Nam-myoho-renge-kyo

How, while going from the zoo, I find myself making incantations with 200 Japanese.

After visiting the animals of Ueno Zoo, Tokyo, I walk back to my hostel, crossing the park of the same name. Two Japanese women in their early thirties approach me. Usual questions in very uncertain English. " Where do you come from ? What are you doing here ? Oh, you love Japan! ". One of the two in particular speaks 95% to me in Japanese. I only understand what is happening with his intonation and a few mimes.

Nonetheless, I quickly accepted their invitation to accompany them to a Japanese Buddhist prayer session. Without really understanding where and what we are heading, I follow them inside the train.

Twelve stations further on, we land in a more open and a little more vegetal suburb. Tokyo may be the largest city in the world, with 43 million inhabitants, but it is surprisingly human. We walk there a few blocks and enter a square, ordinary concrete building. Like almost everywhere in the land of the rising sun, we take off our shoes and leave them at the entrance.

With my guides, we will see the person in charge of the event. This one puts in my hands what looks like a rosary. The many black balls are completed with a few small white balls hanging in hair. They tell me how to hold it properly. Then I am taught and made to repeat the most important word of the evening: Nam-myōhō-renge-kyō. I'm writing it to remember it better.

This word, which will be repeated endlessly in intervals like an incantation, is in reference to an important text from this Japanese branch of Buddhism called Nichiren Shōshu.

Now knowing how to hold my rosary and repeat my multi-syllable word, we enter a new small room. About fifteen people are already kneeling on the tatami-mat floor. The ceremony begins at the same time and I settle down quickly like them, legs curled up under me, placing my buttocks on my soles.

Trying to keep up with the reading is no small feat.

The Japanese all put out some sort of little booklet at "Prayers in the Church", which printed hundreds of characters in Kanji. My host gives me my booklet and opens it for me on the first page - which is actually the last, the Japanese reading "backwards". She points out the words to me and invites me to follow the hymns ... as if I could follow something!

The sentences that all my neighbors utter with conviction sound like unbroken, monotonic syllables, as if they were just one extremely long word. A few syllables seem to come back and be repeated like mantras.

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Every few minutes, my neighbor leans over to turn the page of my booklet, again as if it really helps me keep up with the reading.

After only ten minutes, I no longer feel my legs in this position at all. I dare not move and sit differently from the group, and I tell myself that my feet will get used to the almost absence of blood circulation. I focus on repeating the only words I know.

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

After about thirty minutes, we come to the end of the libretto and the incantations.

People then quickly leave the room. I try to get up too but I can't even get off the ground on my paralyzed legs.

As my new friends ask me why I stay on the ground, the blood returns to full capacity in my calves. I am lying in the middle of the room, seized with pain. A little humiliated, I ask them for a minute!

But a new group is already coming in to pray. I managed to drag myself outside. The girls then ask me if I would be interested in seeing a Japanese movie. Well yes, why not!

We then go up to the upper floor to enter a new room, this time huge. It must be filled with about two hundred people, here also squatting on the ground, and listening "religiously" to the equivalent of the Lord's Day (the televised mass of Radio-Canada). Not just listening, they sincerely applaud every new person who comes to speak on the microphone in front of a large crowd on the TV show. This is not the Japanese movie I expected!

The girls who invited me here come to pray a few times a week. I ask them if it's still the same movie. “Oh no, they answer me, the film changes every month! "

All good things come to an end and we eventually leave the Great Hall to get back on the train. I leave my devout and welcoming friends as I have to change stations to return to the center of town. On the way to my hostel, I smile all alone on the train, thinking about the events of the last hours. I tell myself once again that the best way to experience travel adventures is to say yes to all great opportunities.