This month I’m planning to update mid-month as there has been a long period of no posts. My life’s relatively stable now or so I hope, after a year’s work towards attaining it, and this should allow me to update more regularly at least during the rest of year 2017. Will this strike you as boring or make you feel a kinship but I like routines, and it feels so good to be able to go through the same procedures every day. Psychologists seem to think making choices is one of the greatest causes of stress, and I guess that’s one of the reasons I like routines, although they’ve also found that stress alone doesn’t make you ill unless you believe stress is bad for you. Anyway, about the life of routine, more relevantly, it will let me write more.
Writing a note for the upcoming episode about commanders’ heads being trophies brought back something I’ve been wondering about for quite a few years. It’s just a casual impression of mine but traditionally in Japan, and possibly in many other cultures that I’m not aware of, bosses tended to get the worst deals in adversity because of the responsibility they assumed for the entire group, although this may be changing for Japan now perhaps due to progressing westernization. Perhaps you have a better idea?
The eight characters in the eight gem stones representing the eight worriers. Courtesy of Fumikura.net by TAKAGI Gen
Well, for now, see you soon! À bientôt! ¡Hasta luego! Tschüss! Magkita tayo ulit kaagad! (I picked the last one in Tagalog on the Internet and can’t even pronounce it. I hope it’s the right expression.)
The Legend of the Eight Samurai Hounds 
Good to read again from you!
“It’s just a casual impression of mine but traditionally in Japan, and possibly in many other cultures that I’m not aware of, bosses tended to get the worst deals in adversity because of the responsibility they assumed for the entire group, although this may be changing for Japan now perhaps due to progressing westernization.”
You are absolutely right! And it is a universal pattern of the Old World, when human sacrifices, and I mean ritual killing, was an important procedure for the peacekeeping within societies. The French anthropologist Renè Girard wrote that the institution of kingdom derives from the archaic practice to ‘spare’ one human sacrifice at the top of the social hierarchy for the time of crisis. If this happens, be it a natural disaster, disease or a lost war, this was the subject predestined to be killed for the restauration of peace order. We know that this was still in our known history the case with the chiefs or proto-kings of the Gaulish tribes in today’s France. Chiefs, kings and bosses of all kinds are by definition spared subjects of punishment, scapegoating and ritual sacrifice.
“In the mimetic delirium which arises when a society is afflicted or in crisis, a frenetic activity arises whereby someone has to be found responsible for this terrible situation, someone who, by being sacrificed, can restore peace. In other words, sacrifice has to come about in order to prevent a disintegrating society dissolving into violence. The conflicts, caused by mimetic desire, can reach apocalyptic dimensions where the all-against-all finds a solution in all-against-one. The choice of scapegoat can be arbitrary, but it tends to be someone marginal, who differs from the community or has some kind of weakness. This means that it may be a foreigner, a child, a woman, somebody with a physical or psychological deficiency. But it could also mean someone of high rank, for example, in some cultures, the sacrifice of a king. According to Girard, the most primitive and basic sacrifice was probably made spontaneously, in a raw and unconscious manner. Gradually it became more conscious and ritualistic. Thus there has been a certain evolution from violent to less violent types of sacrifices.” http://www.girardstudies.com/www.girardstudies.com/Mimetic_Thory_and_the_science_of_relgion.html
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Thanks for keeping in touch! It’s great to hear from you too.
That is very interesting indeed. It’s something we intuitively know somewhere at the back of our minds but now that you (or another expert) have put it in words it’s like huh, why didn’t I think of that?! Cool. Thanks for the input.
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