Asia Wilson Quotes

Unlike native’ peoples in Africa and Asia, indigenous Americans have not decolonized, and we have not been forced - or allowed ourselves - to see them in a fundamentally different role. Instead, we have more and more involved variations on the same basic theme which, like layers of calloused skin built up over a raw nerve, still effectively distance America from the fact that it grew to greatness by dispossessing and almost exterminating another people. Refracted through the culture of the most powerful society on earth - and the culture which, more than any other, has moulded the twentieth-century imagination - these stereotypes are now so deeply engrained in our consciousness that they seem almost immovable.

Preachers of the gospel must also be students of the culture they are sent to. A minister must be a student of the Word, but he must also be a student of men. He must study them—not just men generally, but the men of his own era, the men to whom he is charged to bring the gospel. When the Lord speaks to each of the angels of the seven churches of Asia, the message for each church is different. Same gospel, different sins, and so a different message applying that gospel.

According to philologist John Allegro in his speculative The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, these links between eros and religion also link back to mind drugs – specifically, to the phallic-looking amanita muscaria mushroom, whose effects are similar to belladonna’s, and which is still used for magic purposes by Siberian shamans. Moreover, according to Allegro’s hypothesis, it was worshipped as a god throughout Europe and Asia in the late Stone Age.

We'd incorporated Asia into our bones - its colours and laughter, its smells, its rhythms, its tolerance and patience, its compassion, its lack of ageism.

In much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, sturdy majorities considered the whole thing a U.S. plot or accident, probably a failed attempt to create some kind of SDI defense system. I had once asked Jason why this was. He said, “Consider what we’re asking them to believe. We’re talking about, globally, a population with an almost pre-Newtonian grasp of astronomy.

So I was surprised to learn that actually most of Japan’s current food culture was invented very recently—in living memory, in fact. Barak Kushner, who is professor of East Asian History at Cambridge, has explained that, until the 1920s, Japanese cooking was just “not very good”—fresh fish was eaten only once a week, the diet was dangerously low in protein, and even the techniques of stewing or stir-frying weren’t used. Life expectancy was forty-seven. He told the food writer Bee Wilson: “Japanese culture is neither timeless nor unchanging.” It was only when Japan’s imperialist government was creating an army to attack other parts of Asia that they were disturbed that the population ate so badly and was so weak, and a new food culture began to be invented, quite consciously, to produce healthier soldiers. After the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, when the country was in ruins, the new democratic government realized that if they didn’t have a healthy population, they would have nothing, and they stepped up this transformation. “The Japanese only really started eating what we think of as Japanese food in the years after the Second World War,” Bee says. “Instead of being dispirited by the way the Japanese eat, we should be encouraged by it. Japan shows the extent to which food habits evolve.