Japanese skinship, food and communion with kami

I have ardent dietary, emotional and other featured "skinship" bonds with Japanese customs and formalities. My mother died when I was still more or less a child. Afterwards I began to live with a Japanese American family in Diamond Bar. In this way, my second mother was Japanese. This is where it started.

Focusing on food, I suppose in ancient agrarian times the Japanese were essentially vegetarian subsisting primarily on rice and preserved vegetables. Consumption of meat, fish or any sort of animal by-product was probably rare. Bauddha instilled morality was also likely well in place, and as the islands were abundant in enzyme-rich forest herbs and other items the Japanese used these materials to develop incredibly creative and subtle ways of nutritionally enhancing and flavoring their food. Such patterns of food preparation and eating were furthermore seen as a means for people uniting themselves with numinous qualities of nature and thought through a kind of ontic absorption, both with and in the presence of local spirits traditionally conceived as kami.

Later as an undergraduate student of philosophy I studied with Professor Floyd H. Ross who had lived in Japan on several Fulbright Scholarship periods and wrote an influential study titled, Shinto: The Way of Japan (1965).