High-class bread to waste time
Having a weaker constitution but strong desire than most, I am bound by many restrictions.
Despite being less mentally and physically strong than the average, I try to do this, that, and the other more than most, and I wear myself out and use myself up and become unable to move my body or my mind. Because of this, I live my life with various restrictions on meals, shopping, and activities.
Using shopping as an example, I don’t use convenience stores and I don’t buy 500 ml plastic bottles of drink. Looking at activities, I don’t open my smartphone or computer from the evening on.
Making up rules like this for myself is fine, but it’s a bit of a problem when I have time to kill. After finishing work the other day, I made to go and pick up my child from kendo class, but I wasn’t too fussed about waiting in the cold dojo. On the other hand, I couldn’t spend the time on my smartphone or in a convenience store.
As I was thinking about what to do, I wandered around behind Toyama Station and happened upon a café with a notice saying that they had received a shipment of high-class bread.
Raisin bread, ¥500 a loaf. I dithered a little, but figuring that a whole loaf of bread for about the price of a small cake is not too bad, I decided to buy it.
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It was delicious.
A blog entry in Japanese on the baker
The ethics of a daughter who devours bread and the father watching her
The next morning, when I toasted it and gave it to my daughter, who had just started to walk, she munched and crunched and tore into it.
Possibly because her parents are from Akita and Nagano—both rural parts of Japan—she looks somehow rustic. The way she desperately ate the bread suggested the baby of a farming family in dire poverty in medieval Germany.
Reading books about history brings various added benefits, one of which is the ability to think that the period we are living in now is not so bad.
There is no great spilling of blood every time the government changes, and except in special circumstances, you are at least unlikely to starve to death, unlike in the past.
However, looking at my daughter gobbling down bread like a ravenous beast, I was suddenly struck by the thought that “what is right is to survive.”
Ethics and survival, maintenance of homeostasis
Being subhuman, I find humans to be so, so strange.
Reading books and learning about the brain, all of that is to learn about humans who are so strange to me.
When I think about what humans might be, the destination that I always reach in the end is ethics.
Why do people kill each other and love each other? Why are they so obsessed with good and evil? What are good and evil, anyway?
With one thing or another, I think about ethics for about one week in total every year. What is “right”?
When I saw my daughter chomping on bread, I instinctively felt that “surviving is what is right”.
Over a long, long time, we tilled fields, dug channels, developed farming implements, and created distribution methods so that we can easily eat bread.
People might talk about mass production or additives, but they are probably something that has been done in the context of preventing starvation and surviving more safely and certainly, and they are certainly not evil.
The ways and mechanisms of the world must have come together to ensure survival, with the desire that our children be able to survive.
To ensure that my children survive, I might kill anything that attacks them without mercy, but for me, that is what is good.
To ensure that my family survives, I might take work that I am not interested in. Nevertheless, that is good. The impulse to survive probably contains essential good.
However, the problem is how much to include in “I”.
Family, country, profession and me
If “I” is taken to be me as an individual, the actions that I take for justice would be merely those of a ruffian.
But if “I” is broadened to mean “my family”, I would not be a ruffian to my relatives, at least.
If it is expanded to “my profession” or “my country”, I could behave as someone with good sense within that scope, at least.
However, the problem is that the ethics in a certain scope often fail to match the ethics in the larger scope that encompasses it.
The ethics allowing a certain profession to survive sometimes do not match the ethics of the country that occupies the rank superior to it.
The “ethical” actions that a certain country takes in seeking to survive may sometimes be nothing short of “evil” when considered on the stage of international society or a large region.
However, lying at the base of these is also “actions seeking survival”.
Ethics as maintenance of homeostasis and dynamic balance
I am a living creature so the word “survive” is appropriate, but professions and countries are not living creatures. However, they are similar to living creatures in the respect that both replace the old with the new and “constantly change yet remain the same”.
This state of “constantly changing yet remaining the same” is referred to as dynamic balance and it is considered a necessary condition for living creatures to be living creatures.
Using the body as an example, the body produces many hormones to maintain homeostasis, and blood pressure, body temperature and the like are kept within a certain range.
To maintain homeostasis, on encountering a foreign agent, the body launches an attack.
To maintain homeostasis, I may activate my amygdala and even become violent if I feel uneasy.
To maintain homeostasis, the industry that I belong to creates various systems and excludes those who do not belong.
To maintain homeostasis, the country that the industry belongs to seeks to strip the industry of its interests in order to secure sources of revenue.
To maintain homeostasis, the international society that the country belongs to sanctions countries that act in ways that go beyond the bounds of the current scheme.
All actions are good at some level and derive from operations seeking to maintain homeostasis.
What is “I”?
I often think about what I am. In this case, too, the more I think about it, the less I understand.
Am I my thoughts?
If that is so, these thoughts are no more than innumerable past thoughts that pass through my brain and they are not mine alone.
It has been said that all the world’s a stage, but even so, a stage needs more than just its players.
Only once it has scenery, backstage crew, lighting technicians and an audience, and all the other sundry elements does it become a play, and in that sense I cannot reconcile me the phenomenon with me the individual.
If the background that makes me “me” is included, where do I end? Is it family? The city of Toyama? The country? The world? All the events that have led to the world as it is now? As I was idly pondering this while I waited for my morning train,
I suddenly felt that I am the world and the world is me.
At that instant, I was overcome by the odd sensation of every last concern or worry and anger disappearing and of being wrapped in light.
For a moment, for just one moment, I wondered if this is what it felt like to reach enlightenment.
I don’t know what is right.
As I float unattached, I am not anyone, and I don’t want to be anyone.
For just this reason, I thought maybe I can be ethical without let or hindrance.
