Their
name appeared everywhere. In the neon signs announcing their next appearance,
on the helmets of baseball players, as tattoos on the arms of young men and the
ankles of young women. The whole nation felt good. It was as if some magic dust
had been sprinkled over the land by the songs of The Kizunas – a coating of
grace and enlightenment. People began to reassess their lives, heeding the
songs’ messages, which reminded them of the important things in life, as well
as its brevity and impermanence. Family members who had not met up for years
began to make efforts to renew contacts with their kin; there was forgiveness
for the absentees and the runaways, the divorcees and the lost contacts. Nobody
could quite explain how such a feeling, such a mentality, had suddenly gripped
the nation. That the Kizunas had triggered such emotions with their music was
in no doubt, but how it had happened at this precise time and to this extent
was still under debate. A flash in the pan? A short-lived fad? Or a permanent
change in the mindset? A famous psychologist explained as follows:
This is a
good example of what is known in our field as the Schilstrom-Richtblufter
Effect. There is what we call an intra-psychosertive desire within people to
manifest a behaviour, feeling, or habit, which needs an extra-psychoadsertive
contrareflexive stimulus to release a series of emotions acting as pre-parietal
hippocampial reflex agents. In other words, if a behaviour is suggested to you
as being desirable, it will be readily embraced and even enhanced further if
the initial desire, no matter how deeply buried or concealed, is present. The
Kizunas are spreading a message that a lot of people have found that they need.
It’s nothing new; it was always there.It just needed an exogenous impetus to
generate an endogenous reaction. And it’s a common phenomenon, with many
examples existing in every culture. One famous equivalent could be the Flower
Power movement at the end of the 1960s, and it is likely that the impact of The
Kizunas will last for about the same length of time. It does not necessarily
mean that the pervasive feeling or trend will disappear, but there is always a
thinning out, a decline, or a transformation to mask the original phenomenon,
even though it could actually continue for a long time, albeit in a less
conspicuous form.
Meanwhile, The Kizunas were still flying high.
