One of the things that happens when foreigners live for a country in a while is that they come across things that they don't understand. They then make a guess at interpreting what they see. Then, unless they're corrected, they continue to believe this guess and it eventually becomes received wisdom. When you've got a community of such foreigners, such as a mission field, the received wisdom can be passed down the generations. And all the time it can be completely and utterly wrong.
I remember when I first came to Japan. It was around the time of the O-Bon festival of the dead, when the spirits of the dead come back to visit. I noticed that a number of houses had bottles of water lined up outside them. Aha, must be so that the spirits can have a drink while they visit.
Now I live here, I noticed that the bottles are not just there for O-Bon, they're there all year round. I asked another missionary about it. "It's to ward off evil spirits," they said. Well, OK, something to do with spirits visiting, anyway.
Today I was talking with my language teacher about this, and asking him whether it was to do with welcoming spirits or warding them off. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed. "Well, it's something to do with warding them off..." he said.
Turns out it's nothing to do with religion at all. It's about cats. People don't want cats peeing in front of their houses, so they put out bottles full of water. The water reflects the light of the sun, which blinds the cats and scares them away.
And then he told me about another one which does mix religion and pragmatism. Occasionally in Kyoto you will see, stuck into the walls of a house, little Shinto torii gates, like this:
Torii act as the gateway between the sacred and the secular worlds. They symbolise "there is a god enshrined here". I have a mental image of missionaries wandering around Kyoto doing prayer ministry and casting out the evil spirits from these gates in the walls. I am absolutely sure this has happened.
But again this is nothing to do with religion. It's once again to do with peeing. Drunk people pee against walls. But even drunk people have reservations about peeing on something that appears to be sacred, even if actually it isn't.
Culture is a really complicated thing. For those of us who don't completely comprehend a culture, we can jump to some fantastic conclusions, especially where religion appears to be involved and we get all touchy about stuff. I bet we probably teach new Christians to avoid stuff that's completely innocuous, because some missionary fifty years ago got the wrong end of the stick and nobody ever checked it out. So whenever a missionary tells me something about a peculiar Japanese religious practice, I'm not going to trust them. I'm going to go and actually ask a Japanese about it. Odds are good it's actually something to do with peeing.
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