Losing my religion

This week is O-Bon, one of the two mega-festivals in Japan (the other is New Year). During O-Bon, ghosties return to their homes and the Japanese traditionally return to their hometowns to suck down a few sakes with them. As Tokyo is a reasonably big home town (only around 10 trillion souls floating around), quite a few people return to Tokyo and a fair chunk flock to their local shrine or temple. I had the day off, so I followed everyone else and ended up at Senso-Ji in Asakusa.

The major religion in Japan is Buddhism, although Christianity is getting more of a look-in these days. Shinto, is more an indigenous ideology than a religion. Buddhists believe in the solemn fat man and enlightenment through meditation, and the Shinto(ists?) adhere to a pantheistic idea that gods (kami) exist in all things in nature - woods, trees, rivers, trains, pachinko parlours - you name it! (OK, I was kidding about the trains).

I'm buggered if I can tell the difference between a temple and a shrine. Senso-Ji, for example, is supposed to be a temple, but there seem to be a hell of a lot of shriney elements mixed up in there - the temizuya, the area where you rinse your hands and mouth and omikuji, the paper fortunes that worshippers tie to a large abacus-like structure are just two. So I just dunno. Both philosophies appeal to me, though, for different reasons...

During our trip to Koya-San, where we stayed in a Buddhist temple and mediated with the monks, it seemed quite idyllic to me, not necessarily as a religion but as a lifestyle. It could have been simply the magic of the night we stayed there, after all, it was better than a ryokan, the food was top shelf, and it snowed all night - quite a sight to see the monks raking patterns in the snow at 5am. And I don't know about belief in the solemn fat man, but he seems just as believable a dude as JC, and there aint no excruciatingly boring sermons about the meek inheriting the earth or cataclysmic warnings against the number 6 in Buddhism. Although the asceticism of Buddhism strikes a chord, I could never spend hours a day lighting incense and humming. I just couldn't. I would sooner take my eye out with a fishfork.

In fact, there is a refreshing lack of religion-imposed sexual-funk in Japan (no, nothing to do with fishforks). Of course, this lack of sexual shame is open to corruption - don't even start me on the enjo kosai thing - high-school-girls-selling-themselves-to-skanky-old-salary-men-so-they-can-buy-designer-products, which is still rife in Japan, and scarily, a lot of people don't see that there is anything wrong with it. There's certainly no shame on the part of the school-girls as long as they can show off their Louis Vuitton handbags.. . Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, religion.

Shinto, on the other hand, seems to me to be like an oriental, state-sanctioned version of Wicca. Without the spells or funky potions (damn!). The essence of the two though, that being the worship of nature's deities is pretty much the same.

At Senso-Ji, the so-called "working-(wo)man's temple", there is no peaceful meditation in the main hall or solitary monks enjoying a rake and a hum. Thousands of people are pinning their paper fortunes onto the abacus, worshippers are throwing their five yen coins into a big wooden chest with a grill on the top (the 5 yen is meant to be lucky because "go" (five) means something special in Japanese, can't recall what). There is cleansing of mouths and hands at the temizuya and people are wafting incense smoke into their heads (supposedly to wish for intelligence) or into their pockets (wish for money) or as one very dodgy guest of ours once tried to do, waft it into his groin area (apparently he was wishing for something he was lacking).

It was a screamingly hot day, and as I went to cool off at the temizuya, a pigeon head-butted me out of the way to get to the water. The salary-man next to me, in the usual contrived, over-exaggerated salary-man fashion, was huffing and puffing about the poor bird who was obviously thirsty. I started to think "Bloody salary-m..." when I thought, "Shit, he's right. Just think of all those diseases that birds carry and deposit in a pool that thousands of people drink out of every day." Then I started to think about all the people that must drink the water straight from the ladles, and promptly put down my own. A toddler next to me had the same idea. His mum kept forcing him to drink out of the ladle (she tried 3 times), but he kept tipping out the water and handing his mum the empty ladle. He wasn't having any of it, smart fella.

And wherever there are thousands of worshippers wafting and abluting and wishing, there is food. You could never accuse the Japanese of missing an opportunity to cash-in on religious-festival fever. Mind you, most of the yatai at festival-ground-zero are run by Yakuza, so the working-class can't cash-in on the yatai gold-mine.

I guess that's what the paper fortunes, big box and a 5 yen coin is for.