I have a couple of posts coming that aren’t quite direct follow-ups to what I wrote last week about Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on atheism and belief, but deal with issues related to the whole modernity/belief/atheism tangle. For the first one, I wanted to juxtapose two pieces whose intended audiences don’t necessarily overlap that much — a London Review Books essay on Japan and “the ghosts of the tsunami,” and a Grantland career retrospective on the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, of “Robocop” and “Showgirls” fame.
The LRB essay, by Richard Lloyd Parry, investigates some of the ghostly visitations — visions, feelings of possession, poltergeist-ish phenemona — experienced by survivors of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the north of Japan. Parry plausibly links these experiences to Japanese ancestor veneration, which he argues is the “true faith of Japan,” the enduring religion of an allegedly-secular island. The tsunami “did appalling violence” to the rites and rituals of this faith: Carrying away “household altars, memorial tablets and family photographs,” destroying temples and with them the “memorial books listing the names of ancestors over generations,” and creating the kind of conditions — violent death, an interruption of rituals, the eradication of entire families — that Japanese folk belief associates with the creation of “gaki, ‘hungry ghosts’, who wander between worlds, propagating curses and mischief.”
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