Byline: Tokyo
Genghis Khan made sure his body was hidden so it couldn’t be found and desecrated. He probably left orders to kill the team that buried him. George Pullman had ten feet of concrete poured over his casket for the same reason. Many a potential martyr has found his or her ashes scattered by their executors so future pilgrims could not find a place to worship the deceased.
I would like to worship at the sacred alter of Commerce. The two founding centers of modern commerce were Amsterdam and Scotland. Amsterdam invented bonds and the way to raise taxes to support bonds. Scotland, in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, created the industrial mind that generated future industrial leaders to cover the planet.
The capitals of modern commerce would certainly have to be the United States and Japan. There is no specific place in the U.S. to treat as a sacred commercial center. Manhattan may have once qualified for that honor, but today the entire society is a sacred center of modern commerce. (I don’t even make an exception for Berkeley or Santa Monica -- these cities make significant contributions to modern commerce in spite of a few local anti-commercial radicals.)
Japan is another story. Tokyo is much larger than New York City and much more important to the total management of global Japanese commerce. Therefore I consider the city of Tokyo a major sacred center of modern commerce.
Where to go in Tokyo to worship the goddess of modern commerce? Tokyo is large, but scattered. The center is distributed over an area the size of Manhattan, referred to locally as the Yamanote Circle. The Yamanote is a train line that circles the dense part of downtown in about an hour. (There are trains every 3-5 minutes going both directions around the circle.).
I’ve considered making the Tokyo international airport the sacred center. I’ve considered the major telecom satellite dishes as a potential sacred center; similarly one could choose the place where undersea fiber optic lines converge in Tokyo. I could choose the tallest building or tower that has a 360 degree view of the city. I could choose a station on the Yamanote line.
I have come to realize the sacred goddess of commerce can not be worshipped in one geographic spot, nor can she be desecreated.
In the end, I bow to the four points of the compass every morning in front of our Tokyo home and appreciate the inherent decentralized nature of my beloved goddess.