Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

184 SPECIFICITIES OF GLOBALIZATIONNow that I was in fact going home, I had finally becomeaware of the state of the young in Japan.A spiritual hunger that drives them either to escapeor salve their emptiness. And so they consume andconsume, for satiation, sublimation or salvation, butstill they are hungry.And I am not talking about religion here. But somethingeven more primordial than that.Return to Tokyo, April 2008And so it was finally revealed to me that my return fromthis one-year Fellowship period was in fact just the endof the beginning, the hard-fought journey towardsunderstanding and revelation that I had sought fromthe beginning.I know now the angle or approach my documentary filmwill take. I will still be taking aim at Spirituality in Japanbut, to be more specific, I will focus on spirituality or theabsence of spirituality in contemporary Japanese society,especially amongst the young; the current “spiritualboom” in Japan; the role of ‘spiritual counselors’such as Hiroyuki Ehara and Kazuko Hosoki and theconsumption of spiritual experience; the meaning ofdeath, life and afterlife; and the growing numbers ofsuicide and parricide amongst the young; the incidenceof bullying, acute social withdrawal, depression andwrist-cutting as well as other social anomalies andpsycho-social disorders in Japan.My return to Tokyo this time in fact allowed me tore-contextualize my feelings, concerns, responses andmeditation on the metropolis, as well as to intellectuallyand emotionally engage with selected experts andactivists involved at the heart of my subject-matter inan honest, open-ended, exploratory, two-way dialogueand essentially test how accurate or even how naïvemy views and pre-conclusions might have been, andto gauge how ready I was to contemplate and addressthese issues in an effective, well-reasoned and wellempathizedmanner.I began by interviewing Professor Nobutaka Inoue,Head of the Institute for Japanese Culture & Classicsand a Professor of Shinto Studies at KokugakuinUniversity, who was also Host Professor for my entireFellowship period.Professor Inoue set the tone for the many revelations thatwere to come by stating emphatically, amongst otherthings, that there was a clear detachment or separationbetween the people responsible for the religiousenvironment in Japan and the people, especially theyounger generation, who actually need some form ofspiritual dimension, guidance and bearings within theircurrent everyday lives; that the religious environmenturgently needed significantly large effort in redefiningits roles within the context of the needs of the youngergeneration today; and furthermore, there was instead alack of genuine drive and initiative to understand thesituation of the young today amongst the people at thedecision-making level.This was followed by an interview with Ms. FumieKamitoh, a Psychotherapist/Mental Health Counselorand Director of the Child Protection Project withthe Tokyo English Life Line (TELL) CommunityCounseling Service, as well as a Mental HealthCounselor with a University in Tokyo.Ms. Kamitoh delivered a hammer-blow of reality whenshe confirmed that the desire for suicide, certainlyamongst those she has counseled, represented a totalannihilation of the self, rather than a ‘resetting,’ ‘rebooting’or ‘re-starting’ of the ‘program’ suggested bysome analysts citing the special influence of reincarnationbeliefs and a ‘multiple-life’ video-game mentality.Furthermore, it often had little social dimension, suchas a sign of protest or escapism or statement, as itmay be in other countries or previous generations inJapan; rather, today’s suicides, or the desire for suicideamongst younger people in Japan, are largely borne bya deep sense of nihilism or, at least to me, that sea ofmeaninglessness that I had described earlier.Next, I interviewed Mr. Yasuyuki Shimizu, Founderand Director of Life Link, a non profit organization(NPO) focusing on suicide prevention and suiciderecovery therapy.Mr. Shimizu, on the other hand, warned that one mustbe careful in reading too much into media reports onyouth suicide, since the highest percentage for suicidein Japan is still amongst middle-aged men, and thereports of youth suicide tend to be sensationalistic andrepetitive. Nevertheless, he affirmed that there wasindeed a disturbing trend, even though represented bysmall numbers, pointing towards a far more disturbedstate of the heart and mind amongst the youngergeneration, beyond what the general public is wellaware of.He lauded the opportunity ‘spiritual’ TV programs, suchas Ehara-san’s Aura no Izumi (the Fountain of Aura),Asian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows