Christ! On!

I'm neither of the people in this photo.

This photo is of two weird men at a restuarant in Osaka called Christon. The man on the right is a waiter. They are not in a church, they are in a restaurant.

I went to this restaurant a few times, once with a friend (M) who enjoyed himself immensely. We ordered a kind of peach champagne that the menu promised would leave a "fizzy reverberation in our behinds", but failed to deliver.

The people who run this chain (they also do Buddha), bought all their authentic Catholic iconography in Spain and shipped it to Japan to be used as decor in restaurants. That's right, it's not even fake, all those Virgin Mary's were once in churches, were once objects of prayer.

It is all peculiarly offensive and laughable at the same time.

Detaching the sacred and associating it with the profane is jarring. Curiously associating evil with the profane is also jarring.

As this blog puts it:

Yet for much of the world, Hitler and the Nazis are no more than an obscure historical reference--a vague association with Germany. So, in far-flung places like Mumbai or South Korea, when you think of beer, you think of Germany, and when you think of Germany, you naturally think of Hitler.

True.

Which leads me back to 300.