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Thought for the day...
11.28.06 / 08:26PM / Joe
 The context: this is Peter talking, an American who has lived in Japan for many years, running J-List, one of my favorite online interesting import shops.
"Pets are a part of our household in Japan, and currently we've got a dog (faithful old Sakura) and two cats (black-and-white Mix-chan and all-black Kuro). My wife once remarked to me, "It's important to keep pets in the home. They die in place of family members when the family runs into bad luck." My eyes become little black points like an anime character's at this, as I struggled to understand her statement. She was talking about the concept of "migawari" (me-gah-wah-ree), literally meaning "substitute for" or "sacrifice for." When our dog Chibi passed away earlier this year, the general consensus among my Japanese family was that he had died in order to protect someone in the family from injury or worse, and everyone loved him a little more for that. Originally a ninja term meaning to dress up a tree to look like a person so an enemy would think it was you and attack it mistakenly, the word refers to anything that takes bad luck in your place, protecting you as it does so."
If you're at all into Japanese culture, you should be reading his weblog weekly. Or grab the RSS feed or the email mailing list, which, you know, won't include NSFW pics of Japanese skin mags. Yeah, everything kinda steers back into plugs for the stuff he sells, but his little insights and revelations about life in Japan are worth the commercializing.
I also recommend Japanmanship, which is written by a British game developer also living in Japan. And of course, A Geek in Korea comes to us from an english teacher living in Korea, which is where I learned of the popular Korean superstition that sleeping with a fan on in your room will kill you. I kinda looked twice at the mini-fan we keep in Clark's room after that. |
