Through Foreign Eyes
Being Hindu, my family received religious cards from relatives in India much in the way Christians exchange Christmas cards. Key differences, of course, would be we received ours at Diwali or perhaps Rakhi, and where Christmas cards might sport the manger scene or perhaps the magi, ours would have Ganesh with his elephant head, or perhaps a six-armed Durga holding weapons and blessings with a decorative border of swastikas.
This caused my parents quite a bit of anxiety when they first moved to the States. Because the images were holy, it would be sacrilegious to throw them away, and yet they felt adorning a house in America with swastikas wasn’t quite the thing to do. In my childish mind, this filtered down into the thoughts that if other people saw these bad pictures, we would end up in jail. Or thrown out of the country. While it would hardly result in that, bringing in such a card for show and tell in the strongly Jewish Boston suburb we lived in would certainly create an incident. Being too young to grasp the complexity of the issue, I decided to keep this horrible secret of my family’s from the outside world.
Then I grew up and promptly forgot about it. In fact, the thought did not resurface at all until I was walking back to my apartment in Kyoto one day. I was spending a year studying abroad in a city that practically bristled with shrines and temples, and yet it took me nearly a semester before I realized something that jostled me back to that childhood preoccupation. While waiting for the walk singal, I had been idly staring at one of the small Jizo shrines dedicated to the protection of travelers and the souls of children, aborted fetuses, and miscarriages. The Jizos, small stone statues adorned with bibs, seemed to crop up at every intersection and were hardly remarkable except for the swastika carved in the stone base of the shrine. Then I began looking around me; Buddhist architecture incorporated swastikas in the designs and maps used swastikas to indicate the location of temples. The symbol was not colored at all with the inhuman cruelty of the Holocaust.
I realized then that in some things, those cliché terms of East and West really existed. Just as Europe and America are more concerned with the Western theater, while there is a vague awareness of the European end of World War II in Asia, understandably, Asia is more preoccupied with its side of the conflict--Hiroshima for Japan, the independence movement for India, the Japanese invasion for South East Asia, and so on. And so the religious roots of the swastika that spanned millennia have persisted. Whereas in Europe and America, it elicits images of Hitler and his atrocities and is a jagged and twisted symbol of Nazism; in Asia it has remained a Hindu and Buddhist symbol of good luck and auspiciousness, a sign of good beginnings, and in some cases is as holy as a cross or a Star of David.
Will the symbol retain its split image? How can cultural understanding and assumptions ever be reconciled in such a case? Perhaps it’s a minor detail to focus on, but to me at that moment, it seemed to incorporate all the differences that lie between cultures, between people; differences with unending histories, with irreconcilable views of the world.
This caused my parents quite a bit of anxiety when they first moved to the States. Because the images were holy, it would be sacrilegious to throw them away, and yet they felt adorning a house in America with swastikas wasn’t quite the thing to do. In my childish mind, this filtered down into the thoughts that if other people saw these bad pictures, we would end up in jail. Or thrown out of the country. While it would hardly result in that, bringing in such a card for show and tell in the strongly Jewish Boston suburb we lived in would certainly create an incident. Being too young to grasp the complexity of the issue, I decided to keep this horrible secret of my family’s from the outside world.
Then I grew up and promptly forgot about it. In fact, the thought did not resurface at all until I was walking back to my apartment in Kyoto one day. I was spending a year studying abroad in a city that practically bristled with shrines and temples, and yet it took me nearly a semester before I realized something that jostled me back to that childhood preoccupation. While waiting for the walk singal, I had been idly staring at one of the small Jizo shrines dedicated to the protection of travelers and the souls of children, aborted fetuses, and miscarriages. The Jizos, small stone statues adorned with bibs, seemed to crop up at every intersection and were hardly remarkable except for the swastika carved in the stone base of the shrine. Then I began looking around me; Buddhist architecture incorporated swastikas in the designs and maps used swastikas to indicate the location of temples. The symbol was not colored at all with the inhuman cruelty of the Holocaust.
I realized then that in some things, those cliché terms of East and West really existed. Just as Europe and America are more concerned with the Western theater, while there is a vague awareness of the European end of World War II in Asia, understandably, Asia is more preoccupied with its side of the conflict--Hiroshima for Japan, the independence movement for India, the Japanese invasion for South East Asia, and so on. And so the religious roots of the swastika that spanned millennia have persisted. Whereas in Europe and America, it elicits images of Hitler and his atrocities and is a jagged and twisted symbol of Nazism; in Asia it has remained a Hindu and Buddhist symbol of good luck and auspiciousness, a sign of good beginnings, and in some cases is as holy as a cross or a Star of David.
Will the symbol retain its split image? How can cultural understanding and assumptions ever be reconciled in such a case? Perhaps it’s a minor detail to focus on, but to me at that moment, it seemed to incorporate all the differences that lie between cultures, between people; differences with unending histories, with irreconcilable views of the world.