Japanese Culture Blog - Oni/Setsubun
エミリー (15:56:26) :
Reading all this, I keep trying to find something within my culture to compare with setsubun - the closest I’ve come up with is Halloween, but I don’t think it has the same cultural significance. It probably once did - I did some research and found that Halloween celebrations a long time ago follow some of the same general traditions as setsubun - the roleplaying as evil spirits and good luck ceremonies in particular. It seems to me that the United States doesn’t have quite the respect for superstition or supernatural things as does Japan - here, people who are really into the occult or superstition are pretty much dismissed, but in most of the Japanese media I’ve seen, the same types of things are treated with greater seriousness - and I wonder if that’s the cause of the divergence between setsubun and Halloween.
I didn’t, however, find any kind of mainstream spirits or anything to compare with the Japanese oni. Like I said above, I just don’t think we treat superstition seriously enough in the United States for something like that to become as much of a colloquialism as it is in Japan. I mean, we too have proverbs and sayings based on superstitious or supernatural things, and ghost stories or other supernatural stories are quite common, but they’re really not part of our culture.
It just occurred to me that this might be because of a difference in the way we think of history and our ancestry - it seems that here in America we live very much in the now, but family ancestry and legend seem to hold much more significance in Asia. General history also is kind of ignored here in contrast to the rest of the world - we tear down our old buildings while other places repurpose them. I wonder if we don’t subscribe to ghost stories because we prefer to destroy our ghosts?
This particular post made me think about the differing value systems of my culture and others - not just the Japanese, but European and Native American cultures in particular. Here in the United States, everything really is very much "in the now" - despite our Smithsonians, small-town museums, and national registry of historic places, I would hazard to say that the vast majority of Americans don't care much for learning about the past or don't feel that they have any connection to it. Or, perhaps they claim to care, but their actions speak otherwise - the comment I made about tearing down old buildings presents this. Europeans don't tear down their old buildings because they feel there is significance to them. Likewise with the Japanese, who so far as I have heard rebuild their old buildings when they get destroyed, or the Native Americans, whose entire spiritual belief system is centered around geographic locations.
I wonder why we don't attach the same significance or simply attach ourselves to places or buildings like so many other cultures do - perhaps it's the commercialism that's so deeply ingrained in our culture, but it seems to me that Japan to some extent is commercial as well. I suppose if we don't attach significance to the things we produce, everything is intrinsically worthless to begin with (which might be going a little too far, but what I believe I'm getting at is, for lack of better words, spiritual bankruptcy. I find this ironic, since among developed nations, the United States is one of the more religious). It never fails to astound me how much more value other cultures seem to give to pretty much everything, whether it's outright ceremony as in Native or Japanese culture, or a simple appreciation, as in Europe.
I'm not sure I've made my train of thought exactly clear (things kind of went from holidays to superstition to history to spirituality) but overall it was a very interesting ride, and a very enlightening one, as it allowed me to realize a little more fully the differences in value systems.