Japan: Day Three

Nara is about an hour by train from Osaka.

It’s a pleasant trip. You cross rivers and wend your way around and through low laying mountains. If it is spring wildflowers will be in bloom on either side of the tracks. On the day I travelled there alabaster clouds were drifting through an impossibly blue sky.

The city itself is small – a population of just under 375,000 souls in an area of about 260 square miles – but, having been Japan’s first capital, it is steeped in cultural tradition and history: sake is said to have been created in Nara sometime during the early Edo period; Nara Women’s University, one of only two such universities in Japan, is located here; the city is replete with ancient shrines and temples; and it is famous for it’s cuisine including it’s vegetables, Yamato chicken, and even sake flavored ice cream (which I, very regrettably, did not get to try for myself.)

With all these fabulous foodstuffs just begging to be tasted can you guess what your intrepid band of travelers feasted on after arriving in Nara? Was it a light lunch of Nara-zuke pickles? Miwa-somen noodles, perhaps? Or maybe we just wanted a snack and settled on rice cakes with a cup of Yamato-cha­ to wash it down?

Ladies and gentleman we had coffee and donuts.

Sometimes it’s life’s simple pleasures, y’know?

After gorging ourselves on one of the world’s most perfect food combinations we headed into Nara proper. One of my goals on this trip (right up there with playing “Street Fighter IV” and digging the vintage videogame scene) was to explore a Shinto shrine. Nara would not disappoint me in this regard, but I had to tackle another goal first: tracking down a maneki neko, a “lucky cat”.

If you’ve eaten at a Chinese or Japanese restaurant in the states you’ve seen a “lucky cat”. It is a feline of porcelain or sometimes brass usually propped up next to the cash register waving its paw like it’s high-fiving an invisible friend. I have a pal here in Korea who fancies them and I wanted to get her a souvenir – surely it wouldn’t be difficult tracking one down in Japan, I thought. Surprisingly (and distressingly on this my last full day in the country) I couldn’t find one anywhere.

Luckily the first street we turned down was lined with one gift shop after another. You know the place: tourist traps masquerading as “authentic [enter wherever you’re taking a vacation here] goods” stores, a regular black hole with designs on your pocket book. It took some trying but I finally found a “lucky cat” – literally just after I’d given up and purchased a different souvenir.

Maybe it should be Murphy’s Universal Laws?

Right in the heart of this merchandise maelstrom I saw my first Shinto shrine. Up a flight of stone stairs and between two shops stood a torii – the iconic gateway of Shintoism – and beyond that the shrine itself. The shrine was closed so I couldn’t get a good look inside, but I did spy a number of stone lanterns and red-bibbed statues beyond the locked gates. From within I could hear the methodic tolling of a bell.

Japan has the lowest number of Christians per capita of any country in the world; something like just 1% of the population identify with Christianity. Growing up as I did in Mid-West America, the gleaming buckle of the Bible Belt, I’m not used to this. Even Korea, which has the highest number of professing Christians of any East Asian country, wasn’t too unlike home in that regard. Neon crosses glow in abundance here in the Land of Morning Calm. So it is interesting to witness firsthand a culture shaped by the currents of a different mythology, a different set of conventions.

And for a kid who cut his teeth in the Protestant tradition as it is practiced in America’s Heartland, it doesn’t get much more different than Shinto. The indigenous religion of Japan, Shinto, which means “the way of the gods”, is a blend of ancestor worship and the belief that kami, or gods, preside over the living, dead, and inanimate things of nature. It was the state religion from the 1870’s until Japan’s surrender at the end of WWII and, while few people today are strictly Shintoists, the religion still plays an influential role in Japanese society.

From pop culture (many of the bad guys I conquered in videogames when I was younger were – you guessed it! – kami from the Shinto pantheon) to higher brow film and literature, Shinto still informs a large swath of modern Japan’s culture.

A travel blog – and even one as rambling and digressional as is this one – probably isn’t an appropriate venue for exploring the dialectical relationship between religions and the societies and cultures that form, support, promulgate, and resist them. It is just that Japan offers such a fascinating picture of a culture mediating and coming to grips with an outside influence – in this case the Christian tradition of the West.

Consider the above a disclaimer for the following.

Regardless of your religious affiliation (and clearly this is not a conversation about religion that intends any theological implications), if you have lived for any period of time in the West the cultural legacy of Christianity has left a mark on you: architecture, film, (certain) social mores, traditions, the “culture wars”, literature and poetry and the visual arts, the list reads as long as you’d like it to. In these ways and many others Christianity has been a guiding cultural influence in Western nations. Not so in Japan. In fact, for much of the time since its introduction by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th-century the Japanese – the ruling body especially – were hostile to Christianity. (The book to read is Silence by Shusaku Endo.)

This hostility has generally abated post-WWII but it has been replaced, as evidenced by the very low number of Japanese Christians, with a collective shrug. Christianity as a religion just doesn’t seem to resonate with the Japanese. What does seem to resonate, and in a big way, is Western culture. Of course this is Western culture with a distinctly Japanese twist: Walt Disney’s Pinocchio inspired Dr. Osamu Tezuka’s “Astro Boy” series as did the horrors of atomic warfare; you can enjoy a shrimp burger with a side of squid fries at the McDonald’s in Osaka; the English language has seen a number of mutations in Japan that have yielded words like beeru (“beer”) and serufu esutiimu (“self esteem”). And in much of the Western culture the Japanese absorb, parts of Christianity get absorbed with it. Not so much doctrinal aspects of the religion (I’m not familiar with any anime based on the “Apostle’s Creed”) but more the mythological underpinnings of the faith.

View a film like Kurosawa’s Hakuchi – an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot – and you realize that while Christianity as an act of devotion may not appeal to the typical Japanese there is something about the religion, that same something that has spoken to artists for nearly two millennia, that is a viable source of creative inspiration. The faith itself may have fallen on hard soil, but its cultural influence has taken root.

Having hijacked this entry with an essay let me steer us back to a sunny spring day in Nara, Japan.

Down the street and as the souvenir shops begin to peter out you come to the entrance of the relatively sprawling Nara Park. The Nara National Museum is on the park grounds as are a number of splendid shrines and temples including Todai-ji, the world’s largest wooden building. In addition Kasuga Shrine - a magnificent temple complex originally built in 710 and then subsequently demolished and rebuilt in identical fashion every 20 years according to the strictures of purity and renewal inherent to Shinto - is located here. All well and good but I had myself set on seeing one thing: tiny deer.

The legend has it that the god Takenomikazuchi-no-mikoto (you think his friend’s called him “Tak” for short?) showed up in Nara Park years ago riding a white deer. Since a deity manifesting itself on earth is a pretty big deal people began regarding deer in the area as divine and the messengers of the gods. In fact, killing a deer in Nara was a capital offense until the 17th-century and Nara deer weren’t divested of their divinity until after the fall of Imperial Japan. Divine or not these deer and their descendants got pretty friendly with humans and, while they’re not domesticated, they are certainly tame.

I imagine I looked like a largish man-child in a petting zoo; my fist full of barley cakes with which to make new furry friends, my movements slow and steady but betraying an obvious excitement. Also: jumping and frolicking and gamboling (me, not the deer) and just generally dewing up with joyful tears.

I dunno. I just really like little deer, I guess.

The deer were pretty non-plussed with the food I had to offer (although one sneaky bastard made a meal of my map) but they were kind enough to indulge my petting and picture taking.

I spent the remainder of my last full day in Japan wandering about Nara on foot: discovering neighborhood shrines; chatting with (or attempting to chat with) some kids catching tadpoles in a creek; drinking more coffee and eating more donuts (cut me a break it was vacation); then back to Osaka to pay another visit to “Big Tiger” and gobble up an aquarium worth of sushi.

I’d be packing my bags that night.