Error #9

Never Try to Please Your Mother

Japan is the safest country in the world. My mom was thrilled. I was not.

It was late August, and I was following a hundred and fifty old men in white along a remote mountain ridge in the Dewa Sanzan Mountains. They were Yamabushi, a 1400-year-old Japanese ascetic cult, doing their annual pilgrimage to worship at a series of sacred lakes, trees, and waterfalls. I was a gadfly, lying in wait to film them as they crossed rivers and navigated steep hillsides, asking annoying questions during breaks like "what does your wife think about your doing this?". At one point I stepped off the path to film a group of them as they walked by. I was kneeling on a sandy slope that eventually led to a drop-off. The Yamabushi froze. I heard a curious buzzing noise, like a hornet’s nest after you’ve hit it with a stick. It was the sound of 30 men sucking the air in through their teeth. "Come back from there," one of them said, very gently, as though talking to a jumper on the 52nd floor. I glanced behind me. The drop-off was over twenty feet away, and I was solid as a rock. "No problem," I said, "I’m fine." And then it dawned on me -- it was that hierarchy thing again. Even though they were under no obligation to take care of me, the Yamabushi organizers were much higher in the food chain than I was and were therefore responsible for everything I did. In other words, I was about to commit political suicide long before I was in any danger of the real thing. I got off the slope. I apologized, profusely. I was forgiven, barely. After that, when I wanted to shoot stuff like the edge of a waterfall, I waited until everyone had gone on ahead.

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