The first part of Arnaud Desjardins' Japanese film went inside the monasteries. This second part leaves them, and asks what Zen has actually done to a country.
It opens in Ginza, Tokyo in 1971, all production and expansion and neon, the part of Japan that made the words East and West feel geographically confused. Desjardins takes us up through a modern tower to the Mikasa Kaikan restaurant and lets the question hang: what can any of this have to do with a film about Zen Buddhism? The answer arrives the next morning. Before service, the dining room becomes a dojo. Staff sit in silence, and the kyosaku falls on their shoulders. The commentary notes the contrast with Western magazine pieces on relaxation seminars for executives, Buddha put at the service of management. In Japan, he observes, it still happens the other way round.
From there the film goes to the psychology laboratory at Komazawa University, where researchers were measuring what could be measured of zazen. Deshimaru himself is wired up: electrodes for electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram, a belt recording the movement of the ribcage, pens tracing waves onto moving paper. The readings are explained patiently. Fast beta rhythms in ordinary mental activity, slower and wider alpha in inner calm, theta in drowsiness. During zazen the desynchronised waking trace gives way to alpha and theta and holds there steadily, yet the subject does not fall asleep. Inner silence and complete vigilance, the film concludes, turn out to go together. Analysis of exhaled air shows oxygen consumption falling sharply.
Then the traditional sciences. A monk practises and teaches massage along the acupuncture meridians, thumbs replacing needles, points connected to organs, the big toe to the brain. The film contrasts an Eastern medicine concerned with the sick person rather than with naming and classifying diseases, working by strengthening natural defences rather than by chemistry, psychosomatic long before the word existed. It is honest about the experience: real Japanese massage hurts. Moxibustion with mugwort follows.
The rest moves through Japanese life. A farming family in Tsuruoka with a small Buddhist altar, reconciling an imported doctrine with the older worship of the kami. Students at the Zen university attached to Soji-ji in Yokohama, chanting sutras in the gymnasium before class. A monastery near Kobe where children train in kendo, in a dojo whose name means the place where young shoots are cultivated, and where every session opens with a long sitting.
Running through all of it is one physical argument. The Western idea of strength inflates the chest and pulls in the stomach, which is to say it inhales. The monk and the samurai know that strength lives in the out-breath, which is why we exhale when we laugh and inhale when we weep. Kinhin is presented as the training of exactly that.
The last third turns to the arts. Aikido, which refused competitions and championships, summed up by a young practitioner in one sentence: it is the teaching of love. The film argues directly against the claim that Zen produced Japanese militarism, pointing out that bu in budo also carries the sense of stopping the spears. Then calligraphy, where a single character is drawn only after the monk has identified with it in prolonged meditation. Ink painting, where spontaneity turns out to be the fruit of extreme rigour. The tea ceremony, filmed in full. And ikebana, born in the monasteries from flower offerings to the Buddha. It ends with a No master rehearsing without costume or mask, at which point Desjardins decides to stop talking.