Smart-assing is good (?) but as a friend pointed out, the statue I was writing about the other day has a rather sombre history; in a nutshell, in its dais there is buried a copy of the book "Seiki no Isho" (世紀の遺書) which contains 701 wills and diary excerpts of Japanese who were, tried, convicted and executed as war criminals after WWII. The statue was created in 1955, ten years after the war and it symbolizes the determination of the Japanese to not get involved again in war. I couldn't find anywhere why its creators chose to write the word "love" in Greek but I suspect (and because it's written using the old, polytonic orthography i.e. multi-accent writing, also used in the Bible) that there has been some influence from Christianity and the idea of love as expressed in its scripture.
(For a bigger version of this picture both in color and black and white, check my "Japan Arekore" set on Flickr).
4 comments:
Interesting! A Christian influence might be, but, I'm not so sure if the polytonic Greek writing should be considered as evidence of it in this case. The polytonic Greek writing system was the official form of Greek writing back in the 1950's and the monotonic system was officially adopted in Greece only at the beginning of the 1980's. So, anyone who wanted to write Greek in a formal way back in 1950's had no other system than the polytonic one.
Good point! Yes, I know about the change of the system: it happened when I was in junior high and confused the hell out of everyone :-) The reason I wrote that was because the dais looks considerably newer than the statue and I haven't seen any old pictures of it so I can verify if it was there from the beginning.
I see! That makes it even more interesting! A book written by criminals of war, buried under the absolute, the divine, word for love: a contradiction? A call for forgiveness? A reminder that they acted out of pure love for their country/ nation/ Emperor? A manifestation of the fact that they also were humans, who had loved ones? An attempt for reconciliation? A way to restore the balance? Who knows...
Who knows, indeed. Personally, I tend towards the "love as forgiveness" explanation.
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