The Sword of Heaven

by Mikkel Aaland

  No one in the van was hurt, but Donna’s back was injured, thankfully not seriously. My wrist was painfully sprained from trying to swerve the car to safety, and it would be a long time before I could hold anything, even a small camera. My right knee was swollen like a balloon from hitting the bottom of the dash. My car was totaled.

  “Bad luck, eh?” I said as a friend drove us back home from the hospital. Then under my breath I said, “Or bad spirits.”

  “We were at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Donna said.

  “What’s the difference?” I asked, and then neither of us spoke the rest of the way home.

  Not long after the car accident, the death threats began. At first, I had no idea where they were coming from, or whom. I’d come home to my answering machine:

  “You son of a bitch. You are dead.”

  The first time I figured it was a prank. But the threats continued, always with the same short threatening message. We called the police: they authorized a call trace on my phone, but added that phone terror was becoming common. It was not, they said, to be taken too seriously.

  It had been nearly a year since I wrote the newspaper article on the Shinto project, but in the meantime, with Kazz’s reluctant approval, I had given permission to Not Man Apart, a national ecology magazine, and East West Journal to reprint the story. I was now getting responses from all over the country.

  “Your article doesn’t have anything to do with the threats,” Donna said one day. I told her I agreed: after all, the responses to the reprints were all positive. People wanted to help.

  Nonetheless, after Donna left and I was sitting at my desk alone, I felt fear spread through my body like a fever. My chest, still tight from the pneumonia, felt as though it would burst. I played the latest message from my machine, desperately listening for a clue to the caller’s identity. My heart began pounding furiously, out of control, and then seemed to move like vomit up my throat. Could the caller be some crazed survivor of Pearl Harbor with a lifetime vendetta against the Japanese? Was it some right-wing religious nut, embarking on a holy war against the infidels, against pagans? In near panic I stared at the gods left on my bookshelf. In my mind I reassembled all the pieces of the Sword of Heaven to make a single shiny steel blade. Strangely, the mere thought of the powerful weapon gave me courage, and I felt protected from the angry voice on the tape.

  It didn’t take long for me to go deeply into debt. I was charging everything, even my rent. The bills from hotels, restaurants, and camera stores in Japan arrived. Even though Donna offered to help me financially, I refused. I felt we had settled into a comfortable rhythm, splitting our time between her place and mine, and I didn’t want to upset the delicate balance between being close and being too close that would come with financial strings. At least that is how I understood it at the time.

  At first it was easy to blame my six weeks away, the illness, and the accident for my financial woes. But when the situation didn’t get better, I could only blame myself. Instead of hustling work, as I should have, I spent long hours in the library, reading, researching, and contemplating the nature of Shinto.

  I wasn’t interested in converting. I wasn’t writing a theological or philosophical dissertation. But I did hunger to understand the religion at the base of the project in which I now, for better or worse, was a player.

  On the surface it seemed so simple: Shinto was the worship of nature and the ancestors. But what did it mean to worship nature: to call a stone or a tree a god? And why did it seem that Shinto and the fanatic worship of the emperor were never far apart? Was there an inherent flaw in Shinto that actually encouraged a fanatical approach to the world, rather than the sensible moderation espoused by other Eastern religions such as Buddhism?

  The first book I consulted was Gerald L. Berry’s Religions of the World, published in 1947, not long after the end of World War II. Berry was downright disdainful:“The best that can be said of Shinto is that there were never bloody sacrifices or cruel or immoral rituals. It has no appeal to any instinct of good or evil; and it is hollow and empty, promising no definite destiny. What its future will be since Emperor Hirohito has renounced his claim to divinity is uncertain.”

  The great Buddhist philosopher, Suzuki, who is commonly credited with bringing Zen Buddhism to the Western world, seemed at best ambivalent about Shinto. Writing about the Shinto sword in his book Zen and Japan, Suzuki said: “[The sword] betrays [Shinto’s] naturalistic origin. It is not a symbol but an object endowed with some mysterious power. Here lingers an animistic way of thinking…Shintoism has no philosophy of its own to stand on; it is awakened to its own consciousness and existence only when it comes in contact with one of the others, and thereby learns how to express itself.”

  I found corroboration for my friend’s earlier remark that Shinto was outlawed in the U.S. during World War II. Prejudice, War and the Constitution stated that religious services could be performed by Japanese-American Protestants, Catholics, and Buddhists during the war, but Shinto ceremonies were forbidden.

  I found pictures of the Shinto shrine, which stood inside Golden Gate Park, taken before it was torn down during the war. It had been a medium-sized pavilion, with a high, slanted roof and beautifully carved patterns in the wood beams. I couldn’t see from the photograph what was inside, but the shrine fit so nicely into its park surroundings that I felt shocked that they had actually leveled it.

  Did government officials know something I didn’t? Was the practice of Shinto really that threatening?

  Finally I found some books that were more helpful. Joseph Campbell’s Oriental Mythology contains an amusing anecdote. A Western sociologist was frustrated in his long attempt to understand the ideology and theology of Shinto. He expressed his frustration to a Shinto priest, who smiled as he said to the scholar, “We do not have ideology. We do not have theology. We dance.” Campbell then adds, “Which, precisely, is the point. For Shinto, at its root, is a religion not of sermons but of awe: which is a sentiment that may or may not produce words, but in either case goes beyond them.”

  Campbell, in the same book, also spoke of “astonishing affinities” between Shinto mythology and those of other northern cultures, such as the Irish, Siberians, and natives of the Canadian Northeast. I remembered the ease with which my father and other Norwegians as well as Native Americans seemed to accept the story of the Shinto gods.

  It was both reassuring and disconcerting to read from Shinto, The Kami Way that “except for the student [with] almost inexhaustible resources and time for his investigation, Shinto remains practically a closed book. There are very few people, Japanese or foreign, who understand Shinto thoroughly and are able to explain it in detail.”

  “Even the Japanese don’t know,” I thought with some satisfaction.

  One of the best books that I found was The Looking-Glass God by Nahum Stiskin. The book gives detailed explanations of every aspect of Shinto rites and rituals and draws well-thought-out parallels between Eastern mysticism and Western science. “Shinto is not a religion in the normal sense of the word.… Of course, if an awareness of the invisible energies of life, an awe before the immensity of the cosmos, a deep humility with regard to the smallness of oneself, and a never-ending gratitude for the order within nature are taken to be defining characteristics of religion, then Shinto is indeed one.… What then, is Shinto? In the final analysis, it is a pure expression of human intuition…[which] is the universal inheritance of mankind and is the root of human existence.”

  This made sense to me, and appealed to my rational Western mind fostered by my father. It also spoke to what I indeed feel are some of the essential elements of spirituality. And interestingly, it had been my intuition which had gotten me involved in the first place.

  I also began taking Japanese language lessons. The beginning classes, offered by the Japanese Society of Northern California, met twice a week for three months. We mostly learned simple survival phrases such as “Hello,” “Good mo
rning,”“Where are you from?”“How much is it?” and the like. But we also learned some of the basics of Japanese writing: hiragana, a phonetic script not unlike Roman letters; katakana, another phonetic script used solely for Japanese words; and kanji, the visual script inherited from the Chinese which contains both a pictorial and literal meaning. There are more than 3,000 kanji symbols, and even the most literate Japanese cannot know them all.

  “This helps…it all helps,” I told Donna after explaining to her how kanji characters were both pictures and words at the same time.

  I explained how our Japanese language teacher had told us that the brain of people who study Japanese from an early age physically develops differently because they are exercising both the literal and the figurative capabilities at once. The right side of the brain, which handles mostly visual information, and which is also considered the side most responsible for intuitive insight, is actually more developed in the Japanese than in people who learn only a Western language. As a result the Japanese generally put more emphasis on nonrational or intuitive approaches to problem solving.

  “Like artists!” exclaimed Donna.

  “She also said that in Western languages there is a sharp distinction between subject and object: I, you, it. In Japan,“I” or “you” is rarely used. They are assumed.”

  “No wonder we were confused when we were there,” Donna said.

  “My teacher told the class that the Japanese are more interested in harmony and consideration for one another’s feelings. They prefer suggesting things and hinting, or indirect reference, so they can change direction without hurting anyone’s feelings. We saw that too, didn’t we?”

  “Yes!”

  “One last thing. She told us that they don’t use the Greek logic of precision, where something is either/or. In the West, we always want something to be good or bad, hot or cold, odd or even, this or that. If something is in between, we call it ambiguous which carries a negative connotation. In Japanese there is a special word for the third alternative, mu, which carries as much importance as either/or.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Donna said.

  “Me either,” I confessed.

  “Are you trying too hard? I mean, I like the stuff you’re saying. But don’t you think you are getting a little too philosophical? Too much in your head? Aren’t you overdoing all this research?”

  “I know, I know,” I replied. I appreciated Donna’s support, and I knew she was right that I was tying too hard. But as I saw it, Kazz was less than forthcoming, and books and Japanese classes offered an important way into Shinto and the project. I felt incapable of sitting still and letting understanding come slowly with time.

  Even though I hadn’t tried to place a god in more than six months, the Shinto project continued both from San Francisco and Japan. Too confused and too broke to place gods myself, I continued sending them with friends to other parts of the world. Helen Johnston, owner of the Focus Gallery in San Francisco, took one to Kenya and put it in Lake Naivasha. “The Shinto god was dropped about 6 p.m. My great worry is that the lake with the current drought may shrink enough to expose it. It was down when I was there for I had to cross a muddy area to reach the lake’s edge. Well, we can only hope!”

  Michael Winn, a writer friend of Juan Li’s, took one to the Kun Lung mountains, a restricted area of China where the Chinese military perform nuclear tests.

  Barbara Schneider, a Bay Area woman who had responded to the California Living article, carried a Shinto god to Egypt and placed it in the Nile River, near the temple of Karnak.

  My good friend Barry Marshall, a land surveyor, took one to Morocco and placed it in a shallow lake near Azorou. He wrote a beautiful letter about the placing. He ended with: “A little faith and a stone tossed in a lake may make a world of difference or none at all…it is harmless. And ripples are magic.…”

  “Harmless,” I thought to myself as I reread his letter. “Yeah, harmless…as long as you aren’t too involved.”

  Kazz, too, was busy. He wrote and told me about placing gods in the Middle East, China, and North Korea. He was traveling at amazing speed, crisscrossing the earth as if it were just a few miles wide. One month I received a letter from Israel, where he placed a god in the Sinai desert. Then I heard he had just returned from a grueling trip to Karachi, Islamabad, and Bombay. He finished the trip by traveling through Nepal and Tibet to climb and place a god on holy Mount Kailas.

  Borders seemed to open magically for him. I was astonished that he was able to enter Iran, carrying not one but several of the stone-encased gods. When the border guards asked him what they were, he told them “Gods from Japan,” and they hastily put them back in the bag and hurried him through. “They are so fanatic,” Kazz said, “that the mention of God scared them.”

  But not all was right with him either. His wife, fed up with all his travels, left home with their daughters for three months. His back, which had been better, was again giving him serious trouble after the strenuous trips.

  “Her mother convinced her to leave,” Kazz wrote, “and now she isn’t talking to me.” He blamed the separation on “bad spirits.”

  Donna and I weren’t getting along either. The tension exploded just after my 32nd birthday in June. On the surface, the issue was vacation. She wanted to make plans to go somewhere, anywhere. I made excuse after excuse for not being able to commit: no money, no time, too much work. But the issue wasn’t vacation, or money, or time, and Donna knew it. Her brown eyes flashed and her hands went to her hips.

  “You can’t make up your mind about anything! About me. About the Shinto project.”

  I started to protest, but then stopped.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I can never tell for sure what you want. You’re so vague.”

  She went to a drawer and pulled out a print I had made for her. A few weeks earlier, we had taken a stroll on the beach where Donna combed the sand for driftwood and rocks that she could incorporate into her drawings. Inspired by her very personal art, I focused my camera on nature, a clear departure from my normal journalistic and documentary work. I had taken a picture of our feet, Donna’s boots and my white tennis shoe.

  “See,” she said, “My two feet are here, but you, you have only one foot forward. It’s what you always do: put just one foot forward. I’m really tired of it. Jump, for god’s sake. Be bold!”

  “There are other shots with both my feet showing.”

  “Then it’s strange that you chose this shot to print,” she said, leaning against the wall. “It was your choice.”

  The next morning at breakfast Donna handed me a piece of paper with a Kahil Gibran poem she had carefully transcribed. I read it and put it away without comment even though I was profoundly moved by its wisdom.

  Doubt is a pain

  too lonely to know

  that faith

  is his twin brother

  Nearly a year after meeting Kazz and the teacher, my situation finally improved. Donna and I took a late-summer vacation in the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains. The death threats were becoming less and less frequent. In the fall, photo assignments first trickled and then poured in. There was nothing tangible I could credit for the change of fortune, although interestingly it coincided with a feeling that through my research and language classes I was finally getting a grip on Shinto and the Japanese. I had also taken Donna’s comments to heart and was trying to be more engaged in the relationship.

  As 1984 closed, I suggested a fancy restaurant to celebrate. We toasted the year of bad luck, laughing bravely at the memories of the car accident, our illnesses, the death threats and our fights. I was filled with confidence that the dark cloud had passed.

  Not long after, I suggested that we take a week off to visit Donna’s father in Florida. He’d taken a winter house in Venice, on the Gulf, and since he was divorced and alone, there was plenty of room for us. The vacation would cost
us only airfare. Suddenly, I remembered that none of the Shinto gods had been placed in that part of the world. Although I had sent seven gods to faraway places, I had not personally placed any gods since the first in Norway a year and a half earlier.

  The whole year I was soul searching, the world hadn’t gotten any safer. The confrontation between the two superpowers, which had escalated in the early 1980s, was more intense than ever. Star Wars, instead of diffusing a stressful situation, actually made things worse. Many Americans, including me, didn’t believe the plan would work and thought Star Wars was instead a tremendous waste of time and money. The Soviets considered it a further arms buildup and feared that it was a prelude to a nuclear attack. Nuclear trauma still gripped the world.

  Perhaps this was the time for me to place another god.

  Within moments of deciding to take a god, a storm of doubt hit me. “What am I doing? Another god?” I made a silent prayer to no one in particular.“Please make this easy, not confusing like the Lab or Shasta. I want to help, I truly do.”

  chapter 9

  The newspaper headline says it all.

  “You have certainly heard of the ‘butterfly effect.’ The belief that everything in the world is so mysteriously and comprehensively interconnected that a slight, seemingly insignificant wave of a butterfly’s wing in a single spot on this planet can unleash a typhoon thousands of miles away.”

  —Czechoslovak poet and Cold War dissident Vaclav Havel

  It started so normally. Donna’s father, Don Speed, picked us up at the St. Petersburg airport and drove us the 60 miles south to Venice. Within an hour we had changed into our swimsuits and were strolling on the nearby beach, our white skin turning pink in the intense sun. Don, a retired Air Force captain whom I liked immediately, walked with us fully clothed, happy to be with younger company.