DEPAYS6 STACK002

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You’re always afraid of seeming to tell more than you know, so you’ll
refrain from any babble about hyoshi (the « integration of tempos »
-Kenji Tokitsu). But what your head isn’t sure it can put into words,
you’ve felt with your skin several times. When one speaks about
harmony with respect to Japan, people immediately think of the
famous social consensus, and the Right swoons, the Left goes into
convulsions. You think of something else, of the fuzzy network of
rites, signs, and offerings that everyone claims not to believe in, or
just a little, but that so often unseats the arrogance of pragmatism
and efficiency, and that so graciously fills the void remaining between
human enterprise and the vast abyss of nature. As though on the
horizon of every event, of every action, there were not a beyond
-that would be too metaphysical- but rather an in-between, which
might not be so far from Jankélévitch’s je-ne-sais-quoi. As though,
when the hymn to the machine has been heartily sung, and the social
screws locked tight (God knows they are), a space still remained to
be filled, a surplus value of the spirit. No one knows exactly what to
do with this in-between, this twilight zone, this nameless realm shared
between the eight hundred and eight gods who watch over the flock
of dreams; no one knows how to address it, but at least one can be
polite. Hence the politeness toward ancestors, hence the politeness
toward animals (those innumerable festivals of reconciliation with
the birds, when the Awa Odori dancers of Koenji call them politely
by their names, and with the fish, when the men of Morosaki south
of Nagoya beg them to let themselves be politely fished), hence,
in the heart of this society which is as pitiless as any, a respect for
others that can peacefully coexist with the rat-race. The materialistic