The Present Day Nengraphy (Psychic Photo) and Its Experimental Demonstration
Tokyo: THE ASSOCiATiON OF NENGRAPHY [sic], 1972. 274pp.
This rare and strange book has much of interest inside its inexplicable formal looking cover defaced by a message in red print, which reads “Are you aware that the spirit can make direct impressions on photographic paper?” For one thing, the introduction is written by Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo until just a few weeks ago. For another, the final chapter is written by someone who probably never existed.
The book itself is a collection of “nengraphs”, uncontrolled photographs allegedly taken through paranormal means. It is unclear why Ishihara, who was a Diet legislator in 1972, found this parapsychology in particular a good opportunity to contribute a preface. But the following message on the first page of the book is clearly his, since it is written in a quite different style than the rest of the book, using some of the most formal, literary Japanese I’ve ever read.
I think readers of this blog from the Perennialist side of things may find this statement by the Tokyo governor quite interesting.
The nensha discovered by Professor Fukurai, which prove the supernatural abilities of humanity, were once applauded by foreign researchers as a very original method and valued quite highly, but have been distorted and have not received the appraisal they deserve, since social conditions in Japan prohibit an understanding of the categorical difference between the rigors of the scientific method and blind faith in someone’s supernatural powers. [… A brief overview of the Meiji period taboo on supernatural phenomena and a comparison to the European Catholic insistence on the verifiability of miracles follows.]
However, in these pages is revealed, according to Mr. Miyanaka, a reconstruction of the genealogy of Japanese-style approaches using nengraphy as a basis, which should prove of great value not only for a small cadre of researchers, but for the salvation of the great majority of this country who have fallen into delusion and forgotten the very essence of humanity.
What I feel upon reading these records anew is that we may ourselves someday be able to approach through the means of science the truths of when it was that human beings came to be human, the limits of humanity, the existence of Mystery and the knowledge of this existence, and other values of humanity.
Science is not done for the sake of science alone. The essence of humanity, which is inexplicable through science, may perhaps be much too distant for science to ever approach, but for that very reason, the wonders of humanity, as well as the meanings of human existence, are unquantifiable.
The things that might be inspired by the mere publication of these records of obstinately persistent approaches, untainted by prejudice, in these modern times, are likewise unquantifiable.
April 7, Showa 47
Representative Shintaro Ishihara
Most of the book, unfortunately, does not live up to the standards of a scientific report. The English summary in the back will provide a representative sample: “At first [the Cosmo-Research Group] was a society for studying cosmos and cosmians, but it has come to make good use of [n]engraphy as a means of correspondence with these cosmians. The contra-NENGRAPHY worked out by Mr. Susumu Mizutani, one of these members and a student in mathematics, cultivated a new field in our nengraphic researches. This is an experiment of mental process which draws out energy contrawisely from the stabilized silver molecules of latent image neucleus [sic] on the sensitized photo-plate once returned to the light, returning to the old nonsensitized conditions and it will answer the purpose of proving the existence of minus energy in the future.”
The final chapter of this book is devoted to someone named Toshio Matsunami, and is completely bizarre. The author appears to be interested in getting the opinion of this person on how nensha works, but there is no reason to suspect that Matsunami’s opinion is valuable. He informs us that great people like Kukai can live for 200 years, that yellow is the “highest” color, and that “sounds can save people”, so therefore there is no such Bodhisattva as Kannon, and her name actually means the sound of clapping. Why exactly was Matsunami considered an authority on nensha?
Here I’d like to quote the only biography of Toshio Matsunami I know of, from an interesting book called
Takenouchi Documents III:
The late Matsunami Toshio, special advisor to Emperor Hirohito, had a lot of ups and downs in his life. During World War II, he was captured by the Russian army (former Soviet) as a prisoner and was supposed to be executed by firing squad. For some reason the bullet missed him not once but five times. This strange incident was reported to Stalin who then interviewed him. Later Stalin asked Matsunami to become his advisor, because he was impressed with Matsunami’s high level spirituality. At the end of the war, Matsunami returned to Japan, where General Macarthur was waiting to welcome him as an advisor. Matsunami declined the offer because of his friendship with Stalin, but accepted an offer to become a consultant. After this, Matsunami became a consultant or a top advisor to the Ruling party, political and financial organizations, and finally an advisor to Emperor Hirohito. Matsunami was asked for advice from General Macarthur, US Presidents including Jimmy Carter. British Crown Prince Charles unofficially met Matsunami in Kyoto for advice concerning a problem with his wife Diana when he visited Japan. Because of his high spirituality, many people sought advice from him. He was even nicknamed as ‘Charlie Cook’ in the USA and regarded as a messenger for a highly noble space being. Matsunami was even called ‘the successor’ by George Adamski, a well-known author who wrote a book entitled ‘Record of boarding a flying saucer’, probably because he was somewhat similar to the successor. According to followers, Matsunami boarded a flying saucer (for him a flying saucer was an ‘IFO’ not ‘UFO’) through teleportation from Tokyo each Monday and took a leading role to bridge the gap between the universe and the earth.
I have never seen any other reference to this person besides in the Takenouchi book and this weird Nengraphy book prefaced by Governor Ishihara. This Toshio Matsunami is clearly an illusory creature.
Posted: November 22nd, 2012 | Book Reviews
“Mr. Morrow,” said an English teacher. “Did you hit a student with your bike this morning?”
I understood what he was talking about but not why. Yes, that morning at 8:20, I had rounded a corner and was surprised to see another bike, its driver wearing a high school uniform and a scarf around his face, coming directly towards me. We brushed each other, I turned around and asked “are you okay?” only to see him disappear around the corner. I silently cursed the rudeness of high school kids, and pedaled on. That was several hours ago.
“That student went to the hospital,” the teacher continued. “He had a bruise, and his pocket was torn.” He gave me a piece of paper. “Would you be willing to write a statement explaining what happened?”
The last time I had been made to write a statement explaining my actions was in elementary school, when I was caught using spell check on a spelling test. I knew Japan did not assign fault for accidents, but I felt like socially, I had just been accused of something outrageous–like I had knocked the kid off his bike and then ran away. But that’s not what I did.
Or was it? Had I really seen that student go on to school as if nothing had happened? If I hadn’t, I would have stopped my bike. Right?
The only reason the high school had identified me is because I’m the only foreigner in town. If I had been anyone else, I thought self-righteously, that kid wouldn’t have known what hit him, and that would teach him to flee from the scene of an accident. My memory was uncertain, but I still felt wrongfully accused by the whole process. I was made to take a photocopy of the statement down to the board of education, where one of my coworkers, Okita-san, translated it into Japanese. I expressed my disbelief to her.
“I don’t think you’ll have to pay for the torn pocket,” she reassured me. “Insurance will cover it.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: November 9th, 2012 | JET
The Tree in the Middle of the World (1989) is a Japanese children’s book by Ghibli animator Makiko Futaki. According to the Afterword, Ms. Futaki got the idea for the book while visiting Yakushima to draw great, ancient trees for My Neighbor Totoro, and the idea got stuck in her head of a tree so large it could have animals and people living in it. Another afterword is by Hayao Miyazaki. Here are the first six pages of the book.
In the middle of the world stands one great tree. Long ago there were a few people who knew about it, but these days, it seems that everyone has forgotten.
That tree sprung up in a valley encircled by scraggy mountains, and before long overtook the mountains, and grew so, so tall that you couldn’t see the top. The tall trunk split into far-off branches, and bushy leaves billowed out and melted into the clouds.
Nobody knew how many hundreds or thousands of years ago the first leaf sprouted on this tree. Over the centuries its surface was covered with countless layers of moss, mistletoe, and sprouts, so much that it was impossible to see the original trunk.
In a little cottage at the base of this tree lived a girl named Cici and her grandmother. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: November 5th, 2012 | Japan
A gentleman on a mailing list once wrote of Japanese bureaucratese, “it has been rumored that top American officials can read Japanese government documents without translation because they speak the same language.” But us ordinary folks must puzzle it out.
The Japanese dialect of this international language has a funny word called seibi. Seibi means anything at all and is vaguely like the English “maintenance”. Here are some lovely examples of seibibun, or 整備文 “maintenance literature”, from a mysteriously undocumented and unknown Canadian named Iain Arthy:
地下の情報整備
Underground information maintenance
|
土壌の調査
Soil survey
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事業整備
Business maintenance
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事業を推進する
Promoting business
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パソコンの整備
Computer maintenance
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新しいパソコンを買う
Buying new computers
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街路樹の整備
Roadside arboreal maintenance
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道端に木を植える
Planting trees on the road
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就業機会の整備
Job opportunity maintenance
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働き口を増やす
Hiring people
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特定商業集積
Specific business accumulation
|
オフィス街
A street of offices |
As you can see, seibi is a word you can’t do without when you are trying to make your ordinary action look very official and important.
Someone wrote an article about this in English a long time ago but I’m afraid I can’t find it. I guess these things disappear from the Internet sometimes.
Posted: September 5th, 2012 | Japan
Divine Signposts at the Oomoto website – actually a retranslation from the Esperanto
Aizen-en on Onisaburo
Jinrui Aizenkai (ULBA — Universal Love and Brotherhood Association)
The Moon of Onisaburo Deguchi
The Oomoto movement : its origin, aims and objects and the Universal Love and Brotherhood Association, 1952
The Outline of Oomoto, 1958
Bankyo Dokon: Seventy Years of Inter-Religious Activity at Oomoto, 1997 – edited by Alex Kerr!
A Portrait of Oomoto
Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburō, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan (aka scholarly nonsense), 2008
Bonus fun facts about Onisaburo Deguchi!!
- When his son entered elementary school, Deguchi listed his occupation as “World Remodeller”
- He was the successor of Nao Deguchi who is regarded today as the founder of Oomoto, but he wrote a document denouncing her as “Yamaguchi Slime”.
- When he was sentenced to life in prison for the Second Oomoto Incident, he turned to the visitors’ gallery and stuck out his tongue.
Posted: August 27th, 2012 | Oops! I forgot!
かみさまはいる いない？ (2012)
Shuntaro Tanikawa
I was surprised to see my local library put in its childrens’ rack a book about the existence of God, supplementing their amusing and popular series about the Buddhist Hells. This book is written in very simple script and it seems the audience is 4 to 7 year olds. Remember that Japanese has no plurals and sex is usually unspecified, so all instances of “he” could also be “she” or “they”.
God exists (it seems).
We can’t see Him anywhere
But God exists somewhere (it seems).
God doesn’t speak.
Instead, humans speak for him.
God can’t be seen.
Instead, humans depict him.
How many Gods are there?
Some people think there is one God.
These people build a house for God.
Some people think there are many Gods.
These people build a house for the Gods.
Some people think there is no need for God.
These people build a house for themselves instead.
Did God make Man?
Or
Did Man make God?
Did God exist before the beginning of the world?
What is He doing now?
Is God not doing anything anymore?
Could it be that after leaving us with this bountiful world, He has nothing left to do?
The people who God left in charge of the world have big shoes to fill.
Posted: August 6th, 2012 | Secular-Religious
It is said that the residents of Mito in Ibaraki Prefecture exhibit three ishes (水戸の三ぽい mito no sanpoi):
Rikutsuppoi: churlish
Okorippoi: snappish
Honeppoi: mulish
Sometimes you also hear akippoi, coquettish. If you regularly display all three ishes in the area, you may be called Mitoish (水戸っぽ mitoppo).
A psychologist once encountered the snappish folk of Mito on a crowded bus. As it pulled up to a stop where more people were waiting, the driver announced, “Folks in the middle, pack it in please!” Said the churlish passengers, “Hey, pops, which way are us people in the middle supposed to pack it in?” Everyone laughed.
It is unknown whether the three ishes of Mito are flaws or merits.
Posted: August 1st, 2012 | Japan
Frithjof Schuon’s essays on Shinto, included in Treasures of Buddhism (2003), are a record of Schuon’s discovery of two obscurantist like minds in Motoori Norinaga, about whom nothing more need be said for those familiar with this subject, and Genchi Kato, whose work I have summarized in a past essay.
Schuon is writing about a subject he knows nothing about, so I will be brief. Repeating Norinaga’s unique and unjustified pseudo-Christian interpretation of the Kojiki, he seems to believe that the first kami named in the Kojiki is equivalent in the Japanese mind to the creator God, when in fact each national history assigns a different name and function to that original kami. This is irrelevant to someone who lives in the real world, though, because the closest thing to a “creator God” you’d find in the average Japanese mind is Mr. Sun (お天道様), who brings warmth to all human beings and is always watching over us. The Kojiki has been fussed over considerably by Norinaga, but we should be reminded that both it and the Nihon Shoki are first and foremost a record of the imperial ancestors and their noble deeds, and are cited in Japan’s traditional society for this reason and not for their mythical symbolism. He constructs an analogy between Japanese and Greek “myth”, which I have also taken a look at and found not very intellectually profitable. Anyway it seems that if this symbolism can be better understood by a foreigner than it can by most Japanese people then is really not relevant to how the Japanese tradition functions at all, and is the mission field only of syncretic religionists and people with too much time on their hands.
Posted: July 30th, 2012 | Japan, Secular-Religious, Tradition
So, this Continental philosopher writes a reading of the universe, and it syncs up to modernity. He says stuff like that everything is just a play for political power, but he doesn’t back this up with definite evidence, which is sensible enough because it is a metaphysical principle and not a scientific claim. Some of what he says, for example on madness, is merely a repetition of G.K. Chesterton, but he adds a tone of suspicion that makes a perfect fit for the academic culture of critique.
He uses some examples but they are clearly symbols, for example, the Panopticon was a mere idea that never got built. If you wanted to write an anti-Foucault you would do very well to start with the everyday image of a guard rounding a blind corner in an ordinary prison. His premodern historical examples have been shown to be rubbish. Anyway, the plural of anecdote is not evidence.
This metaphysical theory of modernity is then claimed to be the basis of everything that ever happened in history. Well, maybe not everyone considers Foucault specifically when they are rewriting a medieval church-state dispute to claim that nothing was incarnate in the actors for the church or the state except selfish greed, but if they run into a conflicting theory written by someone who claims the church had higher goals in mind (this would have to be a very brave academic these days), they will laugh at them and remind them that Foucault “proved” all of this wrong.
Foucault did not “prove” anything, any more than the Bible “proves” that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Like Foucault, the Bible is a testimony and not an evidence, and the only difference between Foucault and the Bible is that you can believe in the Bible and be happy and content with what life gives you.
But maybe I just don’t understand Foucault.
Posted: July 24th, 2012 | Academic mumbo jumbo
This translation of Nobuo Ikeda’s blog post is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. I stole some of the text from Amptontan following the terms of this license.
Photo: A nuclear protester’s sign, “we know you have enough electricity, stop hiding it from us!”, reveals the secret conspiracy of by Japan’s electric companies to drive themselves to bankruptcy.
It seems like an anti-nuclear protest rose up in front of government offices last night. I had thought that these kinds of classical mass movements were already finished in Japan, but perhaps they were revitalized by social media in the manner of Occupy Wall Street in the United States. That in itself isn’t bad, but the objective of stopping the resumption of generation at the Oi plants is nonsense.
The authorization has been issued and restarting work has begun, so according to the Electric Industry Law, it can’t be stopped without an order for technical improvement. Protests won’t stop it. If the protest was to keep other nuclear plants off-line, the economic hit from their idling would continue to grow from the 5 trillion yen ($62 billion) already lost. In other words, the demonstration was held to make Japan even poorer.
The health risk of nuclear power is lower than that of steam power, so stopping plant operation doesn’t even increase safety. If the plants stay offline in this way, in a few years not only TEPCO but other electric companies will become insolvent. The only way to avoid that is to transfer costs to the consumer. If we imagine this as a consumption tax increase, it would be a 2% bump. Essentially, protesters have given themselves a totally different problem.
The most serious crisis facing Japan now is the threat of becoming poorer tomorrow than we are today. The working population declines by 1% every year, while government debt grows by 50 trillion yen at the same rate. Nominal GDP last year was the same as it was 20 years ago, and the growth rate may soon turn negative. So, the lifetime disposable income of an average child born today will be more than 100 million yen ($1.25 million) less than that of an aged person who retires today.
The manufacturing industry is rushing to move overseas to prepare for power outages this summer. Consumer electronics manufacturers and semiconductor makers are already drowning in debt. Talk to businessmen working in the manufacturing industry and the conversation turns to how long they will be able to stay in Japan. A protest clamoring, “stop our energy supply!” during such a time will likely be remembered as the final episode of stupidity in a once-prosperous Japan.
Top comment by Takashi Aoki:
The Communist Party has been putting up contradictory posters reading “Stop the nuclear plants, jobs for the youth.” This is ridiculous. If we keep the nuclear plants shut down, industries seeking cheap and reliable energy will be forced to move production overseas. I don’t see how young people could find jobs at all in that situation.
Posted: July 1st, 2012 | Res pueriles
