Living – in between – Cultures

Rotkoff undoubtedly read Sun Tzu's The Art of War, written over 2,000 years ago. War is an art. Japanese got acquainted with Sun Tzu's text in the fifth century, when envoys visited China to acquire new insights in skills and to purchase tools and techniques. After the introduction of Buddhism the warrior class, bushi, started to write haiku as a meditative stylization of the now here experience, the core element of Zen: emptiness (mu, Sanskrit: sunyata) and the suchness of things (son-omama, konomama; Sanskrit: tathata). During the pacification of Japan after 1600, Yamaga Soko forged martial skills into a Zen Buddhist based, self-disciplining practice: The way (do) of the samurai class.² While walking the bushido in peace time the samurai handled both sword and pen — bu to bun — to write and paint. And when their time had come to kill themselves so as to appease conflicting loyalties or pay their debts to their clan, before cutting (kiri) their bellies (hara) open, performing seppuku, some even wrote down their final haiku. The long trajectory from Japanized Chinese knowledge via meditative verse to the briefings of an Iraqi-based American Colonel with a Jewish background is highly intercultural, because of the temporal and spatial transformations that are presupposed in this process of cross cultural adaptation and cultivation.