To a recent friend, born in UK, raised in New Zealand, escaped a difficult nurturing to adventure overseas for some eight years before teaching one year in Tokyo : money to begin University in Auckland at the age of twenty-five

Dear Stefan,

Thank you for your kind and descriptive letter. It does one's heart good to meet an adventurous, intelligent soul from out of the blue as fate occasionally allows. In a way I felt talking to a son or kid-brother, and I'm happy my advice has proved useful.

Your educational plan appears logical and, significantly, maturely felt; sure to be a more beneficial and wise use of strengths forged from life experiences than desires merely forged from parental urging and accounting. Having overcome the iniquities of your particular nurturing and experiencing the ignorant gaps between ideologies and reality, now learning theories and academic interpretations will demand an education beyond bachelor and master scrolls. Your maturity affords allowance at deeper levels, for now you will study not as a mere scribe but as a discoverer. I think you will not be content to just listen and write but will explore into your subjects searching for the substance.

Sometimes a person supposedly late in accommodating himself to the societal processes or institutions, education or whatever, does so because younger he missed something akin to the social graces : society did not fully process him into its stream. Not provided the leisurely pace to move from one comfortable place to another, he had to struggle first with the very definition of that place, had to secure it by, for and of himself. His track may wander afield, maybe overseas, maybe taking inconsequential jobs, or questioning rules or objecting to norms, assuming defenses iconoclastic, offending the status quo. But later, if wisely adapting these experiences to reality, he socializes his intelligence and ends by defining his place more acutely than most, likely finding himself superior to his peers in nature's graces : those instincts and intuitions adding to a wisdom beginning where social graces end. More easily perceiving what Milan Kundera noted as the 'truth behind', his balance has become widely rooted, more flexible, his use of intelligence far less programmed by conventions shadowed in unquestioned treatises, untested imaginations and unreliable myths.

I must claim deeply sympathetic feelings for the express pleasure you found in leaving Japan's fantasies for friendly conversations on your villa's veranda surrounded by the bush, horses, sand, sea and sunsets. Those are nature's lasting pleasures, are far more profound than any dream nurtured by the imagery of many an 'advanced' society, whether imagery of individual security or success or economic power; even than that mystically induced, lyrical high romanticists dress in the misnomer, 'falling in love'. The former pleasures provide honest experiences against which to measure the diverse obsessions of contemporary society; against which our thinking well, rather than the present unhealthy habit of thinking too much, clarifies worthy relationships, and knowledge. And security. And, hopefully along the way, real love.

In your letter you also said that your recent year in Japan now feels like a remote dream. That is an interesting addition coming from someone who studied Japanese language and culture, lived in a Japanese family for a year's high school exchange program and speaks the language well. Remember our Tokyo conversation about male/female relationships, when we agreed that the scene here is shallow and boring? Fantasies and dreams are often related, specially in the realm of value structures, which nuances all the way into the subject of mortality. A year like a dream, plus feeling a release from a fantasy land, plus the boredom you expressed about the year's work and the Tokyo relationship. I think maybe they all add up and conclude in mortality, or, rather, that none of your experiences here moved you a step towards immortality. And certainly not as the veranda can.

Many fantasies are related to forgotten dreams related to immortality, somewhere from one end of that continuum to the other. Whether on the introverted, generally benign side Freud and Jung played with or the extroverted malevolent side played with by people attached to a form of Superiority Complex, such as stories played out by hundreds of savage conquistadores - whether themes on geography, gold, god, power, adventure, king, boredom, ideals or any number of other expressed motivations - by men from Alexander to Jesus, from de Gama, Cortes and Pizarro to Stalin, from Hirohito and Hitler to Westmoreland. Down to the local seducer floating around Roppongi. Immortality calls, quietly, internally; its external manifestations must be watched with a suspicious eye, judged by a wary mind.

Your bad aftertaste from the hectic superficialities experienced running around Tokyo maybe goes back to an understanding of what Japan had been, back to that value system so radically changed as a result of the Meiji Reformation, back to older, honorable perspectives on immortality. As we agreed at dinner, the quality of the individual Japanese kokoro may often rest a step, or several, above that of other nationals. Their people's modern problems began when Edo masters misinterpreted projections of power and ideology upon being forced to open to the West. The Meiji reformers copied too perfectly the ethos of avaricious superiority used to colonialize imperialist Christian 'civilization' everywhere. In ignorance of religious history and cultural anthropology, this pragmatic yet fearful Japanese elite misinterpreted certain evils inherent to Abraham's tribes as being universally valid symbols of success. The Satsuma clan samurai from Kyushu - headed by Saigo Takamori, heroically combining Sir Launcelot's legendary valor and La Rochefoucaud's learnedly well-jaded morals - being more idealistic and less insecure, adamantly disagreed and fought archaic battles against imported firepower, only to lose : he and some 400 of his last samurai freely choosing suicide, either by ritual seppuku or charges with katana (the most efficiently beautiful swords ever made) into fusillades on a Kagoshima mountainside. They preferred annihilation than accept Westernizing of Japan's mores and commercialization of their unique code for honorable life.

The winners - a possible misnomer in hindsight? - proceeded to write new catch-up myths for all those good hearts to be misused in the prodigious industrial slavery that followed. This studying and copying of Western economic and military advances, this 'developed' society whose efficiency awed foreign observers, was so amazingly complete that within less than thirty-five years Japan was able and willing to go to war, in full Western industrial regalia, against two vast, old Empires, China and Russia. Her first foreign wars since minor expeditions against Chinese outposts on the Korean peninsula in 1592 and 1596 (her only other foreign confrontation since defending against Mongol invasion attempts in the 13th century)... Japan decisively beat both China and Russia.

Significantly, until the Sino-Japanese war of 1894 Japan had total peace with foreigners for nearly four hundred years by the simple stratagem of remaining content in her lot, in a territory sized between UK and California, an enviable record matched in Europe only by the 500 plus years of peace brought to Spain by the infidel Moors in 711. In so well duplicating Western strategies, after winning the second of these wars in 1905 against Russia, Japan was openly praised by several Western powers for her surprising successes. Until forced to 'modernize' (a Western description) by Admiral Perry's gunboat demands in 1853 - supported subsequently by cowardly English naval attacks replicating their Opium War terrorist tactics bombarding civilian cities - Japan had a unique national history of non-aggression and non-interference with foreign countries for nearly 2,000 years : Highly Moral if compared to the worldwide campaigns of conquest, colonialism and imperialism of non-white peoples by the West continuously from 1492 through post-World War II; Outstandingly Benign if compared to the well over 100,000,000 people killed just in Christian wars since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870; Extraordinarily Contented if compared with the 212 occasions the United States has sent its armed forces against non-European nations since its founding. Previously Japan had been spiritually one with China and India, following fundamental policies disdaining involvement with foreigners - "leave me alone, I'll leave you alone".

In their flight from this time-tested national ethos into Western moral paradigms condoning violence in expansion of interests, Meiji era leaders had hastily sought a balancing of their actual material inferiority with their actual spiritual superiority. Without time for much reflection - so as to avoid being treated as China, Indochina, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, et. al., had been by the West - Meiji leaders carelessly adapted old Eastern values in playing Western power games. In racing with make-up time velocity they turned obsequious clan followers into Neo-colonialist Western clones, fatally programmed to help grab Japan's share of whatever parts of undeveloped East Asia the White-man had left assailable. They quickly learned, though, that Western racism and economic hegemony objected to Japan's application of her newly adopted strategies any further than the boundaries of her last, 1905, victory. Coincidentally, she had adapted Sun Tzu's The Art of War to the gentlemanly rules of European diplomacy : and by 1922 had the largest, most effective spy apparatus functioning in the world.

Then Japan developed a specific response to this limiting of her rights and equity in the power-elite Club (which she presumed she had meritoriously joined by so astutely copying the Western way of applying violence in foreign affairs) : she turned the 400 year history of Western/Christian exploitation and debasement of Asian races into a national threat by foreign devils. Japan had learned this lesson in imagery observing Western theologians and politicians using imagery to run campaigns against sundry perceived evils, either created whole or exaggerated, in order to lend contrast to their own claims of righteousness.

Thusly Japan lent righteousness to its complaints of unequal treatment by copying another Western precedent : having its plutocrats preach racist dogma, foreign evils threatening borders, Japan adjusted the West's 'Fear of the Lord' tactic for producing abject obeisance into tactics for catalyzing her uneducated feudal masses into a spiritual fervor. But instead of the threat of god's avenging sword sweeping from heaven condemning one to hell, or an inquisition torture, Japan used the more terrestrial, historical threat of Western devils sending Asians into an early grave with gun powder or economic slavery.

Peasants left the countryside to work feverishly in factories, to stand taller, more 'modern', gouging not on material reward for 70-80 hour weeks but on stories of how they would serve their ancestors and their progeny by correcting White injustices against fellow Asians, and by so doing prevent Japan from being treated as their degraded old mentor, China, had been for over a hundred years. The old Samurai proceeded to retire, or to style themselves either on the externally aggressive Western military or the new, free-reigning, formerly despised commercial class, in the process a few becoming as enormously wealthy as the fattest Robber-Barons. The vast majority of the population served the cause only slightly more slavishly than their counterpart Western workers served the likes of Carnegie, Gould, Rockefeller and Mellon. Under this tyrannical capitalism, strongly warned against by Adam Smith, Japanese workers were as economically powerless as their Western counterparts. And just as the latter workers were politically marginalized by a State Capitalism controlled by the Boss Tweeds and the Robber-Barons, the Japanese workers were emasculated under a Bismarck styled constitution.

Thusly it is that uneducated peoples are seduced with ancient and new mixed metaphors controlling first their values, then their minds, then their bodies. Whether by way of Eastern goddesses conceiving Emperors or Patriarchs fertilizing apples into misogyny or Abraham conceiving Covenants with Yahweh or fundamentalists conceiving America as God's earthly Paradise, each myth was used by an elite to produce a 'Chosen People' syndrome, a righteousness, expressly targeted to condition an uneducated mass into unconditionally following infallible leaders pursuing blessed causes.

Potent juices these godly metaphors, hyped mythology distilled into Superiority Complexes : regardless it begins with Amaterasu-no-kami seduced from her cave by music and dancing, or Eve seduced from her lush garden by a snake, or Mary seduced in the desert by a ghost, or Lady Liberty seduced from Paradise to save the world from the imagined enemies of Jesus and Jefferson. If people better understood the seductions of Lady Macbeth and friends, they would have an easier time placing their own myths and imagery into healthier contexts. For example, I have no doubt, the good heart hidden in America would have understood their imagery seduction into Indochina aggressions; there would be no Vietnam Syndrome requiring mythical erasure by macho economic violence, no Military Industrial Complex's fabricated theater of the absurd called the Gulf War.

So, too, were the uneducated innocent of Japan doped-up on their particular form of cultural hegemony until ripe, until national feelings of frustration with the West and superiority over the East collided... to transform Hirohito's children from simple ancestor and nature spiritualists, harmful to no one than themselves, into aggrandized effigies of Westernized aggravation off to exploit sleepily happy, supposedly inferior tribes. Doing so, they replaced the hated Europeans; awakening Asians to the rights of man in an age of reason.

But Hirohito and his Council of Peers had not the time to study their enemy well enough, had not truly understood the historical racism bubbling under Western economic and military power, had not understood Biblical admonitions to the children of Abraham to conquer all pagan tribes, to control all that their god had created, whether human or nature. By the time the Japanese elite realized the vastly evil extent of the Western complex of superiority towards every non-white, non-Christian earth-dweller, it was too late to turn back from their war path, too late to mitigate the developing national neurosis, too late for historical make-up.

They only had sufficient time to soften the national schizophrenia by rewriting history, fabricating a national amnesia on the detailed role their demi-god Hirohito had played in war preparation. The purpose was to save the Emperor System then leading Japan into certain defeat, preserving a historical mythology, as best possible, upon which to rebuild the country. This new mythology, common sense might conclude, ended the physical crisis with the West; but it also began deep soulful reflection on the role of Western values in Japan's spiritual revolution which continues unresolved today.

The institutional hangovers from defeat were insufferable but, as America proceeded to reinvent Japan as its subservient Eastern economic bulwark, Japan proceeded to reinvent its 'busy' image as national syndrome, covering lost face. Soon, this time within only 25 years, a century after Meiji first deduced new behavior patterns from foreign cultural myths, American protection and style had emphatically replaced Eastern substance. Japan now better understood old Western enemies, while uneasy Eastern neighbors recognized a new, plagiarized, superiority.

Thanks to a transfusion of expertise in political economics, McArthur, covertly advised and financed by the newly-created CIA - insidiously more powerful than he, busily installing military-industrial bastions hyping the Cold War - had, by 1952, helped organize an effective single-party political system. Expressly peopled by Hirohito's rightist and fascist 1930's Strike South cabal, it was destined to control Japan for the next half century. The creation of this Japanese Oligarchy was America's first successful post-war export of a prototype false democracy.

So it was that, effectively between the late 1870s and the early 1950s, the Japanese reality had been transmogrified from a feudal agricultural people controlled by spirits of nature and clan loyalty to an industrial proletariat controlled by a wholly copied mythology and its adjusted, orientalized, imagery. Yet the stimuli for these radical changes were totally foreign, neither native to Japan's cultural roots nor natural to her spiritual codes : being, firstly, copied by the Meiji elite under the military/political pressure of imminent invasion and, secondly, forcibly injected by Perry's conquering grandsons into a traumatized, atomically wounded patient. But, in effect, Japan, so limited in its material resources and surrounded by more powerful Empires, had accepted these torturous, internally contested changes in vain hope of beating the West at its own game, by adapting Western tactics to prevent being emasculated as had been the rest of Asia. In this most crucial, logical fear of subservience, she had received many soul-rendering lessons brought home by her Samurai students traipsing around Europe, the Americas and Asia during the pivotal learning period from the late 1850s to the late 1880s.

Besides the major confrontations with China and India, Japan's excellent students had also been well aware that Western 'culture' had much experience forcing the same choice, exploitation or destruction, on numerous other tribes. Within its colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the economic slavery or genocide offered by most European powers was acknowledged through condescending snickers, even while historically slurred. As in the Americas, where the Natives' rebuttal of slavery and baptism resulted in, initially, either genocide or physical oblivion through military aggression, then spiritual degradation by virtual imprisonment in patrolled and unnaturally sterile reservations; as in Africa, where the Blacks were kidnapped into a culture of inhumanity so insufferable they accepted both slavery and baptism to save their bodies just long enough for their minds to negotiate Heavenly equality from the Christian god. Their main argument of appeal being the guarantee of Divine Justice written in the 'Black Book' installed in them by their oppressors.

Japan's choices, finally, were not much better than these other tribes, the differences being distance, feudal discipline and the peoples' fatalistic readiness to die in large numbers to force a better deal with the barbarian Western powers. They might have been able to achieve such compromise, in fact, if it was not for two developments : most significantly, instead of helping fellow Asians throw-off their Colonial chains, as they had promised, Japan had become so hypnotized by Western success stories that she arrogantly tightened the chains in the strong rays of Amaterasu's godly rising son, Hirohito; and, secondly, their technological and psychological catch-up was too slow to anticipate America's atomic ingenuity and its superiority targeted ruthlessness.

Such is the stuff of dogma and ideology fermenting into pallid fantasies and shaky dreams, whether the god-promotion starts in an off-Broadway garden-snake play, an off-Ginza Son festival, in Kremlin's spawning a Lenin, or in a Munich beer hall intoxicating Wagnerian salutes.

So you see, Stefan, your memories of time in Japan passing as though a dream are probably not entirely dissimilar to the dreams of those Japanese hearts of which we spoke, or the fantasies of other good hearts wishing to step off a merry-go-round turning to one rhythm and playing another tune. Analogous to America's disharmony marching up one scale of democratic ideals and down another of greedy deeds, your Japan now feels as a dream because its true heart is covered over with much falsely created imagery. Luckily your veranda acts as an effective filter for the waves of gloss and glitter, the gibberish of inane verbiage, embellishing such fantasies. In stepping back, centering in nature, your mind protects by casting a haze over memories of the worthless.

For such protection, many Japanese isolate themselves into work, power trips and copying Western ethics at the high-end, or family, paper cartoons and boredom at the lower-end. Americans at the high-end behind work, security devices, therapy and fraud, at the low-end into family and filmed cartoons, apathy and/or anti-social behavior. As epitomized in politics, many American institutions run highly sophisticated propaganda programs targeting well-researched demographic groups. At a minimum they are designed to manage decision making, or nuanced to distort reality, at worst behavior modification conditioning to control opinions and reactions : words and images portray meanings contrary to the values which they supposedly represent.

These questions of imagery vs. reality, distinguishable only when one perceives the merry-go-round from a calm center, are also being asked by citizens in other countries slowly awakening from the social 'graces' under which their values, and hopes, were often nurtured. As in Japan, a graceful mix of ignorance, legends and mythical history are used to create insecurity in people so false images can be fed them smoothly, usually offering some form of salvation. Whether the temporal or spiritual elite are partially ignorant themselves, being used that is, or, as usual, in connivance for wealth and power, the false creations they offer can only be understood as such by an individual stopping long enough to look carefully behind the imagery projected on the public screen. You wisely stepped off the merry-go-round into a natural field of greater consciousness. Keep to it. Simply use the university as an extension of your far-seeing veranda.

As you can gather, I believe real wisdom results from sensing nature's graces from honest verandas and, therefore, am much appreciative of your kind offer of hospitality. Your specific veranda is a guide around narrow institutional fantasies, it defines personal satisfaction far clearer than media fogs, it doesn't cloud superficiality in induced need. It occurs that, with much writing and conversation hanging loose somewhere between script factory correctness and cliché‚ get-well couches, effective perceptions, after TV guides and advertising, of course, come not from affectations on elite-managed publicity balconies but from securely iconoclastic creatures kicking-back at programmed conformity from cartoon verandas. Sadly, though, this truth trickles down even slower than Reagan's Voodoo economics

Real truth is always awaiting, from a center of calmness it hangs its ornaments around nature stopped in its track by a sensitive observer, and whatever form of nature one gets close to, animal vegetable or mineral, it is a position from which developing a Superiority Complex makes no sense whatsoever. Superiority used selfishly serves to unbalance the fragile human inclination towards the 'good', used for power it unleashes an evil inhumane and, eventually, self- destructive.

That's how that imaginative little iconoclast, Calvin, and his devil's advocate of a tiger, approach the search for truth, simply debunking the misuse of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes on subjects from absolutism and conformism to rationalism and xenophobia; or Charlie Brown playing with the legacies of Viennese shrinks; or Doonesbury allegorizing Government by Richelieu and Corporations by Fagan. From Vietnam puppets to Gulf War technocrats, the real characters are those who disregard the welfare of people as they murderously Kissengerize personal fantasies adapting to Machievelli, von Clausewitz, Adam Smith, Nietzsche or/and Freud.

So, too, you and dialectic-minded tigers laughing and arguing honestly from a veranda, up to a podium, can imaginatively debunk the mushy effigies spread by a Western 'culture' now dominated by America and her lap-dog, England... a culture of godly-sanctioned greed effectively taking root in countries as diverse as wealthy Japan and as narrowly deprived as the hodgepodge of Soviets. Stefan, maybe the ephemeral, dream-like memories you filtered out from Japan were sad intuitions of the same disquiet felt by those losing Kyushu samurai; or those acted on later by Admiral Yamamoto, Kawabata, even Mishima, all in making decisions to get off the merry-go-round in a clean-cut, chosen way. You have now left off adventuring to step from a veranda into University - a clean trip, that. More fun, too.

When one watches for propaganda carefully - lessons found in Noam Chomsky's incisive observations on the Media - it is clear that much of the public still sleeps through the overwhelming greed founding the strategic, racially biased, Superiority Complexes practiced by their leaders. Still dominant is Western economic policy founded around Herbert Spencer's promotion of the survival of the fittest rich people, and selfishly selective applications of Adam Smith which ignore his fine principles on equity; still accepted - equally today by the American plutocrats as by 19th century English oligarchs - are social policies winking at Malthus' espousing of Crime, Disease, War, and Vice as the four natural checks limiting the poor (causing controversy, he added a fifth control : Christian Moral Restraint). Still offered are flirtations with fear, warning of godless empires or liberal ideas menacing greater productivity and enhanced exploitation of resources. Demanding defeat by laissez-faire capitalism and laser-beam democracy, these fears of lost riches only serve the top 5-10 percent wealthy.

Victories, these? Looking carefully, the historical 'victories' Western righteousness has won over many a 'banana' regime, specially in Latin America and Asia, were usually gained and celebrated by drinking the enemy under a table of corruption, side-showed by bawdy consumer displays paid for with mystical dollars, using gunpowder pyrotechnics as the forced stupor of last resort. This designer strategy of exporting Tammany Hall style capitalism is an unheralded Anglo-American success story, with tyrants and dictators playing the role of Robber-Baron, and the profits remaining off-shore. With a certain mystical justice, these criminal methods of exporting corruption to asset-strip weaker peoples have been returning home now for a generation or so, to roost with a revengeful, pro-life fecundity. In the USA from Latinos and Asians, in UK from the variously colored.

The description of your home, friends and activities leaves me both nostalgic and envious. For two years in the mid-sixties I held over 1,000 acres of mortgaged mountains, well treed, descending into a clean creek dissecting the hills between the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains of New York. A valley named after the Mohawk tribe. With two quarter-horses and a standard bred, a German shepherd and a new doe, four children and a woman... I patrolled my domain. Being a flag-displaying, god-eating citizen also meant maintaining various arms to do violence against any animals noting my occupation of their homeland, or recently released felons revengefully following from N.Y.C. Fortunately, as I was still maturing the weapons remained mostly locked, me paying more attention to riding into the valley after a morning of construction, walking the horse through a swim and drink in Schoharie Creek, shivering in spring-fed water so to then sensuously lie naked on black slate hot from the noon sun, getting cold again, then another hot slate - a fantasy Swede moving between steam and stream - finally resting motionless between warm sun and slate waiting for the birds, squirrels, woodchucks, beavers and deer to emerge into my stillness, as wont to do.

Your wisely studying and seeking to understand Maori culture and people, close in their nature, reminds me of these experiences : of the paths through trees and streams used by numerous tribes of the Algonquin and Iroquois Nations, now invisible, who lived and passed through the Mohawk Valley not long over one hundred years earlier... constantly wondering how to stop the Europeans from fully destroying the harmonies between nature and their 'Family of Nations'.

Most tribal names translated in variations of "The Real People", "True People" or simply ''The People". That oft-repeated word summed most Native American social foundations, a Socialism that cared for all tribal members equally. Few Americans know that Benjamin Franklin found the structure of the Iroquois Confederacy so democratic and just that sundry elements were used in framing the US Constitution. A matriarchy, it was likely the first and the most equitable democracy to yet exist in the Western Hemisphere. Many possessions were communal, all surrounding nature was used with respect, having no owner; but that which was private passed down mother to daughter, and she divorced simply by placing an irresponsible mate's personal belongings outside the door, from which he was thereafter prohibited.

A council of senior matriarchs elected, fired, punished, even condemned, the chiefs managing tribal affairs (e.g., the War Chief); men were protectors, warriors and hunters, expected to act according to strict codes of honor the violation of which was decided through council consensus. Witnesses spoke for and against the accused, a system America tries duplicating with degrees of iniquity Natives would not have tolerated. Their codes placed the truth above all else, social justice and individual rights following, values America has reversed dramatically as money, fame, lawyers and legislators incestuously reproduce conflict. Evidenced in gratuitous violence and neurotic sexuality, individualism is king, enabling Oligarchs to degrade community cohesiveness by breaking America into controllable factions of self-interest.

The Native tribes cared for the harmony of their village society so much that punishment for irresponsibility, breaking verbal tribal laws, was not imprisonment in society but complete exclusion from society : being ostracized from both the tribe and the Nation to which the tribe belonged, for a period commensurate with the offense, from weeks to life. Not entirely dissimilar to traditional Japanese mothers punishing children not by home restriction but by various exclusions from home life. The home being joyous and secure, restriction to it is no punishment. The American home often becomes a scene of distractions, to be escaped from. Themes dominated by personal salvation and economic success make family values mere sideshows for lives echoing individualism. The result, ironically, can be personal insecurity; escape from, not into, family and community cohesion.

To the woodland Natives of the Northeast, their long houses and villages meant friendship, trust and security shared with the Nation and extending into the natural world surrounding them. Colonial children, and adults, taken captive were permitted freedoms proportionate to their degree of cooperative behavior as 'guests', to the point of ending in full liberty to stay or leave the village. Of those captives who returned to Colonial society, a number, specially among children, later came back to live with their Native families, temporarily or permanently. But when Colonists attempted to duplicate this custom with their Native captives, there are no records recounting any Natives who voluntarily chose to stay in Colonial families once they were allowed, or old enough, to visit their Native village (f. Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Labaree, Leonard, 1961).

The word 'people' also referred to their religious sense, to their being only one of the 'people' created by the Great Spirit, an undefined pantheistic spirit whose altars were found equally in each Native as in each river, tree, rock, earth and animal. Members not only escaped mundane tribal responsibilities and daily life on those occasions of ritual and ceremony but they also stepped back individually, escaping periodically into the rhythms of the forests to communicate with those other creations of the Great Spirit dwelling therein. They stayed listening, talking and dreaming with them. Their fantasies became the imagery and dreams learned from understanding the substance which exists in each creation of the Great Spirit. They returned perceiving the tribe and themselves with clearer, more balanced visions than when they had left their earth place by the fire.

The three dominant characteristics of White behavior which wise leaders of the Native and Japanese tribes could not interpret clearly, viewed through their own history and codes - though they watched and told many stories during four-hundred years of fitful contacts - were : a) the lying and breaking of oaths, b) the totally unnecessary murder of innocents in both peace and war, and c) the attempts at Christianizing using the 'Black Book', the many principles in which the Whites usually dishonored in dealings with the Natives and often with their fellow Europeans. Many stories told of the great hypocrisy of men preaching moral beliefs which they constantly violated, and for which they were just as constantly forgiven by their God's many shadows.

The 18th century Japanese paths were not spiritually that different from these tribal paths of the Six Nations around my Mohawk valley, and that is why neither of these distinct and distant peoples truly understood where the European found his consciousness, where his head came from so to speak. What spirits of our world did the White man listened to or hear? The Japanese and the Native never truly came to understand that but, then again, maybe neither did the White man sincerely portray or understand himself as he attempted to force the Indian tribes, later the Yamato tribe, to listen to and obey the strictures codified in his ever changing statute law books and his flexibly interpreted 'Black Book' of morals. The European Christians were so confused with rhetorical beliefs that they often could never remember, or expressly forgot, what they had said while interpreting truth ad hoc. The Natives finally had to conclude that European tongues were forked in two directions according to their then purpose in speaking.

While sensitive to avoiding a 'Noble Savage' simplification of any Natives, American or Oriental, as the Romanticists were wont to do, there is no doubt in my mind of the wisdom in much of Rousseau's views comparing Natives, Nature and 'Civilization'. From many other studies, there are abundant documentary proofs that the 'savagery' of Native Americans was miniscule in quantity and honorable in quality when compared with the violence, lies and fraud perpetrated by the Christian Colonists.

Historically shown, various Christian tribes have committed, just since 1492, an accumulation of violence and plunder (not counting other Ten Commandment damnation to Hell) which incomparably exceeds all bounds of that committed by any other religion, groups of religions, tribe or group of tribes, in the history of the world. Even the savage warrior Celts and Mongols had codes of honor more seriously adhered to than the Western tribes did their pouted Christian biblical codes. Significantly, the former two 'heathen' tribes were far more honest in avoiding the hypocrisy of preaching theology, and proselytizing, while conquering. If there were competitions in hypocrisy, Christian history would undoubtedly hold most of the top prizes.

Regarding your expressed interest in Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology, try tying some of the above observations into Western history through Noam Chomsky's Year 501, The Conquest Continues, 1993, South End Press, Boston (see the bibliography, plus much of everything else he writes outside his teaching specialty, semiotics). Alexis de Toucqueville's Democracy in America and most of John Stuart Mill are also well worthwhile. Adam Smith if you want to see how some of his finest principles are still astutely ignored by our religious, political and business elite. In fact, if you want to glue your studies together with semantics and human exploitation, capitalism and religion, politics and economics, and bits of anthropology - in all of which you have an interest - various themes come together in the writings of the one American icon of integrity of whom I am aware, the above noted Chomsky of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I respect him as an intellectual, and practical, hero, perhaps one of the rare few America has produced for many years: an honestly courageous man among the many hypocrites, cowards and self-servers who pollute American institutions. Some theme on the media, definitions and distortions, propaganda as imagery, histrionics as history, etc., would be a first-class thesis exploration, an invigorated enlightenment in the evil hypocrisies resulting from beliefs based on bad mythology.

If, as you said, I was helpful in advising you about your educational plans, let me take advantage of that generous comment to offer the following as you begin your studies : try to be incisive in seeking the substance; one way by being iconoclastic, another by 'looking behind' everything for real truth; another by realizing 'reality' does not necessarily reflect truth, often just an interpretation colored by ego or false habits or hidden agenda; sometimes mundane laziness, incompetence or ignorance. Not infrequently, reality seems the result more of the consequence of that worst failure of our leaders, moral cowardice.

From these external pitfalls, we should be aware of those of an internal nature. While monotheistic cultures base much of their nurtured beliefs on omnipotent, omniscient and non-empirical sources, ordered via a heavenly divine - a mythology often used to rationalize bloody superiority complexes - most other cultures keep their mythologies confined within legendary human contexts, interpreting experience as lessons for leading a 'good' life on earth. In distinguishing these two fundamental teaching fonts we can identify ancient truths common to East and West. Two of the simplest and truest are : "Know thyself !", and "To thine own self be true!". Theologies often cause violence, these are profound discoveries opening oneself to love all life.

Acute self-knowledge teaches our most critical faculty - Discrimination, the final arbiter of Aesthetics, itself the simplest, purest definition of pleasure. Pleasure being as wide or narrow as your enlightenment entitles, and the pursuit recommended by 19th century Utilitarians as the most democratic of social objectives. In education, discrimination should determine what we need to know and what we want to know. There is so much useless, in fact debilitating, stimuli to sense in modern life that developing a highly discriminatory ability should be the prime goal of a truly educated person. From incisive discrimination the intellect moves to achieve wisdom, the senses an aesthetic taste and the spirit a calmness. Learning to discriminate is as important to life as smiling, laughing and being happy, those most fundamental instincts into living peacefully with yourself and your neighbor. Or as a friend recently quoted Karl Jaspers : "Fundamental knowledge is not a knowing of something but is one with the reality of the knower". I imagine Jaspers sitting on a veranda with a perspective like an old funnel, a deep spirit seeing mankind through a wide-angle lens.

Important human truths are actually universal, forever present, simply waiting to be rediscovered, like a beautiful line of poetry suddenly scribbled down, or an unforgettably fine prose phrase... like true love courage and honesty, always there, part of man... sadly, though, their descriptions and appearances too often forgotten. Read richly, question input, demand your kokoro discover, for then your intuition will answer along instinctive lines, fermenting others' theories through your experiences, old and new.... there's the spice of learning : correctly perceiving the true force behind human words and actions. One begins by feeling it inside.

Finally, with others of integrity, hook-up with a heartfelt group as your educational path narrows your ability to discriminate, otherwise truth is perhaps a too lonely pursuit for we feeble beings. If you can find such a vocation, honest collegiality balances weaknesses and strengths, helping to avoid the compromises most lonely for the modern warrior.

Regarding your sweet Tokyo students, I must apologize for getting rid of most, e.g. : proving unable to teach in cafes, more private venues were requested; trains and bus was too much for a one hour lesson with Dr. Tsuji (as nice as he is); several others were too boring or inconvenient so I increased their fees substantially, chasing them away; the ANA woman failed in a bid for NW/KLM so quit her job for Europe. BUT, Dr. Tobata is left and we enjoy each other's thoughts twice a month for two hours. Too much of an old dog, I guess, but I should have been realistic enough to remember that teaching English in Japan is beyond me. Thanks for your confidence anyway and rest assured we separated politely, your students probably relieved to get rid of a demanding pedagogue. If you know someone who can use the lesson books, have them call me, otherwise I'll place them somewhere for hopeful discovery by the needy.

As to our other discussions on women, love, desire, etc. Mikiko is leaving her work and intends adventuring overseas. Fortunately she understands wisdom now timely indicates doing her 'own thing', for a while free of my strong, iconoclastic influence. Along the lines we spoke of about women before you left, it is most important she find something else to love that becomes more significant in her life than I. In doing so she will, naturally, come to know and love herself at a higher level... the foregoing being two ingredients crucial to all healthy love, regardless the subject-object nature. Thoughts from which religions and men with Superiority Complexes cringe.

I am happy for her developing path, not least it allowing me a much needed fast from sensual women. We'll probably meet again, somewhere, we imagine. She has good art talent, perhaps studying overseas her nature, German Romantic, will broaden to discover a mental state more valuable than 'couplehood'. Then her intelligence will be prime, the feudalistic and oppressively misogynist 'Christmas Cake' culture of Japan completely out of her system. A new path will brighten, maybe ensuring European carnivores converging on her as an exotic prize : leaving her mentor with wonderful memories and sad loss, while happy for her. Well, if so, that's karma, and perhaps I need certain sensory deprivations to develop a deeper consciousness... a fasting from sensual, maybe even sensuous, pleasures to better feel the Universal consciousness. This appeals to me... but, do you think the highly conscious drink red wine with bread rubbed in garlic and olive oil while cavorting? More to the point, can a highly conscious zeitgeist really be satisfying without the taste of a Cuban cigar, a French Armangnac and a Strong woman?

I am sorry we are rather far distant, but I believe our friendship connection will remain... too much travelling, breaking contacts over time, all part of my Vietnam karma, and the bitter side of adventuring. Anyway, let's keep open the communication..., who knows the paths?

Finally, two hints, on learning well :

 - - - Dr. Usa (a Morita psychotherapist) gave five rules on how to effectively use conversation: Listen intently, Digest the words, Feel the intent of the speaker, Pause, and, Answer. I believe this applies to all senses, including the most powerful sixth sense, intuition; including that non-human dialogue American Natives had in forests. Recently there was a 74 year-old retiree asked to return to maintain antiquated steam locomotives as new engineers failed to keep them running smoothly. Arriving just as a locomotive came off a run, he first slowly walked around it merely looking, then went over and under the machine palming joints, poking spaces, touching push-pulling shaking parts, watching listening movements, even smelling places. He was asked, "What did you do"? His answer, as his walk, was laconic, "The most important part of my job is to develop an intuitive feel for the engines." My mind jumped back to Vietnam, comparing this sentient train man blessing engine life with priests blessing armaments off to destroy and kill with Jesus' Cross and holy water.

 - - - Samuel Beckett verbalized a train man's deeds, not theologian's creeds, when asked advice on a writers' responsibility: "Drill holes in words until what is behind, something or nothing, seeps out". Creeds are easier than deeds, but was it not through deeds that Black, Student and Women demonstrators of the 1960-70s protested Racism, War and Misogyny?

Not writing fiction in Tokyo, funds depleted (helped by my three month SE Asian escape last year), needing work - physical and sweet fiction's sweat... means Etsushi and I will leave by Spring, probably for southern France, or Spain?, but I'm frustrated and tired moving, changing, thirty years nearly, escaping the false teachings discussed. Think escape could be a neurosis now?

My best wishes for your success, and that we meet again soon.

richard

PS : quite evidently I became carried away after failing to fax you the original two-page answer to your letter, left it a while, came back adding to it numerous times, only to finish by feeling it needs cutting. But, too lazy, I now send you both the original and this expanded version, egocentrically hoping you'll find tidbits becoming savory over time. In any event, friends are made for suffering, even new ones, right? So this is sent asking your indulgence, having been away too long from my cultural, intellectual and social peers ('Expatriatitis', this) to perhaps easily find and maintain a more concise intellectual balance. Though my Spirit stays quite healthy, my mind needs to apply Beckett. As well, clearly I need escape to the West soon, even as the spirits of Asia touch my soul, its fauna and flora sensitize every palate and its aesthetics discriminate into my universal animal nature. Intellect vs. spirit.... what would a wise man do?

Oh, yes, further to your questions in Tokyo about Philosophy : although as a practical matter I still don't advise formally studying it at this point, those writers mentioned above are all worth leisurely reading for their thoughts which have stood the test of time. An anthology by an excellent editor, preferably with diverse commentaries, is the easiest way to develop a good grounding from which to selectively decide if deeper pursuits are desired, or timely. Freud, loved and hated as a psychiatrist, has perhaps written more relevant philosophy; but then, you should do Jung equally or more for his is a more balanced mind, a whole being. Then Fromm (excellent humanist principles), Ericson (the non-institutionalized intellect), and Adler. Humanistic psychologists can hatch potent philosophy, contriving dreams of immortality in life's contradictions clearer than exalted philosophers explain images of mortality in moral labyrinths.

There's something else I forgot : there's danger on my Veranda! It's the danger of seeing far. While still full of energy one may feel that, somehow, use should be made of this vision. If only to test the world, learn what others think, or perhaps to amuse. If already fatigued the question may never arise, one retires under the Bodhi tree. But if the energy is there, returning to Avon without sharing the view can raise the disconcerting question of satisfaction, or responsibility. Can I be happy staying on the Veranda? or do I have to tell others about this? Back in the world with a deeper vision may be depressing, as dangerous spirits testify, but staying on the veranda raises questions not easily answered there. Buddha had the same problem, not being sure what to do for a while, being quite content under his tree. A bit of a conundrum, eh?

Ciao