Most Hustle & Desire

Generation after generation is enamored of being in the movies. My mother’s father often recounted how as a U.S. Marine munitions expert at Camp Pendleton, California, he set up the beach-scene explosions for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), seen at the end of this trailer in which he is off camera pushing buttons. My first chance came as an extra in ジャッジ! (pronounced “jajji,” meaning “judge”), in which I screwed up a shot by walking between the camera and the actors Satoshi Tsumabuki and Keiko Kitagawa. As I participated in the closing scenes with an eclectic mix of foreigners who had been bussed from Tokyo to the set at a desolate seaside resort on the Boso Peninsula, it all seemed an ill-conceived cheering-up centered around the promotion of a fish product following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and 2011 earthquake strangely referred to as “3/11.” The main character (Tsumabuki) wins an ad competition under the paternal-like assurances of a U.S. contest judge played by Jam...

A free spirit, the Zen monk Ikkyū (1394–1481) writes rebelliously of institutional Buddhism – “that stone Buddha deserves all the bird shit it gets / I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind” – which perhaps freed him to make insights beyond his professed order. Shinkichi Takahashi (1901-1987), a rebel also, was educated with easy access to western thought, writing in one poem, “A quail has seized God by the neck // With its black bill, because there is no / God greater than a quail. / (Peter, Christ, Judas: a quail.)” Takahashi sees God in all phenomena and “All the phenomena in the universe: myself.” Though freeing, such an approach can be reductive in its formulaic nature, rather than accumulative toward deeper and deeper understanding – the difference perchance between a rolling stone and the snowball effect. Zen and the western ethic have also mixed in some of our greatest American poets, namely Jim Harrison (1937-2016), a follower of Ikkyū and Takahashi ...