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172 SPECIFICITIES OF GLOBALIZATIONTHE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION AND CONSUMPTION:SPIRITUALITY IN JAPAN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A THAISing SuwannakijINTRODUCTION: Chasing reality, shift of focusFrom my research experience, I learned what is almosta life truth: that there is always a chasm between realityand one’s understanding of reality. My primary interestwas Buddhism and, before the actual research, I naïvelythought, gathered from books I read, that Japan wasprimarily a Buddhist country, and that perhaps I couldstudy it in comparison with Thailand. This is what Iwrote in the proposal to the API:While still in monkhood in the Theravadatradition, I was intrigued and greatly inspired bythe teachings and characteristics of Mahayana andZen Buddhism, as well as their forerunner, Taoism.In particular, I am fascinated by the emphasis onquietism, simplicity, minimalist way of living, andmore importantly, their down-to-earth, natural,and ordinary approach to truth in everyday life, asopposed to text-based hierarchical, rigid, yet highlyarbitrarily interpreted, complex phases to attain thegreat Enlightenment in the Theravada tradition.The fascinating aesthetical virtue of wabi-sabi,for example, runs counter to the celebration ofpermanent and grandiose construction of symbolicmaterials.Although I also wrote that Zen and Taoism “…themselves have been conceptualized, institutionalized,and broken into often-contending sects and schools,and later, in the context of Globalization, repackagedand commodified,” indicating that somehow I wasalready cautious of the danger of the over-idealizedimage of another culture, this was just a bookish levelof caution. After arriving in Japan, I found in myselfcountless ‘misunderstandings’ or misconceptions aboutJapanese society and its spirituality, which shall beoutlined below. Doubtless, to correct these is certainlythe purpose of research, which should bring aboutmore understanding, trying to get as close as possibleto reality. I then set myself, in the first few months,the task of covering the existing literature on Japanesespirituality as much as possible. At the same time, I alsotried to get to know people, talk to them and makefriends, bearing in mind that natural interviews cantake place at any time.As a result, I learned more about Japan and Japanesereligions. For instance, I learned that the present stateof Japanese spirituality is typically segregated andcompartmentalized into different beliefs, and varioussects and schools within even one belief system,comprising a plethora of religiosity, with greatly diversefeatures of teaching, ritual and practice, althoughcertain similar patterns also exist. Take Buddhism, forinstance: there are the sects of Shingon, Tendai, Zen(which is sub-divided mainly into Rinzai and Soto),Pure-land (or Jodo, with a (dis-)affiliation of Jodoshinshu)and Nichiren (split off into Nichiren-shoshuand its modern next of kin, Soka Gakkai, etc.), amongothers. All these are further liquefied in their details,and yet have solidified into new religious organizations.To give one example, one of the people I met was thehead of a new Buddhist organization based aroundTendai teachings, yet it does not belong to the Tendaisect. The actual practice of Buddhism is tied with localtemples, which are usually run like a family business,and ie (the household system) further breaks downthe specificity and diversity of the religion. A friend ofmine kindly pointed out that Buddhism and Shintoismcould hardly be separated before the official segregationin the Meiji period. This is not to mention some of theshinshukyo or New Religions which often draw and fuseinspiration, worldviews, concepts, ideas, rituals andpractices from various major religions. The notoriousAum Shinrikyo, for instance, encompasses the teachingof three major Buddhist schools, Theravada, Mahayanaand Vajarayana, but also includes some elements ofHinduism (note the word aum), and Christianity (thebelief in the apocalypse, also the group has changed itsname to Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet),and the practice of Chinese gymnastics and yoga. Toconfuse things even more, I learned that not a fewreligious followers belong to more than one sect atany time, or change from one to another after some‘trial period’ to see if the faith can offer solutions totheir problems (Reader 1991). Meanwhile, among thenon-believers, or so they claimed to me, which seemto be the majority of the people I encountered, thecelebration of many traditions around yearly events,such as the Buddhist-related bon festival, Christmasor visiting Shinto shrines during the New Year,seems to be a perfectly normal practice, without anyAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows