There was no Crab Rangoon...

... that concoction is pure Orientalist-Imperialist-Colonialist bunk! (Though undeniably tasty.)

A Happy New Year to my dear hypothetical readers! 
 

In the month of December I hurtled through a trip that gave me quite a few passport stamps and a bout of digestive distress (finally) worthy of the illustrious title of “food poisoning”. [1] Many memorable moments were had, but the most outstanding were the six days I spent in Myanmar. The Nation-state Formerly Known As Burma has been headlining frequently of late with Secretary Clinton’s visit and Aun Sang Suu Kyi’s decision to run for office; all the media attention's probably been causing thousands of geographically challenged heads to be scratched vigorously from sea to shining sea at every mention. Not that I should pretend to be so superior; here's an index of what I knew about the country before visiting it:

(1)   Jade, loads of
(2)   Freely elected government, absence of
(3)   Petite, steely-eyed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, name of
(4)   Villainous foe of King Mongkut’s Thailand in The King & I, appearance as

Thus I arrived in Yangon on a hot midmorning in December, formidably naïve. Despite my ignorance, I have had the dubious privilege of having lived in societies so publicly riddled with corruption that their people seem almost proud of the fact, as though nepotism and flagrant abuse of the law were unique facets of the national character. So I imagined all sorts of terrors in wait for me even as I biked, six weeks earlier, to the Myanmar embassy in Beijing to get my visa. The building was square-cornered and about as cozy as the backside of a bathroom tile. A lavishly carved sideboard in the lobby, looming  as one entered, is all I really remember of the place--that, and the subtly terrifying waiting room with over-high ceilings and bad lighting. The transactions with a kindly, roundish gentleman behind the window were pleasant enough (I spoke English, my go-to for when I am actually begging someone to "please be nice to me"), but for a small obstacle. I was supposed to turn in a copy of an invitation letter, even though I was merely asking for a tourist visa! After some parleying, I was given a sheet of white paper and a juicy black pen to write my own invitation letter, stating name, age, occupation, and intentions. My handwriting is evidently much better than I usually think it to be. One week later, I had my visa.

Cutting back to my arrival in Yangon: all around the airport there were fields. Inside it were the efforts of very diligent floor-waxers on display, and little else; the official money-changers--distinguished from the nice lady who eventually made the trade for me by sitting beneath a sign with a logo on it--refused to do anything with my Chinese bills. The airport and our hotel were so far apart that, by my eventual arrival in the lobby, I had taken a taxi-tour of the city. The town was bustling enough to have a few traffic jams, but the billboards plastered with very cheerful people endorsing suspiciously named vitamin pills (along the lines of Lucy's Vegetameatavitamin), 3-in-1 coffee mixes, and the odd piece of industrial hardware gave away the poverty, or rather the gaping canyon that split poor from rich. It was especially a shock to notice that the men and women selling fritters, clinging to the backs of tiny pickup trucks-turned-buses, or otherwise going about their business were uniformly thinner than their fairy-tale counterparts in the ads. Much thinner, maybe in proportion to the relative size of haute couture models to the average North American. A very shallow bit of first-world irony, perhaps, but a bit that, thanks to the ubiquity of those ads, never quite left me.

The remains of my first morning in Myanmar was spent at Shwe Dagon, an enormous complex of pagodas, shrines, and images that dazzled every sense and packed us off with raging thirsts and slight headaches from the merciless sun. 

Very, very shiny.

The apparent piety suggested in all the well-tended buildings and the wafts of fragrance from the flowers and fruits on altars was, I would later learn, rather more complicated: local spirits, sages, and ghosts had been thoroughly merged with imported Buddhism, though it's a wonder that some of them, transplanted into the Buddhist body of belief, weren't summarily rejected. According to an otherwise stodgily P.C. book on Myanmar culture I later borrowed from a hotel, sages who attained great wisdom would, as they meditated on remote peaks, seek out a kind of plant shaped like a woman's torso, animate a few with their wisdom-magic, and… well, have a bit of fun. Not what Lord Buddha was doing on his mountain retreats, if my feeble grasp of his biography serves.

A game in which kiddies threw coins at a creakily rotating bowl for luck.

Anyway, insight into the sages' frolicking came later; initially Shwe Dagon simply overwhelmed with its sheer size and density of decoration, an effect amplified by the contrast with the shanties and mostly-pothole lanes in the neighborhood. Then, it felt odd. Odd in in the way that you might feel odd if you caught sight of an enormous, gilt, many-tiered cake daintily sitting atop an overflowing bin of (unsorted) trash, or a gold lamé party dress sized to fit a giantess on top of a hamper of dirty socks.

But then I realized that much of the country was like this, innumerable pagodas shining over landscapes of toil. On the first of two 17-hour train rides--the worse one, because it took up an entire day after rising at 5 o'clock--I could only think, repeatedly, of how medieval this was. Maybe it reflects on my shabby understanding of the European condition before 1250, but wasn't the ideal, at least, a landscape of agricultural productivity as far as the eye could see dotted with beacons of spirituality/sinkholes of resources in the form of churches? That was the Myanmar countryside, anyhow, and the view was especially striking at night, when many of the palm-thatched huts in villages past which we bounced were bathed in darkness while a nearby pagoda beamed, tawny under a few weak incandescent bulbs.

Sunset in Mandalay.

 Our train took us to the capital of British Burma, Mandalay. The city was big, but the electricity was unreliable; the streets stank of the gas-powered generators that shopkeepers posted before their establishments in case the lights went. (I gave one family a little entertainment when I showed up with my headlamp to buy crackers.) After passing out, my head still woozy with a phantom sensation of swaying, we woke to gawk at a colorful market and to rent bicycles to take around town. Having been in 2011 to a good number of picturesque places with ridiculously abundant produce, the stalls at the Zegyo Market were less notable to me for their unique wares than for the aesthetic of poverty, what Zoolander would call "derelicte" gorgeousness. Baskets balanced improbably on the heads of slight women, doorways jammed with coconuts, the smoke-belching mopeds that hauled away sacks of rice--all looked antique because they were. During our entire stay, one of perhaps ten cars had a third brake light. Apparently, back in the Days of Yore (i.e., before the mid-eighties), there had been no requirement for a third light-- a dire condition that I was too little to remember. (This is the kind of enlightenment you get in on when traveling with your father.) I've been suspicious before of my own lust for all things old or even merely old-looking, and in Myanmar this suspicion rose once and again. What brand of perversity could make me think the creativity born of desperate poverty beautiful? The answer, of course, is the perversity of privilege.  And that, reader, is why everyone who can afford it should go to places like Myanmar--to realize the depth of that privilege. It doesn't really lighten any spiritual burden, make me feel special or lucky; instead it supplies everyday life with a ballast by reminding us, "Behold, the bottom, where it has always been!"

Picking up a few things at the market?

 Before tapering off this far too lengthy post, I have two further reasons for visiting, both rather more positive. The first is the glorious ancient capital of Bagan, on the banks of the wide slow Irrawaddy--for consistency's sake I should call it the Ayeyarwady, to go along with "Yangon" and "Myanmar." Dotted with somewhere between two and four thousand stupas, pagodas, and shrines, the place is a marvel, especially for those who just can't get tired of temples. Far and away the highlight: remnants of beautiful frescoes from the twelfth century adorning some of the sites. These, along with the stucco columns and lacy embellishments on the outside faces of the buildings, had a distinctively Indo-Greek feel. 

Bagan, Land of Indeterminate Thousands of Pagodas.

But it wasn't all medieval treasures and glory. We saw that some of the frescoed interiors had been brutally whitewashed--though often only up to a height of seven or eight feet, above which the old, colorful patterns clung on. It seemed like an attempt to restore the paintings had suddenly lost the half-a-heart that it had begun with, probably to a new golf course. [2] And we had the answer to the question of why UNESCO hadn't made the city into a Heritage Site, namely the clumsiness with which the Orwellian government had rebuilt some of the buildings and maintained the city has kept it from the fame (and lucre) that status entails. 

Alas.

I'm not at all sure of the justice in this sort of exclusion, but the trade embargo on Myanmar is at the root of the second reason for visiting: the virtual absence of American stuff. No McDonald's, no Starbucks, and hardly even any Coca-Cola--what few cans there were cost a couple times the average daily wage of a local adult and had been shipped from Thailand. When I tried to pay my credit cards online, I got the rare privilege of seeing a special error message about my account being inaccessible from a location under sanction. Inconvenient? Of course. But an utterly unique experience, to have no Wal-Mart squatting in the shadows of Mandalay Hill or among the Bagan pagodas.

It seems the changes ongoing in Myanmar will mean the reversal, soon, of the cultural and economic sanctions. On the one hand, maybe that would mean fewer villagers having to ride to town in ox-drawn carts virtually identical to those their great-great-grandparents used or work the fields with water buffalo and wooden plows; maybe that would mean more consistent electricity, education, better health, and all sorts of wonderful things that everyone deserves, as our domestic politicians always remind us. Maybe it would also mean that glass-and-steel bastions of the wealthy would come to tower above a country of smoke-darkened thatch along with the grand, golden monuments to Buddha.

In George Orwell's documentary novel, Burmese Days, the villain U Po Kyin dismisses his own conscience with "a careless wave of his hand that meant 'pagodas'." And while I agree, as I struggle through Orwell's brilliant but emotionally tortuous story, that there's something terrifying about a country being known as "the Land of a Thousand Pagodas" when each is a gilt-and-plastered black hole for wealth that very few have, at least the people hold something sacred. Neither U Po Kyin nor the military junta could tear down the pagodas; though watered down, some vague flavor of righteousness versus evil lingers on.  What will happen when the powerful, ardently embracing Globalmegacorp., decide that they can ignore their consciences, or at least trade out the dharma for Diet Coke and iPads?

Aun Sang Suu Kyi is revered like a saint, with her face in sticker form on the dilapidated dashboards of countless cabbies (including those driving not early-80s jalopies but horse-carriages). She might be on her way to Power at last. But the One Ring, as Bilbo Baggins taught us so well, corrupts absolutely; can she avoid its perils?

Go now to see this country, now, before the sharks of change circling it finally close in.

Sunrise on the Irrawaddy/Ayeyarwady.

(1) It is most shocking that I had never had anything more the matter with my innards than this, considering the sorts of things in poorly considered combinations that I routinely stuff down the hatch.

(2) The view from Mandalay Hill included one of these; though I never saw the Bagan counterpart documented by Mr. W. Pedia's site on Bagan, turfing that parched soil, which was beyond sandy, being actually sand--couldn't have been a very ecologically sound plan.

Musings on belief and ritual

(Fushimi-Inari Daisha, Kyoto)

Dear hypothetical readers, I really have no excuses. I have been recovering from my months abroad (i.e., slacking off) at home for nearly ten days now; it's high time to do a little more reflection.

First, a brief disclaimer: I have been raised as, and remain, a nonbeliever. I am convinced that organized religion, particularly those that usurp social and cultural power to the extent that they attempt to exclude alternatives, can be extremely pernicious. At the same time, I have great admiration for what has already been created under such would-be spiritual monopolies, viz. music involving pipe organs, enormous marble statues and mosaics, oil paintings with perhaps unnecessarily sumptuous draperies, etc. Also, it is more than obvious that materialist histories that place intangibles like belief aside are simply lacking--they just do not touch upon the psycho-emotional world that human life cannot be without. For all that, though, attempts to read any doctrine inflicts upon me a throbbing headache, followed by the urge to nap for a couple of hours. [Read: the following may be incredibly shallow and/or somewhat offensive, despite my intention otherwise. Then again, what else is new?]

With that out of the way, onto the post!

Traveling in Japan during the summer meant encountering massive clumps of tourists, of course. I mostly paid visits to Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, but these too were crowded with people, from the pimped-out glitter of Ieyasu's shrine/tomb to the relatively subdued Touji temple. Observing the people and the surroundings, the following points were immediately obvious:

1. Ritual observed at temples and shrines were distinctly similar, featuring the same hand- and mouth-washing, coin-tossing, bowing, and clapping. For tourists, of course, there was also frantic photo-taking (or complaining about not being able to take photos in areas that forbade it). And, aside from the peer pressure of hundreds of other tourists in close quarters, authorities put up signs with multilingual "NO PHOTOS" signs at every point that a photo-crazed person might get the urge.

2. Ritual materials also overlapped considerably. Ema (wooden placards with pictures on one side and blank spaces for wishes to be written on the other) and o-mamori (protective charms, usually wooden or paper, the latter folded and inserted in a cloth pouch) I had thought the special province of shrines, but were also offered for sale (and offering) at temples:

(Ema praying for romance.)
(Ema of various designs, Hakodate Kokoku Jinja)
(Fox-faced ema, Fushimi-Inari Daisha, a kitsune, or fox-spirit, shrine)

3. Which leads me to the next characteristic: money was evident everywhere. Money tossed at small stone Buddhas for luck; money stuck into the trunks of ancient trees planted by long-dead, famous emperors; price labels for every charm, stick of incense, candle, and paper fortune on sale.

(Piles of dough at Kinkakuji, Kyoto)
(Coins lodged in the trunk of this old tree Go-Shirakawa of Heike Monogatari fame was supposed to have planted)

Of course, this high profile for $$$ is not limited to Japanese places of worship. But a votive candle or the Pietà seem like quite different ways of displaying sociocultural capital while simultaneously expressing belief. For one, the sensation of being in some of the more tourist-laden shrines was more like strolling through an amusement park or even a department store of gifts (お土産) to buy for friends and family back home. Yet these were indubitably "places of worship"-- on the personal level, there were certain quieter spots and moments of sensory in which I felt something spiritual.

(Kinkakuji again. Not so many people snapping shots of this!)

Moreover, there were people partaking in ritual processes and material consumption of a level that probably seems rather more "faithful" than chucking your 5-yen coins at a stone Bodhisattva of Mercy. One particularly impressive scene: a family was seated in the "Shogun's Room" to the right side of main shrine of the Toushouguu 東照宮 at Nikko, accompanied by a Shinto priest who walked them through making offerings and prayers. This extremely formal occasion occurred less than ten feet from the hall where all we tourists shuffled about making noise and wishing we could blast the place, complete with its portraits of the 36 Japanese "Immortals of Poetry," with photos.

Anyway, the point is that for wearing consumption so conspicuously on their collective sleeves, the shrines/temples/tourist hotspots could not be derogated as not being sacred centers of belief and faith in some way. Which leads me to the principal question that I pondered (half-assedly) as I sweated my way through Kyoto, Nara, and Nikko: to what extent is religion fundamentally about conspicuous consumption and cash changing hands? This is not meant to be disrespectful (though the question is probably not one any devout believer would ask); in what sense are belief, ritual, and commerce one and the same?

(Nara mascots...)

In the broadest view, the three concepts could be understood as one. Commerce and ritual involve a fundamental faith in the continued significance of all social, symbolic, and material elements involved; what good could it do to trade a pear for an apple if one has not some deep belief that there is something meaningful in the trade--that will remain meaningful a hour, a day, or a week after the trade occurs? Similarly, ritual could be called a commerce of a particular stripe, and without sustained belief in the world remaining unchanged enough to give one's ritual act meaning, it could not stand. Such belief can be called faith, for its contents are not known to be a priori fact. (Unlike some atheists, I hold that trust in the scientific method and other positivisms should properly also be called "faith," of the same species as faith in ritual practice.) On the other hand, perhaps faith also requires such rites and exchanges to define it. Could any of the usual dogma of a given organized religion be explained without some idea of exchange included? Rather than denying the intangible of belief a place in more concrete and statistically measurable venues, it seems pretty clear to me that such spirituality must of needs rise from physical origins, for instance the acquisition of a new object or the swinging of a censer. Of course, there's a biological explanation for this, as senses tingling and muscle fibers twitching are inseparable from cogitation.

That was a long detour to the real point, which is that for all the apparent weirdness of shrines that look more like shopping arcades, such consumption is in fact a crucial element of belief and worship in these specifically Japanese instances and, I believe (punny!), in all organized religion at large. It's easy to condemn the "lack of spirituality" in things like these polylingual, obviously tourist-targeted fortune-selling machines,

but is it really so bad to acknowledge openly the inseparability of belief and trade? I for one thought it was refreshing to throw my coins into the collection boxes before bowing, clapping and praying to the gods and Buddha. It would help the priests and monks preserve their historical buildings and lovely landscaping, and maybe help get the attention of the divine, too.

(Touji, Kyoto)