{"id":1822,"date":"2014-02-28T07:11:20","date_gmt":"2014-02-28T07:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/?p=1822"},"modified":"2014-02-28T17:23:48","modified_gmt":"2014-02-28T17:23:48","slug":"lamps-the-ruin-of-the-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/2014\/02\/lamps-the-ruin-of-the-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"Lamps: The Ruin of the Nation \u300c\u30e9\u30f3\u30d7\u4ea1\u56fd\u8ad6\u300d\u306e\u771f\u5b9f"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u90a6\u8a33\u306f\u4ee5\u4e0b\u3067\u3042\u308b\u3002<\/p>\n

\"\u30e9\u30f3\u30d7\"<\/p>\n

You may be familiar with Jun’ichir\u014d Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows<\/em> (1933). But were you aware that Tanizaki had a predecessor in the form of a Meiji period crank? I think not! Kaiseki Sata was a Shin Buddhist monk who published a ferocious series of essays in the 1870s, on topics such as “On the Uselessness of Bookkeeping and Ink”, “On Boycotting the Solar Calendar”, “On the Four Dangers of Western-Style Umbrellas”, “On the Great Dangers of Milk”, “On Railways: The Ruin of the Nation”, and everyone’s favorite, “A Caution Against Lamps: The Ruin of the Nation” (1880).<\/p>\n

I was unable to find any information about the majority of these essays, but the logic of “Lamps: The Ruin of the Nation” is actually not bad<\/a>. Sata warns his readers that to light Western-style lamps you need kerosene, but Japan’s only oil fields are in Niigata, and would be depleted within 50 years (1930). If Japan becomes addicted to lamps and exhausts the Niigata fields, they will have to trade their reserve funds for oil until they have no more funds, and the nation will be ruined quod erat demonstratum<\/em>. The argument is basically that oil is a non-renewable resource, and is therefore not backwards but remarkably foresighted.<\/p>\n

“The West became civilized in the Western way,” said Kata, “and Japan will become civilized the Japanese way.” He had no desire to plunge Japan into darkness. Instead, he invented himself a lamp that ran on vegetable oil, to which he gave the suitably native name kank\u014dt\u014d<\/em> (pictured above; source<\/a>). He also advocated for Japanese lamps, andon<\/em>, which ran on fish oil.<\/p>\n

Sata only neglected to recognize that Japan could not defend its independence from the oil-powered Western nations without finding some oil of its own. Running steamships and tanks on vegetable oil would have been quite sustainable, but not politically viable. Indeed, the military use of oil was a principal motivation behind imperialism and World War II.<\/p>\n

Again, none of the other essays are available online, so I don’t know what the dangers of Western-style umbrellas were, but at least some of them are apparently collected in a journal he ran (also pictured above). Or you can read “Bread: The Ruin of the Nation”<\/a>, by an unrelated author, at the National Diet Library site. Learn why bread will cause Japan’s physical, spiritual, and economic ruin! If only we had listened…<\/p>\n

(Japanese translation)<\/p>\n

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\u90a6\u8a33\u306f\u4ee5\u4e0b\u3067\u3042\u308b\u3002 You may be familiar with Jun’ichir\u014d Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows (1933). But were you aware that Tanizaki had a predecessor in the form of a Meiji period crank? I think not! Kaiseki Sata was a Shin Buddhist monk who published a ferocious series of essays in the 1870s, on topics such as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1822"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1822"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1852,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1822\/revisions\/1852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}