| Diacritics-∞ | This user is a strong supporter of diacritics. |
| Nengō | This user knows nengō are essential when writing about Japanese history. |
 | This user prefers to cite books of Japanese history written by Japanese. |
| lapsed | This user is a lapsed musician. |
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In early 2010 I at last understood I don't like anonymity. I want Wikipedia to be an integral part of my life as much as possible and for as long as possible. Hence what follows.
These pages and my articles (see list) are the work of Francesco "Frank" Baldessari, an Italian national who'd rather be a citizen of the world, who resides in Japan since 1982, and who now lives in good old Kamakura. Some Japanese have told me that, over the years, I have become another Urashima Tarō (my only love however says the maximum I can aspire to be is a Tarō Urashima), hence my user name. They have a point: every once in a while I find myself involuntarily riding my bicycle either on the right in Japan or on the left in Italy. It's just as well that I don't have a driver's license. In a deeper sense, though, my friends are wrong, because I have been like Urashima Tarō since the day in late 1954 when I was born. The stork landed in the wrong country, and I still haven't found the right one.
Over the years I have however learned other things, in particular the great truth in Bernard Berenson's line:
"A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there's no self to die."
The happier I am, the more time I spend looking at the world, rather than at my wounds and/or scars. I used to do the opposite.
I write almost exclusively about Japan, not because I think it's a particularly important subject, but because it is what I know.
About my articles, I try to write them as well as I can, given the fact I am not even a native speaker, but ultimately I care about their content, correctness and clarity far more than about banalities like using an academic tone and avoiding the use of abbreviations (if they are OK for New York Review of Books, they should be in Wikipedia too, methinks). As Albert Einstein once said, quoting his old pal Ludwig Boltzmann, "matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and the cobbler."
My favorite fields, to my great surprise, have turned out to be religion in Japan and Japanese religious architecture, two things I thought I had no interest whatsoever in. (I am far from religious. Like Steven Weinberg, "I am not indifferent to religion, I am hostile to it.") The subject of religion in Japan in particular has proved to be a treasure trove of surprises with immense cultural and political implications in every field I have looked even superficially into.
I have clear positions on the subject of religion in Japan, although I have tried VERY hard to keep them out of the 194 articles I have written to date.
- First and most importantly, I fully agree with Allan Grapard when he says that the two main religions in Japan, Buddhism and Shinto, are distinct but not separate. They have a symbiotic relationship, and studying them separately is therefore a mistake. You can't be interested in Japanese Buddhism and not in Shinto, and far less can you be interested in Shinto but not in Japanese Buddhism.
- Second, insofar as the term "Shinto" is concerned, I am more or less a follower of Kuroda Toshio's, John Breen's, Mark Teeuwen, Allan Grapard, Sueki Fumihiko and many other scholars in the sense that like them I believe Shinto as we know it today is a Meiji era construct and an offshoot of Buddhism. Kami worship is old, today's Shinto is not. And it's not simply a matter of terms, but also of substance. That's why, like many specialists both Japanese and foreign, I prefer to use the term "kami worship" instead for subjects before Yoshida Kanetomo, who first came up the idea of Shinto as a separate religion.
The reason is that, as far as I can tell, little in Japan makes sense, even in the history of art, if not in the light of these two concepts.
IMHO, by far the most important of my contributions are the following articles. Their content is the background against which I write almost all my contributions. They should be read, if possible, in order of appearance in the list.
The first two explain in some detail the relationship between kami worship and Buddhism in Japan. The third describes the collusion of Buddhism with the Tokugawa shogunate for power. The last two deal with the immense and long-lasting repercussions of that collusion.
As attested by my user boxes, I have a user page at Wikipedia Commons too under the same name. No art in my pics, at least not intentional. I do not consider myself a photographer, and my work there is just part of my work here.
There. If one of these days I unexpectedly leave this vale of tears like my Wikipedia role model Fg2 (Where is he? I miss him more than I thought I would), at least you will know who I was.
Design by user Phaedriel, but purloined from user Andradus.
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