Wild "Heavenly Horses" Return Home

"Heavenly horses" return to Steppes of Mongolia and China. 

(Photo and Story: AFP via JT, 2013)

Chinese legend says the Silk Road's iconic Heavenly Horses were discovered 2,000 years ago by a criminal exiled to Dunhuang (a Silk Road crossroads in western China) who captured some and then presented them to the emperor, who fell in love with the breed.

  

They became known as Przewalski’s horses during European contact in the 19th century. Once thought to be extinct in the wild, the ancient species is being revived by conservationists in China and Mongolia.

Steppes horses came to Japan during the Kofun Period (250-540), from the Asian continent via the Korean Peninsula. Haniwa (funerary clay) horses were buried in tombs, along with figurines, from the Kofun to the Asuka Periods (538-710). 

Haniwa (clay funerary) horse acquired by the LA County Museum in 2010. 

(Photo: LA Times)

Ikuo Hirayama, artist from Hiroshima: War is the "supreme folly of humankind"

(Image: Art Acknowledgement News)

Ikuo Hirayama passed away in December 2009, five months before the Miroku Project's Nara 2010: Conferences on the Future of East Asia, which he chaired, was to begin.

The renowned artist and Silk Roads preservation activist said that the wish for peace was the core of his work. His fervent quest was born when he was a fifteen-year-old living in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. That morning, he witnessed the atomic bombing "like a flashbulb had gone off right in front of me." Suffering from radiation-induced leukopenia, Hirayama knew he wanted to work for world peace but did not know how to do this until his mind suddenly filled with spontaneous image of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang who defied his government to go in search of Buddhist texts:

As a child I suffered from the effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. This devastating experience has made me harbor a strong wish for world peace, just as I believe monk Xuanzang did. Identifying with him thus, I have wished to relive his journey of sacrifice and discovery along the Silk Road.

In following Xuanzang's footsteps across the Silk Roads, Hirayama realized the deep historical and cultural interconnections between Eurasia, Africa, and the Middle East, all the way to Japan:

What we call Japanese fine arts have their origin in China...If Chinese art objects of the early Tang age were excavated (in Japan) now, they would be taken for Japanese objects. With the passage of time, Japanese fine arts became recognizably different from Chinese fine arts, but in the Asuka, Hakuho and Tenpyo periods, that is, in the seventh century, the two were identical.

This realization of human unity helped to heal Hirayama's psyche and spirit. His journeys west also reinforced his knowledge of the devastation of war:

It’s no exaggeration to say that a culture can be wiped out in a second by war. Many ruins and remains found along the Silk Road are the result of war, the supreme folly of humankind.

It took the artist decades to recover enough personal strength to look backwards into his life, at what happened in Hiroshima. When he did, he was ready to portray the atomic bombing in his medium, Nihon-ga, the richly colored traditional Japanese paint medium using dry mineral pigments, which originated in India and was brought to Japan via the artist's beloved Silk Roads.

"Ikuo Hirayama says the wish for peace is at the core of his art work" by NPR's Robert Rand, published in 2008, explores Hirayama's peace activism through visual art and historic preservation:

Today, the Japanese city of Hiroshima is a thriving metropolis of 1.2 million that speaks with the rumble and squeal of streetcars and traffic. But on Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb shattered the city, killing more than 90,000. Of those who survived, one man, Ikuo Hirayama, would go on to turn the devastation into art...

"There was a powerful flash right in front of me. I covered my ears. And there was a strong wind, and I squatted down and the wind went right over my head. And I then tried to escape through waterfalls of fire..."

Many of his friends died. Hirayama grew ill from radiation sickness and his white-blood-cell count plummeted, but eventually he recovered. He left Hiroshima, adopted Buddhism as a way of honoring the dead, and took up painting, practicing an ancient technique called Nihonga, in which colors are blended from ground-up mineral pigments, then attached to the canvas with glue.

Hirayama became famous as a painter of Buddhist images and of the Silk Road, the highway that brought Buddhism to Japan. His Silk Road paintings convey Hirayama's belief that the road, with its exchange of commerce and ideas, showed that cultures can interact constructively. The paintings epitomize a sense of hopefulness and cooperation, peace and tranquility, the antithesis to Hiroshima, 1945...

Two decades after the bombing, Hirayama finally returned to Hiroshima. He visited the city's Atomic Bomb Memorial Park, and found himself drawn by the hiss and flicker of a flame honoring the dead.

"I saw the color of the fire, which was orange. It reminded me of the day of the bombing, and I could not get rid of that color behind my eyelids," he says.

Hirayama immediately began sketching out what would become one of his most powerful works, a huge, six-paneled canvas called "The Holocaust of Hiroshima..."

(Takato Kageyama, who lost his parents and two sisters in the bombing, stands before "The Holocaust of Hiroshima." Photo: NPR)

Hirayama says that despite the sorrow and destruction portrayed in "The Holocaust of Hiroshima," the painting offers a message of hope.

"The Buddhist god is telling everybody to rise like a Phoenix, to stand up and live for all eternity," he explains. "I believe that art can overcome hardships. I believe that flowers can blossom from anguish and inhumanity. You can overcome these things and make something beautiful..."

"I started to create my artwork as a requiem for those who lost their lives in the war. The wish for peace is at the core of my work," says Hirayama.

Read Rand's entire article here.

— JD

Beyond History as Antagonism—"Silk Roads: Samarkand to Nara"

Some political scientists and writers—seeking to legitimate preemptive permanent war—have propagated an image of "clashing civilizations" as the dominant theme of history.  This perspective overlooks the significance peaceful trading, cooperation, intercultural merging in the ongoing co-creation of our shared history. Although territorial conflicts betweeen empires as well as more mundane forms of violence took place during this period, the Silk Roads exemplifes an elevated period of global civilization in which peaceful trading and collaborative exchanges predominated.

Kyoto Journal's latest issue, "Silk Roads: Samarkand to Nara," revisits this time period when the Silk Roads connected the myriad, interrelated cultures of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and all of Asia.

"10,000 Miles Away: Chang’an and Nara” introduces the issue by challenging British Poet Rudyard Kipling’s assumption that never the "East" and "West” shall meet:

Instead, the very opposite has been happening ever since humans moved out of Africa and into Eurasian crossroads. Groups did not just split off, but continued to meet again and again throughout history, re-merging their cultures every time around.

Contributor Eiji Hattori's essay, "Civilizations Never Clash. Ignorance Does Clash," the moral center of the issue, refutes the view of world history as antagonism, and eloquently sets forth an alternative paradigm of the history of collaborative civilization:

If we look at human history, we can see that “civilizations have consistently encountered one another, and have grown and developed through those encounters”. That is what “dialogue between civilizations” means. Dialogue, in fact, indicates cross-fertilization, not negotiation.

Hattori also challenges the idea that "civilization" was created by the "West."

The illusion that Western civilization is the one and only civilization has been shared not only by people of Europe and the United States, but also by non-Westerners until quite recently. Why? It is because textbooks written by colonial powers during the colonial period spread around the world. The singular view of “civilization” was fed to children through “education”.

Guest editor Leanne Ogasawara's Tang Dynasty Times, from which four contributions were sourced, is linked here; four articles are available online at the KJ site:

 "Of Bonds, 'the Word' and Trade: There are no straight lines through mountains" by Jeff Fuchs:

“There are no straight lines through the mountains.” This ‘truth’ rumbles out of Lobsang’s mouth, a mouth that seems as unyielding and direct as the words that pass through it. I have heard these words before from ancient traders who still remember a time when mule and camel caravans wound their way to and from the great market towns of Asia and the Middle East...

"Beauty and Power on China's Silk Road" by Sam Crane:

The tour guide opened the door and we stepped into darkness. It took a moment for us to adjust visually but slowly, slowly the interior of the small cave came into view.

In front of us stood a statue of Buddha, about three meters high, surrounded by swirling painted blues and reds and browns — flanked by two smaller statues of guardians. The light from the open doorway fell on the Buddha and suffused throughout the space...

Into Dasht-e Kavir: Notes From the Great Salt Desert.

Story and photos by Steven Tizzard:


In Iran it is the year 1388, a new year, the spring, the month of Farvardin. It is the celebration of Norouz, a Zoroastrian festival that has survived, despite being usurped in this land by Islam, its heir; despite being turned outlaw for a time in the most vigorous days of the Revolution. This celebration of the vernal equinox flourishes again, the most important holiday in ancient Persia and modern Iran...

 "A Minute and 100 Meters Down the Road" by David Maney:

(Copyright: David Maney)

Urumqi, Xinjiang, Sept. 3, 2009. The soldier outside the station had one hand on the barrel and the other on the butt of his shotgun. There were two military trucks by the bus stop and two soldiers in the back-right seats of every bus leaving Urumqi station.

Welcome to west China.

I arrived via long-haul train, 40 hours and just under 4,000km in a hard-seat, from Beijing, where rumours were circulating about the extent of the military presence, needle attacks, Uighur and Han street gangs, and the validity of the reports coming out of Xinjiang....

The issue includes an interview with composer Minoru Miki who revived Japan's traditional musical exchanges through his project, the "Orchestra Asia."

Miki explains his impetus:

The Japanese society of the eighth century was extremely internationalized and integrated with the rest of Asia. Foreigners comprised much of the skilled labor force and, like England in the 16th and 17th centuries, there was an active exchange of artists, musicians and statesmen with the mainland. It is one of my dreams to re-create an active musical exchange with the rest of Asia.

Miki, a timeless visionary, has an English-language page at his website.

For a further glimpse of the contents of the issue, visit Kyoto Journal's website.

How the Irish Saved Civilization, Spread St. Patrick's Day Parades (Occidental-friendly Matsuri) throughout Japan, & May Be Saving Civilization Again

(or at least putting some much-needed goodwill and fun into our shared World Civilization for one day a year)

The outward signs of any Japanese matsuri are the most puzzling enigmas to the stranger who sees them for the first time. They are many and varied; they are quite unlike anything in the way of holiday decoration ever seen in the Occident; they have each a meaning founded upon some belief or some tradition, --- a meaning known to every Japanese child; but that meaning is utterly impossible for any foreigner to guess.

- Lafcadio Hearn, 1894

A little less than a century after Hearn wrote these words, the first St. Patrick's Day parade in Tokyo in 1991 joined Japan's many matsuris, with decorations easily understandable to people all over the world. This year marks the 15th anniversary of the first Japanese St. Patrick's Day parade down Omote-Sando's broad, tree-lined boulevard in Tokyo's youth mecca, Harajuku. This year, six parades will be taking place throughout Japan, in Nagoya, Sendai, Kyoto, Ise, Yokohama, and Tokyo.

Thomas Cahill's 1995 book tells us how the Irish saved civilization during the European Middle Ages. However, it remains a mystery how and why Irish people from the far western end of the massive Eurasian landmass, leapfrogged two continents, to its far eastern end in Japan—to make Tokyo an epicenter of ever-increasing waves of St. Patrick's Day parades spreading throughout the archipelago. These Irish-Japanese parades seem to be generated by enthusiasm at the grassroots, thus are different from other adopted European and American holidays such as Valentine's Day and Christmas, popularized by department stores for commercial reasons.

There are many issues here that merit scrutiny and discussion by those interested in multiculturalism: What is it about St. Patrick's Day that gives it such strong appeal in Japan? The Guinness? The similarity to Japanese matsuri? The costumes? The music? The dancing? How does the Irish concept Craic compare with the Japanese term Tanoshii? Are they both the same and different? Why and how?

Does everyone, in fact, become Irish on St. Patrick's Day? That would make St.Patrick's Day's "Irishness" a metaculture, possibly saving contemporary civilization by serving as a global day of ethnic transcendence every year.

Why did Japan become the eastern center for St. Patrick's Day parades? Simply because of geography, because it's at the far eastern end of Eurasia and the Irish could go no further? Or are there more compelling reasons why? And, will these parades now begin spreading from Japan westward through Korea to China to India, in a reverse path from Buddhism? Will Celtic Christian motifs join the syncretic art in the Dunhuang caves in China? Who will be the pilgrims and saints spearheading this movement? Do I hear Enya singing "Sumiregusa" ("Wild Violet") in Japanese in the background?


The St. Patrick's Day parade, now a global cottage industry, has been multicultural from its inception. It was not indigenous to Ireland, but, instead, created in the Irish-American diasporan culture when the first parade took place in 1762 in New York. When Irish immigrants flooded the United States to escape the mid-1800's Irish Famine, they encountered discrimination by the dominant Anglo-Protestants. As St. Patrick's Day became a rallying symbol for Irish-American pride, parades began proliferating all over the United States.

The story of the Irish in Japan, of course, dates at least back to Lafcadio Hearn, a nineteenth-century global nomad, and an Anglo-Irish-Greek-American-Japanese hyphenate. About a century after the chronicler of "Old Japan" migrated to the archipelago, Irish engineers, business people, and teachers started arriving in larger numbers during Ireland's economic slump when Japan experienced its 1980's Go-Go decade.

Around one hundred young Irish teachers come to Japan on the JET program every year. Some Irish students simply come to Japan to study or visit. A sizeable proportion of these people have remained to permanently work for a Japanese company, often marrying Japanese spouses. When the Irish economy began taking off in the 1990's, IT and other business networks have developed between the two countries. Japanese companies have established offices and manufacturing plants in Ireland and Irish businesses have come to Japan. There are also 70 Irish pubs throughout Japan, from Kyushu to Hokkaido; the Japan Gaelic Athletic Association; and several Irish music and dance groups and schools.

Around nine hundred registered Irish residents live in Japan (compared to a little over seven hundred Japanese residents in Ireland). Japanese spouses, mixed children, Japanese aficionados of Irish culture, Irish-Americans, and Irish-Australians increase the population of the multi-ethnic Irish community in Japan.

One of my most pleasant memories of the Irish community in Tokyo is of an Irish-Indian-Japanese St. Patrick's Day party at the Irish ambassador's house in the early 1990's, where a Japanese virtuoso Celtic harpist played in the background.

The ambassador's wife was from India so they had an Irish-Punjabi fusion cuisine buffet – Irish soda bread served with curry dishes – with Guinness Stout and Bailey's Irish Creme for beverages. When I commented on how great the combination was, a young Irishman told me that India and Ireland actually have ancient connections and that the Irish and Indian languages are related through the Indo-European/Central Asian family. For example, the word for "brother" in Sanskrit is bhratar, and related to the Irish brathair.

And while there are differences between Ireland and Japan, they have more in common besides both being island outposts of Eurasia. In ancient Ireland, before the Christian conversion, the sun was also a powerful symbol. It's said that St. Patrick actually incorporated sun symbology with that of the cross, creating the Celtic cross. Their cultures share the veneration of water as a regenerative symbol in ritual cleansing and purification. There's a deep love of poetry in both countries. Seamus Heaney, the Irish literary Nobel laureate, is a personal friend of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, who visited him last year.

An Irish friend of mine, who is married to a Japanese woman, and lives in Japan permanently, told me he felt at home in Japan from the moment he arrived, especially when he saw the spirals and circles in the rock gardens of Kyoto. They reminded him of Celtic art.

Similarly, a Japanese friend of mine told me that traditional Irish music awakened something hauntingly powerful inside of him. I told him perhaps aspects of traditional Japanese culture—repressed in Japan during its rapid modernization during the Meiji (1868-1912) period when schools began teaching classical European music at the expense of traditional Japanese music; similarly to the Anglo-Saxon repression of Celtic culture—still lingered in the Japanese collective unconscious. Perhaps these yearnings for what had been lost began surfacing in him upon the recognition of a parallel of itself in the traditional Irish musical revivals.

Formerly suppressed indigenous and traditional cultures have not only resurfaced, but are also flourishing worldwide. In the African-American experience, ancient African rhythms survived severe cultural repression during slavery. One African-American scholar attributes this to persistent "cultural memory." In the 1990's, as a Japanese traditional musical revival began building steam in tandem with the Irish traditional musical explosion (and world music everywhere), I couldn't help but wonder if there was something very old and powerful at play.


Echoing Buddhist thought and the mysticism of other faith traditions, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who had his own connections with Japan, including writing a Noh play, At the Hawk's Well, had another more mystical theory—that we all resonate to archetypal symbols, no matter from which culture, because, ultimately, we are all made of one single energy—and that memories of this unity can be evoked by symbols:

The borders of our minds are ever shifting
And many minds can flow into one another...

And create or reveal a single mind, a single energy

But these are just a couple of possible hypotheses on the topic of the proliferation of Irish parades in Japan, a subject which deserves much more investigation, and, as a toast to this ongoing discussion, I join all those in Japan and everywhere wishing each other "Éirinn go Brách"or "Happy St.  Patrick's Day!"

- Jean Miyake Downey

(Originally posted at the Kyoto Journal website. Photos of St. Pat's Day parade in Tokyo 2006, courtesy of Kjeld Duits at iKjeld.com.)

Minoru Miki's ORA-J performs Hagoromo ( an angel of many cultures) in Tokyo

(Noh performer performing in Hagoroma. (Photo: sacred-texts.com (site has the full text of the play)

Composer Minoru Miki's Orchestra Asia, ORA-J, will be performing Hagoromo in Tokyo:

The 17th regular concert of ORA-J will be held on November 8 &10 in Tokyo and Chiba under my producing. I am planning to premiere a theatre piece Hagoromo which story is very famous in Japan and in 1995 it premiered as a music drama in Moscow as Japanese-Russian cooperation. This time I will use its 12 song melodies and ORA-J members including me will add instrumental sections for the drama with two singers.

This is an ancient story about a human who stole an angel's cloak, preventing the angel's return to heaven. This story probably goes back to Central Asian as variations of it exist in India, Persia, China, Japan, the Liu Chiu Islands and Sweden. The story of Hasan in The Arabian Nights is based on same theme.

According to Arthur Waley, the Noh version of Hagoromo was written by Seami, who begins by quoting a couplet from the Shih jen Yu Hsieh (Jadedust of the Poets), a Sung Dynasty poetry text popular in medieval Japan:

On a thousand leagues of lovely hill clouds suddenly close;
But by one tower the bright moon shines in a clear sky.

-JD