Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

SPECIFICITIES OF GLOBALIZATION 173contradictory feelings about observing many faiths.All these are to briefly illustrate how, when one takes acloser look, Japanese spirituality can vary and diversifygreatly, defying any simple classification, whether interms of organizations, locality, teachings or practices.Down to the individual level, one still has to discernthe differences from one person to another even withinthe same faith, and even within one person at differenttimes.Considering this, the gap between the reality and whatI had in mind earlier seemed to widen even further.Even after I was already in the research site, it took mea long time to make heads or tails of what was going onin the complex Japanese spiritual landscape. I alreadythought at that time that to compare it with Buddhismin Thailand was beyond any possibility. When I startedto be able to grasp a vague understanding of it, I stillencountered something ‘deviating’ from the picture Ihad, but it remained hazy. It seemed to me that I couldonly ever chase reality 1 because the more I tried to graspit, the more it eluded me; the chasm mentioned abovecould never be filled.However, this does not mean that we should not try tostudy anything, but that we also need to bear in mindthe limitedness of our perceptions. This opened up thequestion of how I should proceed with my research.To find similarities between the religious practices ofthe two countries risked the over-glossing and oversimplificationof a complicated reality. To descend intothe minute details of the diversity would be an endlesstask. Even specialists who can speak the language andhave been in the country for a long time still strugglewith it. The task would have overburdened my capacityand limited time frame. Apparently, a shift of focus wasnecessary.Certainly, I could easily discard my earlier‘misunderstandings’ and try to elaborate what is ‘true’of spirituality in Japan, collecting and quoting at lengthwhat specialists have said about it, and present it here.However, I came to notice the significance of thismisperception. Firstly, I asked, why is there such a starkdifference between reality and its representation? In mycase, why did I think that Japan was primarily a Zencountry while in reality there are people who have norelation whatsoever with Zen, or have absolutely no ideaabout it? Certainly, there are many factors involved; myignorance must share part of the blame, but beyond thatthere was the issue of how, in other countries, Japan andits spirituality are represented, mainly through printmedia, but also through other kinds of pop culture,especially visual mediums, including films, mangaand animation (think about Studio Gibli’s animationmovies). In Thailand, for instance, most of the bookson Japanese religion are translated from English, withembedded Western perspectives and preoccupations, butare usually treated as natural. The famous works on Zenby Thomas Merton, for instance, are based principallyon the comparison between Zen and Christianity, butare translated into Thai without this caution. Even sucha pioneer in translating, sparking off discussion, andpopularizing Zen Buddhism in Thailand from the 1970sonwards as the late Buddhadasa Bikkhu seemed not tobe overly concerned on this point. The Western viewof the East, in a rather romanticized, Orientalism-likefashion, is definitely in the working, and the discourseon Zen which has been massively popularized since the1960s in the West is not an exception. However, I shallalso show below that this politics of representation is byno means a case of the last century, but was occurringalready much earlier, with a particular emphasis on thevisual, scientific bias.Secondly, it is a representation that competes with realityto replace reality. Representation is not necessarilya ‘wrong’ or ‘mis’-conception but “representationshave a strong built-in tendency to self-naturalization,to offering themselves as if what they represented wasthe definitive truth of the matter… representationsdefine worlds, subjectivities, identities, and so on”(Pendergrast 2000). This means that nothing can beclassified easily as false or true, if the person believes thatit is true. In anthropology, researchers often encountersituations where the time-line in the memory of theinformer is ‘distorted.’ Nationalistic discourse is usuallya ‘distorted’ version in the eyes of revisionist academics,but a majority of the population in a country stillbelieves that it is the natural, absolute truth about theirhistory. Therefore, we must also, instead of merelyattacking representation as illusion, consider and analyzehow the process of representing works. In my case study,the representation of Zen in Western countries is alsore-introduced and adopted by the local Japanese, wholook at themselves as such, calling to mind the processthat Harumi Befu calls auto-Orientalism (Befu 2001). 2However, this ‘looking at oneself through the eyes ofothers’ (Dubois 1989) in a recent context differs fromany previous eras on the point that it usually occurs inthe form of consumption, especially among those whoare susceptible to the flows of images, ideas, perspectivesand information in the globalized, consumerist society.Having laid out my groundings for an argument, Iwill present my findings by dividing them into twomain interrelated themes—the representation and theconsumption of Japanese spirituality.Asian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows