And are the Japanese Jewish?—asks this great Pink Tentacle post, from a series on Japanese urban legends. Even with the urban-legend disclaimer, the wording of the post repeatedly assumes that there really is (or was) an Ark of the Covenant.

I wonder why we feel the need even to speculate about “lost artifacts” and apocryphal heroes. Do we find it cathartic to imagine that there was a Seal of Sulayman, a Rod of Aaron, a Sword of Roland—at some point—and we’ve merely degenerated, been scattered in an ur-diaspora (courtesy Babel, the Deluge), losing our physical links back to the Divine?

That any one of us could find tomorrow our own Lost Tablet or Holy Horseshoe and so become the future Sulayman, Frodo, or Per-Ce-Val—”Through the Veil,” the vale of the shadow of mortality, through all the way to the gnostic-mysterious Origin of our very Being?

The Japanese talkshow clip is pure entertainment, of course, as is the first Indiana Jones. The whole Pink Tentacle post is entertainment. But the comments reveal how seriously and variously we take questions of national identity and religious ipseity.

For me, the convergence of entertainment and serious give-a-shit-ness is where fiction comes in. These “fabled lost somethingerother of Ancientplace!” para-connections between remote peoples and times make for great fiction, unless Dan Brown hears about them. (My favorite consequence of the search for the [Japanese] Ark: The government named the supposed Ark-locus “Tsurugi-san Quasi-National Park.”)

And, yes, if some lost Middle Eastern influence did end up all the way on the remote slopes of Tsurugi-san in Shikoku—if the Ark did indeed cometh out of Israel or Babylon, then somehow into Japan—I would want to know more, as a historian—a conscientious fabulist, playing around with a limited set of signs-of-things-that-supposedly-happened, drawn from certain sets of texts.

But I wonder just how many other schizoid theories there are out there—of the secret still-attainable flat earth/lost tribe/Dead Sea Powerscroll/ancient biblical ninja powersword/lost Powerthirst flavor (Ark Lite), and so on—floating around, begging to be entertained, like Tourette’s-afflicted children, in Japan and here in New York—and especially on the internet. The number must be staggering.

Eventually, we must all be the “lost tribe” of some other tribe, one not lost to itself.