even go on to live in a place overwhelmed by trash, as in Junrei (Pilgrimage), a novel by Hashimoto Osamu, in which an elderly man turns his house into a virtual garbage dump reminiscent of the house and grounds in the film Grey Gardens (1975).⁷¹


The logic of the bureaucratic organization, however small that organization may be, is that the individual plays a role and is therefore replaceable. No one, no matter how charismatic or brilliant, is indispensable to any bureaucratic organization of any size. As a result, no matter how easily one has been able to find meaning and purpose in life while employed by the organization, it becomes very difficult to do so when one’s employment comes to an end. One may have enjoyed high status in the organization, but retirement imposes a rough equality. One’s organizational title and rank are stripped away, and one must now move through the social world as an old person. Especially when one has enjoyed organizational success, coming to terms with the reality of its loss is like experiencing all the bitterness of the samurai’s life, but without the customary sartorial markers and social sustenance.


Hagakure is regarded as the bible of samuraihood. The prewar military generals were said to read it every day. Like most other classics, it has been reduced to a few selective quotations, which are tantamount to misquotations, such as that “the foundation of bushido,” or the way of the samurai, “is death.”⁷² The author of Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, propounds absolute loyalty for the samurai—obedience unto death—but his life philosophy is larger than this occupational injunction. In his autobiographical reflections, he does not regret that he left his job after his lord’s death, and he suggests guidelines for living.⁷³ “A human being’s life is very short,” he says, having himself retired early. “Therefore, one should spend time doing things one likes. . . . It is stupid to spend life in pain, not doing things one likes.”⁷⁴


Not everyone wants to be like Yamamoto and write a treatise on ikigai. But when it comes to finding reasons for living after retirement, a leaf can be borrowed from the book of the otaku, and a surprising number of retirees are seriously interested in studying.⁷⁵ There are retirees who are involved in numerous other pursuits as well. For instance, a woman in her seventies found her life’s work after retirement when she volunteered to help impoverished refugees and immigrants learn the Japanese language and explore Japanese culture. “I’ve found nothing more rewarding than trying to teach them,” she told me. “I feel really useful, and I think I’m really helping them.” Others look to more self-centered pursuits, such as mastering a sport (golf, for example) or a board game like Go. These retirees have no interest in acquiring professional-level skills in these sports or games, but there are many tournaments and other venues where the competition is challenging yet friendly.


What has been striking about the post-Bubble decades in Japan is the strong tendency of Japanese people in general to embrace the ordinary and to find ikigai in everyday life. As for retirees, one plausible way for them to live is to embrace their decline and resist the dictate of busyness that dominates so many lives. Thus Higuchi Yūichi encourages those who are sixty-five and older—those who have retired—to have “the courage to do nothing.”⁷⁶ What Higuchi is proposing is not the achievement of a Zen state of nothingness but rather self-emancipation from the externally imposed imperative to do something. Time is precious, but it is one’s own to burn or waste freely—and honorably.


SHINIGAI.


Then there is death. If philosophy is preparation for death, then either contemporary philosophy has lost its way, or many have been wrong about the task of philosophy. The striking achievement of the twentieth century, at least in the affluent parts of the world, is that death is no longer an everyday affair. One can go a long time without seeing anyone dying or dead. Life expectancy has nosed up into the ninth decade, and there’s a common saying in Japan that people should expect to live for one hundred years. No wonder the Grim Reaper and the Japanese equivalent, Shinigami, have such a low profile. At the same time, the news about Japan’s aging society is not all good. Many people in their last years are burdened with pain and other kinds of suffering, and their desire for a peaceful death, perhaps at home, surrounded by loved ones—their shinigai (reasons for dying), we might say—often remains unfulfilled.⁷⁷ It is a strange form of biopolitics that seeks quantitative lengthening of life—vita without vitality—but does not ponder the quality of life. As in economic growth, so too in life—more is not necessarily better. A person benefits at least as much from reflection on ars moriendi as on ars vivendi.


Kobori Kōichirō, a retired surgeon, observes that in modern Western medicine as he practiced it, death was seen as defeat, pure and simple, and aging was to be resisted.⁷⁸ According to this line of thinking, the longer the life, the better; patients are enjoined to fight aging and struggle against death. After Kobori’s formal retirement from surgery, he became involved with a regional hospital and made home visits to dying people. He witnessed hundreds of cases in which the patient, the patient’s family members and friends, and the medical staff, all in denial about the finality of death, made unfortunate choices that exacerbated pain and suffering.⁷⁹ Kobori now argues for a paradigm shift in palliative care, with more investment in end-of-life care infrastructure, a shifting of the site of death from the clinic back to the patient’s home, and greater involvement of the patient’s family members. Kobori’s fervent hope is that more doctors will spend time individually with dying people in their last days.⁸⁰ And perhaps family members and friends, too, will find that their involvement in hospice work serves as a reminder of their own mortality, illuminating the lives of the dying but also shedding light on the preciousness that life still has for the living. The pursuit of shinigai is another sort of ikigai.


Just as different regimes have honored different ways of death—consider, for instance, the celebration of the kamikaze pilots under the prewar regime—Japanese people over time have held various views about life, death, and the afterlife.⁸¹ And despite the dissemination of progressive ideology, there is still widespread awareness of life’s simultaneous preciousness and finitude, a concept that is often expressed as mono no aware (the pathos of things), one that incorporates both the assumption of impermanence and an appreciation of the haecceity—the “thisness” or “thusness”—of things, the ephemeral beauty of existence.⁸² Premodern samurai and, later, the modern Japanese military appropriated this concept for purposes of their own, but it serves as a contemporary reminder of mortality, an ordinary realization of ontological finitude. It serves, in other words, as a final chapter in the consideration of ikigai, or shinigai.


Ikigai and shinigai, like love and life, can be discussed only in the abstract but in fact are experienced and expressed only in the concrete. The inevitable chasm makes it difficult to say anything meaningful about ikigai or shinigai. Let me conclude, then, by noting the sheer distance between, on one hand, the people of the Edo era, who, though plagued by disease and surrounded by death, seem to have been insouciant about mortality and, on the other hand, their contemporary descendants who live with exaggerated fear for their safety and their lives even as they enjoy unprecedented security and longevity.⁸³ Kōda Rohan’s Edo-era novella Gojūnotō (The five-storied pagoda) offers a vivid sketch of the inaccessible Edo shokunin spirit. The protagonist—Jūbei, a carpenter—is nicknamed Nossori (meaning, roughly, “slow and quiet”). He has achieved nothing of significance but wants to build a pagoda, or tower. He says repeatedly that it would be fine for him to die if only he were first able to undertake his life’s work.⁸⁴ It is not that Jūbei hungers for fame or fortune, or that he seeks to realize his desire out of vanity. Rather, the tower will be a proof of life, and its realization will be a moment of both transcendence and immanence, a synthesis that sublimates his being. Kōda makes it clear that the novella is not about dense networks of human relations and expectations—it is not, in other words, about giri ninjō (ethical obligations and humane feelings)—nor does it represent the modern quest for the true self. In fact, Jūbei’s struggle to build the tower, a job entrusted to him by a Buddhist priest, has almost nothing to do with self-satisfaction or self-development. It is simply embedded in his life as a carpenter, a shokunin. In the teeth of a ferociously destructive storm, Jūbei becomes despondent, but only because he believes that the priest has lost confidence in his artisanship. This artisan is willing to go down with his tower—the artisanal ethos is free of egocentric desire, untouched by the hubris of human autonomy. The tower and the story are all that remain.⁸⁵ Very few people today could resuscitate Jūbei’s shokunin spirit within themselves (and it is unclear how desirable that would be). That spirit is alien to modern temperaments. But it points to a way of living life: if one should lose what makes life worthwhile, it would not matter if one died; knowledge of what makes life worthwhile is what is worth recognizing and preserving.


In the novel Junrei, mentioned earlier, Hashimoto traces the life of his protagonist, a straight arrow who has lived through the period of Japan’s rapid economic growth but now, in retirement, lives in a house overflowing with discarded objects not unlike his own life, objects whose value he tries to redeem. Only when his younger brother comes to help him does the protagonist allow all the accumulated detritus to be hauled away. His brother urges him to go on a pilgrimage to Shikoku so as to discover the meaning of living, and is relieved to see his older brother smiling with delight while eating tempura. “My brother has finally chosen to live,” the younger brother says to himself, but he is surprised when his older brother dies in his sleep that very night.⁸⁶ In the end he decides that his brother, upon realizing that he had undertaken a pilgrimage with no purpose, finally accepted his life and his death and let himself be pulled into the void. A life without a reason for living is hollow, like the mindless accumulation of things and pleasures. And so it goes in the quest for ikigai.

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CHAPTER 8. IKIGAI 
 
1.  Hashimoto Osamu, Tatoe sekai ga owattemo (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2017), 235, 
243. 
2.  Helen Hardacre, Shintō (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 
2016). 
3.  The classic argument remains Ishida Takeshi, Meiji seiji shisōshi kenkyū 
(Tokyo: Miraisha, 1954). 
4.  Murakami Shigeyoshi, Gendai shūkyō to seiji (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku 
Shuppankai, 1978). 
5.  There are reasons to be skeptical about how many true believers there were 
in Japan even at the height of the prewar regime. As a proxy measure of true 
believers, the highest figure presented for the number of Japanese people who 
committed suicide at the end of the war is just over five hundred (they were 
primarily high military officials), and there are almost no reports of mass civilian 
suicide; see Oka Kiyoshi, “Jobun,” in Nukata Hiroshi, ed., Seiki no jiketsu (Tokyo: 
Fuyō Shobō, 1968), 8. This is in striking contrast to Nazi Germany, where at least 
seven thousand people under the Third Reich committed suicide in Berlin alone, 
and there were also numerous reports of mass suicide; see Christian Goeschel, 
Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 159–66. Even 
more striking is the fact that so many German civilians committed suicide, 
presumably from despair as they saw the Nazi dream crumbling and going down 
to defeat. Some even enjoined their children to kill themselves; see Florian 
Huber, Kind, versprich mir, dass du dich erschieβt (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2015). 
Whatever else one may say about Nazi Germany, it had its share of true believers. 
6.  Murakami Shigeyoshi, Kokka Shintō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), i–ii. 
As for the previously divine Emperor Hirohito, in the 1960s he ranked only 
fourteenth among people whom the Japanese most respected, far behind 
Abraham Lincoln (in first place) and Florence Nightingale; see Mita Munesuke, 
Gendai Nihon no seishin kōzō (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1965), 69. 
7.  See John Lie, Multiethnic Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 
2001), 130–36. According to a survey published by Japan’s NHK Broadcasting 
Culture Research Institute, the imperial household remains popular, but it is safe 
to say that the dominant attitude toward State Shintō is benign indifference, to 
judge by data from the majority (60 to 70 percent) of the respondents; see NHK 
Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūjo, Gendai Nihonjin no ishiki kōzō, 7th ed. (Tokyo: NHK Hōsō 
Bunka Kenkyūjo, 2010), 119–23. 
8.  Joseph M. Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese History (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 1966), 331–32. 
9.  See Nishihara Shigeki, “Shūkyō,” in Tōkei Sūri Kenkyūjo and Kokuminsei 
Chōsa Iinkai, eds., Dai4 Nihonjin no kokuminsei (Tokyo: Idemitsu Shoten, 1982); 
and Tōkei Sūri Kenkyūjo, Dentōteki kachikan to mijikana seikatsu ishiki ni kansuru 
ishikichōsa hōkokusho (Tokyo: Tōkei Sūri Kenkyūjo, 2011), 33–35. Only 16 percent 
of Japanese respondents to a survey conducted in the 1980s reported that they 
were willing to sacrifice their personal interests for the sake of a collective 
national goal, whereas more than 70 percent of respondents in the United States 
and South Korea expressed willingness to make that sacrifice; see Nishihara 
Shigeki, Yoron chōsa ni okeru dōjidaishi (Tokyo: Burēn Shuppan, 1987), 98. More 
than 78 percent of respondents to a 2003 survey claimed not to participate in 
civic life of any kind, and fewer than 9 percent acknowledged being members of 
an organized religious group; see Ishii Kenji, Dētabukku gendai Nihonjin no 
shūkyō, rev. ed. (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2007), 57–61. In the same year, 77 percent of respondents to another poll claimed to have no interest in religion; see Ichiro 
Tanioka, Noriko Iwai, Michio Nitta, and Hiroki Sato, Japanese General Social 
Survey (JGSS) 2003 (Ann Arbor: Inter-university Consortium for Political and 
Social Research, University of Michigan, 2003), 
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR04242.v1 (tellingly, later surveys in this series did 
not include questions on religion and religiosity). And, according to a 2017 Gallup 
poll, 29 percent of Japanese people are confirmed atheists, another 31 percent say 
they are not religious, and only 13 percent claim to be religious; see Worldwide 
Independent Network of Market Research and Gallup International, “Religion 
Prevails in the World,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine, 
https://web.archive.org/web/20171114113506/http://www.wingia.com/web/files/news/370/file/370.pdf. 
10.  Yamaori Tetsuo, Kindai Nihonjin no shūkyō ishiki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 
1996), 2. 
11.  The nineteenth-century Edoites, though worldly and relatively irreligious, 
were deeply superstitious. Their descendants have dropped such superstitions as 
not living on the fourth floor of a building (the Japanese word for “four” is a 
homonym of the word for “death”) and seeking expert opinions on fêng shui 
(geomancy), though this is not to deny the curious persistence of interest in ways 
to divine personality traits and future romantic possibilities by way of astrology or 
blood types. But if the old superstitions have gone by the board, there is 
nevertheless widespread fear in Japan—of the unknown, of terrorists, and of 
religion in general with its connections to brainwashing and acts of terror. 
12.  Kōfuku no Kagaku (Happy Science) is as representative of these new 
religious groups as any. Initiated in 1986, it claims to be a religion of love, peace, 
and happiness that synthesizes the teachings of Jesus and Muhammad, Buddha 
and Confucius. Its founder, Ōkawa Ryūhō, has established a political party, in 
seeming rivalry with the Buddhist sect Sōka Gakkai (itself founded by Ikeda 
Daisaku) and its powerful political party, Kōmeitō. In his latest tract, the founder 
of Kōfuku no Kagaku has moved on to identifying the laws of bronze and 
discussing Socrates and Sakamoto Ryōma; see Ōkawa Ryūhō, Seidō no hō (Tokyo: 
Kōfuku no Kagaku Shuppan, 2018). 
13.  Yamamoto Shichihei and Komuro Naoki, Nihonkyō no shakaigaku (Tokyo: 
Kōdansha, 1981). But if contemporary Japanese people’s belief in Japaneseness 
entails respect for the notion of the community and for the salience of the larger 
society, the Japanese nevertheless remain stubborn individualists. In 1971, for 
example, 32 percent were reported to privilege the individual over the country, and 
by 2011 that proportion had risen to 56 percent; see Naikakufu Daijin Kanbō Seifu 
Kōhōshitsu, Shakai ishiki ni kansuru yoron chōsa (Tokyo: Naikakufu Daijin Kanbō 
Seifu Kōhōshitsu, 2017), 21, 29. By contrast with the prewar generations, the 
overwhelming majority of Japanese people born after 1945 place greater value on 
the individual pursuit of personal likes and preferences than on the family, the 
community, or the nation; see NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūjo, Gendai Nihonjin no 
ishikikōzō, 8th ed. (Tokyo: NHK Shuppan, 2015), 162–68; and Tōkei Sūri Kenkyūjo 
and Kokuminsei Chōsa Iinkai, Dai5 Nihonjin no kokuminsei (Tokyo: Idemitsu 
Shoten, 2003), 66–84. It is very difficult to shake most Japanese people’s 
fundamental faith in the ontological uniqueness and distinctiveness of the 
individual. 
14.  What is more significant is the continuing legacy of folk spirituality, not 
only with respect to seasonal rituals but also regarding concern for hotoke (the 
dead, or a menagerie of living and deceased spirits). The Edo-era practice of 
splashing water or placing mounds of salt in front of a house remains remarkably 
persistent (though not in urban areas, given the dominance of high-rise 
apartment buildings). The archaeological accretion of Japanese religious history 
survives as an eclectic and syncretic modality of spirituality, which includes 
something like a religion of nothingness that still resonates deeply, as in the 
frequently invoked idea of ichigo ichie, or the ephemerality of life. Indeed, it has 
been suggested that the relative absence of religious affiliation in contemporary 
Japan is in fact an identification with the religion of nothingness; see Yamaori 
Tetsuo, Shinzuru shūkyō, kanzuru shūkyō (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronshinsha, 2008), 
27–28. 
15.  In more mundane terms, and in the words of a quotation misattributed to 
Sigmund Freud, “Love and work are the cornerstone of our humanness”; see 
BrainyQuote, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/sigmund_freud_165464. On 
the misattribution as such, see Alan C. Elms, “Apocryphal Freud,” Annual of 
Psychoanalysis 29 (2001), 83–104. Cf. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (New York: 
Schocken, 1995). 
16.  See, for example, the plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, in which what we 
would call romantic passion comes up against the intransigent realities of rigid 
social norms; a representative work would be Sonezaki shinjū (1703). 
17.  Yanabu Akira, Hon’yakugo seiritsu jijō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), 
89–97. See also the suggestive essay by Itō Sei, “Kindai Nihon ni okeru ‘ai’ no 
kyogi” (1962), in Kindai Nihonjin no hassō no shokeishiki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 
1981): “We imported ‘love.’ But we didn’t import prayer or repentance, the dowry 
or a sufficient income on the husband’s part” (153). According to Itō, love became 
fallacious in Japan without a Western background of Christianity and economics; 
in the West, he argues, there is a tendency to achieve inner peace through stable 
social relations, whereas in the East, by contrast, there is a tendency to hesitate to 
form egalitarian relationships (140). 
18.  The 1953–54 film version, which aired on NHK from 1952 to 1954, was 
directed by Ōba Hideo and is loosely related to the 2016 anime directed by 
Shinkai Makoto. 
19.  Kajiwara Ikki and Nagayasu Takumi, Ai to Makoto, 16 vols. (Tokyo: 
Kōdansha, 1973–76). 
20.  Fukunaga Takehiko, Ai no kokoromi (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1956). 
21.  Ōshima Michiko and Kōno Makoto, Ai to shi wo mitsumete (Tokyo: Daiwa 
Shobō, 1963). See also Sonia Ryang, Love in Modern Japan (Abingdon, UK: 
Routledge, 2006), 75–90. 
22.  It is possible to argue that for the wartime generation, before the end of 
World War II, the significance of death far outweighed the significance of love, 
and that after the war, economic recovery and material pursuits also outweighed 
love. In this respect, the sociologist Mita Munesuke’s study of popular song 
lyrics considers more than twenty themes, including anger and joy, but not love 
(though Mita does consider bojō, which denotes affection or longing and possibly 
love, but only in the sense of agape); see Mita Munesuke, Kindai Nihon no shinjō 
no rekishi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1967). 
23.  Yanagisawa Kimio, Tonda kappuru, 15 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1978–81); 
Takahashi Rumiko, Mezon Ikkoku, 15 vols. (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1980–87). 
24.  Saimon Fumi, Tokyo rabusutōrī, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1990). To be 
sure, one of the two love interests in Yanagisawa Kimio’s Tonda kappuru is also 
decisive and expressive. 
25.  Natsume Sōseki, Kōjin (1913). 
aozora.gr.jp/cards/000148/files/775_14942.html. 
26.  Sōseki Natsume, And Then (1909), trans. Norma Moore Field (Tokyo: 
Tuttle, 2011), 202. 
27.  These amorous symptoms are brilliantly anatomized by Roland Barthes, 
Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977). 
28.  Watanabe, Shitsurakuen. 
29.  Louise Bogan, “Juan’s Song,” in The Blue Estuaries (New York: Farrar, 
Straus & Giroux, 1968), 10. 
30.  The phrase is in the banner added to the cover of the book’s Japanese 
edition. See Murakami Haruki, Noruwei no mori, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997). 
See also Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood, trans. Jay Rubin (New York: Vintage 
International, 2010). In Murakami Haruki Shinbun, Murakami suggests that his 
preferred phrase would have been “This is 100 percent Murakami Haruki’s realist 
novel”; see “It’s a 100% Love Story,” Haruki Murakami Newspaper, 
http://murakami-haruki-times.com/100percentlovestory/. Be that as it may, most 
readers regarded the novel as a love story, as is blatantly clear from the 2010 film 
version directed by Tran Anh Hung. 
31.  Okazaki Kyōko, Ribāsuejji (1994; reprinted, Tokyo: Takarajimasha, 2015). 
32.  Umino Tsunami, Nigeru wa haji da ga yaku ni tatsu, 9 vols. (Tokyo: 
Kōdansha, 2013–17). The original manga had a Hungarian subtitle, Szégyen a 
futás, de hasznos. 
33.  Matsuura Rieko, Nachuraru ūman (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1991); 
Matsuura Rieko, Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha 1993). 
34.  Matsuura Rieko, Kenshin (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2007); Tawada Yōko, 
Inumukoiri (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993). The word mukoiri (rather cumbersome to 
translate into English) denotes adoption by one’s wife’s family upon marriage. 
35.  Mizumura Minae, Honkaku shōsetsu, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2002). 
36.  Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun, trans. Philip 
Gabriel (New York: Vintage, 2000), 4. 
37.  Divorce, once an affront to the sacrosanct family, became common, and if 
it still carried a whiff of embarrassment, it was seen as a garden-variety error, a 
venial sin. At the same time, there has been a precipitous decline in the total 
Japanese fertility rate (that is, the mean number of births per woman over her 
lifetime). Until 1974 the total fertility rate was higher than 2.0, but in the 
twenty-first century it has fluctuated between 1.26 and 1.45; see World Bank, 
“Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman)—Japan,” 1960–2019, 
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=JP. Whatever 
the causes of Japan’s declining fertility—the usual suspects include the difficulty 
of childrearing in a two-career household and the considerable expense of having 
children, especially when it comes to their education—there is no doubt that the 
typical twenty-first-century Japanese family is not the same as in the immediate 
postwar decades. And not only are there fewer children, but there are fewer 
marriages, and the unions are of shorter duration. In fact, nearly 66 percent of 
respondents to a 2013 survey said that there is no need for marriage; see NHK 
Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūjo, Gendai Nihonjin no ishikikōzō (2015), 2.
====
38.  Yoshinaga Fumi, Kinō nani tabeta?, 17 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2007–20). 
39.  See Ikeda Riyoko, Berusaiyu no bara, 13 vols. (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1972–73). 
The series depicts a turbulent love affair during the French Revolution (the very 
definition of turbulence and tumult). This work is significant in that it established 
gender-based manga written by and for women, though some trace the genre to 
Tezuka Osamu’s Ribon no kishi (available in English as Princess Knight). From at 
least the era of Yamagishi Ryōko’s Hiidurutokoro no tenshi (1980–84), the primary 
romantic relationship had been between two men. By the twenty-first century, this 
genre, often called yayoi, had come to be known as BL (boys’ love) manga. 
40.  The novel is Kodama, Otto no chinpo ga hairanai (Tokyo: Fusōsha, 2017), 
and the manga version is Kodama and Gotō Yukiko, Otto no chinpo ga hairanai, 5 
vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2018–20). 
41.  Ōtsuka Eiji, Otaku no seishinshi, rev. ed. (Tokyo: Seikaisha, 2016; 1st ed., 
2004), 44; Azuma, Dōbutsukasuru posutomodan. 
42.  In 1988 and 1989, a number of girls were kidnapped and murdered by a 
young man whose room was overflowing with manga and anime, and this 
sensational crime helped cement the perfidious image of the otaku; see Ōtsuka, 
Otaku no seishinshi, chap. 6 (see also chap. 24 for the impact of the Aum 
Shinrikyō cult). 
43.  The otaku do not quite belong to the ranks of furītā and nīto, the under- 
and unemployed young people who are demonized as only slightly more 
functional than the hikikomori (Japan’s urban agoraphobics, young adults 
suffering from acute social withdrawal and fear of leaving the house); see Honda 
Yuki, Naitō Asao, and Gotō Kazutomo, Nītotte iuna! (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2006), 
38–41, 220–22 (the discourse of nīto stresses not only deviance from the previous 
generation’s norms of work and ambition but also criminality). Willingly or not, 
however, the otaku do not lead the regimented life of the office worker, and so 
they deviate socially and psychologically from the dominant lifestyle of the 
postwar regime. In the mid-2010s there was considerable discussion about young 
men who, unlike their aggressive, “carnivorous” elders, had become meek 
“vegetarians” (more symbolic than actual culinary orientations); this discourse 
formed part of a story about declining masculinity, a putative cause of Japan’s 
declining marriage and fertility rates. 
44.  The scale of sex work is staggering: an estimated 350,000 women work in 
the sex industry (fūzoku), with an array of services ranging from deriheru (health 
delivery, entailing the delivery of sex-related services) to the long-standing 
sōpurando (soaplands, that is, bathhouses with sexual services); see Nakamura 
Atsuhiko, Nihon no fūzokujō (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2014), 38–69. In addition, 
perhaps 10,000 women every year enter the vast industry of pornographic video, 
usually called AV (for “adult video”); see Mori Yoshiyuki, Adaruto bideo ura no 
sekai (Tokyo: Takarajimasha, 2012), 5. 
45.  See Miyadai Shinji, Ishihara Hideki, and Ōtsuka Akiko, Sabukaruchā 
shinwa kaitai (Tokyo: PARCO, 1993), 40–49. 
46.  Hiraoka Masaaki, Momoe wa Bosatsu de aru, complete ed., ed. Yomota 
Inuhiko (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2015; 1st ed., 1979). 
47.  Hamano Satoshi, Maeda Atsuko wa Kirisuto wo koeta (Tokyo: Chikuma 
Shobō, 2012). 
48.  Nakano Hitori, Densha otoko (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2004). 
49.  On the political economy of Japanese subculture, see Nissim Kadosh 
Otmazgin, Regionalizing Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). 
50.  Ōizumi Mitsunari, Otaku to wa nanika? (Tokyo: Sōshisha, 2017), 240–47. 
51.  Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (c. 401 BCE), in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed. and 
trans., Loeb Classical Library, vol. 21: Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, 
Oedipus at Colonus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 547. 
52.  Puzzled outsiders’ reactions to the ubiquitous otaku slang term moe, 
which expresses strong attraction and enthusiasm, are symptomatic of the 
general misrecognition regarding the otaku’s passionate inner life. For example, 
the father of a single otaku woman in her thirties asked, “Why can’t she say, ‘I 
love you’ or ‘I like that’? Instead, it’s ‘moe.’ What is that? Is it moyamoya [uneasy] 
or moeru [burning]? I don’t understand.” There is in fact a curious convergence 
between the meaning of moe and Motoori’s classic definition of mono no aware 
(usually rendered in English as “the pathos of things”) as “to feel deeply in the 
soul” about something. Thus the consummate eighteenth-century thinker 
anticipates the soul of otaku folk; see Motoori Nobunaga, 
“Isonokamisasamegoto” (1763), Ashiwake obune, isonokamisasamegoto (Tokyo: 
Iwanami Shoten, 2003), 177. 

53.  The object of study should not determine that study’s worth (though I 
hasten to add that this illusory correlation does fuel much research in the social 
sciences). The pursuit of a dream, of purposefulness, is not something to be 
judged by its content. Just as one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, 
something that is of consuming interest to one person may leave many others 
cold. A passionate interest may fade over time and even disappear, but a new 
interest may appear. The point is not the transcendental importance or long 
duration of the interest. Rather, it is having something to be interested in. 
54.  Tokyo Shinbun, 11 May 2019. 
55.  The locus classicus of this argument remains Theodor W. Adorno and 
Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944; reprinted, Frankfurt am Main: 
Fischer, 1988). 
56.  The average amount of sleep in Japan in 2015 was seven hours and 
forty-three minutes—a full hour less than the 1960 average. The 2015 US average was eight hours and thirty-six minutes. See Japan Institute of Sleep Science, 
“Sleep Situation of Modern People,” 
https://www.nishikawasangyo.co.jp/company/laboratory/topics/01/. 
57.  There are more than one hundred thousand sunakku in Japan, which 
means that sunakku are more common than the ubiquitous izakaya (taverns or 
pub-like restaurants) and only slightly less common than real-estate offices. A 
sunakku is primarily for eating, drinking, and conversation. The sunakku exists 
outside the so-called water trade of sexually tinged clubs and bars, and so its 
servers, almost all women, must sit across from rather than next to their 
customers, who are almost all men. The figures regarding sunakku are from 
Taniguchi Kōichi, “Sunakku kenkyū kotohajime,” in Taniguchi Kōichi, ed., Nihon 
no yoru no kōkyoken (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 2017), 16. 
58.  Katō Hitoshi, Teinengo (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2007), 26–28. 
59.  On this point, the pioneering analysis is Miyadai, Ishihara, and Ōtsuka, 
Sabukaruchā shinwa no kaitai. The Tokyo neighborhood described in chapter 6 of 
this book has two shops dedicated to old jazz LPs, and the bookstore in that 
neighborhood has a full shelf of new books on jazz. Moreover, an almost 
maniacal devotion to waning musical genres (waning in the United States, 
anyway) can be observed in everything from the demotic (such as blues) to the 
Olympian (such as Western classical music). The passionate pursuit of jazz or 
classical is surely otaku by another name.
===
60.  Compare Furuichi Noritoshi, Zetsubō no kuni no kōfuku na wakamonotachi 
(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2011), chap. 6; and Futagaki Nōki, Nīto ga hiraku kōfuku shakai 
Nippon (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2012), chap. 2. 
61.  Aristotle, Politics (c. 350 BCE), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol.2, 
ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 1337b. See 
also Josef Pieper, Musse und Kult (Munich: Kösel, 1947), chap. 2. 
62.  William Morris, “The Lesser Arts of Life” (1882), in The Collected Works of 
William Morris, vol. 22, 269. 
63.  The members of the tokkōtai (kamikaze pilots, as they’re known to 
outsiders) and their ilk were not poorly educated. On the contrary, many of them 
were overeducated and excessively idealistic. It is bracing to read their diaries and 
letters, which convey the pilots’ moral sincerity through references to a veritable 
Who’s Who of modern Western philosophy, from Marx to Heidegger. To be sure, 
we should not overlook the curated and justificatory character of these accounts, 
often composed after the war by the pilots’ survivors; see Hidaka Kōtarō, 
Fujichaku (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsuōraisha, 2006). 
64.  Gordon Mathews, What Makes Life Worth Living? (Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 1996), 232–38. 
65.  Mathews, What Makes Life Worth Living? 12–16. 
66.  Kamiya Mieko, Ikigai ni tsuite (1966; reprinted, Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 
2004), 7, 11, 31. 
67.  Kamiya, Ikigai ni tsuite, 28–29. 
68.  When respondents to one survey were asked what they would do if they 
could live their lives over again, they most commonly replied that they would 
study more, or better; see Asahi Shinbun, 18 May 2019. 
69.  As late as 1981, Japan had more companies with a mandated retirement 
age of fifty-five or younger than companies with a retirement age of sixty or older. 
By the turn of the millennium, however, less than 1 percent of Japanese 
companies had a formal retirement age of fifty-five or younger. See Kōsei 
Rōdōshō (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare), Koyō kanri chōsa (Tokyo: 
Kōsei Rōdōshō, 2014). 
70.  Katō Jin, Teinengo (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998). According to one 
writer, many diseases exist—fugenbyō (literally, “father-created illnesses”)—that 
are caused by retired husbands who put stress on their wives; see Ishikura 
Fuminobu, Fugenbyō (Osaka: Osaka Daigaku Shuppankai, 2011). 
71.  See Hashimoto Osamu, Junrei (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2009). (The 1975 film 
Grey Gardens was directed by Albert and David Maysles.) 
72.  Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure (1716), ed. Kanno Kakumyō, Kurihara 
Gō, Kizawa Kei, and Sugahara Reiko, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2017), 35. 
73.  Yamamoto, Hagakure, 466–68. 
74.  Yamamoto, Hagakure, 392. 
75.  For example, Tokyo’s Asahi Culture Center, where many retirees enroll 
alongside younger people, offers more than a thousand courses and is much 
more comprehensive than many colleges and universities. The curriculum 
features classes geared to absolute beginners in various subjects, but past 
offerings have also included advanced physics, recherché topics in classical 
Japanese literature, and a course in which students read Proust in the original 
French. One retiree, a Buddhist art and architecture otaku, has dedicated 
considerable time and energy to visiting Buddhist temples and looking at pieces 
of art that are usually not shown to the public. Having amassed a body of 
knowledge equal to that of a professional expert in the field, this man points to 
other otaku whose expertise far exceeds even his own. 
76.  Higuchi Yūichi, 65sai nanimo shinai yūki (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2018). 
77.  Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die (New York: Knopf, 1994), chap. 1. As 
recently as 1951, almost 90 percent of Japanese people died at home, but today 
that proportion is only about 10 percent; see Kobori Ōichirō, Shi wo ikita hitobito 
(Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 2018), 1. 
78.  Kobori, Shi wo ikita hitobito, 5, 89–91. 
79.  My mother, for example, after her diagnosis of stage 4 cancer, wanted to 
spend her remaining time with family members and friends, and to visit hot 
springs. But my father and my siblings believed both in the miracle of modern 
medicine and in the notion that a dying loved one should be encouraged to 
scratch out every possible extra moment of life, and so they insisted on 
experimental interventions that caused my mother excruciating pain, great 
personal indignity, and, soon enough, loss of cognitive function. 
80.  Kobori, Shi wo ikita hitobito, 198. 
81.  See Shimazono Susumu, Nihonjin no shiseikan wo yomu (Tokyo: Asahi 
Shinbun Shuppan, 2012). 
82.  The consensus is to credit Motoori Norinaga’s reading of Genji 
monogatari (The Tale of Genji); see Watsuji Tetsurō, Nihon no seishinshi (Tokyo: 
Iwanami Shoten, 1926). 
83.  On ordinary Edo-era people’s attitudes toward death, see Watanabe, Edo 
to iu genkei, 81–87. 
84.  Kōda Rohan, Gojūnotō (1887; reprinted, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1927), 
24–26, 36–37. 






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