Soon after arriving in Japan, I walked to a Seven Eleven to buy some onigiri, those triangle-shaped rice balls that are similar to sandwiches in the U.S. While I enjoyed my lunch, I wandered behind the convenience store and was surprised to see a beautiful Buddhist temple nestled in between a beauty shop and CD rental store. People were walking by, not paying the slightest attention to the small temple despite it looking to my outsider’s eyes as out-of-place in a modern glass-and-asphalt city as a UFO. That’s largely what Buddhism is for many in Japan, it seems to me: all around you like the air, but generally unseen until your life takes you to some point where it shifts to the foreground, such as the death of a family member. Buddhism has been a part of Japan since the beginnings of its culture, and you can see its footprint in many interesting places. Amano-jaku is a word that describes a person who is a contrarian and who does the opposite of what’s expected of him because he wants to be “going my way” (that is, live life at his own pace), like a friend of mine who loves to quote ironic movies yet who has never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I was surprised to learn was this word originally referred to a mischievous Buddhist deity known for tricking people into doing evil things. There are other signs of the religion in everyday language, such as the Japanese word for “to get ahead in life,” which is shusse suru (shu-seh suru), which I realized one day was written with characters that really meant “to go into the next world,” and which is related to Buddhist teaching.
One of the thousands of Buddhist temples in Japan.
