Salt * Wet * Fish

The most traumatic news this month is not the increase in taxi fares or Suharto’s ill health or that our ministers are getting more pay whereas mine is not, but the Japan Rail decision to not allow posters of the Tokuseki temples’s Somin Sai in Mizusawa in Japan. Now everyone in the world knows about this festival and more people are dying to see naked Japanese men!

Now this reminds me of  what happened a long time ago in Japan during the times when Westerns were traded heavily with Japan. So much of the Western culture were flowing into Japan, including their hang up on nakedness and sex, that the government at that time tried to ban sumo wrestling because they thought that men fighting in loincloth was “disgusting”. It was a good thing that some sumo wrestlers fought back and it helped to saved the tradition.

I have also heard from my Japanese friends that mixed hot public baths (onsen) are actually quite common during the old days, where men and women would be naked in the same baths. Apparently when the Americans came in after WWII, they decided that this practice was, again, “disgusting” and had them split into two.

So much of our “globalisation” have us taking in the fears and aversions of the mainly powerful econonmics of the West, that it threatens to create a mono-culture. Some are, of course, beneficial like equality, but there are also those that increases our fears and aversions towards what was a norm in some of our traditions and it takes an issue like this to remind us of the diversity and beauty of values long lost to many of us who have been “globalised”.

The Japan Rail decision is surely one of those decision made due to internalizing much of the Abrahamic religions’ hang ups on nakedness with their corporate structure. Yet they forget that there are even more scantily clad women posters and magazines everywhere else in Japan, but that is okay with them (the men)… it seems.

Below photo is from http://www.chibaphoto.jp/sominsai/sominsai2.html  and more festivals from http://wadaphoto.jp/maturi/