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10,000 Things (1992) 12:00 A year after travelling together to Eastern Europe, Warner Wada and I went to Japan to participate in Hiroshima's Peace Day ceremonies through concurrent Asian Cultural Council fellowships. We would be able to stay at his Uncle's house, in the only neighborhood not destroyed by the atomic bomb. We also travelled to many other places in Japan, including a pilgrimage to a zen shrine at the top of an inner island of the Sea of Hiroshima, bon festival in Kyoto, country market in Takayama, and various places in Tokyo. Japan is saturated with images, often repetitive. Since I saw this work in sequence with time in Eastern Europe, I also decided in preplanning to make the tape a kind of homage to one of my favorite filmmakers, Alain Renais, who made a similar connection between the Shoah and slaughter of Japanese civilians who lived in ancient cities without military significance or targets. For example, while in Hiroshima I looked for images and landscapes that I remembered from the film which I had seen more than 25 years ago and didn't look at until returning to NYC. I quote passages and music of that film with some of the footage I collected there. I have been studying life through Zen Buddhist concepts and practices since learning about Zen from the composer John Cage while I was in High School. I understand that when one bows to the Buddha, the heart is elevated above the head. My appreciation of the Heart Sutra which was influenced by John Daido Loori's book Zen Mountain Diary. This is the sutra that is chanted during an all night dance ritual celebrated during the Bon festival. |