On thoughtfulness and Serene beauty
Never had I wanted to visit a cemetary as much as the one he has described here.
Dear......
It is 3000 yen per person for a night, and I would like to inform you
about the location of the guesthouse.
There is something I have to inform you before you make your booking.
It is about a small cemetery which is located at the entrance of the
guesthouse. Because the guesthouse is right in the heart of Gion, there
are a lot of temples as well as cemeteries. And the guesthouse's stood
nearby one of the temples. That's why there is a cemetery for monks over
the fence at the entrance of the guesthouse.
I was worried that poeple from China, perhaps, would not like staying
such a place for the cultural reason. So I thought I must inform you
about it now.
In Japan, people visit temples and shrines as well as cemeteries to pay
their respects to their ancestors and dead. Those places are very
special places where people can find the connection to the past and to
the people they still love after they passed away. I always take those
places as sacred.
However, a different culture has a different point of view to it. So I
understand how other people might feel about it. (If only more people would see it from this perspective. Case in point: Han vs. Tibetan people. To clarify, I wanted to highlight that some Han viewed Tibetans as living off their taxes and being unhygenic due to cultural differences towards bathing. It is just one of the stereotypes that perpetuates through time and causes deep segregation. This is just an example on hand, other cases in China would also involve the treatment of Xinjiang people as well.)
Kind Regards,
Yashi
IchiEnSou guesthouse Kyoto
Labels: thinking out loud
posted by Chinogypsie @ 8:50 PM
3 Comments:
There are shrines, and then there are shrines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine
Didn't understand the juxtaposition against the IHT article though. There it is not just a simple question of meaning of a symbol (that cultures may differ about the meaning of a cemetery or a swastika or something) - it is a deep rooted political struggle about identity, poltical sovereignty, freedom of religion, preserving a way of life etc.
I didn't make my point clear I guess. But yeah, been reading up on the Tibetan issue and this has hints in a book I just read by Xin Ran's Sky Burial. It is more than cultural differences, but I don't think the Chinese government made life any better for Tibetans by allowing segregation and stereotypes constantly to exist.
I also spoke recently to a Shanghainese friend about this recently and had another point of view military wise - Tibet being a buffer from India and Taiwan being a ideal military base.
as long as your identity and sense of self is defined by biologically inviolable truths (your ethnicity, gender, age, skin, hair, parentage, ancestry) rather than by things that are under your conscious control and choices/things that you have actually made yourself, there're bound to be problems between humans. e.g. if you are born as a Chinese woman in Singapore and think that that is your identity (a Singapore Chinese woman) then that your natural instinct is going to be to be defensive about all those three parts of your identity - Singaporean, Chinese, woman - to celebrate the good things about all these three parts, and to downplay the bad things about all these parts.
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