Spiritual refugee

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN BEGINS THE STORY "The Little Mermaid" with a description of the place where the little mermaid princess came from. It was far, far from land, where no anchor could reach the bottom and where you would have to pile many church towers on top of each other before one of them emerged above the surface of the ocean. The little mermaid princess fell in love with a human prince when she saw him dancing at a party on the deck of the big royal boat illuminated brightly, crossing the ocean. She wanted to dance with him and to be a human to marry him:

She went down to the dark seaweed forest and asked a witch to give her human legs so that she might dance with the prince. "It is stupid of you, for it will bring you misery," the witch cackled. "Your beautiful tail will divide and shrink until it becomes what human beings call 'pretty legs'. It will hurt; it will feel as if a sword were going through your body: every time your foot touches the ground it will feel as though you were walking on knives. If you are willing to suffer all this, then I can help you."--"I am," the little mermaid whispered.--"But remember, once you have human legs you will never come back and swim in the deep sea. And if the prince does not marry you, you will become foam on the ocean the very next morning that the prince marries another. And," grinned the witch, "I want no small payment for my portion either. I know you thought of using your beautiful voice to talk to the prince and charm him, but I want your very voice for my payment!" The little mermaid nodded; the witch cut out her tongue and she became mute.

When she appeared to him as a human figure the prince asked her to dance with him and she did just as she dreamed of, but every time her foot touched the ground it felt as though she were walking on knives. The prince wanted to know who she was and he asked her many questions, but she could not utter one word. The prince, though he was sweet to her in the way one would be towards a little sister who is mute, was going to marry the princess of the neighboring kingdom.

This is a story of irony. What the Little Mermaid sacrificed in order to gain the opportunity was the very tool she needed in order to exploit it. And that was exactly what I had done in coming to America, leaving my native land Japan, paying the cost of my own mother tongue. I came to America to live as an honest, integrated individual. If I am allowed a psychological interpretation of the symbols in the story, the royal marriage the little mermaid wanted is the symbol of integration with her own self. And the depth of the ocean represents the unconscious world. Integration with my own self was the precise reason that I came here too, from a culture where one is never encouraged to be separated, to emerge from the mother's womb, where everyone drifts still in the dark tribal unconsciousness, to a culture which had reached the concept of individuality. The mermaid's is a story of one who took serious risks to become an exile and endured all the consequences.

One must have a certain amount of freedom to be honest as an individual. Without this freedom there is no way to take responsibility for one's own actions and thoughts and therefore there is no inner life, no place where one experiences oneself as an ethical being. Without that private place, others are merely strangers and one is a stranger even to oneself.

In a society that does not allow for the existence of individuality, the effort to become an individual invites persecution. Although this sort of persecution is not as visible as political persecution it is nevertheless fatal to one's spiritual being, so the persecuted person becomes an exile. One usually goes into this sort of exile only after a sustained battle against the cultural system in which one's whole life is wrapped up. The battle is painful. Wounded and bleeding, one becomes an exile. These people I call "spiritual refugees"; I consider myself one of them.

I grew up in Japan during World War II with images of total destruction: thousands of airplanes which kept welling up from the other side of the sky aligned perfectly like the lines of a chessboard, moving, keeping perfectly the same distance from each other in the sky above us, flying towards the big city where they dropped all their bombs at once--a carpet bombing. It was a well-thought-out and well-calculated plan: they did not miss one square inch, there was no undestroyed spot on the land, they did not miss even one baby who might have been born that very morning. Every day, every night it was done. Images of Tokyo. in ruins, a field of debris spread where all buildings used to stand and where people lived, worked, and studied, stretching to the horizon like craters of the moon. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed overnight, their dead bodies piled under the debris. I grew up on top of those bodies. The memory of the smell of the dark wet soil in the little hole we dug underground for a bomb shel ter, and which we crawled into every night, the memory of the young American soldier's laughing face I glimpsed when he aimed his machine gun at me from the low-flying airplane--these are all still very vivid in me.