Japan: A Thoughtful Travelogue by Cecilia Brainard in Positively Filipino

I went, some­what reluc­tant­ly. My par­ents had been in the guer­ril­la move­ment in the Philip­pines dur­ing World War II and had told me count­less sto­ries of Japan­ese atroc­i­ties and the suf­fer­ings of the Fil­ipinos dur­ing that war. In fact, my first nov­el, When the Rain­bow God­dess Wept, inte­grates many of my par­ents’ sto­ries of sur­vival in Mindanao.

I was there­fore a biased observ­er in Japan. I did try to keep an open mind, and I did see what my friends saw in Japan, its beau­ty for instance.

Japan Is Beautiful

The moun­tain­top place of Koy­asan with its ancient cedar groves and Bud­dhist tem­ples felt oth­er-world­ly and mys­ti­cal. Koy­asan, a UNESCO site, pre­serves Shin­gon Bud­dhism, a sect began in 805 by Kobo Daishi. The town only has Bud­dhist tem­ples for hous­ing, and we stayed at Ekoin Tem­ple, where we slept on tata­mi mats, ate veg­an food pre­pared by the monks, and wit­nessed their med­i­ta­tion, chant­i­ng, and a morn­ing prayer rit­u­al that involved burn­ing wood­en sticks with peti­tions. We had a won­der­ful walk through the Okunoin ceme­tery with graves and mau­soleums of shoguns and emper­ors. This ancient ceme­tery also has many small stone stat­ues tucked here and there, near impos­ing grave mark­ers and enor­mous cedar tree roots. The fig­ures have knit­ted head cov­er­ings and red aprons; these small Bud­dha fig­ures rep­re­sent dead babies and indi­cate that infant mor­tal­i­ty was high and that fam­i­lies griev­ed for their dead babies …

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