332
the Japanese deities enshrined at Iwashimizu Hachiman-gu endeavored to nurture
and sustain.
37.3 A Moral to the Tale?
There is no moral to the tale of electricity, except to blindly acknowledge humanity’s unguided thirst for energy. We are afraid of the dark, no matter how much we
court its effects, take comfort in sleep, or thrill to the inducement of night lights
from Las Vegas to Kyoto’s Gion District, Singapore’s 250-acre Garden by the Bay
of electrified “supertrees, downtown Ho Chi Minh, Time Square, or Hong Kong.”
One of the first American scientists to visit Meiji Japan (1868–1912), Edward
Morse of Boston, later to become the president of the American Academy for the
Advancement of Science, wrote, “A foreigner, after remaining a few months in
Japan, slowly beings to realize that, whereas he thought he could teach the Japanese
everything, he finds to his amazement and chagrin, that those virtues or attributes
which under the name of humanity are the burden of our moral teaching at home,
the Japanese seem to have been born with”.
8
It was another Boston-based academic,
Serge Elisséev, director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 1934 to 1956, who
persuaded President Roosevelt to spare Kyoto, when the US military was firebombing every other major city in Japan.
9
And so the contradictions in human
nature continue to escalate a certain riddle, our quest to see the light (Fig. 37.2).
8 In Henry Smith, ed., Learning from Shogun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy, University
of California Program in Asian Studies, Santa Barbara, CA, 1980.
9 See After Eden – History, Ecology and Conscience, by M. C. Tobias, Avant Books, San Diego,
1985, p. 87.
37 The Paradox of Light
the Japanese deities enshrined at Iwashimizu Hachiman-gu endeavored to nurture
and sustain.
37.3 A Moral to the Tale?
There is no moral to the tale of electricity, except to blindly acknowledge humanity’s unguided thirst for energy. We are afraid of the dark, no matter how much we
court its effects, take comfort in sleep, or thrill to the inducement of night lights
from Las Vegas to Kyoto’s Gion District, Singapore’s 250-acre Garden by the Bay
of electrified “supertrees, downtown Ho Chi Minh, Time Square, or Hong Kong.”
One of the first American scientists to visit Meiji Japan (1868–1912), Edward
Morse of Boston, later to become the president of the American Academy for the
Advancement of Science, wrote, “A foreigner, after remaining a few months in
Japan, slowly beings to realize that, whereas he thought he could teach the Japanese
everything, he finds to his amazement and chagrin, that those virtues or attributes
which under the name of humanity are the burden of our moral teaching at home,
the Japanese seem to have been born with”.
8
It was another Boston-based academic,
Serge Elisséev, director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 1934 to 1956, who
persuaded President Roosevelt to spare Kyoto, when the US military was firebombing every other major city in Japan.
9
And so the contradictions in human
nature continue to escalate a certain riddle, our quest to see the light (Fig. 37.2).
8 In Henry Smith, ed., Learning from Shogun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy, University
of California Program in Asian Studies, Santa Barbara, CA, 1980.
9 See After Eden – History, Ecology and Conscience, by M. C. Tobias, Avant Books, San Diego,
1985, p. 87.
37 The Paradox of Light