by liberal japonicus
Despite the title, this post has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Actually, nothing to do with anything but 2 monkeys and their connections.
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"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
I was hoping you would elaborate on this a bit. But I realize it’s a non-politics post. Maybe another time.
Most of my experience with manga stems from my wife’s infatuation with One Piece. Primarily the animated TV series, although we’ve also seen the live action adaption. Hero’s name: Monkey D. Luffy. [emphasis added]
Of interest is that characters can gain (a) super power by eating a Devil Fruit. But they don’t seem to have any control over, or way to predict, just what super power it will be. Those super powers all seem to take some work to master, and all seem to have some weakness which can be exploited by enemies. Other characters have extreme skills of one kind or another.
Hey look, another chance at a long [tangent] from me…
I understand how Loki got shoehorned into the role of a “trickster god” by Joseph Campbell and other comparative mythologists, and I especially understand how that characterization has been picked up and built upon by a lot of pop culture. As someone who has spent a lot of time with the Old Norse archive, though, I think this version of Loki really misses the role he actually played in Norse Literature.
The real trickster among the Aesir is not Loki, it’s Odin. Odin is the one who defies propriety and gender roles to learn women’s magic (seidh – learned from Freya in exchange for her receiving half of the battle-slain) so that he could gain insight into the future. He’s also the one who associates with those outside of the kin group in order to protect that group by using dodgy means.
Loki is a part of that. He is, by blood (giantish) and character, an enemy of the Aesir/Vanir. He is an utangardr (one from outside the walls), where Odin is inangardr. The only reason he is allowed into the homes of the Aesir/Vanir is through his blood bond with Odin. Odin keeps him around because he has to accomplish dodgy shit in his mission to keep Ragnarök at bay, and none of the other Aesir/Vanir is willing to bend from law and custom. Odin is willing to violate taboos and cultural norms to get stuff done, but he can only go so far. He cannot risk putting himself outside of the law, so he keeps Loki around to do the things that would get someone outlawed.
And sure enough, Loki does get himself outlawed after he violates hospitality laws and hurls deadly insults at his hosts.
It’s only after the comparativists come in and start trying to map Norse myth onto Greek/Roman pantheons, and then try to further schematize things to fit an idea of Proto-Indo-European origins, that Loki gets turned into a trickster figure and eventual edgelord hero. The Old Norse wanted nothing to do with him.
[/tangent]
The narratives in the Abrahamic religions tend to be set more of a historical context. That is, the actors are presented as real human figures who lived in particular places and times.
In that context, I’d say the trickster figure in that tradition is Jacob. Supplanted his brother and stole his inheritance by guile, repaid his father-in-law Laban’s deception around his marriageable daughters by engineering spotted progeny in the herd of sheep he managed (and so got to keep). Wrestled an angel all night for a blessing. And so on.
There’s actually a lot of… hinky behavior in the Genesis narrative – Abraham pretending his wife was his sister (twice!), Joseph concealing his identity from his brothers, and so on.
But Jacob is the guy for whom tricksy behavior and sharp dealing seems part of his identity as a character.
Odin keeps him around because he has to accomplish dodgy shit in his mission to keep Ragnarök at bay, and none of the other Aesir/Vanir is willing to bend from law and custom.
The main purpose for all the tricksters in mythology seems to be breaking rules. That could be an interesting discussion.
Go. Write. Post.
Everyone, that’s really fun stuff, and nous, a really nice inversion. So would you say the story of Loki and Baldr, which seems like typical trickster shit, is like a retcon?
Quick tldr, Baldr is the cool handsome kid and is invulnerable to everything because his mom Frigg got everything to promise never to hurt him. Of course, she missed mistletoe (which has a particular resonance with Celtic mysticism and gets imported into Christmas, so that figures). So Loki gets a party game going where all the gods throw shit at Baldr and it just bounces off of him. As everyone’s mom used to say, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. In this case, Baldr’s twin brother, Hodur (which was the inspiration for George RR Martin’s Hodor), who was blind, was left out, so Loki says come on, join in and gives him a twig of misletoe and guides his arm. And of course, it pierces Baldr’s heart and kills him and the gods lose it. Baldr goes down to Hell and his mom follows and pleads for his release. Hel, ruler of the underworld, says ok, if you can get everything in creation to weep for Baldr. Spoiler, one giantess (who may be Loki in disguise) refuses to, so Baldr stays put and when the gods discover it was Loki shapeshifting, they bind him to a rock with a poisonous snake.
So the story has overtones of Sisyphus (another trickster) and with the whole bringing back Baldr, you have the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Though it does make Loki out to be a shit (he supposedly did it because he was jealous of Baldr)
When I was looking up Trickster gods, it noted that the trickster god role in Africa is often taken up by a spider, which had me wondering if the story of Arachne and Athena, which I thought was a creation of Ovid, might be related, but gemini says they aren’t. Who you going to believe, an LLM or your pet theory?
Wj’s observation that Monkey D Luffy is an homage to Dragonball is spot on. Eichiro Oda, who does One Piece (and is from where I live!) has often said how much he idolizes Toriyama and he actually redrew the entire volume 42, which was the last volume in the original series, as a tribute. If the Thai students are really manga heads, I’ll bring this up and send them to the prefectural office to see this.
https://kumamoto-guide.jp/en/spots/detail/368
And the question about Abrahamic religions, sure, let’s go there. I’ve never really delved into Old Testament as myth, something actively discouraged by my sunday school bible training, but my primary memory of Jacob is going up the ladder and talking to God, which seems to open up the possibility of trickster. A Joseph Smith jr. for biblical times.
But my thinking is that because people think that the Bible is somehow historical fact (or ignore it because they don’t want to get in fights) has them fail to see how people and situations are archetypes and that we are placed in those situations in the process of living our lives. For Abrahamic religions, you have people who take their texts as actual historic truth. While the thread passes through a lot of anti-Muslim rhetoric, you’ve got a place like the Ark Encounter, as well as Israelis right wingers arguing for Greater Israel. All of these seem like taking mythological tales and attributing them a historical truth. Of course, Socrates ran up against the same thing on his way to a hemlock chaser, so it’s not like mythic thinking is a guard.
Anyway, this was probably too long, but keep the observations coming!
I’d love to take credit. But I didn’t, at least not consciously.
What bugs me particularly is how often obvious figures of speech are translated and taken literally. A couple of examples:
And that ignores cases of simple mis-translations, due to the different ways different languages parse the world. Hebrew, like English, distinguishes conceptually between a young woman and a virgin; Latin does not. So a prophecy that “A young woman shall conceive,” doesn’t actually require a virgin birth.
It seems like the literalists are aware of the potential problem. Hence their insistence that the translations were all divinely inspired. Avoids numerous awkward facts.
lj – So would you say the story of Loki and Baldr, which seems like typical trickster shit, is like a retcon?
The version of the Death of Baldur that you somewhat recount comes from Snorri Sturluson, recorded about 300 years after the Icelandic conversion to Christianity. The story of Baldur’s death itself is very old – it appears on gold bracteates dating to the Migration Era – but not much is known about the details of the myth outside of Sturluson’s Eddas and Saxo’s Gestae Danorum, which gives a different version of the story (Balderus and Høderus fight over a woman, Balderus wins, Høderus kills Balderus with a sword made of mistletoe). I’m glossing Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology here. He’s the most thorough source I have for documenting the archive.
In the eddic poem Lokasena, Loki does brag that he is the one who made it so that Baldur will never ride home again, but neither that nor the other eddic poems confirm the details of the story as told by Sturluson in the Prose Edda.
The Danish version ties Baldur to the royal family of Denmark, don’t know if that lends more weight to the Danish version as given by Saxo or not.
Give all this, the story itself is a bit of a mystery, and I would not put any bearing weight on Sturluson’s account of it. Sadly, it’s one of our only extant versions.
Also, Simek confirms that there are no known Scandinavian place names dedicated to Loki, nor are there any known religious sites for him, and the bits of folklore we do have that survived are mostly the sort of little things done to try to avoid the “god’s” notice.
One further note about Odin as trickster – in the Lokasena, Loki insults Odin by saying that he is treacherous as a god of victory, often leading the stronger side to lose. That would fit with the idea of Odin being wholly concerned with staving off Ragnarök, taking the strongest of the slain to fight with him at the last battle.
though his character was invented after the OT, Satan sometimes is a tricky troublemaker in Christianity. and Islam has Iblis (and his devils).
cleek – interesting possible connection between the figure of Satan and of Loki in scholarly debate…
Milton scholars are divided over what inspired Milton’s characterization of Satan in Paradise Lost. Some scholars posit influence from the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Another group points to the possibility of Milton having had access to the Junius II manuscript, which contains the Anglo-Saxon account of Genesis and, in particular, an imaginative addition referred to as “Genesis B,” in which Satan expresses sentiments and grievances surprisingly like those in Paradise Lost.
The reason why this has drawn parallels to Loki is because in “Genesis B” Satan has not just been cast into hell, but has been bound there by chains meant to keep him there so that he cannot wage war against The Almighty. Given that the language here is Anglo Saxon, medievalists have pointed out the parallels between Satan here and Loki, bound in Hel, and between the description of the angelic rebellion and of Ragnarök.
No proof of a connection, or of Milton having actually read the manuscript, but this sort of thing is catnip to academics.
Meanwhile, Elaine Pagels also posits in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent that Satan started out as a tricksterish figure in Abrahamic myth before developing into a sort of anti-god.
Another take on the concept of a trickster is to see it as a change agent, as chaos, as potential and creativity. I am TOTALLY ignorant on this topic, but I did read an essay published by one of the Ojibwe nations about the role of Hare who is called a trickster by anthologists. Hare often gets in trouble by trying to be tricky and thus harms himself. This pattern jostles others into actions they might not have taken, often to their benefit.
Wonkie, you might be thinking of the book by Paul Radin, a student of Franz Boas. If anyone wants to check out his book on it, it is here
https://ignca.gov.in/Asi_data/4517.pdf
Since we’re going there anyway…
Pantheons that include a trickster have the trickster break rules that sometimes works out well. Eg, multiple pantheons where the trickster steals fire from one or more of the other gods and gives it to mortals. Some of the Southwestern Coyote stories go even farther, with Coyote stealing light in the form of the sun, moon, and stars and making those available to the benefit of mortals.
That sort of origin story simply doesn’t work in the Abrahamic religions.
Since lj is mentioning Radin, I’ll drop this in the discussion, which represents my attempt to sort out the origin of the concept of the trickster as a mythological type (not the origin of stories that feature what we would now call a trickster figure, but the origin of the taxonomy), all in response to Michael Caine’s request for more on the topic.
So to start off, I do what every modern student does and head straightaway to find out what Wikipedia has to say about the topic as a springboard to a deeper dive. And what I get is this…
To which the first year writing professor in me immediately responds with “Wonderful, it’s a ‘Since the beginning of time…’ introduction, and starts skimming for some moment of actual engagement or analysis with the concept beyond summarizing concepts and making lists. Alas, to no avail. There is nothing like a genealogy of the idea, or any indication of why it is that this particular concept has wormed its way so firmly into general usage to become a foundational concept. Sometimes a Wiki article manages to transcend this tendency and go somewhere useful. This one does not.
I’m inherently suspicious of concepts that have shed their contexts and genealogies to become timeless and monlithic.
So begins my archaeological dig into the concept.
Two names that frequently get associated with the concept of the trickster are the Brothers Grimm and Vladimir Propp (who assembled a grand typology of Russian fairy tales), who are often mentioned as collectors of many tales featuring classic trickster figures, but neither of these ever seem to have used the concept thematically, nor used their own equivalent of the term to describe these figures. From what I can tell, the concept of a class of mythological entities that can be typified as “tricksters” dates back to the latter half of the nineteenth century with American antiquarian Daniel G. Brinton writing about Native American tribal mythologies in his essay “The Hero-God of the Algonkins as a Cheat and Liar” in 1885. From there the term gets adopted by other folklorists of Native American mythology, like Franz Boas who studied the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and on to Paul Radin, who worked to systematize the various sources starting in the 1920s and culminating in 1957 in his book The Trickster : A Study In American Indian Mythology. We’ll return to it in a moment. But first…
In the mean time, another figure enters the chat – Joseph Campbell – whose grand mythological bouillabaisse so fascinates Bill Moyers and pretty much anyone else not inclined to actually do the reading (I’m looking at you, George Lucas). Campbell takes mythology assembled from everywhere with the serial numbers filed off of it à la Frazier’s Golden Bough, throws it in a pot with a heaping serving of Jungian psychology, then plates it all with an eye towards James Joyce’s Ulysses. Somewhere in the cooking he adds a dash of the trickster concept to the descent-and-return motif, and the ground has been prepared for the trickster archetype to bloom in every garden. He publishes The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1949.
And that brings us back to Radin’s The Trickster…. When Radin is writing his magnum opus, he enlists the input of Jung and of Karl Kerenyi to add some heft to the underlying ideas and give the concept more universality. Jung ties the Trickster to the shadow side of humanity’s collective unconscious and the trickster takes on the role of the mediator between two irreconcilable concepts.
Yep, the mythologizing of the dialectic. Thesis/antithesis/synthesis as a modern day god for anyone who is brave enough to confront their shadow side. And all just in time for the explosion of the counterculture. Just a few years later, Levi-Strauss also gets on the bandwagon with his Structural Anthropology, but it’s really the mixture of Campbell and Jung that kicks things into high gear and makes it all spill over into popular culture.
I haven’t worked out yet quite how Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Discordianism manages to exert outsized influence in the neopagan ciricles that grew out of this counterculture, but I know it’s there alongside Stranger in a Strange Land so feel free to speculate there if you wish.
For my part, I was surprised to find how very recent the concept of a trickster god was, and how beholden to Jungian psychology it was.
Fascinating discussion. For some reason I immediately thought of the Lord of Misrule tradition, and when I tried to work out what the connection was, all I could really come up with was that both seem to represent the human need for inversion…..
A few notes to add to nous summary (thanks).
I too was surprised at the recency of the trickster and it was interesting that Radin wrote about it in the late 50’s given that he was a student of Boas, who is late 19th century/early 20th. Radin must have been in his 70’s when he wrote the book mentioned. Something to think about when you hear bitching about the gerentocracy.
Boas came to the US from Germany with an ax to grind, which was that Primitive people weren’t as primitive as people said, so I give him points for pushing back against the tide of Social Darwinism. A lot of the research was linguistics, trying to figure out why you had this patchwork of languages and cultures in the US. Brinton, mentioned by nous, was appointed professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at UPenn, becoming the first Anthro professor in the US. He liked the theory of psychic unity, which was that people were people, but then argued that what particular races did with those building blocks determined their evolutionary advance (boo!). This was opposed by Radin’s teacher Boas, who argued for cultural relativism, with no culture being superior to another. (yay!) Though I wonder how they would deal with MAGA culture…
But you had both Brinton (under the guise of psychic unity) and Boas, (who argued that no culture was superior to another) pushing the trickster and linking it to Western mythic figures like Loki and Hermes. The whole idea is foundational to studying Native American culture and linguistics, cause you had all these field anthropologists collecting trickster tales which then gives you your data for study.
However, most linguists dealing with NA languages are not really chasing Jung, but are more obsessed with their particular language family and take a more romantic approach, thinking well, I’m sure there’s something to that trickster stuff. I recall a presentation about something related to a Coyote tale, maybe from the Southwest by 2 people and just before the conference, one of the presenters had to have emergency eye surgery and the other presenter said, well, what do you expect, we are talking about Coyote and everyone kind of nodded, and probably thought yeah, that makes sense.
https://hofstra.github.io/coyote/sources/coyote-as-trickster/myths/opler-lipan-apache-coyote-eyes/
The whole site is pretty interesting and I got to looking at it when my wife asked me if it was kay-yot or kay-yot-tee.
My recollection (It’s been half a century since I was a Cultural Anthropology major) is that it distinguishes cultures and sub-cultures. MAGA would be a subculture of the general American culture. That is, something which shares the vast majority of features with the general culture, while having multiple features which are peculiar to itself. It can take exposure to foreign cultures to realize just how much the subculture share with the general culture. But be assured, you have an enormous number of points of cultural agreement with MAGAs.
Cultural relativism is about understanding a culture (or subculture) in its own terms. Look at how its cultural norms work for the benefit of its members — how they impact others from outside the culture is irrelevant.
Look at it this way. You, in your culture, may find certain features of another culture peculiar or even abhorrent. But your opinion is irrelevant because you are not part of the culture. In short, cultural relativism rejects the concept of universality between cultures. Your views on, for example, universal human rights are just that: your views. Another culture may have other, equally valid, views of what constitute human rights which ought to be universal.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t try to change features of your culture that you dislike.** Cultures change constantly. (There’s an entire specialty withing Cultural Anthropology which focuses of how that change happens.) Anyone who demands that their culture never change might as well argue that the sun circles the earth or that gravity doesn’t apply to people and inanimate objects equally. That just ain’t the way the universe works.
Sometimes those changes are apparently adjustments to external forces. If you contact a different culture, a lot of people in your culture may find something new and attractive there and embrace it — see the impact of Hollywood, or of K-pop, outside their culture of origin. Or economic forces force an adjustment — think the spread of the railroads or cell phones. Nobody said: let’s change our culture. But it happened anyway.
Other changes are the result of conscious effort by some group. Think of women’s sufferage or gay marriage. This tends to generate more pushback, partly because pushback can work more successfully. But what is more common is change in fits and starts. Or, if you prefer, two steps forward, one step back. Which is very irritating for advocates of the change, who typically have trouble taking a long view of just how much change they have made successfully.
** You can also try to change features of other cultures that you dislike. Just don’t try to convince a believer in cultural relativism that you are morally correct in any univerally vaild sense.
In the mean time, another figure enters the chat – Joseph Campbell – whose grand mythological bouillabaisse so fascinates Bill Moyers and pretty much anyone else not inclined to actually do the reading (I’m looking at you, George Lucas). Campbell takes mythology assembled from everywhere with the serial numbers filed off of it à la Frazier’s Golden Bough, throws it in a pot with a heaping serving of Jungian psychology, then plates it all with an eye towards James Joyce’s Ulysses. Somewhere in the cooking he adds a dash of the trickster concept to the descent-and-return motif, and the ground has been prepared for the trickster archetype to bloom in every garden. He publishes The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1949.
Just wanted to see that paragraph again. Thanks for my laugh of the year, nous.
Cultural relativism is about understanding a culture (or subculture) in its own terms. Look at how its cultural norms work for the benefit of its members — how they impact others from outside the culture is irrelevant.
Hmmm, I think the first part is right, but the second part is problematic. Certainly, no culture, with the possible exception of the Sentinelese, is exists in a vacuum, so you are moving from cultural relativism to ethical relativism. It seems like the second statement could be used to justify anything. Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn’t become a moral compass.
The point is, everybody thinks that their morals are, and should be, universal and applied to all of humanity. But nobody has found anything resembling an objective way to prove that. (Just like nobody has found an objective way to show which religion is right.) Hence “relativism.”
The people who you think are behaving immorally, presuming they are from another culture, have their own ideas about what is moral behavior. And probably wish to apply that moral compass to correcting your behavior.
All that cultural relativism says is that immoral behavior should be identified as doing something that your own culture considers immoral. Which may be part of pushing your culture to change. But that doesn’t change how it will be viewed initially by other members of your culture.
To return to the earlier question, cultural relativism would look at MAGAs and say: this is how those who hold their culture’s old morals inevitably react when the changes to the culture are past the tipping point. It’s a hysterical attempt to turn back a clock. In most cases, even if it is briefly successful, it will be seen in retrospect as a last gasp.
Are you saying that there are no objective morals? And no one has any grounds to criticize cultures that fall short of those morals?
lj – Hmmm, I think the first part is right, but the second part is problematic. Certainly, no culture, with the possible exception of the Sentinelese, exists in a vacuum, so you are moving from cultural relativism to ethical relativism. It seems like the second statement could be used to justify anything. Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn’t become a moral compass.
I think part of wj’s framing comes from it being an undergraduate major. A lot of the instruction and reading would be aimed at preparing the students to engage in ethnographic fieldwork, be ready to record observations with thick description, and keep an open mind about what they were observing with no preconceptions or biases. From that perspective, of course one doesn’t want to import any judgments that might get in the way of listening and understanding.
I remember early on in grad school having my MA advisor tell me that my first paper written for her class would be a fantastic undergrad lecture, but it had not established a critical perspective from which to make a scholarly intervention in the discourse. That was a really important transitional moment for me, prodding me to stop writing as a student trying to display my understanding of the subject to a teacher, and start writing as an early career authority with something worthwhile to say to a more experienced community of academics. I’m sure wj experienced something like this as he moved into his eventual field of expertise, and his undergrad work helped to prepare him for that.
I think wj’s explanation works fine as a set of guiding principles for the initial cultural engagement and gathering of data. At some point, though, I agree that one has to start making some judgments, and figure out how to engage more critically, and start to try to negotiate a shared understanding that bridges the worldviews in a way that is fair and accurate for the culture being observed without giving up the value that can be added by bringing an outside perspective.
That transition is the trickiest bit, and requires so much epistemic humility to be done well.
I’m saying that morals arise out of, and are part of, particular cultures. Certainly you can criticize other cultures for falling short of your morals. But can you demonstrate that your morals on a particular point are superior to theirs? A demonstration which would convince someone from a culture which doesn’t happen to have a position on the issue, and is therefore arguably objective.
There are some moral precepts which are, if not quite universal, are very widespread. You can probably make a decent argument that the anomalies have missed the boat somehow. But it’s also possible that they got it right, and the rest of us will eventually get it right, too.
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal. But gay marriage did not (to my knowledge) occur anywhere, was not even raised as a serious possibility, until the last few decades. There might be recognized relationships, but they were not (and nobody in their culture would have characterized them as being) marriage. Was that universal rejection of the idea a universal moral precept? Are those places which still reject it being immoral for doing what everybody in the world did a century ago?
Doubtless where I picked it up initially. On the other hand, that particular framing didn’t change when I was in grad school. It seemed to be a solid feature of the subculture which was Anthropology at UC Berkeley in the late 60s (undergraduate) and early 70s (grad school).
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up. Well, I’m pretty sure gay people have partnered up through history. Every small southern town had their two spinsters who were living together while President James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor, roomed with a politician from Alabama for 10 years before he became president (and the roommate passed away before Buchanan became president). So why is that not ‘marriage’?
But when a lot of people talk about marriage, they are thinking about wedding cake, or licenses, or getting drunk at receptions. But those are certainly not universal, but it is easy to have the lines blur between what is the core and what is peripheral. In addition, there are a lot of things associated with marriage that, if we acknowledge some set of universal human rights, we can’t simply say oh, we have to accept that. Dowries? Father giving away the daughter? Understanding it requires understanding the social networks and all the other anthro sort of things, but it’s just a conservative conceit that this means researchers _defend_ those practices. You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can’t be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.
“I assume you mean partnering up”
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought. It seemed obvious to me that wj meant marriage in the legal sense, ie conferring the same rights and responsibilities as with any other legally married couple. wj, what did you mean?
Actually, no. That’s exactly what I don’t mean. Because, as you say, partnering up has been going on forever.
What I mean is a socially recognized partnering, one which confers various rights and obligations which the culture recognizes and will enforce. Sometimes there are legal processes involved. But even if a particular culture doesn’t do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.
If it will help (and the terms are still in use), consider the difference, in American culture, between “getting married” and “shacking up.” The obvious difference being that, if you’re married, you can’t just walk away and it’s over. Not only are there legal consequences, those around you will expect you to provide for the other party appropriately. Whereas, if you’re shacked up, you can pack and move out, and nobody will expect you to do anything else.
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought.
Across time? I’ll forgo a deep dive, but the Asian words are all about creating family ties rather than any kind of intimacy or family unit implication, which may be why for Japanese, you have this strange combination of citizenship being represented as an individual passport and having/being listed on a koseki (family register) Just cause it gets translated as ‘marriage’ doesn’t mean that it is.