From Jomon cooking pot to nuclear kitchen

The Japanese script for culture is composed of the kanji bun (文) meaning “literature” and ka (化) meaning “becoming.” In one sense, culture is our becoming through story – from haiku to Nintendo, from town crier to internet news. However, there is an insinuated perverseness: ka also implies the phantasmagorical, and appears as ba in the word for monster, bakemono (化け物), literally “becoming or changing thing,” and is the root in the verbs bakeru (化ける) “to turn oneself (into)” and bakasu (化かす) “to bewitch.”

In all its monstrosity, culture just as food has been who we are as humans since prehistoric times. And as we are what we eat, we are more so the stories we consume, which may be why in the kanji ka (化) you can find the traditional radicals for “man/human being” (the left side of the kanji) and “spoon” (the right side of the kanji). It may also be the reason why the best ancient Jomon cooking pots were so flamboyantly decorated.

The English word “culture” itself has culinary roots, in the Latin cultus, the past participle of colere, “to till” or “cultivate.” But with the abandonment of farms and domesticated animals scavenging the no-entry zone of the Fukushima nuclear accident, the wider contamination of fisheries and agricultural land, as well as the pervasiveness of petrochemical pollution, I have to pause. What are we eating? What tales are we telling ourselves? What are we turning ourselves into?

This etymological digging was excavated from “Cultural Perversion: Monsters, myths and man’s becoming” written for Metropolis, Tokyo, Issue 940. I later learned that the “spoon” on the right side of “ka (化)” is actually a Japanese corruption of the original Chinese character of a an upside-down man, falling down.

Location: Tokyo, Japan

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