Loyalty

The concept of loyalty has been swirling around in my head lately.

Loyalty or allegiance is not a prominent part of the modern American psychic landscape. It's too connected to old or alien ways, feudal kings and queens, primitive tribes.

I free-associated the word. It connects with solidarity. But solidarity implies more of an idea of equals working together. There's the possibility of power inequality in loyalty. Dogs are the paragon of loyalty. Parents are not loyal to their children. Brothers and sisters are loyal to each other. You're supposed to be loyal to your friends, but not to your parents. Unless you're in a divorce custody case or family feud. Then, you might have "divided loyalties". When it comes to families, loyalty, as long as the family holds together, is absent, or hidden and unspoken.

This helps me puzzle out the way my father thought of his adoption. He has so little connection with any family left. I don't talk about it much, but I miss that feeling of family. My only connection to Japan is through him. Because of a series of events that was triggered before I was born, I have a half-brother that I have never met, and a half-sister I haven't talked to in more than 15 years.

He calls his adoptive parents "stepparents", never talks of them, and has only told me a few bare details about his biological mother and father. But his loyalty lies near his adoptive home, in the mountains west of Tokyo. It's an attachment to place, to clan, to a name, to the spirits of the earth and water. It's not an attachment to people.

More than a hundred years ago, an order came down that everyone (even peasants!), must have a last name. This was part of a sweeping modernization movement. It made a lot of sense. My father's adoptive ancestor went to the records official, who asked him where he lived. When he told them, they wrote that down and it became his last name.

I get a headache thinking about this stuff. It's like I'm wearing a pair of glasses. In one lens, I look at a world where everyone is a separately formed individual moving around in search of love and belonging while trying to be rational. In the other lens, I see half-formed people sprouting from seemingly random webs, sometimes trying desperately to disentangle themselves, with the webs constantly being ripped apart by invisible forces and woven back together again.

I'm not a huge cultural relativist; I believe all humans are basically the same, but they tend to see their worlds in very different ways.