Click here to support the Daily Grail for as little as $US1 per month on Patreon

News Briefs 15-08-2012

Enjoy.

Thanks RPJ, evolvingeye, & Jake Adelstein.

Quote of the Day:

“Sometimes in the mountains the animals make paths by using the same route again and again. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you might think it’s a path made by humans–it looks that way. If you follow that path, the path of beasts, you won’t get anywhere at all. People lost in the wilderness, they follow these paths and only get more and more lost. Sometimes they lose their way and they die. It’s not a path for humans, it’s a dangerous diversion. Are you sure that’s the road you want to take? It won’t get you where you want to go.”

Yakuza advice to Jake Adelstein, from his book Tokyo Vice.

  1. “It’s Not A Path for Humans”
    “It’s Not A Path for Humans”

    Depends on the human. The Inuit would beg to disagree. People are often biased by what they perceive to be “human.” What they often mean is themselves as if that were a blanket definition of human.

    1. Path of the Animal
      Yep, that’s why I used this quote from Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice. In his line of work, it makes perfect sense — he went down a very dark path, but you’ll have to read the book to find out what happened and why the quote applied to him. But I like the concept of humans getting lost by following animal paths, there are all kinds of metaphysical metaphors we can get into. In Japanese, the proverb is called kemono no michi (I’m surprised novelist Haruki Murakami never used it, it’s right up his alley). It reminds me of Becoming Animal by David Abrams, shamanism, and whatnot.

  2. O Bon
    Rick MG

    That was a good article about O-Bon. The following are a few clarifications and other comments of a cross cultural nature.

    1} The Lunar Calendar was the official calendar of Japan until the Meiji Period (1867~1911). In the Meiji Period the Solar Calender or Modern Calendar, which first appeared in the Pre- Tokugawa era, was made the official calendar.

    2} The food offerings are usually traditional food offerings like O-Saki, O-Mochi (Rice Cake), Fruits, Gohan (Cooked Rice), etc..

    3} Traditional Holidays in Kansai, Osaka is in Kansai, sometimes fall on different dates than they do in the rest of Japan.

    4} When families go to the cemetary to clean the graves of their ancestors, they often have a picnic at the grave and share their foods with the dead. This custom is similar to “The Day Of The Dead” customs in Mexico.

    5} Samhien(pronunced Sowen), the basis of both Halloween and All Hallows Eve, in its pristien origens was similar to O-Bon. The origional version of the song “Deck The Halls With Boughs Of Holly”, not the CR@PPy Christian version, was about Samhien!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mobile menu - fractal