Headline August 22, 2018/ '' ' *HUMANNESS IN HAMPERS-WE* ' ''

'' ' *HUMANNESS IN HAMPERS-WE* ' ''

EVEN THE DEAD are treated as humans in Japan. After my mother-in-law passed away in February, her closest relatives never stopped chattering to her-

Setting out her favorite drink next to her coffin, applying blush to her waxen cheeks.

My wife stills puts food out for her father five years after he was placed into the earth; this month our son will return home because his departed grandfather and grandmother-

Are believed to be visiting for three days then as well. To me this only confirms the visceral sense many of us have that holiness and humanness maybe more closely entwined than we can imagine.

IN JAPAN, as in its neighbor North Korea, a human is often taken to be part of a unit, a voice in a choir; her job maybe to be invisible, inaudible and all but indistinguishable from those around her.

At the Family Romance company in Tokyo, 1,200 actors stand ready to impersonate, for a price, a child's absent father, for years on end, or a wife's adulterous lover. The Henna-na-Hotel in Nagasaki describes itself as the world's ''first hotel staffed by robots ''.

But all this mean only that the boundaries of what is to to feel human emotion are stretched, to the point of including motes of pollen or the railway carriages people bring presents for.

Speaking to the Dalai Lama for 44 years now, I'm often most touched when he stresses how mortal he is, sometimes impatient, sometimes grieving, just like all the rest of us.

I keep returning to the novels of Graham Greene because he reminds us that a ''whiskey priest'' can get drunk, neglect every duty, yet still rise to a level of kindness and selflessness that a pious cardinal might envy.

It's in our vulnerability, Greene knew, that our strength truly lies if only because our capacity to feel for everyone else lies there, too.

"I've been travelling - to Yemen, to Easter Island, to Ethiopia - to see what humanness might be,  beneath differences of custom and circumstances and race.

I've watched young mothers dodging bullets, children living in garbage dumps, those whose disease has left far from most of the capacities and restraints we associate with being human.

If circumstances change, however, I never doubt that the humanness of just about every one can be recovered.

The first time I visited North Korea, 24 years before my evening on the barge, my guide led me, during my last afternoon in the city, up a hill. It was the just the two of us.

Below were the cutting edge [if often uninhabited] sky - scrapers, the amusement parks and spotless boulevards his government had created of what, only 35 years before, had been rubble, a demolished city in which North Koreans claim, only two building remained upright.

My guide wasn't unworldly; he'd studdied for three years in Pakistan and spoke Urdu and English. He knew that his sense of what it is to lead a human life was very different from mine.

But what he said was, ''Don't listen to my propaganda. Just tell your friends back in America what you've seen here?

Was he going off script for a moment - or only offering an even craftier set of lines his directors had given him?  I couldn't tell.

But I could feel that he was appealing to something human in me and whatever understanding two humans can share, even if they come from the opposite worlds.

Official Pyongyang seems the last world in inhumanity to me, but as my guide kept waving and waving goodbye while I passed through immigration-

I felt with fresh power how no can fully fully deprive us of our humanity but ourselves.
 
The World Students Society - on this sacred moment - wishes the entire mankind every best wish. We pray for peace, prosperity and well-being for the entire mankind.

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''' Honours & Heaves '''

Good Night and God Bless

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