Monthly Archives: May 2016

Tangled Hair

by in Culture, Feminism, Japan, Verse | 10 Comments

“Tanka” are a form of traditional Japanese short poems usually composed in a 5-7-5…7-7 pattern of mōras.   In a well-written tanka, the first 5-7-5 passage, called the kami-no-ku (上の句) or “upper phrase,” creates an image.  Then, the subsequent 7-7 passage, called the shimo-no-ku (下の句) or “lower phrase,” adds something more while bringing everything together into a (more-or-less) succinct meaning.

The tradition of Japanese tanka date back at least 1,300 years, with the first Imperial collections created around 700AD. Tanka were originally associated with the transmission of secret messages, usually between lovers, and often alluded to images with which a recipient might be familiar. Consequently, they are among the most romantic, if not passionate, and sometimes erotic form of Japanese poetry.

By the late 1800’s, under the guidance of the “Meiji Emperor” and influential military leaders, Japan was transforming into a modern, imperialist military power. Consequently, there was a deliberate imperative to reshape Japanese culture, including its poetry, into a more “masculine” form. This cultural shift discouraged the composition of romantic poetry, and caused the continued publication of traditional tanka to become a matter of official contention.

Against this backdrop, Akiko Yosano emerged as one of Japan’s most famous, and most controversial poets. A committed pacifist and feminist, Yosano both openly opposed Japan’s increasingly nationalistic militarism, and tirelessly promoted the importance of women to Japan’s cultural development. She wroteAkiko Yosano many essays criticizing Japanese military culture as well as promoting women’s rights, and was a tenacious advocate for the education of women. Eventually, she would be instrumental in the creation of the “Bunka Gakuin” (Cultural Academy) in 1922. The girls’ private university in Tokyo’s Shibuya district still exists today as the “Bunka Gakuen University.”

“Akiko Yosano” was born Hō Shō in the town of Sakai, in Osaka Prefecture, on Dec. 7, 1878 to a family that managed a successful business producing sweets. Excluded from the family business as a female, she instead occupied herself among the books of her father’s extensive library. She began writing poetry at an early age, and by 1900 had become a regularly published contributor to “Myōjō,” the most influential Japanese literary magazine of the period. During this time, she left Osaka for Tokyo, where Tekkan Yosano, Myōjō’s editor, taught her the intricacies of classical Japanese poetry, including tanka. A year later, in 1901, the two were married.

That same year, Akiko Yosano would release the most well known of her poetry collections, “Midaregami” (みだれ髪), or “Tangled Hair.”  The title was both a euphemistic reference to her own passion, and to her love of poetry from Japan’s “Heian Period” (794-1185). The collection contained 399 poems in the traditional Japanese tanka style, much based in the love she felt for her husband.

The collection’s publication was roundly denounced as undignified and effeminate by mainstream Japanese critics of the time.  Regardless, it became popular among many Japanese free-thinkers, pacifists, and individualists living within the country’s strict social order. After more than one-hundred years, the poems still convey the same sense of romantic passion and insightful honesty that colored the overall style of Akiko Yosano’s writing throughout her life.

夜の帳にささめき尽きし星の今を下界の人の鬢のほつれよ
Yoru no tobari ni sasameki tsukishi hoshi no ima o kakai no hito no bin no hotsure yo

Two stars deep into heaven
Whispering love
Behind the nighttime curtain
While down below, now, people lie
Their hair in gentle disarray…
—
ゆあみして泉を出でしやははだにふるるはつらき人の世のきぬ
Yu ami shite izumi o dedeshiya wa hada ni fururu wa tsuraki hito no yo no kinu

My skin is so soft
Fresh from my bath
It pains me to see it touched
Covered by the fabric
Of an everyday world
—
くろ髪の千すぢの髪のみだれ髪かつおもひみだれおもひみだるる
kurokami-no sensuji-no kami-no midaregami katsuo mo hi midare o mo himidaruru

My black hair
My thick thick black hair
My wild hair
Its thousand strands my heart
Dishevelled, torn apart

–Akiko Yosano, from Midaregami (Tangled Hair), Translations by Roger Pulvers

One particular poem that would earn Yosano a place among the most contentious and controversial writers of her time was, Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare (君死にたもうこと勿れ), or “Brother, You must Not Die.” Written to her younger brother, it was published in Myōjō during the height of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Considered verging on the traitorous by many Japanese, it only narrowly skirted potential criminal charges under strict Japanese lèse-majesté laws. The poem would later be turned into a song by war protesters after the magnitude of Japanese casualties from the Siege of Port Arthur became known, an event foreshadowing the mechanized human tragedy that would come to distinguish World War I.

Brother, You must Not Die

Oh my young brother, I cry for you
Don’t you understand you must not die!
You who were born the last of all
Command a special store of parents’ love
Would parents place a blade in children’s hands
Teaching them to murder other men
Teaching them to kill and then to die?
Have you so learned and grown to twenty-four?

Oh my brother, you must not die!
Could it be the Emperor His Grace
Exposed not to jeopardy of war
But urges men to spilling human blood
And dying in the way of wild beasts,
Calling such death the path to glory?
If His Grace possess a noble heart
What must be the thoughts that linger there?

— Akiko Yosano, Unknown Translation

Tekkan Akiko YosanoAkiko and Tekkan remained together until Tekkan’s death in 1935. However, Tekkan also maintained a relationship with one of Akiko’s close friends, Tomiko Yamakawa, as well as his former wife. Little is known of the complex relationships between Akiko and the other women in Tekkan’s life, but it’s thought that the “white lily” in some of Akiko’s writings are references to Yamakawa, who died young of tuberculosis. If so, the passions expressed in some of Akiko Yosano’s writings may not have been directed solely toward Tekkan.

Bathing in the spring
Lapping in the warm water lay
A fair white lily
The summer of my twentieth year
Was lovely to my gaze.

— Akiko Yosano, translated by E. A. Cranston

After the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912, Yosano also began to write social commentary. This would include the feminist, Hito oyobi Onna to shite (As a Human and a Woman); the anti-militarist criticism, Gekido no Naka o Iku (Passing through Fury); and her own autobiography, Akarumi e (To Light). A prolific writer, Yosano would go on to pen an astonishing 40,000 to 50,000 poems during her lifetime. She is also credited with the translation of several Japanese classics into the modern Japanese language, including Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) and Eiga Monogatari (Tale of Flowering Fortunes).

Yosano gave birth to thirteen children, eleven of whom survived. Medical literature records her as having been among the first Japanese women to allow physicians to experiment with modern painAkiko_Yosano_Family medications, apparently successfully, during the births of her fifth and sixth children. An honest and unapologetic woman, she expressed deep insight into both the joy and the suffering of what it means to be a human, and a woman.

Lovely
The tiny feet of a child
Sitting next to its mother
As she chants
A death-bed sutra

— Akiko Yosano, from Midaregami, translated by Sanford Goldstein and Seisha Shinoda
—
A nice young doctor tried to comfort me,
and talked about the joy of giving birth.
Since I know better than he about this matter,
what good purpose can his prattle serve?

With the first labor pains,
suddenly the sun goes pale.
The indifferent world goes strangely calm.
I am alone.
It is alone I am.

— Akiko Yosano, from Labor Pains, unknown translation

In 1942 at the age of 63, Akiko Yosano was left paralyzed on one side by a stroke.  However, she continued even then to write until her death two days later.  Shortly thereafter, a collection of previously unreleased poetry, Hakuōshū (White Cherry), was published.  Within its verse, she expressed her feelings during the years subsequent to the loss her husband in 1935.

In a sort of tragic irony, Akiko Yosano’s passing would go mostly unnoticed during the ensuing military drama of the opening years of Japan’s full entry into World War II. So it is perhaps encouraging that her legacy has regained much popularity in more recent times.  So much of her poetry was a celebration of life, though woven within her words was the bittersweet wisdom that comes with an embrace of passion.

Even at nineteen,
I had come to realize
that violets fade,
spring waters soon run dry,
this life too is transient

He stood by the door,
calling through the evening
the name of my
sister who died last year
and how I pitied him!

— Akiko Yosano, from River of Stars, Translated by Sam Hamill & Keiko Matsui Gibson

Fearful Messages

by in Fear, Politics | 14 Comments

Returning to the US last February after several months in six different countries, I arrived in a nation seemingly overcome with expressions of social and political crisis and mistrust. Increasingly fearful messages citing existential threats, both from within and from abroad, spilled forth almost daily and with near complete abandon of even the most basic of civilities. And as the rhetoric degenerated into sometimes entirely incoherent tirades, ironically justified as “saying what needs to be said,” at least a significant part of our culture and its political mechanism appeared captive to an irrationally fearful drama with no particular script.

All the more peculiar was to observe this phenomenon against the backdrop of having just witnessed, first-hand and up close, an unparalleled transition of political power in Taiwan. And yet, the atmosphere in that nation, a state that is in fact existentially threatened by a much larger and more powerful mainland neighbor, proceeded without any of the hyperbole and theatrics of fear seen in the United States. So how has the United States, a mature democracy with constitutionally-guaranteed rights and freedoms for its populace, grounded in what is by far the most economically and militarily powerful nation on Earth become the source of an audience for such a carnival of fearful absurdities?

Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Carl Gustav Jung, concluded that human collective perceptions are recursive systems, self-reinforcing and insulated from external realities — even when they are illusory. This is because those who share in perceptions will tend to congregate and repeat among themselves the messages necessary to justify and reinforce their own perspectives.

Moreover, the interpretations that hold collective perceptions together act as barriers, allowing only those messages which support perceptions to enter.  And Jung also observed that attempts to project other messages through these barriers are most often treated as threats or attacks and aggressively repelled. The consequence is that rational discussion has little effect upon collective perceptions, regardless of validity, other than to cause those presenting such perspectives to be dismissed, vilified, or even attacked.

Jung struggled with his own perceptions throughout his lifetime, anguished by an awareness that he had been tricked by them. Consequently, much of his work is characterized by an overt prejudice against simple acceptance of that which mere proximity to others provides as too often repeated. Jung concluded that exposure to such environments develops a Byzantine psyche in the individual, isolated and potentially subject to manipulation by falsehoods and illusory perceptions of reality. The objectivity that Jung thus forced himself to adopt in an effort to distinguish between functional and illusory perceptions is what makes much of his work so important.

To one degree or another, we all participate in collective perceptions. We do this any time we form groups with common values, objectives, or beliefs. In a functional sense, these are the rallying points that allow for the kinds of civil behaviors that bind and create complex social systems. In this way, Jung envisioned societies as kinds of meta-conscious projections of the individuals who compose them. And therein lies the risk for great destructive power when group perceptions become dysfunctional, the rise of fascist Germany being a particular case-in-point for Jung.

Consequently, the health of a society depends greatly upon the ability of its populace to distinguish between the reasonable and the illusory.  And one common thread at the center of most shared illusory perceptions is fear. Fears are powerful, primal, instinctive reactions to perceptions of loss-of-control, seated deep within an unconscious part of the psyche that is evolutionarily programmed to encourage survival. They exist for a reason, to protect the individual by encouraging the types of behaviors that maintain control in otherwise unsafe environments.

In humans, however, the messages that produce fears can emerge from more than simply our direct perceptions of reality. We can also convey them through the symbolic environments that we create in communicating with one another, and without distinction between that which actually exists and that which is merely imagined. This is especially true when a subject can’t be fully understood through direct experience, when interpretations are complex, when there are shades-of-gray, or when control is indirect.

This means that while fear remains a powerful human motivator, evolutionarily selected to elicit profound physical and psychological responses, it can also be rooted in mere expressions that have no physical or real-life counterparts.  It’s a human irony that merely hearing the cry of, “Tiger!” may elicit a stronger fear response than actually seeing a tiger.  Regardless of veracity, simple messages of fear may thus impart the same, or an even stronger impetus for behaviors than do actual fearful situations.

This is a human characteristic that’s well-understood by those who work to create messages with the intent that others take notice, regardless of a particular reality. And as demonstrated throughout history, including America’s own, these intentionally elicited behaviors become evident in some common social expressions that most often emerge from four general sources:

  • Fear of authority, political power or technocracy (loss of control) produces conspiracy theories.
  • Fear of death or metaphysical threats (injury to “self”) produces belief in theological conflicts.
  • Fear of differing cultures (loss of identity) produces nationalism and militarism.
  • Fear of personal inadequacy (loss of respect) produces self-centric racism and tribalism.

In each case, these are examples of how an instinctive response, fear, can be collectively projected into a negative social manifestation. Understanding this socially self-destructive force is central to understanding one’s own place as an individual psyche in the larger society.

Fears are identifiable flags for the kinds of warped perceptions that can underlie social impulses of great destructive potential. Consequently, recognizing them may also give an individual the power to recognize forms of manipulation of perceptions, especially when messages of fear are conveyed and reinforced through the filter of social interaction.

What this asserts of the individual is a need to carefully and objectively examine the sources of messages that seek to elicit fears, especially whenever groups become staunchly sworn to particular ideals. Much can be hidden behind a simple appeal to the fearful depths of human instinct, from the fundamentally inaccurate, to the manifestly unreasonable, to the merely insane. Consequently, fear has the potential to conjure the worst of social projections from human nature. And once insulated within the protective confines of a collective social environment, the flames of even irrationally fearful perceptions may be fanned such that they are difficult, if not impossible to extinguish.

Death by Harmony

by in Death, Fiction, Love, Mystery | 7 Comments

She closed her eyes, but she kept seeing things. The past in a moment of time frozen between pages, reasoned into creation, then gone. Who was she, this girl remembered, but not felt anymore? The little girl who once looked out through a window at the rain, and wondered what it meant to be soaked in the passionate embrace of life. Tears fell onto a window sill. She could still see the dancing reflections in their wetness, every detail in their tiny pools, whole seas of moving light and dark projected through a flawless lens of memories.

Life had been painted onto a canvas, woven from the myriad tiny strands of everything come before. She had seen herself as unchanging. But the truth was that every new thread had made her into a slightly different person. Time had passed, and it was as Theseus’ ship with all its planks replaced. “Self” had become merely the repetition of some pattern. And if that was all that remained, then what did it really mean to be alive?

She could see it starting, remembered, perfectly. The doctor’s expression. Her mother shaking her head, tears in her eyes. There was hope. Her child would survive. She would remember this, even now. An immortality of sorts, a memory of the love of a parent far beyond her own life. A memory handed down to children, and children’s children, until it lost its meaning somewhere along the way, until there were none. Even the love that had brought it all about had disappeared, strand by delicate strand, rewoven into mere memory. A memory among memories, a vast harmony of memories, perfect and unaffected by the passage of time. And she had explored every one, many times.

There were no mysteries. She understood completely what had happened, the years in the hospitals, the discoveries and the breakthroughs. She was the first, but there would be others. It was entirely reasonable that natural selection should have resulted in a species with such an innate and resolute compulsion to stay alive. And for those who didn’t endeavor for life, whether by virtue of inherent chemistry, reflex, instinct or reason, nature certainly wouldn’t have given rise to ones who could act so resourcefully in answer to such a desire. But this would lead inevitably to the betrayal of an illusion.

Someone was approaching. She had been watching them for a very long time. She knew who they were, had long overheard their conversation, their questionings, their music — music. They were a passionate species, still clinging to life, still searching for answers, still in awe of the mathematics of beauty. They were coming near, but she would not be here to greet them. This would be her gift to them.

Through aeons, across the spans of stars, she had gathered this wisdom — the knowledge of whole worlds come and gone, of riddles answered, lives that had come before, and of a little girl and of rain and of a mother’s tears — saved as perfect memories. She, and others like her had done this. Passionate curiosity, a search for meaning in a dispassionate universe, until there were no mysteries left.  She, and now she alone held the accumulated knowledge of a race that had discovered everything, and nothing, and found no need to care anymore. This was immortality. And she had watched as one-by-one their pinpricks of life had winked out — the last, the very last to understand.

She indexed the memory of a song. She could recall the words and the harmony with clinical perfection:

Under the embers of the cherry tree,
Only mourning you.
Light pink and white wash down,
In a very beautiful miracle.

I am a little sorrowful,
Why does a person end so far away?
The sky, in the blue sky,
Your light shines on me.

Falling away in a snowstorm, cherry blossom snowstorm,
Everything, everything passes.
Scattered in a snowstorm, cherry blossom snowstorm,
Everything, even feelings pass away.

Wind driven snowstorm, cherry blossom snowstorm,
Losing everything, it lets go.
Wind scattered snowstorm, cherry blossom snowstorm,
Everything falls away.

The measure is nothing,
The wind overwhelms it all!

Then she let the patterns fall away, certain the little girl would have understood.

Lyrics credit:　山根麻以　(Mai Yamane),　 桜の木の下で　(Under the Cherry Tree)

Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” — A Timely Treatise?

by in Boundary Behavior, Hmmm..., Identity, Politics | 13 Comments

“Mass movements can occur and spread without belief in God, but not without belief in a devil.”
— Eric Hoffer

The True Believer, is a study of mass movements, their causes, mechanisms and development, and their place in the context of both historical and contemporary human events. It was written in 1951 by Eric Hoffer, a self-educated polymath, social philosopher, historian, writer and longshoreman.  The book became well known in 1952 after receiving a recommendation from US President Dwight Eisenhower. In 2002, the book again gained popularity after it was listed in the writer, Allen Scarbrough’s, What You Need To Read To Know Just About Everything: The 25 best books for a self education and why.

True Believer CoverThe True Believer is written in Hoffer’s usual aphoristic, non-academic style, giving it a slightly odd-feel for those accustomed to more formally composed texts. However, Hoffer carefully referenced and annotated sources throughout the book, making it clear that he was not constructing an argument based merely upon his own opinions. And since the writing avoids much technical and academic language, its content is accessible to a wide range of readers.

In the book, Hoffer presents an argument that all mass movements share common characteristics, whether they are religious, political, social, economic, or a mix thereof. He contends that followers share common traits, and that they behave in similar manners. He also argues that mass movements and their leaders tend to present themselves using similar tactics, and that rhetorical arguments likewise follow similar patterns.  Consequently, mass movements are interchangeable, dependent more upon their abilities to produce fanatical, “true believers” than their promotion of any particular belief.

The book is divided into four sections, each with short “chapters” presenting historical evidence, academic sources, or examples upon which a general argument is constructed.

In part one, Hoffer addresses the ways in which mass movements generate an appeal through already existing populations of individuals who feel dis-empowered, or that their lives have lost value or meaning. By encouraging these individuals to allow their own centers of principle to be transferred to an outside source, an influential leader can arise. Then, by promoting the perception of a zero-sum competition in which there will be all-or-nothing winners and losers, a fanaticism is generated, and the movement grows more resolute.

However, Hoffer then uses examples from history where followers of mass movements switched sides, along with comparisons of the characteristics of symbolisms from the cross to the hammer-and-sickle, and presents examples such as the religious nature of WWII Japanese nationalism to propose that all mass movements are essentially interchangeable.  Hoffer is thus proposing that the principle of a mass movement is not nearly so important as the fanaticism that it can generate, the source of a mass movement’s “true believers.”

Part two examines the characteristics of those who are potential converts to mass movements. According to Hoffer, the most likely are among those who have seen themselves become poor or disenfranchised. The abjectly poor, Hoffer argues, are too busy trying to eek out a living. And the long-term poor have often adapted to their circumstance. But to those who see their own wealth and status as disappearing, the impetus may be to blame others for a loss of prosperity.

Hoffer also considers those social, psychological, or intellectual misfits within an existing society whom he describes as the often “incurably frustrated.” Unable to contribute creatively, they may become passionately committed to a “holy” cause that supersedes social boundaries. He considers these individuals to be among the most dangerous within mass movements, as they are motivated by irrational drives that can result in violence.

Hoffer also addresses the selfish, the ambitious among opportunity, disenfranchised minorities and ethnic outsiders, the “bored” who find no joy or purpose in life, and “sinners” who contend with their own feelings of guilt.

Part three describes the ways in which individuals become subordinate to a mass movement, sacrificing individuality to a belief. Members become familial or tribal, identifying themselves within the safely bias-confirming identity of the larger community. There is a communal sense that Hoffer suggests is a “primitive state” in which values and norms are entirely dictated by an ever-present collective. Central ideas become doctrine, reinforced through propaganda, coercion and proselytization. Rational thought is replaced by faith.

Hoffer proposes that while mass movements ultimately come to depend upon a “belief” in some higher power, they don’t require belief in a supernatural God. However, all mass movements do require the unifying belief in a supernatural-like “devil,” a convenient place in which to focus a collective’s hatred, and an outlet for followers’ self-loathing.  And in a disquietingly relevant conclusion, Hoffer states, “…the ideal devil is a foreigner,” and continues, “To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry.”

Part four describes the manner in which mass movements pass through their “active phase,” and either fail, are replaced, or become established as institutions. At some point, all mass movements must move away from fanaticism and adopt practical means in order to be sustainable, and this is often when they become culturally institutionalized. Pragmatic leadership may adopt bits of ideology from a mass movement in order to keep the faith of those who followed. But ultimately, only those portions that can be fit within the structure of a viable society can be kept. If a mass movement cannot maintain followers as it changes into a socially viable form, then the movement necessarily dies along with its fanatics, just a Nazism died along with Hitler’s own fanatical self-destruction.

Mass movements, according to Hoffer, are largely predictable in their progression. Ones with very specific goals tend to be shorter-lived and more pragmatic. Those with vague, unstructured or philosophically or religiously disputable goals tend to be longer-lived, bloodier and more prone to bringing about subsequent mass movements.

Hoffer doesn’t consider that all mass movements are necessarily doomed to failure, nor does he consider their end results to be necessarily destructive. However, he maintains that leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi, F.D.R., Churchill, and Nehru are the “rare exceptions.” Hoffer declares that mass movements more often institutionalize themselves, or find themselves replaced by subsequent mass movements through increased brutality.

Hoffer concludes by citing J. B. S. Haldane’s, The Inequality of Man, that fanaticism is one of only four truly important human inventions between 3000BC and 1400AD. But Hoffer also alludes to the irony that while fanaticism is a, “malady of the soul,” it can also be, “an instrument of resurrection.”