Ethnic Narcissism and Infertility in Japan - 2
By Tom Bradley
Speaking of priestcraft infiltrating places of public education, it occurs to me now to wonder what might happen if the "Elder" of my boyhood, the man who suspended me so regularly from elementary school, could be persuaded to leave the holy land of Utah and come here to engage these rightists in cosmological dispute. Which side of the red-hot evolutionism/ creationism controversy might they come down on? Their revealed scripture, the Kojiki, speaks of the royal line descending directly from the Sun Goddess. That puts a kink in natural selection. Maybe there would be no dispute at all.
Lately there are signs that the rightists’ eager acolytes, the cheerleaders, are dying out as a phenomenon at my school. I’ve always been one to hail the withering of clergy in any form. But, considering who is replacing them, I think I might sort of miss the weird little pricks.
Now their big bass drum is not beleaguered quite so vigorously or often. Instead, unmuffled motorcycles idle everywhere, making it even more unpleasant to breathe than usual. Working-class punks from the neighborhood vocational high school, the so-called bosozoku, or teen bikers, have been admitted—no, seduced and sucked—into the higher education system. And their wholesomely nihilistic presence makes all religio-patriotic display seem quaint, even cute.
With their spiked tangerine-flake hair, tattoos, nose- and nipple- and navel-rings, and all the other courage-boosting mutilations of tribal warriors, these arriviste "bozos" lend the collegiate scene a hellish quality, reminiscent of genuine varsity bashes at Heidelberg and other centers of learning on the European continent. Sneaking behind a styrofoam incinerator now and then to mainline their methedrine, these honest, burping degenerates are the only people on campus, besides my curmudgeonly old colleague and me, who know how to behave like scholars in real countries. They speak quietly to one another, and do not even look twice as I lurch past on my way to the language laboratory. I hear no genocidal slogans or nationalistic sentiments from their brown-painted lips. They have more mature, or at least cooler mannerisms than the dwindling leaders of cheers, who watch them from a safe distance with unconscious admiration and metaphorical penis envy.
How can the complexion of the Japanese matriculator be changing so drastically in such a short time? If this wasn’t the proverbially hyperfecundant yellow race, one might almost wonder if there has been a sudden decline in the supply of eighteen year olds. Is the bottom of the demographic barrel being desperately scraped? Well, as a matter of fact, I have been told that my school hands out admission certificates in the railroad stations, stapled to free packets of mini-kleenex to persuade people to take them. A lot of the incoming freshmen would have been better advised to use the latter and discard the former for the sad joke it is.
With the graying of this society (potential baby-makers would rather window-shop), college entrance requirements are steadily being lowered. The two classes of youngster become less distinguishable, as buzz-cut kamikaze nerds with red polka-dotted megaphones morph into gutter punks toting contraband Italian stilettos. By this time next academic year I will be confiscating paint thinner and zip guns from the customary knot of blackness that tends to form against the back wall of any classroom, Japanese or foreign.
Unlike my native colleagues, I do not dread this development. It will be my professional apotheosis: my jackbooted teaching style will finally come into its own. Besides, if I’m still here when it happens, that will mean my position hasn’t been rendered redundant in the meantime for lack of interest, and old Bradley-sensei hasn’t been sent home to manage a convenience store in the middle of the Salt Flats, there to dodge the semiautomatic fire of New World bosozoku.
These scooter-trash dope-fiends are not so much taking over Japanese academe as seeping up from below, and supplying by default a vacuum left by the infertility of their betters. As it is, the top two floors of our classroom building have been sealed off and allowed to sink into cobwebbed desuetude, and the remaining desks barely have a thirty-percent occupancy. To walk down the corridor is creepy even for a former desert dweller like me. I miss the Caucasoidophobic rants as the shuffling sound of my regulation slippers rebounds off the vacated linoleum.
To grasp the sheer apocalypse I’m prophesying here, you must understand what blood lines have always meant in "this backwater called Dai Nippon, this lightless cranny of the modern world," as my politically incorrect limey colleague calls our adopted home. The natives’ spiritual development has been arrested at a point similar to that of the very early Jews and Greeks. They cannot imagine the deathlessness of the individual soul, which suffers or rejoices eternally according to its own deserts. Instead, like the rank-and-file members of the Troy and Canaan expeditions, they’ve always cherished hopes of blood immortality, of descendants countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore, even unto the umpteenth generation, and so on and so forth, with no shortage of great-great-great-, etc., grandchildren to maintain your effigy in the household shrine and feed your numb ghost with the smell of burnt sandalwood. Hence the adulation of their own well-chlorinated gene pool, and the rabid chauvinism that actuated the cheerleaders back in the days when my university, and Japan itself, seemed to be flourishing.
The old chestnut, "Blood is thicker than water," translates directly into their idiom, and seems to have been coined independently. If pressed, a habitué of Christendom, whether pious or not, will at least feel obliged to allow that the blood under consideration should ideally be that of humanity at large. But in this country it is invariably taken in the much more circumscribed sense. And what strikes our ears as a stale cliché has, until recently, lost none of its piquancy here.
But now they appear even to have lost faith in that pitiable and dangerous deoxyribonucleic delusion. Their own uniqueness and superiority have evidently become matters of indifference, unworthy of perpetuation. Japan’s current "negative population growth," according to my disgruntled old colleague, is the expression of an unexampled moral degeneracy. "Here is a people so exhausted and shortsighted," he sputters, "they’ve sold what little dangling scab of a soul they had for a shopping spree."
In amelioration of that perhaps borderline-racist statement, we must glance at our surroundings. The geography of this archipelago is so cozy, the mountains so tiny and green. Rivulets of sweet water trickle gently from feathery bamboo groves. Hornets are the most dangerous animals. Maybe we can excuse the natives for never developing a spirituality beyond the gutless Zen. The only reminders of Providence’s down-side are occasional typhoons, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, as impersonal as nature gets, and just random enough to encourage mindless totemism.
I find myself forced to agree with my crusty colleague on this point. The level of spiritual attainment on these islands is as low as any I’ve encountered in my random stumblings from the Far West to the Extreme Orient, including the white-slum Sugar House district of Salt Lake City. But what right have I to be surprised to find them just as theologically inchoate as the polygamist cultists who founded my hometown? What should I expect other than yet more anemic religiosity on this side of the Pacific?
Read your Second Book of Kings, where the Israelites’ backslide into degenerate Canaanite cultism is disdainfully described: "On top of every high place and under every big tree, shrines appeared." Then take a drive through the Japanese countryside and see if you can begin to count the shrines. And visit some of them. With their thatched roofs and splintery altars stacked high with citrus, are they not merely modified tiki-huts? These children of the Mikado should not be classed among the major Asian civilizations. They’re island-hopping Polynesians who paddled their canoes a little too far north, and wound up over-financed by us.
If you unshade yourself from under the big tree, and traverse the high place, you will probably come to a temple outright, which is to say a fane dedicated to the local third-hand style of Buddhism. If this temple happens to be located in my depopulated and depressed neighborhood, it might very well look at first glance like an abandoned garden, poinsettias drooping over everything. It will be enclosed by four nostril-high walls, wattle and daub, topped by rotting pine bas-reliefs of fox demons scarfing fried tofu.
A greenish carp pond will send small belches of airborne murk to sink in around the graven lineaments of pagan idols, called jizos, nearly featureless under the granite pudge, looking like neonate Buddhas, or Gary Bauer. Stacked at their toeless feet will be baby toys, canned food offerings, and mandarin oranges caved in like bottled fetus-heads in high school biology labs.
A dozen questions will pop into your mind about the pink bibs on those jizos: where do they come from, what do they signify, what invisible hands mend and replace them, and why are they the only elements of this scene that receive any kind of maintenance? This temple yard is such an obscure place of devotion that the food offerings have long ago been carted off by crows and mountain-roaming derelicts. But, even so, someone has been by to replace the bibs. They’re pink as the bolt in the fabric store.
In answer to your questions, hear now the time-honored words of Japanese grannies preparing their granddaughters for womanhood: "Once you’ve contrived that he should cease to be, all you need to do is place a little piece of fish, or perhaps a dab of pork gristle, between the lips of the youngster after you expel him, before you burn him. He will not become a buddha as a result of this dietary indiscretion. He will return to the cycle of metempsychosis, his tiny soul and penis 'recycled,' as your mother says of milk cartons and plastic bags. Perhaps, with any luck at all, he and not some other youngster will return to your household when the time for parenthood is riper. And if you’re inclined to feel sentimental, stitch a few cozy pink bibs for the baby-sized jizo figurines in the temple yard."
I don’t want to come on like the above-mentioned Mr. Bauer (heaven forefend I should get such a licking), but I need to point a few things out here, purely for the sake of cultural context: there is not enough demand to persuade Nipponese pharmacists to shelve the latest oral contraceptives; rubbers are unwrapped less often than miscarriage is procured (retroactively in no rare instances); far more bouncing bundles of joy get liquidated than are permitted to feel the smoggy sunshine on their sweet little cheeks.
Meanwhile, another wing of classrooms at my place of employment is scheduled to be surrendered to the spiders. And guess whose job it is to mop up after the few howling sons of Tojo who manage to dodge and duck down the birth canal more-or-less intact.
© Tom Bradley 2001