2016/09/14

Nitobe Inazo - New World Encyclopedia

Nitobe Inazo - New World Encyclopedia



Nitobe Inazo

This is a Japanese name; the family name is Nitobe.
Nitobe Inazō(1862-1933)
Nitobe Inazō (新渡戸 稲造 Nitobe Inazō) (September 1, 1862 – October 15, 1933) was a Christian, agricultural economist, author, educator, diplomat, and politician during the Meiji and Taishō periods in Japan. Born the son of a samurai of the Morioka Clan in Iwate, he converted to Christianity while a student at the Sapporo Agricultural College in 1881. In 1884, he went to study in the United States, where he became a Quaker. After earning his doctorate in agricultural economics in Germany, he married Mary Patterson Elkinton in Philadelphia and returned to Japan in 1891 to assume an assistant professorship at the Sapporo Agricultural College. Nitobe served as a professor of law at Kyoto Imperial University and Tokyo Imperial University, Headmaster of the First Higher School (then the preparatory division for the Tokyo Imperial University), and the first president of Tokyo Women's Christian University. He was an Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations from 1919 to 1926, and later chairman of the Japan Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations.
Nitobe was a prolific writer and exerted a powerful influence on Japanese intellectuals and students. He was critical of the increasing militarism in Japan during the early 1930s. He wrote many books in English, and is most famous in the West for his workBushido: The Soul of Japan.

Early life

Nitobe was born September 1, 1862, in Morioka, Mutsu Province (present-day Iwate Prefecture), the third son of Jujiro Nitobe, a samurai of the Morioka clan and a retainer to the local daimyo of the Nambu clan. His infant name was Inanosuke. Nitobe left Morioka for Tokyo in 1871 to become the heir to his uncle, Ota Tokitoshi, and adopted the name Ota Inazo. He later reverted to Nitobe when his brothers died.

Educational career

In 1881, Nitobe graduated in the second class of the Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University). He was converted to Christianity under the strong legacy left by Dr. William S. Clark, a former president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College and the first Vice-Principal of the Sapporo Agricultural College. Dr. Clark, taught in Sapporo for only eight months, but left a deep impact on the student body. His words to the ten or so boys who came to see him off at his departure, "Boys, be ambitious!," have become a famous saying in Japan. Dr. Clark left before Nitobe's class arrived in the second year after the opening of the college, so the two men never personally crossed paths. Among the classmates who converted to Christianity at the same time as Nitobe was Uchimura Kanzo.
Nitobe and his friends were baptized by an American Methodist Episcopal missionary, Bishop M.C. Harris. Nitobe's decision to study agriculture was due to a hope expressed by Emperor Meiji that the Nitobe family would continue to advance the field of agricultural development. Nitobe's father had developed former wastelands in the north of the Nambu domain, near present-day Towada, then part of Iwate Prefecture, into productive farmland.
In 1883, Nitobe entered Tokyo Imperial University for further studies in English literature and in economics.
In 1884, Nitobe traveled to the United States where he stayed for three years, and studied economics and political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. While in Baltimore he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).[1] Through a Quaker community in Philadelphia he met Mary Patterson Elkinton, whom he eventually married. While at Johns Hopkins, he was granted an assistant professorship at the Sapporo Agricultural College, but was ordered to first obtain his doctorate in agricultural economics in Germany. He completed his degree after three years in Halle University and returned briefly to the United States to marry Mary Elkinton in Philadelphia, before assuming his teaching position in Sapporo in 1891. By the time he returned to Japan, he had published books in English and in German, and had received the first of his five doctorate degrees.

Meiji bureaucrat and educator

In 1901, Nitobe was appointed technical advisor to the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan, where he headed the Sugar Bureau.
Nitobe was appointed a full professor of law at the Kyoto Imperial University in 1904 and lectured on colonial administration policies. He became the Headmaster of the First Higher School (then the preparatory division for the Tokyo Imperial University) in 1906 and continued this position until he accepted the full-time professorship on the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University in 1913. He taught agricultural economics and colonial policy, and emphasized the humanitarian aspect of colonial administration. During his tenure as president at the First Higher School, he implemented education based on the principles of personalism.
Nitobe attempted to compensate for Japan’s late start in the education of women by supporting the establishment ofTokyo Woman's Christian University (Tokyo Joshi Dai), becoming its first president in 1918.
His students at Tokyo Imperial University included Tadao Yanaihara, Shigeru Nanbara, Yasaka Takagi, and Tamon Maeda. (Yanaihara later continued Nitobe's chair in colonial studies at Tokyo University; but Yanaihara's pacifist views and emphasis on indigenous self-determination, which he partly inherited from Nitobe, came into a full conflict with Japan's wartime government during World War II, and he was barred from teaching until after the war).
In 1911, Nitobe and Hamilton Wright Mabie became the first exchange professors between Japan and the United States, under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Bushido: The Soul of Japan

Bushido: The Soul of Japan is, along with the classic text Hagakure by Tsunetomo Yamamoto, a study of the way of thesamurai. A best-seller in its day, it was read by many influential foreigners, among them President Theodore Roosevelt, President John F. Kennedy and Robert Baden-Powell. Possibly, it shaped Baden-Powell's vision for the Boy Scoutmovement.
Nitobe originally wrote Bushido: The Soul of Japan in English.
As Japan underwent deep transformations of its traditional lifestyle while forging into a modern nation, Nitobe engaged in an inquiry into the ethos of his nation. He found in bushido, the Way of the Warrior, the source of the virtues most admired by his people: rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, sincerity, honor, loyalty and self-control. His approach to his task was eclectic and far-reaching.
Nitobe delved into the other indigenous traditions of Japan, such as Buddhism, ShintoismConfucianism, and the moral guidelines handed down over hundreds of years by Japan's samurai and sages. He sought similarities and contrasts with Western philosophers and statesmen, and the antecedents of European and American thought and civilization. Delving into Ancient Rome, Hellenistic Greece and Biblical times, he found a close resemblance between the samurai ethos of what he called “bushido” and the spirit of medieval chivalry and the ethos of ancient Greece, as expressed in books like the Iliad of Homer.

Diplomat and statesman

When the League of Nations was established in 1920, Nitobe became one of the Under-Secretaries General of the League, and moved to GenevaSwitzerland. He served as a founding director of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (which later became UNESCO under the United Nations' mandate). His legacy from this period includes the settlement of a territorial dispute between Sweden and Finland over the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands. The Islands remained under the Finnish control, but were disarmed and granted autonomy, averting a possible armed conflict (See also Åland crisis).
In August 1921, Nitobe took part in the 13th World Congress of Esperanto in Prague, as the official delegate of the League of Nations. His report to the General Assembly of the League was the first objective report on Esperanto by a high-ranking official representative of an intergovernmental organization.[2] Although the proposal for the League to accept Esperanto as their working language was accepted by ten delegates, the French delegate used his veto power to block the issue.
In 1927, after his retirement from the League of Nations, Nitobe briefly served in the House of Peers. He was critical of the increasing militarism in Japan during the early 1930s, and was devastated by Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 over the Manchurian Crisis and the Lytton Report.
Nitobe died in Victoria, British ColumbiaCanada in October, 1933, on his way home from an international conference in Banff, Alberta. Morioka, Nitobe's birth place, and Victoria have been twin cities since 1985. Mary Elkinton Nitobe lived in Japan until her death in 1938. Mary compiled and edited many of Nitobe's unpublished manuscripts, including his memoirs of early childhood, and contributed greatly to the preservation of his writings.

Legacy

Nitobe Inazo was a prolific writer, who published many scholarly books as well as books for general readers (see below), and contributed hundreds of articles to popular magazines and newspapers. A fine stylist in English, he wrote many books in that language, which earned him a place among the best known Japanese writers of his age. Nitobe is perhaps most famous in the West for his work Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), which was one of the first major works on samurai ethics written directly in English for Western readers. (The book was subsequently translated into Japanese.) Although sometimes criticized for portraying the samurai in terms so Western as to lose some of their actual meaning, the book was a pioneering work of its genre.
Nitobe's writings are now available in Nitobe Inazo Zenshu (the Complete Works of Inazo Nitobe), a 24-volume set published by Kyobunkan, 1983-1991. His English and other Western-language works are collected in the five-volumeWorks of Inazo Nitobe, The University of Tokyo Press, 1972. Major critical essays on Nitobe's life and thought were collected in Nitobe Inazo: Japan's Bridge Across the Pacific (John F. Howes, ed., Westview, 1995). George M. Oshiro published Nitobe’s full biography in English as Internationalist in Pre-War Japan: Nitobe Inazo, 1862-1933 (UBC PhD. Thesis, 1986); and in Japanese as Nitobe Inazo, Kokusai-shugi no Kaitakusha (Chūō Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1992).
His portrait was featured on the series D of ¥5000 banknote, printed from 1984 to 2004.

Nitobe Memorial Garden

Nitobe Memorial Garden during July
The Nitobe Memorial Garden is a traditional Japanese garden located at the University of British Columbia in the University Endowment Lands, just outside the city limits of VancouverCanada. It is part of the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research.
One of the most authentic Japanese Tea and Stroll Gardens in North America, it honors Inazo Nitobe, whose goal was "to become a bridge across the Pacific." The garden includes a rare, authentic Tea Garden with a ceremonial Tea House. Each tree, stone and shrub has been deliberately placed and is carefully maintained to reflect an idealized conception and symbolic representation of nature. There is harmony among natural forms—waterfalls, rivers, forests, islands and seas—and a balance of masculine and feminine forces traditionally attributed to natural elements. The garden's creators incorporated many native Canadian trees and shrubs could be trained and pruned in typical Japanese fashion; maple and cherry trees and most of the azaleas and iris were brought from Japan. A UBC professor, who has studied the garden for over fifteen years, believes that its construction hides a number of impressive features, including references to Japanese philosophy and mythology, shadow bridges visible only at certain times of year, and positioning of a lantern that is filled with light at the exact date and time of Nitobe's death each year.

Quotations

  • "What is important is to try to develop insights and wisdom rather than mere knowledge, respect someone's character rather than his learning, and nurture men of character rather than mere talents."
  • "If there is anything to do, there is certainly a best way to do it, and the best way is both the most economical and the most graceful."
Excerpt from “A Japanese View of the Quakers,” by Dr. Inazo Nitobe
“Let it be far from me to turn Quakerism into Oriental mysticism. Quakerism stays within the family of Christianity. ... Unlike Orientals, George Fox and his followers conceived ... of light as a person, but by making their person eternal and existent before the world was, Quakerism came to much the same conclusion as the old mystics….

Curiously enough the Cosmic sense as described by those who attain it, is very much the same everywhere-whether it be by a Buddhist priest, a Shinto votary, or an American farmer. The central doctrine of Quakerism is the belief in this Cosmic sense, which they call the Inner Light, and all the doctrines and precepts of Quakerism are only corollaries drawn from this premise. ...

Is there then no superiority in the so-called revealed religion, by which is meant, I presume, the revelation of Godhead in the person and life of Jesus Christ? ... We read Lao-tze; we read Buddhist saints; I've studied Oriental mystics, ... we are brought very near to the idea of redemption, atonement, salvation. ... but we feel that we have not reached our finality. ... Yes, we see light, but not the one thing essential-perfect, living Personality.”

Major works

  • 1969. Bushido: the soul of Japan; an exposition of Japanese thought. Rutland, Vt: C.E. Tuttle Co. ISBN 0804806934
  • 1972. The works of Inazo Nitobe. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
  • 1912. The Japanese nation; its land, its people, and its life, with special consideration to its relations with the United States. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Notes

  1.  For a Quaker View of Nitobe, see Tadanobu Suzuki, Bridge across the Pacific: the life of Inazo Nitobe, friend of justice and peace (Argenta, B.C.: Argenta Friends Press, 1994 (Canadian Quaker pamphlets; 41), ISBN 0920367364).
  2.  "Esperanto and the Language Question at the League of Nations" Retrieved May 16, 2008.

References

  • Dower, John W. War without mercy: race and power in the Pacific war. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. ISBN 978-0394500300
  • Elkinton, David Cope. The Elkintons and Inazo Nitobe. Morioka, Japan: Inazo Nitobe Foundation, 2002.
  • Howes, John F. Nitobe Inazô: Japan's bridge across the Pacific. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0813389240
  • Kitasawa, Sukeo. The life of Dr. Nitobe. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1953.
  • Thorne, Dorothy Lloyd Gilbert, and J. Passmore Elkinton. Inazo and Mary P.E. Nitobe. Swarthmore, PA: J. Passmore Elkinton, 1955.

External links

All links retrieved July 31, 2014.

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:
Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.

1: Inazo Nitobe | Peacebuilder Profile | PACT:Peacebuilders Across Cultures

1: Inazo Nitobe | Peacebuilder Profile | PACT:Peacebuilders Across Cultures

A Continuing Quaker Thumbprint on Japanese (& World) History - A Friendly Letter

A Continuing Quaker Thumbprint on Japanese (& World) History - A Friendly Letter



A CONTINUING QUAKER THUMBPRINT ON JAPANESE (& WORLD) HISTORY

A Continuing Quaker Thumbprint on Japanese (& World) History
Recently, there’s news about how the Japanese prime minister is about to dump the antiwar provisions of Japan’s constitution — which have kept Japanese troops from fighting in other countries for seventy years.
Hey — what could possibly go wrong?
There have been loud street protests there against this impending change. Good on them.
Japanese-antiwar-protest

But another major dissenting voice there is very subdued, but unmistakable: that ofJapanese emperor Akihito.
He’s made statements about this more than once. In fact, many Japan experts believe this dissent, as much as his age, is behind his latest statement in August 2016 about being allowed to “retire” or “abdicate” the Chrysanthemum throne. But there is now no constitutional provision permitting such an action.
“Any legal changes will take time, probably years, to usher through.” the Washington Postreported. ” But in the meantime, the emperor’s intentions probably will create headaches for [prime minister Shinzo] Abe, whose top — and controversial — priority is revising the constitution to loosen the pacifism imposed on Japan after the war. . . .”
As a report in Japan Times summarized his role in early 2015:

“The people’s Emperor speaks truth to power“:  

“Since his reign began in 1989, the Emperor has weighed in on sensitive issues numerous times and in doing so has repeatedly repudiated the agenda of right-wing nationalists. Of course his words are carefully vetted and are sufficiently ambiguous to avoid an explicit political stand, but in the context of his remarks and gestures over the years, his choice of topics represent a powerful message to all but the most obtuse.”
Akihito-and-Michiko
Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko.

Recognize thekey phrase in that headline? Thereby lies a story for Quakers,  worth recalling today.  Here’s a version of it, which shows how small-scale, low-visibility work can cast a long shadow. It centers on a mostly-forgotten Quaker writer, mainly of children’s books:
Elizabeth Gray Vining, who died in 1999 at 97, was an eminent figure among Quaker authors of the twentieth century. She was also a candid observer of many things, including both Quakerism and herself.
    Consider, for instance, what she wrote in 1939 for a compendium on “Contributions of the Quakers,” specifically the section on “the Arts”:

    “This section, unfortunately, might almost be entitled: What the Friends Have Not Given. When they ruled music and decoration out of their meeting houses, the Quakers, being a consistent people, put music and art out of their lives too. So intent were they on worshiping God and helping man that they overlooked the healing and inspiring power of great music and great art….
    “Quakerism has produced scientists, as you would expect, for a scientist is one who gives his life to the search for truth …. Quakerism also produced saints, philosophers, philanthropists, reformers, prophets.  Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps we should not ask for artists, too.”
Elizabeth Gray Vining in later years.
    But avoiding creative work was not enough, certainly so for her. She also, by her own testimony, knew she wanted to be – had to be – a writer from the time she was a child. Her publishing debut came at the age of 13, with a story in “The Young Churchman,” for the princess-ly sum of $2, and an encouragement from the editor to send more.

    From then her life was marked out by four poles: her brief marriage; Japan; Quaker Philadelphia; and through it all, her writing.

    Born Elizabeth Janet Gray and raised in the Germantown area of Philadelphia, she married Morgan Vining in 1929. Less than four years later, her husband was killed, and she was seriously injured, in a New York automobile accident.
If her physical recovery was long, Vining’s emotional healing went on for the rest of her life. Forty years later she wrote of “the long slow assimilation of grief. Sorrow becomes a companion, a way of life. Grief and joy are opposite poles; joy and sorrow often walk hand in hand.”

    She had done teaching and library work when, in 1946, she was selected to be an American tutor to crown prince Akihito of the Japanese imperial family; one of the stated requirements for the position was that the tutor be “a Christian, but not a fanatic.” When Vining quotes this description later, one can see the sly grin; she spent nearly four years in this assignment.

How did it happen that she was picked for this key assignment? A more scholarly assessment of the choice came in a 2010 study by Kaoru Hoshino, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh:

“Over the past decades, scholars as well as the media have given explanations as to why it was Vining, a Quaker, not Chaplin or someone else, who was chosen for the position, and their explanations seem unanimous. Vining was chosen because she was not only a Quaker known to be a pacifist but also an author of children’s literature, whom the Japanese expected to be sympathetic to the 12-year-old crown prince in the midst of the postwar confusion. Some also write that the imperial side found Vining more ideal than the other candidate [a Presbyterian], as she, having lost her beloved husband in an accident, had experienced the utmost sorrow in life and therefore would have compassion for others.
Vining-Akihito
Elizabeth Gray Vining with crown prince Akihito.
While such reasons may have been true, there was also another reason why the imperial advisers preferred a Quaker, and based on several sources, the religious denomination of the new tutor was, in fact, one of the major factors that led to the imperial household’s decision to hire Vining. According to Maeda Yōichi, son of Maeda Tamon and the crown prince’s French tutor, a Quaker woman was considered most ideal because Quakers are pacifistic but not self-righteous or preachy. Japanese officials also found Quakerism ideal because it was understood, among Christian religions, as most compatible with the oriental world (where different religions had long co-existed) and therefore a Quaker would not force conversion.”
 — “Why an American Quaker tutor for the crown prince? An Imperial Household strategy to save Emperor Hirohito in MacArthur’s Japan.”  Kaoru Hoshino, Master’s Thesis, U. of Pittsburgh, 2010

    As personally enriching as this Tokyo sojourn was, Vining returned to the U.S. in 1950 to discover that it had also made her something of a celebrity. “Oh, Mrs. Vining!” gushed one matron, on meeting her in Maine, “How wonderful to meet you! I have never been so close to royalty before.” She published several books based on her experiences in Japan, and one of them, Windows for the Crown Prince,was a 1952 best-seller.

    Friends report that even in her last years, around the time of her birthday a sleek diplomatic limousine would pull up at Kendal, the Quaker-related retirement community southwest of Philadelphia where she lived, and disgorge the Japanese ambassador, often accompanied by a large spray of sumptuous flowers, for a courtesy call on behalf of her former pupil, now the emperor.
Vining-Windows-Crown-Prince-Cover    Given that Friendly connections paved the way for her time in Japan, one might think Vining had one of those long Quaker pedigrees. But in fact she was a convinced Friend, who was drawn magnetically to meeting in Washington, DC after her husband’s death, when her native Episcopal services proved no help.    
“It was the silence that drew me,” she wrote, “that deep healing silence of the meeting at its best, when the search of each is intensified by the search of all….I found each Sunday just enough of acceptance, of strength, of inner serenity to carry me through the week…My searching, restless, arid heart was like a stranded boat which was lifted for a time on buoyant waters from an ocean beyond the boundaries of selfhood.”

    Once inside the Quaker circle, however, Vining steeped herself in the most Anglophilic Philadelphia-centered version of the faith, rarely straying from a circuit that included Germantown Meeting, the American Friends Service Committee’s headquarters downtown, and Pendle Hill in suburban Wallingford, with side trips to Quaker and literary locales in England and Scotland.
Friend-of-life-cover    This focus turned up frequently in her work. Vining spent three years working intensively on a biography of Rufus Jones, who became the mid-20th century icon of Philadelphia Quaker culture (though himself an immigrant from New England). The book, Friend of Life, explores Jones’s thought and work deeply, reverentially, and well; but from it one will get little insight into why Jones was so reviled, by so many, for so long, even decades after his death. Why not? The best guess is that the opposition, by Vining’s time, came almost entirely from outside Philadelphia, and is thus only barely worth notice.

    She also wrote about Jones’s idol, John Greenleaf Whittier, a biography of William Penn, and a historical novel, The Virginia Exiles,about a group of Philadelphia Friends who were falsely accused of spying for the British and taken prisoner by George Washington’s army during the American revolution. She returned to Japan as the only Westerner invited to the crown prince’s wedding; she described this journey in Return to Japan (1960).
Vining-Return-to-Japan-Cover    She was not entirely uncritical of her adopted community, however. Listen to the narrator from her 1967 novel, I Roberta,fingering the way old-time Friends had turned the plain language, originally used as a blow for equality, completely inside out:
“Some Quakers have a way, which I dislike, of saying thee to other Quakers and you to outsiders. If there’s a roomful of Friends and non-Friends, they’ll sort it out quick as lightning, theeing the sheep and youingthe goats in the same breath.”
    But if her range of vision was sometimes limited, her sense of vocation was always clear: she was a writer. “I am with Book as women are with child,” she once said. Besides best-sellers, among her 25 books, Adam of the Road, for young readers, was a Newberry Medal winner in 1943.
    Yet for all her dedication, she spoke of this career late in life with an appealing modesty:
“That I have never been the writer that I wanted to be has not greatly diminished my satisfaction in the work of writing. Every book has fallen short of my vision for it…There must be many people like me…not first-rate writers, but…born writers, who write because we would rather write than do anything else, because we are fulfilled while writing, because in some obscure way we feel guilty when we are not….”
    As a later member of this writer’s fellowship, I smile and nod at the clear-eyed wisdom and balance of this last comment. Friends are fortunate that our contribution to the arts is much more real 75 years after she commented on the lack thereof. Elizabeth Gray Vining’s long life of creative labor is one major reason for the improvement.
And beyond the books, she left a thumbprint on history that may be faint now, but is still visible.
— Adapted from The Harlot’s Bible, a collection of Quaker essays, now available in paperbackand Kindle.
Harlot-cover-front-new

Quakerism in Japan: a Brief Account of the Origins and Development of the Religious Society of Friends in Japan: Edith F. Sharpless: Amazon.com: Books

Quakerism in Japan: a Brief Account of the Origins and Development of the Religious Society of Friends in Japan: Edith F. Sharpless: Amazon.com: Books



Quakerism in Japan: a Brief Account of the Origins and Development of the Religious Society of Friends in Japan Paperback – 1944

Mito MM Meeting House, Japan | quaker.org.nz

Mito MM Meeting House, Japan | quaker.org.nz



Mito MM Meeting House, Japan

Monthly Meetings and individuals in Aotearoa/NZ contributed a significant sum towards the reconstruction of the Mito Meeting House in Japan, and this was sent to Mamoru Hitomi, Clerk of Mito MM, in 2011.
A letter has been received thanking us for our contribution:

Mito Monthly Meeting
5-36 Bizenmachi
Mito, Ibaraki 310-0024
Japan
September 2012
Dear Friends worldwide,
 
Nobody could expect the dedication ceremony of our Meeting House and Kindergarten coming so quick!  It was held on 9 September 2012, just two days before a year and half after the great earthquake on 11 March 2011.  It was cerebrated by 130 attendants not only from our area but also Tokyo and much further.
 
Let me express appreciation to all the donors worldwide who have supported Mito Monthly Meeting to build a Meeting House and Kindergarten.  The house is a joint house of the two.  On weekdays it is a kindergarten and on Sunday it is our Meeting House.  This system has been kept since 1951 when Edith F. Sharpless, a Philadelphia Quaker, started over again after WWII.  100 year old brick meeting house was replaced by wooden house, but bricks carefully taken out from the ruins were put on the walls up to the waist and on the walking space around the whole house.  At the porch the kindergarteners placed each brick piece as their memory in July.  Now they enjoy playing in the new house and out in the garden lively.  Wood smells good in the hall under the tall triangle ceiling.  On Sunday meeting for worship has been held comfortably.  It might be impossible without your kind donation. 
 
But I’m very sorry we have made you troublesome when you directly wanted to send us your donation because of our wrong bank account. That’s why some of your donation took a long journey through FWCC Section of Americas, FWCC World Office in London, FWCC Asia West Pacific Section and Japan Yearly Meeting, and to Mito Monthly Meeting.  During the long journey personal donors’ names were not always clear, sorry to say.  We thank each FWCC staff who worked for us often.
 
As our Meeting House and Kindergarten is a joint house, 1/3 of the building belongs to the Meeting and the other 2/3 to the kindergarten. The kindergarten is to be nearly half granted disaster subsidy from the government, but none to the religious body.  That’s why your donation was very helpful for Mito Monthly Meeting
 
We cannot say thank you all directly, but let me send you much appreciation to all of the donors.  Enclosed are the photos of the new safety and lovely house.  We will be very happy if you could some day visit us and see our Meeting House and Kindergarten.
 
Friendship in Light,
 
Mamoru Hitomi, Clerk, Mito Monthly Meeting
 
Some photos follow:

2016/09/02

Games People Play (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Games People Play (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Games People Play (book)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships
GamesPeoplePlay.jpg
First edition
AuthorEric Berne, M.D.
PublisherGrove Press
Publication date
1964
Pages216
ISBN0-345-41003-3
Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships is a bestselling 1964 book by psychiatrist Eric Berne. Since its publication it has sold more than five million copies.[1] The book describes both functional and dysfunctional social interactions.

Summary

In the first half of the book, Berne introducestransactional analysis as a way of interpreting social interactions. He describes three roles or ego states, known as the Parent, the Adult, and the Child, and postulates that many negative behaviors can be traced to switching or confusion of these roles. He discusses procedures, rituals, and pastimes in social behavior, in light of this method of analysis. For example, a boss who talks to his staff as a controlling 'parent' will often engender self-abased obediencetantrums, or other childlike responses from his employees.
The second half of the book catalogues a series of "mind games" in which people interact through a patterned and predictable series of "transactions" which are superficially plausible (that is, they may appear normal to bystanders or even to the people involved), but which actually conceal motivations, include private significance to the parties involved, and lead to a well-defined predictable outcome, usually counterproductive. The book uses casual, often humorous phrases such as "See What You Made Me Do," "Why Don't You — Yes But," and "Ain't It Awful" as a way of briefly describing each game. In reality, the "winner" of a mind game is the person that returns to the Adult ego-state first.
In the game entitled "Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch," one who discovers that another has made a minor mistake in a matter involving them both holds the entire matter hostage to the minor mistake. The example is where a plumber makes a mistake on a $300 job by underestimating the price of a $3 part as $1, so the plumber sends a bill for $302, the correct price. The customer won't pay the entire original $300 unless and until the plumber absorbs the $2 error instead of just paying the (undisputed part of the) bill of $300.
Not all interactions or transactions are part of a game. Specifically, if both parties in a one-on-one conversation remain in an Adult-to-Adult ego-state, it is unlikely that a game is being played.

Origins

In the 1950s, Berne synthesized his theory of "human gaming" and built on work fromPaul Federn and Edoardo Weiss and integrated results from Wilder Penfield to developtransactional analysis.[1] Transactional analysis, according to physician James R. Allen, is a "cognitive behavioral approach to treatment and ... a very effective way of dealing with internal models of self and others as well as other psychodynamic issues."[1]

Influence

In 1993, American therapist-turned-author James Redfield self-published The Celestine Prophecy influenced by the theory of Berne's human gaming. Specifically, the life games to which Berne refers in his book is a tool used in an individual's quest for energetic independence.

References

  1. Berne, Eric (1964). Games People Play – The Basic Hand Book of Transactional Analysis. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-41003-3.

External links