It’s all about you

Welcome to this new and shiny blog on Myth, Heroes, and Japan, but most of all about the greatest riddle you’ve ever known - you!

Let me explain:

I arrived in Japan two decades ago, lost, confused, and with a grant for a year of Japanese studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. What I didn’t realise then was that this was going to be a life long journey through uncharted territory. That territory was vast regions of myself that I had no idea even existed. I had made a promise to return to Sweden after my studies. But after 20 years, I’m still travelling.

You see, Japan is a weird and wonderful, sometimes horrible place, just like your own self, when you start to see what you’re all about. And that is the thing: when you come here you are forced to look at yourself in the mirror - I mean, really look at yourself - and discover all sorts of stuff. 

Lost in Japan

How does this work? Think about it: living your plain old life in your plain old home country, you start to take things for granted, including yourself and your own consciousness. You’re here - so what? But if you think about it, being here is the greatest riddle you’ve ever encountered. It’s just that you’re not thinking about it.

When I arrived in Japan, there was nothing to take for granted anymore. Everything was surreal. I remember one day in my room - it was in a newly built and very nice block of flats - I suddenly started to feel like I was in an utterly alien place. Imagine that you stand in a room, and suddenly realise it has been built by insects. Think about that for a while… Wouldn’t you get a creepy, alien feeling of being somewhere you don’t belong, somewhere utterly strange, like in a parallel universe? That’s how I felt in that moment: The room might have been built by insects. That is how surreal Japan felt to me.

What has myth to do with all this?

This is where myth comes to rescue. As we shall find out in this blog, if you can bear with my rumblings and occasional grammatical mishaps due to my Nordic background, myth is the force that binds humanity together. Myth is a journey to your True Self. Starting this journey in a place as strange as Japan is in fact a great advantage, because it works like a mirror. In the mirror of the foreign culture you for the first time can see your own culture, forefathers, all the stuff you took for granted or never thought about, and last, but not the least, you begin to see the image of your True Self.

Had I not come to Japan I would never have thought about the fact that the greatest holiday in Sweden is not Christmas, but Solstice, a festival where we raise a huge maypole and dance around it. I’d also probably not realised that that pole in fact is a huge phallus. Most likely I wouldn’t have begun to take interest in my ancestors and their culture. I would for instance never have discovered that the Vikings could have more than one wife, but only after permission being granted by the original one (you have probably not realised that the English names for the days of the week are derived from the names of Viking Gods). I also would never have realised that people in my home village even today ask forgiveness to the Tree Fairy before they cut down a tree. Or that my home county a couple of hundred years ago was full of wizards and witches. If you’d turn off electricity we’d be back there again in no time.

The Hero’s Journey

Travelling to a foreign land - the more alien the better - is one of the fastest routes to realising all these things about yourself and your own country. A journey is in fact one of the best means there is to do this. In myth, that journey is often undertaken by a Hero or Heroin. We are starting out on that journey here, and we will travel with Japanese heroes through time and space through a wildly strange country, which on the surface is called Japan. But at a deeper level, the path will take us through the boundless universe of your own imagination.

I am excited to have started a blog that covers four of my passions — story telling, myth, Japan, and heroes (in particular as described in Campbell’s A Hero’s Journey). Another man who was impressed by Campbell’s analysis of myth and story was George Lucas. The Star Wars universe was largely created out of that inspiration - it’s built on a mythical concept. And to judge from those light sabre fights, Lucas must have been impressed by Japan too: the samurai way of sword fighting - no shields and frozen postures exploding into action - is close indeed to that of the Jedi.

Going for a wild ride

On this blog I’ll try to cover hard to find material on Japanese mythology, using original texts in Japanese that I dig up, as well as other stuff hard to find for Westerners - or even Japanese. There is going to be lots of sound (I am a radio man) and other action. There will be e-books for download, and audio-books. There will also be reviews of books and movies, and a look at all the mythically inspired stuff that abound in Japan.

Heroes and heroines, the central element in myth, will be our theme, and we will also try to see them in the larger scheme of things. But most of all, this will be a journey of self discovery. Not very many have gone this route before. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride - it’s going to be a wild one.

Hans Shimizu Karlsson

Tokyo, Japan