The Fruitsaladist Manifesto

I am a Fruitsaladist. Well, I may be a fruitcake case but now I want to introduce myself as a Fruitsaladist. So please allow me to introduce what is Fruitsaladism...

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I simply did not know how to answer when my son's Anglican school asks me about my family's religion. But now I can answer that we are Fruitsaladists!

Well, I can say I am a Christian because I was baptised by a Lutheran pastor at 17. But I now keep a lot distance from Christianity in the past decade because this Jesus religion is getting increasingly creepier. So now I rarely identify myself as a Christian. So I cannot answer to the school that my son is a Christian.

I do not feel like teaching my son about God or Jesus. After I found out an advertisement of a movie about the discovery of Noah's Ark (claimed by fundamentalist Christian scholars) in his school textbook, I started to talk a lot about evolution with him. (The goose bumps that the movie ad gave me is a good piece of evidence of evolution, isn't it?) I feel the need to protect him the creeping wave of fundamentalism.

Well, my wife is a Theravada Buddhist but rather agnostic because of rampant corruption among some Buddhist monks in her native country. She is very disappointed by Buddhism as an institutional religion. So we rarely talk about Buddhism at home.

But it does not mean that I am not religious. I am very religious and believe in the healing power of religion. I am simply very unhappy with many institutional religions' desire to monopolise truth. I know Jesus is my great teacher but so is Gautama Buddha. Buddhism helped me improve my depression a lot. (My depression is rooted in my father complex. So I could reject his control over me by converting myself to Christianity, a religion with almighty God. But I could not solve my father complex by simply replacing my biological father with the almighty Father in the Heaven! So I had to kill God to free myself.)

I know I can tap into the healing power of other time-tested religions. I believe that the goal of every religion (at least in the modern/postmodern context) is to bring peace among people. But a religion does not fit all unlike a free size T shirt. Everyone has a different spiritual need and the right to explore more than one tradition to find the right solution for himself.

I guess many intelligent people of the world today feel the same way. Although they do not like institutional religions or do not want to subscribe to particular religion, they feel religion could bring them peace of mind.

Here I would like to introduce the idea of Fruitsaladism. It is a mixture of any religious or philosophical ideas and practices for the peace of mind. I am not going to provide you with the only right recipe. There can be as many recipes as the number of Fruitsaladists in the world. Each spiritually eclectic person can propose his/her own recipe and share with others.

So Fruitsaladism will not build a strong institution. But I think it is nice to make a loose network of the world's Fruitsaladists to share our experiences of personal spiritual journeys with each other.

Seems Silly But Take It Serious!

I felt those TV dramas and movies silly and did not watch them. The main female characters were not my type of girls, anyway. But I still somehow remember those...

It was when I was in a high school and chasing after a cute boyish girl who was not interested in me at all. But I was just happy to have someone to drive me crazy. So it has been more than 20 years since then.

There were quite a lot Japanese teen movies in 1980s that high schools were taken over by some evil organisations. Rebellious students were captured by the teachers controlled by bad guys with supernatural powers and tortured in dungeons. But some beautiful girls (usually in navy blue sailor suits and dragging extremely long pleated skirts) heroically fought to set the schools free!

Those movies successfully captured the hearts of Japanese teen. My classmates were crazy about those shows and often imitated their favourite scenes. But I simply could not understand what the evil organisation wanted to do by taking over one high school? It seemed ridiculous.

But when some of those movies were remade in the past few years, I could understand why the Japanese teens welcomed those shows so enthusiastically. By then, I had struggled for more than a decade with the traumatic memories of my abusive primary school teachers. Looking back, I could feel as if my primary and junior high schools had been indeed taken over by some evil organisations!

Now I understand why my classmates loved those shows. They also felt as if their primary and junior high schools had been controlled by evil guys. Between 1970s and the early 1990s, Japanese teachers were obsessed with how to manage or control students. Students were treated as if they had been factory products. They imposed grossly outdated and harsh school rules and punished the offenders relentlessly with fists and wooden swords. I also used to see a delinquent kid with black eyes and bruises on his face and/or in a blood-stained shirt time to time at my junior high school. Anyway, many schools were frightening places in 1970s and 80s in Japan...

Perhaps I am rather a lucky one even though I am still struggling with school trauma. I can work and support myself now. But there are so many former Japanese students, now in their 30s and 40s, who have withdrawn into their rooms and refused to contact anyone. Many of them have refused any contact even with their family members for many years, even more than a decade...
Remembering those shows, I now feel how pop culture is a mirror that reflects the shadow of the society. We cannot take that lightly...

But so is everyone's.

Whew! My company recently hired a new writer (after half a year) and it has lightened my workload a lot. It lightened my heart up so much even before the arrival of new colleague that I could read more than 1,200 pages last month. I felt so good!

But things has gone quite strange last week.

I first found that my reading significantly slowed down. Unexplainable fear built up in my heart. Then I got irritated so easily, thinking a lot about my primary school teachers' full-blown abuses. Uh-oh, these were signs of another depression episode. Then by Thursday, I started to feel a lot of energy draining out of me. By Friday, I hoped my life be short and I was aware that I was depressed again.

Well, I might have made my depression prophecy come true by labelling my slower reading speed, fear and irritability as signs of depression...

When my efficiency drops due to exhaustion, I tend to think about what my primary school teachers did and said to me. Although it has already been 26 years since I left the school that was more like a boot camp or a religious cult's extremely long seminar than a grade school, I still feel I am still under the control of that school's violently abusive teachers.

Over and over again, they reminded me that I was the most sinful person in the world. Over and over again, they told me that I did not understand how much they and my classmates hated me. Over and over again, I was labelled as the source of all evil, who was responsible for the bloody civil war in Cambodia and the horrifying famine in Ethiopia. Over and over again, they destroyed my identity as a Japanese national and a human being... (That is the reason why I emigrated from Japan.) I was like Damien (a devilish boy with a sign of 666 on his head in a 1976 movie The Omen). In addition, they labelled me as a mentally retarded and physically handicapped child. They even said that I should be thrown into a special facility on a mountain so that I, an eyesore, would not disturb others but would die quietly.

All these things were said by Japanese public servants, who had sworn their allegiance to the Japanese Constitution that guarantees all the human beings' dignity.

Anyway, I was supposed to have an extremely evil mind that would contaminate the entire school and eventually the whole world. Everyday was for me the day of a denunciation meeting led by a teacher and all my classmates. When I first saw a film of the Cultural Revolution of China, I cried a lot because the scene was so similar to my primary school classroom!

What did I do? Did I constantly beat classmates? Did I steal other students' things? Did I try to burn the school down? NO!

I was just a feeble kid, who could not run fast and often forgot turning my homework on time. I was not a bully but constantly bullied five years out of six. Those teachers allowed the bullies to do anything to me but severely punished me when I stroke them back. One of them even reported to my mother that I loved streaking when my arch enemy stripped me down and beat up so I ran all around in the school naked, crying loud! (Their logic is that if I had not been there, there would have been no bullying! So they wanted me, not the violent bullies, to disappear.)

I don't know what made my teachers to label me evil. But I feel I was an unpleasant kid for a teacher to have as a student. I was exposed to information from overseas as my father was a seafarer. I wore a more urban hairstyle. I did not look like a Japanese (so Tokyo cops often stopped me while I was taking a walk at night in my 20s). And I was sick and feeble so I could not run fast, i.e. I would be useless in the next war. (I don't know why but the teachers always talked about the next war even though it is illegal for Japan to fight any war.) I guess I was simply an eyesore.

But because of that I have always had to face the evil inside of me. I have always imagined it as an abyss that if someone dropped, he would not reach the bottom in thousands of years. I imagined of me falling in the abyss, die while falling and continue falling even after I turn into skeletons and then into dust. It is indeed a chilling image. But I felt I deserved it because I was evil, anyway.

However, it is crystal clear to my intellectual side that my teachers were insane. I know it is immoral to find the source of all evil in a feeble, horrified kid who repeated petty misdeeds such as forgetting his painting set for an art class. It is indeed illegal and unethical to beat a student with a bamboo sword for such a small mistake. Above all, physical punishment of any kind was/is illegal in Japan. I also think it is unethical that the teachers carry weapons such as bamboo or wooden swords in a school so that they can beat students for any possible reasons (such as looking bored or unhappy). Being a champion of morality while ignoring laws is nothing but immoral and unethical.

I know my teachers were crazy. Even though they said I was evil, now I know they were the evil ones. So I am angry. (I thought I was evil so I deserved the teachers' all those punishments until I was 18 when I found out that any physical punishment was prohibited by a then 30-year-old national legislation in Japan.)

But my soul is still frightened. My soul is still crying under the crushing weight of guilt. My soul is still trying to take personal responsibility for what is happening in Sudan or Iraq...

It caused a big struggle in my heart in last few days. Even though I did not want to label myself a victim, even though many (including some psychiatrists) had told me to forget and grow up, I peeled off all the evil labels on me and put them back to the teachers. And I imagined about all those teachers taken to a court of law as defendants of a criminal case. I let my anger explode so that I could quit being the source of all evil.

I feel good this morning. I guess I have successfully rejected the evil long imagined in my heart.... From now on, I am going to take responsibility only for the things I am really responsible. Well, I know it does not waive me from my share of collective responsibilities (such as environmental pollution or awareness of human rights) that everyone has to bear, though....

Still, I know some part of me (the Ego?) is evil. But so is everyone's.