This article was published on Financial Times Chinese website
At the foot of Mt. Takao, there are several posters advertising hiking routes and the mountain’s red foliage. The mountain, which is only a few hundred meters above sea level, is referred to as the most climbed mountain in the world in Wikipedia’s introduction. The mountain is on the west side of Tokyo, at the end of the Keio Line railroad. It’s the Mt. Fragrance for the people of Tokyo, if you compare it to Beijing.
Being new to Tokyo and not having everything settled in, we first took a trip up Mt. Takao. There are several routes along the way, and we chose to follow the older members of the community as they hiked a trail that took about 100 minutes. At first we encountered trees that were at the thickness of a bowl, and wondered if they had grown up after the war. Not far down the trail there is a stone bridge that crosses a mountain stream. On the other side of the bridge is a place where people in the shrine practice. Further up the mountain, the path begins to steepen and the trees grow thicker and taller, somewhat like Mt.
At the end of the trail is a temple. There is quite a bit of ceremony along the way into the temple, monuments, gates, statues, not to mention other religions. But along the way there were wooden boards over a meter long posted, each with names of people who had given donations to the temple. When you arrive at the temple, there is a plaque hanging on the door of the reception center, which lists the category list of the blessing business: safety in the home, business prosperity, career prosperity, traffic safety, doom removal, school entrance achievement, luck, when the disease healed, safety on the body, the wish to achieve success, good karma achievement, security and birth achievement, advancement in the school achievement, the elimination of disasters, sound health, longevity, safety of the work, longevity, blessing life success, consecration of cedar seedling, a total of 19 items. The scope of business here ranges from body and mind to family and society, basically covering all major life events. It is evident that this temple deep in the mountains is actually quite grounded. When I saw it, I had the urge to suggest that they add programs like WeChat Security and Netgroup Security.
On the side wall of the reception desk, there are two rows of wooden plaques, each about 10 centimeters in size, with the same name and the region they come from. It turns out that visitors are provided with a folded pamphlet, which looks very quaint. Every time a visitor climbs a mountain, he or she can get a mountaineering stamp. There are more than 20 folded stamps in one booklet. The stamps are replaced when they are finished. The booklet is beautifully printed and costs only a few hundred yen, which is probably just a labor cost. When you have completed a booklet, you can put your name on a wooden plate. The boards are separated by the number of booklets, with the largest collection being 99 booklets.
I’ve been messing around for years in the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia and other backward countries, and I’ve been to a lot of places with feudal superstitions, but I honestly haven’t seen superstitious marketing and operations this close to the customer; it’s really service-minded and closely tied to the secular. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem wouldn’t be so forthright as to hang a directory of blessing operations on the door. Then I went to a small restaurant and they also wrote the menu on a wooden sign and hung it up, a ruse.
Another point that struck me was the user management system. How do they like so much to put the customer’s name in the public, I have seen in the domestic temple mosque, is not something new, but listed in such a giddy, blatant, ubiquitous, indeed rarely seen. Mountaineering commemorative albums such as this, is simply a community software product managers must have the skills, the user’s behavior will be disassembled, to complete a small task to give a reward. Rewards accumulated to a certain extent can be upgraded for a gift package, in order to ensure that the user’s repurchase and stickiness.
Perhaps other regions of feudalism have cumbersome user systems, but the level of OPENness is so much worse. Japan seems to be the society that most likes to have individual names on display. Europe and Latin America apartment door signs will have the names of the occupants, I don’t remember much from other regions.
Wandering through another temple in Tokyo the other day, the beams of the mountain gate were covered with hand-sized seals of people’s names in a misplaced and disorganized manner, giving the impression that they were trying too hard. I guess this suggests that personal prestige is worth more here than elsewhere. Whether this is a retro or modern phenomenon is hard to say. After all, in ancient Japan, most people didn’t really need to have names.
Tradition and modernity sound like opposites. There is more tradition and a high concentration of feudal superstition in the late-developing countries, and this is common, from West Asia to South and South-East Asia. In the Far East, there seems to be less. For example, the dress code, the Middle East has robes and turbans, South Asia has robes and sari, and Southeast Asia has cage bases. I remember the shock of visiting the Burmese parliament to see the MPs in their traditional cageki long skirts and flip-flops. It’s kind of a coupling of tradition and modernity.
In comparison, East Asian societies seem to have modernized a bit more thoroughly, with men wearing Western clothes or modern casual wear. There have been long shirts and cheongsams on the mainland, but they have died out in everyday life. The popularity of hanbok among young people is not so much a tradition as a substitute sought after the disappearance of tradition. Unlike Japan, kimonos are not only worn on holidays, but can also be seen in the subway. And anyone who dares to wear a kimono on the street these days seems to have some family status.
Two days ago, I went to another temple to catch up with the July 5 Festival, adults stayed in kimono children kneeling in the temple hall, listening to a few monks chanting sutras. After closing the chanting, they got up and recited to the children for a while, spinning the duster in their hands a few times. I guess it’s probably some kind of good luck message to wish you good health and growth.
To put it simply, all these days of wandering around Japan have made me feel more and more that this place is very traditional. Tradition here is not the custom of the New Year’s holidays, but everyday life. Tradition here is not knowledge from books, concepts from leaders’ speeches or certain slogans, but something that affects the behavior and relationships of ordinary people every day.
When I was younger, I spent a lot of time in the Middle East, and one of my reflections on the Middle East at that time was that it was too hard to modernize the land, that tradition tied people’s bodies, lives and societies too tightly, and that it was hard to change. Now that I’ve been around Japan, I realize that maybe this is not the right way to think about it. The Japanese phenomenon shows that very modern societies can be traditional. Considering the modernization achievements of the East Asian countries, I even think that perhaps there are some factors in the traditions here that are more conducive to the modernization of the society.
To put it simply and crudely, the modern approach places more emphasis on standardization, quantification and rationality. While the traditional seems to be based on the human sensory perception derived from the set. The former is more scientific, but also more mechanical. The latter has emotional and social relationship management tools that have been developed through long-term testing and are consistent with human experience. While the former may be based on a logical and clear set of intellectualized rules to establish order, the latter is more non-standard and empirical.
The truth is, we actually embrace tradition more readily than we think.
Two days ago, a friend was talking on WeChat about why so many people have gone to Halloween in the West, criticizing them for their ignorance. It just so happened that I ran to Shibuya the day before Halloween to check it out. Shibuya is said to be the busiest intersection in the world. A buddy said that when it’s crowded, 30,000 people will pass through there on a single green light. Halloween night is indeed very crowded, a lot of media simply do live to the intersection. From time to time, there are all kinds of strange monsters, cosplayers shuttle between them. Probably because of the stampede in Seoul, South Korea, Shibuya intersection also stood a bunch of police officers with loud speakers to direct order. I wandered around the neighborhood a few times and also saw Chinese players showing up, some in Hanbok. I also saw two big white guys, I don’t know if they were dressed up as Chinese players.
The word that popped into my head at the time was contemporary Venice Carnival. It seemed to me that what was happening in this time and space was not fundamentally different from what had happened hundreds of years ago in Venice or in many periods in the history of human civilization. Completely alien homo sapiens gathered from all over the world into the same space, connected to each other and by default the same species, in order to fulfill some ritual full of meaningful tension. ,. Perhaps humans are such creatures that they need to channel their emotions and express a certain side of themselves through the redefinition of self-symbols. This is a tradition represented by Shibuya Halloween and that temple on Mount Takao. Whether Halloween is Western or religious is not so important. What matters is that people have to find ways to channel and manage their desires. Whether it’s revelry or self-restraint, they complement each other.
Takaozan and Shibuya, traditional and modern, try to respect the individual’s body and mind, emotions and desires. This, I think, is a reflection of cultural confidence, of local modernization. To be politically incorrect, feudal superstition, needs to be re-recognized.
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