Hokkaido Trip
Day 6 (17/12) - Narita Temple (Narita-san) (Part 2)




Kaizan-do Hall (1938)






Sanja Shrine




Holy (?) Water


Pagoda


Pagoda sign


Interior of one temple

Next, I went to the garden through the back door.




Hut













The Japanese garden in San Francisco was prettier, possibly because it was more compact, but I shan't bother discussing notions of authenticity here, and anyway I really liked this one as well.








Closed shops














Garden entrance




Novel donation box


Spy shots from what was presumably the main temple hall (certainly it was the only I saw with a 'No Photography' sign)


Jap lucky charms. These are priceless.


"Safe driving charm: This charm protects your car from traffic accidents. You keep this charm in your car.
Migawari-Mamori: This charm protects you from accidents. You keep this in your pocket or bag. If you have some accident, this wooden charm splits instead of you.
Yakuyoke-mamori: In Japan YAKUDOSHI is ages which are unlucky and bad things happen. If you are this age, you had better keep this charm.
Nissan-mamori: This charm is of the painted FUDOU MYOUOU's figure. If you can't come to NARITASAN daily to pray DUDOU MYOUOU, you had better enshrine this charm in your room and pray every day."


"Fujyou-mamori: This charm avoids uncleanness. You enshrine this uncleanness place such as the lavatory.
Mushifuuju-mamori: This charm calms your child's hysterics. You enshrine it in your child's room."


"Pass the exam votive tablet: This votive tablet is for success of an examination. Please write your name and your wish or the purpose on back side of the tablet, and pray to FUDOU MYOUOU for your wish from the bottom of your heart.
Lucky charm: This lucky charm is a necklace with 24K gold foil. [Ed: 24K gold seems to be the only attraction of this charm.]"

I advise against laughing at these, though, since that might count as inciting religious hatred against the Shinto religion and/or wounding Shinto religious feelings.


The black belt you see is a conveyor belt and it was moving. Uhh.


Close-up of the altar. Maybe the conveyor belt brings offerings to the statues of the gods.

I saw a bunch of Latinos in Narita-san.

[Addendum: Some pictures reuploaded due to a down Imageshack server.]

S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S

A great primer on Postcolonialism

"When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we'd been saying they were." - John F. Kennedy

***

"The growth of modern Western knowledge systems and the histories of most 'disciplines' can be seen to be embedded within and shaped by colonial discourses. Martin Bernal's well-known book Black Athena demonstrates this most forcefully in the case of classics. It argues that the history of black Egypt and its centrality to ancient Greek culture was erased by nineteenth-century scholarship in order to construct a white Hellenic heritage for Europe. Bernal goes further than that: he suggests that the rise of professional scholarship and its bifurcation into 'disciplines' are profoundly connected with the growth of racial theory (1987: 220). Thus he questions the objectivity of not just the writing of history but of all knowledges produced in Europe during the colonial era...

[Ed: Martain Bernal is talking rubbish. As Wikipedia notes: "Bernal's specific theories are not accepted by the majority of classical scholars; Mary Lefkowitz of Wellesley College is a notably active critic... Bernal's model posits, among other things, that Greece was occupied by Egypt for two long periods, even though no evidence for that can be found in Egyptian or other sources." And the Ancient Egyptians weren't 'black'.]

The development or reproduction of even those knowledge systems that appear to be too abstract to have an ideological inflection, such as mathematics, can also be connected to the imperialist project (Bishop 1990). To that extent, we may say that all discourses are colonialist discourse. At one level, such a conclusion simply underlines the Marxist notion that all ideas are inter-dependent with economic and social reality.

[Ed: This is priceless, and underlines the notion that a lot of post-Marxism is bullshit. Cock: if you mean the domination of indian numericals over the whole world, certainly. (he probably means Arabic)]

... At a very practical level, colonialists were dependent upon natives for their access to the 'new' lands and their secrets. As Caliban reminds Prospero, he showed the latter 'all the qualities o'th'isle,/The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile'...

The female body is described in terms of the new geography, as in Donne's 'Love's Progress':

The nose (like to the first meridian) runs
Not 'twixt an East and West, but 'twixt two suns;
It leaves a cheek, a rosy hemisphere,
On either side, and then directs us where
Upon the Islands Fortunate we fall,
(Not faint Canaries, but Ambrosial)
Her swelling lips... and the straight Hellespont between
The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts...
And sailing towards her India, in that way
Shall at her fair Atlantic navel stay... (Donne 1985: 181)

The lovers' relationship is worked out in terms of the colonialists' interaction with the lands they 'discover', as in 'To his Mistris going to Bed':

Licence my roving hands, and let them goe
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America, my new found lande,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My myne of precious stones, my Empiree,
How blest am I in this discovering thee. (1985: 184)

... Sexual and colonial relationships become analogous to each other. Donne's male lover is the active discover of the female body, and desires to explore it in the same way as the European 'adventurer' who penetrates and takes possession of lands which are seen as passive, or awaiting discovery. Here the sexual promise of the woman's body indicates the wealth promised by the colonies - hence, in the first poem the lover/colonist traverses her body/the globe to reach her 'India', the seat of riches. But the woman/land analogy also employs a reverse logic as the riches promised by the colonies signify both the joys of the female body as well as its status as a legitimate object for male possession...

[Peter] Hulme shows how two words - 'cannibal' and 'hurricane' - were liften from Native American tongues and adopted as new words into all major European languages in order to 'strengthen an ideological discourse' (1986: 101) Both words came to connote not just the specific natural and social phenomenon they appear to describe but the boundary between Europe and America, civility and wildness. 'Hurricane' began to mean not simply a particular kind of a tempest but something peculiar to the Caribbean. Thus, it indicated the violence and savagery of the place itself. [Ed: What's in a name? A hurricane by any other name would be implicated in colonialist discourse.] Similarly, 'cannibalism' is not simply the practice of human beings eating their own kind, not just another synonym for the older term 'anthropophagi'. 'Anthropophagi' referred to savages eating their own kind, but 'cannibalism' indicated the threat that these savages could turn against and devour Europeans... they both came to designate whatever lay outside Europe. Moreover, 'cannibal' was etymologically connected to the Latin word canis (dog), reinforcing the view that 'the native cannibals of the West Indies hunted like dogs and treated their victims in the ferocious manner of all predators'. Hulme discusses how a play like Shakespeare's The Tempest (far from being a romantic fable removed from the real world) is implicated in these discursive developments, and in the formation of colonial discourse in general, how its tempests are hurricanes in this new sense, and why Caliban's name is an anagram for cannibal, and why also Prospero turns a dog called Fury on to the rebels (Hulme 1986: 89-1340. [Ed: Seems some people don't know what anagrams are.]

... George Lamming... claimed that there were 'for me, just three important events in British Caribbean history' - Columbus's journey, 'the abolition of slavery and the arrival of the East - India and China - in the Caribbean Sea' and 'the discovery of the novel by the West Indians as a way of investigating and projecting the inner experiences of the West Indian community' [Ed: I wonder how many of the 'colonised' actually read colonial/postcolonial works.]

... Caliban in The Tempest, who, Prospero alleges, threatens to rape his daughter Miranda. This stereotype reverses the trope of colonialism-as-rape and thus, it can be argued, deflects the violence of the colonial encounter from the coloniser to the colonised. Understood variously as either a native reaction to imperial rape, or as a pathology of the darker races, or even as a European effort to rationalise colonial guilt, the figure of the 'black' rapist is commonplace enough to be seen as a necessary/permanent feature of the colonial landscape. [Ed: i.e. black rapists exist because white men are evil; white rapists exist because white men are evil.]...

As Spivak pointed out in an early essay, 'It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English' (1985a: 243). Thus, no work of fiction written during that period, no matter how inward-looking, esoteric or apolitical it announces itself to be, can remain uninflected by colonial cadences. [Ed: Why stop at fiction? Non-fiction too is tainted!]"

--- Colonialism/postcolonialism / Ania Loomba (2005)

Addendum: In sum, post-colonialism is bullshit

To ring in the New Year:


Ratbert: What kind of party are we having for New Year's Eve?
Dilbert: Why would I celebrate an arbitrary calendar event?
Ratbert: Suddenly I don't feel so bad about using your hairbrush as a loofah.


- For all the grinches out there

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience." - George Bernard Shaw

***

Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism

"Of all the school subjects which were imposed on indigenous pupils in the colonial schools, arguably the one which could have been considered the least culturally-loaded was mathematics... This article challenges that myth, and places what many now call ’western mathematics’ in its rightful position in the arguments - namely, as one of the most powerful weapons in the imposition of western culture...

But where do ’degrees’ come from? Why is the total 180? Why no 200, or 100? Indeed, why are we interested in triangles and their properties at all? The answer to all these questions is, essentially, ’because some people determined that it should be that way’... [Ed: We also drive on certain sides because some people determine it should be that way. Feel free to drive on the other side and kill yourself (hopefully not other people who aren't as ideologically driven as you. And I'm sure driving on a certain side of the road restricts us and prevents the subaltern from having a voice.]

We are now aware of the fact that many different counting systems exist in the world. In Papua New Guinea, Lean has documented nearly 600 (there are more than 750 languages there) containing various cycles of numbers, not all base ten.’ As well as finger counting, there is documented use of body counting, where one points to a part of the body and uses the name of that part as the number. Numbers are also recorded in knotted strings, carved on wooden tablets or on rocks, and beads are used, as well as many different written systems of numerals. The richness is both fascinating and provocative for anyone imagining initially that theirs is the only system of counting and recording numbers. [Ed: Try adding up your supermarket bill with knotted strings.]

... Nor only is it in number that we find interesting differences. The conception of space which underlies Euclidean geometry is also only one conception - it relies particularly on the ’atomistic’ and objectoriented ideas of points, lines, planes and solids. Other conceptions exist, such as that of the Navajos where space is neither subdivided nor objectified, and where everything is in motion. [Ed: Try designing a plane using Navajo space instead of Euclidean space. Just don't take anyone else on the test flight.]

... Regarding trade and the commercial field generally, this is clearly the area where measures, units, numbers, currency and some geometric notions were employed. More specifically, it would have been western ideas of length, area volume, weight, time and money which would have been imposed on the indigenous societies... as Jones’ informant showed in Papua New Guinea in a recent investigation: ’It could be said [that two gardens are equal in area] but it would always be debated’ and ’There is no way of comparing the volume of rock with the volume of water, there being no reason for it’. [Ed: You can use measuring systems where volumes can't be compared and remain as isolated indigenious tribal societies.]

... There are four clusters of values which are associated with western European mathematics, and which must have had a tremendous impact on the indigenous cultures.

First, there is the area of rationalism, which is at the very heart of western mathematics. If one had to choose a single value and attribute which has guaranteed the power and authority of mathematics within western culture, it is rationalism. As Kline says: ’In its broadest aspect mathematics is a spirit, the spirit of rationality. It is this spirit that challenges, stimulates, invigorates, and drives human minds to exercise themselves to the fullest. With its focus on deductive reasoning and logic, it poured scorn on mere trial and error practices, traditional wisdom and witchcraft. [Ed: I wonder if Alan J. Bishop has ever gone to a witch doctor instead of a real one, and thus been complicit in the marginalisation of indigenous cultures.]

... A third set of values concerns the power and control aspect of western mathematics. Mathematical ideas are used either as directly applicable concepts and techniques, or indirectly through science and technology, as ways to control the physical and social environment. As Schaaf says in relation to the history of mathematics: ’The spirit of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is typified by man’s increasing mastery over his physical environment. ’ So, using numbers and measurements in trade, industry, commerce and administration would all have emphasised the power and control values of mathematics. It was (and still is) so clearly useful knowledge, powerful knowledge, and it seduced the majority of peoples who came into contact with it.

... Certainly, even if progress were sought by the indigenous population, which itself is not necessarily obvious, what was offered was a westernised, industrialised and product-oriented version of progress, which seemed only to reinforce the disparity between progressive, dynamic and aggressive western European imperialists and traditional, stable and non-proselytising colonised peoples. Mathematically inspired progress through technology and science was clearly one of the reasons why the colonial powers had progressed as far as they had, and that is why mathematics was such a significant tool in the cultural kitbag of the imperialists. [Ed: Subsidising AIDS drugs to the Third World is cultural imperialism, and it's not necessarily obvious that they want to live longer.]

In total, then, these values amount to a mathematico-technological cultural force, which is what indeed the imperialist powers generally represented. Mathematics with its clear rationalism, and cold logic, its precision, its so-called ’objective’ facts (seemingly culture and value free), its lack of human frailty, its power to predict and to control, its encouragement to challenge and to question, and its thrust towards yet more secure knowledge, was a most powerful weapon indeed. When allied to the use of technology, to the development of industry and commerce through scientific applications and to the increasing utility of tangible, commercial products, its status was felt to be indisputable."

--- Alan J. Bishop, Race & Class (2000) 32: 51-65


Someone: if the western powers didn't teach mathematics, they would be accused of leaving 3rd world people in the dust, depriving them of knowledge

Something someone sent me:


"MSN 07-08 Countdown
be there or be gay