Father Mazzocchi during a baptism of two Japanese faithful in Milan.
Father Luciano Mazzocchi, a Saverian missionary, 85 years old, lived in Japan for 19 years and, from Milan where he lives and cares for the souls of the local community of the Rising Sun, continues to cultivate his love for the people who welcomed him with friendship and for their language. His faith itself was enriched by that experience, which is made up of the complex sum of factors that characterize the life and mentality of a people. Starting from the local language, which reflects a way of being and conceiving life. We met him to have him tell us about the legacy he brings with him from that extraordinary experience starting precisely from the Japanese language.
Father Luciano, as always in life what we experience changes us. You were a missionary in Japan for many years. The theme of the Japanese language has also greatly influenced your faith. What fascinates you about it?
«After two years of intensive study of the Japanese language, from 1963 to 1965, at the YMCA language institute in Kobe and after 17 years of missionary immersion in the daily life of the people of the Land of the Rising Sun, the soul of that archipelago of rice paddies that hosted me and the soul of the Emilian land with its green meadows where I grew up have agreed to coexist within me. I felt it for the first time when I dreamed in Japanese. 43 years have passed since I returned to Italy in 1982 and still in dreams Italian and Japanese words confabulate among themselves. In the homilies of the mass in Japanese, if I read (which rarely happens) the words come out formatted, almost boring, while when I express myself with the Japanese that flows spontaneously from the heart, I feel that I am communicating with the assembly that listens to me. The Japanese language fascinates me because, unlike the similar neo-Latin languages, it has a soul that is different from that of my native language. The soul of the Japanese language and that of the Italian language are reciprocally other because the relationship between Eastern and Western man with things, with events, is different, above all the relationship with himself is different».
In what sense?
“I happen to reflect on this otherness of the Japanese language compared to Italian and I wonder where their differentiation comes from. For a long time that “where” was untraceable to me, because I persisted in observing from my obvious Italian point of view, but it was precisely the constant use of the Japanese language that accompanied me to where and how the Japanese see existence. That where and that how is the Japanese heart. In fact, the language is the heartbeat of a people.”
Can you give us some examples?
«The Japanese language knows neither the pronoun nor the adjective that we call relativeso it cannot correlate the complement of time, place or other to a sentence that is placed as the main one. Therefore, there is no literal translation in a Neo-Latin or Anglo-Saxon language in which the pronoun and adjective relative acts as a glue, but an Italian sentence must first be broken down and recomposed according to the flow of Japanese thought. In Japanese the concept of to be divided and of comprehend it is expressed by the same verb: wakaru (The sun)a real contradiction for us Westerners who understand the activities of comprehend and of split as opposites. Let’s take for example a very common expression: “Today by chance I happened to meet that friend of yours that you told me about when we met at the bar in Piazza Duomo”. Our syntax in the sentence distinguishes the main statement, formed by the subject and the corresponding object, which in the above sentence is “Today by chance I happened to meet that friend of yours…”: the subject (implied) is I and the object that friend of yours. The following three specifications are related to this main statement through the relative pronoun. The Japanese language, however, to translate the above expression, must separate the four assertions that form the above sentence into as many distinct brush strokes. Thus:
“Duomo del Piazza in the bar in the ,
we saw each other that occasion in,
your friend told me about,
today by chance I met”.
Note the reversal of syntax and how prepositions in Japanese are postpositions. All this is very significant; in fact, while in Italian the preposition is the particle that precedes and introduces, in Japanese it is the postposition that concludes each brushstroke. Note above all how the verb is not conjugated, but always in the infinitive form. In this form the verb absorbs the relative function, as it dissolves the distinction between subject and object and between main and complementary clause. That is, highlighting the subject in classical Japanese is secondary or even useless, almost blocking the flow; while the infinitive form describes the verb as a dynamic that occurs by involving not just one pole, the subject or the object, but the environment in which things happen. Even the subject and the object emerge from/in the happening of things. Japanese is an impersonal, contemplative, rather than reasoned language. I translate the above sentence into Japanese (I transcribe Duomo and Bar in Roman letters because by now the two terms have also entered the Japanese language):
Cathedralの広場にあるBarで
The wolf is a beast
紹介してくれたあのお友達と
今日偶然にも会いました。
Cathedral no hiroba nor aru Bar de
I’m going to tell you about it
shōkai shite kureta ano otomodachi to
“Kyo Guzen and I will never forget.”
The last book written by the Xaverian missionary, “Gratuity and Inner Freedom”.
Certainly a great reversal of our categories… And what can you tell us about God?
«In 1867, after 250 years of isolation, Japan reopened its doors to the world and many scholars flocked to learn about that portion of humanity that had remained secret. In the archives of the shogun, a manuscript was found entitled “西洋紀聞” (Seiyō Kibun – News from the West”) which reports the interrogation of the Confucian scientist Arai Hakuseki to the missionary Giovanni Sidotti, in 1708. The missionary Sidotti had been imprisoned because he had entered illegally into forbidden Japan and because he was the minister of a religion already forbidden by the second shogun in 1614. Arai Hakuseki – this is the name of the scientist who wrote the manuscript – charged by the shogun to investigate the intentions of the invading missionary, carefully noted the many questions asked to Sidotti and the answers received, adding his comments. The following is the personal comment that the scientist wrote down after having investigated the missionary’s concept of God. Here is the note that Arai Hakuseki delivered to the shogun: “According to the European, the Latin term Deus corresponds to our Sōzō no Nushi (the Lord of creation) and indicates the being who directly created the universe. This theory maintains that nothing can originate from itself and that it must necessarily have a creator; then this Deus needed a creator in order to begin to exist. If, instead, Deus could be the origin of himself, why could not nature also self-generate?” (from “The Last Missionary, Renzo Contarini and Augusto Lucap. 117, Italia Press Edizioni)».
Skip the cause and effect criterion…
«Exactly. The fundamental criterion from which the Oriental starts in his search for the right way of existing is not the principle of cause and effect, nor is it the subject who produces and the object produced, nor therefore the distinction between a creator and his creatures, or between the thinking self and the res extensive thought. The Oriental perceives self-generation as the source of being of all that is. The characteristics that differentiate existing things are the DNA intrinsic to self-generation itself. God is divine self-generation, man is human self-generation, natural things are natural self-generation. The many statements that the Westerner subordinates to the main sentence correlating them with the pronoun and the relative adjective, and concluding each with a postscript, these statements in the Oriental language are like brush strokes, each with its own autogenous stamp of intensity. What is autogenous precedes and envelops the distinctions and contradictions that follow one another in the scenario of life. The verb endlessly It serves as a backdrop in whose profound dimension the actors take turns appearing to play their parts.”
It is rightly the mentality that underlies a linguistic conception.
«I will add more. An elderly Japanese priest dictated a reflection to the priests of the diocese of Kagoshima, including myself. At the end of the meeting, somewhat upset, I asked the elderly priest why he had repeatedly said: “I think that God exists” and never clearly: “God exists”. His answer was: “The statement God exists it is without the heartbeat of what is alive. But when I say: I think God existsinside there is the heartbeat of my experience”. The Western church has always been afraid of pantheism and has preached the transcendence of God to the limit of dualism. But where is the transcendence of God if not in the heart of the man who thinks and venerates him? When God as himself and man as himself meet in the verb love conjugated in the form of infinity, then the mystical experience occurs. The unum occurs. I evoke an expression of Scotus Eurigena, a theologian at the court of Charlemagne: “Deus facit omnia et fit (Deus) in omnibus – God does all things and becomes God in all things.”
The language of my native land of green meadows on dry land and that of the land to which I was sent from the rice fields immersed in water, today coexist in me. I feel that it is mine to conjugate the verb according to the personal pronouns: I – you – she/he etc. recognizing in/of what happens the subject and the object. I equally recognize as mine to pronounce the verb in the infinitive involving the subject, the object, the environment, even when it is a serious crime in which one kills and the other is killed. In the crucible of the verb conjugated in a personal way and at the same time of saying it and understanding it in the impersonal mode of infinitedividing with the mind and at the same time unifying with the heart, in this fruitful tension the echo of the true nature of what exists and happens, always truer and deeper than what a single culture can recite. I join my hands – gassho- and I say: Amen! So it is!
In my latest book entitled “Gratuity and Inner Freedom – Climbing with Bare Hands”, which I dare to recommend reading, is my bold attempt to sketch the face of man that today I understand and contemplate as more noble, more vigorous, closer to God than when I thought of him with the sole contribution of my native Western culture.
How do you want to end the interview?
«I end by reporting a verse from the Divine Comedy in which a verb in the infinitive form is the unum that includes everything, in the distinction: “Amor, ch’a nullo amato to love “forgive” (Inferno V 103).