ALL AMERICANS: Super Rich, Professional, Poor, and Outcast

ALL AMERICANS: Super Rich, Professional, Poor, and Outcast


A Japanese woman who has worked in New York and the Silicon Valley as the first Japanese female economist for 26 years wrote a Japanese book titled "Reality of America, the Super Disparity Society."

The author, Yumi Kobayashi, categorized Americans into four groups: the super rich, the professional, the poor, and outcasts.

Readers of the book, of course mostly Japanese in Japan, largely praise its contents. Especially, as the author defined herself as one of lower professionals, her viewpoint seems to be well welcomed by readers.

First of all, God forbids man to stay rich.
Therefore, being super rich is a sin.
I have nothing to say to them. You wait for God's judgment.

The question is whether professionals love the poor and outcasts as God wishes.

I suppose it will decide the future course of the U.S.

On this earth, there are only two types of people: those who are afraid of being rich and those who are not.

In other words, those who know in any form of recognition that God forbids man to become rich and those who do not mind such an idea.
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However, I am not in a position to decide any particular person to be super rich, professional, poor, or outcast.



"WILL BOW DOWN AND WORSHIP GOD"

"THE BOOK OF TEA" and My Practice

"THE BOOK OF TEA" and My Practice



In 1906, "THE BOOK OF TEA" by Okakura-Kakuzo was published from Fox Duffield & Company in New York.

The author, generally known as Tenshin Okakura, wrote about the way of tea, one of unique cultural assets of Japan.

Probably due to the influence the book bore in the United States, even Americans today have some knowledge about wabi (taste for the simple and quiet) and sabi (elegant simplicity) both of which are concept deeply rooted in the traditional Japanese culture and are embodied in a tea ceremony.

He wrote: "Why not destroy flowers if thereby we can evolve new forms ennobling the world idea? We only ask them to join in our sacrifice to the beautiful. We shall atone for the deed by consecrating ourselves to Purity and Simplicity. Thus reasoned the tea-masters when they established the Cult of Flowers."

In a small room where a Japanese tea ceremony is conducted, you will surely find a humble decoration of plants.
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Buddha is said to have said that you could go into flower gardens but must pass through them without picking any of plants and flowers.

The beautiful is not in the nature or living things but in the spiritual universe which sometimes project its elements and members onto the nature.

You are not allowed to kill life of a flower.
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Decorate a room with flowers may be an art, but walk through a flower garden without picking a flower may be a religious practice.

And practically, drinking Japanese green tea is good for a human heart medically.

I take it everyday intentionally. If you like, please try it.



"THEY HEAR THE MESSAGE"

"Hillary and Rice"

"Hillary and Rice"


There is a Japanese book titled "Hillary and Rice" written by a Japanese female essayist named Yukiko Kishimoto.

I suppose we had better focus on descriptions about Ms. Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State of the U.S., especially in this age of the War on Terror.

The essayist mentioned two Japanese men who had met with or saw her, separately in many academic occasions, when Ms. Rice was in her 30's.

The two Japanese men described alike Ms. Rice as a Venus or a truly rare beauty.
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In ancient China, it is said that there were Four (or Five) Beauties who were extremely beautiful and prominent.

Among them, about a woman called Diaochan (Chou-sen in Japanese), whose life was not recorded in any historic documents but believed to have existed, it is said that she was so beautiful that the moon hid herself in nearby clouds when she was praying under the moon for peace of the Han Dynasty her father was serving.

She has been thus called a Beauty Making the Moon Hide.
(In East Asia, everybody thinks that the moon is beautiful.)

There is also another related expression created in ancient China but still known in Japan: a Beauty Making Fish Drawn, Goose Fall, and Flowers Shamed.
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The beauty Diaochan was used successfully by her father to drive a fatal wedge between two powerful warriors who were both enemies of Han.

This episode became a prologue of a long historical story based on civil wars in China in the 2nd and the 3rd century.

Japanese seem to love the story called "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" more than contemporary Chinese do.
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The female essayist who wrote the book "Hillary and Rice" was interested in the remarks of those Japanese men about Ms. Rice.

The actual expression they used is "Zessei-no-Bijyo," which literally means a beauty that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

If two decent Japanese men testified that a certain foreign girl was a truly rare beauty, I think she must be.
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What I hope is that Ms. Rice is actually a very different type of ladies from the ancient legendary beauty Diaochan.

Anyway, God's teaching to me has nothing to do with a beauty except such one as "Do not believe what you see but what you feel."

I feel that she would not let others feel the way she does not like, which I would rather respect.



"TAKEN OUT OLD THINGS AND NEW THINGS"

Japanese Spacecraft Peering into the Sun So Nearly

Japanese Spacecraft Peering into the Sun So Nearly



The surface of the sun emitting several jet streams of energy was for the first time so clearly presented in pictures released yesterday.
(Especially at p.14 of http://hinode.nao.ac.jp/news_e/20061127_press_e/sot_press_en.pdf)

The pictures were taken from a Japanese spacecraft called Hinode using its solar optical telescope.

Hinode also took some pictures of Mercury this month with the sun as its background.
(http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/solar-b/index.html)

This project called Solar-B is being promoted by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.
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The width of a bundle of energy jet streams on the sun is almost equal to the diameter of the earth. We can really feel something enormous but also so real therein.

Mercury with a diameter a little larger than one-third of the earth's cannot be observed easily from the earth and a real picture showing its shape, of course being round, is also rare.
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In Japanese, we call Mercury "Sui-sei" meaning the star of water.
We call Venus "Kin-sei" meaning the star of gold.
We call the Earth "Chi-kyu" meaning the ground globe.
We call Mars "Ka-sei" meaning the star of fire.
We call Saturn "Do-sei" meaning the star of soil.
We call Jupiter "Moku-sei" meaning the star of trees.
We call Uranus "Tennou-sei" meaning the star of the Heaven King.
We call Neptune "Kaiou-sei" meaning the star of the Sea King.
We call Pluto "Meiou-sei" meaning the star of the Underworld King.

The sun is called "Tai-you" meaning the great brightness, though there are some other synonyms.

The moon is "Tsuki" meaning the moon.

A star is "Hoshi" meaning a star, the Kanji letter of which can be also pronounced as "Sei" in certain contexts.
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Though the sun, consisting mostly of hydrogen and helium, is not a gigantic inerratic star, this kind of stars with a larger volume could generate internally various types of atoms, including oxygen.

The combination of hydrogen and oxygen is water.

The origin of water on the earth is traced back to another larger sun which once existed prior to the current sun.

That kind of gigantic, hot, and burning globe is the source of water which makes us live in combination with light and heat.
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Jesus Christ really said, "Do not judge a person by his outlook but by his mind."

A mind that can give you water, light, and heat may be, however, being carried by a person with a forbidding aspect.



"HEALED THOSE WHO NEEDED IT"