:28:09
He wrote me that the Japanese secret
what Lévi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things
:28:14
implied the faculty of communion with things,
of entering into them, of being them for a moment.
:28:19
It was normal that in their turn they should be like us:
perishable and immortal.
:28:32
He wrote me:
:28:33
animism is a familiar notion in Africa,
it is less often applied in Japan.
:28:36
What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to
which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart?
:28:43
When they build a factory or a skyscraper,
they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land.
:28:48
There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses,
and even for rusty needles.
:28:53
There's one on the 25th of September
for the repose of the soul of broken dolls.
:28:57
The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon
the goddess of compassionand are burned in public.
:29:42
I look to the participants.
:29:44
I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots
had the same look on their faces.