American Buddhist Net

Oxygen bars, exercise classes, acupuncture, yoga and social networking sites - pets in Japan have never been so popular

July 24, 2008
DANIELLE DEMETRIOU

TOKYO — Chisai Yasuda and his wife arrange play dates for their four-year-old. They buy her pretty clothes, take her with them to cafés, give her baths and every night she shares their bed.

The Tokyo couple may sound like typical doting parents, but they are childless and put their parental energies instead into their four-year-old miniature schnauzer.

"Meru is not just a dog," Mr. Yasuda says. "She is our baby. Many of our friends feel the same way."

Fuelled by the disintegration of the traditional family unit, the rise of women in the workplace and a faltering economy, a new generation of young Japanese couples are choosing to remain childless. Last year, only 1.09 million babies were born in Japan with a fertility rate of 1.34 babies per woman, confirming Japan's status as home to one of the lowest birth rates in the world.

July 24, 2008 06:52am

AT least 43 people were taken to hospital for injuries after a powerful earthquake struck northern Japan early today, officials said.

The injuries were reported in and around the city of Hachinohe in Aomori prefecture, near the epicentre of the earthquake, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale.

"The number of injuries related to the earthquake in the region has now risen to 43," a spokesman for the National Police Department in Tokyo said, adding that all the injuries were not serious.

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Japan earthquake: Fears as fire hits northern city of Hachinohe

By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: July 22, 2008

The observance lasted but a few minutes. For that brief ritual, the visitors had traveled nearly 7,000 miles — from Shimoda, Japan, to Brooklyn, U.S.A. It might seem a long way to go to lay flowers on the grave of someone who has been dead these last 130 years. Not if you’re from Shimoda, though. Not if the grave is that of a New Yorker named Townsend Harris.

Many of you may now be wondering, Townsend Who?

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July 18, 2008

A row between South Korea and Japan threatened to spill over into Korean bedrooms yesterday after authorities in Seoul ordered the removal of posters advertising Japanese condoms from subway trains.

This week, South Korea recalled its ambassador from Tokyo in protest at guidelines for high school teachers in Japan reportedly saying that two islands in the Sea of Japan belong to Japan, while noting that South Korea also claims sovereignty.

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By Jonathan Petre

The rector who presided at the controversial 'gay marriage' of two priests has caused fresh outrage by conducting £1,800 'white wedding' services for Japanese tourists.

The Rev Martin Dudley has benefited from a craze for Western-style ceremonies among Japanese couples - many followers of Shintoism or Buddhism - by blessing their unions in his London church.

The blessings - which feature traditional music, a white bridal dress, prayers and Bible readings, bouquets and confetti - are not banned by the Church of England but critics say they undermine the dignity of marriage.

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July 19, 2008

TOKYO - A 15-YEAR-OLD girl was arrested on Saturday on suspicion of stabbing her father to death at the family home in the suburbs of Tokyo, a local police spokesman said.

The junior high school student, whose name was withheld, has admitted to stabbing her 46-year-old father in the chest several times with a knife, according to the spokesman and news reports.

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Saturday, July 19, 2008
By AMY CHAVEZ

On July 2, at the lowest tide of the year, my neighbors and I prayed to the goddess of the sea. The islanders call her Benten (also known as Benzaiten), and she lives on her own special island, just off the coast of Shiraishi Island. Here she convenes with the sea and brings us luck, prosperity (well, most of the time) and protects us from evil.

...Nature gods and goddesses are numerous in Japan and reflect a mix of Buddhism and Japan's folk religion of Shinto. And when you live on a small island in the Seto Inland Sea vulnerable to typhoons and high seas, some of your best friends are gods. We rely on them to protect us.

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July 17th, 2008
Steve Levenstein

Hakodate Juvenile Prison on Japan's chilly northern island of Hokkaido may not strike one as an originator of fashion trends, but that's exactly what's happened. A series of stark, black & white aprons and totes emblazoned with the prison logo in both Japanese and English have taken off like a lifer who's loosed the lock on his leg-irons.

The aprons first appeared at the Correctional Association for Prison Industry Cooperation's Tokyo store outlet and quickly sold out. Even the agency's online website has stopped taking orders until supplies are back in stock.

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July 17, 2008
Jim Casper

NAMI is a series of photos of waves around the shores of Sado Island in Japan. The photographer, a young Buddhist monk named Syoin Kajii, watches the water patiently, waiting for a moment of surprise.

We discussed his work via email. Here is an excerpt of our conversation:

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16th July, 2008

KABAROLE-The Omukama of Toro, Oyo Nyimba Rukiidi IV, has been invited to attend the 5th World Buddhist Summit scheduled to take place in Japan in November. The ceremony will involve the inauguration of the Royal Grand Hall of Buddhism, a temple constructed to serve as a spiritual centre for over 370 million Buddhists in the world. “We are much honoured and pleased to officially invite Your Majesty to these ceremonies. We sincerely hope you will enjoy and appreciate the beautiful autumn of Japan,” said a letter sent on June 1 by Dr. Kyuse Ensinjoh, an official.

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July 15, 2008

The Tokyo High Court on Monday approved the retrial of two men who spent almost three decades behind bars for the 1967 robbery-murder of a carpenter in Tone, Ibaraki Prefecture, arguing their initial confessions had been forced.

The life sentences of Shoji Sakurai and Takao Sugiyama, both 61, were finalized by the Supreme Court in 1978 for the strangling of Shoten Tamamura, 62, and robbery of some ¥100,000 in cash from the victim, whose body was found in August 1967.

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The "humanistic Buddhism" (renjian fojiao) of Masters Taixu and Xingyun in China and the "engaged Buddhism" of Thich Nhat Hanh were founded, in part, to move those Buddhists traditions out of the temple and out of the funeral business and into the world that most people actually live in. The key to a vibrant Buddhism will always be education of devotees in the teachings of the Buddha, something long lost in Japan. The difficulty with this approach is that it takes at least a few years for someone to attain a good grasp of the Dharma. While it is sad to see this happening in Japan, it was all but inevitable as the hereditary priest-son private structure of most Japanese temples tended to emphasize money-making over education. I am fairly confident that there will be a revival of Buddhism in Japan, probably modeled on the humanistic Buddhist traditions of China. Another problem with the Japanese tradition is the ancient sutras are written in Chinese and are thus very difficult for ordinary Japanese to understand. In contrast, an ordinary Chinese can learn directly from the sutras without too much difficulty. American Buddhists today are very fortunate as most Buddhist literature has been translated into English and there are good number of Buddhist groups actively engaged in teaching the Dharma. It's good to read books about Buddhism and to think about the teachings, but it is also very important to join a Buddhist group, if possible, and attend classes and sutra study groups for at least a year, if not longer. Once there is good grounding in the core concepts, the tradition offers immense freedom of practice and behavior. ABN
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By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: July 14, 2008

OGA, Japan — The Japanese have long taken an easygoing, buffetlike approach to religion, ringing out the old year at Buddhist temples and welcoming the new year, several hours later, at Shinto shrines. Weddings hew to Shinto rituals or, just as easily, to Christian ones.

When it comes to funerals, though, the Japanese have traditionally been inflexibly Buddhist — so much so that Buddhism in Japan is often called “funeral Buddhism,” a reference to the religion’s former near-monopoly on the elaborate, and lucrative, ceremonies surrounding deaths and memorial services.

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Thursday, July 10, 2008

A Japanese labor bureau has ruled that one of Toyota's top car engineers died from working too many hours, the latest in a string of such findings in a nation where extraordinarily long hours for some employees has long been the norm.

The man who died was 45 and had been under severe pressure as the lead engineer in developing a hybrid version of Toyota's blockbuster Camry line, said Mikio Mizuno, the lawyer representing his wife. The man's identity is being withheld at the request of his family, who continue to live in Toyota City, where the company is based.

...There is an effort in Japan to cut down on deaths from overwork, known as "karoshi." Such deaths have steadily increased since the Health Ministry first recognized the phenomenon in 1987.

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Ken Hamaguchi confronts the devious nature of female sexuality in “Black, Sutra and the Rest”.

2008-07-09
by Lena Oishi

Kimonos, half-naked women, rope. These may sound like the ingredients for an Araki photograph, but in “Black, Sutra and the Rest” currently showing at Takahashi Collection, artist Ken Hamaguchi subverts this age-old recipe of Japanese eroticism by using buxom Western models in place for the submissive, demure Japanese girls traditionally bound up in such portraiture. In the exhibition, which features dozens of identically-composed small paintings showing mostly naked blonde girls in bondage (some in high-school uniforms or kimonos) with Buddhist sutra written over the surface in black ink, Hamaguchi not only condemns the commoditization of sexual desire and pornography, but also seems to imply that a certain aggression or devious nature of Western sexual expression is tainting the more delicate or complex Japanese concept of eroticism.

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Tue Jul 8, 2008

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese woman and her six-month-old baby escaped unhurt from a knife-wielding thief this week after the mother calmed him down with a cup of tea and a chat.

The 30-year-old Tokyo woman was walking along a corridor in her apartment building with her daughter Monday when a man brandishing a knife demanded money, the Asahi newspaper said.

When the housewife told him she had none, the man barged into her apartment. Hoping to calm him, the woman made the thief a cup of tea, whereupon he put his knife away and began a 20-minute monologue about his life.

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Sunday, July 6, 2008
By ROGER PULVERS

For years I have been watching from the sidelines as the opponents battle it out. For the players this fight will go on and on, and the theater of war is right here.

This is a linguistic war, but it naturally involves archaeology, history, religion and a host of wounded egos. The question to be decided is: What exactly are the origins of the Japanese language?

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You don’t need to be a monk to enjoy a uniquely Japanese experience

Rory Moulton
Vail CO, Colorado

JAPAN —Startled awake by lurking footsteps delicately approaching my room, I sprang upright in the plush down bedding.

Amazingly, the translucently tan, paper walls (shoji ) had kept my room warm throughout the freezing mountain night. Unfortunately, the paper walls were paper thin, so I heard every snore, sniffle and footstep that reverberated down the pine-floored hallway of the 30-room Muryoko Inn, a shukubo Buddhist temple in Koyasan, Japan.

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07/05/2008

Tokyo (AsiaNews) - About 50 visitors and 100 Japanese participated at the "summit of religious leaders for the G8", the meeting that for three years has been gathering representatives of the various faiths in view of the summit of political leaders from the major powers, and has become one of the main assemblies on the calendar of interreligious dialogue. The stated aim is that of giving a spiritual face to a summit that, although it is political, deals with topics fundamentally concerning the human heart.

From June 27-29, representatives and leaders from the main religions of the world met in Osaka and Kyoto, in view of the summit of the Group of Eight, which will be held at Lake Toyako (Hokkaido) from July 7-9, in order to send it a joint declaration.

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Sunday, June 29, 2008

...It was partly her desire to give such a firsthand account that prompted social anthropologist and filmmaker Fiona Graham to join a geisha house early last year and then to live, at least for a while, that life of legend.

"I have investigated a number of Japanese topics, and doing geisha seemed a great idea, as not much has been written on geisha from an insider's point of view," said the Australian.

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Thursday, July 03, 2008

In a country known for the official silence surrounding its use of the death penalty, people in Japan have been confronted with an image of their execution chamber -- by a recording made 50 years ago.

The execution of the unknown prisoner, recorded at Osaka detention centre in 1955, has given people a rare and gruesome insight into their country's death penalty, which -- apart from the type of rope used -- has changed little since.

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July 3, 2008
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

NIBUTANI, Japan — The Ainu had lived on Japan’s northernmost island for centuries, calling their home Ainu Mosir, or Land of Human Beings. Here, they had fished, hunted, worshiped nature and established a culture that yielded “Yukar,” an oral poem of Homeric length.

But just as with America’s expansion West, the Japanese pushed north in the late 19th century in the first sign of their imperialist ambitions. Japanese settlers decimated the Ainu population, seized their land and renamed it Hokkaido, or North Sea Road.

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Haruka Takahashi / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

With full Buddhist funeral services at temples typically costing a small fortune, families of the recently deceased now have a cheaper option--pick up the phone and dial a monk to give their beloved the spiritual send-off they deserve.

A company specializing in dispatching Buddhist monks to funeral services was established in Inagi on the outskirts of Tokyo in 2004.

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Sat Jun 28, 5:37 AM ET

As many as 300 Internet warnings of mass murder and other death threats have been posted online in Japan after a knifing rampage in Tokyo left seven people dead, media said Saturday.

Tokyo police said 200-300 death threats appeared on Internet message boards since 25-year-old Tomohiro Kato went on a killing spree on June 8 in the popular Akihabara district, Kyodo News and the Sankei Shimbun said.

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With the full-scale rollout of Japan’s cigarette vending machine age-verification system just around the corner, a Sankei Sports news reporter has confirmed the existence of a minor flaw: magazine photos can be used to fool the age-verification cameras on some machines.

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Thursday, June 26, 2008
By MIE SAKAMOTO

HAEBARU, Okinawa Pref. (Kyodo) Chie Miyagi, an English teacher in Okinawa, has published an English-language picture book to teach her students about the mass suicides involving local civilians during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.

"A Letter from Okinawa" depicts a girl whose parents kill themselves under orders from the Japanese military on Tokashiki, one of the Kerama Islands. The girl lives separately from them on Okinawa's main island, where she has been drafted into the nurse corps.

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