A secular spiritual pilgrimage around the Res publica

Map of Tokyo (1930)

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation.

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

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Last week, quite by chance, I found myself kindly invited by the Professor Emeritus of Brighton Univeristy & Editor of the jounal, AI&Society, Karamjit Gill, and Dr Satinder Gill a research affiliate at the Centre for Music and Science, to be involved in a short dialogue session at a conference here in Cambridge on the general subject of Artificial Intelligence and Society. And in my case, on the specific subject of ethics and society, particularly how individual persons might be able to help promote and encourage faith, trust, and humility as part of the possibility of something that is called the “Res publica”, that is to say the “public good” or “public things.”

Now those of you who know me will know that, although I am reasonably competent enough to speak moderately coherently on the subject of ethics, I know very little, almost nothing in fact, about the nuts and bolts of Artificial Intelligence (AI). So why on earth was I invited to contribute in a very small way to this conference? 


Well, it is because, in order to get the ideas of the important, twentieth-century Japanese Unitarian, educator and advocate of free-religion, Imaoka Shin’ichirō (1881-1988) circulating properly in the English-speaking world, for the past two years I have been using ChatGPT and DeepL, along with the occasional but necessary help of my Japanese-speaking friends, to translate 104 of his essays into English. For those who don’t know, ChatGPT is an example of what is called a Large Language Model of AI, a model now being used by the lastest version of DeepL.

Now, I have learnt a huge amount from this experience, not only, of course, about Imaoka-sensei, Japanese liberal, free-religion and Japanese culture in general, but also about the wonderful possibilities and huge dangers and pitfalls presented to us by a new technology that can facilitate a translation project that has been utterly stalled for over forty years. Without the availability of DeepL and ChatGPT, Imaoka-sensei’s words would have continued to remain utterly inaccessible to the English-speaking world for many more decade, and perhaps for even longer, and the little seeds we have planted in within the Cambridge Unitarian community, and the little seed I’ve just sown at the conferance would not have been available.

Anyway, it was through this process of using AI that I have been able to become properly informed about Imaoka-sensei’s ideas about the self and his own ideas about how to promote and encourage faith, trust, and humility as part of the possibility of something that we can call the “Res publica”, that is to say the public good or public things.  

And so, with less than a week’s notice, there I was, on stage taking part in a brief dialogue and with little more than five minutes to say something that might be of relevance and interest to the conference delegates. Now, it really was a dialogue situation, so I wasn’t sure what it was I was actually going to say when my moment to talk came. But something my dialogue partner, Dr Caterina Berbenni-Rehm, said about the very interesting work of her brother, the Franciscan historian and theologian, Father Gianfranco Berbenni, suddenly made me think, aha!, I know exactly what would be useful to bring to this conversation.

In 1934, Imaoka-sensei was principle of an important private school in Tokyo, the Seisoku Academy, and he was looking for ways to encourage his students, not only to be creative, free and enquiring individuals, but also to be people who would be motivated and able to go out into the world to create, and indeed serve and maintain, the Res publica, the public good or public things. The question was, how was he to go about encouraging the latter and so truly offer his students what he called an “integrated education” (綜合教育 sōgō kyōiku).

Clearly, a lot of this education could be done in the school itself but Imaoka realised that Greater Tokyo could utilised as an extension of the school’s own facilities. Now, a less imaginative person might simply have instigated a programme of school trips to various places in Tokyo, but Imaoka-sensei saw that these excursions and visits could easily “degenerate into mere sightseeing.” And his genius was to realise there was a way of emulating “the beautiful custom” of the Saigoku Kannon Pilgrimage (西国三十三所, Saigoku Sanjūsan-sho), a pilgrimage to thirty-three Buddhist temples throughout the Kansai region of Japan. The principal image in each temple is Kannon, better known to us in the West as the Bodhisattva of Compassion (sometimes called the “Goddess of Mercy”). It is traditional for pilgrims to wear white clothing and conical straw hats and to carry walking sticks. This was, of course, because in the past the route was followed on foot, but today most pilgrims travel by cars or train. Pilgrims record their progress in a stamp book (集印帳 shūinchō), which the temple staff marked with red stamps and Japanese calligraphy indicating the temple number, the temple name, and the specific name of the Kannon image.

Imaoka-sensei began, therefore, to develop for his students a new pilgrimage consisting of thirty-three sites in Greater Tokyo that would not only take in traditional sacred religious sites, both Buddhist and Shinto, but would take in places connected with the wider history of Japan as well as more modern sites that would normally be considered secular. What some of those were I’ll come back to in a moment.

A stamp book (集印帳 shūinchō)

In the school itself, the students were expected first to acquire sufficient preliminary, critical knowledge about the history and meaning of the sites they were to visit, but then, from time to time, they were expected to go out in groups of five or six friends to make the pilgrimage itself and to complete it within a year. Not only that but, like the original pilgrims visiting the thirty-three Buddhist temples, they were to have stamp books in which they would not only collect stamps from the various sites visited but also to seek the signatures of people associated with each site.

So, where did they go? Naturally, they were to visit various temples, both Buddhist and Shinto and well as various important Imperial sites and those connected with the nation’s military history (not that Imaoka-sensei was, himself, a supporter of military action of any kind). Also on the list are various famous sites/memorials to important religious, political and artistic figures, both ancient and modern. But in addition these, perhaps obvious sites, we find Imaoka-sensei adding the following, less obvious sites: the Prefectural City Hall, the Bank of Japan, the Stock Exchange, the Rice Exchange, the Imperial University, the Diet Building, the Prime Minister’s Residence, various Government Offices and Statues, the Red Cross Society, the Broadcasting Station, the Science Museum, the Zoo, the Botanic Garden, cemeteries and the city’s crematorium, newspaper companies and department stores, St. Luke’s Hospital, the Central Market, the Sumida and Tama Rivers with their various factories and industrial sites, the various foreign embassies, the observatory in Mitaka Village, water reservoirs, the Sewage Treatment Plant, the port, and lastly, the International Airport. 


At each of these sites Imaoka-sensei hoped that his students would begin to get the integrated education he desired for all people which would break down the arbitrary distinction between what we call the sacred and what we call the secular, what we call the self and what we call society. In other words, it as a project to help people see all these things and themselves as being part of one extraordinary, integrated whole, a co-operative society. Now, obviously, I haven’t got the space to illustrate every integrated lesson he hoped his students would learn, so here are just three.

“For those seeking to transcend reality and yearn for the eternal world” he felt that a visit to the crematorium “provides a profound lesson.”

In the garden in front of the treasure hall at the Meiji Shrine he tells his students to pay attention to the “exemplary view that takes advantage of the illusion created by limited visual fields.” Imoaka-sensei then observes that by visiting this site “we can also study practical physics (物理学).”

At two of the Government sites he also encourages students to look at the three standards of measurement for the metre and the kilogram, and he notes that “[t]he need for precision in measuring instruments is absolute from both the standpoint of mathematics and physics and in practical life. In this sense, although these standards are merely alloys of platinum and iridium, they even give us a sense of sacredness and inviolability (神聖不可侵)” and an ability to “comprehend the profound sanctity and solemnity of rules and standards.”

I hope you can see that Imaoka-sensei created a real-world secular religious — or perhaps better, a secular spiritual — pilgrimage around the Res publica. It took students not only to physical places, to sites, but as you have already heard, to meet with and collect the signatures of those who were actually running and maintaining those sites, from grand ministers of state, priests and professors, to those working in factories, the sewage treatment plant and the crematorium. All of them were sacred, all of them were holy, all of them were worthy of honour as secular Bodhisattvas of Compassion serving the Res publica.  

Imaoka-sensei could see — as I think we are all also now beginning to see — that a modern secular, democratic society is in great need for something like this spiritual practice if its citizens are to become properly educated, passionate about and willing to uphold and maintain the Res publica, the public good and public things.

And, you know what, immediately upon finishing I was approached by three genuinely excited delegates who told me they were going to see if they could do something similar in their own contexts, in Turkey, Portland Oregon, and York here in the UK — and I’ve already been contacted again by two of them to see how we can take that forward. New pilgrimages are, it seems, just beginning. So, perhaps we, too, should try to initiate something like that here in Cambridge ourselves? Any volunteers to help me out?

All quotations are from my, as yet, unpublished English translation of an essay called, “Greater Tokyo as an Educational Environment” (教育環境としての大東京), published in Shōwa 9 (1934) by the Tokyo Prefecture School Affairs Section (東京府学務課).