SOUL GOO

Australian Foreign Minister ALEXANDER Downer said, regarding Junichiro Koizumi's pilgrimage to Yasukuni shrine which, in addition to soldiers who died in the second world war, enshrines the remains of several Class A war criminals:

"He (Koizumi) told me, he understood that point of view but that in Japan it wasn't possible to separate souls in a way we might understand in our own culture."

I will be the first to admit the truth of the fact that we in the West do not experience any difficulty in separating one soul from another; we do it all the time, it's like sorting onions. (If any occidental reading this has encountered inseparable souls in their soul-separating activities, please let me know.)

In fact, if you ask me, we in the West are getting a bit cavalier in the ease with which we separate souls. Koizumi has me thinking maybe we should take a more serious look at our approach to this whole psyche-partitioning business, maybe we've been doing it wrong all these millennia (which would explain a lot), and should show a little more respect for what we might call soul cohesion, even soul blending.

On the other hand, further study may reveal cultural differences in the quality and nature of Japanese and Western soul stuff. We'll need some specifics, ideally obtained at the Ministerial level, regarding Japan's soul-separation difficulties: do Japan's prana problems involve some kind of ubergooeyness, like a bag of hard candies left open for a month? Or is it more like a cosmic blender kind of thing? As an obstacle to real-world diplomatic resolution, it would definitely be worthwhile looking into this. Maybe just a little soul sugarcoating, a metempsychotic crowbar, maybe we could even jointly develop some kind of spirit separator...

Koizumi's explanation that Japanese souls can't be separated like souls in the West also seems to indicate his awareness of some fundamental differences between Japanese and Western souls that we of other cultures have never known about, and that we should look into. For example, is this anything like the sticky white rice of Japan vs. our non-sticky long-grain rice that the Japanese will simply not import? And can diet affect soul adhesion?

On the other hand, the souls of the class A war criminals that were sneaked into Yasukuni must have been separate at the time of sneaking (the inseparable is not sneakable); do they have an ubercuisinart there or something? (Once you blend something, it is tough to unblend it.) These are clearly questions of international import. Maybe the UN could take up the subject; they seem to handle the ethereal pretty well.

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