Spirits and Animism in Contempo - Fabio Rambelli

Spirits and Animism in
Contemporary Japan
Also available from Bloomsbury:
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The Sea and the Sacred in Japan, edited by Fabio Rambelli
Spirits and Animism in
Contemporary Japan
The Invisible Empire
Edited by
Fabio Rambelli
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Contents
List of Figures vi
List of Contributors viii
Introduction: The Invisible Empire: Spirits and Animism in Contemporary

Japan Fabio Rambelli 1
1 The Dead Who Remain: Spirits and Changing Views of the
Afterlife Satō Hiroo 17
2 The Mystical “Occident” or the Vibrations of “Modernity” in the Mirror
of Japanese Thought Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm 29
3 A Metaphysics of the Invisible Realm: Minakata Kumagusu on Spirits,
Molds, and the Cosmic Mandala Fabio Rambelli 45
4 New Religious Movements, the Media, and “Japanese Animism”
Ioannis Gaitanidis 65
5 Animated City: Life Force, Guardians, and Contemporary Architecture
in Kyoto Ellen Van Goethem 81
6 Essays in Vagueness: Aspects of Diffused Religiosity in Japan Carina Roth 95
7 Came Back Hounded: A Spectrum of Experiences with Spirits and
Inugami Possession in Contemporary Japan Andrea De Antoni 109
8 The Spirit(s) of Modern Japanese Fiction Rebecca Suter 127
9 Techno-Animism: Japanese Media Artists and their Buddhist and Shinto
Legacy Mauro Arrighi 143
10 Spirit/Medium: Critically Examining the Relationship between Animism
and Animation Jolyon Baraka Thomas 157
11 From Your Name. to Shin-Gojira: Spiritual Crisscrossing, Spatial
Soteriology, and Catastrophic Identity in Contemporary Japanese Visual
Culture Andrea Castiglioni 171
Notes 187
Bibliography 202
Index 226
Figures
1.1 Votive image (kuyōe): four family members who died at different
times spend time together in the afterlife. Courtesy of Jōrakuji, Iwate
Prefecture. Photograph by Satō Hiroo. 17
1.2 Votive image (mukasari ema): scene of a post-mortem marriage
ceremony for a man who died young. Courtesy of Jakushōji, Tendō City,
Yamagata Prefecture. Photograph by Satō Hiroo. 18
1.3 Kumano kanjin jikkai mandara (visualization mandala of the ten realms
of transmigration as they are found in Kumano). Courtesy of Hōshōji,
Akita City, Akita Prefecture. Photograph by Satō Hiroo. 23
3.1 Images of intangible entities. From Minakata Kumagusu zenshū,
vol. 7: 31 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971–5). Courtesy of Heibonsha, Tokyo. 47
3.2 Yudaikyō no mikkyō no mandara, part one. From Kōzanji-zō Minakata
Kumagusu shokan: Doki Hōryū ate 1893–1922. Edited by Okuyama
Naoji, Undō Hitoshi, and Kanda Hideaki (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2010)
(illustration at the beginning of the volume). Courtesy of Kōzanji and
Fujiwara Shoten. 50
3.3 Yudaikyō no mikkyō no mandara, part two. From Kōzanji-zō Minakata
Naoji, Undō Hitoshi, and Kanda Hideaki (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2010)
(illustration at the beginning of the volume). Courtesy of Kōzanji and
Fujiwara Shoten. 51
3.4 Matter, mind, and events. From Minakata Kumagusu zenshū, vol. 7: 145
(Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971–5). Courtesy of Heibonsha, Tokyo. 55
3.5 “Minakata mandala.” From Minakata Kumagusu zenshū, vol. 7: 365
(Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971–5). Courtesy of Heibonsha, Tokyo. 56
3.6 The second “Minakata mandala.” From Minakata Kumagusu zenshū,
vol. 7: 390 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971–5). Courtesy of Heibonsha, Tokyo. 60
3.7 “Illustrated mandala” of slime molds. From Kōzanji-zō Minakata
Naoji, Undō Hitoshi, and Kanda Hideaki: 259 (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten,
2010). Courtesy of Kōzanji and Fujiwara Shoten. 62
5.1 Gridiron structure supporting the curved glass roof of Kyoto Station.
Photograph by Ellen Van Goethem. 85
Figures vii
5.2 Stained glass window in the Kitakyushu Literature Museum. Photograph

by Ellen Van Goethem. 89
5.3 Ensemble Hall Murata with twelve pillars representing the animals of
the Chinese zodiac and a fengshui compass embedded in the floor at the
center. Photograph by Ellen Van Goethem. 90
5.4 Bottom of the SKIP house’s rooftop staircase. Photograph by Ellen Van
Goethem. 92
5.5 The SKIP house’s one-legged “torii.” Photograph by Ellen Van Goethem. 93
7.1 The head priest (gūji) performing the ritual with a kinpei. Photograph
by Andrea De Antoni. 120
7.2 General symptoms of attachment/possession. Table by Andrea De Antoni. 121
7.3 A spectrum of experiences with spirits. Diagram by Andrea De Antoni. 122
7.4 Breakdown of mentioned physical symptoms according to frequency.
Table by Andrea De Antoni. 124
9.1 Wakuraba—Ethereal Encounters (2007) by Masaru Tabei. Interactive
installation. Photograph courtesy of Masaru Tabei. 153
9.2 Comado—Small Connections (2004) by h.o (Ogawa Hideaki studio).
Interactive installation. Photograph used with permission
of Ogawa Hideaki. 154
List of Contributors
Mauro Arrighi is an Italian independent media artist and researcher, with graduate
degrees from Kunstuniversität Linz (Austria) and Solent University (UK), currently
living and working in Tokyo. He performed at the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz,
Austria, 2008 and 2009), at the Biennale of Architecture (Venice, 2006 and 2008),
and at the Biennale of Art (Venice, 2007). His representative works include “Reality
Bonsai” (video, 2016) and “Tokyo Calling” (EP, 2018). He is also the author of the book
Japanese Spell in Electronic Art (2011).
Andrea Castiglioni is a lecturer of Japanese Studies in the Department of Intercultural

Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nagoya City University. His
research focuses on Shugendō (mountain asceticism), conceptualization of sacred
natural environments, materiality, and religious epistemologies of the body in the
Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1911) periods. He recently published an article on
“Devotion in Flesh and Bone: The Mummified Corpses of Mount Yudono Ascetics in
the Edo Period” for Asian Ethnology.
Andrea De Antoni is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at

Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. He is currently studying spirit/demonic possession and
exorcism in contemporary Japan, Italy, and Austria from a comparative perspective. His
books include Death and Desire in Modern Japan: Representing, Practicing, Performing
(coedited with Massimo Raveri, 2017) and The Practices of Feeling with the World:
Towards an Anthropology of Affect, the Senses and Materiality (with Paul Dumouchel,
special issue of the Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology, 2017). He is now working
on the book Going to Hell in Contemporary Japan: Feeling Landscapes of the Afterlife,
Othering, Memory and Materiality (forthcoming).
Ioannis Gaitanidis is Assistant Professor at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,
Chiba University, Japan. His research focuses on contemporary crossings between therapy
and religion, and he is currently working on popular understandings of hypnotherapy in
Japan. He is also interested in the teaching of Japanese Studies in Japan. He edited a 2017
special issue of New Ideas in East Asian Studies that stemmed from this interest and is
currently working on a textbook of Japanese Studies.
Satō Hiroo is Professor of Japanese intellectual history at Tōhoku University in Sendai

(Japan). His many publications include Nihon chūsei no kokka to bukkyō (1987), Kami,
hotoke, ōken no chūsei (1998), Amaterasu no henbō (2000), Reijō no shisō (2003), Shisha
no yukue (2008), and, in English, How Like a God: Deification in Japanese Religion (2016).
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm is Chair of Science & Technology Studies as well as Chair

and Associate Professor of Religion at Williams College. Josephson-Storm received
List of Contributors ix
his PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2006 and has held visiting
positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris, and Ruhr
Universität, Germany. He is the author of The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012,
winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, book of the year award), The
Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017),
and “Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory after Postmodernism” (forthcoming).
Fabio Rambelli is Professor of Japanese religions and cultural history and International
Shinto Foundation Endowed Chair in Shinto Studies at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He is the author of Buddhas and Kami in Japan (with Mark Teeuwen,
2003), Buddhist Materiality (2007), Buddhism and Iconoclasm in East Asia: A History
(with Eric Reinders, 2012), A Buddhist Theory of Semiotics (2013), Zen Anarchism
(2013), and The Sea and the Sacred in Japan: Aspects of Maritime Religion (2018).
Carina Roth is a research and teaching fellow at the History Institute (Maison de
l’Histoire) of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She specializes in Japanese
religions, with a focus on the Shugendō history and textual tradition. Her translation
and commentary of Shozan engi, one of the earliest Shugendō sources (end of twelfth
century), are forthcoming.
Rebecca Suter is Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Culture at the
University of Sydney. Her main research interest is in modern Japanese literature and
comparative literature. She also works as a translator of manga and has translated
works by many Japanese authors. She is the author of The Japanization of Modernity:
Murakami Haruki Between Japan and the United States (2008), Holy Ghosts: The
Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction (2015), and coeditor of Rewriting History
in Manga: Stories for the Nation (with Nissim Otmazgin, 2016). She is currently working
on representations of Italy and Australia in Japanese popular media as an alternative to
the Anglo-American-centric model of Western culture; on representations of disaster
in popular fiction; and on Japanese and Australian cultures of soft drink consumption
and their relationship with corporate strategies and health policy.
Jolyon Baraka Thomas is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of

Pennsylvania. He is the author of Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion
in Contemporary Japan (2012) and Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-
Occupied Japan (forthcoming in 2019). He is now working on a book about religion
and public school education in Japan and the United States after 1945.
Ellen Van Goethem is Associate Professor of Japanese History and History of Ideas at
Kyushu University. Her research mainly concerns the Asuka, Nara, and Heian periods,
with a specific focus on the layout of Japan’s ancient capital cities, on religious and
philosophical thought underpinning the construction of these cities, and on inscribed
wooden tablets (mokkan). More recently, she has also started to investigate site divination
in East Asia and the presence of Chinese cosmological symbolism and practices in
Shinto shrines. She is the author of Nagaoka, Japan’s Forgotten Capital (2008).
x
Introduction: The Invisible Empire:
Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan
Fabio Rambelli
Spirits Everywhere
A striking aspect of contemporary Japanese culture is the pervasive nature of discussions

and representations of spirits, generally rooted in vaguely articulated discourses on
animism that often exist separately from explicit religious forms. Indeed, to many
Japanese their country has a split ontological outlook: on the one hand, there is Japan
as the concrete place of their everyday lives; on the other, an invisible realm populated
by all kinds of presences: ghosts, spirits, ancestors, gods … Ancestors’ cults (predicated
upon the continuing presence, in ectoplasmic form, of deceased family members) have
played a central role in Japanese culture and religion for many centuries, even though
in recent years they seem to be less relevant for a growing number of Japanese (as
discussed by Satō Hiroo in Chapter 1); still, the invisible dimension of reality occupies
an important place in literature, the arts, popular culture (cinema, games, manga
comics, etc.), and even in representations of Japanese cultural identity.
One of the most successful movies in Japan in recent years was Kimi no na wa.
君の名は。(Your Name.), a visually poetic meditation on natural disasters, cultural
nostalgia, spirits, and much more (see Chapters 10 and 11 by Jolyon Thomas and
Andrea Castiglioni, respectively). Perhaps, the film is not unrelated to phenomena
of spirit apparitions and possession now rampant in areas of Tohoku affected by the
tsunami that struck the region on March 11, 2011, and triggered a nuclear disaster
in Fukushima (Parry 2017). Before Kimi no na wa., in 2015, writer Itō Seikō いと
うせいこう published the novel Sōzō rajio 想像ラジオ (Imagination Radio), based
on the idea of a broken radio, a relic from the tsunami that ended up on a tree and
became the unlikely instrument for the dead to speak and tell their stories. Even before
March 2011, over many years, other Japanese authors have presented to us portals
to a different reality, where people and things function in a different way; Murakami
Haruki 村上春樹 is perhaps the most famous author who did so, but his is only one
name in a long list. Much better known all over the world is the presence of all kinds of
invisible beings in manga, anime, and computer games—the central mass products of
what has been called “cool Japan.”
2 Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire
Ideas about spirits lingering around, most likely in the place where their human
carriers died, can also be found in mainstream politics. Debates on the controversial
Yasukuni Shrine 靖国神社 in central Tokyo, enshrining the Japanese war dead
(including A-list war criminals sentenced to death at the Tokyo Trial for crimes against
humanity), focus essentially on spirits and how to deal with them (Breen 2008). Prime
Minister Abe Shinzō 安倍晋三, in his historical speech at Pearl Harbor on December
28, 2016, repeatedly evoked the presence of “spirits” and “souls” (both Japanese and
American) on the bottom of the bay:
I paid a visit to that memorial, the resting place for many souls … the souls of the
servicemen who lie in eternal rest aboard the USS Arizona […] the seabed [,] is
the final resting place for a tremendous number of sailors and marines. Listening
again as I focus my senses […] I can almost discern the voices of those crewmen
[…] I cast flowers […] upon the waters where those sailors and marines sleep.
(Japan Times, Thursday, December 29, 2016, p. 3)1
In contrast, President Barack Obama’s speech on the same occasion contained only
two references to theology and cosmology, and they are clearly Christian: “we think of
the […] American patriots […] manning Heaven’s rails for all eternity” and “May God
hold the fallen in his everlasting arms” (Japan Times, Thursday, December 29, 2016,
p. 3). In other words, for President Obama, the dead servicemen are not in Honolulu;
they are unmistakably resurrected in Heaven in the fullness of their bodies and are
now in God’s embrace; for Prime Minister Abe, in contrast, the spirits of Japanese
soldiers are at the bottom of Pearl Harbor and there is no other place for them to go.
The image of defeated warriors “living” on the seabed and haunting the waters
where they perished has a long history in Japan, dating back at least to medieval stories
about the defeated Taira 平 warriors in the waters of Dan no Ura 壇ノ浦 in 1181; their
lingering ghostly beings were painted in ukiyoe 浮世絵 prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi
歌川国芳 (1798–1861) in the late Edo period.
Aspects of traditional religiosity such as ancestor cults, and new popular
phenomena such as manga and their offshoots in other media, are also related, in a
complex symbiosis, to a constellation of other cultural phenomena. These include the
study of monsters (yōkai 妖怪), which is a flourishing academic field and a successful
publishing genre; occultism (in Eastern and Western forms); and tendencies that are
harder to define, such as the interest for certain places, called “power spots,” where
some kind of spiritual “energy” supposedly concentrates and can be experienced
by visitors—interest that has been promoted by the mass media for more than two
decades and is now being appropriated by established cult sites such as Shinto shrines
and Buddhist temples (see Chapter 6 by Carina Roth). Whereas ancestor cults are
traditionally the province of the family and its community, all other phenomena just
mentioned are broader and more diffuse; now they are related to tourism as well, as
visitors travel to sets of manga and anime, power spots, and even “haunted places”
in Kyoto and other cities (as discussed by Andrea De Antoni in Chapter 7). Precisely
because of their multiple entanglements and multilayered functions and relations,
it is hard to determine at first sight whether these phenomena are manifestations of
Introduction 3
“traditional,” ancestral spirituality in their adaptations to contemporary society, or

whether they are instead forms of commercial merchandise created by the media for
mass consumption—or a mix of the two, or none of the above.
Many scholars, especially in the West, tend to explain this Japanese interest in spirit
entities by seeing them as metaphors for a number of things—for tradition, cultural
identity, social and personal anxiety, and so forth. This is an important interpretive
key, as it involves issues of identity and personal ontology, which in turn fosters a
rich artistic production (see Chapter 8 by Rebecca Suter). And yet, in addition to this
important aspect, many Japanese typically treat spirits as real (or at least potentially
real) presences. While not many Japanese would perhaps subscribe to hard ontological
beliefs about the objective existence of these spirit entities, many would be reluctant to
simply discard the possibility of their existence. It is then important to pay attention to
these claims and try to understand their often implicit ontological positions, without
the assumption that us who describe know better than them who experience (or claim
to do so).2
The idea that spirits linger around us, and at least in some cases can affect our
lives, is of course not new and far from superficial. In fact, this set of ontological
assumptions about spirits, especially surprising in a country known for its high degree
of secularization, its technological advancement, and social development, is so deeply
ingrained in the cultural fabric that it is almost always taken for granted as a typically
Japanese form of animism rooted in the most ancient past. It is therefore in order for
us to provide a brief outline of Japanese attitudes toward spirit entities, in the broadest
sense of the term, because this will help us better understand the situation today.
A Brief History of Japanese Animism
It is obvious that animism refers to a range of different phenomena, entities, representations,

beliefs, and practices, ranging from ideas of an animated nature (a sort of panpsychism if
not pantheism) to accounts of different types of “spirits” (tama 霊 or tamashii 魂)—often
not clearly distinguished from gods (kami 神), ancestors (senzo 先祖), ghosts (yūrei 幽霊),
and monsters (yōkai 妖怪). These intangible entities belong to different, but partially
overlapping, cultural spheres (religion, folklore, customs, the arts) and have different
origins and cultural genealogies. The attempt to conflate and subsume all of them under
the general term “animism” is often cause of simplification and confusion.
Most authors, especially in Japan, argue that the belief in the constant presence of
spirits (the dead and other beings) in this world is one of the fundamental features
of Japanese ancestral religion since the remotest past. Umehara Takeshi 梅原猛, a
very influential author of books about Japanese thought, has been very successful in
promoting the vision of a worldview in which the living and the dead (the latter, in
invisible form) coexist harmoniously with nature, a worldview present-day Japanese
supposedly inherited from their tree-loving Jōmon ancestors dating back to 12,000
BCE (Umehara 1989a, b). Almost three decades ago, medieval historian Hosokawa
Ryōichi 細川涼一 questioned Umehara’s claims, stressing that no medieval sources
support his vision; rather, Hosokawa argued, such ideas about spirits were created
by new religious organizations in the twentieth century (Hosokawa 1991). In fact,

numerous new religious movements (NRMs) focus their teachings and ritual systems
on interactions with and control of spirits, supposed to exist all around us and capable
of affecting the living in various ways. These NRMs include Mahikari 真光, Shinnyoen
真如苑, Kōfuku no kagaku 幸福の科学, and World Mate ワールドメート. And yet, it
would be wrong to dismiss ideas of Japanese spirit beliefs as just another fad created by
a few local gurus in search for self-promotion.
A genealogy of spirit beliefs in Japan is not the goal of this volume, which aims
rather at formulating a map of discourses and representations of the spirit world in
a broad sense in modern and contemporary Japan; still, an awareness of the complex
historical background of these representations is crucial.
Many NRMs focusing their activities on interactions with spirits seem to follow a
path that began more than a hundred years ago with Deguchi Onisaburō 出口王仁三郎
(1871–1948) at Ōmotokyō 大本教; Onisaburō was deeply influenced by the thought
of Kokugaku 国学 (National Learning) author and activist Hirata Atsutane 平田篤胤
(1776–1843). Indeed, Atsutane seems to be the person most responsible for setting up
the possibility and defining the contours of the contemporary metaphysics of spirits,
with his theorization of an Invisible World (meikai 冥界) inhabited by kami and the
dead, which existed in parallel with the visible world of the living and was ruled by the
supreme god Ōkuninushi 大国主 (see Zhong 2017). Atsutane’s vision of the invisible
became enormously influential, but it was not a radical innovation. As Satō Hiroo
discusses in Chapter 1, by the eighteenth century many Japanese had already formed
ideas about the dead existing in invisible form in this world. Before that time, the dead
were believed to transmigrate to a remote paradisiacal Pure Land (gokuraku jōdo 極楽
浄土) envisioned in Buddhist terms. Those dead who remained in this world as ghosts
were suffering beings that had to be pacified and controlled until they could also move
on to the Pure Land.
It is still unclear how ideas about an invisible afterlife in this world developed, especially
since they are so distinct from what appears to be the common understanding until the
seventeenth century, but changes in social structure together with the growing impact
of Chinese Confucianism in the development of ancestor cults in Japan are probably the
main factors. Within this context, particularly important were Buddhist funerals, initially
diffused all over Japan by Zen monks since the fourteenth century. Buddhist funerals
since the beginning were a hybrid formation: they were devised to prevent the dead from
going through transmigration so as to reach instead a stable and unchanging existence
as semi-divine ancestors called “buddhas” (hotoke ほとけ). In the popular imagination,
this translated into the image of the dead being forever present not in a remote Pure Land
but at specific sites in this world: the place where they died, their tomb, and their homes
(especially, the Buddhist family altar or butsudan 仏壇: see Rambelli 2010). Practices of
memorialization centered on the family became the centerpiece of the Tokugawa 徳川
(1600–1868) government’s religious policies, and in some form still continue today.
What is the worldview behind these new ancestor cults centered on funerals? In
addition to Confucian thought, which, in its standard form, had only a limited impact in
Japan, we should also consider the role of the newly imported Chinese literature of the
Ming and Qing dynasties, which was widely read in Edo-period Japan and presented a
Introduction 5
world inhabited by spirits, ghosts, and ancestors who, their invisible form notwithstanding,
were able to intervene directly in human affairs. Hirata Atsutane may have in fact given
a theological and ontological grounding, based on his own idiosyncratic understanding
of Shinto, to ideas drawn from what was the “pop culture” of his time. In other words,
popular culture (literature, theater, the visual arts), and not theological speculation, seems
to be one of the pillars of animistic thought that was systematized by Hirata Atsutane.
Indeed, pop culture (in the sense of a mass culture produced mostly for immediate
consumption, often incorporating foreign elements and models) plays an important role
in the creation and diffusion of discourses about spirits and animism. Media coverage
about NRMs and their scandals contributes to spreading a sense that their animistic ideas
are in fact fairly standard and common, as Ioannis Gaitanidis shows in his contribution to
the volume (Chapter 4). In addition, art forms of all kinds have for centuries given shape
to spirits, beginning with Noh dramas evoking dead heroes still present in this world
(in almost always invisible form), continuing with Edo-period ukiyoe representations of
yōkai monsters and yūrei ghosts, all the way to contemporary Japan, when Murakami
Haruki presents portals to a parallel alternative reality (as discussed by Rebecca Suter in
Chapter 8), media artists create computer-assisted animistic installations (presented by
Mauro Arrighi), and architects adopt ideas about a spiritual landscape to create a new
urban image for Kyoto (in Chapter 5 by Ellen Van Goethem). Especially influential are,
of course, manga, anime, and computer games, which constitute the repository of images
and situations to describe the world to many among the younger generations; Andrea
Castiglioni and Jolyon Thomas discuss the role of spirits in recent manifestations of pop
culture and the nature of the “animism” they envision.
One of the aspects that emerge from contemporary developments in representations
of spirits is their technological nature. This should come as no surprise, as the history of
modern science in the West (and elsewhere) is deeply intertwined with spiritualism and
scientific attempts to prove (or disprove) the existence of ectoplasmic entities, as Jason
Josephson-Storm describes in detail (Chapter 2). In Japan, the combination of the nascent
paradigm of modern science with “traditional” knowledge is most clearly detectable
in scientist and polymath Minakata Kumagusu’s 南方熊楠 (1867–1941) work, which
includes extensive gestures toward a metaphysics of the invisible reality of spirits and
other entities (as discussed by Fabio Rambelli in Chapter 3). Even so, one of the reasons
Minakata is so popular today is also because “spiritual intellectuals” such as religious
scholar Nakazawa Shin’ichi 中沢新一 and others have exploited this “occult” side of his
work in bestselling publications;3 in other words, Minakata is not popular today because
his thought highlights ancestral Japanese perceptions but because segments of it have
become fodder for the contemporary pop culture of spirits and animism.
A Japanese Neo-Animism
However, the sequence connecting Edo-period social transformations, Hirata

Atsutane’s theology, NRM’s dealings with the spirit world, and contemporary pop
culture is not the whole story of present-day Japanese animism. After all, one would
imagine that, after Hirata Atsutane, modernization and its relentless campaigns
against superstition would have eradicated premodern beliefs in invisible agencies,

also in light of the emphasis placed on modern Western science, but this is not the
case. On the one hand, late nineteenth-century Western science was a combination
of rationalism and spiritism, and in that form it was adopted in Japan (as discussed
by Josephson-Storm in Chapter 2). Moreover, modernization may have reduced the
interest of many Japanese for specific buddhas and kami, but massive state propaganda
in favor of ancestor worship, emperor worship, and the cult of past heroes and the
war dead, promoted a widespread idea that the dead continued to exist in some form,
albeit invisible, in this world. It would be an oversimplification, if not an entirely
wrong intellectual operation, to collapse and confuse these categories of “spirits”—and
especially, to conflate them with “animistic” worship of nature, which was not part of
State Shinto and was not encouraged until the end of the Second World War.
In fact, there is another crucial moment for the development of Japanese animism:
the period of rapid economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a sense of
cultural malaise and decline from the early1990s. It is at that time that animism, as an
umbrella term for a disparate set of phenomena, came to be envisioned as a key feature
of Japanese culture and spirituality. In this case, mass media, popular culture, members
of the academia, a resurgent Shinto movement (under the leadership of the Association
of Shinto Shrines or Jinja honchō 神社本庁), in combination with some type of
resistance against the growing materialism and consumerism of Japanese society and
a sense of crisis of the model of development chosen by Japan until then, converged in
a proliferation of new discourses and representations of spirits, all subsumed under a
supposedly traditional Japanese animism, referred to by the imported term animizumu
アニミズム. This complex set of factors intersected with the diffusion in Japan of New
Age tendencies (see the discussion by Carina Roth in Chapter 6; Prohl 2002, 2007).
As suggested by Hirafuji Kikuko 平藤喜久子, a popular discourse about the
animistic nature of Japanese culture emerged in the 1970s (Hirafuji 2017: 43–44);
this discourse was followed and amplified by a number of academics, authors (of
manga, anime, movies, and TV programs), and journalists. It is perhaps impossible
to firmly determine the prime originator of this tendency, but Hirafuji identifies in
anthropologist Iwata Keiji 岩田慶治 (1922–2013) the first intellectual to create and
develop a successful and influential discourse about Japan’s animism.4 Let us follow
for a moment Iwata’s trajectory. The beginning of Iwata’s ideas can be found in Kami
no tanjō: genshi shūkyō カミの誕生—原始宗教 (The Birth of the Gods: Primitive
Religion), a book originally published in 1970 (Iwata [1970] 1990). Based on his own
fieldwork in various Southeast Asian locations, Iwata traces the features of what he
calls “primitive religion” (genshi shūkyō) and, especially, the origin and development
of ideas about the gods. Interestingly, he distinguishes different types of gods
(kami) by referring to them in katakana (カミ) and in kanji (神); the former refers
to vague and primitive formulations of the sacred, whereas the latter points to more
systematized representations of individualized gods. A turning point occurs with the
1973 book Sōmoku chūgyo no jinruigaku: Animizumu no sekai 草木虫魚の人類学—ア
ニミズムの世界 (Anthropology of Plants, Insects, and Fish: The World of Animism)
(Iwata [1973] 1991). Again based on fieldwork in Southeast Asia, this book contains
references to Stanley J. Tambiah’s work on spirit cults in Thailand (Tambiah 1970) but
Introduction 7
adds theoretical considerations, in an approving tone, on E. B. Tylor’s (1832–1917)

definition of animism, combined with citations from Shōbōgenzō 正法眼蔵 (the main
work of Japanese Zen patriarch Dōgen 道元, 1200–1253), the Zen poet Ryōkan 良寛
(1758–1831), and other Japanese classical texts. In Sōmoku chūgyo no jinruigaku we
already find some of the later features of Japanese discourses about animism, namely,
references to fieldwork in some remote locale in Asia (including Okinawa),5 envisioned
as preserving elements of the “primitive”—in the sense of pristine and authentic—
Asian civilization, interpreted through outdated ethnographical theories and peppered
with snippets of Buddhist thought.
A third step in Iwata’s development of a discourse on animism takes place in
Kosumosu no shisō: shizen, animizumu, mikkyō kūkan コスモスの思想—自然・アニ
ミズム・密教空間 (Cosmos Thinking: Nature, Animism, and the Space of Esoteric
Buddhism) (Iwata 1976). Here, Iwata expands his perspective to a planetary and cosmic
dimension, with references to naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s (1769–1859) later
works, Japanese Esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō 密教), and anthropological descriptions
of nature and the planetary awareness of folkloric cultures. After that book, for thirty
years, Iwata developed the same ideas along the same lines: learning from “Asian
cosmology,” highlighting differences between simplified concepts of animism and
monotheism, emphasizing Esoteric Buddhism (especially, in the version originated
in Japan by one of its leading Buddhist thinkers, Kūkai, 774–835) as the key for the
emergence of a new “cosmic man” (uchū ningen 宇宙人間) with an elevated planetary
awareness (Iwata 1989, 1993, 2005). Interestingly, though, Iwata also posits the need
for a new kind of animism, which is no longer the form of religiosity of primitive
peoples but a condition he defines as “before the primordial gods” (カミ以前)—a
condition he sees as free of limits and limitations and open to infinite possibilities
(Iwata 1989: 297–299). Years later, he characterized this condition as a multicentered
world of infinite deities (kami カミ), infinite subjectivities, and deep freedom (fukai
jiyū 深い自由) (Iwata 2000).
Iwata Keiji was joined in the 1980s by other authors who in turn became very
influential in shaping current understandings of Japanese animism. Aramata Hiroshi
荒俣宏 has been relentlessly pursuing occult traditions all over the world, in essays
(Aramata 1985) and novels; among the latter, his Teito monogatari 帝都物語 about the
dark side of Meiji modernization (Aramata 1983) triggered a lasting boom in fengshui
風水 and the Onmyōdō 陰陽道 tradition (see the discussion by Ellen Van Goethem
in Chapter 5). The previously mentioned Nakazawa Shin’ichi began his career as a
Tibetologist and scholar of Esoteric Buddhism (Nakazawa 1983) with a strong interest
in poststructuralism; gradually, he turned into the main proponent of a new brand
of Japanese cultural identity which extols the virtues of prehistoric Jōmon culture
(see Sakamoto and Nakazawa 2015), animism, and more generally an expansive neo-
Orientalistic discourse (Nakazawa 1991).
Another author that can be singled out for his influence in shaping contemporary
discourse about Japanese animism is environmental archeologist Yasuda Yoshinori 安
田喜憲. In a recent book, Yasuda summarizes all the common topoi of a new brand of
Japanese animism. He writes that humanity is facing environmental catastrophes and
widespread military conflicts caused by agriculturalist and pastoralist monotheistic
peoples. He argues that the civilizational ethos of monotheism requires expansion,

which is the direct cause of natural destruction. At the same time, the control of
livestock requires force, so pastoralist cultures invented an entire system of transcendent
metaphysics and ethics to justify violence and war. In contrast, communities engaging
in wet rice cultivation and fishing privilege sustainability, as indicated by the advanced
eco-compatible society of Edo-period Japan. Yasuda even proposes a “Transpacific
Animist Alliance” (Kan-Taiheiyō animizumu rengō 環太平洋アニミズム連合) as the
beginning of a movement to promote animism globally and, for Japan in particular,
the creation of a “high tech animist state” (Yasuda 2006).
It is perhaps worth noting that the postwar wave of intellectuals promoting
animism, from Umehara Takeshi to Nakazawa Shin’ichi, tended to consist of
cosmopolitan left-wing intellectuals, trained in contemporary European philosophy,
often with a background in cultural anthropology, and with a strong interest (if not
an academic specialization) in environmental issues. Their vision of animism, which
took shape during the postwar economic boom (a time of major transformations
in Japanese society and the environment, including major environmental disasters
such as in Minamata), was also a reaction against a certain model of development
based on advanced capitalism and the hegemony of Euro-American discourses and
ideologies. These intellectuals were also seeking an alternative society (after the
ravages of the Second World War) in an idealized vision of a Japanese remote past,
which they thought could be revised as a model for the present: thus, their emphasis
on nature, harmony, and peace. However, their work ends up taking a more or less
explicitly declared neo-Kokugaku connotation, while reviving (again, in a more or less
explicit form) early twentieth-century debates on modernity (as Westernization) and
the need to overcome it (Calichman 2008; Harootunian 2002); at a deeper level, these
authors appear to share a classical idea of harmonious and homogenous primordial
community, ultimately mediated from Daoism (especially, the Laozi 老子). A precursor
in their idealized vision of primitive Japanese society was artist, critic, and ethnologist
Okamoto Tarō 岡本太郎 (1911–1996). Okamoto studied in Paris with Marcel Mauss
and knew Pablo Picasso and other leading artists and intellectuals of the time; back in
Japan after the Second World War, he formulated his own vision of primitivism, which
was not limited to animism but incorporated radical elements he had mediated from
Georges Batailles and the Surrealists. Okamoto engaged in a long quest to retrieve
what he thought was the primitive, original, and authentic form of Japanese spirituality
(see Okamoto 2011).
Thus, these accounts of animism were attempts at creating a different description
of Japanese spirituality in ways that were unrelated to wartime State Shinto and its
authoritarianism; authors tried to reframe Shinto in a broader context that also
included Daoism and Southeast Asian folk traditions. However, these brands of new
Japanese animism were also part of a developing discourse, increasingly influential,
about the uniqueness of Japan and its radical difference from all other countries
(both in Asia and the West). This discourse, known as Nihonjinron 日本人論 or Nihon
bunkaron 日本文化論, gave new forms to early twentieth-century ideas about Japanese
exceptionalism. Further, this alternative discourse about the place of animism in
Japanese cultural identity, deeply steeped in images of “reverse Orientalism,” merged
Introduction 9
with discourses and practices of NRMs, also fueled by intense media campaigns, and
later with attempts by Jinja Honchō 神社本庁 (the Association of Shinto Shrines) to
rebrand Shinto as an environmental religion based on ancestral and immemorial
animistic beliefs (see Rots 2017). As such, and despite their initial progressive stances,
many aspects of contemporary animism are inescapably reactionary and dovetail
with recent positions put forth by Jinja Honchō.6 We can observe the complexity
and limitations of discourses on cultural identity related to animism not only in the
“spiritual intellectuals” (especially, Prohl 2007; also Shimazono 2004) but also in the
contemporary art scene (see the respective chapters by Mauro Arrighi, Chapter 9, and
Ellen Van Goethem, Chapter 5). Animism, by creating a space of “hesitation” (Rebecca
Suter, Chapter 8) between different orders of reality and different cognitive regimes,
offers a consolatory antidote to personal and social issues. As such, animism can be
either reactionary or progressive (Jolyon Thomas, Chapter 10), but either way it can be
used as a political tool to formulate images of society and national identity.
Animism, popularized by the work of anthropologist E. B. Tylor in the late
nineteenth century, was a fraught and problematic term from the beginning. Together
with other terms such as fetishism, totemism, and magic—also extensively discussed
by patriarchs of anthropology and religious studies such as J. G. Frazer (1854–1941),
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986)—it was used
to describe the way in which “primitive peoples” conceptualized their own worldview.
In conjunction with two other terms, polytheism and monotheism, it was envisioned
as the first phase of human religious development in an evolutionary trajectory
from primitive religion to Western post-Reformation Christianity (see Chapter 2
by Josephson-Storm). Overall, theories of animism from the beginning were deeply
steeped in colonialism, as most recently reiterated by David Chidester (2018: 23–29).
As early historian of religions Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883–1959) noted, animism is
for Tylor a “philosophy,” that is, a “theory of personal causes elevated to a general
philosophy of man and nature” (Pettazzoni 1929). It is not surprising, then, to see
that many discourses on animism in contemporary Japan are essentially intellectual in
nature, that is, they are not simply descriptions of beliefs and practices, but normative
accounts of idealized visions of Japanese cultural identity and spirituality in general.
On the other hand, another aspect of modern animism is the result of what Spyros
Papapetros has called “a relationship that always oscillates between the inexplicable
revolt perpetrated by objects and the dumb role we insist on assigning to them”—
an “ambivalent attitude” resulting from a sense of “‘hostile external environment’
(die fiendliche Umwelt)” (Papapetros 2012: 21). This ambivalent attitude about reality
resonates with the “hesitation” identified by Rebecca Suter, and perhaps also in recent
products of pop culture and the arts (discussed by Ellen Van Goethem, Mauro Arrighi,
Jolyon Thomas, and Andrea Castiglioni—Chapters 5, 9, 10, and 11, respectively),
in which attempts to re-enchant the world, as it were, are motivated by potential or
explicit threats. Furthermore, the original (and never forgotten) connection between
animism and other forms of religiosity (polytheism and monotheism) also resonates
with a widespread cultural primitivism in modern Japan—a primitivism which was
promoted in modern times by artist and ethnologist Okamoto Tarō but has its roots
in Edo-period nativism (Kokugaku 国学). Finally, the colonial context for the origin of
ideas about animism also allowed modern Japanese authors to appropriate it in a sort of
postcolonial move of cultural assertion (what Mauro Arrighi calls “self-Orientalism”).
Spirit Ontologies
In this context, another issue that emerges, and cannot be avoided, is that of the nature
and ontology of the spirits in contemporary Japan. An important aspect of received
assumptions about Japanese animism is its homogenous nature. In most treatments of
the subject, any and all formulations of spirits are understood as variants of the same
belief that everything in nature is animated. In reality, however, even a cursory look at
the chapters in this book will make clear that Japanese animism is anything but a single,
homogeneous discourse. In Japan, as in the rest of the world, there are several kinds
of animism, and what stands out is precisely the absence of a unified ontology about
spirits and their agency. Thus, films and anime discussed by Castiglioni and Thomas,
Arrighi’s media installations, Suter’s literary texts, Van Goethem’s fengshui-inspired
architects, Minakata Kumagusu’s metaphysics of spirits discussed by Rambelli, De
Antoni’s presences, and Roth’s enchanted nature have very little in common in terms
of animism: the ontology, agency, and representations of spirits and energies they
imagine are very different, if not even in contradiction with each other.
Jolyon Thomas in his contribution to this book proposes to distinguish among
three modalities of animism, each with different ethical and political vectors, which
he describes as “pejorative,” “recuperative,” and “obscurantist.” Typically, outside
observers tend to consider animism a negative phenomenon, and are thus bearers of
the pejorative position. For Japanese insiders, on the other hand, it is often difficult
to distinguish between “recuperative” and “obscurantist” positions, because both are
often intertwined with each other; as my previous discussion of neo-animism made
clear, a progressive approach at rediscovering positive values (peace, harmony, ecology,
etc.) in more or less imaginary past worldviews (“recuperative” animism) often dovetail
with nationalistic and exclusivistic assertions of cultural superiority (“obscurantist”
animism). Thus, it becomes essential to discuss what people actually mean when they
speak of animism. As Ioannis Gaitanidis stresses, general and oversimplified labels
cover a number of different theologies, cosmologies, and practices, which came to be
as a result of multiple cultural and intellectual trajectories.
Early in Japanese modernity, Inoue Enryō 井上円了 (1858–1919) and, especially,
Minakata Kumagusu (presented by Rambelli in Chapter 3) developed sophisticated
ontologies of the invisible and its denizens. Later, leaders of NRMs proposed their
own visions, but the media—and, often, academic authors as well—have continued
to stubbornly rely on a vague and simplified definition of animism as a worldview
in which spirits of various kinds abide in the landscape, with a privileged position
given to family ancestors and to malevolent forces. These entities have an important
role in contemporary Japanese society that cannot be downplayed, mitigated, or
dismissed.
To the best of my knowledge, no systematic and comprehensive study exists on the
ontology of spirits in contemporary Japan—its metaphysical foundations, theological
Introduction 11
implications, historical roots, and connections with present cultural formations and
concerns.7 I remember well a conversation I had years ago with a respected Japanese
scholar of religion (who is also the head priest of an important Shinto shrine), in which
I asked him if he really believed in the existence of the kami. He replied that “you
Westerners always ask about belief and existence; I think it is necessary to distinguish
between phenomenological existence and ontological existence.” At the time, that
sounded like a sophisticated way to avoid giving me a clear personal answer. Today, I
think there might be some value in that approach. After all, the ontological existence
of anything (not only deities) is independent of any individual’s personal beliefs; on the
other hand, the phenomenological existence of spirit-like entities can be experienced
also by people who don’t believe in them, as Andrea De Antoni’s chapter makes clear.
Moreover, experience of spirits’ existence can also be mediated by particular places (as
discussed in the chapters by Roth and Van Goethem) and enhanced by media coverage
and intersubjective discourses.
The presence of animistic and spirit-related themes in Japanese contemporary
popular culture (also and especially outside of strictly religious discourses—and this
is a point I would like to emphasize) is so pervasive that it is often taken for granted
as an obvious feature of Japanese culture and spirituality. As a consequence, little is
articulated about the nature of spirits and the characteristics of the multiple forms
of animism that give them shape. This book is an attempt to redress this situation by
looking at various ways in which spirits are evoked, experienced, and described. As
such, it aims to contribute, in critical ways, to the growing arena of studies animated
by an ontologically oriented approach about animism and the “agency of Intangibles”
broadly understood (see Blanes and Espírito Santo 2014; for Japan in particular, Jensen,
Ishii, and Swift 2016). Within this theoretical context, it may prove productive to direct
our critical attention to fetishism—another fraught term in anthropology and religious
studies, recuperated in its original definition as an agency attributed to material objects
(see Morris and Leonard 2017; for a different approach, Latour 2011)—also in order
to disentangle discourses on Japanese animistic spirituality from its disembodied form
toward an enhanced attention to materiality. Often, in actual practice of Japanese
religiosity, the intangible agency (often described as animism) lies primarily in material
entities—particular landscapes, objects, and artifacts—and not in spirits supposedly
inhabiting them.
The Chapters in This Book

This book is an attempt to take seriously not only the modes of representations and
cultural meanings of spirits, but also and especially the metaphysical implications of
contemporary Japanese ideas about spirits. The chapters offer analyses of specific cases
of “animistic attitudes” in which the presence of “spirits” and spiritual forces is alleged,
and attempt to trace cultural genealogies of those attitudes. In particular, they present
various modes of representation of spirits (in contemporary art, architecture, visual
culture, cinema, literature, the natural environment) while at the same time addressing
their underlying intellectual and religious assumptions.
Chapter 1 by Satō Hiroo is an account of the transformations in Japanese visions

of the afterlife and the status of the dead. Satō challenges received ideas of continuity
by showing the vast differences in the ontology and cosmology of the dead and the
afterlife separating the medieval from the early modern period. He also focuses on
recent changes that jeopardize received practices of memorialization, such as “nature
funerals” (shizensō 自然葬), in which the ashes of the dead are scattered in mountains
or at sea, and “handy memorials” (temoto kuyō 手元供養), in which they are fused
inside jewelry ornaments to be carried by the living (of course, both phenomena are
not unique to Japan). Satō also draws our attention to existing regional traditions of
memorialization, such as pictures showing the dead in everyday situations in their
imagined condition in the afterlife. This chapter alerts us from the beginning to the
existence of several discourses and practices about an invisible dimension of reality,
discourses and practices that are far from static but change according to social and
cultural determinations.
Next, Jason Josephson-Storm addresses the paradox of a highly developed,
technological society such as Japan’s that is also deeply enamored with and enthralled
by spirits. He points out that in the Meiji period, when the modernization of Japan
based on Western ideas began, the West itself was far from stripped of its belief in
spirits, magic, and an animated nature. This chapter discusses Japanese portrayals of
an enchanted Europe, and then provides a genealogy of European theorizing about
fetishism and animism. Josephson-Storm concludes by showing how in the process
of theorizing “primitive” civilizations Europeans were really describing themselves.
The same attitude is still adopted by many authors in contemporary Japan, who, when
writing about disappearing folk practices, Okinawan religion, Asian tribal religion, or
the Jōmon people, are really trying to provide an idealized description of themselves.
Fabio Rambelli’s chapter deals with the work of Minakata Kumagusu, one of the
leading Japanese intellectuals between the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth
centuries. Not limiting himself to the physical world, Minakata also tried to explain the
existence of spirits and other ectoplasmic entities by outlining a multilayered ontology
of reality based on different epistemological systems—what has recently been termed
“Minakata mandala.” In order to construct this ontology, Minakata brought together
a serious understanding of classical Buddhist philosophy, deep scientific knowledge,
and awareness of the Japanese folk tradition. This chapter thus presents various
interventions by Minakata as forming one of the most systematic attempts to outline
an ontology of spirits in modern Japan.
Next, Ioannis Gaitanidis addresses the role of the media in another important field,
that of public perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs) and their animistic
positions. Through a multipronged approach involving historical developments,
academic studies, and discourse analysis of media coverage, Gaitanidis shows
the crucial role of the media in spreading a sense that animism is part of ancestral
Japanese culture while at the same time they criticize NRM’s egregious behaviors. In
other words, unusual occurrences of manipulation, money scandals, and violence are
chastised while animistic beliefs are not only condoned but even normalized. Many
scholars also seem to follow this attitude, which is intrinsically paradoxical, as it ends
up providing widespread support and recognition to the worldview of NRMs.
Introduction 13
Ellen Van Goethem explores the urban landscape and architectural interventions
in it, based on the idea that Kyoto is a city animated by invisible agencies. Inspired
by the belief that the city was designed and built according to the core principles of
Chinese site divination (popularly known as fengshui, Jp. fūsui 風水), it is now generally
assumed that Kyoto is vitalized by the invisible flow of qi 気 (Jp. ki) and protected by the
guardian spirits of the four directions. However, Van Goethem shows that such widely
spread assumptions about the city actually emerged in the 1990s, when a fengshui
boom gripped Japan, and when a number of people and organizations began to find
ways to justify and promote the building of the new Kyoto Station. Architects such as
Isozaki Arata 磯崎新 also incorporated fengshui in their creations as a way to connect
their work to an imagined traditional past. This is a clear instance of new phenomena
trying to find legitimization in elements from a long-forgotten ancient past.
Carina Roth continues the discussion on enchanted landscapes by focusing on
recent developments in Japanese religiosity that give special spiritual value to certain
places known as “power spots” (pawā supotto パワースポット) and to forests as agents
of healing. The idea of “power spots,” sites that are considered to be receptacles of
spiritual energy, was imported in Japan around the mid-1980s, most likely following
New Age developments in the United States. The rich and luxuriant forests of Japan
have also become the sites for “forest therapy” (Jp. shinrin’yoku 森林浴, lit. “forest
bathing”), a medical treatment officially sanctioned by the Japanese government that
has quickly spread abroad. Either way, the idea that something intangible, “spiritual,”
can be acquired at specific places is part of a more general concern for a so-called
“invisible world” (me ni mienai sekai 目に見えない世界), inhabited by numerous spirit
agencies—what has been called “diffuse spirituality,” in which mass media have been
playing a crucial role in their diffusion.
Andrea De Antoni develops arguments on the ontology of spirits by an investigation
of recent cases of spirit possession (tsuki 憑き, hyōi 憑依) as it is treated at Kenmi
Shrine 賢見神社 in Shikoku. This is a way to understand the concrete impact of spirit
beliefs on the bodies of individuals affected by spirits and their social environment,
and, at the same time, a window from which to glimpse ontological positions on spirits.
Something that one tends to miss in the pervasive literature on spirit beings is the fact
that they are not mere figures in tales and visual representations, but have agency of
their own: they reside in certain places and in some cases affect humans, mostly by
possession. De Antoni follows here the recent “ontological turn” in anthropology in
an understanding of spirits based on their embodied nature and affective dimension.
In her chapter, Rebecca Suter shifts our attention to modern Japanese fiction, one
of the most thought-provoking and elusive features of which is its portrayal of the
realm of the uncanny. This of course is not unique to Japan; and the fantastic genre as
a whole is normally considered to be one of the products of secularization in Europe
and elsewhere. The spirits that populate Japanese literature (as well as film, manga,
and anime)—whether ghosts from the past that keep haunting the present or liminal
monsters that exist simultaneously inside and outside “our world”—offer a unique
standpoint from which to reflect on contemporary Japan. By focusing on case studies
drawn from works by Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
芥川龍之介 (1892–1927), and Murakami Haruki, Suter identifies what she calls a
“fantastic hesitation” that prevents the authors from choosing a settled and defined
position (be it rational or supernatural, psychological or spiritual, personal or political)
to explain the reality they portray. This hesitation, perhaps gesturing toward a sense
of undecidability of reality, seems to be one of the main gateways to the spirit world.
Mauro Arrighi shows that animism functions as one of the main creative sources
for the evolving media arts scene of Japan, especially computer-aided performances
and interactive installations. After a discussion of works by artists such as Hayakawa
Takahiro 早川貴泰, Shinto priest Tanahashi Nobuyuki 棚橋信之, the AEO Group, Tabei
Masaru 田部井勝, Ogawa Hideaki 小川秀明, and Hisako Kroiden Yamakawa 山川 K.
尚子, combined with interviews with them, Arrighi argues that their understanding of
Shinto and Buddhist animism is closer to what is found in pop culture than to standard
beliefs and modes of worship. Arrighi highlights the existence of a widespread and
uncritical belief that objects, especially technological devices, have a soul and the often
explicit role of self-Orientalism in their creators’ works, and explains the connections
between these two elements.
Jolyon Thomas revisits the world of Japanese anime, a world replete with spirits.
The chapter examines the characteristics of the anime medium that lend themselves
to the portrayal of eerie phenomena before examining spirits as mediums for social
connection and reconciliation in some recent anime. Whereas many professional
observers of Japan prefer to view anime as a repository of Japan’s “animistic” heritage,
Thomas argues that the putative connection between the spirits of anime and
autochthonous kami veneration is tenuous. Thomas provides a threefold typology of
animism, which he calls, respectively, “pejorative,” “recuperative,” and “obscurantist”—
all underscored by what he calls the “specter of the ‘Real Animist,’” a silent and invisible
category that pervades most contemporary discourses about Japanese animism.
Finally, Andrea Castiglioni discusses other instances of shifting and multiplying
ideas of the spirits and the invisible through a close reading of recent blockbuster
movies such as Your Name. and Shin-Gojira. Against the grain of dominant discourses
about spirits and animism, Castiglioni sees a growing tendency to focus on violent
spirit entities (araburugami 荒ぶる神), rather than benign, Totoro-like figures. Perhaps
more significantly, the traditional symbolism associated with the countryside and the
big city is questioned and reversed: the countryside is no longer the idyllic and idealized
heart of Japanese traditional culture, but a boring place subject to disasters; it is the
metropolis that has the power to solve those disasters and keep Japan alive. This novel
attitude seems to gesture toward the emergence of a new national identity for Japan
as a strong and resilient country that is uniquely able to control the unpredictability
of nature and of malignant invisible agencies. It will have to be seen whether this
tendency, a positive embrace of dystopia, as it were, will continue to grow.
The “Invisible Empire”
Finally, the title of this volume refers not too subtly to that of Roland Barthes’s Empire
of Signs (Barthes 1982), a sophisticated exercise in what we could call “passionate
Orientalism” or, perhaps, a “reverse reverse Orientalism”—that is, the acceptance in a
Introduction 15
Western context of Orientalistic themes developed in the East. Barthes was certainly
a fan of some aspects of Japanese culture, where he saw possibilities to counter the
dominant cultural and political trends in the West, and his work has had a vast influence
on many Japanese intellectuals. More specifically, the title of this volume plays with
Barthes’s idea of the “empty center” in Japanese culture. What if the center is actually
not “empty” but fully populated with invisible ghostly presences? After all, ghosts and
spirits are particular semiotic devices, as signifiers of absence (the dead, gods, denizens
of a different dimension of reality) and at the same they are themselves invisible
presences. This semiotic ambiguity, which is also an ontological problem, generates
the need for means to recognize, experience, represent, and communicate with the
invisible that Japanese culture itself produces. Barthes’s “empty center” suggests a
supposed primacy of the signifier in Japanese culture. However, this invisible realm is
also a manifestation of a collective past (culture, history, tradition, and so forth) and the
incessant necessity to deal with it—a past that, because of its ectoplasmic nature, can be
seen or unseen, and can be molded, represented and re-enacted in many ways. In this
sense, the Invisible is not only a matter of individual belief and ritual practice, but also
something that constrains and guides the construction of the present and the future.
16
1
The Dead Who Remain: Spirits and Changing

Views of the Afterlife
Satō Hiroo
Translated by Emily B. Simpson
Four people, two men and two women, are seated in a Japanese-style tatami room with
a decorative alcove (tokonoma 床の間) in the background (Figure 1.1). The main male
figure, with hair tied in a topknot, occupies the seat of honor with sake cup in hand.
The young woman in the lower right corner concentrates intently on her needlework.
All figures are in full formal dress and a beautiful meal is laid out on the table, as if for
a special day.
This picture, which resembles a scene taken from mundane everyday life, differs
from the average family portrait in one aspect only: all the figures appearing here are
dead to this world. This can be seen in the posthumous names (kaimyō 戒名)1 written
on the hanging scroll on display in the alcove (tokonoma). Here, the dead, whose
outfits and hairstyles show they died in different time periods and probably in different
locations, are shown together in one place, relaxed and at ease.
Figure 1.1 Votive image (kuyōe): four family members who died at different times spend time
together in the afterlife. Courtesy of Jōrakuji, Iwate Prefecture. Photograph by Satō Hiroo.
The Tōno region in the Iwate Prefecture, where this picture originates, has long
held the custom of depicting deceased ancestors and relatives as they were in life, in
the midst of a light-hearted conversation. This family portrait is one of such memorial
votive pictures (kuyō egaku 供養絵額) that were offered at temples.
The practice of making pictures of the dead and offering them at temples is not
limited to the Tōno region, but can be seen throughout the Tohoku area. In the
Murayama region of Yamagata prefecture, the custom of offering mukasari ema ムカ
サリ絵馬, wooden tablets depicting men and women who died young in the wedding
clothes they never got to wear in life, continues to this day. An example of this custom
can be seen in Figure 1.2, which was produced in 1919 (Taishō 8) at Jakushōji Temple
若松寺 in Tendō City, Yamagata. A young bridegroom is sitting in the center right of
the picture. Facing him from the left is the figure of a bride in traditional wedding garb;
her facial expression is hidden by the watabōshi 綿帽子, a bride’s silk floss headdress,
and cannot be seen. Seven men and women in formal dress encircle the pair, perhaps
matchmakers and relatives. Within this group, the bridegroom is the one no longer
alive in this world, having lost his life at a young age. The bereaved family, pitying this
youth who died before participating in a wedding ceremony—an important marker
of adulthood—offered an illustration of an imaginary one instead. In the roughly
one hundred years since this picture was produced and offered to this deceased man,
his representational figure has been immersed in the blissful time he was unable to
experience in real life.
Lastly, in the Tsugaru region of Aomori Prefecture, mourners offer bride and
groom dolls to comfort the souls of young people who died prematurely. In the
Figure 1.2 Votive image (mukasari ema): scene of a post-mortem marriage ceremony for a
man who died young. Courtesy of Jakushōji, Tendō City, Yamagata Prefecture. Photograph
by Satō Hiroo.
The Dead Who Remain 19
Ningyōdō 人形堂 (Doll Hall) of Kawakura Jizōson Temple 川倉地蔵尊, a large number
of these dolls are enshrined in glass cases. When the object of memorialization is a
young man, the customary portrait of the deceased and a bride doll will be offered
together as a set. When the person being remembered is a young woman, a groom
doll is offered instead. There are also offerings of bride and groom dolls as a couple,
with one of the two figures standing in for the deceased. The dolls acting as spouse
of the departed are each given their own fictional names. Along with the dolls in the
case are offerings such as cans of tea, sake, or beer. There is sometimes a small baby
doll resting between the feet of the two dolls, presumably representing an imaginary
child born to them.
At first glance, this Tohoku regional custom seems archaic and old-fashioned.
However, it is a practice almost never observed before the Edo period (1600–1868),
and may in fact only date back to the Bakumatsu period (1853–1867). In other words,
the custom actually began to flourish in modern times. Why would such memorial
rituals reproducing the afterlife of the dead take hold in this northern region of Japan
in the modern period?
The Dead Who Leave and the Dead Who Stay
Once dead, people are no longer tangibly present in this world; only a year after death,
almost all physical traces of a person’s existence are gone. Regardless, the living do not
forget the departed who were close to them in life. Why do we believe in the existence
of souls, create images of the deceased, and constantly return to the subject of life after
death?
In fact, for the people of the Japanese archipelago, the tendency to defy the natural
process of forgetting by preserving memories of the dead did not originate in the
distant past. Rather, it was during the transitional period between the fourteenth and
sixteenth centuries that ideas about the dead and the world after death underwent
a great transformation. That period was a turning point between the view that the
deceased did not maintain any existence in this world alongside the living and the
view held nowadays, according to which the dead remain nearby for eternity and
continue their interactions with the living.2 The attempt to intentionally preserve
memories of the deceased is a phenomenon that first emerges after this transition
was complete.
In the medieval world, before this transition occurred, people had deep faith in
the power of buddhas as saviors who would take them to the Pure Land (jōdo 浄土)
after death. The image of an ideal world believed to physically exist in another
dimension—the Pure Land—was shared throughout society and thus held a vivid
sense of reality. Those who had entrusted themselves to divine saviors (buddhas and
kami) were believed to fly instantly to the Pure Land at the moment of death thanks
to the power of these savior figures. Once individuals entrusted themselves to the
Buddha, they were promised an afterlife of religious exaltation in the Pure Land,
and, consequently, there was no longer any need for anxiety about one’s fate after
death.
Buddhist thinkers preached doctrines that supported this worldview of life and
death, as a great number of extant texts show. Kamakura Buddhism was a typical
representative of this view, particularly the realization of rebirth in the Pure Land
based on recitation of the nenbutsu to the Buddha Amida, as Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212)
advocated. Even Buddhist authors who held positions completely antithetical to
Pure Land teachings on salvation, such as Nichiren 日蓮 (1222–1282) or the priests
of Esoteric Buddhism, who instead focused on achieving Buddhahood in one’s body
during the present life, shared a belief in the reality of an invisible Pure Land to which
one undoubtedly went after death, as did all people living in that period.
Thus, in medieval Japan, the aim of rebirth in the Pure Land was widely embraced,
and examples of those who had successfully achieved it were constantly collected
and compiled in various “Stories of Rebirth in the Pure Land” (ōjōden 往生伝). There
were also many depictions of the Buddha coming to this world to greet people as they
departed human life (raigōzu 来迎図). This worldview was predicated on the notion
that any of the dead who remain in this world have not yet attained salvation and
thus lead an unhappy existence. The Gakizōshi 餓鬼草紙, a painted scroll created in
the twelfth century, depicts hungry ghosts (gaki 餓鬼) prowling around gravesites and
coveting the flesh of corpses. Thus, cemeteries were not abodes where the dead lived
peacefully but places where those who fell into unpleasant afterlife destinations, such
as these hungry ghosts, stayed on.
For this reason, there was no custom of relatives visiting a graveyard from time
to time in the medieval period (ohaka-mairi 御墓参り). Going deliberately to a place
where the deceased person was not present in any form was utterly useless. Even
when memorial services were carried out at gravesites, they were not performed to
pray for the tranquil rest of the dead buried there but in order to definitively send off
the hungry ghosts that may have missed out on salvation, like those depicted in the
Gakizōshi, to the other world.
By contrast, after the late medieval shift in the worldview of death and the afterlife,
the deceased were no longer thought to set out for a distant other world. People living
in early modern Japan did not imagine a separate other world, as the concept of an
absolute being that instantly rescued human beings was no longer shared throughout
society. In the medieval period, a particular “Buddha” worshiped at a temple was
nothing other than the invisible true form (honji 本地) of the Buddha existing in
another realm; the Buddhist statues enshrined at temples and shrines were not the
actual Buddha but a mere representation. However, just like many of us living in
modern times, early modern Japanese, when hearing the word “Buddha” could only
bring to mind the Buddhist statues installed in various places, those they saw with
their own eyes.
As the image of buddhas with enormous salvific power and the enlightened places
in which they lived lost their colorful appeal, the deceased could no longer fly off to
another world. Instead of leaving for a nirvana out of reach of the living, the dead
stayed where their bones and remains lay—this world—indefinitely. Early modern
society, having discarded the notion of retreating with buddhas of another world into
a religious salvation that transcended life and death, gave humans the leading role
in caring for the dead. By means of the care given to them by relatives over a long
period of time, the deceased gradually shed the vibrant desires and emotions they had
experienced in life, and finally ascended to an existence that transcended human form:
they became “ancestors.”
It is in early modern Japan that the concept of ancestors who protect their
descendants came to fruition. At the same time, the understanding of what kind of
existence one should attain after death changed from achieving enlightenment in an
unknown, far-off location to remaining in this world and continuing to interact with
one’s descendants, just as one did in life.3
The Family Registers of the Dead
In early modern times, one’s well-being after death depended on whether or not
family members could continuously care for the deceased.4 During the process of
transformation from dead relative to ancestor, the living could not afford any lapse in
memory regarding the dead and thus interrupt the course of their memorialization.5
The importance of continuing to remember the dead first took hold in society at large
in the Japanese archipelago in the early Edo period. The time of remembering a specific
deceased person, and maintaining the indivisible relationship with that person even
after death, had arrived (Satō 2015a).
As I already mentioned, there was no custom of visiting graves during the medieval
period in Japan; the dead carried to cemeteries were abandoned and were not visited
again. The names of those entombed in such graves did not remain, and the deceased
quickly reached a state of anonymity.
In contrast, from the sixteenth century on, five-element funerary pagodas (gorintō
五輪塔, gravestones consisting of five stones layered on top of one another in a
pagoda-like shape) began to appear, first in the Kinai area around Kyoto and Osaka
and later in other parts of Japan as well (Yoshii 1993). At the same time, people also
began to make square pillars featuring the names of the deceased. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, a vast number of new Buddhist temples were built with adjacent
gravesites (Tamamuro 1977); in the ancient and medieval periods, temples did not
have graveyards within their precincts. The majority of the temples we now view as
standard, with temple and cemetery as a natural pairing, were originally constructed
during these two centuries. Behind this massive increase in temple building were two
key trends: the spread of temples into areas inhabited by the common people and
the Edo period system of parishes (danka seido 檀家制度).6 Beyond and above these
trends, however, was the concept that the dead did not leave for another world but
stayed forever in this one.
For the deceased remaining in this world to be successfully elevated to the status
of ancestor, a long period of assiduous care and attention was required. In order to
achieve this, a place where the living could be assured of meeting their dead relatives
whenever they went there—a fixed spot for communication—was indispensable.
Therefore, in the early modern period, the dead, just like the living, came to have a fixed
domicile. The graveyard that held their remains was the natural choice for a residence
for the dead. And just as the living have name plates on their residences, the dead also
required similar markers on their graves as landmarks for those who wanted to meet
with them. The tombstones at the gravesites and the posthumous names (hōmyō 法名)
carved into them served that function.7
On fixed occasions, such as the anniversary of the person’s death, the summer
Obon Festival お盆, and the week of the equinox (when Buddhist services are held),
relatives would visit the grave carrying flowers, incense, and the dead person’s favorite
food and drinks, and speak with the dead in the exact same way they would with
living human beings. For the Obon Festival, each family would create a Buddhist
altar for the spirit of the deceased (shōryōdana 精霊棚) and light the welcoming fire
(mukaebi 迎え火) on the first night of Obon to greet their ancestors. Such etiquette
regarding the interactions between the living and dead is normally carried out in
Japan even today.
At the beginning of the Edo period, the use of tombstones engraved with the
posthumous name of the dead first emerged among the warrior class. The construction
of such gravestones gradually spread throughout society, and by the latter half of the
Edo period, there is evidence that even commoners had stone grave markers. The
trend toward remembering the dead as an individual with a particular name spread
rapidly through all regions of the archipelago (Satō 2015b).
Alongside the establishment of gravestones, memorial rites for the deceased
became formalized and increasingly complex. As Buddhist services for the dead were
mandated from the seventh day to the thirty-third year after death, they came to
regulate the lives of the living (Tamamuro 1979). The detailed customs of these funeral
services, still widely practiced today, came to be inherited as traditional rites with
regional differences. Even among temples belonging to the same sect, it is not unusual
for the form of funeral rites to diverge significantly according to region. Rather than
the denomination of the temple, distinctive local characteristics came to strongly
influence the nature of funeral rituals.
The Other Shore, Sans Buddha
As the nucleus of care for the deceased shifted from savior buddhas to human beings,
the world of the dead underwent a rapid process of secularization. The peaceful image
of the dead was, in fact, an interpretation gleaned from the desires of the living.
At Hōshōji Temple 宝性寺 in Akita City, a picture produced in the Edo period, the
Kumano kanjin jikkai mandara 熊野観心十界曼陀羅, tells the story of the human life
cycle (Figure 1.3). This is not a hanging scroll but a single large painting. This type of
mandala—many of which are still extant in the Tohoku region—was carried by the
Kumano bikuni 熊野比丘尼, a group of religious women who circulated all over Japan,
telling stories and providing explanations while showing images such as these.8
The upper half of this picture features an arch-shaped mountain. From the right
edge of the mountain, two individuals, a man and a woman, are pictured as infants
who gradually grow into adults. At the summit, the two people, possibly a couple, have
reached the pinnacle of societal distinction. From there, they gradually descend the
mountain and eventually reach old age.
Figure 1.3 Kumano kanjin jikkai mandara (Visualization mandala of the ten realms
of transmigration as they are found in Kumano). Courtesy of Hōshōji, Akita City, Akita
Prefecture. Photograph by Satō Hiroo.
This image deploys the birth of a child and the image of the cemetery on different
slopes of the mountain, as if to display life from its starting point to its final conclusion.
At the center of the mountain, the character for mind and heart (kokoro 心) is written.
In the upper region of the mountain area, under the arch of human life, the Buddha
Amida and his accompanying bodhisattvas look down on the great number of sentient
beings in the section below, suffering the tortures of hell and other evil paths.
We can see from this self-repeating cycle of life that people do not go to a separate
world after death. Both the Pure Land that one should pray for and the hell that one
must shun are here in this world. The ideal life does not culminate in passing to an
unknown other world. After a life lived to its full extent in this land, one receives a
new life and is reborn somewhere in this world. Death is but a short time of rest before
returning to the world of the living.
In the early modern Japanese mentality, buddhas no longer invited human beings to
other worlds, nor did they lead people to an enlightened existence transcending life and
death. Instead, their role was to continue watching over human beings whether dead or
alive and grant them a peaceful existence. Sentient beings prayed to be protected from
taking the wrong path and falling into the evil realms as inhabitants of hell, hungry
ghosts, beasts, or asuras. If by some chance they fell into such realms they prayed to be
rescued. Furthermore, in order to realize these hopes, the most important factor was
the possession of “mind and heart” (kokoro).
Behind the weakening belief in the Pure Land was the unique worldview of the Edo
period, in which people no longer held a shared faith in the real existence of a distant
Pure Land. Thus, they could no longer earnestly wish to be reborn into such a place
after death. The possibility of falling into evil paths, especially hell, was to be avoided at
all costs, not because it was an impediment to enlightenment, but because it prevented
the dead from achieving peaceful rest and made returning to life as a human being
very difficult.
During the early modern period, pictures of hell (jigokue 地獄絵), which showed
humans who had committed sinful actions while alive suffering in hell, were created
in large quantities (Nishiki 2003). Such pictures often depicted people who had fallen
into the animal realm and were reborn as dogs, cats, and cows. To people of the time,
the greatest fear was a misstep that would take one out of the cycle of rebirth from
human being to another human being.
However much the other world moved toward the present world, Buddhist
institutions in the Edo period held overwhelming power and influence through the
operations of the parish system. This meant that the medieval image of the dead in the
Pure Land of the Buddha seated with blooming lotuses, performing ascetic practices
with the goal of being finally liberated from their earthly desires, could not be entirely
extinguished. However, as Japan moved toward the end of shogunal rule and the image
of the Pure Land as the other world become more and more rare, the very symbol of
the world after death underwent a significant change. The existence of a Buddha who
controlled one’s fate after death increasingly faded, and eventually the figure of the
Buddha disappeared entirely from the world of the dead.
Instead, the deceased, dressed in lovely clothes, came to be envisioned as residing in
a realm that was an extension of this world, abundantly provided with the necessities
of life. The memorial picture at Tōno and the mukasari wooden tablet of Yamagata,
discussed at the beginning of this chapter, were new customs born with the modern
era as a result of this change in the concept of the world after death.
New Directions in Funeral Rites
The notion of the deceased staying forever in this world, which took root in Japan
at the beginning of the early modern period, depended on societal networks such as
family and community. For the dead to reside continually in a particular location, such
as a grave, and maintain close ties with the living over long periods, the existence of a
stable family lineage with no break between ancestors and descendants was essential.
By contrast, in the medieval period, relationships among people were incredibly fluid,
and the class of people who could form stable family lineages (ie 家) was extremely
limited. In this context, as I have already mentioned, the idea of an absolute savior was
widely shared throughout society. To put it differently, it is precisely because there was
no possible expectation of human care for the dead beyond one’s own lifetime that
people had no choice but to entrust their fate entirely to the buddhas.
The establishment of peace following the end of the violent Sengoku period
(1467–1600) eradicated the complex and multilayered medieval system of rights
related to land ownership. This, together with new Edo shogunal policies, allowed
for the emergence of farmers who directly owned their land and, thus, resulted in the
creation of a particularly large class of landed farmers. Care for the dead over a long
period became possible as new beliefs about the afterlife spread to the agricultural class,
which comprised the overwhelming majority of society. These societal conditions were
essential prerequisites for the practice of visiting graves (ohaka mairi) to take hold as
a countrywide activity. Folklorist Yanagita Kunio (柳田國男, 1875–1962), in his essay
“Sosen no hanashi,” wrote that in Japan, “ancestors are always worshipped by their
descendants” (Yanagita 1946: 126). Here, he indicated the importance of the ie family
system of succession through direct descent, which took firm hold in the early modern
period and remains an institution shared throughout Japanese society today.
In recent years, however, we can see that the early modern relationship between the
living and the dead as mediated by the grave, though stable through many centuries
and upheavals, is now undergoing a significant transformation. This can perhaps be
most clearly seen in recent new forms of burial (Inoue 2003). Consider, for example,
the relatively recent development of “natural burials” (shizensō 自然葬). This term
was introduced by Yasuda Mutsuhiko (安田睦彦, b. 1927), whose activity since the
early 1990s in the “Association for Promoting the Freedom of Burial” (Sōsō no jiyū
wo susumeru kai 葬送の自由をすすめる会) has achieved clear social recognition
(Nakamura and Yasuda 2008). Following cremation, natural burials consist of scattering
the ashes (sanpu 散布) in the mountains or at sea; the process is also called “scattering
bones” (sankotsu 散骨). Another example is “woodland burial” (jumokusō 樹木葬).
Initiated by the temples of Ichinoseki City in Iwate Prefecture with the additional
aim of protecting undeveloped woodland, these burials take the form of interring the
deceased’s remains in mountain forests and planting a tree in their memory. Similar
forms of burial are being carried out throughout Japan.
Behind these new forms of burial and their wide social acceptance is a growing
criticism of large-scale cemeteries, which tear up mountain woodlands and destroy
nature during their construction. As part of a growing criticism against the heedless
pursuit of material wealth, the condemnation of traditional funerals expresses the
personal desire of many people to return to nature after death.
In both natural and woodland burials, there is almost no desire to leave behind
proof of one’s existence in some form of memorial. Once the act of scattering the
cremated ashes is complete, the deceased individual no longer has any clearly
identified, permanent residence in this world. Here, we no longer find the notion that
bones represent the spirit of a dead person. Similarly, in the case of woodland funerals,
by merely erecting a small wooden marker at the burial site, together with a newly
planted tree sapling, there is no intention to leave behind the name of the dead at a
specific location.
Additionally, in the past few years, crematories have reported that many people do
not come to pick up the ashes of their deceased relatives after the cremation process is
complete. Thus, we begin to see a clear shift in the tendency to view physical remains
as a link with the deceased.
This raises an extremely important issue. It is not only the visible form of funeral
rites, but the very worldview of life and death that seems to be in the midst of a
significant transformation. The accepted practice of the gravesite as an intermediary
between the living and the dead, which has continued from the sixteenth century to
the present day, is approaching another transitional phase. The dead are gradually
withdrawing from the sites of their graves.
If they are not in the grave, where are the dead going? We might look to the new
trend of decorating the house with photographs of the deceased (Suzuki 2004). This
practice rejects any explicit religious overtones and is thus different than placing a photo
alongside Buddhist mortuary tablets (ihai 位牌) in the family Buddhist altar (butsudan
仏壇), as has been typically done until now. Another method of memorializing the
dead in fashion today is called “at hand memorial” (temoto kuyō 手元供養). This takes
the form of mixing the cremated ashes with clay or glass and firing them together in
order to make a pendant or other ornament that can be worn or otherwise kept close
at hand. This practice also focuses on material objects within the home and lacks any
religious overtones.
All of the examples discussed above have one aspect in common: a lack of concern
toward remembering the dead for eternity. Whether performing natural burial or at
hand memorials, the relationship between the deceased and the person memorializing
them stays on the personal level. Once the living individual leaves this world and joins
the memorialized deceased in the next, there is no longer anyone left in this world to
remember the person who died first. This differs fundamentally from the concepts and
practices of recent centuries, such as inscribing a posthumous name on a gravestone.
Behind these new forms of burial and memorialization is the changing structure
of the traditional family system. Along with the great influx of people to metropolitan
centers, as a result of Japan’s period of rapid growth, came the dissolution of large
families, which had many generations and even branch family members living together
under the same roof. Instead, small families consisting of a husband and wife and their
children have become the normative household unit. In the past decade, the percentage
of men and women remaining unmarried throughout their lives has increased, and
this trend has resulted in the emergence of a great number of people with no families
to mourn them after death. Many of those who choose natural or woodland burials are
people with no future generation to succeed them; accordingly, they cannot hope for
continuous memorial services to be performed on their behalf. At most, they may wish
for their spouses or close friends to keep some of their modest belongings close by, and
remember their deceased loved one when occasionally coming into contact with such
material reminders.
“As long as people I know remember me” or “it’s enough if my friends keep me
in their thoughts”—feelings such as these form the basis of these new patterns of
memorialization, which stem from the individualization of relationships between the
living and the dead. Unlike the socially structured relations of earlier times, when the
relationship between the living and the dead was mediated by the family, this bond
has changed into a relationship of equals, fellow individuals to whom one has some
sort of connection.9 When all of the surrounding people who might remember one are
gone, the image of becoming one with nature and continuing one’s existence in a small
corner of the earth has become a new and appealing way to understand death.
The deceased are therefore liberated from the materiality of their remains and
graves, and as long as there is someone to remember them they may freely appear to
that person. The recent popularity of the song “Sen no kaze ni natte” 千の風になって
(“Becoming a Thousand Winds”), with lyrics about the dead residing in nature rather
than in graves,10 attests to how thoroughly this new outlook on death, life, and the
world has permeated society. Memorial items, such as photographs or pendants made
from the remains of the dead, are not objects in which the dead soul resides but tools
that serve to awaken memory. Therefore, the deceased are not in some tangible place
that we can easily locate. Rather, like the humanoid character Hatsune Miku,11 who can
be summoned via the computer or by means of a smartphone app, the dead are virtual
characters existing in a virtual space. Objects that belonged to them, or that remind the
living of who they were, are simply the switch that activates our recollection.
Conclusion
When people you are close to—people you have spent part of your life with—leave this
world, you don’t immediately forget them. It is our nature as humans to recall, again
and again, those who have departed before us. However, the method and time-span of
remembrance differs according to location and time period.
In the case of Japan, it was the early modern period, after the sixteenth century,
when the effort to reverse the natural process of forgetting by remembering the dead
as long as possible became an important part of Japanese culture. At the same time, the
reality of an ideal other world, ruled by an absolute savior who would embrace human
beings, grew less prevalent. Rather than depart for a separate world, the dead took up
a permanent address in this one. Instead of an otherworldly Buddha one could not see
or touch, blood relatives or other close relations customarily cared for the dead over a
long period.
The context behind this shift in the rituals memorializing the dead was twofold. In
addition to the changing cosmology, from which Buddhist symbolism had vanished,
there was also the phenomenon of the ie family structure—a continuous household
that transcended generations—becoming generally established across all social classes.
During their lives, people created local communities through the agency of their
households. After taking one’s last breath, one would be welcomed by their deceased
comrades in the graveyard. From there, the deceased could hear the constant reading
of sutras from the main temple hall and be comforted. The dead could also anticipate
occasional visits from relatives and descendants to share their mutual sadness. Just as
the living created communal groups through their houses, the departed also formed a
community via household units in the graveyard, continuing their function as part of
a communal group.
The dead thus became guests of this world, and as the role of memorializing them
moved from buddhas to humans, the secularization of the world after death progressed
to the point that, by the modern period, even the landscape of the Pure Land and
the figures of Buddhist divinities had started to disappear. Therefore, the image of the
realm of the dead was liberated from the Buddhist worldview. The dead went to an
afterlife in which, instead of gods and buddhas, relatives and colleagues gathered and
enjoyed a “life” without suffering or sorrow, with plentiful food, clothing, and lodging.
This image is reflected in the memorial picture, mukasari votive tablet, and bride dolls
that I discussed at the beginning of this chapter.
It is the existence of the ie household system, maintaining its prominence over
five hundred years until today, which undergirds both actual society and the world
after death. However, the very nature of the ie is now in the midst of a massive
transformation, which seems to have led to the individualization of the dead. There
has been a rapid increase in the number of the deceased who are not memorialized
through the framework of the ie, of the dead without community ties, and of people
who do not wish to be remembered after death by generations to come. We are about
to enter a period in which the dead with no family register will appear in increasingly
great numbers.
Behind this reality we can see the progressive breakdown of the traditional family
system and its role in Japanese society. In tandem with the declining birth rate and
aging population of Japan, the proportion of single-member households has risen
to one in four, and ending up alone in old age has become almost expected. Graves
without any relatives to follow have increased to the point that the word “finished
grave” (haka jimai 墓じまい), which denotes a grave where no descendants will follow,
has become common. Today, we have reached the point that it is now difficult to reverse
the shift from families to individuals as the basic unit of society. Concurrent with this
shift is the dismantling of the household in the world of the dead as individualization
continues to progress.
When looking back on the various cultures constructed by humanity on this earth
up until now, there is, without exception, no civilization that has failed to imagine the
existence of spirits and of a reality after death. From this fact, we can derive only one
conclusion: people require the existence of the dead. The story of one’s life must also
include the deceased and the world after death for it to be considered complete.
When the ie household system was established at the beginning of the early modern
period, our ancestors told a story of close relationships between the living and the dead
with this premise in mind. However, now that this system is no longer functioning as it
once did, we have not yet been able to agree upon a new story that reflects this change.
Such a premise is essential in order to not only construct a stable relationship with the
deceased, but to send off the newly departed after the end of an emotionally fulfilled
lifetime. What form this relationship will take is an important question that the dead
continue to put before us.
2
The Mystical “Occident” or the Vibrations of

“Modernity” in the Mirror of Japanese Thought
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
Shortly after 8:00 p.m. on May 10, 1911, a spirit medium named Takahashi Sadako
高橋貞子 (b.1875) prepared to give a demonstration of her psychical powers in front
of a group of Japanese academics led by Fukurai Tomokichi 福来友吉 (1869–1952), a
professor of psychology at Tokyo Imperial University. Three days earlier, Takahashi
had entered a trance and spoke with the voice of a possessing tengu 天狗 (goblin),
which told her audience that at the appointed time she would be able to project a
particular thought-image (nensha 念写) onto a photographic plate. On the evening
in question, she chanted a prayer to Nichiren and visualized the kanji for “heaven”
(天) in front of a prestigious audience including not just Fukurai and his wife, but
also the famous philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō 井上哲次郎 (1855–1944), the Shinto
intellectual and legal scholar Kakei Katsuhiko 筧克彦 (1872–1961), the physicist and
educator Gotō Makita 後藤牧太 (1853–1930), and the psychologists Kubo Yoshihide
久保良英 (1883–1942) and Kuwata Yoshizō 桑田芳蔵 (1882–1967), among others.
Fukurai judged the experiment to be a success, but this particular medium chose to
give no further demonstrations. Nevertheless, it was far from the only such psychical
experiment orchestrated by Fukurai and his team, which at times even involved the
one-time president of Tokyo University and pioneering physicist Baron Yamakawa
Kenjirō 山川健次郎 (1854–1931) as well as the founding father of Japanese religious
studies Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治 (1873–1949).1
Fukurai did not portray these séances as indigenous traditional animist or shamanic
rituals; rather, he described them as modern and suggested that Japan needed to catch
up with foreign paranormal research, arguing that, by contrast, “in the European
countries and in America the psychic science has been developing with great rapidity
day after day” (Fukurai 1931: 8).
Although Fukurai eventually fell into disrepute after one of his psychic mediums
was accused of fraud and then committed suicide, he would go on to elaborate a theory
of psychical powers that he saw as an extension of especially Western insights into the
nature of spirits. Nor was he wrong about this tradition’s Western pedigree, for similar
kinds of research were indeed being carried out by a range of influential European
and American thinkers including physicists such as Marie Curie (1867–1934),
philosophers like Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and famous psychologists such as
William James (1842–1910), whose work Fukurai translated into Japanese.2 To be

sure, during Fukurai’s lifetime there continued to be a massive boom in spiritualism,
séances, and theosophy across Europe and America, and he was not alone among
Japanese thinkers in registering its impacts. To exaggerate slightly, we might say that
from a certain vantage point in Meiji-Taishō Japan, it was the Europeans who looked
like the real animists.
This chapter will make sense of this pattern and in doing so problematize a range of
issues in the study of animism. To telegraph the grand trajectory I want to explore here:
first, classical anthropological and sociological theories often promoted notions of an
opposition between primitive animism associated with belief in spirits and modern
materialism associated with a dispirited cosmos. Moreover, this binary opposition was
often spatialized to suggest a contrast between a primitive, spiritual East and a modern,
rational West. Second, when some influential nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Japanese thinkers turned their gaze westward, they described not a disenchanted
world but a vibratory modernity overflowing with spirits and invisible forces. Third,
when we follow this line of thought and examine the writings of some of the most
influential European theorists of “animism” and “fetishism,” we can find that they too
often believed in a spirited modernity. Canonical European theorists often seem to
have been caught in their own theories. Put differently, animism as a theoretical lens
may have emerged closer to home than scholars have given it credit.
Animist Japan
Wherever mystery is possible, there man imagines non-human spirits to exist. A

suggestion of the enormity of the numbers of spirits whose existence is conceived
is given by the following from the strongly animistic Shinto faith of Japan.
George Williams Gilmore, Animism: Or, Thought Currents of Primitive Peoples, 1919
Classical theories of modernization often presume that as a civilization gets more

modern it exchanges belief in a vibrant cosmos of spirits and animating beings for a
clockwork universe consisting in dead and insensate matter. Theorists have described
this evolution of thought in different terms. But it is striking that as scholarly categories,
“animism,” “fetishism,” and “ancestor worship” were all often used to refer to putatively
primitive worldviews associated with the belief in spirits. Moreover, it was often
assumed that as modernity reached fruition these various spirited belief systems would
vanish.
Insofar as this schema was spatialized, belief in spirits was often described as the
central difference between civilized and uncivilized cultures. Indeed, a common
Orientalist trope is to suppose an opposition between a backward spiritual or mystic
“Orient” and a modern materialist or rational “Occident.”3 Here, belief in animism or
spirits is seen as the dividing line between East and West. Although scholars today
are generally wary of describing Asia in such terms, one has only to walk into most
bookstores in the United States or Western Europe to find popular versions of this
theme (e.g., Cushman and Jones 1999).
The Mystical “Occident” or the Vibrations of “Modernity” 31
Strikingly, as the trio of concepts—animism, fetishism, and ancestor worship—was

being theorized in the nineteenth century, Japan was sometimes seen as exemplary
of all three. Indeed, the American orientalist William Elliot Griffis deployed all three
terms in the influential The Religions of Japan (first edition 1895), arguing:
The animistic tendency in that part of Asia dominated by the Chinese world of ideas
shows itself […] in the location of the spiritual influence in or upon an inanimate
object or fetich [sic]. Among men in Chinese Asia from the clodhopper to the
gentleman the inheritance of Fetichism [sic] from the primeval ages is constantly
noticeable […] Further illustrations of far Eastern Animism and Fetichism [sic]
are seen in forms once vastly more prevalent in Japan than now […] Among the
common people the real basis of the [Shinto] god-way was ancestor worship. From
the very first this trait and habit of the Japanese can be discerned. (Griffis 1904:
22, 27, 50)
According to Griffis, Japan might seem to have been the quintessential empire of
spirits.4 At the very least, his writings depict Japanese culture as having preserved
different stages in the cultural history of mankind.
Griffis did not write in simple binaries, but his colleague, the American philosopher
and historian of Japanese art Ernest Fenollosa, published a volume of poetry so
explicit in its Orientalism that the only reason it hasn’t received more attention is that
it probably is too obvious. I’m referring to Fenollosa’s East and West: The Discovery
of America and Other Poems (1893). In the preface to this collection, Fenollosa
distinguishes a materialist and “masculine” West with a spiritual and “feminine” East,
before fantasizing about a coming marriage of “[Occidental] Scientific Analysis and
[Oriental] Spiritual Wisdom” (Fenollosa 1893: vi).
This rhetorical framing was sometimes echoed by Japanese thinkers themselves.
For instance, a similar binary opposition can be found in works such as The Ideals of the
East (1903) by Fenollosa’s former student Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三, and earlier in the
expression “Japanese spirit, Western technique” (wakon yōsai 和魂洋才) popularized
by Yoshikawa Tadayasu 吉川忠安 (Josephson 2012: 108). Nor were they alone, for a
number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers suggested that the “West” was
primarily to be understood in terms of its technical or scientific advancement, while
the “East” was defined by its connection to spiritual traditions. In some cases, this
putative difference was used to justify various programs directed at disenchantment
or the elimination of belief in backward “superstitions.”5 In other cases, notions of
a “mystical Asia” were used either to fuel indigenous spiritual revivals or were
appropriated by European occultists looking to re-enchant the West (see Goto-Jones
2016; Patridge 2013).
But when some Japanese thinkers turned their attention to Euro-American
civilization in the period, the “West” they saw was far from stripped of its belief in
spirits, magic, and an animated nature. Indeed, Japanese thinkers were often struck
by what seemed to be the resurgence of belief in ghosts and invisible forces in a
civilization that portrayed itself as experiencing the progressive demystification of the
supernatural.
The Mystical Occident
It had been my belief that ghosts and [demonic] palanquin-bearers had

permanently gone out of business with the [Meiji] Restoration, but […] it seemed
as if, unbeknownst to me the ghosts had returned.
Natsume Sōseki, “Koto no sorane,” 1905
As mentioned above, one of the more famous participants in Fukurai Tomokichi’s

séances was the scholar Anesaki Masaharu. Anesaki’s interest in psychical research
might seem out of keeping; after all, today he is remembered as Japan’s first professor
of religious studies. Scholars have noted Anesaki’s importance in establishing the new
field in Japan and have often praised his “scientific” history of Japanese religions or
underscored his influence on the Japanese government’s religious policy (see Isomae
and Fukasawa 2002; Isomae 2003; Kitagawa 1964; Suzuki 1979). While there have
been occasional references to Anesaki’s devotion to Nichiren, scholars have generally
tended to emphasize the seriousness of his academic project and his role in buttressing
Japanese imperial ideology.
But what is less well known about Anesaki is that he was interested in spirits and
the paranormal. Not only did Anesaki engage in experiments with Fukurai, but he
was also a member of the British Society for Psychical Research and he often met with
Theosophists like Annie Besant.6 His attitudes toward spiritualist phenomena can be
found in a written response to an experiment in which a spirit medium had accurately
predicted the location of a lost Hebrew coin. In his reply, Anesaki argued:
It seems to me that the only possible explanation of the facts is the hypothesis
of spirit communication. My conception of a spirit may differ a little from many
others, but I find it not necessary to state it here in full. The existence of spirit
forces, not necessarily of spirit individuals, will be enough for the explanation.
(Anesaki letter, reproduced in Funk 1911: 511)
Hence, Anesaki seems to have had no problem making his belief in spiritual forces
public knowledge. Moreover, in published writings Anesaki described his own
uncanny experiences and made reference to spiritualist texts, including F. W. H. Myers’s
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death ([1903] 1954), which he described
as a “masterpiece” (Anesaki 2002, vol. 6: 94–95). Anesaki also taught a course at the
University of Tokyo in 1903 that addressed “theosophy, occultism, and psychical
research.” And his writings on religion contain the occasional reference to European
belief in ghosts.7 He even edited a volume by Albert J. Edmunds, a spiritualist who
attempted to synthesize Buddhism with occultism (Edmunds 1914).8
Anesaki was far from alone in his engagement with occultism. When Japanese elites
turned their attention to Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, they often encountered belief in spirits, theosophy, and psychical forces. Once
you turn to the Meiji and Taishō eras with an eye to Western esotericism, it seems to
be everywhere. Not only were there translations of European spiritualist texts (e.g.,
Flammarion 1921) and books by Japanese scholars addressing such subjects directly
(including Shinrei no genshō 心霊の現象 by Hirai Kinzō 平井金三 (1909), Shinrei no

himitsu 心霊の秘密 by Hirata Motokichi 平田元吉 (1912), Saiminjutsu ni okeru seishin
no genshō 催眠術に於ける精神の現象 by Sasaki Kyūhei 佐々木九平 (1903), and Shinrei
kōza 心霊講座 by Asano Wasaburō 浅野和三郎 (1999)), but one can also find references
to spiritualism and theosophy in everything from novels to scholarly essays.9
To provide a few more examples, scholars have already observed that D. T. Suzuki
(Suzuki Daisetsu Teitarō 鈴木大拙貞太郎, 1870–1966), founder of the academic
study of Zen Buddhism, was a member of the Theosophical Society and engaged
with its teachings and those of the Christian esotericist Emanuel Swedenborg.10
Contemporary Japanese scholars such as Yoshinaga Shin’ichi 吉永進一and Kasai Kenta
葛西賢太 have shown that a number of other Buddhist thinkers from the period also
had to contend with Western forms of occultism in order to place Buddhism on an
international stage.11 Moreover, the fact that the pioneering folklorist Yanagita Kunio
柳田國男 (1875–1962) attended spiritualist séances is a matter of public knowledge.12
We also know that the novelists Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 芥川龍之介 (1892–1927)
and Mori Ōgai 森鷗外 (1862–1922) were interested in spiritualism and mesmerism,
respectively.13
The Japanese novelist with the most interesting account of Western spiritualism
was Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916), who had likely introduced Akutagawa
to the subject (Kurachi 1991). Today Sōseki is often praised for his psychological
realism, but even a casual reader of his extended corpus of writings cannot but be
struck by the regular appearance of the paranormal. For instance, Sōseki’s Kōjin 行
人 (1912) is largely concerned with his favorite themes—love triangles and the shock
of Japanese “enlightenment”—but one of the subplots is about how the protagonist’s
brother has encountered Western spiritualism. As Sōseki writes: “my brother at that
time had constantly alluded to the problem of death. Apparently, his interests had been
aroused in the studies of life after death which were currently popular in England and
America, and he had done considerable reading on the subject” (Natsume 1967: 256).
As an example of this reading, the protagonist gestures toward the writings of the
Belgian playwright, spiritualist, and mystic Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949). In this
respect, Sōseki knew what he was talking about. Moreover, elsewhere in the novel, Jirō
is described as “seriously studying mental telepathy” and carrying out half-hearted
paranormal research on the subject (Natsume 1967: 250).
This is far from Sōseki’s only reference to such themes, as spirits and psychical
research dot his published works.14 Perhaps one of Sōseki’s most overlooked texts in
this regard is a 1904 essay titled “Makubetsu no yūrei ni tsuite マクベスの幽霊に就て”
(Concerning the Ghost in Macbeth) (published originally in Teigoguku Bungaku 1904,
see Natsume 1904, and also Borlik 2013). The main thrust of this work of scholarly
criticism is likely directed at Sōseki’s rival, the Japanese literary theorist and author
Tsubouchi Shōyō 坪内逍遥 (1859–1935). Tsubouchi had both translated Shakespeare
into Japanese and written the famous manifesto Shōsetsu shinzui 小説神髄 (The
Essence of the Novel, 1885–1886), which argued that realism and a rejection of the
fantastic were the hallmarks of truly modern literature.15
In his Macbeth essay, Sōseki takes issue with the notion that Banquo’s ghost is
intended to be a mere hallucination (Natsume 1970, vol. 2: 105). He argues instead
that Banquo was an “apparition” and that Shakespeare was fully intending to deploy
supernatural elements. In this respect, Sōseki argues that modern literature should be
allowed to include elements like ghosts which, while not necessarily scientific, have a
poetical reality (Natsume 1970, vol. 2: 105).
The work by Sōseki that has attracted the most previous scholarly attention
in regard to spirits is the short story “Koto no sorane” (The Hollow Sound of the
Koto), quoted in this section epigraph.16 The story is mostly about the protagonist’s
relationship with a friend who has a background in psychology and an intense interest
in researching ghosts. Hence, “Koto no sorane” can be read as a commentary on the
rise of parapsychology in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Japan. This is
a moment that scholars of Japanese history have referred to as the Japanese “occult
boom” or Taishō spiritualism.17
To give some historical context, in 1886 pioneering Buddhist philosopher and
ghostbuster Inoue Enryō 井上円了 (1858–1919) founded the Fushigi Kenkyūkai 不
思議研究会 (“Paranormal Research Society”) modeled on the British Society of
Psychical Research, which eventually evolved into the Yōkai Kenkyūkai 妖怪研究
会 (the “Monster Investigation Society”).18 Together, members of this society did
research into everything from Japanese folklore (such as spirit foxes) to spiritualist
séances and even ectoplasm. Indecently, and shortly after having published his critique
of supernaturalism in literature, Tsubouchi Shōyō himself joined the Paranormal
Research Society, though perhaps more as a ghostbuster than a paranormal believer.
Inoue’s work was just the beginning, and in the decades that followed a number
of thinkers (such as Fukurai Tomokichi) were drawn into global spiritualist and
theosophical currents.
As one might expect from his interests, Inoue Enryō was also well aware of psychical
research and Euro-American spiritualism. His knowledge was on display in a number
of places. For instance in Shinrigaku bumon 心理学部門 (Psychological Classification,
1893), Inoue provided an account of the history of Western spiritualism and estimated
that it had over a million and a half followers in the United States alone. He also
speculated about its roots in notions of animal magnetism, which he rendered “animal
electricity” (dōbutsu denki 動物電気), and compared table-turning to the Japanese
kokkuri コックリ divination fad (Inoue 2000, vol. 2: 242–246).
While Inoue had been largely skeptical of European spiritualism, the next
generation of Japanese intellectuals took it more seriously and often became vocal
advocates. Alongside these advocates there was a shift in governmental policy.
As I have discussed elsewhere, the Meiji government had attempted to disabuse
its citizens’ beliefs about a whole host of different “superstitions” (meishin 迷信),
including belief in things like tengu, spirit-foxes, and, initially, ghosts—but by the
end of the century “ghosts” had dropped off that list (Josephson 2012). This may
have arisen out the seeming contradiction of banishing ghosts while simultaneously
promoting worship of the souls (reikon 霊魂 or eirei 英霊) of worthy martyrs, which
the Meiji government had officially collectively enshrined in Shōkonsha 招魂社
(Shrines for Invoking the Dead). The changing status of ghosts in official policy
may also suggest an ontological shift perhaps inspired by contact with Western
spiritualism.
In the turn to notions of magnetism or electricity to explain Western spiritualism,

Inoue Enryō was not alone. As Michael Foster has astutely observed, the cultural
resonances of “electricity” exploded in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Japan. Japanese stores sold everything from electric brandy to electrolyzed medicines.
More importantly, as Foster has noted, for a number of Inoue’s contemporaries “Electricity
served as a substitute for what rationality had disenchanted” (Foster 2009: 104). In
particular, they often explained the effects of Western spiritualism through recourse
to a discussion of “human electricity” that ended up asserting the reality of many
spiritualist effects, even as it explained them in quasi-scientific terms. I think Foster is
basically correct and the importance of this thread in Japan and elsewhere cannot be
overstated.
In the first instance, Japanese depictions of Europe and America often blurred
the line between electricity, animal magnetism, hypnotism, spiritualism, psychical
powers, and then later atomic energy, x-rays, and radiation. In this respect, the West
could be seen as a repository of a kind of “vibrational modernity.” From this vantage,
the “modern” or “scientific” cosmology seemed to describe not austere mechanism
or a world of dead matter but, rather, a pulsating animated cosmos overflowing with
invisible forces that were often seen as spiritual. In sum, the modern West appeared
less disenchanted than vibrantly electrified.
A Partial Genealogy of “Animism”
Everything around us is but vibration and hence radiation. Luminous radiations,

caloric, electric, sonorous, and now why doubt telepathy, the influence of thought
on thought at a distance? We sought the agent for the transmission [of thoughts]
and voilà! The rays which escape from the nervous cell are very capable of exciting
from afar the vibrations of other nervous cells.
Henri de Parville, “Revue des Sciences: Radiations,” Le Correspondant, 1904,
pp. 188, 190.
As this quote from the French journalist Henri de Parville illustrates, European thinkers
also often intermingled the spiritual, the psychic, and the new physics of radiation.
By way of another example, the British physicist William Crookes (famous as the
inventor of vacuum tubes and the radiometer that bears his name) was a member of
the Theosophical Society and a vocal spiritualist, and he often entangled his scientific
endeavors and occult investigations (Oppenheim 1985: 347–349). In this, Crookes was
far from alone (see Hessenbruch 2002).
A recent group of historians have shown that spiritualism was a major transnational
movement in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, perhaps peaking with as
many as two and a half million members in the United States and Great Britain and
affecting everything from women’s rights movements to literature and psychoanalysis.19
Moreover, almost the same period was also characterized by the rapid growth of the
Theosophical Society and various European occult revivals.20 As the German scholar
Ernst Benz has argued, many of these movements were grounded in a “theology
of electricity,” which interwove recent discoveries in magnetism, electricity, and

psychology with various innovative theological notions of “life-force” and other
spiritual powers (Benz 1971). In this regard, the “vibratory modernism” depicted by
Japanese cultural translators was in many respects a widespread part of global society.21
So if “modernity” was indeed overflowing with spirits and occult forces, where then
did the binary opposition between modern materialism and primitive animism come
from?
This section will turn to two early master theorists of European disenchantment—
August Comte and E. B. Tylor—to provide a genealogy of European theorizing about
fetishism and animism and then turn the enterprise on its head to show how both
thinkers were captured by their own theorizing. Put differently, it will show how in
the process of theorizing “primitive” civilizations, Europeans were really describing
themselves.
***
The term “animism” (Ger. Animismus) was coined by the German physician Georg
Ernst Stahl (1659–1734), who was arguing for an immortal “soul” or “anima” as
a kind of vital force that made life distinct and could even be the cause of illness
(Chang 2002). Hence, “animism” was thus originally a reference not to a primitive,
foreign belief-system but instead a synonym for a theory in European medicine also
known as medical vitalism.
The use of the term “animism” to describe primitive beliefs, however, comes from
the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917). He first discussed
“animism” in “The Religion of Savages” (1866). In that text, Tylor observes that
primitive religion is often described as “fetishism,” which is depicted as the belief
that “man conceives of all external bodies as animated by a life analogous to his
own, with differences of mere intensity” (1866: 84). Tylor broadly agrees with
this characterization of primitive religion, but he rejects the label “fetishism” on
the grounds that the term is too closely associated with witchcraft and particular
manmade objects like “idols.” He argues instead that primitive religion is basically
nature worship, not idolatry. His alternative suggestion is to describe the most
primitive form of religion that depicts the world as enlivened with spirits and
invisible forces as “animism.” I will return to his notion of animism below, but
first I want to excavate the history of the term “fetishism,” which Tylor is explicitly
replacing.
The term “fetishism” (Fr. fétichisme) was first used systematically by the French
historian Charles de Brosses in Du culte des dieux fétiches (1760). For de Brosses,
primitive religion was monotheistic, but following the Flood fetishism became
dominant when the ancient Egyptians began worshiping animals. But the main
influence on Tylor and indeed most later uses of fetishism was the pioneering French
sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857).
To understand what Comte was doing with “fetishism,” you should know that his
most influential contribution to social theory was what amounted to a universal rule of
scientific progress, generally referred to as the “Law of the Three Stages” (Loi des trois
états).22 Probably the most canonical formulation is:
By the very nature of the human mind, each branch of our knowledge is necessarily
subject to successively progressing through three different theoretical stages:
the theological or fictional stage; the metaphysical or abstract stage; finally, the
scientific or positive stage. (Comte 1883: 100)
In the first volume of Cours de philosophie positive (1830), Comte clarified these stages
in greater detail:
In the theological state, the human mind directs its researches mainly toward the
inner nature of beings, and toward the first and final causes of all the phenomena
that it observes-in a word, toward absolute knowledge. It therefore represents these
phenomena as being produced by the direct and continuous action of more or
less numerous supernatural agents, whose arbitrary intervention explains all the
apparent anomalies of the universe. In the metaphysical state, which is in reality
only a simple general modification of the first state, the supernatural agents are
replaced by abstract forces, real entities or personified abstractions, inherent in
the different beings of the world […] Finally, in the positive state, the human mind,
recognizing the impossibility of obtaining absolute truth, gives up the search
after the origin and hidden causes of the universe and a knowledge of the final
causes of phenomena. It endeavors now only to discover, by a well-combined use
of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena. (Comte 1970: 2; my
emphasis)
At first pass this might look like an account of secularization in which science will
ultimately replace religion, and it has certainly been read as such (e.g., Gorski 2003: 111).
But Comte’s Law of the Three Stages has features that make it an uncomfortable fit for
classical accounts of secularization.
First, while the law portrays epistemological change, it is mainly intended to describe
the progress of specific disciplines or fields of knowledge rather than society as a whole
(e.g., astronomy frees itself from theology before biology does). Accordingly, Comte
imagines a society in which some spheres are primarily theological while others are
metaphysical, and so on (See, for example, Comte 1970: 29). Thus, there is no society
yet in which the positive stage has been completely attained.
Second, Comte subdivided the theological stage into fetishism, polytheism, and
monotheism. While he argued that a given society might sustain all three at once,
Comte generally saw these terms as an evolutionary progression (Comte 1875,
vol. 2: 157). The idea that polytheism led to monotheism had plenty of precedents,
from Hume to Henri de Saint-Simon. But his assertion that “fetishism” represented the
primordial form of human religiosity would come to be influential. This is because in
Discours sur l’Esprit positif, when Comte defined fetishism it was as “mainly consisting
in attributing to all external bodies a life analogous to our own” (Comte 1844: 3). Again,
fetishism is almost identical to what Tylor would later call “animism.” Comte, however,
argued that primitive fetishism eventually transformed itself into the worship of the
stars. Then it became polytheism, which was the beginning of the gradual evacuation
of spirits from the physical world.
Third, and most importantly, to treat Comte as primarily a theorist of secularization

is to ignore the importance of the second term, namely the intermediate metaphysical
stage. His model’s central axis is not the end of religion but its prediction of the demise
of philosophy. Comte had almost no nostalgia for metaphysics, associating it with the
critical “negativity” that positivism was supposed to surpass (Comte 1875, vol. 2: 289).
Hence, a “positive society” is not in its most significant feature a secular society but one
rooted in fact and unburdened by philosophical abstraction.
To be sure, in volume four of Système de Politique Positive (1851), Comte did
characterize contemporary European society as being imperiled by “the irrevocable
collapse of the kingdom of God” and argued that his project was precisely to remedy
this catastrophe.23 Hence, Comte’s sociology was intended first and foremost to grapple
with a secular society or at least one in the throes of the death of God. But as his
writings illustrate, Comte thought something like secularism had already happened.
He argued that the culmination of metaphysics (in its negative aspect) is “atheism.”
This is important because “atheism” is a feature of the second stage—not the third.
Moreover, Comte argued that this atheism was fundamentally mistaken because
it had inherited from theology its claim to be able to access the absolute. It merely
“substitutes Nature for the Creator,” and then claims to know what is natural and what
does and does not exist (Comte 1875, vol. 2: 292). Atheism’s denial of God was itself
nonempirical because there was no way to prove definitely that some kind of deity did
not exist. Thus, Comte mainly characterized atheism as bad science. Like other forms
of metaphysics, he thought atheism too would vanish in the face of cultural progress.
The positivist age, therefore, would bring us beyond atheism and even secularism.
His answer to the postsecular was a religion of his own devising: the so-called
“Religion of Humanity” (Fr. Religion de l’Humanité). An older generation of scholars
often described the Religion of Humanity as a break from Comte’s early project or even
as a madness originating in emotional loss. If today Comte’s religious turn is rarely
attacked, it is because his whole project has gone out of vogue. But while it is clear
that the Religion of Humanity underwent various changes, more recent scholarship
has demonstrated in detail how Comte’s entire oeuvre was animated by his attempt
to construct this new faith and how this religion emerges directly from his other
concerns.24 For example, the basic idea of Comte’s Law of the Three Stages was that its
operation could be run on anything, and the Religion of Humanity was primarily an
attempt to positivize the religious sphere in order to address the problems of modern
society.
In brief, the Religion of Humanity was explicitly a religion of progress and science,
directed at constructing a scientific-priesthood of pedagogues and political leaders
(Comte 1862). It was rooted in a positivist liturgical year that replaced the calendar
of saints with days dedicated to scientists and philosophers. To address what Comte
saw as the fraying social-ligature and egoism of industrial modernity, he called on
his followers to cultivate a new virtue directed toward the “other” and, more broadly,
toward the whole of humanity (1862: 59). He called this virtue by a term of his own
coinage, “altruism” (Fr. altruisme), and we have inherited the word from Comte.
In its early formation, followers were also asked to engage in prayers, hymns, and
rituals intended to evoke a feeling of reverence toward humanity, represented
as Le Grand-Être (the Supreme Being). As a whole, the Religion of Humanity was often
satirized as an atheistic Catholicism whose main feature was to position Comte himself
as a “Positivist Pope.” As Thomas Huxley famously quipped, the Positivist Church was
just “Catholicism minus Christianity” (Huxley 1992: 85).
In its attempt to preserve the morality and ritual structure of Catholicism, the
Religion of Humanity might also look like a conventional response to the death of God
in terms of what Heidegger called a kind of “incomplete nihilism” (see Wernick 2001: 8).
It might appear to be merely a post-theistic attempt to preserve Christian ethics by
regrounding them in an immanent abstraction. Insofar as this is the case, the model
for Comte’s religious missions can be seen in the Cult of Supreme Being and other
post-Revolutionary attempts to produce religions of reason. Accordingly, the Religion
of Humanity certainly sounds like Secular Humanism, and indeed a number of secular
humanists looked to Comte for inspiration. But to emphasize only these readings
would miss the importance of the return of “fetishism” and the impact of Spiritualism
on Comte’s thought. The surprise is that to positivize religion would ultimately mean
the revival, rather than elimination, of primordial fetishism.
To explain, Comte had argued that fetishism was the most primitive form of
human thought, and indeed it was something he explicitly racialized and gendered
by associating fetishism with Africa and the feminine. This may sound like standard
European colonial ideology. But instead of arguing for a conquest of the “primitive,”
Comte suggested that modern European society needed more—rather than less—
fetishism (see Pickering 1998: 56). In particular, he wanted to bring back a way of
relating to the world he associated with primeval humanity (Pickering 1998: 61). Nor
was Comte’s project without an associated racial and gender politics. He made it clear
that he was advocating for interracial marriage. But on an abstract level he was calling
for a return or higher-order synthesis of positivism and primitivism. Comte thought
that fetishists had gotten something right that later thinkers had missed.
To flesh out the details, in System of Positive Polity I Comte argued that fetishists had
a conception of “living” matter that had been lost in the transition to polytheism and
the gradual bifurcation of the world into spirit and matter (Comte 2001, vol. 1: 75–77).
Polytheism had embraced the theological position that “all bodies are conceived as
passive in themselves; each as depending for their whole existence on the God who
directs it, though he be not residing within it” (vol. 1: 75). But this is a mistaken view
for Comte as he denied the existence of a transcendent God and yet also attacked the
idea of a merely mechanized cosmos. Hence, he asserted that:
At bottom the fetishist reasoned, who fails to distinguish activity from life, is less
distant from scientific truth than the theological dreamer who in spite of all the
evidence persists in taking matter to be passive. (vol. 1: 76)
Paraphrased, the fetishist was closer than any theist to understanding the scientific,
animated cosmos. As Comte made clear in the Cours, pantheism was merely
“systematized” fetishism. For Comte, it was the rise of positivism that allowed one
to see that matter was itself fully “active,” even if it differed from fetishism in how it
personified this activity. And hence, “at the bottom there is no difference in theory but
this between Fetishism and Positivism” (vol. 1: 127). Furthermore, Comte portrayed
the age of fetishism as a lost “harmony” between nature and the individual, and
suggested that fetishists had a better attitude to the world then either world-rejecting
theologians or dispassionate metaphysicians (vol. 1: 76). Moreover, Comte described
his Religion of Humanity as recovering the emotions he associated with fetishism.
In summary, if fetishism was primordial affective animism, then it would seem that
Comte wanted to bring it back.
This is clear in later formations of the Religion of Humanity. While initially worship
was directed toward Le Grand-Être alone, subsequently Comte made it trinitarian
by adding Le Grand-Milieu (Supreme-Space) and, significantly for our purposes,
Le Grand-Fétiche (Supreme-Fetish). By its terminology, it is clear that Comte was
interested in installing the “Supreme-Fetish” into the heart of the Positivist Church.
Strikingly, the terms in which it did so were evocative of the spiritualist milieu of the
period. The return of fetishism did not merely mean a new approach to nature; its most
significant formulation was a new attitude toward the dead.
By 1855, Comte was diagnosing a new “Western malady” in terms of an “ongoing
revolt of the living against the dead” (Comte 1973, vol. 8: 5). Comte had come to
believe that one of the sources of modern chaos was its rejection of the past, further
expressed in a repression of the dead or perhaps in the efforts to consign them to a
distant heaven. By contrast, he began to assert repeatedly that we are “governed by
the dead” (Braunstein 2003: 64). In part, Comte meant that contemporary culture
and science rest on the discoveries of our ancestors, and the most basic impulse of
this statement was to remind his followers that the humanity that the Positive Church
worshiped included not just the currently living but also the departed. But Comte’s
rhetoric went further.
Comte argued that death as it is conventionally understood does not exist. What we
call death is just a shift from “objective life” to “subjective life.” As he went on to argue,
death is a “sublime inversion” in which mental life is separated from bodily existence.
The death of the body is actually a good thing, as “our nature needs to be purified
by death” (Braunstein 2003: 65). When the body dies, sensation and intelligence
abandon the mortal frame, but they do not vanish. The dead live on as long as they
have purchase in a human mind, existing “in us and by us” (Comte quoted in Pickering
2009, vol. 3: 315). Comte was emphasizing a kind of memorialization of the departed.
But this was not merely passive. Comte described intimate conversations with the
deceased that were made possible precisely because the soul had “disengaged from
corporeal existence” (Comte quoted in Pickering 2009, vol. 3: 315). Comte gradually
came to emphasize the centrality of the reverence for the dead in the Positivist Church,
and eventually the Day of the Dead became the culmination of the Positivist calendar.
Indeed, as Jean-François Braunstein has argued, the Religion of Humanity effectively
turned itself into the Religion of the Living-Dead (La Religion des Morts-Vivant),
which, as others have noted, meant that Comte had started sounding a lot like his
occult and spiritualist peers (see Pickering 2009, vol. 3: 315).
In summary, the concept of “fetishism” started as a way to describe an evolutionary
hierarchy between European modernity and primitive savagery. But eventually in
Comte’s thinking fetishism became integral to positivism and it increasingly came
to resemble the European spiritualism that Comte saw all around himself. Just as
spiritualism was often portrayed as a religion of science, higher-order fetishism was the
European religion of the future. At the very least Comte’s increasing turn to fetishism
and the dead makes it look more and more as if his grand theoretical structure was
describing his own present rather than some truly primitive other.
***
E. B. Tylor’s notion of “animism” can be problematized in similar terms. I discuss Tylor’s
case in greater detail elsewhere (Josephson-Storm 2017: 95–101). To summarize,
Tylor is most famous today for formulating the minimalist definition of religion: that
religion is belief in “spiritual beings.” He also argues that animism is the earliest and
most basic form of religion. He suggests that the central features of animism are that
nature is endowed “with personal life” and that the animist understands the natural
world as “preserved and controlled by personal spiritual beings who from time to time
may enter into [things]” (Tylor 1866: 84).
Against his contemporaries—who compared the thinking of “savages” to madness—
Tylor advanced the notion that a kind of natural religion is everywhere established
rationally. The Tylorian savage, like a primitive philosopher, engages in an essentially
empiricist study of the world around him or her, positing explanations for his or her
experiences according to the kinds of forces he or she understands. The primitive’s
experiences with death and dreams give birth to an idea of spirits or ghosts, which are
then believed to pervade the natural world, serving as the foundation for primitive
religion. It is worth noting that this is almost the same definition of religion described
by the spiritualists themselves, who also believed that spirits were and should be the
foundation for religion.
Tylor argued that over time the rude animism of the savage is ultimately replaced by
polytheism; and then, finally, the most rational system of all—monotheism—emerges.
Again, in Tylor’s evolutionary teleology, we arrive at a Voltaire-esque rational Supreme
Being as the ultimate fruit of human cognition and a rational religion that looks like
Tylor’s minimalistic Quaker faith. Although never explicitly stated as such, cultural
progress means the gradual elimination of belief in spirits.
The spiritualism of his day, therefore, occupies an important position in Tylor’s
system. Insofar as religion is essentially belief in spiritual beings and insofar as
spiritualism seems to be the “animism” Tylor posited at the origin of religion,
spiritualism is both the quintessential religion and quintessentially primitive. The fact
that many of his contemporaries believed in it was a problem for his grand trajectory
of religious evolution.
Accordingly, Tylor treats “modern spiritualism” as “a direct revival from the regions
of savage philosophy and peasant folklore” (Tylor 1891, vol. 1: 129). In order to make
spiritualism into a proper archaic return, Tylor had to obscure spiritualism’s position and
history as a contemporary movement. He had to dismiss its proximate Euro-American
origins and insist that it is a holdover from an ancient and savage past, and he did so
repeatedly in Primitive Culture (see for example, Tylor 1891, vol. 1: 424–426). Of course,
he was not alone in this. Many spiritualists validated their project by similarly imagining
continuity between contemporary spiritualism and earlier epochs in human history.
Perhaps more surprising is Tylor’s own attendance at séances. As I have discussed

elsewhere, we have access to notes unpublished during Tylor’s lifetime, which describe
his own interest in spiritualism (Josephson-Storm 2017: 100–101). In brief, in 1872,
he went to a series of spiritualist events, attempting to ascertain the truth of such
phenomena. Tylor ultimately concluded that there “may be a psychic force” involved
but remained skeptical of the existence of spirits as independent entities. Tylor seems
to have believed in the possibility of a kind of vitalism, even as he rejected spiritualism
itself as a superstitious survival. His conclusions were never published, but Tylor’s
attendance at séances was no secret. Yet Tylor failed to take the next step and recognize
that he was one of his own primitives—or at least that Victorians were the real animists.
To summarize this section, Comte and Tylor are important for the genealogy of
animism as a conceptual formation. Generations of European and American scholars
have followed them in portraying animism and fetishism as central features of the
primitive cultural other. But all of that now needs to be seen as suspect insofar as it
appears that the original theorists were in some significant sense talking about their
own culture even as they displaced their own anxieties about the possible existence of
spirits onto the “other.”
Conclusion
Classical modernization theory often presumes that as a civilization modernizes it

exchanges its belief in a vibrant cosmos of spirits and animating beings for belief in
a clockwork universe that consists of dead and insensate matter. Thus, “modernity”
seemingly enclosed a notion of its own opposite understood as a “primitive,”
“superstitious,” and animated worldview. But as I have been arguing this animism was
never truly absent from the theory’s heartlands and was instead merely the underside
of modernization theory itself. Animism and modernism therefore function as
complementary options of a common package.
This is true of the present. As several contemporary scholars have noted, the term
“animism” has been having a modest comeback (Halbmayer 2012; Stringer 1999;
Wilkinson 2017). In 1993, the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie caused quite a stir with
Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. While drawing on research in cognitive
science and psychology, the theory Guthrie presented was not exactly new and was
instead explicitly drawn from E. B. Tylor’s account of primitive animism. Guthrie
argued religion was at its core the result of a cognitive tendency to “anthropomorphize”
and “animate” or “credit our environment with more organization and more organisms
than it has” (Guthrie 1993: 39). Although the book was controversial, Guthrie led a
modest return of a specifically Tylorian account of animism as cognitively basic.
The Israeli anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, responding to in part to Guthrie,
published a widely read article in 1999, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment,
and Relational Epistemology,” which attempted to rehabilitate animism not as a “failed”
epistemology but as a way of overcoming what she saw as a “modernist” dualism. In
the decades since, a group of theorists have if anything doubled down on Bird-David’s
insights and argued that the solution to a range of modern/postmodern ills is to come
to see the world as if it were vibrant, living, or animated. As the Danish anthropologist
Rane Willerslev summarizes, the new animists “seek to take animism seriously by
reversing the primacy of Western metaphysics over indigenous understandings and
follow the lead of the animists themselves in what they are saying about spirits, souls
and the like” (Willerslev 2013b: 275). Accordingly, there has been a significant call
not just to take seriously animism as an interpretive classification but to actively see
it as a way to recover something lost in modernity (see, for example, Harvey 2006;
Harvey 2013; Ingold 2000; Viveiros de Castro 1998; Willerslev 2007). While I am
sympathetic to this movement, it fails to take into account the history of “animism” as
a European self-misrecognition.
As I have been arguing here, the term “animism” appears as an anthropological
category at the tail end of a series of substitutions. First, “paganism” (understood
often as euhemerism or worship of the dead) becomes “idolatry,” which gives way to
“fetishism” to describe a supposedly more basic form. By then shifting the location of
spirits from statues and images into the natural world gives us the notion of “animism.”
Moreover, European and American thinkers spatialized this terminology to chart
an imagined opposition between a mystical or spiritual Orient and a material or
technological Occident. But when Japanese thinkers turned their attention to Euro-
American civilization in the Meiji and Taishō eras, the “West” they saw was far from
stripped of its belief in spirits and animating forces. Instead, of seeing animism as the
nonmodern or primitive it was the modern “Occident” that seemed to be vibrating
with both new technologies and new spiritual movements—everything from x-rays
and animal electricity to ghosts and table-turning. Finally, I have aimed to provide a
brief genealogy of European theorizing about fetishism and animism and then turned
the enterprise on its head to show how thinkers like Comte and Tylor were captured
by their own theorizing, how in the process of theorizing “primitive” civilizations they
were really describing themselves.
Depending on how the definition is formulated, one can find “animism” even
today in the so-called “modern West.” The evidence is all over the place—from tales
of ghosts and haunted houses across America and Europe to New Age bookstores full
of popular texts on spirits, angels, and channeling. In recent decades, there has been
a proliferation of “reality” television shows that claim to report evidence for ghosts,
psychics, extraterrestrials, monsters, curses, and even miracles. In both the United
Kingdom and the United States, it is easy to turn on the television and encounter
the prognostications of celebrity psychic mediums. It might seem that contemporary
audiences are at least willing to flirt with the existence of spirits and the supernatural
as a form of entertainment and, possibly, reality. Various sociological evidence seems
to support this. As I have discussed elsewhere (Josephson-Storm 2017: 23–30), based
on data from two massive surveys conducted in 2005 and 2007, we can produce a
picture of American “animism” (again depending on definition). According to this
data, 81 percent of Americans believe in angels and 55 percent believe that they have
been “protected from harm” by a “guardian Angel.” Sixty-eight percent of Americans
believe in demons, with 53 percent believing in the reality of demonic possession, and
roughly 50 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and these are not fully overlapping
sets. It would seem the majority of Americans believe in some kind of spirit being. Nor
is America unique in this regard as there is some evidence that belief in spirits is the
global norm rather than the exception (Hufford 2010).
“Modernity” is as much a project as a periodization, and it was globalized as a notion
with an aspirational content. Modernity once carried a normative force that evokes
Arthur Rimbaud’s ironic imperative: “one must be absolutely modern” (Il faut être
absolument moderne)—felt everywhere from Paris to Tokyo to Kinshasa—and as such
it led toward various modernization campaigns. But this call toward modernization
was rooted in a contradictory impulse: on the one hand, “modernity” included its own
enemy in the form of a notion of backward “superstition” that represented obstacles to
modernization’s progress. As I have argued elsewhere, this notion of superstition can
be seen as the legacy of an imagined paganism that provided a quasi-scientific rationale
for excluding the old rhetorical enemies of Christian civilization (e.g., demons, spirits,
and magic), which were now exorcized by in some respect being labeled as nonexistent.
This account of disenchantment is likely to be familiar to scholars who know their
postcolonial theory.
On the other hand, there is an additional wrinkle in the narrative, because (at least
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) “modernity” as project brought with
it a notion of spirits and invisible forces. Ghosts were globalized. Science and séance
were entwined. Spiritualisms and animisms were promoted as antidotes to the very
ills “modernism” was generating. In that respect, colonization and modernization
often produced spiritualism and theosophy. Taken altogether, we might say that
modernization was both disenchanting and enchanting. Put differently, the real
“invisible empire” might be the notion of “modernity” itself.
3
A Metaphysics of the Invisible Realm: Minakata

Kumagusu on Spirits, Molds, and the Cosmic
Mandala
Fabio Rambelli
Introduction
Minakata Kumagusu 南方熊楠 (1867–1941) was one of the leading intellectuals

between the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. He was a veritable
polymath, one who embodied the premodern encyclopedic knowledge of Japan upon
which he grafted his studies in the most recent academic fields in the West. As a child,
he read and annotated the Edo period encyclopedia Wakan sansai zue 和漢三才図絵
(1714) and other premodern encyclopedic materials on natural science. In his youth,
Minakata traveled widely in America (1887–1892), Cuba (1891–1892), and England
(1892–1900); during his years in London, he spent time at the British Museum
studying and established epistular relations with a number of leading international
scholars. After his return to Japan in 1900, he settled in the Kumano region, first in
Nachi (1900–1904) and later in Tanabe, where he lived until his death in 1941.
Minakata wrote extensively on comparative religion, literature, folklore, and
anthropology, but he is most well known as a naturalist, especially for his assiduous
studies on slime molds, of which he collected thousands of specimens in various places
throughout his life. He was even asked to lecture Emperor Hirohito on the subject
in 1929. In 1905–1906 he became actively engaged in politics, as a vocal opponent
of a new state policy aimed at merging local Shinto shrines (jinja gōshi 神社合祀)
(see Fridell 1973). Minakata argued that such policy would have a negative effect on
multiple levels: the social organization in affected locales, their cultural traditions, and
the environment (as local shrines to be demolished and merged were at the center
of centuries-old forests with their rich ecosystems). We now know that Minakata’s
position on that matter was uncannily prescient, and today’s authors have made
him into a champion of environmentalism, if not even a precursor of current Shinto
environmental attitudes (see Rots 2017).
Like many other scholars of the time, Minakata was also interested in supernatural
matters: not only metaphysics but also spiritualism and occultism. His striking originality
in his approach to these matters consists in his systematic utilization of theoretical
categories from Shingon Buddhism, in a stunningly creative attempt to use classical

Japanese thought to frame, orient, and interpret new scientific knowledge from the West.
Most of Minakata’s work was never published during his life; his extant publications are
mostly short articles, many of them in English. Instead, he shared his ideas with friends
and colleagues in long letters. Particularly well known is the epistular exchange with
Shingon monk Doki Hōryū 土宜法龍 (1854–1922), which extended over three decades.
After decades of neglect, there has been a sudden explosion of interest in
Minakata and his work since the 1980s, especially fueled by the appropriation of his
thought by popular authors, such as Nakazawa Shin’ichi 中沢新一 (see in particular
Nakazawa 1992), who often describe him as a cultural hero.1
Among his astonishingly broad scholarly production, we encounter an attempt to
outline a multilayered ontology of reality based on different epistemological systems—
what has been defined as the “Minakata mandala” 南方曼荼羅. In order to construct
this ontology, Minakata brought together a serious understanding of classical Buddhist
philosophy, deep scientific knowledge, and awareness of the Japanese folk tradition.
In it, Minakata also tried to explain the existence of spirits and other ectoplasmic
entities. This chapter presents the “Minakata mandala” and other aspects of Minakata
Kumagusu’s intellectual interventions as one the most systematic attempts to outline
an ontology of the invisible in modern Japan. After a brief excursion into Minakata’s
experiences of the spirit world, we discuss his theorization of spirit entities (reikon
霊魂 = soul; seishin 精神 = spirit; and kokoro 心 = mind) through references to Shingon
Buddhist metaphysics, Jewish Kabbalism, and his research on slime molds. We then
move on to Minakata’s proposed new science of intermediary human facts (koto
事 or こと), which we treat as a prelude to a more in-depth analysis of his general
ontology (the “Minakata Mandala”). Finally, we trace the cross-fertilization between
Minakata’s interest in natural science (especially, his research on slime molds) and his
understanding of life and death.
Minakata and the Spirit World
During his years in London, Minakata was initially dismissive of occultism. When
asked by his epistolary partner, the Shingon monk Doki Hōryū, Minakata replied that
“it’s like a name without substance” (na arite jitsu naki no yō no koto 名ありて実なきの
ようのこと, quoted in Karasawa 2015: 118) and said that most, if not all of it, involves
tricks, prestidigitation, and chance (Minakata 1971–1979, vol. 7: 139–141); however,
Minakata did read Theosophist Mme. Blavatsky’s (1831–1891) work (in particular Isis
Unveiled, [1877] 1968). He also knew the work of Frederick Myers (1843–1901) on
telepathy and extra-bodily experiences (his book Human Personality and Its Survival
of Bodily Death, published posthumously in 1903, was a worldwide sensation); in fact,
Minakata wrote several short pieces in English on related subjects, which he published
in journals such as Nature, Notes and Queries, and other venues. After his return to
Japan, when living alone in the forest near Nachi in Kumano, Minakata had several
paranormal experiences—such as separation from the body, visions, premonitions,
and telepathy—in 1903 to 1904 (in fact, he had dreams and visions throughout his
A Metaphysics of the Invisible Realm 47
life), which he tried to study scientifically by producing a sort of phenomenology of

intangibles—ghosts (yūrei 幽霊) and phantoms (utsutsu うつつ or maboroshi 幻).
Figure 3.1 is an image found in a letter to Yabuki Yoshio 矢吹義夫 dated
January 31, 1925, which explains how Minakata understood the differences between ghosts
Figure 3.1 Images of intangible entities. From Minakata Kumagusu zenshū, vol. 7: 31
(Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971–5). Courtesy Heibonsha. (Transliterations by Fabio Rambelli.)
and phantoms: whereas the former tend to appear in a vertical position with respect to the
ground (top part of the image), the latter appear horizontally or obliquely (lower part of the
image). Minakata explains this difference in ontological terms, by arguing that ghosts share
the same spatial awareness of the living in the world, while phantoms display an unreal
spatial awareness (Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 7: 31).
This difference posits an ontological split in the universe, between “this world”
(kono sekai この世界) and an invisible dimension, which elsewhere Minakata refers to
as “the invisible” (yūmei 幽冥)—the realm of the dead (and ghosts). For him, dreams
often granted privileged access to this other dimension.
In a diary entry dated March 10, 1903, Minakata recounts one such dream, in which
he saw people gathering by a temple by the coast; among them, there was a deceased
friend, Kiyohara Shōsuke 清原彰甫. The following conversation occurs in the dream:
Minakata: In the Invisible, who has more prestige, those who have achieved great
results in this world, or those who have quietly practiced their virtue?
Kiyohara: There’s no such difference.
M: There are no differences at all?
K: There are some.
M: What are the differences between this world and the Invisible?
K: I understand this well because of personal experience. The principles (gensoku
原則) of this world only concern humans (ningen nomi no mono ari 人間のみ
のものあり); therefore, they are different from the principles of the Invisible.
However, after entering the Invisible, one can understand the principles of the
Invisible by inference from those of this world, because the latter are merely
one aspect of the single great law of the universe (uchū no ichidaihō 宇宙の一
大法). Even when the principles are exactly the opposite [in the two realms],
one must know that their standard is one and the same.
M: How is the Invisible?
K: One always feels sad and depressed. However, there is a great variety in the
Invisible, and one keeps going from here to there endlessly.
M: So there’s no peace of mind?
K: There is, but like in this world, it’s hard to achieve for those who have not
attained a special state of mind. (Minakata 1987–1989, vol. 2: 329–330)
The conversation in this dream contains several elements that characterize Minakata’s
thought. We see the inquisitive nature about principles and laws of nature; the idea that
the human world, with its principles, is only one aspect of the universe, envisioned as
the underlying substance of everything; methodologically we see the importance of
inference, the human capacity to know the unknown (including the metaphysical and
the mystical).
We can better understand Minakata’s interest for ghosts and the invisible if we place
it within the context of his three lines of philosophical inquiry, namely, (1) the study
of spirit entities (what can be called reikonron 霊魂論); (2) the science of intermediary
“human facts” (koto no gaku ことの学); and (3) the outline of a general ontology (what
has been called the “Minakata mandala” 南方曼荼羅).
The Study of Spirit Entities
In a letter to Doki Hōryū dated March 25, 1902, Minakata presents a stunning series
of diagrams describing the metaphysical process by which objects (mono 物) come
into existence from the cosmic substance. In the main one, which Minakata calls
“Esoteric mandala of Judaism” (Yudaikyō no mikkyō no mandara 猶太教の密教の
曼陀羅), which is in fact two separate diagrams, he tries to explain the processes of
development and interaction of immaterial entities (mind, spirit, soul) and material
entities (matter, physical objects). It is a reinterpretation of the tree of Sephiroth of
the Kabbalah, which Minakata complements with ideas from Shingon Buddhism
and modern science. Significantly, Minakata develops this mandala as an extension
of a discussion on both slime molds and minds (see below). (See also Minakata
2010: 264.)
At first, Minakata writes: “the eternal soul [reikon 霊魂] turns into spirit [seishin 精
神]; the spirit touches the atoms and through the bodies of father and mother gives
birth to the human body and the human mind,” in a process similar to the sun giving
birth by separation to the earth and the moon, which then exist on their own and
generate various processes such as the eclipse. This is represented in the diagram
in Figure 3.2, in which elements [genso 元素] and the entire world [banbutsu 万物]
coalesce in mother and father and produce an individual body-mind together with the
spirit that emanates from the Soul (Minakata 2010: 261).
Additionally, when one attains a little degree of liberation (gedatsu 解脱) by
separating oneself from one’s mind and reaching the spirit world (seishinkai 精神界),
that is not the level of the soul; only by returning to the original condition of the
soul one can attain the utmost bliss (Minakata 2010: 262). Minakata defines the soul
as “inextinguishable and unborn” (fumetsu fushō 不滅不生) “radiance that shines
eternally” (jōshō kōmyō 常照光明) (Minakata 2010: 264).
The second diagram of the Kabbalah mandala represents visually the process of
manifestation of physical objects (mono) out of Dainichi 大日, the cosmic Buddha of
Shingon metaphysics. Further, it indicates that any material entity also includes a spirit-
like component; both matter and mind (in all their permutations), in fact, issue forth
from Dainichi. Minakata refers here explicitly to his understanding of this dimension
of the real (bukkai 物界, physical world) as the realm of the “wonder of the physical
world” (mono fushigi 物不思議) (see Figure 3.3).
More specifically, we can identify the following phases in the process:
1. The soul (reikon) of each individual entity emerges from Dainichi, which is the
primordial, fundamental entity of the entire universe.
2. The soul becomes a spirit (seishin, a mind-spirit).
3. The spirit comes to inhere physical objects (busshin 物心). At this point, a full-
fledged physical object, endowed with a mental capacity, comes into existence.
This process corresponds to the development of matter: from Dainichi, who emanates
the “fundamental substance” or “ground stuff ” (genshitsu 原質 or genso 原素), to its
Figure 3.2 Yudaikyō no mikkyō no mandara, part one. From Kōzanji-zō Minakata
Kumagusu shokan: Doki Hōryū ate 1893–1922. Edited by Okuyama Naoji, Undō Hitoshi,
and Kanda Hideaki (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2010) (illustration at the beginning of the
volume). Courtesy Kōzanji and Fujiwara Shoten.
Figure 3.3 Yudaikyō no mikkyō no mandara, part two. From Kōzanji-zō Minakata
Kumagusu shokan: Doki Hōryū ate 1893–1922. Edited by Okuyama Naoji, Undō Hitoshi,
and Kanda Hideaki (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2010) (illustration at the beginning of the
volume). Courtesy Kōzanji and Fujiwara Shoten.
configuration into “atoms” (genshi 原子) and later into material substance, to its final
convergence with the spirit-like stuff into a fully formed physical entity (mono).
Minakata divides spirit-like entities into three categories, for which he employs both
Japanese and English (or English-based katakana) terms, namely: soul (sōru ソール) =
reikon 霊魂; spirit (supiritto スピリット) = seishin 精神; and mind (maindo マインド) =
kokoro/shin 心. In at least one occurrence, he uses the term seirei 精霊 (normally translated
as “spirit”) as a synonym for reikon. A simpler diagram a few pages later sketches out the
processes of embodiment and disembodiment: from reikon (soul), glossed as “the essence-
spirit [seirei] at the basis of spirit [seishin],” to seishin (supiritto), defined as “the power
to create and sustain a distinct and unified body prior to its aggregation into a human
body [jintai 人体]”; next, shin/kokoro (maindo), the “power that emerges from a human
aggregation”—“human aggregation” referring to an individual body-mind. The mind
is mutually associated with one’s body (mi 身); when the body dies, the spirit (seishin)
reemerges, and when the spirit dies the original soul reemerges (Minakata 2010: 265).
In a sequel to the same letter, written on the same day, Minakata further expands
on the Kabbalah mandala with the help of another diagram showing the becoming
of matter (Minakata 2010: 269). In this case, the development of spirit entities is
represented on the right axis and that of material objects on the left.
In this case too, Dainichi is the starting point of the entire process. It emanates a
soul (reikon) and, at the same time, Dainichi’s disposition and function to manifest
material entities also emerges; for Minakata, these two items are unrelated to each
other (mukankei 無関係). Next, Minakata sees a relation (yūkankei 有関係) between
the concurrent emergence of “spirit” (seishin) out of the soul and the formation of
atoms (genshi 原子). He adds the following gloss to the term “atom”: “[genshi refers
to] what I called genso 原素 in a previous page; it can also refer to what is called in
religion a ‘fundamental element’ (genso), not necessarily limited to earth, water, fire,
and wind.” The following stage is the development of the “material mind” (busshin
物心) out of the spirit and, on the opposite axis of materiality, the formation of
“material objects” (buttai 物体) through the action of physical force (butsuryoku 物力)
upon the atoms. Busshin seems to indicate an embodied or practical mind, a kind
of sense of judgment and general understanding (normally expressed in Japanese by
the vernacular pronunciation of the same Chinese expression, monogokoro), which
Minakata believes is present in all things, not only in animate entities.2 For Minakata,
these two emergencies (spirit and atoms first, and busshin and buttai next) are also
“related” (yūkankei). Finally, the two processes converge and result in the entities we
experience in the world (mono 物). Minakata explains the diagram as follows:
The soul is inside the center of Dainichi. However, Dainichi’s disposition and
function to manifest material entities is in a collective soul [shūgō reikon 集合霊魂]
(Dainichi’s center) (the totality), not in a particular soul (as when we become a soul
and return to Dainichi’s center, especially when we remember our individual past,
present, and future). For this reason, I say it is unrelated [mukankei]. Especially
when [the soul] separates itself of its own will from Dainichi and reappears in the
material world, it is obvious that this is unrelated [to the general soul of Dainichi].
(Minakata 2010: 269)
Minakata continues:
When the spirit’s function is applied to atoms it produces physical force

[butsuryoku], therefore they are related [yūkankei]. When it comes to embodied
mind and material objects, they are closely connected and inseparable, therefore I
call them highly related [daikankei 大関係].
The spirit touches the atoms and turns into busshin; busshin united with
buttai manifests the physical world. The atoms, coming into contact with the
spirit, produce physical power [butsuryoku] and result in buttai. As for the soul,
in terms of the process from Dainichi to the formation of busshin, one portion
of Dainichi separates itself from Dainichi’s disposition to manifest buttai. In the
same way, the human mind is one type of busshin, a particularly excellent one
at that. As for the question if there is busshin outside of humans, the superior
animals of course have it, but microorganisms and plants do too, in the form
of a degree of consciousness and so-called animal and vegetal life-energy. The
busshin of dead matter (stones, fossils, slag, etc.) can be understood as analogous
to crystal’s duplication power, and in their capacity to react to gravity, attraction,
resistance and such […] “Things” [mono] include animate beings [seibutsu 生
物] and inanimate objects [hiseibutsu 非生物]. Animate beings have an excellent
busshin function, inanimate objects an excellent function of physical power.
In his Kabbalah mandala, Minakata also envisioned the emergence and

articulation of the physical and spirit world as different stages of the Four Noble
Truths of Buddhism (shitai 四締), namely, all is suffering (ku 苦), suffering is
caused by an accumulation of causes (jū 集), causes and ensuing suffering can be
extinguished (metsu 滅), and that results in enlightenment (dō 道). Specifically,
Dainichi corresponds to enlightenment, the first manifestation of spirit and
matter corresponds to extinction, their embodiment corresponds to the causes
of suffering, and the resulting objects we experience correspond to suffering
(Minakata 2010: 261).
In a previous letter to Doki, dated March 23, 1902, Minakata had already written:
“we are all atoms of Dainichi, and based on the totality of Dainichi, each of us, to a
larger or smaller extent, contributes to give shape to Dainichi; in that activity lies our
hope for salvation” (Minakata 2010: 256). In the original, “salvation” is rendered as
jōbutsu 成仏, literally “becoming a buddha”—a soteriological concept that, in Shingon
Buddhism and differently from other Buddhist traditions, refers to literally becoming
a buddha oneself by realizing one’s originally being part of Dainichi. Two days later,
Minakata explains:
The capacity for the human mind (any embodied, physical mind) to attain
enlightenment [satori 悟り] refers to the possibility for the human mind, through
seishin, to open up a path to return to the Soul. After death, the busshin, once
separated from the atoms and physical body, has a choice to either return to the
Soul or go back directly to the body of Dainichi. (Minakata 2010: 270)
In the same letter, Minakata offers a further explanation of his spirit cosmology:
The human mind [jinshin] dies with the body. From it, the spirit becomes either
a god [kami 神] or a demon [oni 鬼]; it cannot semiotically affect [shirusezu
記せず] the phenomena [koto 事] of this world. However, if the mind of the
person [who dies] is enlightened, and if his/her spirit [seishin] is also enlightened,
then it becomes the soul [reikon]; it can semiotically affect [shirusu 記す] the
phenomena of this world. This is the condition of great peace of mind [daianshin
大安心].
All things/beings [banbutsu 万物] have a chance to become soul [reikon]—their
chances are simply worse than those of humans. Then, the soul is free to choose
[katte nari] whether to return to this world as a special being [tokuson shite 特
存して] or to join Dainichi and experience quiet joy [seishi gyōraku 静止行楽].
In other world, death represents a phase in which the ontological components of beings are
disassembled and simplified. Coarser minds return to the stage of spirit [seishin] and join
the invisible realm as gods [kami] or demons [oni], and as such have no semiotic existence
in the phenomenal world of koto. In contrast, enlightened minds can proceed further to
the stage of the original, cosmic soul [reikon] and have a degree of semiotic agency upon
this world;3 reikon are also free to choose their future, whether to return to this world or
directly join the ultimate realm of Dainichi and experience the bliss of nirvana.
We can read in this interpretation Minakata’s idea that scientific and philosophical
research should go beyond phenomena and aim to attain the fundamental causes
of reality; in this, it is equivalent to Buddhist soteriology. This is a bold statement
regarding the compatibility of Buddhism and science.
The Science of Intermediary Human “Facts” (koto no gaku)
Minakata the scientist and humanist was attracted by all those phenomena that
emerge from the interaction between matter [mono 物] and mind [kokoro 心]; he
calls those phenomena koto 事, a term that is normally translated as “event” or “fact”;
I prefer to render it, in this particular context, as “intermediary human facts” for
reason that will become clear in a moment. Minakata represents the status of these
phenomena in a diagram, included in a letter to Doki Hōryū of December 24, 1893
(Figure 3.4).
In the same letter, he describes the realm of koto in the following way:
Electricity releases light and light brings forth heat—things like this are operations
of the physical realm [bukkai no hataraki 物界の働き] (proper to physics
[butsurigakuteki 物理学的]). Now, the mind [kokoro], through its desire [bōyoku
望欲] uses one’s hands and puts things in motion, from making fire to warm
oneself all the way up to cutting up stones to build the Great Wall, or preparing
timber to build a temple—these are all operations that become possible only
when the mental realm [shinkai 心界] interacts with the physical realm [bukkai].
(Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 7: 145–146)
Minakata defines the results of these interactions koto; koto phenomena range “from
taking paper in one’s hand to blow one’s nose to establish teachings for the sake of
humankind”; each individual koto “has its own karma” [inga 因果], in the sense that it
depends on causal factors to emerge, and when those factors cease, the koto-entity itself
ceases to exist. This explanation is preceded by the description of a dream and a long
interpretation that shows the interaction between physical things and events occurring
in the external world [mono] and mental phenomena [kokoro] such as intentions and
thoughts. In fact, the dream itself is a typical example of koto. One particular aspect
of koto, besides the fact that it results from two different ontological dimensions (the
physical and the mental), is that it has a different temporality: “old things appear and
intersect with today’s things” (Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 7: 145).
How are we to understand and define the realm of koto? On the one hand, we find
social facts and realities: human activities, dreams, etc. resulting from mental activities
(plans, desires, intentions, ideas, etc.) acting upon physical matter and external
circumstances. On the other hand, Minakata saw in it something that goes beyond
simple understandings of everyday reality—precisely an opening into the Invisible.
Figure 3.4 Matter, mind, and events. From Minakata Kumagusu zenshū, vol. 7: 145 (Tokyo:
Heibonsha, 1971–5). Courtesy Heibonsha. (Transliterations by Fabio Rambelli.)
Outline of a General Ontology: The “Minakata Mandala”
His interest for koto-like entities brought Minakata to attempt a systematic theory of the
general laws of the universe. At first, Minakata writes to Doki (letter of June 7, 1903): “in
my mandala, names (na 名) and signs (shirushi 印) have the same real existence (jitsuzai
実在) as mind, matter, and koto; this is a major discovery” (Minakata 1971–1975,
vol. 7: 326). He announces his intention to submit a paper to a British scientific journal;
it is unclear whether he ever did it, but in any case it was never published. Minakata will
return to the issue of names and signs in a subsequent letter to Doki (see below).
Then, about one month later (letter of July 18, 1903), Minakata presents his general
theory in a detailed explanation, accompanied by an elaborate drawing, what is now
commonly known as the “Minakata mandala” (Figure 3.5). This appellation, however,
does not belong to the author. It appears that Tsurumi Kazuko 鶴見和子, the person
most responsible for rediscovering Minakata in the postwar era, one day showed the
drawing to Buddhologist Nakamura Hajime 中村元 who named it the “Minakata
mandala.” Tsurumi adopted the appellation, and this term became widely accepted
(Tsurumi 1981: 82).
This diagram, which Minakata imagines as a three-dimensional model (Minakata
1971–1975, vol. 7: 365), represent the entire scope of human knowledge, from its most
direct and certain information to its most distant and uncertain reaches; it also enables us
to envision that which is unknowable to us. The central point, I イ, is called by Minakata
Figure 3.5 “Minakata mandala.” From Minakata Kumagusu zenshū, vol. 7: 365 (Tokyo:
Heibonsha, 1971–5). Courtesy Heibonsha. (Transliterations by Fabio Rambelli.)
suiten 萃点 (focus, nodal point, point of concentration); it represents topologically the

position of the human knowing subject. The various dots with appellations are specific
phenomena, which are identified by their position along multiple lines representing
thought trajectories based on reasoning and principles—what Minakata calls ri 理.
Minakata envisions an infinite number of elements (jiri 事理, a term we can render
as “phenomena and intellectual trajectories to understand them”) in all directions of
the diagram; if one traces one element long enough, one can discover and do all kinds
of things (365). Minakata’s approach, as exemplified in this diagram, closely reminds
us of C. S. Peirce’s concept of “unlimited semiosis.” This similarity is not far-fetched,
as Minakata’s peculiar interpretive strategy also explored all possible features of a
phenomenon, including those related to other, even very distant semantic fields.4
Before we discuss the various points identified by Minakata and their signification
in more detail, we should introduce the five different realms in which Minakata
divides the universe. Each of these realms is referred to as fushigi 不思議, a vague
term that refers to something mysterious, strange, inexplicable. As Karasawa
Taisuke explains, in Minakata’s usage fushigi means not so much “mystery” but
rather “wonder” (Karasawa 2015: 167). In fact, Minakata always expressed a sense
of wonder for the beauty and richness of reality, which prompted him to unlock its
mysteries. The five realms are (Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 7: 364–365): (1) koto fushigi
(the wonder of human facts), which emerges from interactions between the next
two realms; (2) mono fushigi (the wonder of things): the realm knowable through
natural science; (3) kokoro fushigi (the wonder of mind): the mental realm knowable
through psychology; (4) ri fushigi (the wonder of principles), a realm only knowable
in vague form through alternative intellectual endeavors, such as intuition, inference,
and premonition; this realm is situated at the outer limit of human knowledge and
intelligence; and (5) Dainichi Nyorai no daifushigi 大日如来の大不思議 (the great
wonder of Buddha Dainichi), the realm encompassing everything that transcends
human intelligence; this realm has no outside nor inside, and no dichotomies.
Minakata writes regarding this elusive realm: “Is there something else in addition
to everything else in this diagram? It is Dainichi, the essence of the great wonder
[daifushigi]” (Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 7: 366).
Let us now follow in some detail Minakata’s explanation of the diagram (based on
Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 7: 365–366):
I イ, as we have seen, is the nodal point, the position of the knowing subject in
reality (which seems to correspond, at least in part, with the entire semantic system
available to that subject).
Point (phenomenon) RO ロ can be understood by reaching points CHI チ and
RI リ. Minakata explains that until those two additional points are reached, that is,
additional knowledge is gained, element RO is essentially useless (muyō 無用), but
some people can have a limited knowledge of it.
Point NI ニ is similar to RO.
Point HAハ is not essential (being located far away from the central part of the
knowledge area immediately available to the knowing subject) but is at the intersection
of the two lines of inquiry (ri) and is thus easy to identify.
Point HOホ is essentially the same as HA.

Points HE ヘ and TO ト are far away from human awareness, with only feeble
connections with other phenomena and intellectual trajectories (jiri) and thus difficult
to detect and understand.
Line NU ヌ is at the far edge of the reaches of human knowledge, like “the trajectory
of a comet”; it can vaguely be approached only through points O オ and WA ワ.
Line RU ル, located farther away from NU (which can be vaguely envisioned only
through points O and WA), merely indicates the possibility of existence of additional
phenomena beyond human knowledge. This is the elusive realm of ri fushigi.
Minakata emphasizes that at present, only mono no fushigi was barely known to
humans; the functioning of the mind was still largely unknown. Even psychology
studies the mind not in itself but as based in the brain or the sense organs, and thus it
is no different from physical science that deals with mono no fushigi. In any case, the
first three realms are based on laws and principles (hōsoku 法則) and are potentially
accessible to human knowledge.
Ri fushigi, however, represented in the diagram by the top line marked as RU,
gestures toward a vague and chaotic realm, one that cannot be known objectively by
scientific analysis. Minakata defines it, in an appropriately vague manner, as those
things “that would not be possible if this did not exist” (Dōyara konna mono ga nakute
kanawanu to omowareruどうやらこんなものがなくてかなわぬと思われる) (letter to
Doki Hōryū of July 18, 1903, in Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 7: 366). Ri no fushigi requires
thus a different type of reasoning (ri): no longer deductive, as in logic (ronri 論理) or
scientific theory (riron 理論), but inferential (suiri 推理) and hypothetical; Karasawa
describes this different mode as premonition, imagination, sixth sense (Karasawa
2015: 173). Minakata himself wrote about the insufficiency of observation and the
need to “plunge straight” (chokunyū 直入) into the phenomenon.
In the same letter, Minakata also tried to outline a method to approach ri fushigi,
the unknown. He introduces two terms, namely, “tact,” which he writes in English
and claims he doesn’t know how to translate, and a special word he created, yariate
やりあて, which has the implication of “succeeding simply by doing something.”
Karasawa associates these two terms with the sixth sense, a special sensibility that
enables people to do or know certain things, in a process that cannot be explained
logically (2015: 182). Minakata clearly suggests that objective rationality and the
scientific method is not enough to attain ri fushigi, and was certainly open to hints
from dreams and intuition, but tact and yariate refer to something that is not
mystical nor mysterious. He defines “tact” as “simply knowing” that something
exists or knowing what it is, like “an ant that wanders through a room and ends
up reaching some sugar, and simply knows it is food” (letter to Doki Hōryū of July
18, 1903, in Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 7: 368). As for “tact,” he offers the example
of a stone cutter who can make a perfect mortar while talking and without taking
measurements. Regarding yariate, he seems to understand it as trying hard to do
something and randomly getting a useful positive result in an unexpected way
(367).5 Casper Jensen, Miho Ishii, and Philip Swift, in a collective article, interpret
Minakata’s tact as follows:
Like a hunter wandering in a forest, tracing faint signs of game, tact entail trying
to sense the “reasons” of nonhuman orders […] Thus, tact can be seen as the limit
point where that which one has consciously learned encounters worldly surprises
that go beyond this learning. […] Even so, Minakata did not see tact as akin to
the intuitions or inspirations of genius […] tact has practiced experience as a
necessary condition. (Jensen, Ishii, and Swift 2016: 162)
With the two terms “tact” and yariate Minakata was not positing a vague form of
mystical intuition; rather, he seems to be gesturing toward two different processes:
on the one hand, to what Charles S. Peirce calls “abduction,” a weak form of inference
supported only by scant elements,6 as in the example of the ant; and on the other hand,
to what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus, that special “embodied knowledge” resulting
from extended practice that feels like second nature.
Three weeks after this stunning document, Minakata writes again to Doki Hōryū
with a second mandala (Figure 3.6), in which he further develops the previous one by
adding two other components, “names” (na) and “signs” (shirushi). This is Minakata’s
explanation in letter to Doki Hōryū dated August 8, 1903:
Inside Dainichi of the Matrix Realm [Taizōkai 胎蔵界] there is Dainichi of the
Diamond realm [Kongō 金剛]. In one part of it, mind (kokoro), through the action
of Dainichi’s mind extinction [messhin 滅心] (in Diamond realm’s Dainichi, the
portion in which mind is no longer present), creates physical objects (mono).
Objects and mind, through interaction, produce human facts (koto). Human facts,
in turn, through action of a certain force [chikara 力], are transmitted [tsutawaru
伝わる] as “names” [na 名]. [This force combines the four elements—mind,
objects, names, and human facts—into various combinations.] When human facts
cease to exist, they remain as “names” in Dainichi of the Matrix realm (human
facts, differently from physical objects and mind, cease to exist when it [the action
that produces them] stops). When names are projected onto the mind, signs
[shirushi] are generated. Therefore, things such as creed, language, habit, heredity,
and tradition [in kanji and katakana transliterations in the original], cannot be
fully understood by contemporary western science and philosophy, but Shingon
proves they are truly existing entities [jitsuzai]—precisely, “names.” (Minakata
1971–1975, vol. 7: 390)
In this dense passage, Minakata combines the Shingon doctrine of the twofold
mandala [ryōkai mandara 両界曼荼羅] with his own ontology to gesture toward
a semiotic theory. Dainichi of the Diamond realm represents perfect, innate
enlightenment, and is the source of the transmission of enlightenment back to
beings. In contrast, Dainichi of the Matrix realm represents enlightenment attained
by beings through practice. Minakata seems to suggest that perfect enlightenment
in Kongō Dainichi implies the extinction of mind as discriminating activity; for
him that is the source of physical objects. Still, mind remains present (as part of
the other component of the twofold Dainichi, the one of the Matrix realm), and,
in combination with objects, together they generate human facts (koto); as we have
Figure 3.6 The second “Minakata mandala.” From Minakata Kumagusu zenshū, vol. 7: 390
(Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971–5). Courtesy Heibonsha. (Transliterations by Fabio Rambelli.)
already seen, Minakata described more in detail this generative process through a
modified version of the Sephiroth. At this point, however, Minakata adds a semiotic
dimension to the entire process. Human facts, he says, are transmitted as “names”;
the Matrix realm is a repository of names. Next, when names are projected onto
the mind, they become “signs.” Moreover, complex social realities such as religion,
language, and traditions are endowed of real existence as “names.” Unfortunately,
Minakata did not expand further on this fascinating topic. It would seem, though,
that “names” are, for him, conceptual entities—or, in Charles S. Peirce’s terminology,
semiotic “types” that can be actualized in concrete occurrences as “tokens”—in this
case, specific human facts or koto. “Signs” are the forms in which such conceptual
entities (names) are stored in the mind; we can even detect here an echo of Ferdinand
de Saussure’s semiology. Minakata seems to have understood social facts as full-
fledged ontological realities endowed with semiotic existence, in ways perhaps
analogous to more recent theorizations by John Searle (1995) or Maurizio Ferraris
(2012); more radically, however, Minakata grounds his ontology of signs not on their
intersubjective existence alone (their being recorded in a collective subject, what
Ferraris has recently called “documentality”) but, more fundamentally, in the cosmic
substance and agency that is Dainichi, anticipating Pier Paolo Pasolini’s pantheistic
theory of culture (see Rambelli 2013: esp. 41–42).
Slime Mold, Mandala, and the Mystery/Wonder of the Universe
At this point, one thing that remains to be discussed is the connection between
Minakata’s ontology and epistemology of reality and his scholarly interest in slime
molds, a subject that occupied him throughout his life. Slime molds are liminal
creatures, neither plants nor animals, neither individual nor collective. They can
reproduce and move, and establish a unique role in the environment as connectors
among plants, in addition to whatever organizational functions they carry out for
themselves. Minakata was attracted by mycetozoa especially because of their liminal
and transformative nature. He wrote that they are “microorganisms for which it can’t
be decided whether they are animals or plants” (letter to Yanagita Kunio 柳田国男 of
May 1911, in Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 8: 32). He insisted in his interpretation years
later, stressing that mycetozoa are “the primitive, fundamental organisms” (genshi
seibutsu 原始生物), against the opinion of other scholars for whom they are merely “one
part of primitive animals” (letter to Hiranuma Daisaburō 平沼大三郎 of November 17,
1924, in Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 9: 456). What Minakata found particularly attractive
in them is that “differently from other primitive animal organisms, [mycetozoa’s]
original form is extremely large; they can be observed by naked eye while making
important scientific experiments”—something that, Minakata adds, cannot be done
when studying life-and-death processes of human beings (letter of June 4, 1915, in
Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 6: 114).
The role of molds is still not fully understood, but a few years ago scholars
discovered a vast underground network, called mycorrhiza, in which fungi connect
trees of different species by passing chemical and electrical signals among the trees’
roots; it was called “wood wide web.” The mycorrhiza seems to be one of the ways
in which plants in a certain habitat, sometimes very large, communicate among
themselves—a sort of primordial connective substratum, analogous to the role that
Minakata attributed to Dainichi.7
Minakata’s vision of all entities (humans, physical objects, human facts) as particles
or atoms of Dainichi, all related to each other and the whole, is closely related to the
nature and structure of the realm of slime molds (nenkin 粘菌). In a letter to Doki
Hōryū dated March 25, 1902, Minakata describes the life process of mycetozoa, these
“primitive forms of animals and plants” (Minakata 2010: 259) with the help of a series
of sketches which he calls “e-mandara” 絵曼陀羅 (illustrated mandala) (Figure 3.7). In
it, each organism is a transformation of a different one and encompasses in itself life
and death.
Let us follow Minakata’s description closely. At first, we have pin-like molds found
near withered trees (HE ヘ). Their spherical heads break apart and release many seed-
like things (I イ and I’ イ’), which in turn break into drop-like biomatter (RO ロ and
RO’ ロ’); diluted in a little water, they melt together and form HA ハ, a chaotic mass
similar to phlegm (konton taru tan no gotoki mono 混沌たる痰のごときもの). HA
changes shape freely, and in the process assimilates (eats) food-like elements (NI ニ)
and grows. It moves toward areas exposed to light and turns into a shape like HO ホ.
At this stage it stops moving and turns into a vertical shape (HE), in which the bottom
parts gradually ascend to the top and become a spherical head where many seeds
(HE’ ヘ’) form. This is one of the pin-like mycetozoa structures at the beginning of this
entire process. Sometimes, one clump of phlegm HA produces one HE pin, sometime
many pins (Minakata 2010: 259–260).
In terms of life and death, when the seeds I break apart (die) RO and RO’ droplets
are born; when they melt together (die) a HA clump is formed; when HA stops
moving (dies) it turns into a HO thing; when the latter stops moving (dies) the pin-like
structure HE is born; when HE break apart (dies) I seeds are born (260).
Figure 3.7 “Illustrated mandala” of slime molds. From Kōzanji-zō Minakata Kumagusu
shokan: Doki Hōryū ate 1893–1922. Edited by Okuyama Naoji, Undō Hitoshi, and Kanda
Hideaki: 259 (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2010). Courtesy Kōzanji and Fujiwara Shoten.
(Transliterations by Fabio Rambelli.)
Minakata then extends this process to the entire universe, which he calls, following
Shingon cosmology, “Dainichi”: within it, the death of submolecular formations
contributes to the life of the molecular entity and of the entire organism all the way
to minerals, plants, animals, even society and, ultimately, the great trichiliocosm (the
entire universe). However, this incessant process of life-and-death does not happens
in synchrony, but with different intensity and speed at different levels of complexity
(Minakata 2010: 260).
Furthermore, Minakata argues that the same process can be applied to the
understanding of mental/spiritual matters. He proposes the existence of different
configurations and levels of mind, ranging from the equivalent of micro- and
submolecular formations (mental micromolecules or shin gokubishi 心極微子,
mental submolecules or shin bishi 心微子, mental molecules or shin bunshi 心分
子, mental parts or shin bubun 心部分, mental body or shintai 心体 [corresponding
to one human individual]) to corporate mind or shindan 心団, corresponding to
actual society (Minakata 2010: 260–262). These different mental entities function
very much like mycetozoa: the individual mind is not eternal (koshin fujō 個心不
常), distinct minds can melt or separate (shinshin gōri 心々合離), when one mind
dies another is born (isshinshi tashinsei 一心死他心成), when many minds die
one single mind is born (shūshinshi isshinsei 衆心死一心成), when one mind dies
many minds are born (isshinshi shūshinsei 一心死衆心成). Minakata sees this
articulation as an improvement from animism in contemporaneous Western science
(Minakata 2010: 262). However, Minakata continues, “mind” (shin=maindo) in the
previous account, “being a result of the spirit [seishin=supiritto] projected [eijite 映
じて] upon physical matter [buttai], is definitely not spirit, not to mention the soul
[reikon = sōru]” (262).
It is especially interesting to note here that Minakata introduces the “Esoteric
mandala of Judaism” discussed above as an extension of this discussion on both slime
molds and minds (see also Minakata 2010: 264).
Years later, in a letter to Iwata Jun’ichi 岩田準一 dated August 1931 (Minakata 1971–
1975, vol. 9: 28–29), again as a way to describe a more general cosmology, Minakata
recalls that twenty-two years before, he received a visit from leading scholar of Daoism
Tsumaki Naoyoshi 妻木直良 who, after having observed Minakata’s slime molds at
the microscope, told him that it was as described in the Nirvana Sutra: “when one
aggregate organism [in 陰] extinguishes itself, another aggregate is born, as when a
light is born darkness is extinguished, and when a light is extinguished, darkness is
born.”8 In the letter, Minakata elaborates on this image in his own distinctive way:
In the same way, when a criminal is about to die, the denizens of hell await for
the new birth of another one among them; if the criminal recovers his health and
survives, in hell the denizens will say that a baby was aborted because of a difficult
delivery. When the criminal finally dies, his comrades will cry, but the denizens
of hell will celebrate the safe birth of a new baby. (Minakata 1971–1975, vol. 9: 28)
Over they years, Minakata was able to combine different threads of his vast knowledge
into a coherent vision of life-and-death deeply rooted in a particular materialistic
ontology, in which spirit entities originate in the totality of the universe and interact
with physical entities, both as continuously shifting epiphenomena of the totality.
Conclusion
The genius of Minakata consisted in his ability to combine and develop, in an

encyclopedic net, premodern traditional Japanese knowledge with new approaches
and discoveries in Western science; what was particularly astonishing, was his facility
in dealing with different disciplines across the hard sciences and the humanities. His
rich, polymath production makes it difficult for us to assess the range and scope of
his scholarly production. In addition, his reference to Buddhist philosophy makes
his approach heterodoxical, if not plainly “weird”—something that needs to be either
ignored or studied as a queer curiosity. However, a sympathetic interpreter is left
with the doubt—what if other authors had followed Minakata in his scholarly quest?
What happens if we employ slime molds and the mycorrhiza as general models of the
cosmos? What happens when Buddhist philosophical notions, such as the ontology
and epistemology of Dainichi and its cosmos, rooted in a long intellectual tradition
of academic inquiry, are employed as explicative concepts for modern scientific
discoveries? One is left with the impression that perhaps, had these lines of inquiry been
continued, human knowledge today would be several steps closer to an understanding
of the barely visible areas at the far edge of the Minakata mandala.
4
New Religious Movements, the Media, and

“Japanese Animism”
Ioannis Gaitanidis
In August 2017, on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, Happy
Science (Kōfuku no Kagaku 幸福の科学), a Japanese religious organization founded
in 1986, published the records of an alleged interview that the leader of the group,
Ōkawa Ryūhō 大川隆法, had with the spirit of Diana on August 10. Although local
Japanese mainstream media, as usual, ignored yet one more of Ōkawa’s “eccentric”
spiritual interviews with celebrities both dead and alive,1 the foreign press did not
miss the opportunity to report on the “weird” and “bizarre” activities of a movement
that “even has a university and school buildings” (Oakley 2017).2 In fact, reading
these newspaper articles, one cannot help but sense that the journalists struggled to
make sense of the purpose of such a publication by someone whom they refer to as
“psychic.” Is this addressed to the religion’s members? Is there a message behind this
interview? How widespread are beliefs about the possibility of conversing with spirits
among members and nonmembers (since this is published for a wide audience and
available on Amazon)?3 For most uninformed readers of these articles, questions like
these probably came to mind.
Academic studies of individual organizations, such as Kōfuku no Kagaku, can
answer most of these questions, as well as explain the absence, in this instance, of
media coverage in Japan, but cases like this tend also to be presented as proof of the
so-called animistic character of religious belief in contemporary Japan. Indeed, from
attributing the popularity of televised fortune-telling sessions to the spiritualism of
the Japanese psyche (Fujioka 2006), to explaining spiritual sales scams by pointing at
the superstitious nature of Shinto (Brasor and Tsubuku 2011), it seems that authors
are ready to find spirit belief, often equaled to “superstition,” behind many Japanese
behaviors. Yet, every time, authors are talking about very different and diverse beliefs,
which are associated with specific individual and group dynamics.
Erica Baffelli’s studies of Kōfuku no Kagaku show, for example, that regular
publications attributed to Ōkawa Ryūhō have been an effective media campaign
since the founding of the religion. His books are meant to be bought (thus, they are
also a major source of income) and studied by members whose aim is to attain “true
happiness” (also called satori 悟り, “enlightenment”) (Baffelli 2016: 91). These nearly
monthly publications are also for many followers a unique opportunity to learn of
Ōkawa’s thoughts, because his interaction with members is strictly limited and mostly
virtual, thus allowing him to avoid criticism and maintain his authority and legitimacy
as a spiritual guide (Baffelli 2016: 112). Regarding the lack of Japanese coverage of
Ōkawa’s spirit interviews, one must look into specific patterns of the relationship
between the media and religions, and into the tendency of Japanese media to attack
religious organizations on ethical grounds mostly for what are seen as financial scams
and embezzlements, but not, a priori, for their theological teachings (see, for example,
Dorman 2012a). This does not mean that in the past there have not been other types
of critique of religious movements. In fact, in 1991, Kōfuku no Kagaku was involved
in the so-called Kōdansha Friday Affair, in which a journalist, based on what later
was revealed to be mistaken information, denigrated the mental state and personality
of Ōkawa Ryūhō, which provoked an aggressive response by the group in the media
and directly to the offices of both the publisher Kōdansha and the magazine that had
published these stories, Friday (Baffelli 2016: 105). Yet again, the attack did not really
seem to concern the beliefs of the group but its leader.
Indeed, contrary to the English-language media treatment of Ōkawa’s spiritual
interviews, “weird” and “bizarre” are not adjectives that the Japanese media today
attributes to such religious occurrences. One would perhaps be inclined to conclude
that because the animistic theology that underlies these spiritual interviews has
been and still is common among the Japanese public it is therefore not worth special
attention. In fact, a recent textbook on religion in daily life in Japan argues that
Japanese young people today might appear different from those of a previous
generation but if asked why they consult fortune-tellers, or what their attitudes
are towards mikuji oracles at a Shintō shrine, very often their answers are actually
the same responses that people were giving me more than thirty years ago. Why
their answers are now fairly predictable is because the underlying attitudes and
motivations are essentially unchanged […] Their comments about carrying a
safety charm in their luggage display the same kinds of attitudes […] most of
[basic elements in Japanese religion] are to do with relationships, either with the
spirits, or with people or with the natural environment. (Lewis 2017: 4)
In this chapter I claim, however, that we should, if not reject such sweeping
generalization all together, at least qualify what we mean by the Japanese “basic
relationship with spirits” that many authors (academic and popular) today like to find
in all things Japanese, from consumer behavior to animation films.4
There are several ways to achieve this. One would be to trace the faults of the
argument to the academic construction of the self-orientalistic “spiritual discourse”
promulgated by many scholars of religion and philosophy in Japan (see, for example,
Prohl 2007: 368), or even to the appropriation of the term “animism” from early
anthropologists such Edward B. Tylor, who used it as an artifice allowing him to separate
good “religion” from bad “magic” (see Hanegraaff 1998a; see also Josephson-Storm
2017: 98–101; and Chapter 2 in this volume). An investigation into the history of Shinto
as the tradition that is often placed at the center of popular arguments about Japanese
animism, i.e., a study of the nature of what Fabio Rambelli calls “the Shintoesque”
New Religious Movements, the Media, and “Japanese Animism” 67
(Rambelli 2012: 13), would also be another way of qualifying the historicity and nature
of this alleged animism.5 In this chapter, I propose instead a different method. I wish to
illustrate the dynamic nature of the label “spirit belief ” by showing the degree to which
this spiritual discourse in Japan has resulted in referring to very different religious
cosmologies, even within the most publicly visible manifestations of such beliefs, for
instance when they appear in the media coverage of new religious organizations, such
as Kōfuku no Kagaku. In this way, I intend to focus directly on the defects of the media
rhetoric, by creating a genealogy of spirit belief as it was constructed and developed
through the attacks by the press onto new religious groups since their appearance in the
nineteenth century. This approach has, in terms of my argument, the double advantage
of not only situating the discourse on Japanese animism and spirituality within the
media discourse in which it most often appears, but also of searching for defaults
in the background of the typologies of new religion’s theologies that one frequently
comes across in relevant academic literature. In addition, in terms of methodology, this
approach shows one way of analyzing the effects of the action orientation of discourse
in the field of religion and social problems, where discourse analysis has been found to
be still underused (Hjelm 2011: 144).
Spirit Belief, Animism, and New Religious Movements in Japan
Typically, new religious groups have been categorized based on either sociological
criteria, such as the structure of the group and their process of formation and
development, or on doctrinal criteria. Doctrinal criteria, which interest us more here,
stem either from a comparison with the teachings of religious traditions/organizations
that have preceded the New Religious Movements (NRMs) under scrutiny (whether
these predate the period when NRMs initially appeared in Japan, or they are just older
NRMs), or from an analysis of their core beliefs. A recent classification distinguishes,
for example, between two general types of NRMs, the text-based (tekusuto テクスト)
groups and the magic-based (reinō 霊能) groups (Terada and Tsukada 2016: 34).6
These general classifications do not tell us much about the contents of the groups’
beliefs and, as their authors also note, these types often overlap. For example, Kōfuku
no Kagaku would belong to both a subcategory of the text-based groups (the syncretic
text-type) because of the strong peculiarity of the group’s doctrine, but it could also
be included in the magic-based groups because of the “spiritual” powers attributed
to and enhancing the charisma of the group’s leader, Ōkawa Ryūhō. Furthermore, to
understand the role that spirits, gods, and other invisible beings play in these “magical
practices,” one needs to first know that, as most textbooks on religion and society in
Japan often point out, the most important common characteristic of NRMs in Japan is
a vitalistic concept of salvation (Tsushima et al. 1979), which Tsukada Hotaka 塚田穂高
(2012: 30) breaks down into six essential interrelated beliefs: (1) there is a fundamental
source of vital energy, (2) this vital energy stems from a source/god/being who is like
a parent who gives birth to all life, (3) humans are alive thanks to this vital energy, (4)
calamities are said to originate from a split with this vital energy, (5) salvation can only
be achieved by recovering a state of harmony with the life source by avoiding selfish
actions in everyday life and practicing simple magic, and (6) the religious leader acts
as the intermediary between this vital energy source and humans.
Furthermore, extensive analyses of NRMs’ doctrines show that this fundamental
source of vital energy can take five forms: (1) a kami-form inspired by shrine Shinto
traditions; (2) a Buddhist form, such as a Buddha, a mandala, etc.; (3) a Christian God-
like form; (4) a form borrowed from other religions, such as Taoism; and (5) an original
form that is peculiar to that specific new religious group (Inoue et al. 1994: 254). The
existence of such invisible beings therefore presupposes the existence of another,
“spiritual” realm (reikai 霊界), usually invisible to the human eye, which hosts, in
addition to divine beings, the spirits of the dead, evil spirits, guardian spirits, and even
the spirits of living people (ikiryō 生霊) (Inoue et al. 1994: 227) (which explains why
Ōkawa Ryūhō can also perform his spiritual interviews with living people, such as
Donald Trump or popular actress Aoi Yū 蒼井優). In this worldview, the world of the
living is connected with the world of the spirits through the vital energy that emanates
from it and through individual connections with various types of spirits—connections
that the magical practices of NRMs usually strive to manipulate for the benefit of their
members. What is particularly interesting here for the argument of this chapter is how
scholars of NRMs in Japan, joining popular media exegeses, explain the origin of this
dualistic worldview with its separation between the spirit world and the human world.
In the authoritative Shinshūkyō jiten (Encyclopedia of New Religions)—which, to
this date, remains an essential work of reference for all scholars researching NRMs in
Japan7—Tsushima Michihito 対馬路人 traces the vitalistic concept of salvation and its
relations to a spiritual realm to the “fundamental religious and moral consciousness
of the Japanese people,” which is characteristically “pantheistic and animistic” (Inoue
et al. 1994: 232). To prove his argument, the author does not only refer to opinion
polls used in textbooks on Japanese religious life but also to the practice of ancestor
worship, which he considers as a defining factor of the Japanese worldview (Inoue
et al. 1994). Interestingly, the main theoretical source for this argument is sociologist
Hamaguchi Eshun’s 浜口恵俊 emphasis on the contextualism of Japanese relations,
developed in his Nihonrashisa no saihakken 「日本らしさ」の再発見 (1977), a classic
of the nihonjiron 日本人論 literature of the 1970s and 1980s (see Befu 2001: 23). This
argument of Japanese religions being essentially animistic is repeated on several
instances by another famous scholar of religion, Shimazono Susumu, who traces the
origin of the NRMs’ vitalistic concept of salvation to “Japan’s underlying religious
culture [in which] one recognizes that—as in Shinto and animism—the susceptibility
to regard as manifestations of the sacred mainly the creation and development of life
in this world, has from the ancient times up to the present, been very influential”
(Shimazono 2011: 53–54).
However, there are various factual and conceptual issues with this line of thought.
Firstly, recent research has shown that an animistic view of the world does not stretch
back into the depths of Japanese antiquity but is “in fact a mode of thought deriving
from highly abstract ideas that appeared in the process of the internalization of
the divine in medieval Japan” (Satō 2016: 137; see also Chapter 1 in this volume).
Secondly, it has now become a standard academic argument to link the practice of
ancestor worship to the Edo period’s danka 檀家 (parishioner) system and, especially,
to the Meiji government’s successful attempt to legally establish ancestral rites as the
cornerstone of a national identity (Rowe 2011: 25). And thirdly, the term animism is
perhaps not appropriate in the case of many doctrines of NRMs. Indeed, if we accept
(ignoring for a moment its negative connotations in its original formulations) that
animism is “the belief that things within nature—animate and sometimes inanimate—
are energized by spirits” (Olson 2011: 25), we may find that the vitalist/spiritualist
worldview of NRMs is much narrower than animism, for the simple reason that the
NRMs’ worldview is centered on the individual and “grounded in an outlook in which
the spiritual world (especially ancestral spirits) may influence the physical world”
(Reader 2012b: 178).
Here a clarification is in order. In his history of the transformation of beliefs in
gods in Japan, Satō Hiroo argues that the early modern era “produced a profusion
of figures who elevated themselves to deities through their own inner light, and not
the reflected glory of a supreme being or honjibutsu 本地仏, as in the middle ages”
(Satō 2016: 195). The appearance of these living gods (ikigami 生き神) reached its peak
in the final years of the Tokugawa period, with the establishment of new religious
movements, such as Tenrikyō 天理教, Konkōkyō 金光教, and Kurozumikyō 黒住教,
by peasants or commoners who claimed to be divine (Satō 2016: 192). A characteristic
of these groups, however, was that the divine was open to all members of the religion,
regardless of class and social status, because this divine was conceived “as a primordial
existence transcending secular society […] [and as] a deity who resided within human
beings and spoke to them, playing the role of a fountainhead for the birth of countless
hitogami 人神 [divinized human beings] in this world” (Satō 2016: 194). The vitalism
of these NRMs emanates therefore from a sole source and mainly concerns humans.
Furthermore, this rapprochement of the world of the spirits to that of the humans
did not necessarily include “all” kinds of “animism” but consisted in a narrow
selection that became even narrower as Japan rushed into the Meiji era. Popular
imagination of the Edo period—for example, the catalogs of ghosts of Toriyama Sekien
(鳥山石燕 1712–1788) and the growing belief in the existence of specters yōkai 妖怪 (see
Foster 2009, especially chapter 2)—undoubtedly led to a certain feeling that a different
realm existed very near the world of the humans; this belief was further developed
by the influential kokugaku 国学 scholar Hirata Atsutane (平田篤胤 1776–1843) in the
early nineteenth century. Hirata’s exegesis of a relationship among gods (kami 神), the
ancestors, and the living, “cleansed of misguided beliefs about demons, ghosts, and
goblins […] attributed […] to the deceits and corrupting effects of Buddhism and
syncretic, ‘vulgar’ Shinto” (Figal 1999: 36), led to what Gerald Figal identified as the
principal task of Meiji ideology: to “fashion from disparate beliefs in spirits a modern
and unified Japanese Spirit of certain, albeit mystified form” (Figal 1999: 5).
Particularly relevant for the argument of this chapter is how Hirata established
himself as an authority on Japanese theology by offering a very different interpretation
of the dominant religious cosmologies that predated him. Hirata’s attempts to argue
for an investigation of spirits and the afterlife bore fruits when, in his third work, Tama
no mihashira 霊能真柱 (The True Pillar of the Soul), he grounded his theories on the
classic literature, such as the Kojiki 古事記, which had been used by Nativist scholars to
argue for the existence of a fundamental Japanese religiosity. More specifically, while
agreeing with some existing arguments, for example, about the existence of heaven
(the Sun), earth, and the realm of Yomi (which Hirata identified with the moon)
(McNally 2002: 370), Hirata, unlike his predecessors, claimed that the afterlife is
not a particular place, like the moon (Yomi 黄), but a spiritual realm, which coexists
with that of the living. When the soul dies, Hirata argues, the soul enters the spiritual
realm and protects the living on earth (372). Moreover, this afterlife realm is not an
evil place but is ruled by a benign god who presides over the souls of loved ones
(273). McNally, in fact, argues that Hirata’s objective ended up producing a Shinto
eschatology which he wanted his readers to believe in. Also, thanks to his favorable
reception at the imperial court, Hirata became an authority of the Nativist school
from the 1820s onwards.
The association between Hirata’s spiritualist cosmology and the concept of animism
is, however, a much later development, linked to what Aike P. Rots has called “animism
politics” (Rots 2017: 115–120). As Rots describes it, late twentieth-century thinkers such
as Umehara Takeshi 梅原猛 called for a return of animism, based on the (stereotypical)
idea that the origins of Japanese religion lie in the worship of trees (118), leading to the
modern view that Japan used to be a culture living in social and ecological harmony
thanks to its animism (116). It thus appears that it was thinkers such as Umehara who
linked Hirata’s “cleansed” spiritualist cosmology to what Satō Hiroo has identified as
an early modern vitalist development in Japanese religious culture. To be sure, many
NRMs, first and foremost Ōmotokyō 大本教, which was directly influenced by Hirata
Atsutane’s school, call for a return to a simple life in the countryside, but this, as Nancy
K. Stalker notes, has more to do with “Nativist ideals of hard work and reliance”
(Stalker 2008: 69) than with an animistic concern with Nature. In fact, if we were to
link the NRMs’ belief in the existence of spirits to Hirata’s Nativism, this would point
to a rather specific issue, namely, a fundamental concern with the existence of another
realm populated with spirits and the possibility to communicate with it (McNally 2005:
189). I would like to argue here that the animism imagined to be at the (ahistorical)
basis of Japanese religiosity (and consequently of Japanese NRMs) today is therefore a
later product, born out of a combination of national and international trends, a rising
Nativist conservatism aimed at linking individual development to national growth,
and an influx of Anglo-Saxon spiritualist beliefs and practices that focused on the
communication with the dead from the Taishō period onwards (see, for example,
Hardacre 1998).
Media’s Contribution to the Debate on “Japanese Animism,

Hence NRMs”
The rising of traditionalism associated with the Kokugaku movement in the early
modern period, as well as the specific attempts by Hirata Atsutane to stand out among
other Kokugaku scholars and push his own political agenda, resembles in a way the
arguments that would later link the rising of conservatism and nationalism in the
1890s to the clashes between NRMs and the public. As Janine A. Sawada (2004) shows
in the case of the rise and fall of Renmonkyō 蓮門教 (see below), the criticism of
NRMs in the media was also related to the inter- and intraorganizational efforts for
legitimization (similar to Hirata’s attempts to be recognized as a legitimate Kokugaku
scholar) by both established religious organizations and new religious groups wishing
to continue their practice and attract new audiences under the new Japanese state.
However, when considering the Renmonkyō incident—a conflict between
a religious organization and the media (important because it was the first)—in
detail, one cannot help but notice that it coincided with the publication of the first
newspapers in Japan in the 1870s, an event that promoted a very specific interpretation
of NRMs’ theology. Sawada, in fact, ends her narrative by noting that the group was
attacked because its beliefs did not conform to notions of religious transformations
that emphasize the role of the subject, which were “widespread in the middle strata
of Japanese society in the late nineteenth century, partly through the proliferation of
the print media” (Sawada 2004: 258). My claim here is that these notions of religious
transformation are not a unique development of Japanese religious culture but, rather,
are intimately related to the conceptualization of a modern culture of media and
entertainment that unavoidably made the individual subject its target audience. As
a result, the theological background of religious practices was largely ignored and a
focus on how these practices impacted individuals was preferred. In this sense, Japan
offers a fascinating example of how the emergence of the information society, with
its urge to tell the news and entertain and through that to foster a common sense of
morality and orthodoxy, contributed to the production of a “public superstition.” This
confirms also, in a sense, Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) classic theory that media are
extensions of ourselves because they create and sustain a shared cultural environment.
In this section, I argue that the construction of the “Japanese animism” narrative
cannot be separated from the development of the newspaper industry and the mass
media critique that has accompanied the appearance of NRMs since the late nineteenth
century. Animism, both as an academic concept and as a national imagery, developed
in conjunction with—and, sometimes, in reaction to—official policies and mass media
treatments of practices that were deemed new, extravagant, or even illegal. In other
words, the emergence of NRMs’ magical practices as based on an alleged unified belief
in spirits in Japan occurred through an entanglement between a variety of older and
new beliefs in ghosts, gods, and humans endowed with magical powers, and the rise
of commercial and mass information culture. Here, I take inspiration from Simone
Natale’s argument that the rise of spiritualism in the United States and Great Britain
was directly associated with the rise of modern entertainment (Natale 2016: 15), not
only through the spiritualists’ use of modern media’s techniques, formats, and narrative
patterns, but also through their mutual competition for audiences and for a unified
worldview that social movements in general rely upon to prosper.
Ben Dorman has already touched on this topic briefly (2012a), but his emphasis is
more on the media treatment of founders of new religions rather than on the media’s
interpretation of and impact on theological doctrines of these groups. Dorman notes,
however, that the media are indeed, like new religions, social movements, albeit
with greater power and larger audiences (13). Dorman, furthermore, offers us a
nonexhaustive, but fairly accurate, list of the reasons for which new religions have been
attacked in the press from the birth of the Meiji newspapers in the 1870s till today: (1)
they advocated doctrines that were somehow suspect and dangerous to the public; (2)
they engaged in medical quackery and illicit sexual practices; (3) they were involved
in fraud of a material or financial nature; (4) their founders were mentally unstable;
and (5) the people who followed the groups were either uneducated or they lacked the
ability to judge right from wrong (16).
Interestingly, the promotion (through, for example, journalistic attacks on new
religious groups) of this sense of reality that was impervious to experiences or
perceptions that contradicted it occurred simultaneously with the Meiji promotion
of national gods and the spirits of the war dead (Josephson 2012: 242). Yet, I claim
here that rather than being eradicated, and despite the political circumstances that
wanted spirit belief to be very specific and supportive of a nation-centered ideology,
the fact that belief in spirits generally survived in Japan eventually depended upon
and was exacerbated by news reports on new religions throughout the modern period.
To put it in other words, I would claim that today’s popular idea that the Japanese are
“animistic” and that spirit belief can be found everywhere in Japanese culture partially
stems from the constant negative advertisement of such beliefs by a press that benefited
for its sales on reporting incidents associated with them.
The Encyclopedia of New Religions lists 106 incidents involving new religious groups
reported in the news between June 10, 1872 and December 15, 1988 (Inoue et al. 1994:
488–490). Fujita Shōichi 藤田庄市, a journalist involved in the post-Aum anti-cult
movement, in his monograph on new religion-related incidents from December 1979
to September 2008, presents twenty-one different new religious groups, including
the infamous Aum Shinrikyō (Fujita 2008). Of course, the high number of incidents
reported reflects the very large number of groups that sprang up in Japan in the last two
hundred years, but also illustrates how the public’s knowledge of these incidents very
much depends on them being reported by newspapers, which only started to appear
in the 1870s. The question perhaps remains as to what extent the media contributed
to spreading this image of “spirit belief ” and animism as fundamental elements of
Japanese religiosity.
Again, the example of Renmonkyō is very useful. Renmonkyō’s fall was largely due
to continuous attacks by one single newspaper, which in the span of six weeks forced
the Metropolitan Police Department to start investigating the group and which, one
month later, in May 1894, led to forced church reforms that meant the loss of the
religion’s identity and, eventually, to the head of the movement being stripped of
her official religious ranking. The newspaper that almost single-handedly brought
down in this way “one of the largest of the new religions” (Takeda 1991) of the Meiji
era was Yorozu chōhō 萬朝報, a two-year-old publication in 1894 that had already
surpassed its rival paper Tōkyō Asahi 東京朝日 and which, as James L. Huffman
argues, would establish the rules of impact for all other papers from then on: cheap,
short, easy to read, paying attention to serialized novels, and politically independent
(Huffman 1997: 193). These rules stemmed from an element that connects modern
new religions and the modern press: both “institutions” rose originally to respond
to the modernizing forces that were changing public life at a tremendous speed
but soon had to respond to the needs and interests of their audiences. Therefore,
newspapers, like new religions, became sensationalist and moralistic. The editor of
the Yorozu chōhō is, indeed, said to have “wanted to think as the general public felt,
to feel anger with them and solve problems with them. He wanted to help the poor,
the weak” (cited in Huffman 1997: 194).
The main reason for Renmonkyō’s growth and demise is the selling of korera
fūji コレラ封じ (charms to stop cholera) and shinsui 神水 (holy water) to cure the
disease during a time when large outbreaks of cholera occurred (Takeda 1991).
These practices attracted the attention of intellectuals and newspapers, which were
at the same time reporting on both modernization of the healthcare system and on
official attempts by the Japanese government to stop “superstitious” activities. As a
result, the focus on these illegal activities, together with the group’s use of prophetic
sermons and organization of events with celebrities to attract ordinary believers,
overshadowed the fact that the object of worship had been the Lotus Sutra and the
God of the Wondrous Dharma (Myōhōjin 妙法神). Indeed, the focus in the press
was on how individual believers “found” faith through everyday miracles: a parent
who saved his child from high fever thanks to the religion’s holy water, a man who
succeeded in business as soon as he switched faith from Christianity to Renmonkyō,
or a family who escaped intact from their house destroyed by an earthquake (cited
in Inoue 1992: 54).
As Satō observes, popular religions that arose in the late Edo period frequently
saw the divine manifested as a primordial existence transcending secular society, a
monotheistic deity who resided within human beings (Satō 2016: 194). The same trend
can be seen in Tenrikyō (established in 1838), Konkōkyō (1859), Maruyamakyō 丸山教
(1873), and Ōmotokyō (1892), each having their own god: Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto 天理王
命, Tenchi Kane No Kami 天地金乃神, Oyagami 祖神, and Ushitora no Konjin 艮の金
神, respectively. Yet, each of these groups was attacked by the press for illicit practices
that were a priori, in their reporting, not explicitly connected to their monotheistic/
vitalistic beliefs but to the “superstitious”—read this-worldly, benefits-related—beliefs
of those religions’ followers. Most researchers consider this trend as having amplified
existing criticism over these practices, but sometimes this criticism was simply created
by the journalists themselves.
Inoue Nobutaka 井上順孝, for example, discusses the second serious attack by
the Meiji-period press on NRMs, which concerned Tenrikyō and occurred in 1896,
two years after that of Renmonkyō. The newspaper involved this time was the Chūō
Shinbun 中央新聞, which went as far as changing the founder’s, Nakayama Miki
中山みき, background information to turn her into the daughter of Christians and
even purported to have proof that events that were interpreted as miracles by Tenrikyō
were based on lies (Inoue 1992: 58). Based on biographical records published by the
religious group, Nakayama Miki, at the age of thirty-one, was said to have saved the life
of a neighbor’s child by praying to the myriad gods (yaorozu no kami 八百万神) with
the promise to give them her life and that of her daughter in exchange. The newspaper,
however, claimed that this had been untrue, since the neighbor’s child had eventually
died and was replaced with another child to give credence to Nakayama’s claim. Inoue
argues that this pattern of the mass media attacking religious groups (especially those
newly formed and rapidly developing) based on what their believers interpreted as
immediate, this-worldly benefits stemming from their faith has characterized the
relation between NRMs and the media until today (Inoue 1992: 54–55). He traces
this trend to the fact that such criticism reflects the opinions of an intellectual elite
who look down on the “backwardness” or “ignorance” (mōmaisei 蒙昧性) of the
masses. On the other side of “ignorance,” however, the Japanese masses are constantly
presented as being enamored with a world of spirits which, as Hirata Atsutane tried
to establish, was not some faraway location but another realm coexisting with that of
the living, with which it remains in constant interaction. One could say that at some
point public opinion also became the public’s belief, a phenomenon that accelerated
in the twentieth century with more coverage of the NRMs and more public visibility
of such groups. Indeed, as Jeremy Kitzinger and David Miller note in their study of
the role played by the mass media in the reproduction and transformation of society,
“the power and persistence of particular images and misunderstandings in the public
imagination […] lie not only in the media representation […] [but] are also rooted in
the social structure of personal experience” (Kitzinger and Miller 1998: 227). To put it
simply, media representations matched people’s daily observations of (what seemed to
be) an ever growing number of NRMs.
Soon, the NRMs entered the second phase of their relations with the media, in
which they used the media to promote themselves (Hardacre 2003: 143). Ōmotokyō
is perhaps a model for such endeavors. As Stalker notes, Deguchi Onisaburō 出口
王仁三郎, the successor of Ōmotokyō’s founder, Deguchi Nao 出口なお, “quickly
grasped that the promise of recreation and spectatorship might lure crowds otherwise
uninterested in a religious message” (Stalker 2008: 111). Yet, Onisaburō’s consumer-
oriented religious innovations (such as the organization of art exhibitions and live
concerts, and the acquisition of a large-circulation daily newspaper from Osaka)
already had predecessors in the United States, from where marketing practices
together with new spiritualist cosmologies were already flooding to Japan. By the time
Ōmotokyō suffered its first public suppression in 1921, Japanese society had already
been witnessing a boom in various methods of self-cultivation, which mainly used
physical exercises to manipulate the spirit (seishin 精神) with the ultimate purpose of
physical healing (seishin ryōhō 精神療法). Over time, as Yoshinaga Shin’ichi observes,
“the meaning of seishin widened until it came to be regarded as an agent to explain
all sorts of supernormal phenomena” (Yoshinaga 2015: 96) and eventually included
earlier, Hirata-type cosmologies.
The ensuing enhancement of magical practices used by NRMs to provide this-
worldly benefits to their believers8 did not of course escape the media’s attention, which
rushed to criticize these groups as heretical (jakyō 邪教), again with sensationalist
reports of perverted sexual practices and murder accusations. But, as Staemmler notes,
the trigger of media criticism—which again led to fierce suppressions (and complete
destruction of its headquarters) by the government of one of the most persecuted
prewar NRMs, Ōmotokyō—were the religion’s public sessions of chinkon kishin
(鎮魂帰神, lit. “pacify the spirit and unite with the divine”) (Staemmler 2009: 119).
This method has been described as a mediated spirit possession in which one person
induces spirit possession in another, then conducts a dialogue with the spirit before
sending it back to “the other world” (26–28). A practitioner of the technique at the
time claimed that chinkon kishin offered “an abolition of the borders between kami
and humans and a way to enter the ‘wonderful realm’ of the spirit world” (cited in
Stalker 2008: 96). Although the reasons Ōmotokyō and other NRMs were suppressed
in the years leading to the Pacific War were mostly associated with the danger of these
groups’ political ideologies for the growing nationalist imperialism of the country,
popular and journalistic accounts of new religions remained concerned with the
“plight” of individual members. Ben Dorman draws on the example of Ōya Sōichi
大宅壮一, a prolific writer in newspapers and magazines, who, in his fierce attacks of
NRMs, ended up criticizing the entire Japanese public that flooded out of curiosity to
Ōmotokyō’s open chinkon kishin session. It was this public in general, and particularly
intellectuals, who, Ōya argued, had lost the power to criticize and led to the rise of such
“pseudo religions” (cited in Dorman 2012a: 59). Again, and even more visibly than
before, arguments against the popularity of magical practices and beliefs in a spiritual
world carried out through these media attacks on NRMs involved an increasingly
larger portion of the Japanese public.
The situation did not change much in the postwar period, although as Dorman
notes the Religious Division of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers
(SCAP) seemed to attempt to subvert prewar discourses on superstition through
press conferences and reports (Dorman 2012a: 116). Rather, the press presented the
newly found “religious freedom” as a potential incentive for more “dangerous” groups
to develop (219). Psychologists such as Inui Takashi 乾孝 attacked NRMs in the
newspapers and claimed that phenomena of spirit possession are forms of psychological
illness, and that the popularity of groups promoting such practices “[we]re barometers
that indicate the serious disorder and chaos of the times. They reflect[ed] the lifestyles
and emotions of people from small towns and villages and [were] closely linked to the
survival of traditional social structures” (cited in Dorman 2012a: 211; my emphasis).
Here again, we find in explicit terms this association of spirit belief with Japanese
traditional society, as if the authors admitted that such beliefs are a fundamental aspect
of Japanese religiosity.
In October 1955, history repeated itself. A newspaper, this time the Yomiuri Shinbun
読売新聞, launched a series of nearly daily attacks on a new religion, this time Risshō
Kōseikai 立正佼成会. The group’s image had already been tarnished from illegal land
purchase accusations earlier in the year (from which it was later found innocent), and
this gave the Yomiuri enough ground to forge a special team to investigate this NRMs
undercover and report on its activities. As Morioka writes, as soon as the attention
shifted to stories of human rights violations, the focus of the attacks immediately
centered on the proselytization techniques of the group, and misconduct was
reported in the area of faith healing and such practices as massage, acupuncture, and
chiropractice (Morioka 1994: 292). Once more, the ensuing public outcry forced the
government to react, and the group was put under investigation by the Ministry of
Health. Yomiuri’s coverage of the affair ended with a report on the resolution approved
by the Committee on Judicial Affairs, which on June 3, 1956, warned of the “various
excesses and numerous activities that can be regarded as disruptive of the public
welfare, particularly acts of deception, coercion, and superstition connected with
joining and leaving the organization, collecting money and valuables, and treating
disease” (cited in Morioka 1994: 298).
A characteristic of these and other reports is the association of actions explicitly

targeting the plight of their victims, such as “deception” or “coercion,” with value
judgments on religious beliefs using expressions like “superstition.” Implicitly, NRMs
keep being presented as organizations that take advantage of the “backward” beliefs
of a general populace, a narrative that, while sounding paradoxical coming from a
newspaper industry that holds even greater power to influence the public, will increase
together with the involvement of NRMs in producing their own media. In fact, after
personalities such as Ōya Sōichi, who had already targeted Ōmotokyō and other
religions using their own media campaigns, the idea that NRMs were media industries
was launched by the media themselves and continues to haunt popular opinions today.
(New) Neo-Nativist Discourse and the Media Today
The well-known social critic Ōtsuka Eiji 大塚英志, in his treatise on “media-mix-zation”
of Japan, claims that new religions are information industries and that, in their ability
to affect the masses, media and religion are two sides of the same mirror (Ōtsuka
2014: 174). Ōtsuka borrowed this idea from a report published by Yomiuri Television
Broadcast in 1973 claiming that groups as varied as Reiyūkai 霊友会, Konkokyō, Sōka
Gakkai 創価学会, Tenrikyō, and PL Kyōdan パーフェクトリバティー教団 are
not trying to attract people into a non-everyday reality by means of rituals. Rather,
they commit themselves to the daily lives of the people and expand their ranks by
completely altering those lives. Thus, they do not manipulate people by creating
pseudo-emotions, but take up various unfulfilled desires, have millions of people
share among themselves those unfulfilled desires, and thus create one community
within which they “resuscitate” people. Therefore, today’s religions place more
emphasis on communication than before, and their headquarters use the media
to appeal to the masses. In this way, [religions] to put it simply, have turned into
information industries. (Ōtsuka 2014: 175; my translation)
Quite significantly, Ōtsuka uses this quote to support his own argument, famous
among social critics (and scholars) of Japan, about the effects of media-mix in Japanese
society in the 1980s. Media-mix (a sort of transmedia storytelling, see Ōtsuka 2014)
is understood as the act of producing fragmentary commodities that people purchase
across several genres and platforms with the goal of reaching a grand narrative
(worldview) that unites them all. Although Ōtsuka usually writes about popular
culture, in his 2014 book, perhaps encouraged by this earlier view that religions can
be considered as information industries, he ventures into a commentary on the most
infamous of the NRMs: Aum Shinrikyō オウム真理教. Ōtsuka’s argument is simple:
Aum used the “grand narrative” of salvation to attract, through small commodities
(the promises of supernormal powers, the sense of community) across various formats
(from yoga and books, to anime and electronic hardware), a young generation already
familiar with this mode of consumption and keen on pursuing pseudo-histories (gishi
疑史) exalting the Japanese nation (Ōtsuka 2014: 182).
In fact, Sunday Mainichi サンデー毎日, the first newspaper to attack Aum in

October 1989 with a series of articles entitled “The Insanity of Aum Shinrikyō,” focused
especially on the group’s initiations that included, in exchange for sometimes large
sums of money, the act of imbibing Asahara’s blood, which was thought to contain
Asahara’s special DNA, in turn believed to allow initiates to develop spiritual powers
(Reader 1996: 38). Social critics, including religious studies scholars, rushed to point at
the immaturity and occult interests of an innocent youth, seemingly devoid of agency
and at the mercy of beliefs in a “misunderstood” spirituality. For example, Nakazawa
Shin’ichi 中沢新一, anthropologist of religion, who was criticized in the immediate
aftermath of the Aum affair because he had previously seemed to support the group, in
a magazine article of May 30, 1995, tried to explain Aum’s violence by blaming it on the
bad elements of contemporary Japanese society that somehow “polluted” the “pure,”
hence anti-social, religiosity of Aum (cited in Hirano and Tsukada 2015: 227). Another
scholar, Yamaori Tetsuo 山折哲雄, claimed in the Tokyo edition of the Nikkei Shinbun
日経新聞 on April 25, 1996, that the responsibility for what happened lies with the
baby-boom (dankai 団塊) generation, which in the years leading to the terrorist attack
had discovered the value of spirituality and had started doubting the almightiness of
scientific technology (cited in Hirano and Tsukada 2015: 240).
Interestingly, however, some of these same scholars who blamed the irrational
Japanese society also figure on the list of spiritual intellectuals, whom Shimazono
Susumu credits with the ideological foundation of the new spirituality culture that has
spread in Japan since the 1970s (Shimazono 2004: 279).9 Here, unsurprisingly, we find
not only Umehara Takeshi and his Jōmon animism, but also Yuasa Yasuo 湯浅泰雄, a
scholar with an interest in religious parapsychological experience stemming in part
from his family’s involvement with various new religious groups (including Hito no
Michi ひとのみち, which was persecuted in the late 1930s after media attacks targeting
the founder’s practice of allegedly being able to take on him the sickness of his followers,
called ofurikae, 御振替 “transfer”) (Murakami 1980b: 86–88). Shimazono claims
that Yuasa subsequently played a determinant role in the popularization of qi-based
therapies, such as qiqong 気功 (Shimazono 2004: 289). More significantly, Nakazawa
Shin’ichi and Yamaori Tetsuo are both included in this group of spiritual intellectuals,
who, while considering Aum as a reflection of the problems of contemporary Japan,
also promoted a (new) neo-Nativist nihonkyōron (日本教論, discourses on Japan’s
unique religiosity), which included an argument for the existence of a special kind of
Japanese animism. Inken Prohl notes that their idea of animism essentially stemmed
from cultural anthropologist Iwata Keiji’s 岩田慶治 book Animizumu jidai (アニミズ
ム時代, The Era of Animism, 1993), in which “animism is said to be the origin of all
religion, but today it can still be experienced ‘especially in remote villages’ in East Asia”
(Prohl 2002: 155).
This phenomenon, in which the media promote a reactionary and nationalistic
view of what Japanese religiosity should be about, while at the same time blaming the
irrationality of Japanese society for NRM-related incidents, seems to have remained
unchanged since the Meiji period. Scholars have argued that in the postwar period and
up to the Aum incident, newspapers had avoided dealing with religion at all (see, for
example, Dorman 2012b), but, from what transpires from the above, there may be an
additional interpretation to this postwar trend, namely, it may be that the idea of an
animistic religion, devoid of doctrinal complexities, organizational complications, and
financial scams, has become so entrenched that the media are content with reporting
only either on “traditional” festivities seen as the expressions (and remnants) of an
idealized past, or on the problematic superstitions polluting a once pure animism.
Understood in this sense, the following words by Kyodo News 共同ニュース journalist
Nishide Takeshi 西出勇志, during a debate on contemporary media’s views of religion,
carry a different meaning:
I think religion is like the air (we breathe); we can’t live without it, but it should
not become a topic of discussion. Because when the air that we usually do not
think about becomes a topic of discussion, it often means that something bad
has happened, such as air pollution etc. It is the same with media reporting on
religion.10
If I interpret Nishide’s comment on the basis of the argument developed so far, I

could argue that what the journalist is really saying is that religion, namely “Japanese
animism,” is so entrenched in daily life and “natural” that it only becomes news when
it becomes the “wrong” type of animism, namely “superstition.”
Animism as Media Discourse: A Paradox?
In 1926, a medium called Hester Travers Smith published a book entitled Oscar Wilde
From Purgatory: Psychic Messages, which reported on the alleged communications
of Smith with the spirit of the famous poet and playwright twenty-six years after
his death. Natale writes that such posthumous works were very popular at the turn
of the twentieth century in the United States and Great Britain and were even used
to borrow the “authority” of celebrity figures to advertise certain products or ideas
(Natale 2016: 123). One would not be wrong to note the tremendous similarities
between Victorian spiritualism and Ōkawa Ryūhō’s spiritual interviews I mentioned
at the beginning of this chapter. Without dismissing arguments that trace these
similarities to the spiritualist and occultist inspirations on Kōfuku no Kagaku’s
doctrines and practices (see, for example, Dessì 2012), one could also agree with
Natale’s argument that such practices reflect “the growing importance of the press as
a vehicle of publicity” (Natale 2016: 132) in the ability of spiritualists to imitate and
eventually develop around literary genres that were already popular at the time.
The rise and fall of several new religions in the last two hundred years cannot be
separated from the media world with which these groups competed for their social
ideals. Out of their entanglement, both in form and content, there seems to have
emerged a discourse that links the (sometimes temporary) existence of these groups
to an allegedly essential feature of religiosity in Japan, namely animism. Explanations
of this animism deviate from its original scholarly use and vary in meaning, reflecting
thus an array of beliefs, from nature worship to nineteenth-century spiritualist practices
of communication with the dead. However, inspired by a Nativist (post-Kokugaku)
view of the world and filtered through a modernist scientific outlook, the discourse
promoted by the modern media, whose appearance coincided with the first public
attacks on NRMs, has shaped a specific narrative. This narrative aims to explain at
the same time the emergence of NRMs and the problems that these groups may cause
in modern society. From this perspective, similarly to the consideration that NRMs
behave like information industries, the narrative of animism being the reason for
both the birth of new religions and the plight of their superstitious members sounds
paradoxical. Yet, the fact that so-called spiritual intellectuals accused Japanese society
for the Aum affair is logical. Like the editor of the Yorozu chōhō who said that he
“wanted to think as the general public felt,” the press also wants a Japanese animism,
just one that is not “superstitious.”
80
5
Animated City: Life Force, Guardians, and

Contemporary Architecture in Kyoto
Ellen Van Goethem
Introduction
Like practitioners of many other occupations, architects are often asked to justify the
meaning behind their creations or are required to envelop their proposals in appealing
narratives to attract clients, to promote their projects, or to convince neighbors, city
authorities, and competition jurors.
In this chapter, I explore the long-held conviction that Kyoto is a city animated by
various invisible agencies and how this notion has influenced its architecture between
the 1990s and the early 2000s. Inspired by the belief that the city was designed and built
in the late eighth century according to the core principles of site divination—popularly
known as geomancy or fengshui (風水 Ch. fēng shuǐ, Jp. fūsui)—it is generally assumed
that Kyoto is vitalized by the invisible flow of qi (Ch. qì 氣, Jp. ki 気, “life force” or
“cosmic breath”) and protected by the guardians of the four directions.1 The influence
of concepts and ideas derived from fengshui is at the center of this chapter and I am
fully aware of the fact that, even though fengshui has been given many labels—ranging
from it having the “rudiments of natural science” (Eitel 1873) or being a “ridiculous
caricature of science” (de Groot 1897) to its more recent incorporation into the science
of human ecology (Anderson and Anderson 1973; Yoon 1976) or as having its origins
in a diffuse vitalism (Bruun 1995)—it typically is not discussed within the framework of
animism. At the risk of oversimplifying fengshui and presenting this dynamic tradition
with its diverse manifestations over the course of many centuries in large parts of
East Asia (and, more recently, in other regions of the world as well) as a monolithic,
homogeneous, and static block, I would like to identify some commonalities with
animism by referring to two usages of the term animism as identified by Graham
Harvey (2006). The first, older and admittedly problematic, use refers to a “putative
concern with knowing what is alive and what makes a being alive. It alleges a ‘belief
in spirits’ or ‘non-empirical beings’” (Harvey 2006: xi). There can be no doubt that
fengshui practices necessitate a belief in the existence of qi (the life-giving energy that
creates mountains, makes rivers flow, and breathes life into animals and plants) and
the guardians of the four directions, collectively termed “four divinities” (Ch. sì shén,
Jp. shijin 四神) or “four spirits” (Ch. sì líng 四靈, Jp. shirei 四霊), as influencing one’s
health, luck, and prosperity. The second and more recent use of animism described by
Harvey refers to “an understanding that humans share this world with a wide range of
persons, only some of whom are human” (xi) and a knowledge of how to engage with
these multitudes of persons (animals, plants, rocks, the elements, etc.) in a correct and
respectful way. Here, too, a parallel with fengshui may be drawn:
According to fengshui, man and landscape are linked together in a system of

immanent order. Nature, consisting of balanced forces, reacts to any interference
imposed on it, and this reaction immediately resounds in man. As in a large
organism, everything is interdependent and pulsating with energy, penetrating
and embracing every single part. In this thinking, the environment should be
utilized thoughtfully, since harmful interference hits back like a boomerang. It
raises the wrath of the Green Dragon or the White Tiger—universal figures to be
detected by configurations in the landscape. (Bruun 1995: 176)
Besides, if animism may be defined broadly as “an approach to life that presupposes the
presence of a soul or spirit in animate and inanimate things in nature, covering all life
(living, dead and yet to emerge), as well as other things such as water, air, soil, rocks, rivers
and mountains” (Yoneyama 2017: 100), one could extend this to fengshui where landscapes
and the geomantic elements within them are personified and treated as living organisms
with vital energy flowing through their veins (Yoon 1976: 29, 65–73) and in which it is
exactly the soil, rocks, rivers, and mountains that have the power to influence our lives.
Starting in the 1990s, when a fengshui boom gripped Japan, several architectural
projects in Kyoto were conceived, announced, or justified with explicit reference to these
practices either because of the architect’s personal beliefs, a particular client’s request,
or to convince the general public of the project’s suitability to the city. Be it implicitly
or explicitly, from the outset or post hoc, fengshui-derived concepts informed—at least
in part and for different reasons—the design of the architectural projects discussed
here. Moreover, it will become clear that the three architects behind the projects, Hara
Hiroshi 原広司, Isozaki Arata 磯崎新, and Umebayashi Katsu 梅林克, each differ in
their level of commitment to fengshui, ranging from a near-total immersion to a more
casual engagement with and isolated application of its principles.
A New Kyoto Station—Twice
On the morning of November 18, 1950, one headline dominated newspapers in Kyoto.
The previous evening, an employee of the Miyako Hotel had neglected to unplug an
electric iron in one of the hotel’s facilities located on the second floor of Kyoto Station.
The appliance overheated and soon the beautiful timber-frame station building,
erected in the early twentieth century, was set ablaze.2
A new station was hastily constructed in the typical style and material of the time;
the end result was a functional, concrete box that arguably was not very aesthetically
pleasing. Already by the 1970s voices started to call for a replacement of the building,
in part to accommodate the ever-growing network of railroads, both national and
Animated City 83
private, linking Kyoto to the rest of the region. Nevertheless, not much progress was
made on these plans until the early 1980s when the city of Kyoto—and with it the
national government—started to prepare for the 1200th anniversary of the ancient
capital’s founding, an event that would be celebrated in 1994.3 In 1983 a special council,
the Heian Kento Sennihyakunen Kinen Jigyō Suishin Kyōgikai 平安建都１２００
年記念事業推進協議会 (predecessor of today’s Kyoto Convention Bureau), was set up
to identify a number of core activities and projects for these anniversary celebrations.
In addition to the establishment of the Museum of Kyoto (Kyōto Bunka Hakubutsukan
京都文化博物館), the Kyoto International Community House (Kokusai Kōryū Kaikan
国際交流会館), the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Kokusai Nihon
Bunka Kenkyū Sentā 国際日本文化研究センター, better known under its abbreviation
Nichibunken 日文研), and a concert hall, the reconstruction of Kyoto Station was
put forward as a project related to the commemorative events (Heian Kento 1200nen
Kinen Kyōkai 1996: 5). Anticipating a marked increase in visitors as a result of the
anniversary celebrations themselves, the new cultural facilities to be established all
over Kyoto, and large-scale campaigns promoting Kyoto as a tourist destination,4 the
council found that the ancient capital clearly was entitled to a worthier entrance than
the hastily erected and by now congested concrete structure of the 1950s.
Over the next couple of years, a growing number of councils and committees was set
up to bring the new Kyoto Station project to completion.5 It is interesting to note that
from the start the Kyoto Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kyōto Shōkō Kaigisho
京都商工会議所) played a crucial role in these committees and thus in the planning
process of the new station building. Strictly speaking, there was no need to involve
local entrepreneurs to such a degree because at that time Japanese National Railways
(Nihon Kokuyū Tetsudō 日本国有鉄道), the proprietor of Kyoto Station, was still a
government-owned company and the new station project could, therefore, have been
completed through negotiations between representatives at the municipal, prefectural,
and national levels with little or no direct involvement from local businessmen.
With the privatization of the national railroad system in 1987, the local business
world became even more involved and committees related to the Kyoto Station project
were typically headed by Kyoto entrepreneurs such as Tsukamoto Kōichi 塚本幸一
(1920–1998), founder of the lingerie company Wacoal and then head of the Kyoto
Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The fact that a local businessman—and one with
considerable power6—chaired the committee charged with rebuilding Kyoto Station
rather than a representative of JR West (JR Nishi Nihon 西日本), the actual owner
and operator of the station building, is telling of the grand ambitions that were to be
realized through the project.
By then, railway stations in Japan, especially those of private railroad and subway
companies, were already no longer mere station buildings but rather a combination
of railroad facilities and department stores. For example, in 1983, Osaka station, then
still managed by the government-owned Japanese National Railways, was expanded
substantially with the construction of Acty Osaka アクティ大阪, a super-high-rise
building housing an underground parking lot, a hotel, two restaurant floors, a thirteen-
story department store, and a medical clinic that occupies the entire seventeenth floor.7
The new Kyoto Station project, however, was going to surpass all of its precursors and
was not merely going to function as a station where the JR, Kintetsu, and Kyoto city
subway lines intersected. In fact, station facilities would take up only a small fraction
of the building. Fulfilling a role as a multipurpose node in the growing transportation
network and as a grand entrance gate to the ancient capital, the ambitious plans for
Kyoto Station called for the integration into the building of a department store; a hotel;
a convention center; cultural facilities that included a movie theater and a museum
dedicated to manga artist Tezuka Osamu 手塚治虫 (1928–1989), the creator of Astro
Boy; offices for prefectural government services; restaurants; an air terminal; and
plenty of car parking space. These added functions meant that the new building would
have to be much bigger than its 1950s predecessor.8 Such an increase in floor area
could not be achieved through simply enlarging the building’s footprint, which in itself
already required the (very costly) acquisition of additional land and the adjustment of
adjacent roads; the new station building would have to be much taller than the old one.
Strict height restrictions applied to any newly built or renovated building within Kyoto,
however, and according to the 1968 City Planning Act (toshi keikaku hō 都市計画法), the
maximum height of buildings in the Kyoto Station area was thirty-one meters (Baba
2010: 122). To bypass the building height restrictions, in 1992 the area was designated a
“specified block” (tokutei gaiku 特定街区)9 despite the fact that contemporaneous official
documents insisted that the project would “be undertaken in strict accordance with city
planning policy” (Agency for Cultural Affairs 1993: s. 4, e, iii).
With preparations for the new station facilities now in full swing, Tsukamoto and
other members of the planning committee suggested a building height of up to 130
meters, roughly the same as that of Kyoto Tower, which is located across the street
from the Kyoto Station site (Okada and Kyōto Daigaku Keizaigakubu Okada Zemināru
1999: 6–7). This proposal met with strong opposition from the Communist Party,
the Kyoto Buddhism Association (Kyōto Bukkyōkai 京都仏教会), and many other
concerned citizens (Nagata and Sugiman 1993: 54; Tao 2010: 184). Not only would
a project like that exceed the originally permitted building height by more than four
times, the gigantic structure would bisect the modern city (thereby cutting off its less
affluent southern part) and destroy “traditional” Kyoto even though there was not
much tradition left in that area by the 1990s.
There were no signs, however, that the project (and its ambitious program) would be
abandoned. On the contrary, the decision was made to launch an international design
competition, then still rare in Japan but quickly gaining popularity after the selection of
designs by Italian architect Renzo Piano for Kansai International Airport in Osaka (1988)
and Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly for the Tokyo International Forum (1989).10 The
basic concept behind the Kyoto Station competition was articulated through the slogan
“Soaring into the twenty-first century: The creation of a new city center for Kyoto” (21seiki
ni habataku Kyōto no shintoshin no sōzō 二一世紀に羽く、京都都の新都心の創造) and
three functions for the new building were identified: (1) a station appropriate for an
international tourist destination, (2) a core facility around which a new urban center
would emerge, and 3) an unprecedented cultural focal point that extended beyond
traditional culture (Okada and Kyōto Daigaku Keizaigakubu Okada Zemināru 1999: 9).
In 1990, seven domestic and international architects were invited to participate in the
competition. These architects, including “master of concrete” Andō Tadao 安藤忠雄, the
Animated City 85
Metabolist architect Kurokawa Kishō 黒川紀章, and deconstructivist Bernard Tschumi,

at that time dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at
Columbia University, were invited to Kyoto for a site visit and a detailed explanation of
the competition’s parameters.11 Nothing was changed to the program, i.e., the various
practical functions the new station building needed to perform, and no mention was
made of any building height restrictions. At a more abstract level, the main concept of
the competition was further specified as a station design that would “operate with the
cultural flavor” (bunka no kaori to katsudō suru 文化の香りと活動する) of Kyoto as a city
that had both a long history and a brilliant future (“JR Kyōto eki kaichiku sekkei kyōgi
kekka happyō” 1991: 193), and that would “reaffirm [Kyoto’s] identity not only as the
centre of Japanese culture but also as Japan’s major tourism destination” (Tiry 2001: 18).
Four months later the design proposals were due and the eleven jurors—an
interesting mix of influential architects, intellectuals, and businessmen12—set to
work. Building height was still a major concern, even within the jury and among the
invited architects (Sterngold 1991; Tao 2010: 183), and may have contributed to the
ultimate selection of the lowest of all seven submissions, that of University of Tokyo
professor of architecture Hara Hiroshi. The jury’s official verdict does not mention
height, however; instead it states that, to them, the reflective glass façade in Hara’s
design was reminiscent of the Kyoto Rinpa 琳派 school of painting and that the
structure of the giant curved glass roof covering the internal open space of the station
building evoked the ancient capital’s original gridiron layout in which north-south
and east-west thoroughfares intersected one another at right angles (see Figure 5.1).13
Figure 5.1 Gridiron structure supporting the curved glass roof of Kyoto Station.
Photograph by Ellen Van Goethem.
Nevertheless, despite being the lowest at just under 60 meters, Hara’s Kyoto Station
was still a massive building twice the originally allowed height and extending 470
meters from east to west.
If the organizers had hoped that the prestige of selecting a design through an
international competition would lessen resistance to their plans, they were sorely
mistaken. After Hara was proclaimed the winner in May 1991, the controversy
surrounding the project even made its way to The New York Times. In addition to the
already mentioned architectural inappropriateness in terms of building height and fit
with “tradition,” there was disagreement about the huge additional expense resulting
from the international design competition, held at a time when the cracks in Japan’s
bubble economy were beginning to show, and there were complaints from disgruntled
architects and worried tourist officials. As one opposing voice, local architect Hisanaga
Masatoshi 久永雅敏, put it, “This was not a competition for a station […] It was for a
commercial center that happens to have a station” (Sterngold 1991). Construction was
delayed and it soon became clear that the project would never be completed in time for
the celebration of the 1200th anniversary of the founding of the city in 1994, but this
may have been a favorable development for the acceptance of Hara’s design proposal
by the general public.
The Fengshui Boom
Since the mid-1980s, the general public had increasingly come under the sway of
occultism, yin and yang theories, and fengshui beliefs. The emergence of this trend
is typically attributed to the serialized publication of Aramata Hiroshi’s 荒俣宏 Teito
monogatari 帝都物語 (Tale of the Imperial Capital, 1983–1989), a science fiction work
in which references to the supernatural, magic, divination, and fengshui are skillfully
woven into twentieth-century Japanese history. Other writers, including novelist
Yumemakura Baku 夢枕獏, author of the ongoing Onmyōji 陰陽師 (Yin Yang Master,
1986–) series about a tenth-century practitioner of Onmyōdō 陰陽道 (lit. “the way of
yin and yang”), soon followed suit and their works were turned into successful movies
and television shows.14
On June 5, 1994, at the height of the 1200th-anniversary celebrations in Kyoto and
a few months after construction on the new station building had finally begun, Japan’s
national public broadcasting organization NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai 日本放送協会 or
Japan Broadcasting Corporation) aired a documentary hosted by the above-mentioned
Aramata.15 As the title of the documentary, Yomigaeru Heiankyō: Aramata Hiroshi
ga saguru sennihyakunen no nazo よみがえる平安京～荒俣宏が探る1200年の謎～,
suggests, this program was finally going to solve a 1200-year-old mystery related to
the ancient capital.
Over the course of nearly fifty minutes, the documentary describes the founding of
the city in the late eighth century and the purported role played by the onmyōji 陰陽師,
or yin and yang diviners, in this process. Most of the program is spent on explaining
the principles of fengshui, first by following a fengshui master in Hong Kong and then
by inviting this master to Kyoto where he analyzes the city’s topography.
Animated City 87
Mr. Liu, the fengshui master, first focuses on the mountain ridge to the west of
Kyoto to try to determine the most auspicious location within the city (the so-called
“geomancy cave” or “dragon cave” (龍)穴 Ch. (lóng) xué, Jp. (ryū)ketsu) and the flow
of qi toward it.16 According to Mr. Liu, the head of the left dragon (i.e., the mountain
range that protects the city to the west) corresponds to Mt. Ōkita 大北. This hillock
plays a very important role in Kyoto’s festival calendar as it is the site where the left
daimonji 左大文字, one of the five Gozan no Okuribi 五山送り火 (see below), is set
ablaze every August. From Mt. Ōkita, the qi surges eastward and accumulates on Mt.
Funaoka 船岡, a small hill located due north of the ancient imperial audience hall
(Daigokuden 大極殿) constructed at the time of Kyoto’s founding. Next, the qi flows
toward the south (i.e., toward the site where the audience hall once stood) roughly
along what is now Senbon 千本 Avenue. Senbon Avenue used to be called Suzaku
ōji 朱雀大路 (named after the directional deity guarding the south) and held great
importance as the central north-south avenue that bisected the city when it was first
established.
Still according to Mr. Liu, the most important east-west axis of the city connects a
round hillock in the western mountain range to the right daijmonji 右大文字, another
of the five Gozan no Okuribi, in the eastern mountain range. Based on his observation
of the landscape, he concludes that the dragon cave where all qi flowing into the city
is gathered lies at the crossing of these north-south and east-west axes (currently
the Senbon-Marutamachi 千本丸太町 intersection). This extremely auspicious spot
happens to coincide with the entrance gate to the original eighth-century palace area
and the imperial audience hall, thus enforcing the concept that from its founding
Heian/Kyoto was blessed with ideal geomantic conditions.
Crucially, Mr. Liu then explains that to prevent the qi from being dispelled and
flowing out of the city along that major north-south avenue, it is important to have
some kind of barrier at the southern end of the capital. In the past, this barrier was
created by the Rajōmon 羅城門, the central gate at the southern end of the city, and two
official temples, the Eastern Temple or Tōji 東寺, and the Western Temple or Saiji 西
寺, with their five-storied pagodas. Still according to the documentary, the function of
these temples’ tall pagodas was to propel the qi upward and to disperse it back within
the city. Of all three structures, however, only Tōji is still extant today and is thus left
all alone to fulfill the important role of retaining the qi and, by extension, the city’s
good fortune.
Because of the documentary’s broadcasting on the country’s largest network,
a wide segment of the Japanese population was thus made familiar with some of
the basic ideas of fengshui and their significance to Kyoto’s prosperity.17 People
were reminded of the ancient capital’s extremely auspicious environment and
the importance of keeping at least some of the abundantly available qi in the city.
Parallels between the three ancient barriers and the Kyoto Station project are easily
drawn. Although placed slightly northeast of the original Rajōmon gate and the
temple pagodas, the 470-meter-long Kyoto Station building could be interpreted as
the new geomantic landscape feature that would help prevent the scattering of qi. As
a result, the proposed building may no longer have posed that much of a problem
for some.
Interestingly, there is no sign of any reference to fengshui or qi in Hara’s original

text outlining the main ideas behind the proposal submitted in 1991,18 but in the years
after the competition, when the project was under attack from various interest groups,
Hara has on several occasions stated that his design was indeed influenced by fengshui
and intended to augment Kyoto’s auspiciousness.19 Specifically, the two large openings
penetrating the station building, one of which is aligned with Karasuma 烏丸 Avenue
(the thoroughfare that has taken over the role of Suzaku ōji as the most important
north-south axis of the city), were meant to be seen as symbolic gateways, intentionally
placed there to ensure the optimum flow of qi.20
To be clear, I am only inferring a connection between the popularity of fengshui and
the increased acceptance of the Kyoto Station project and it remains unclear who first
floated the idea of using references to fengshui in defense of the project.21 It may have
been Hara himself, possibly riding the wave of the growing popularity of fengshui, but
it may also have been Isozaki Arata, a fellow architect and one of the jurors in the Kyoto
Station design competition.
Kyoto Concert Hall
Well ahead of the boom triggered by Aramata’s Teito Monogatari and the NHK
documentary, Isozaki already designed architecture in which his fascination with
fengshui and yin-yang ideas was expressed explicitly. In the early 1970s, Isozaki
was commissioned to design a public library and literature museum for the city of
Kitakyushu on the northern tip of Kyushu.22 From the air, the two facilities resemble
giant curved tubes that intersect at the spot where their joint entrance is located. At one
end of the tube housing the literature museum there is a large stained-glass window
in vibrant hues of blue, red, and yellow (see Figure 5.2). Isozaki credits inspiration
for this window to the Edo-period philosopher Miura Baien 三浦梅園 (1723–1789).
More specifically, Isozaki based his design on diagrams found in Baien’s Gengo 玄語
(Deep Words, 1775), a discourse on metaphysics in which he provides an analysis of
the universe and elaborates on his own vision of yin, yang, qi, and the Five Phases
(五行 Ch. wǔ xíng, Jp. gogyō).23
Moreover, at the time of the Kyoto Station competition, Isozaki had just finished
construction on Art Tower Mito (Mito Geijutsukan 水戸芸術館, 1986–1990) in Mito,
Ibaraki Prefecture. Art Tower Mito is an arts complex comprising a concert hall, a
theater, a gallery for contemporary art, and a rather distinct 100-meter-tall tower
referencing the city’s centennial anniversary for which the project was commissioned.
Isozaki affirms that, here too, he was guided by fengshui and Five Phases theories,24 and
in a 1994 interview he relates the story that when a professor from Tianjin University
analyzed the design of Art Tower Mito, it turned out to correspond perfectly to the
principles of fengshui (Kawamura 1994).25
Furthermore, while acting as a juror on the Kyoto Station project, Isozaki was
waiting to find out about his own submission for another invited competition
related to the 1200th-anniversary celebrations, that of a concert hall for Kyoto. Like
Kyoto Station, the Kyoto Concert Hall (Kyōto konsāto hōru 京都コンサートホール)
Animated City 89
Figure 5.2 Stained glass window in the Kitakyushu Literature Museum. Photograph by
Ellen Van Goethem.
project would be finished only after the celebrations had ended.26 On the street side,
Isozaki’s Kyoto Concert Hall consists of a modest domed cylinder and a rectangular
box, connected to each other by a series of wavy horizontal bands that are meant to
invoke the horizontal character of the roof-tiled buildings in traditional Kyoto (“Kyōto
konsāto hōru (kashō) sekkei kyōgi kekka happyō” 1991: 347–348). In typical Isozaki
style, the entrance to the building is tucked away and the concertgoer is impelled to
walk all the way to the back of the site where the foyer is located.
Whereas Hara’s allusions to fengshui concepts are veiled—and in all probability
date from after submitting his design proposal—Isozaki’s are, for the most part,
blatantly obvious in Kyoto Concert Hall. Most strikingly, at the center of the circular
Ensemble Hall Murata (the domed cylinder visible from the street), a fengshui
compass (羅盤 Ch. luó pán, Jp. raban) is embedded in the tile floor (see Figure 5.3).
Stellar constellations adorn the ceiling of the hall and lines of light point to the
Figure 5.3. Ensemble Hall Murata with twelve pillars representing the animals of the
Chinese zodiac and a fengshui compass embedded in the floor at the center. Photograph by
Ellen Van Goethem.
magnetic north, that is, north as it would be indicated by a fengshui compass.

Moreover, each of the twelve decorative pillars within the ensemble hall has a
ceramic tile embedded at the top that depicts one of the earthly branches (十二支
Ch. shí èr zhī, Jp. jūnishi), or animals of the Chinese zodiac that signify directions,
time, etc.
As far as the more hidden references to fengshui and its principles are concerned,
from the start Isozaki justified the arrangement of the various spaces within the
complex by referring to their alignment with three important axes: true north,
magnetic north, and NNW (“Kyōto konsāto hōru (kashō) sekkei kyōgi kekka
happyō” 1991: 348). The concert hall’s main hall is aligned with true north in
reference to Kyoto’s gridiron layout at the time of its establishment. Isozaki’s starting
point for the alignment of this hall with the geographic pole on a perfect north-
south/east-west axis was Mt. Funaoka, the hillock north of the ancient audience
hall that was identified by fengshui master Liu as the spot where the qi from the
western dragon accumulates and enters the city. In contrast, the concert hall’s foyer
is aligned with magnetic north (i.e., fengshui north) and is thus situated parallel to
Kitayama 北山 Road, an east-west thoroughfare that was added to Kyoto’s grid plan
as the city developed in the decades following its original establishment. Finally, the
NNW axis, or the direction of the Wild Boar (亥 Ch. hài, Jp. i, the eleventh animal
in the sequence of twelve earthly branches) on the fengshui compass, determined the
orientation of a short bridge that provides access to a coffee shop within the circular
Ensemble Hall Murata. This axis, according to Isozaki, runs parallel to Kamo 賀茂
Animated City 91
River, the upstream part of Kyoto’s main watercourse before it merges with Takano
高野 River, and to the line connecting two Shinto shrines specialized in Onmyōdō
and yin-yang-based rituals.27
There can be no doubt that these axes were very important to Isozaki. As happens
so often, the actual concert hall complex deviates somewhat from the original
design proposal submitted at the time of the competition, but the orientation of the
components along the three axes was retained faithfully.
Another Spirit Realm
A third Kyoto project I would like to introduce here is more recent, is a private house
rather than a large-scale public project, and deals with an entirely different spiritual
realm, or rather its design represents a blend of different influences.
The architect behind this particular residence, Umebayashi Katsu, shot to brief
international fame in the second half of the 1990s with his AURA house designed for
a tiny site in Tokyo. At only 4 meters wide and 21 meters deep, AURA has only the
bare essentials; there is no kitchen and no bath or shower, after all, restaurants and
public baths are readily available within the metropolis so these facilities may well be
dispensed with to ensure maximum usability for the residence’s other functions. The
most interesting aspect of the house might be its roof: a Teflon-coated membrane that
makes the house glow in the dark at night and that reveals the ghostly silhouettes of
the people inside.
To Umebayashi, Kyoto is already filled with auspiciousness to such a degree that he
does not see the need to go to great lengths to improve the fortune of a private house.28
Occasionally, however, his clients do have his drawings checked by a fengshui master
and, if possible (and if in line with his vision), he will adjust his design. In the late 1990s,
a couple approached Umebayashi to design a house for a plot, which, incidentally, is
located almost adjacent to Kyoto Concert Hall. According to Umebayashi, the clients
were interested in their house having good fengshui and showed the early drafts to
a master, but auspiciousness seemingly was not their most important requirement.
Rather, the clients wanted the largest possible living space for themselves, their two
teenage children, and an elderly uncle, in addition to having the largest possible
garden. From the street, the SKIP house (completed in 2002) looks like yet another
white, modernist, concrete box, but after one enters the gate a much more intricate
design becomes clear. Both inside and outside, SKIP consists of a winding pathway of
interconnecting stairs; as a matter of fact, the entire roof surface is one gigantic set of
wooden stairs with built-in planter boxes and ample space for placing potted plants
(see Figure 5.4).
All the way at the top of those stairs there is a large platform from which to take in
this unconventional garden. To prevent people from tumbling down the stairs while
enjoying the view from this rooftop terrace, Umebayashi designed an impressive
balustrade painted in the orange-red hue typically used for the torii 鳥居 that marks
the entrance to a Shinto shrine. Not wanting to be entirely sacrilegious, however, the
“torii” on the SKIP house has only one leg (see Figure 5.5).
Figure 5.4 Bottom of the SKIP house’s rooftop staircase. Photograph by Ellen Van Goethem.
Animated City 93
Figure 5.5 The SKIP house’s one-legged “torii.” Photograph by Ellen Van Goethem.
Because of the building height restrictions in Kyoto, the rooftop terrace of SKIP also
provides a spectacular view of the city and its surrounding mountains and is often used
for parties. Every year on August 16, for example, the family invites relatives, friends,
and business associates to enjoy the Gozan no Okuribi, the lighting of six huge bonfires
arranged in the form of shapes or Chinese characters on hills facing the city.29 The
lighting of the Gozan no Okuribi marks the end of obon お盆 during which the spirits
of deceased family members are temporarily beckoned to this world and then sent off
to the spirit world once more by means of these giant bonfires.
Invitations to the party at the SKIP house are eagerly accepted because even in a city
as large as Kyoto, it is very rare to have an unobstructed view of all six shapes. The fact
that they are all visible is due more to a stroke of luck—good fensghui maybe—than
to intentional design, but it shows that stories behind a particular building’s creation
are almost never linear. They change and fluctuate with the times and are themselves
often influenced by elements outside the control of the designer, but, ultimately, they
lead to a better or more justifiable raison d’être for the building; in this case, both for
Umebayashi and the clients. The elderly uncle for whom a separate room was designed,
never moved into the SKIP house, but every year in August, when obon is observed
and the Gozan no Okuribi are lit, the family’s connection to his spirit couldn’t be closer.
Conclusion
The projects presented here are just a small sample of all the structures built in Kyoto
during the 1990s and early 2000s, but it may be clear that architects and clients avail
themselves not just of qi and fengshui, but of references to a variety of forces and spirits
to promote a project or embellish post hoc accounts. Thus, their origin narratives are
not constant, nor are they linear as multiple spirit realms may be referenced at the same
time or projects may accumulate multiple layers of meaning even within a short time
span. Moreover, the Kyoto Station project in particular illustrates that these changing
narratives may in some cases have played a crucial role in influencing public opinion.
There are no signs that this trend to appeal to the support and blessing of invisible
agencies is abating: ground-breaking ceremonies during which the spirits of a site are
appeased remain the norm before any construction starts; certain architects explicitly
advertise themselves as designing according to the principles of qi, fengshui, and house
physiognomy (kasō 家相); and fengshui—or rather the four mythical creatures guarding
the directions—are as popular as ever and are nowadays even used in promotional
campaigns by Kyoto’s major Shinto shrines.
6
Essays in Vagueness: Aspects of Diffused

Religiosity in Japan
Carina Roth
Introduction
In the last fifteen to twenty years, a new kind of religious or parareligious vocabulary has
become conspicuous in Japan: terms such as “power spots” (pawā supotto パワースポッ
ト), “forest bathing” (shinrin yoku 森林浴), and “forest therapies” (foresuto serapī フォ
レストセラピー), as well as the nebulous concept of a “world invisible to the eyes” (me
ni mienai sekai 目に見えない世界) have sprung up in a variety of contexts throughout
the country and are now widely circulating. These terms appear to be devoid of direct
connections to Japanese folk, literary, or religious traditions; as such, they are neutral
expressions. However, they intimate that powers or healing may be obtained through
contact with specific places. At the same time, they hint at the possibility of tapping
into another level of reality, different from that of ordinary experience. Being outside
the traditional and extremely vast grid of Japanese religious terminology and concepts,
they remain at the fringes of the Japanese religious landscape. From a global viewpoint,
all three pertain to the sphere of ecospirituality, one of several umbrella expressions
that refer to a rising worldwide interest in the interconnectedness of ecological and
spiritual needs and issues.1
This feeling of interconnectedness lies at the very basis of animistic and shamanistic
worldviews. Expressions and concepts such as power spots, forest therapy, and the
invisible world, as well as the ecospiritual trends they denote, are clearly inscribed
in such a context, in which special virtues are ascribed to natural elements and
environments, or to a perceived yet unidentified presence. In this chapter, I will first
introduce each of these three terms and associated trends. Then, I will examine how
they intersect with Shugendō 修験道, the “Way to Powers Through Practice,” a Japanese
religious tradition that historically deals with similar concepts and concerns. Lastly, I
will take a broader perspective and suggest that these trends fit into the globalized
context of “diffused religiosity” or “diffused religion,” expressions coined from within
the broad context of secularization theories.
Power Spots
The term “power spot,” also called “power place,” “vortex,” or “spiritual vortex,” has no
canonical definition nor clear origin, but it typically designates a place that sets itself
apart from its surroundings because of its higher level of “energy.”2 Power spots are
mostly (but not exclusively) found in natural landscapes and ancient places of worship.
Often, the two features are combined, as is the case for Stonehenge, Ayers Rock, Machu
Picchu, the pyramids, Sedona, and Mount Shasta. A connection to nature appears
to be crucial, whereas the link to an established place of worship represents added
value without being indispensable. It is generally assumed that the term “power spot”
originated from within the New Age constellation of concepts and practices, where
travel to sacred sites constitutes an integral part of spiritual culture (Ivakhiv 2007: 263).
The expression “power spot” has translations in other languages, such as “Kraftort” in
German or “lieu de force” in French. In Japan, while the term kiba 気場 (“place of vital
energy”) is also used, the English transliteration pawā supotto is much more common.3
Power spots have appeared ubiquitously throughout the country with astonishing
rapidity over the last two decades, and the term is by now firmly established in
mainstream discourse. The phenomenon has been extensively covered in the Japanese
media and led to a wide array of guidebooks introducing special places throughout
the country and beyond. Given the relative novelty of its emergence and its lack of a
precisely definable context or origin, it is difficult to perceive whether the concept of
“power spot” is a passing mass media fad or is actually carving itself a lasting place
within the realm of Japanese religiosity.
In one of the earliest in-depth (and much quoted) studies on the subject,
anthropologist Suga Naoko 菅直子 analyzes the sudden rise of interest for power
spots in the media during the first decade of this century, and the apparent link of
the phenomenon with Shinto shrines (Suga 2010). Her research is essentially based
on word searches in Japanese newspapers and magazines. Because her comprehensive
survey is a common reference for most studies on the subject and has been relayed by
more recent research, I will briefly outline the three distinct phases Suga identifies in
the evolution of power spots between 1986 and 2008.
1986–2002: Gradual inclusion in common discourse

In 1986, the term “power spot” appeared for the first time in Gendai yōgo no kiso chishiki
現代用語の基礎知識 (Basic Knowledge of Contemporary Terms), an encyclopedia
specializing in new words entering common usage based on the frequency of their
appearance in the media. According to the definition provided by Wakimoto Tsuneya
脇本平也, a professor emeritus of religious studies at Tokyo University, power spots
are “sacred places (seichi 聖地) that coalesce the vital energy and spiritual power of the
universe” (Wakimoto 1986: 690).4 In the early 1990s, the term “power spot” began being
used more commonly in the media. One of the reasons for this sudden interest was TV
celebrity Kiyota Masuaki 清田益章, a Japanese psychic heavily influenced by the New
Age movement. In 1991, he published Hakken! Pawā supotto 発見！パワースポット
(“Power Spots Discovered!”), a guidebook in which he presented twenty-seven power
Essays in Vagueness 97
spots in all of Japan. Suga considers his book to be one of the harbingers of the power
spot trend, along with the growing media interest for fengshui (Jp. fūsui 風水) (Suga
2010: 245).5 Kiyota also launched the trend of combining media celebrity with interest
for power spots; many of the power spot guides published to this day are authored by
TV personalities or actors.
2002–2005: Beginnings of magazine special issues

The three-year period between 2002 and 2005 marked the beginning of a trend in
which power spots began being featured predominantly in women’s magazines (Suga
2010: 243). Whereas the keyword search for the previous decade indicated a variety of
magazines, articles on power spots gradually took on a clearly gendered turn. From
the phrasing of their titles, it also appears that the expression as such had becoming
increasingly well known. Whereas the first article listed by Suga, published in Elle Japon
in July 1991, was of explanatory nature, indicating that readers were not expected to
know the meaning of the term, this soon ceased to be the case, showing an already
perceptible inclusion of the expression into mainstream discourse (235–240).
2006–2008: Power spot boom

In October 2005, the weekly news magazine AERA reported on the increased popularity
of power spots among women.6 According to Suga, this article in turn announced a
sudden surge of interest for power spots in women’s magazines, as evidenced by the
growing number of special issues on this topic (Suga 2010: 234–237). In addition, the
trend started to move toward a wider spectrum of readers. Broader age ranges began
to be targeted, notably by magazines catering either to teenagers or the forties-plus
generations; general information magazines also published features on power spots.
Overall, Suga presents the evolution of power spots between 1991 and 2008 as a process
in which a concept emerging from traditional religious and spatial discourses came to refer
to places that were considered sacred because they condensed some kind of spiritual energy
and power. Gradually, the concept started taking a more individualistic turn and entered the
private sphere as a place transmitting both psychological and physical energy. Eventually,
power spots related with shrines came to be seen as providing purification and energetic
recharge (Suga 2010: 249). Despite the title of her study, Suga provides little information
as to the link between power spots and shrines. Most of the sources she examines do not
make a clear differentiation between shrines and temples as power spots, and argue on the
contrary that power spots need not be linked to any established religious authority.7
Natural sites figure prominently in the list of power spots, a feature the Japanese
trend shares with other countries. This is hardly surprising, given the historical
predilection in Japan to emphasize the role and importance of nature. To further blur
the boundaries of power spots, emphasis is put upon the need to choose, or to find,
one’s own power spots. As Ehara Hiroyuki 江原啓之, another TV personality and self-
appointed “spiritual counselor,” explains in an article published in August 2005 in the
weekly magazine Josei jishin 女性自身 (Women Themselves), “the real sacred places are
those that you choose yourself,” they are “one’s very own sanctuary” (jibun dake no
sankutarī 自分だけのサンクタリー) (Suga 2010: 250–251).
Suga’s survey, which stops in 2008, is complemented by a report on “religion in
the news” for the 2011 issue of Gendai shūkyō 現代宗教 (Contemporary Religion), part
of which is dedicated to the coverage of power spots. Given the prominence of the
expression in the Japanese media during that time, the two authors of the report felt
confident in describing 2010 as the “year of the power spot” (Tsukada and Ōmi 2011: 30).
In March 2010, the magazine CREA published a “Complete Issue on Power Spots in
All 47 Prefectures” (100 pages out of 200), including “shrines, temples, giant trees, hot
springs and sacred mountains,” which sold out in ten days (31). As Suga before them,
Tsukada and Ōmi note the trend in women’s magazines, as well as the fact that power
spots are mainly to be found in natural places and in shrines. There are comparatively
few temples and few international sites in the magazine’s list. Places such as Sedona
in Arizona or Ayer’s Rock in Australia were initially praised destinations for early
power spot hunters in the wake of the New Age movement. However, the decrease
in international tourism due to the economic crisis starting in the early 1990s led to
new “discoveries” of domestic sites (Dorman 2016: 93). The power spot trend directly
benefited from this evolution, which led to reframing a number of shrines, temples,
and others places as “power spots” (Rots 2014: 43).
The end of 2009 marked the rise of one of the most emblematic media-empowered
power spots, that of “Kiyomasa’s Well” (Kiyomasa no ido 清正井),8 situated within
the precincts of Meiji Shrine in Tokyo. After a visit to the well, Shimada Shūhei島
田秀平, a comedian and palm-reader, said in a TV show that setting a picture of the
well as a background on his cell phone caused his luck to increase and even brought
him a job. As a result, Kiyomasa’s Well attracted masses of visitors (Tsukada and Ōmi
2011: 30).9 This anecdote may be seen as another instance of “this-worldly-benefits”
(genze riyaku 現世利益), the pursuit of which is part and parcel of visits to shrines
and temples.10 However, it is also different. The bestowing of genze riyaku is the
prerogative of temples and shrines, as such blessings or benefits are granted through
the intermission of kami or buddhas, whereas power spots provide that intermission
in and of themselves, by way of their own inherent qualitative specificity. As such, they
generate a new conceptual class for “this-worldly-benefits.”
At the same time, the power spot boom created a certain malaise within members
of the Shinto and Buddhist clergy, who are often torn between the welcome increase
in visitors (hence in income) and the fact that they are not necessarily themselves at
the origin of the new trend. In other words, the branding of a temple or a shrine as
a power spot is more often than not the result of promotion coming from outsiders
to religious organizations, such as TV celebrities and popular authors, actors, and
journalists. At best, shrine and temple priests take advantage of it and see the positive
aspects of a renewed interest in their institutions, hoping that such interest would be
more than superficial (Carter 2018). Others resent the power spot boom, seeing it as
a form of lack of respect disrupting traditional practices.11 Recent research shows that
the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja honchō 神社本庁), the umbrella institution for
some 80,000 Japanese shrines, is grudgingly making space for power spots. After being
strongly dismissive of the phenomenon at the beginning,12 as Carter’s analysis of the
weekly editorials in the association’s newsletter shows, the organization is now leaning
toward not only tolerating power spots in their precincts, but gradually acknowledging
and integrating them within its discourse (Carter 2018; see also Rots 2014). Given
its recent emphasis on internationally promoting Shinto as a “nature religion,”13 the
inclusion of power spots—understood as places in which an intuitive relation to sacred
space may be combined with traditional conceptions—may indeed prove useful.
In general, it is clear that mass media have played a particularly important role
in the propagation of the power spot trend, starting off with targeting women’s
magazines, which eventually branched off and triggered new developments. In this
sense, the Japanese power spot trend unabashedly endorses the commercial aspect of
New Age practices (Ivakhiv 2007). Shrines and temples have always thrived on the
sales of amulets (omamori お守り) and other talismanic devices, all belonging to a
“practically religious” attitude (Reader and Tanabe 1998). Power spots can readily be
integrated in a religious landscape in which devotion is historically directed with great
ease toward either objects or places deemed to be of numinous nature.14
Further, following up on the fact that “the reinvention of shrines as power spots
seems to constitute a process of sacralization, not primarily driven by the religious
institutions themselves but rather by outside actors” (Rots 2014: 44), it may be observed
that these outside actors could be compared to joker-like figures. People known to
introduce or “discover” power spots tend, more often than not, to be TV celebrities
famous for their talents in fortune-telling, astrology, self-advertised psychic powers,
or, more conventionally, popular historians or actors.15 In a slightly altered way, this
configuration recalls the traditional sacralization process at work in many medieval
Buddhist tales, by which a marginal religious figure, frequently a mountain ascetic,
“opens up” new places of practice.16 It may never become clear (nor is it perhaps
necessary), whether the power spot trend is entirely a media fabrication or whether it
corresponds to a contemporary reformulation of old devotional aspects. However, the
phenomenon has sufficiently taken root over the course of the last two decades for it
not only to be fully integrated into common parlance, but also to be acknowledged and
taken into consideration by the authorities of the very religious institutions it has all
but gate-crashed (see Carter 2018).
Forest Therapy
Another English expression to have taken root in Japan in loose connection with
sacralized nature is that of “forest therapy.” In this case, the origin of the trend is
easier to define: in 1982, the Japanese Department of Forestry (Rin’yachō 林野庁)
introduced the term shinrin yoku 森林浴, which means literally “forest bathing,” as
part of a national health program, the gist of which is: “Let’s use our forests for health
cultivation and preservation!” (kenkō hoyō ni Nihon no shinrin wo katsuyō shiyō
健康・保養に日本の森林を活用しよう). To this day, this government-issued slogan
is still widely used in websites and descriptions by organizations promoting “forest
bathing” or “forest therapy” throughout the country. Thus, differently from the power
spot trend, shinrin yoku is government- and policy-based. It has also triggered a large
number of scientific articles on the physiological and psychological effects of spending

time in forests, focusing on the cortisol values in the body (Lee et al. 2012; Park et al.
2007, 2010). Again in contradistinction to the power spot phenomenon, an imported
product that can be seen as a result of New Age influences arriving in Japan in the mid-
1980s, forest therapy is being exported from Japan to many countries (including the
USA, Australia, Ireland, Scandinavia, the UK, and France). Interestingly, it is generally
known abroad by its Japanese name, shinrin yoku, whereas the English transliteration
foresuto serapī (フォレスト・セラピー) predominates in Japan. At the international
level, forest therapy is clearly presented as a Japanese product and marketed as such,
with wide advertisement on the internet.
In 1986, as a result of the popularity of the program, the Department of Forestry
together with the Green Civilization Society (Midori no bunmei gakkai 緑の文明学会)
and the Foundation for Earth and Environment (Chikyū kankyō zaidan 地球環境財団),
created a “Shinrin yoku Forests: Japan’s Best 100” (“Shinrin yoku no mori Nihon hyaku
sen” 森林浴の森日本百選 2010). In the same way as power spots are often linked to
shrines or temples, forests designated as places for forest therapy may coincide,
albeit not necessarily, with forests or mountains that are considered sacred or have
a religious history. For example, in a study on the interconnections between religion,
environment, and society in Sasaguri 篠栗, a municipality in northern Kyushu, Anne
Bouchy shows how foresuto serapī has become a label that helps federating earlier social
networks both at a local and regional level. In the case of Sasaguri, home to a replica
of the Shikoku pilgrimage, forest therapy provides a new avenue for revitalizing local
businesses such as restaurants, hotel facilities, and arts and crafts (Bouchy 2013: 188).
Bouchy convincingly presents forest therapy as a contemporary form of anthropization
of forests—forests that are seen as an environment pertaining as much to nature as
to cultural heritage (191). From this perspective, forest therapy outgrows its initial
purpose as a tool to foster well-being among stressed urban dwellers and reveals its
potential for boosting local and translocal tourism.
In the case of power spots, beyond the commercial aspects of their “discovery”
and experience in situ, the desire for some kind of spiritual connection comes across
clearly, mostly with the combined aspect of an empowered natural setting and worldly
reward (love, prosperity, fortune, etc.). By contrast, forest therapy is presented from
an explicitly secularized and scientific point of view. Promotional programs and
studies on the subject focus primarily on well-being resulting from stress reduction
due to exposition to the natural environment.17 However, forest therapy does share
with the power spot trend a distinct market-oriented approach, whereby the shinrin
yoku label functions as a type of franchise, with associations granting certificates
both in Japan and abroad. The Forest Therapy Society based in Tokyo is a nonprofit
organization offering certification as “Forest Therapy Bases” (foresuto serapī kichi フォ
レストセラピー基地) to currently more than sixty Japanese forest sites.18 Similarly, but
with decidedly international scope, the California-based Association of Nature and
Forest Therapy Guides and Programs (ANFT) coordinates formation programs on a
worldwide scale, with active practitioners on all continents (although not in Japan!).19
Its parent organization Shinrin-Yoku presents forest therapy as “the medicine of
simply being in the forest,” explaining that the concept of shinrin yoku “was developed
in Japan during the 1980s and has become a cornerstone of preventive health care and
healing in Japanese medicine.”20 At first glance, this approach appears to be purely
commercial and without any religious purport. However, given the importance of
forests and mountains (often seen as one) in Japanese religious representations, it is
almost impossible for the association to remain untouched by the cultural background
it emerges from. Nevertheless, the lack of clearly identifiable religious content makes
it easier to sell forest therapy at an international level, introducing a laicized discourse
discreetly imbued with an appealing Japanese halo of elegant spirituality, as evidenced
by the lean and eco-flavored design of most websites.
In counterpoint to the assertively secular trend of forest therapy, the Association of
Shinto Shrines (Jinja honchō) has been active in recent years in the creation of a “Shinto
Environmentalist Paradigm” (Rots 2014, 2015a, 2017), based on the notion that Shinto
is “a primordial tradition of nature worship (sometimes referred to as ‘animistic’), said
to contain ancient ecological knowledge on how to live in harmonious coexistence with
nature” (Rots 2015a: 213). As stated earlier, the Association emphasizes the importance
of nature, in particular forests and sacred groves surrounding shrines (chinju no mori
鎮守の森),21 as constituting a fundamental part of Japanese spirituality.22 Despite voices
in scholarly circles doubting the sincerity of Jinja honchō’s engagement with “nature”
and environmental issues, such concerns have become central to the association’s self-
definition (Rots 2015a: 208–209). Whether Jinja honchō’s stance is purely rhetorical or
reflects an actual change in outlook is beside the point, very much in the same way as
musing on whether power spots correspond to a deeply ingrained sense of religiosity
or have been produced by mass media. What matters is the outcome of such trends. As
commercial in intent as power spots or forest therapy locations may be, they tap into
a sense of connectedness with nature that resonates with contemporary ecological and
spiritual concerns.23
“Invisible World” (Me ni mienai sekai)
In the present context, the term “invisible world,” or more literally “a world invisible
to the eyes” (me ni mienai sekai 目に見えない世界), serves as an umbrella expression
to denote ways in which nonordinary reality is expressed in circumstances not
immediately linked to a specific religious tradition. Differently from power spots
and forest therapy, which can be pinpointed concretely if not exhaustively, this rather
vague expression subsumes attempts to describe a reality perceived to go beyond a
Cartesian understanding of the world, while staying (mostly) clear of doctrinal
discourses and references embedded in established religions. In Japan, a nebula of
relatively undefined discourses on spirituality and the spiritual realm (seishin no sekai
精神の世界) developed over the course of the twentieth century. The New Religions
(shinshūkyō 新宗教) and the New New Religions (shinshinshūkyō 新新宗教), with
their focus on charismatic leaders, syncretic doctrines, and healing, provided an ideal
terrain for incorporating aspects of the New Age movement from the 1970s onward.24
While expressions like “spiritual world” or “invisible world” denote on the one hand
a general and amorphous interest for the occult, the strange, and the esoteric—that
is, the nonordinary—they can also be taken to reflect, at least since the 1995 Aum
Incident, a wide-reaching distrust for all things religious that resulted out of it.25
Overall, such references to an “unseen” or “intangible” dimension of reality tap into
a realm pertaining to what is usually referred to or explained in religious terms, but
without using the conventional language of historical religious traditions. While it is
tempting, in reflecting upon new religious movements, to look for older traditions
embedded within them, it is perhaps less common to reverse the process and search
instead for elements pertaining to newer and more marginal evolutions within
established religious systems.
Shugendō
Shugendō, the “Way to Powers through Practice,” a Japanese religious tradition

centering on ascetic practice in the mountains, is situated at the confluence of the
topics discussed so far. On the one hand, it places natural environment at the core
of its practices, with ritualized “mountain entries” (nyūbu 入峰) as its most defining
feature. On the other hand, Shugendō focuses on the acquisition of special powers
aimed at both attaining spiritual advancement and making a livelihood through
healing and exorcisms as well as more standard Buddhist services. Both aspects,
mountain practice and acquisition of powers, are grounded in the teachings of
Esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō 密教). In a sense, Esoteric Buddhism can be seen as an
institutionalized way of apprehending and integrating the “unseen” or the “invisible”
world through ritual practice. Shugen practices may be traced to the end of the Heian
period (twelfth century), but as a discrete religious tradition Shugendō was formed
toward the end of the thirteenth century. It bears strong doctrinal links to Shingon and
Tendai Buddhism, the two main traditions of Esoteric Buddhism in Japan. Another
defining characteristic of Shugendō is the fact that it incorporates practices, rites, and
deities from the whole spectrum of Japanese religions, making it a prime object of
research for all forms of combined religiosity.
Historically, Shugendō has been drawn to activities, practices, and perceptions
that pertain to nonordinary reality, hence its condemnation as “superstition” and its
prohibition under the Meiji Restoration.26 However, although it still maintains an
occasional charlatanic hue, it is considered today an established part of the Japanese
religious landscape.27 By being situated both within orthodox discourse and at the
fringes of it, contemporary Shugendō represents an ideal case-study for examining
how “new” or heterodox discourses may be integrated within an established albeit
malleable religious context.
In the winter of 2016, Miyagi Tainen 宮城泰年, the then eighty-five-year-old head
of the Shōgoin 聖護院 and patriarch of the Honzan shugenshū 本山修験宗, granted me
an interview. At one point of the discussion, he asked his wife to join us, saying that
she had had a remarkable experience at Shō no iwaya 笙の岩屋, an important place of
shugen practice we were discussing. His wife, who is not a Shugendō practitioner but
a follower of the Jōdo shinshū school of Buddhism, described what she had perceived
there as follows:
As I was walking towards Shō no iwaya, there was suddenly something, like a
shadow, an ever so slight sense of presence [hito no kehai 人の気配] […]. There
was a shadow, as if somebody was following me, but on the one side, there were no
trees, and on the other, there were none either. […] This lasted all the way to Shō
no iwaya, as if it were showing me the path.
At Shō no iwaya, there has been a cave for hundreds and thousands of years. In
India too, two thousand five hundred years ago, on Vulture Peak, where the Buddha
was teaching the Dharma, there was a small cave, where only a few persons could
enter at once, and people were lining up. […] People who feel this energy—if you
were to use a fashionable expression, you would say a “power spot”—such people
come and practice in these places. So, I had this very strange experience. Although
you cannot prove this, you can’t take pictures of it either, I felt it. (interview with
Miyagi Myōrei, 2016)
This experience as such is not spectacular. What is of interest here is the neutral way
in which Miyagi Tainen validated his wife’s discourse. He is the head of the oldest and
most important branch of Shugendō. Yet he saw a “spiritual experience” such as the
one described by his wife as acceptable and valid without feeling the need to couch it
into shugen terminology (which would have been easy to do). In other words, Miyagi
was acknowledging a discourse situated outside the regular frame of the tradition he is
leading, even though the experience described had happened during a Shōgoin group
practice.
A few days later, I had a meeting with Ōtsuka Tomoaki大塚友明, a shugenja
修験者 affiliated with the other main branch of Shugendō, the Tōzan-ha 当山派, with
its headquarters at Daigo-ji Sanbō-in 醍醐寺三宝院 on the southeastern outskirts of
Kyōto (interview with Ōtsuka, 2016).28 Ōtsuka is the priest of Daishisan-ji 大師山寺, a
small temple at the foot of the Yoshino hills in Nara Prefecture. He is well known for his
practice of ritual prayers (kaji kitō 加持祈祷),29 which he applies in various contexts. He
works from a distance with social recluses (hikikomori 引き篭もり) and their families,
coaches members of the national boxing team but mostly attends to followers who come
to see him at his temple. It was an informal discussion, and Ōtsuka talked freely about
what his own understanding of Shugendō, and its practice, was. Contrary to many
shugen practitioners, Ōtsuka does not particularly enjoy walking in the mountains, even
though he spends most of his weekends bringing people to them. For the past several
years, he has also embarked on a segmented version of the Shikoku pilgrimage, taking
followers on daytrips one Saturday a month and visiting a few temples at a time. To him,
more than the mountains themselves, it is the paths that practitioners tread that become
sacred, thanks to the thought and intention (omoi 思い) of practitioners over multiple
generations. This understanding integrates ancestor worship, since the omoi of those
practitioners from earlier times quite literally pave the way through the mountain. On
another occasion, a few years earlier, Ōtsuka had described to me what happens when
he goes to the mountains: “You walk and walk, and for the first few hours, your mind is
busy with all kinds of thoughts, your schedule, your chores, the next things ahead. Then,
suddenly, everything becomes white inside your head. That is when you could say that
you acquire powers” (interview with Ōtsuka, 2008).
On a different occasion, Tateishi Kōshō 立石光正, a Shugendō practitioner of the

Kinpusenji 金峯山寺 tradition, who founded a small mountain retreat center in the
Kumano mountains, explained the evolution in his practice under waterfalls (takigyō
滝行)30 in the following terms:
Before going under a waterfall to practice, you normally perform the “Nine-Syllable-
Cut” [kujikiri 九字切り]31 in order to expel all demons, but when you purify the
space around you, there are thousands of “mountain and river spirits” [chimimōryō
魑魅魍魎], who also hope to be purified. If you keep expelling them with the kuji,
they remain what they are. However, if you take them and lift them up, you purify
them at the same time as you purify yourself, and you allow them to leave the world
they are living in. No beings are evil by nature. They are where they are by chance;
for example, if they died during the war, that memory remains. But if you take that
memory and lift it up to purify it, it is good. From the moment in which, under the
waterfall, I started thiking that we can lift up all sentient beings, my practice has
changed, and become much more powerful. (interview with Tateishi, 2004)
Whereas Tateishi Kōshō makes use of Buddhist terminology, he adapts and

transforms orthodox practice according to his own experience and his own needs. In the
same vein, after having himself followed traditional training at Kinpusen-ji on Mount
Yoshino, he now teaches a personalized version of Shugendō practice, which he calls “Soft
Shugendō” (Yurui Shugendō 緩い修験道), adapted to an urbanized population less intent
on performing arduous practice in remote mountains (interview with Tateishi, 2017).32
The episodes above are about occurrences situated at the border between an ordinary
and a nonordinary experience of the world. While they do not present any miraculous
accomplishment, they are instances of a discourse that does not entirely fit into the
orthodoxy of the mold from which it originates. Shugendō is a particularly pliable religious
tradition in the sense that it is historically based on the inclusion of and cohabitation
with different religious forms. It may therefore allow individual practitioners a greater
latitude when it comes to describing what they see and experience. Nevertheless, this
personal freedom of expression within a given religious frame is worth reflecting upon,
for two main reasons. First, because it tries to pinpoint a “felt-sense” experience, namely
a bodily perception that precedes (and eludes) the ordinary grid of references.33 Second,
because it does so in terms that are not, or not entirely, cushioned by a given ritual or
doctrinal framework, or rather in terms that pertain to an individual vocabulary, not that
of a group of like-minded persons. When that type of explanation is stripped from its
distinct framework of references, it acquires simultaneously an individual quality, that of
the words expressed by the person who is the subject of the perception, and a universal
quality, because such experiences can take place everywhere in the world.
“Diffused Religiosity”
Terms such as “diffused religiosity” and “diffused religion” (Cipriani 1993, 2006)34—
but also other expressions such as “fuzzy religion” (Voas 2009), “invisible religion”
(Luckmann 1967), “Sheilaism” (Bellah and Madsen 1985), and religion à la carte
(Campiche 1992)—are understood as ways to describe religious or spiritual
baselines that are not directly linked to specific established traditions. They stem
from sociological discourses about secularization in the modern world. The idea of
secularization is based on the assumption that religion is incompatible with modern
societies, understood as governed by science and reason. Its origin is often ascribed to
Max Weber’s vision of a general “disenchantment of the world” in the first decades of
the twentieth century (Jenkins 2000).
The expressions listed above denote diverse attempts to describe the modes in which
religious needs and expressions evolve in so-called modern environments that try or have
tried to disregard and get rid of them. Such expressions represent a further step in the
sociological debate on secularization: has the importance of religion really waned? One
of the fundamental arguments of secularist theories is that for a society to be modern,
it must be rational. Religion, being understood as irrational, needs to be neutralized
before being eventually and completely eliminated. It also must at all costs be kept away
from state affairs. The disenchantment of the world means its intellectualization, at
the price of its “magic.” Secularist theories present this transformation as natural and
unescapable.35 However, it soon became obvious that these theories were not applicable,
even in societies considered strongly secular, such as many European countries and
Japan.36 In his proposition of a “post-secular society,” Juergen Habermas explains how
on the contrary secularized societies are becoming more the exception than the norm
in the midst of a “worldwide resurgence of religion” (Habermas 2008).
Within the context of secularized societies, however, a wide range of sociological
studies show that “religious commitment is not dichotomous (so that people are either
religious or non-religious)” (Voas 2009: 161). Expressions such as “diffused religion/
religiosity” and “fuzzy religion,” therefore, point to two different issues. On the one
hand, they denote the permanence of a certain loyalty to a religious tradition, albeit
in a rather noncommitted way. On the other hand, they open up onto a “heterodox
nebula” in the form of a generalized rise in interest for alternative spirituality (Baubérot
1983; Zinnbauer and Pargament 1997).37 Roberto Cipriani suggests that “diffused
religion” defines the first element above, a kind of tamper zone, a “passive religion”
that may be activated under certain circumstances. “Diffused religiosity,” on the other
hand, is the response to secularization of those who do not find answers in the secular
reality of contemporary society (Cipriani 2006: 127–128), and who proceed to a “re-
enchantment of the world.” In that sense, “diffused religiosity” can also be described as
a religiosity set apart from the one fashioned by churches, a religiosity that is modeled
by individual subjectivity and, therefore, “diffused” or socially undetermined, and
personal. The element of individuality is of particular importance, as it triggers not
only independence from a religious collectivity but also freedom of religious choice:
when religious institutions lose their normative power, individuals can pick and choose
according to their personal needs.38
How does the concept of “diffused religion” or “diffused religiosity” apply to the
three Japanese cases discussed above? Beyond the use of an English expression to name
them, terms such as “power spots” and “forest therapy” share the fact that they are
not directly associated with a given religious tradition. They also have in common the
important role played by commercialization and mediatization.39 As such, both trends

are eminently exportable and therefore susceptible to be developed on an international
level. Though forest therapy does not use religious discourse, perhaps even carefully
steps around it, it hovers very close to the border of needs usually covered by the religious
sphere, which could be termed simply as a sense of belonging and of connection to the
world (Grellier 1994: 70). Thus, “forest therapy” and “power spots” are clearly situated
in the spectrum of “diffused religiosity.” At the same time, they have the potential to
be easily integrated in, as well as appropriated by, institutional forms of religion. The
relationship between power spots, individual Shinto shrines, and the Association of
Shinto Shrines is a case in point. The concept of a “world invisible to the eyes” is,
by essence, much less circumscribed, although it might be the closest to the issues
discussed in this volume, since it alludes directly to a nonordinary reality that lies just
beyond immediate grasp. I have chosen to approach this last notion through the lens
of contemporary Shugendō. As one of the established Japanese religious traditions that
most openly deals with the spiritual world (since its avowed aim is to gain spiritual
powers through ascetic practice), it would seem natural to expect a standard discourse,
or perhaps set categories, procedures, and rites, to describe phenomena that are out of
the ordinary and pertain to the realm of spiritual experience. But it seems that even
Shugendō practitioners, as specialists of the contact with other entities, are left to their
own devices when they attempt to describe a personal experience. There is a part of
individuality that can never be completely absorbed in the collective, because the inner
voice remains one’s own, and cannot be corroborated.
In his discussion of the status of the “supranatural” as a concept in social sciences,
Jean-Pierre Albert provides an in-depth reflection on individuality and subjectivity in
the retelling of counterintuitive experiences (Albert 2009). He argues that the fields
of ethnography, sociology, and history all present a humanity haunted by experiences
of the “supranatural”: encounters with spirits, possession, visions of invisible entities,
unusual physical or sensorial capacities, and so forth. Such experiences, being situated
outside the framework of “ordinary” reality, are entirely subjective, hence individual
in essence. Even in a collective rite, the perception, or perhaps more exactly the
expression of its perception, is individual out of sheer necessity: one person equals
one voice, as long as they are not mediated by a normative discourse. Albert questions
the contradiction inherent to scientific discourse, asking why it is acceptable, from an
academic point of view, to speak about counterintuitive phenomena but not to “believe”
in them. His answer is that scientific arguments need proof, that is, peer corroboration,
to be deemed valid. The transcription of experiences or perceptions describing
counterintuitive phenomena lack the central procedure through which objectivity may
be affirmed: a perception must be corroborated to be accepted as valid, hence the need
for a common language or vocabulary, culminating in the intersubjective validation of
perceptions (Albert 2009: 151). Albert defines what he calls “supernatural in a broad
sense” (supernaturel au sens large) as any counterintuitive entity or process that gives
rise to a religious interpretation (150). He also notes that it is never an actual “spirit”
that is perceived; rather, it is the idea of a “spirit,” which is acquired through cultural
transmission, that operates a synthesis of perceptions that are real but that would remain
otherwise undetermined (153). It is called “spirit” for want of a better way to name it.
Conclusion
Over the last few decades in Japan, “power spots,” “forest therapy,” and references
to an “invisible world” have become established features of mainstream discourse.
Though they pertain to distinctive categories, these three concepts are emblematic
of a globalized “re-enchantment of the world,” often linked to ecological concerns.
As such, they belong to the widening sphere of ecospirituality. The concept of
ecospirituality lies at the junction of widening interrogations about global warming,
the perceived role of humanity in either further deteriorating or helping to recover
a seemingly lost equilibrium between the natural and the cultural environment, and
the idea that the fate of both environments is inexorably linked in an ontological
sense. These concepts are expressed through a large body of literature on ecology
and spirituality that integrates ideas formulated in the New Age and Neo-Pagan
movements in the USA and elsewhere (Urban 2015). The New Age has had a
significant impact in Japan too (Haga and Kisala 1995b; Prohl 2000). “Power spots”
and “forest therapy” share a strong aspect of commercialization, in the sense that
they are linked to the industries of mass media, tourism, well-being, health, and so
forth. This commoditization factor is often underscored, if not criticized, in studies
on the New Age movement (Ivakhiv 2007). However, it is also part of the “worldly
benefits” (genze riyaku) culture that is so prevalent in the history of Japanese
temples and shrines (Reader and Tanabe 1998). The major boom surrounding
Kiyomasa’s Well as a power spot, for instance, very clearly derives from expectations
of such worldly benefits (prosperity, health, successful professional and personal
life) (Horie 2017).
Nevertheless, these three trends contend in one way or another with the limits of
what can and what cannot be scientifically or rationally explained. Whether a given
power spot gives or withdraws energy, whether a walk in the forest increases a person’s
cortisol level and therefore sense of well-being, or whether unseen presences are being
perceived in natural surroundings, on each occasion, empirical understanding does
not entirely suffice to outline the felt-sense experience. While being embedded in
Japanese religious history and culture, the trends discussed here partake of a more
global shift in discourses straddling the spheres of religious/spiritual concerns and
a growing sense of ecological interconnectedness at a worldwide level. Each in their
own way, power spots, forest therapy, and the idea of an invisible world pertain to
such a globalized consciousness by tentatively distancing themselves from clearly
defined religious references, while still making use of traditional frameworks. I have
suggested using “diffused religiosity,” one of the expressions that emerged out of the
critique of secularization theories, to describe perceptions and practices that pertain to
the religious sphere of activities, but remain without specific institutional anchorage.
The greater freedom of religious choice entailed by secularization allows for more
plurality in the expression of such experiences, as is the case, for example, in Miyagi
Myōrei’s testimony of her experience at Shō no iwaya. In this sense, I use the concept
of “diffused religion” to define the blurred border between practices performed within
an established framework of religious traditions and a kind of do-it-yourself kit of
personal and individual “settings.”
My interest in power spots, forest therapy, and the invisible world stems from
the fact that, while being specific to Japan in their local declension, they may also
be seen as part of a global nexus of spiritual movements that tend to set themselves
apart from established religious and doctrinal discourses. In Japan, they find easy
connectivity with Shugendō, which has formalized these concerns linking spirituality
to nature.40 Shugendō practice and doctrine is historically formulated on the basis
of the assumption, fundamental in the discourse of Esoteric Buddhism, that all
elements of the universe are interconnected and that the fastest, most efficient way to
salvation is found in the interaction with nature, ultimately leading to the realization
of “Buddhahood in this very body” (sokushin jōbutsu 即身成仏). Theories around the
notion of “diffused religiosity” and Albert’s attempt to circumscribe the “supranatural”
in neutral terms share the intent to coopt perceptions, beliefs, and practices that are
not fully formulated or apprehended. As such, they are part of an inclusive reflection
on the borders of what a “knowable” experience is, what can or cannot be expressed in
words. Whereas secularization theories aim at purging reality of whatever cannot be
explained scientifically, or at least rationally, concepts such as “diffused religiosity” or
Albert’s definition of spirits as a subjective and personal way of naming the unknown,
on the contrary, seek to bring together different spheres of cognition. Each in their
own way, ecospiritual trends such as power spots, forest therapy, or the invisible world,
partake of the same intention to bridge a gap between a secularized world and the
apparently fundamental human need for unknowable dimensions to muse on.
7
Came Back Hounded: A Spectrum of

Experiences with Spirits and Inugami Possession
in Contemporary Japan
Andrea De Antoni
The long and winding road leading to the shrine offered beautiful mountain scenery.
The taxi slowly climbed up among the trees, passed through a bunch of houses, and
left me in a small parking area, from where I could see all the surrounding valleys and
slopes. That was as far as cars could go. The cold and clean air that invaded my nostrils
as I stepped out of the taxi gave me the shivering feeling that the sky was close. I walked
the short paved path, flanked on the left by a small hill with a cemetery on top and by
some houses on the right. A small vertical flag waved in front of the gray cement torii
鳥居 (traditional Japanese gate), crowned by a shimenawa 注連縄 (enclosing rope),
letting me know that I had reached my destination: Kenmi jinja 賢見神社 (shrine).
The shrine is located in Shikoku. Although, administratively speaking, it is in
Tokushima Prefecture (Miyoshi-shi, Yamashiro-chō Terano 三好市山城町寺野), it
stands at the border between Tokushima, Kagawa, and Ehime prefectures. As I walked
past the torii, the path led me to a small wooden building—the information office—
from which I could see the main hall. The rhythmic tingle of bells reached me from
there. I found only later on that it was the sound of the ritual of deliverance (exorcism)
from evil spirits that characterizes the shrine. In fact, Kenmi shrine is quite uncommon,
not only because it is independent and does not belong to any Shinto organization,
but also because it specializes in healing from spirit possession and, specifically, from
inugami 犬神 (dog-god or dog-spirit) possession.
In this chapter I provide an account of the variety of experiences with spirits in
contemporary Japan. After reviewing the literature on related phenomena and
clarifying my own methodological standpoint, I will focus particularly on the
“symptoms” of spirits, that is, on what they do within the social, with particular
attention to spirit attachment and possession (tsuki 憑き, see below). In order to do so,
I rely on ethnographic data I gathered through fieldwork. I focus particularly on the
accounts of visitors and specialists at Kenmi shrine, but I also rely on data collected
during my previous projects as well as through literature and internet research.1 In
doing so, my goal is to provide a “spectrum of specters” in contemporary Japan, mainly
based on bodily perceptions or feelings of spirits, in the hope to lay some foundation
for further comparative investigations.
Spirit possession and, more generally, spirits, monsters, the supernatural, and the
realm of the “weird” or “fantastic” (fushigi 不思議) in Japan, have long been the subject
of scholarly research. Yet, focusing on “spirits” in Japan is not as obvious as it may
seem and, indeed, all the studies on these topics present two fundamental aspects as
central to their approaches: the first is the definition of the phenomena and of the field
of investigation; the second is the problem of translating the terms involved, which
follows the definitions. Although discussing these issues goes beyond the scope of this
chapter, I believe that clarifying my own standpoint in this respect might be helpful to
shed light on my argument and approach.
Spirits in Action
The presence of a great variety of spirits throughout Japanese history has created issues
in grasping them from a scholarly perspective. This is not only due to the obvious fact
that spirits and related practices and beliefs have changed over time. It is also due to a
tendency in scholarship to lean toward taxonomy and categorization. As a consequence,
there is a general effort in looking at and trying to grasp spirits and related phenomena
for what they are (or were), going through a definitional process that moves from the
general to the particular, thus eventually focusing on the specificities of each of them.
For instance Komatsu Kazuhiko, probably the greatest living researcher on spirits,
monsters, and related phenomena in Japan, begins his Introduction to Yōkai Culture
(2017) with the following definition of the term yōkai 妖怪: “generally speaking, it
means creatures, presences, or phenomena that could be described as mysterious or
eerie.” He continues specifying that this describes something that “isn’t unique to Japan:
things of this sort are seen in every society. The interesting thing about Japanese yōkai
is that they were developed into a unique culture” (Komatsu 2017: 12). Subsequently,
he tries to “eliminate some ambiguity while retaining this broad definition by
dividing the term’s meaning into three ‘domains’: yōkai as incidents or phenomena,
yōkai as supernatural entities or presences, and yōkai as depictions” (12). The first of
these domains refers to yōkai that “arise from fear, awe, or wonder,” as a means to
explain and name unusual phenomena, which become entangled in narratives and
storytelling. The second domain includes “the mysterious presences (or creatures) that
cause strange phenomena, rather than the phenomena themselves”; these presences
are embedded in an “animistic worldview” (15). The third category encompasses the
depictions and representations of yōkai that developed especially from the medieval
period on, particularly in the form of painted scrolls (emaki 絵巻).
In the following chapters Komatsu further distinguishes tsukimono 憑き物 (entities
that “attach” to or possess human beings) from the more general categories of yōkai
(among which he focuses on kappa 河童, oni 鬼, tengu 天狗, and yamauba 山姥) and yūrei
幽霊, before devoting the last two chapters to explain his theories on the historical relations
between yōkai as symbolic representations and outsiders, as well as the negotiation of
borders. In each chapter, the author describes the historical trends in research about yōkai
in Japan, in a painstaking and thorough attempt to provide readers with glimpses of what
Japanese yōkai and their related cultural representations are or were.
Came Back Hounded 111
Similar efforts in grasping what yōkai are become fundamental also when non-
Japanese scholars try to translate the term. Indeed, as Foster points out, the word yōkai
has been “variously translated as monster, spirit, goblin, ghost, demon, phantom,
specter, fantastic being, lower-order deity, or, more amorphously, as any unexplainable
experience or numinous occurrence” (Foster 2009: 2). Ultimately, Foster decided
to keep the Japanese term, whereas Figal (1999)—another author who published in
English on the history of yōkai—opted for the more general “mysterious” (fushigi
不思議), in order to refer to unexplainable phenomena and related experiences. An
attempt was carried out also, for instance, in Italian, with the translation “monsters”
(mostri) by Miyake (2014).
All these studies share some commonalities: they shed light on and provide
analyses of representations of yōkai, also because of their focus on premodern or
modern cultural history. Even in cases in which they analyze Pokémon or yōkai as
contemporary developments of the monstrous in Japan, they focus on its cultural and
representational aspects, thus analyzing them in relation to “longing for something
which is immediately visible and available” (Foster 2009: 214), or to processes of (self-)
orientalism (Miyake 2014). These studies and their arguments are rather different, but
they all tend to focus on the specificities of Japan, thus narrowing down the possibility
for cross-cultural comparisons. Although I believe that an attention to local specificities
is fundamental, I also think that enhancing the potential for a comparative perspective
is equally important. In this chapter, therefore, I will refer to the entities I am going to
take into consideration with the general term “spirits,” while drawing some parallels
with anthropological research in contexts other than Japan.
In fact, the focus on spirits from a representational perspective through discourse
analysis has characterized anthropological research in general and, consequently, tracing
parallels with the Japanese context is neither too complex nor necessarily new, although
the cases in which it has been done are rather rare (e.g., Eguchi 1991; Komatsu 1994;
Matsuoka 1991). As for the focus on Japan, these approaches, centering particularly
on the cultural history of spirits and related beliefs, have shed light especially on their
functions and meanings in the broader context of Japanese society. For instance,
Komatsu (1995) pointed out that from the Nara period until modern times, an “other
world”—demonic or monstrous—associated with the dark outer lands of the realm was
managed by emperors and shoguns through (religious) symbolic practices, in order to
secure and display power and authority. This relation was inverted in case of protests in
premodern Japan, when discontented groups (such as peasants, disgruntled samurai,
religious groups, opposition parties) used the same symbolic paradigm as a means of
protest. When this happened, monsters were appropriated by the rebellion through
reversal processes, while giving birth to carnivalesque practices and parody, or directly
representing authorities in demonic terms (see also Figal 1999; Wilson 1992).
Moreover, the modern history of spirits in Japan, not to mention their very
existence, is deeply entangled with state power. As several studies have shown, spirits
underwent systematic debunking starting with Inoue Enryō and his “monsterology”
(yōkaigaku 妖怪学) and followed by an educational campaign aimed at eradicating local
cults and religious practices related to spirits which were considered inappropriate to
a country—such as Meiji Japan—that was pursuing the light of modernization and
“civilization” (Figal 1999; Foster 2009; Josephson 2012; Kawamura 2007). Buddhism—
as a consequence of the haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈 repression movement—also had
to make efforts to imitate “modern” Protestant Christianity and, in so doing, rebuild
itself as a “religion,” in opposition to “superstitions,” which had to be eradicated (see
Josephson 2006, 2012).
These attitudes toward the mysterious continued in the early Showa period:
in the dominant discourse of the early twentieth century, yōkai were no longer
considered part of the living present; rather, they were an embarrassing reminder
of the premodern past […] Spirit possession and similar forms of mystic practices
were marginalized, and the supernatural entertainments that took their place—
such as the hypnosis craze […]—were subsumed within the expanding realm of
the sciences and increasingly divorced from the yōkai tradition. (Foster 2009: 116)
These efforts in debunking spirits through scientific materialism or psychologization

(Harding 2015) resulted in the eradication of the very reality of spirits and related
phenomena that, consequently, started being seen as representations, ways of making
sense of the world, or a matter of belief.
An exception to the establishment of this modern “regime of truth” (Foucault
1984) was constituted by untamed spirits or ghosts (yūrei). Among other reasons, this
was because, being spirits of the dead, directly debunking them would have meant
negating the existence of the human spirit and, consequently, challenging more or less
directly the cult of ancestors, on which the whole Meiji imperial system apparatus was
based (De Antoni 2015). This, however, created the possibility for ghosts not to be
erased but to also continue existing and being experienced in contemporary Japan,
as I will show below. Similarly, possession is also a current phenomenon, revamped
particularly after the film The Exorcist (1974), which became extremely popular in
Japan and contributed to the creation of the so-called “occult boom” (okaruto būmu オ
カルトブーム) (De Antoni 2015; Taniguchi 2006).
Although “there are some doubts about the general applicability of Komatsu’s
paradigm” (Figal 1999: 23), some cases of connections between ghosts and liminal
figures or outsiders can also be observed in contemporary Japan. For instance, in Mutsu
(Aomori Prefecture)—the closest city to the important sacred mountain Osorezan—
the highest number of ghost sightings was reported in what used to be the area where
Koreans lived up until the Second World War (De Antoni 2010), and scholars cite
cases of local shamans in Okinawa healing people from or being possessed by spirits of
Ryukyuan people who were mistreated by the Japanese and, consequently, reinforcing
Okinawan local identity (Allen 2002a, 2002b; Sasaki 1984; Shiotsuki 2006). Similarly,
there are also reports of sightings of ghosts of Japanese soldiers who died during the
Second World War (Oda 2011).
Outside the specific context of Japan, anthropological studies have highlighted
the relationships between beliefs and practices related to the occult with resistance
to changes in socioeconomic systems; spirits have been interpreted as forms of
protest against colonialism, capitalism, globalization, and related outcomes that were
considered immoral by certain groups (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2002; Ong 1987;
Taussig 1980). Such approaches shed light on the relations between spirits and power,
but have become so much of a standard in anthropology that they have “come to form
a deep-seated and seductive anthropological analytic” (Sanders 2008: 109). Indeed,
“notwithstanding their significant differences, these diverse approaches are broadly
similar in one sense: they depict spiritual beings as primarily reactive” (Jensen, Ishii,
and Swift 2016: 150); it may be necessary to search for “new ways of getting spirit
worlds […] into view” by “repopulating the field of inquiry with more than beliefs,
socioeconomic realities, and politics” (150; original emphasis).
Resonating at least to a certain extent with the so-called “ontological turn” (see
Holbraad, Pedersen, and de Castro 2014; Pickering 2017), recent anthropological
scholarship has begun to provide accounts of the experiences from which the reality of
spirits emerge, rather than on explaining them from a symbolic perspective. As Csordas
points out, “meaning is not attached to experience, but is constituted by the way in which
a subject attends to experience” (2002: 57, original emphasis), seeing the body not as
the object of culture, but as “the existential ground of culture and self ” (Csordas 1994).
He proposes to focus on “somatic modes of attention,” that is, “culturally elaborated
attention to and with the body in the immediacy of an intersubjective milieu” (Csordas
1993: 139, original emphasis), and, with his later work, he demonstrates the centrality
of bodily feelings and sensory perceptions in religious healing—including deliverance
from evil spirits and demons—in the Catholic Charismatic movement. Similarly, others
have given accounts of the importance of bodily perceptions and affective dimensions
in interactions with spirits in a variety of contexts (e.g., Cassaniti 2015; Desjarlais 1992;
Iida 2015, 2017; Laderman and Roseman 1996), although almost no studies from this
perspective have been carried out on Japan.2
Research on spirits has witnessed a renewed interest, based on approaches more
or less inspired by cognitive science. For instance, studies induced apparitions of
ghosts through experiments with humans and robots, pointing out that “the illusion
of feeling another person nearby is caused by misperceiving the source and identity
of sensorimotor […] signals of one’s own body,” emphasizing the brain mechanisms
generating experiences of “self ” and “other” (Blanke et al. 2014:1). Similarly,
possession has been assimilated to dissociative symptoms and related to traumatic
experiences (Hecker, Braitmayer, and Van Duijl 2015; Van Duijl et al. 2010),
whereas Cohen (2008: 103) argues that “what constitutes possession and the paths
by which possession concepts and practices are transmitted […], are informed
and constrained by recurrent features of evolved human cognition.” Moreover,
Cassaniti and Luhrmann (2014)—who propose “a field guide to identify spiritual
experiences across traditions and cultures”—suggest “that there are at least three
different kinds of phenomena that might be compared: 1. Named phenomena
without fixed mental or bodily events. […] 2. Bodily affordances. […] 3. Striking
anomalous events” (334).
These approaches provide a very useful ground for cross-cultural comparison, but
as a consequence of their focus on the body or cognition, they end up “internalizing”
and “psychologizing”—if not even “pathologizing”—spirits and related experiences, or
make them the result of embodied memories and imagination, thus resonating with
standard approaches based on representation and meaning-making.
Nevertheless, such approaches focusing on perceptions can be generally seen as

attempts to elicit the spirits’ voices in ethnographic accounts, along with other analyses
of the reality of spirit entities as it emerges within the social through practice, as the
result of particular ways of interaction among humans and nonhumans, of perceiving
bodies moving with things (Ishii 2007, 2012; Ochoa 2010), or specific environments
(see De Antoni 2011, 2013). In line with these approaches, therefore, rather than
focusing on what spirits are, in this article I propose to focus on what they do, how
they intrude upon reality, and are perceived. In other words, my proposal is to look
at how the “agency of the intangibles” and the “social life of spirits” (Espirito-Santo
and Blanes 2014) emerge; to understand spirits as active “things” rather than “objects”
(Ingold 2011a), entangled in materiality and social practice, experienced by the body,
and in constant change. Indeed, my suggestion is nothing different from following
the direction indicated by the Japanese general category that has defined them since
the Edo period, bakemono 化け物: “changing things.” I will also show that spirits and
related phenomena are not fixed things but, rather, “meshworks,” entanglements of
“lines of life, growth and movement” (64), emerging from attunements among humans
and nonhumans, which include specific “symptoms,” feelings, and perception skills,
and go “beyond the body proper” (Lock and Farquhar 2007). I see “feelings” as “a
mode of active, perceptual engagement, a way of being literally ‘in touch’ with the
world” (Ingold 2000: 23; see also De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017). In fact, there is
much more to spirits than belief: their actions intrude upon reality, influence the social
through perceptions and, as I will show below, they may cause suffering.
Every Time I Feel the Spirit
Recent research in folklore studies about urban legends regarding ghosts (yūrei)
suggest that they are a phenomenon that followed urbanization in the modern period
and that ghosts developed in cities, in opposition to yōkai, associated with feelings
about the natural environment. Following the disappearance of yōkai, ghosts took
their place as entities that also manifest themselves outside of cities in general, in places
such as tunnels, mountain ridges, bridges, hospitals, and schools and, thus, marking
these spaces’ alterity (Takaoka 2006). Nevertheless, particularly after 2005, urban
legends seem to have lost their focus on places and ghosts stopped telling their stories,
while a focus on reikan 霊感—the ability or skill to perceive spirits3—has become
preponderant. Since reikan is a skill that an individual has (or not), this shift of focus
in urban legends has been interpreted as reflecting the progressive individualization of
Japanese society (Takaoka 2015).
Although I would be careful about generalizing these conclusions, this research
pointed out the centrality of bodily perceptions, skills, and experiences in relationships
with ghosts. Even though urban legends seem to have lost interest in specifying places
and memories, there exists a flourishing mediascape of publications, blogs, and
websites that provide information on haunted places (shinrei supotto 心霊スポット),4
around which social practices such as “courage testing” (kimodameshi 肝試し) and
even tourism revolve. Furthermore, the number of ghost sightings have been
reportedly increasing in the Tohoku area—particularly in specific places in the city

of Ishinomaki—following the 3/11 disaster (Kudō 2016). The webmaster of one of
the biggest websites on this subject also acknowledged the centrality of localized
experiences, when explaining to me what haunted places are:
Places that are called “shinrei supotto” are in several locations: ruins, graveyards,
the sea, tunnels, or even at the corner of a residential area. These places don’t
become haunted only because they are eerie. They start to be called haunted
because there are several people who had experiences like feeling a presence,
feeling or hearing something, seeing a ghost […] I think that the reason why a
place becomes haunted is that two conditions: a place in which someone died,
and an eerie place, are superimposed. (email interview with Okaruto Jōhōkan
Webmaster, December 17, 2010)
Indeed, “haunting itself is merely or only affect: it has no existence without affect”
(Heholt 2016: 5; original emphasis) and, as I also mentioned above, the reality of
those experiences emerges as a result of the body moving in certain environments
with specific material features (De Antoni 2011, 2013). Rumors that construct haunted
places tend to describe hauntings and the presence of ghosts as a matter of fact and,
although there are mentions of sounds such as steps, screams, or sutra chanting,
rumors heavily rely on the visual dimension: ghosts appear in those places with specific
forms, related to their histories. Even a simple survey of the first links in the results of
a Google search with the query “haunted places in Kyoto” (Kyōto no shinrei supotto 京
都の心霊スポット) can shed light on this aspect.5 For instance, the first description of
Kiyotaki tunnel, one of the most famous—if not the most famous—haunted places in
Kyoto, reads: “when you arrive at Kiyotaki tunnel you must not enter, because if the
traffic light is green you are being invited by ghosts. They say that, if you enter, the
spirit of a woman will fall on your car’s bonnet,” because a woman allegedly committed
suicide around the tunnel. Similarly, in Kazandō, another famous haunted place, “the
spirits [of people] who died during the war, wander.”6
Nevertheless, during my participant observation in a tour of haunted places in
Kyoto, I never witnessed anyone who saw anything nor saw anything myself. Yet, I
did witness some interactions with spirits. In both the previously mentioned Kiyotaki
tunnel and Kazandō, for instance, twice in front of the former and four times in front
of the latter, some people refused to enter. When I asked for explanations (tourist were
paying 6,000 yen for the tour, and the two places were the “highlights” of two different
routes, held on different days) they said that they felt something weird, stating that it
was creepy (kimiwarui 気味悪い), weird (okashii おかしい), and that they were feeling
“too heavy of an atmosphere” (kūki ga omosugiru 空気が重すぎる) or some ghastly
presence (rei wo kanjiru 霊を感じる). This happened already outside the tunnels,
indicating that spirits can be perceived by some people also without necessarily
entering the haunted place, and that those feelings are unpleasant and indicators of
something that should be avoided. Indeed, those people perceived the danger that
ghosts could attach to them, that they could “bring spirits home” (see below). When
I asked for specifications, however, these people could barely articulate what they felt
more than what they had already said. When I insisted and asked them if they could
explain to me what “feeling a ghost” meant, three of them gave me different answers:
a woman in her forties told me her shoulders had become heavier (kata ga omoi
肩が重い) and she felt cold, another woman in her fifties told me that she felt some
pressure at the chest and shoulder level, whereas another woman in the same age range,
told me that her head had started aching and she was feeling cold. Therefore, although
at the beginning their linguistic reactions pointed at the place as the external cause
(i.e., “creepy,” “weird,” or “heavy”), a further articulation highlighted a relationship
with perceptions of temperature, as well as feelings related to tactility, proprioception,
and pain, with a particular focus on the upper part of the body.
As visitors walked through Kiyotaki tunnel, two people told me that they heard
some sounds similar to a woman’s voice, whereas in Kazandō three times people
claimed that they heard some whispers or small squealing voices coming from afar.
At two different times, moreover, two people suddenly moved toward the wall with
a small scream, claiming that they felt something touching their shoulder or as if
something had swiftly brushed past them at the center of the tunnel. In these cases,
these experiences were more linked to hearing and tactility and were interpreted as
more “direct” than the ones of the people who, in fact, decided to stay out in order not
to be directly involved.
There were also people who did not feel any presence, but they tended to attribute
this to their own lack of reikan, whereas all the people who decided to stay outside
claimed that their reikan was strong. I never found anyone who claimed to have reikan
among the people who did not sense anything and, conversely, even among those who
claimed not to have a particular sense for the supernatural, some were feeling that the
place was “heavy.”
The ways in which these experiences emerge in the engagement of the lived and
moving body with certain affordances of the environment have already been analyzed
through the concept of “affective correspondences” (De Antoni 2017b, forthcoming).
Yet, here, there are some points that can be highlighted: (1) There seemed to be a
recurrence of feelings particularly related to the haptic sphere and the (motor-)senses
(temperature, tactility, proprioception, exteroception, and kinesthesia) that functioned
as “indicators” for spirits, such as in the case of the people who decided to stay outside.
These haptic experiences were also a means to directly—and quite literally—get in
touch with ghosts. (2) Hearing seemed to play a role in the engagements with spirits,
but nothing visual was mentioned. (3) Individual skills of feeling, corresponding, and
attuning with spirits also had a central role in the socialization of these experiences. (4)
In all these instances, spirits were “external,” something that lingered in that particular
place. Bodily feelings and skills were the mediators between visitors and entities; they
became the “symptoms” of spirits’ presence and the ways in which interactions took
place.
Although in these cases spirits did not manifest their visible shapes, during my
fieldwork I did talk with people who claimed they see or saw them.7 In these cases as
well, reikan played a central role. In fact, people who told me that they could see ghosts,
also typically claimed that it was because of the “strength” of their skill. In other words,
the ability to see spirits does not only contribute to the reality of the experience but also
to prove the seer’s ability. Among these people, broadly speaking, I could identify two
categories. The first includes people who belong to religious institutions or practice as
local healers, shamans, or mediums. This category could be divided into two subgroups
of people: those who acquired reikan as a consequence of religious training, and those
who were born with the ability to see ghosts and underwent some religious training in
order to learn how to control their skills, such as in the case of Okinawan yuta ユタ,
itako イタコ in Osorezan, or mediums (reinōryokusha 霊能力者). The second category
encompasses people who claim that they can only sporadically see spirits and identified
such events as a problematic “symptom” that needed to be solved. The first category
has been widely investigated, especially in studies about “shamanism” (Blacker 1975;
Raveri [1984] 2006; Shiotsuki 2006) and the transformative power of ascetic practices
(Blacker 1975; Lobetti 2016; Raveri 1992), so I will not take them into consideration
here. Yet, I believe it is important to point out that, in the case of people who learn these
skills, spirits continue to be external to the seer. The second category, however, points at
a group and—even more importantly—some experiences which have been barely taken
into consideration by scholars. I find these cases interesting because these people do not
become religious practitioners and, yet, they look for the help of religious practitioners
in order to alleviate what they perceive as “symptoms” of so-called spirit attachment
or possession (tsuki). In this sense, although seeing spirits is not the only symptom, it
becomes an indicator of a presence that starts losing its externality, becoming—at least
to a certain extent—part of the “victim,” as I will discuss below.
Spirits Attach
Scholarly works have pointed out that the Japanese word tsuki covers a broader
spectrum than the English “possession” (Komatsu 1994, 2017). “Possession” can be
broadly defined as “any altered or unusual state of consciousness and allied behaviour
that is indigenously understood in terms of the influence of an alien spirit, demon, or
deity. The possessed act as though another personality […] has entered their body and
taken control” (Crapanzano 2005: 86–87).8 Yet, in the Japanese context, phenomena of
attachment also seem to encompass a spectrum of experiences that do not necessarily
include altered states of consciousness. Indeed, Komatsu (1994) points out that tsuki
is a general term, whereas spirits possessing someone could also be called hyōrei
憑霊 and the above-defined “possession,” hyōi 憑依. He sees hyōi as a subset of the
more general tsuki, characterized by loss of consciousness and change of personality.
Yet, for the sake of clarity, he suggests to refer to all these terms as “attachment” or
“possession” (Komatsu 2017). I will also follow his suggestion here because, according
to my experience, all the different phenomena that I will list below were classified as
tsuki by the people in Kenmi shrine.
Research on spirit attachment in Japan has highlighted the complexity and variety
of possessing entities (tsukimono),9 leaning toward taxonomy and identification of
local differences. Generally speaking, possessing entities could be deities; spirits of
human beings, either living (ikiryō 生霊) or dead (shiryō, shirei 死霊, or yūrei); spirits
of animals such as foxes, snakes, badgers, dogs, cats, or monkeys; and even spirits of
plants. Those causing most problems are the ikiryō and animal spirits (Komatsu 1994),
but I have also witnessed several issues related to yūrei and spirits of ancestors. However,
studies have tended to focus mainly on two aspects related to spirit attachment and
possession. The first is discrimination against certain family lineages (tsukimono tō
憑き物統 or keitō 系統, also tsukimono suji 憑き物筋 or tsukimono mochi 憑き物持ち),
identified as particularly susceptible to possession or, more often, as the more or less
voluntary cause of possession in other members of the community (Komatsu 1994).
These studies have highlighted that, because of historical reasons, mainly related to the
economy, these families have undergone exclusion from inter- or intra-village marriage
or community life (see Blacker 1975; Komatsu 1994). These findings resonate with
broader anthropological literature on witchcraft and related accusations, mainly based
on notions of limited good (Evans-Pritchard 1937; Favret-Saada 1980; Komatsu 1994).
The second main focus is the relationship between possession and mental illness or,
rather, efforts to categorize and explain phenomena of spirit attachment in medical
and psychiatric terms. Thus, at different times, attachment was classified as “invocation
psychosis” (kitōsei seishinbyō 祈祷性精神病)—caused by exorcising practices10—or as
mania, paranoia, hysteria, and schizophrenia (Eguchi 1991).
There are some exceptions to these trends, though they are few. For instance, in a
brilliant article that was also one of the works that set the beginning of transcultural
psychiatry in Japan, Eguchi (1991) reviewed three cases of fox possession in a mountain
village in Shiga Prefecture. Although his argument revolved around the difficulties
of classifying fox possession as a “culture-bound syndrome,” his accounts shed light
on the intricacy of the social dimensions of illness and treatment, as “a tangled mass
of the various subtly differing realities of the patient, the healer, and the people”
(Eguchi 1991: 442). Similarly, Matsuoka argued that fox possession needs to be seen
as “a metaphor of social, economic, political, and cosmological situations rather than
explaining it from a medical point of view” (Matsuoka 1991: 473).
These studies, however, strongly focus on symbolic aspects and socially shared
narratives revolving around illness, in line with other anthropological approaches
(Good 1994; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997), thus barely providing an account of
the individual feelings and experiences through which the reality of spirits emerge.
Moreover, although they relativize mental illness as much as possession, their main
focus is on the differences and similarities between the two; yet, the cases in which
they could be assimilated are just a small part of the larger phenomenon of tsuki.
For instance, reporting about snake possession in Shikoku, Blacker wrote that “the
principal symptom […] is a sudden and unbearable pain in the joints, similar to acute
rheumatism” (Blacker 1975: 38), and also in my own experience, cases involving
mainly physical symptoms were preponderant, as I will show below.
Feeling Attached
The following analysis is based on a sample of eighty-one people whom I interviewed

in Kenmi jinja during my initial periods of fieldwork. When people visited the shrine
with their family or friends, I conducted group interviews. There were forty-eight
females (59 percent) and thirty-three males (41 percent), and the majority of people
were in their forties and fifties, although all the ages were represented, including
teenagers and children. The majority of these people (53 percent) visited the shrine
from Kagawa Prefecture, followed by Tokushima (39 percent) and Kōchi (8 percent).11
The motives for visiting Kenmi shrine—most of the times after a drive of more
than one and a half hours—were rather variegated and included its uniqueness as a
shrine, the beauty of the environment, and family histories related to the shrine. Yet,
the majority of my informants (69 percent) visited for what could be summarized as
the attainment of worldly benefits, such as “to be protected by the god(s),” “to pass
entrance examinations at the university,” “hoping to solve troubles at work/in order
to find a better job,” “because of diseases that did not heal,” accidents, or explicitly to
“be delivered from possessing entities [tsukimono] or evil spirits/energies [jaki 邪気].”
Indeed, Kenmi shrine is renowned and promotes itself for its ritual of deliverance
from evil spirits and, particularly, from the dog-god (inugami). I report here the
narrative from the shrine’s webpage:
The only shrine in Japan [Nihon issha 日本一社]—Kenmi jinja, is the greatest
shrine to deliver people from inugami possession, and it is renown as a shrine that
facilitates recovery from illness, as well as safety and prosperity in the household.
It has several features that differ from general shrines, and exorcisms [go-kitō
ご祈祷] are carried out following a peculiar ritual style.12
The website explains that the peculiarities reside in its unique prayers (norito 祝詞) and
the way in which they are chanted, as well as the use of a peculiar tool (kinpei 金弊) for
the exorcism—the same tool as the ones usually used in shrines for purification rituals
but made in gold instead of paper and with small bells attached in the end. The officiant
repeatedly touches the supplicant’s head and shoulders with it during the ritual (see
Figure 7.1). The webpage also explicitly relates the shrine to deliverance from dog-god
possession, and explains its features as follows:
Particularly in the South-East part of Shikoku, from ancient times there have been
legends about possession and curses by the spirit of an animal called inugami. It is
thought that it causes illnesses that are difficult to explain from a medical perspective,
such as changes in one person’s character, shivering hands and legs, sudden fevers,
and so on. […] The inugami cult still remains very strong in certain areas and Kenmi
jinja, which is the only shrine able to exorcise it, is related to that cult.13
On the sheet with the explanation of the kinds of wishes and prayers one can ask
the ritual to be performed for, along with the usual items such as family safety, safe
pregancy and safety from traffic, protection against illness or for business, one could
find “deliverance from evil spirits/energies” (jaki taisan 邪気退散). The main priest told
me that this is what the vast majority of people ask for.
I have already pointed out elsewhere that the majority of people who underwent
the ritual were not concerned with what kind of entity was affecting them, as long
as they felt better after undergoing the ritual. This suggests that experiences of spirit
Figure 7.1 The head priest (gūji) performing the ritual with a kinpei. Photograph by
Andrea De Antoni.
possession, although all very different from one another, were indeed bodily but went
“beyond the body proper” (Lock and Farquhar 2007), being always entangled with
nonbodily symptoms. This also proves that possessions tended to emerge according to
bodily perceptions and feelings, before involving “belief ” in spirits.14
Symptoms of possession were very diverse, and included issues related to social
relations (mainly with family, friends, and coworkers), diseases that did not heal through
medical treatment (persisting fever and weariness, chronic pains, wrist cutting, sudden
changes in character and becoming violent), accidents (mainly by car, but also several
cases of misfortune), feelings of oppression or dissatisfaction (including bad mood,
feeling depressed or nervous, also in relation to misfortunes and troubles at work),
and even events that were perceived as hindrances to visit the shrine and be exorcised
(getting lost on the way, getting stuck at the entrance of the shrine and not being able
to continue, vomiting, sudden and unexpected commitments). Yet, the centrality of
physical symptoms was very evident (33 percent of total mentions, including diseases
that did not heal), as shown in Figure 7.2. Therefore, here I would like to focus on these.
Figure 7.2 General symptoms of attachment/possession. Table by Andrea De Antoni.
The relatively low frequency of each singular symptom shows that there were no
specific symptoms associated to or representative of one particular possessing
entity, but each and every individual would perceive their own physical conditions
(entangled with symptoms listed in other categories above) as possible symptoms of
some sort of attachment. As can be seen in the breakdown in Figure 7.3, the physical
symptoms that were mentioned the most were stomach-ache and sickness. From the
table, it can be concluded that (1) the majority of the symptoms involved either a
(chronic) generalized bad condition (such as weariness), or the upper part of the
body (head, shoulders, and torso), and (2) feeling or seeing ghastly presences was
mentioned relatively often. Below, I discuss some cases that illustrate the complexity
of the phenomena involved.
Case 1 (February 4, 2016): Woman in her fifties, with her daughter in her twenties,
from Kagawa.
They visit at least once a month. The mother told me that the daughter “has a very
strong sensitivity to spirits (reikan)” and that “she brings them home.” The mother
understands when the daughter has some spirit-related issue, because she becomes
pale and her eyes roll upwards. The daughter understands because she starts seeing
people’s faces or shapes hovering, mainly around her head. In those cases, the
mother feels heaviness on her shoulders, which confirms the spiritual origin of the
symptoms. The mother also suffers from chronic toothaches, which improve after
she undergoes the ritual. When the whole situation becomes unbearable (at least
once a month), they drive to Kenmi shrine, but they tend to experience hindrances
to their trip: “When we drive here, even though I have to turn right, I try to turn left,
or tend to get lost. I think ‘I come here every time and yet today it is weird … ’ They
[the spirits] don’t want us to come. [That’s the way] they say that they don’t want
to come. Because as soon as we arrive here, everything changes.” They also told me
that once, while driving to Kenmi jinja, the mother got paralyzed for a moment,
thus finding herself unable to brake and, consequently, crashing into the car in
front of them. They identified the possessing entities as malevolent spirits/energies
(jaki) or ghosts (yūrei).
In this case, the intersubjective dimension of the experiences was very clear: the reality
of spirits and possession emerged because mother and daughter both experienced
symptoms, though very different, at similar times. The daughter’s conditions might
Figure 7.3 A spectrum of experiences with spirits. Diagram by Andrea De Antoni.
be easily assimilated to certain psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, and they

actually told me that the father was undergoing psychiatric treatment (although
they did not specify for what disorder). This proves that they had familiarity with
pathological conditions and, yet, they did not perceive the daughter’s condition as
such. On the other hand, reducing the daughter’s condition to pathology would not
explain the relations to the mother’s experiences and the hindrances she encounters.
Seeing shapes seemed to be central in the identification of attachment. As I mentioned
above, seeing seems to mark the border between spirits as external and (to a certain
extent) internal entities that, although they did not completely take over the daughter’s
self and were perceived as something “other” and different from her, “moved” with
her, as she would “bring them home.” In this sense, spirits were originally external, not
belonging to the individual and, yet, once attached to the daughter, they were able to
influence not only the two women’s bodies but their environment as well.
Case 2 (February 4, 2016): Woman A, late forties, and woman B, early forties,
friends from Tokushima.
They visit once a year. They both defined themselves as the “easily-receiving
(moraiyasui もらいやすい) type.” A understood to have troubles related to spirits
from headaches and from her mood, which suddenly becomes “bad” (kibun ga
waruku naru 気分が悪くなる), and she becomes very nervous, “like … Don’t get
close to me!” B’s symptoms were turning pale, while her mood suddenly becomes
bad. Although they did not explicitly identify the entities possessing them, they
told me that they both work in day-care and that they “receive things” from their
customers or colleagues, thus implying that they were dealing with ikiryō.
In this case too, spirits manifested themselves by causing physical symptoms, associated
to moods and emotions that were perceived as bad and that, clearly, could be related to
social and work relationships, particularly in the case of woman A. These two women
“received” spirits from their customers and colleagues, thus showing that entities can
“move” from a person to another and be internalized.
Case 3 (February 3, 2016): Married couple, mid-fifties, from Kōchi.
They have visited the shrine once a month in the last ten years, because the
husband’s father has suffered from what they explicitly identified as inugami
possession (hyōi). They reported that the father’s character and expression—
particularly his eyes (metsuki 目付き)—change abruptly, he suddenly becomes
angry and, in some cases, violent. He also experiences shivering of hands and
legs. He has undergone medical treatment, but with no improvements. The father
refuses to visit the shrine because, as the man stated, he does not believe in spirits.
The man also made explicit that he did not believe in spirits himself either, and
that he went there for the first time as a last resort. However, whenever the man
undergoes the exorcism, he notices improvements in the father’s conditions.
In this case, possession was experienced through symptoms involving physicality and
worsening social relations, but above all changes in personality; the man explicitly
defined the case as “possession.” These people did not mention the reason why the
father was possessed, so they clearly gave more importance to the fact that the spirit
was “internal” to the self rather than to the “internalization” process, different from
the previous cases. Moreover, this was the only case I could find in which possession
was explicitly ascribed to inugami and, indeed, the symptoms match the description
from the shrine’s website, showing that, possibly, in this case institutionalized
discourses on possession had an influence in the identification of the illness.
A Spectrum of Specters
In this chapter, I provided an account of the diversity of experiences with spirits in

contemporary Japan, with a particular focus on feelings. These experiences are all very
individual and have no common determined or determining feature—not to mention
“structure”—underlying them. Spirits here are not “objects” but “things” (Ingold
2011a), entangled in materiality and social practice, whose reality emerges and intrudes
people’s life experiences through the lived body. Moreover, they are not fixed things but
“meshworks” (Ingold 2011a: 64) of feelings, complexly entangled with other actors
that go “beyond the body proper” (Lock and Farquhar 2007) and include individual
skills (reikan), other humans (visitors to haunted places, webmasters, family members,
colleagues, etc.), social relations, and nonhumans (the internet, the environment,
squeaking voices, visible shapes, aching body parts, cars, etc.). In other words, spirits
go well beyond “simple” belief, for their reality and changes emerge within complex
arrays of intersubjective attunements.
Nevertheless, given the centrality of feelings and bodily perceptions involved, I
believe that the “symptoms” of spirit presence could be arranged along a spectrum, also
for the sake of future comparative research. I think this is useful in order to understand
the processes through which spirits are perceived as external or internal, as part of the
self, or other (Figure 7.4).
Frequency
Symptoms
(mentions)
4 - Stomach ache/feeling sick
- Being pale
- Generalized weariness
3 - Different illnesses in a row
- Feeling/seeing ghastly presences
- Cough
- Headache
2
- Sense of heaviness on the shoulders
- Chronic pain in the lower back
- (Lower) back ache
- Cold
- Loss of control over eating
- Persisting fever
- Persisting weariness
- Belly ache (possible uterus-related issues after miscarriage
or abortion)
1
- Unspecified disorders identified as due to stress related to
social relations
- Chronic toothache
- High blood pressure
- Chronic pain in the knee
- (Father) change of character, with shivering hands and feet
- Wrist cutting
Figure 7.4 Breakdown of mentioned physical symptoms according to frequency. Table by

Andrea De Antoni.
On the left side of the spectrum in Figure 7.4 is a list of the perceptions that involve
interactions with spirits, those “symptoms” through which they make their presence
felt while remaining external. Among these the (motor-)senses, feelings of temperature,
and hearing appear. The first two tend to be related to feelings toward the external
environment in everyday life, as hearing also does. Interestingly, although hearing
voices could theoretically be a symptom of possession—of an internalization of the
cause of the voices into the individual (as it happens for some psychiatric disorders)—
and, indeed, it sporadically appears in literature as such (Eguchi 1991; Matsuoka
1991), it did not appear during my fieldwork at Kenmi shrine. This point needs further
investigation.
Seeing presences seems to mark the borderline between spirits perceived as external
or internal. Yet, this is not related to seeing itself but, rather, to the rest of the symptoms
with which such experience was entangled: if it happens in specific places, together
with feelings associated to external perceptions, the presence seems to be perceived as
external and “stays” in place. When seeing is entangled with misfortunes or accidents
(such as Case 1) it can become a symptom of attachment. In this case, the seen entities
were still perceived as external, but the cause of the seeing was internal and “brought
home” from outside. Moreover, the attached entity was perceived as “other” to the self,
though internalized to a certain extent.
Specific moods and emotions, socially perceived as “bad,” were also symptoms of
attachment (Case 2). In this case, feelings usually conceived as internal to the self, were
perceived as caused by an internalized external presence, particularly when entangled
with other misfortunes. Furthermore, individual skills of feeling spirits and being
affected by them (reikan) were also central in the enmeshing of the symptom and the
creation of the modalities of interactions with spirits.
All these different experiences point at the construction of different “extended
selves” and personhoods that emerge through experience and need to be further
investigated, possibly also from a comparative perspective. Moreover, the interplay
between what is experienced as internal or external, self and other, also seems to
emerge as a consequence of the modalities of entanglement of different feelings with
other symptoms. There is the need for further investigations in this direction, in order
to understand the experiences and the dangers of “bringing spirits home,” to “come
back haunted” from somewhere, or to be “hounded” by the dog-god.
126
8
The Spirit(s) of Modern Japanese Fiction

Rebecca Suter
Introduction: The Fantastic Hesitation
In his groundbreaking structural analysis of the modern fantasy genre, Tzvetan

Todorov defined as fantastic texts those that deal with mysterious events and offer the
reader both a logical and a magical interpretation of their development. In his own
words:
In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils,
sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the
laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt
for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses,
of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world then remain what they are;
or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then
this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us […] The fantastic occupies the
duration of this uncertainty. (Todorov [1970] 1975: 25)
In his analysis, Todorov differentiates the fantastic from two other cognate literary
modes, which he calls the uncanny (étrange) and the marvelous (merveilleux). While
these modes share some of the ambiguity of the fantastic, in the uncanny mode the
narrative provides a rational justification for the events, while in the marvelous mode
it proposes a supernatural explanation, imposing on the reader a greater degree of
suspension of disbelief. In the fantastic genre, on the other hand, the contradiction
between a rational and a supernatural explanation of the events, and the tension between
real and unreal interpretations of the fictional world, are never resolved (41–44).
Another theory of fantasy, which focuses more specifically on its role in modern
society, was proposed by Rosemary Jackson, who connected the rise of the fantastic
genre in literature to the secularization of culture in modern Europe. Building on
Jean-Paul Sartre’s “defence of fantasy as a perennial form coming into its own in
the secularized, materialistic world of modern capitalism,” Jackson argues that
while in premodern literatures the mysterious aspects of human experience are
explained by resorting to the idea of sacred and divine, when a culture becomes
laicized the inexplicable shifts into the sphere of the fantastic (Jackson 1981: 17–18;
Sartre 1947: 59–60). If fantastical interpretations of the things we don’t understand

are therefore, in a way, the new face of religious justifications, there is a significant
difference between the two: a religious explanation provides a form of reassurance
and offers certainties grounded in faith, whereas fantastic literature, by leaving the
inexplicable unexplained and resting on an unresolved hesitation between rational
and supernatural explanations of events, ultimately has a far more unsettling effect
(Jackson 1981: 18–19; Suter 2016: 61).
This unsettling effect in Jackson’s view has the potential to make the fantastic a
“literature of subversion.” At the same time, it can also serve to “re-confirm institutional
order by supplying a vicarious fulfilment of desire and neutralizing an urge towards
transgression,” satisfying the need for change through entirely fictional means and
thus becoming an impediment to, rather than an impulse for, social and political
change (Jackson 1981: 72). In this sense, too, the fantastic is an inherently ambivalent
genre, which can invite a critical perspective on social norms, or on the contrary can
contribute to reinforcing the prevailing values of a society by providing an outlet for
criticism and dissent that remain safely in a separate sphere and do not affect actual
society. Both the formal and the ideological ambiguity of fantasy are evident in modern
Japanese literature.
Most literary histories of Japan see the birth of a European-style realist novelistic
tradition as the most significant features of the literary panorama of the Meiji
(1868–1911) and Taishō (1912–1926) periods. Undoubtedly, the Meiji-period
“modernization/Westernization” of Japan had a significant impact on the field of
literature, resulting in the birth of a modern form of prose fiction, and the introduction
of realistic modes of representation was at the core of this change. At the same time,
however, this period also saw a flourishing of fantastic literature, often written by
the same authors who helped create the new realist novel. Fantasy had always been a
relevant component of the Japanese literary tradition, from foundational mythologies
such as the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, eighth century) and Nihon shoki
(Chronicles of Japan, 720) to collections of ghost stories such as Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu
monogatari (Tales of Rain and Moon, 1667), but in the modern era the genre acquired
a different connotation. The spirits of modern Japanese literature played an important
role as an instrument to reflect critically on, and come to terms with, the technological,
social, and political transformations brought about by modernization.
This chapter examines the appearance of spirits in modern Japanese fiction. It does
not aim to produce a comprehensive picture of Japanese literary ghosts. Its purpose
is to reflect broadly on the function of spirits and the supernatural realm in modern
Japanese literature through close reading of a few select case studies, and to offer some
hypotheses as to the reasons for the widespread presence of spirits in modern Japanese
fiction. In selecting my case studies, rather than looking at horror and ghost stories
such as those of Edogawa Ranpo or Suzuki Kōji, where the presence of spirits is to an
extent simply the product of genre conventions, I will examine the portrayal of spirits
by three mainstream modern Japanese literary author: Natsume Sōseki, Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke, and Murakami Haruki. I will focus on three examples of supernatural
spirits: yūrei (幽霊, ghosts), yōkai (妖怪, spirits), and a third, more diffuse category
that I will call, after Murakami, achiragawa (the other side). There are of course many
The Spirit(s) of Modern Japanese Fiction 129
other spirits in Japanese literature, such as rei (霊, souls), obake and bakemono (お化け
and 化け物, ghouls), gaki (餓鬼, hungry ghosts), gosuto and supirittsu (the Japanized
versions of the English terms ghosts and spirits, respectively), and so forth. I chose
to focus on the aforementioned three because in my view they best exemplify the
hesitation and ambiguity that Todorov and Jackson see as the core of literature’s social
engagement through the use of the supernatural, and by extension represent well the
way in which the “spirits of modern Japanese fiction” reflect and affect the “spirit of
modern Japanese fiction.”
Natsume Sōseki’s Dreams: Ghosts of Personal or National Past?
In her analysis of modern Japanese fantasy, Susan Napier argues that in Meiji-period
literary works, ghosts often function as a symbol of Japanese tradition, which had been
killed by advancing modernity but kept coming back to haunt the present. In Napier’s
view, the literary trope of the modern ghost is derived from premodern literary and
theatrical antecedents, such as the ghosts of dead warriors in Nō theatre, or those of
revengeful women in the monogatari genre, but adds new meanings and functions to
it that more closely reflect the spirit of its time (Napier 1996: 2–3).
The premodern literary and theatrical trope of the ghost, often called yūrei
(幽霊), refers to the soul or spirit (rei 霊) of a dead human being, who retains a strong
attachment to life, be it regret or revengefulness, which prevents him or her from being
able to fully leave this world. In this tradition, the ancestral souls of individuals that
have died peacefully are seen as a comforting presence, whereas yūrei are perceived
and portrayed as harmful and disquieting because of their liminal position in-between
life and death. Modern fictional ghosts retain the same element of ambiguity but
add further layers of complexity. As Napier notes, in modern Japanese literature the
vengeful and the pathetic ghost appear “not only as reminders of a personal past but
as reminders of Japanese history as well” (Napier 1996: 95). Just as it is not always
possible to identify whether modern ghosts belong to this world or the other world,
and whether they are reminders of a personal past or reminders of Japanese history, it
is often unclear whether they are frightening or comforting, aiming to help or to harm,
underscoring the fantastic hesitation and its unsettling power.
A good example of these multiple ambiguities of the modern literary ghost is Natsume
Sōseki’s short story “The Dream of the Third Night.” The text is part of a collection of
ten short stories entitled Yume jūya, “Ten Nights of Dreams,” serialized in the daily
newspaper Asahi Shinbun in 1908. From its very title, the collection problematizes
the relationship between reality and fiction, as it is nowhere clearly stated whether
these were actual dreams that the author saw in his sleep, entirely fictional stories,
or something in between. Furthermore, if the reader takes these stories to be actual
dreams, their reality status is also complex. If we interpret the narratives as projections
of the dreamer’s unconscious mind, should we see this as a random recombination of
memories, or as an act of creation of the sleeping author’s literary imagination? The
role of dreams as windows into the unconscious mind was a particularly sensitive issue
at the time the story was published, considering that Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking
work on the topic, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published less than a decade
before, in 1899 (for a discussion of Sōseki and Freud see Ōhashi 2004: 43–46).
In the text, the first-person narrator/dreamer is carrying a six-year-old child on
his back, and, in the fashion of dreams, he knows, without knowing how he knows
it, that the child is his son and that he is blind. Despite his blindness, the boy seems
to be able to see things, as well as to read the narrator’s mind. Feeling more and more
uncomfortable carrying this spooky creature on his back, the narrator would like to
drop him off somewhere, but the boy guesses his intention and cautions him against
it, saying that this is all part of a larger plan that he has to follow and that he will soon
appreciate the reason why.
“You’ll understand when we get a little farther. It was a night just like this,” he
said on my back, as if muttering to himself.
“What was?” I asked out loud.
“You know what, don’t you,” the child answered with a sneer.1
Again in a dreamlike fashion, the narrator vaguely feels as though he knows what the
boy is talking about, yet is afraid of finding out what his ominous words mean. He
resolves to dispose of the boy before he understands too much, but for some reason is
unable to do so. As they reach a clearing in the woods, the child finally reveals that he
is the ghost of a man that the narrator had killed a hundred years before:
“Father, it was at that cedar’s roots there, wasn’t it?”

Without thinking, I replied, “Yes, it was.”
I think it was 1808, the year of the Dragon.
Of course, it was 1808, I thought.
“Today it’s been exactly one hundred years since you killed me.”
As I heard those words, the realization that a hundred years ago, in the year of
the Dragon, on a dark night like this, by the roots of a cedar, I had murdered a
blind man burst into my mind. And as soon as I started to become aware that I
was a murderer, the child on my back suddenly grew as heavy as a stone Jizō statue.
The child is thus revealed to be a ghost from a distant past, a reminder of historical
memory. At the same time, as testified by his calling the narrator “father,” until the end
he also remains the narrator’s child, and his second identity does not fully supersede the
first one. Finally, as a character in the narrator’s dream, the child can also be interpreted
as a projection of the dreamer’s unconscious, a part of the narrator’s psyche. Impossible
to pin down to a single explanation or interpretation, the child ghost in the dream is an
uncanny and unsettling presence.
While scholars have variously tried to connect this to Sōseki’s own psychological
profile (Doi 1984; Gomibuchi and Magari 2017), one of the most interesting
interpretations of the story can be found in a film adaptation made in 2007. This is
part of a series of ten short movies, made by eleven emerging and established directors
based on the ten stories in the Yume jūya collection. The adaptation of the “Dream of
the Third Night” was directed by Shimizu Takashi, a director internationally renowned
for the creation of the Juon (translated into English as The Grudge, 2000–2016) horror
movie franchise. In the film, the director makes choices that resolve some of the
underdetermined aspects of the literary text, collapsing the fantastic hesitation into
a single interpretation and locating the text in what Todorov would describe as the
uncanny (étrange) mode, finally settling for a rational, psychoanalytical explanation of
the events. At the same time, the film version introduces other elements of ambiguity
that make the story unsettling to the viewer in different ways, thus recuperating the
fantastic hesitation of the original.
The film frames the story as an actual dream of Sōseki’s. It opens with the caption
“Summer 1908, Natsume Sōseki’s residence, Waseda Minami-chō,” and an image of
the author as a thirty-something man lying on tatami mats in a summer kimono,
surrounded by books and newspapers. This is followed by a caption, in white characters
over a black screen with an old-fashioned ornate frame, in the style of early twentieth-
century silent movies, with the opening line of the story, “konna yume o mita” (I had
this dream). We then see a close-up shot of ruled paper with the title of the collection,
Yume jūya, the title of the story, “San’ya,” and the opening line, “Konna yume o mita.”
A fountain pen lies over the blank section of the paper, and we see a glimpse of the
author’s hand resting idly next to it.
The first half of the short movie consists of domestic scenes at the Natsume
residence, as the protagonist tries to write surrounded by his noisy children, and his
pregnant wife asks him to be patient with them, as they are “only kids.” Sōseki looks
at one of his young daughters, and thinks that it is hard to believe that she is a human
being (onaji ikimono to wa totemo omoenai). Small details such as the paper peeling
off the shōji screens at the windows, the screams of the children running after a street
seller of ice, and the crying of the youngest baby off-screen give an overall impression
of domestic tension and distress, heightened by the summer heat.
Things are further complicated by hints at Sōseki’s anxiety toward his wife’s current
pregnancy. Still holding the daughter in his lap and sitting at his desk, he dozes off
and dreams of a woman walking into the sea after telling him that she feels unable to
give birth to her child. This is followed by another silent movie-like framed caption
explaining to the viewer that Sōseki’s wife had miscarried their first child, and
attempted suicide during her second pregnancy as a result of noiroze (neurosis). Back
in the diegesis, the wife reassures Sōseki that she feels optimistic about her current
pregnancy. Later that night, however, she tells him about an unsettling episode from
childhood, when she accidentally broke off the head of a Jizō statue while playing near
her home, and informs him that she had been dreaming about that statue at the time
of her miscarriage, and the dreams have come back. The scene transitions seamlessly
into the “dream of the third night.”
Both the first-person narrative and the dialogues with the blind child in this
section replicate almost verbatim the written text. There are, however, two significant
differences in the plot. First, when the narrator and the blind boy reach a crossroads,
in the film this is marked not by a simple stone, like in the short story, but by six Jizō
statues, one of which has a broken head. Second, in the climactic final scene, the boy
reveals that he is someone the narrator killed not in 1808, but in 1880, also the year of
the Dragon. The ghost of national past killed by modernity that we had found in the
original story becomes here a ghost from the author’s personal past. Specifically, the
narrator realizes that, in that same spot, twenty-eight years before, he had killed “mada
kodomo datta watashi,” his own childhood self.
The film thus seems to settle for a clear-cut psychoanalytical interpretation of
the dream: the author’s irritation at his children is the result of his own problematic
relationship with his childhood past, and this is expressed in his dream in the form of
an ominous child that conflates in one person his son and his past self. Furthermore,
the statue of Jizō, the god protector of miscarried children, is a projection of the author’s
anxiety about his wife’s pregnancy and its effect on her mental health. The ambiguity
and fantastic hesitation introduced in the original story by the hundred-year-old
memory of the protagonist are seemingly resolved here in a more linear narrative
where each oneiric element can be straightforwardly connected to its psychological
source.
The black and white caption panels, however, tell a parallel story that reintroduces
in a different guise the fantastic hesitation. The movie ends with another silent caption
that informs the viewers that Sōseki’s sixth child was born safely in December 1908,
but his seventh child, born one year after, died at age one in circumstances that “remain
mysterious to this day.” We are then presented with another view of the dream, not as
an expression of unconscious thoughts but as a message from a supernatural realm
about a future tragedy, or even possibly as an “event” that actually caused that future
tragedy. Like in the fantastic texts described by Todorov, the film does not settle for
either a rational explanation of the blind child and the Jizō as a projection of guilt and
anxiety, respectively, or a supernatural one that sees the same two elements as spirits
from another world entering our own, in the tradition of horror movies such as the
American film A Nightmare in Elm Street (1984) or Shimizu’s own Juon (2003). While
the first captions lure us into a false sense of rationalizing security, the last one throws
us back in the space of hesitation that characterizes the “pure fantastic.” Much like in
the modern European novels analyzed by Jackson, the spirits of the dream make the
text an example of fantasy as a “literature of subversion.” In this sense, the reference to
Jizō in both the original and the movie adaptation is also significant, as it connects the
ghost to another important category of spirits that abound in modern literature, those
of traditional folklore. I will focus on these in the next section.
Akutagawa’s yōkai: Metafiction or Hallucination?
In the Meiji period, in parallel to the interest in yūrei as symbols of the Japanese
past that had been killed by Westernization/modernization but continued to haunt
the present, there is also a widespread interest among literary authors in the spirits
of traditional folklore, yōkai. This is spurred by the emergence of minzokugaku,
folklore studies, in the works of scholars such as Yanagita Kunio. Such rediscovery
of traditional Japanese yōkai was part of a broader discourse advocating the recovery
of national traditions in response to the perceived loss of cultural identity resulting
from Meiji Westernization/modernization. What is most fascinating about Yanagita’s
approach to yōkai is that while in his works he examines legends about spirits from a
scholarly perspective, at the same time he takes the spirits at face value. Rather than
giving a cold, clinical analysis of local legends, Yanagita describes them on their own
terms, as part of everyday reality (Yanagita [1977] 2007; for a comprehensive and
thought-provoking analysis of Yanagita’s conceptualization of the spirit world and its
relation with modernity see Figal 1999). In this sense Yanagita’s works can be read
as examples of fantastic literature as described by Todorov: the reader is constantly
hesitating between a scientific and a magical interpretation of the texts.
One of the most famous modern literary appearances of yōkai is Akutagawa’s
short novel “Kappa,” published in 1927 and written in the months leading up to
the author’s suicide. The text tells the story of a journey to the land of kappa 河童,
spirits of traditional folklore, by a patient in a mental health institution, known as
Patient 23. The kappa of the story share some of the features of the traditional yōkai of
Japanese folklore: about one meter tall, they have humanlike bodies, beaks instead of
mouths, webbed hands and feet, and the characteristic round saucer on top their head,
surrounded by a crown of short hair (Akutagawa [1927] 1997: 324). At the same time,
they are quite different from their traditional counterparts. Rather than living in rivers
and forests at the margins of the world inhabited by humans, Akutagawa’s kappa have
formed a complex social organization, with its own institutional, religious, economic,
and family structures, all of which are an ostensible satire of modern Japanese society.
The novel is based on the European tradition of dystopian fiction, where a traveler
journeys to a past, future, or parallel world and provides a detailed account of its
political and social system as a way to reflect critically on contemporary reality. Thus,
for example, we learn that the kappa’s solution to the problem of unemployment
that results from the mechanization of labor is to slaughter redundant kappa factory
workers and turn them into meat for the consumption of other kappa citizens, a fairly
transparent critique of the callousness of 1920s Japan’s capitalist economy (338–339).
When visiting the temple of the kappa religion, called Quemoocha in kappa language
and described by the narrator as kindaikyō 近代教 or seikatsukyō 生活教 (translated
by Bownas as Modernism and Viverism, respectively; Akutagawa [1927] 1997: 364,
[1927] 1970: 116), the narrator is shown a series of portraits of the saints worshipped
by the kappa, and discovers that they are all artists and philosophers from Europe, such
as Strindberg, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Wagner, a parody of modern Japan’s xenophilia.
Akutagawa’s kappa thus appear to be closer to fully fictional, parodic characters like
Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians than to the liminal spirits envisaged by Yanagita.
However, Akutagawa’s choice to populate his dystopia with these well-known
Japanese mythical figures, rather than completely invented ones, is worthy of further
attention. On one hand, this decision can be interpreted as a reflection of Akutagawa’s
contemporaneous discussion with Yanagita and Kikuchi Kan about the political
meanings and uses of Japanese folklore (Yanagita 1964: 259, cited in Figal 1999: 32).
On the other hand, the choice of kappa as inhabitants of the dystopian world might
be related to their liminal nature, which makes them an embodiment of the ambiguity
that characterizes much of modern Japanese fiction. Like other yōkai, the kappa of
Japanese folklore are ambiguous figures that can be harmful or helpful depending on
the situation; they are known as tricksters that lure humans and animals into rivers
causing them to drown, but also as endowed with medical skills that they can put in the
service of those same humans and animals. It is never entirely clear whether they are
good or evil, real or unreal. Akutagawa’s text retains the kappa’s ambiguity and expands
on it by deploying narrative strategies that emphasize fantastic hesitation.
In particular, the fact that the story is framed by an external narrator as the account
of a madman gives an ironic and unsettling dimension to its claim to truth, especially
since Patient 23 seems to share many traits with the author himself. The opening
section of the novel is especially interesting to analyze in this respect.
This is the story of Patient 23 in one of our mental facilities. He would tell his story
whenever he can persuade anyone to listen. He must be over thirty, yet at first
glance he seems a much younger madman. The experiences of the first half of his
life […] no, this is not relevant. He would hug his knees, and occasionally stare out
the window, beyond where, through the iron fence, you could see a bare oak tree
spread its black branches towards the cloudy sky. He talked at length to me and Dr.
S from the hospital […] I have tried to report his story just like he told it. If anyone
is dissatisfied with my version, they can just go ask S hospital in xxx village on the
outskirts of Tokyo. Patient 23, looking much younger than his age, will bow his
head and gesture towards the hard chair. Then, smiling gently, he will quietly retell
his story. (Akutagawa [1927] 1997: 317–318)2
The introduction highlights the ambiguous reality status of the text. On one hand,
the external narrator seems to emphasize the factuality of the story by resorting to
all the conventional markers of the modern realist novel. The reader is encouraged
to verify for him or herself the details of the tale from the protagonist, and is assured
that Patient 23 will retell it in exactly the same way as he has done countless times
before. The reference to the presence of another witness, a doctor no less, seems to
confer further authoritativeness to the external narrator’s account. On the other hand,
the extradiegetic omniscient narrator only appears in the first page of the novel, then
withdraws quietly to leave the stage entirely to Patient 23 until the end of the novel. As
a result, Patient 23 acquires greater narrative authority; in fact, the entire story is told
by him in the first person, and the reader has access to the world of kappa exclusively
through his perspective. This has the effect of enhancing the fantastic ambiguity and
hesitation of the text.
Furthermore, several details in the initial passage quoted above lead the reader to
identify the author not with the external narrator, as would be common in texts that
use this kind of narrative framework, but with Patient 23. In particular, the expression
“the first half of his life” (kare no hansei 彼の半生) reminds the reader of what is
arguably Akutagawa’s most autobiographical text, the short story “Daidōji Shinsuke no
hansei” (The Early Life of Daidōji Shinsuke, 1925). The story is commonly interpreted
as a fictionalized account of Akutagawa’s youth; at the same time, the text is more the
product of literary imagination than a faithful account of the author’s life, as many
of the details of Shinsuke’s existence, such as a childhood plagued by “the poverty of
the lower middle class, who must continually agonize over keeping up appearances”
(Akutagawa [1925] 2006: 151) or his experience of bullying at school, contrast with
Akutagawa’s biographical data as we know it. The complexity of the relationship
between fiction and reality is addressed in the text itself, as the narrator notes that
Shinsuke “quite naturally learned everything he knew from books—or at least there
was nothing he knew that didn’t owe something to books. He did not observe people
on the street to learn about life but rather sought to learn about life in books in order
to observe people on the streets” (158).
Akutagawa’s complex take on the relationship between literature and reality,
and the reference to his own pseudo-autobiographical work in the introduction to
“Kappa,” invite reflection on the choice of a psychiatric patient as a narrator. According
to his diaries and letters, at the time of writing “Kappa” Akutagawa was struggling
with physical ailments, particularly stomach pains, as well as what we would today
categorize as mental illness. Komashaku Kimi interpreted another work from the same
period, “Haguruma” (Spinning Gears, 1927), a short novel replete with hallucinatory
sequences, as a literal representation of Akutagawa’s own psychiatric symptoms in the
months leading to his suicide (Komashaku 1972: 164–165). If the kappa in “Kappa” are
the hallucinations of Patient 23, should the story be read as another expression of the
author’s psychological suffering? Or are the kappa to be interpreted, on the diegetic
level, as actual creatures that the narrator saw with his own eyes, suspending our
disbelief and choosing a “marvelous” reading of the story? The text does not settle for
either a supernatural or a rational interpretation of the events, preserving its fantastic
hesitation.
Murakami Haruki’s Achiragawa: Only Connect
My final example is the use of the supernatural by one of Japan’s most popular and
most controversial contemporary authors, Murakami Haruki. Murakami is known for
combining realistic and fantastical modes of storytelling. Matthew Strecher pointed
out already in the late 1990s that a recurrent feature of Murakami’s fiction is the way
in which “a realistic narrative setting is created, then disrupted, sometimes mildly,
sometimes violently, by the bizarre or the magical” (Strecher 1999: 267). Strecher
more recently persuasively argued that the engagement with the supernatural, or what
he defined as the “metaphysical realm,” lies at the very core of Murakami’s fiction
(Strecher 2014). Indeed, the oscillation between realism and fantasy has, if anything,
increased in Murakami’s more recent works, particularly novels like 1Q84 (2009–2010)
and the most recent at the time of writing this chapter, Kishidanchōgoroshi: Killing
Commendatore (2017).
Murakami famously described this metaphysical realm as achiragawa あちら側,
that side or the “other world,” a space separate from yet connected to kochiragawa, this
side or consensus reality. In Murakami’s fiction this other world often functions as the
place where characters are able to get in touch with their deeper feelings and resolve
their difficult relationships with others. We find some version of achiragawa in almost
all of Murakami’s novels: in the second and third book of what is described as the “Rat
Trilogy,” Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1982) and Dansu dansu dansu
(Dance Dance Dance, 1988), it is a parallel universe that can only be accessed through a
magic floor in a hotel in Sapporo, where the narrator meets a spirit-like character called
the “Sheep Professor” who helps him solve the case of a magical sheep that possesses
people. In Nejimakidori no kuronikuru (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1994–1995) it is
a space that the narrator accesses through a well in his neighbor’s backyard, where he
looks for his disappeared wife and tries to address the problems in their relationship.
In Umibe no Kafuka (Kafka on the Shore, 2002), achiragawa is accessed through a forest
in Shikoku where some characters have left half of their soul/mind. 1Q84 is almost
entirely set in the parallel reality, which can be distinguished from kochiragawa by the
presence of a second, smaller, greenish moon in the sky.
The nature and function of achiragawa are closely related to Murakami’s view of his
role as a literary author. The author explained this through the metaphor of the human
mind as a house with several floors, each corresponding to a different layer of inner
and outer reality:
I think of human existence as being like a two-story house. On the first floor
people gather together to take their meals, watch television, and talk. The second
floor contains private chambers, bedrooms where people go to read books, listen
to music by themselves, and so on. Then there is a basement; this is a special place,
and there are a number of things stored here. We don’t use this room much in our
daily life, but sometimes we come in, vaguely hang around the place. Then, my
thought is that underneath that basement room is yet another basement room.
This one has a very special door, very difficult to figure out, and normally you can’t
get in there—some people never get in at all. […] You go in, wander about in the
darkness, and experience things there you wouldn’t see in the normal parts of the
house. You connect with your past there, because you have entered into your own
soul. But then you come back. If you stay over there for long you can never get
back to reality. My sense is that a novelist is someone who can consciously do that
sort of thing. (Murakami, “Rongu intābyū: Umibe no Kafuka wo kataruロングイ
ンタービュー：海辺のカフカを語る” [2002], cited in Strecher 2014: 21)
If the quote sounds familiar, it is probably because, although Murakami does not
overtly cite the passage as an inspiration, it is strikingly similar to a well-known dream
from 1909 described by Carl Gustav Jung, who also uses it as a metaphor for the layered
structured of the mind:
I was in a house that I did not know, which had two stories. It was “My House.” I
found myself in the upper story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine
old pieces in rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings.
I wondered that this should be my house, and thought, “Not bad.” But then it
occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. Descending
the stairs, I reached the ground floor. There everything was much older, and I
realized that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth
century. The furnishings were medieval; the floors were of red brick. Everywhere
it was rather dark. I went from one room to another, thinking, “now I really must
explore the whole house.” I came upon a heavy door, and opened it. Beyond it, I
discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in
the mortar. As soon as I saw this I knew that the walls dated from Roman times.
My interest was by now intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone
slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted,
and I again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down into the depths.
These, too, I descended, and entered a low cave cut into the rock. Thick dust lay
on the floor, and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains
of a primitive culture. I discovered two broken skulls, obviously very old and half
disintegrated. Then I awoke. (Jung [1962] 1989: 158)
Jung had the dream during a week-long journey with Sigmund Freud, and the two
famously discussed its meaning in light of Freud’s theory on the interpretation of
dreams and his idea of the layered structure of the human mind. Fifty years later,
however, Jung returned to the dream and interpreted it in a different way, as a reflection
not of his own subconscious fears or desires, but of his overall view of the human
psyche as transcending individuality, thus giving the spaces of the dream a more literal
meaning as a parallel reality:
It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche—that
is to say, of my then state of consciousness, with hitherto unconscious additions.
Consciousness was represented by the salon. It had an inhabited atmosphere, in
spite of its antiquated style.
The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went,
the more alien and the darker the scene came. In the cave, I discovered remains of
a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself—a world
which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness […] The dream
pointed out that there were further reaches to the state of consciousness […]
Certain questions had been much on my mind during the days preceding this
dream. They were: On what premises is Freudian psychology founded? What is the
relationship of its almost exclusive personalism to general historical assumptions?
My dream was giving me the answer. It obviously pointed to the foundations of
cultural history—a history of successive layers of consciousness.
My dream thus constituted a kind of structural diagram of the human psyche; it
postulated something of an altogether impersonal nature underlying that psyche.
It “clicked,” as the English have it—and the dream became for me a guiding image.
This was my first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche. (Jung
[1962] 1989: 159)
Like Jung half a century before him, Murakami sees achiragawa as an additional
dimension to the Freudian idea of the conscious and unconscious mind. In Murakami’s
house metaphor, this deeper layer of the mind corresponds to the plumbing system,
which connects the house to other houses running deep underneath. Achiragawa is
thus both a space internal to the individual mind and an interpersonal space, separate
from the above-ground “reality” of each individual/house but connected to all of them.
In Murakami’s novels, the boundaries between kochiragawa and achiragawa are often
rendered porous and typically the turning point of the narrative, or the explanation for
its mystery occurs when characters move between the two worlds. This passage is both
necessary and disturbing, and the experience of journeying into achiragawa is often
portrayed in an unsettling manner. Similar to the other two examples I analyzed, the
novels rely on a fantastic hesitation and ambiguity to represent this “other world,” not
as a separate realm that we can easily experience in a contained way to then return to
our reality but as a threat to consensus reality.
Kishidanchōgoroshi: Killing Commendatore is a good example of these dynamics.
The novel has all the signature features of Murakami’s fiction. The story begins as the
nameless narrator, watashi (the polite word for I), a Tokyo painter in his mid-thirties,
is suddenly abandoned by his wife, an event that marks the beginning of a series of
unusual developments in his life. After traveling alone for several weeks around the
Hokkaidō and Tōhoku regions, an old friend offers watashi the opportunity to house-
sit for his father, a famous painter named Amada Motohiko, who is now suffering from
Alzheimer’s disease and living in an aged care facility on Izu peninsula.
After graduating from art school, watashi had pursued a relatively successful
career as a painter of oil portraits, particularly for businessmen. His ability to paint
his clients’ portrait from memory after a single meeting, without asking them to sit for
long posing sessions, made him particularly popular in the field. But after being left
by his wife, watashi feels unable to continue in this line of work, and instead takes up
a part-time job as a drawing teacher at the community center near Amada’s villa, with
the intention of returning to more serious artistic pursuits in his spare time. However,
he spends the first months sitting around in Amada’s house, mostly listening to his
collection of vinyl records of classical music, unable to paint anything. After a hundred
pages where very little happens, the novel develops along three loosely interrelated
plotlines; in each case, the plot is (slowly) advanced both by the narrator’s discovery,
and creation, of paintings, and by his encounters with the supernatural.
The first turning point coincides with the narrator’s discovery of a painting, the
“Killing Commendatore” of the title, hidden in the attic of Amada’s house. The narrator
considers it to be one of the painter’s most stunning works and is puzzled by the
realization that the painting has never been disclosed to the public. It portrays a scene
from the beginning of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, namely Don Giovanni’s murder
of Donna Anna’s father, known as the Commendatore (an Italian title equivalent to
the English “Knight Commander”). However, the scene is painted in Nihonga style,
and the characters are all dressed as Japanese people from the Asuka period (from the
mid-to-late sixth century to the year 710). The narrator hangs the painting in Amada’s
studio and spends long hours looking at it, feeling that it must have held some special
significance for its author. As he learns more about Amada, watashi becomes convinced
that the painting must be a metaphorical representation of an obscure period during
Amada’s youth in Vienna, when he became involved in a failed anti-Nazi conspiracy
and was hastily repatriated as a result. However, since there is no record of the events
and Amada is now at an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease, there is no way for
watashi to obtain more accurate information about either the painting or the episode
that possibly inspired it.
The narrator’s attempts at historical and psychological interpretation of the painting
are paralleled by its supernatural evolution. Not long after discovering the painting, the
narrator begins to hear the sound of a bell ringing at night. This coincides with the
second turning point of the story, the request for a portrait by a very wealthy man
living in the area, called Wataru Menshiki. While watashi had decided to retire from
painting portraits on demand, Menshiki’s astoundingly generous financial offer and
his mysterious personality convince him to make an exception. Creating the painting,
which has much greater artistic value than the conventional realistic portraits he had
previously done, finally allows the narrator to overcome his “painter’s block,” and he
begins to sketch two more artworks for himself.
Halfway through the making of the portrait, Menshiki helps watashi locate the
source of the mysterious sound in a point underground, underneath a stone shrine on
Amada’s property. While the narrator is reassured by the fact that Menshiki, too, hears
the mysterious sound, he is also further spooked by the realization that the sound is
real, not a product of his imagination:
While this reassured me that I was not crazy, at the same time Menshiki’s words
had given realness to this uncanny event, and as a result I had to admit that a
small tear had appeared in the seams of reality. (Murakami 2017, vol. 1: 224; my
translation)
On his part, Menshiki is intrigued rather than scared by the uncanny sound. He tells
watashi that he has experienced many inexplicable things in his life (vol. 1: 231) and
offers to help him remove the heavy stones of the shrine to find out what produces
the sound. What they uncover is a two-meter-deep, three-meter large round hole,
completely empty except for an old, small iron bell. When they try to shake it, they
realize that the bell was, indeed, the source of the sound: but who could have been
ringing it? It was, as it turns out, a spirit who, freed from its stone prison, appears to
watashi in the form of the Commendatore of the painting, a sixty-centimeter-tall old
man in Asuka period dress.
Initially watashi thinks this must be a dream (vol. 1: 355), but several practical
effects of Commendatore’s presence, such as objects being moved in the otherwise
empty house, as well as Commendatore’s knowledge of things that watashi himself
does not know, frame the character as a “real spirit.” Commendatore introduces
himself as an “idea” and tells watashi that he can take visible form for limited
periods, as he promptly does over the next days, offering watashi cryptic words
of wisdom on a variety of topics. Eventually, the narrator leads Commendatore to
Amada’s aged care facility and, upon his request, murders him under the painter’s
eyes, an act which seems to enable Amada to find peace with his past and finally
pass away.
Meanwhile, watashi completes the portrait of Menshiki, who is very pleased with the
result and makes another request, to be compensated just as generously as the first one:
to paint the portrait of a thirteen-year-old girl, Akigawa Marie, that Menshiki believes
might be his daughter. While he could resort to a DNA test to ascertain this, Menshiki
tells the narrator that he has chosen not to do so because he “prefers the fluctuations of
possibility to the immobility of truth” (vol. 1: 420), another apt metaphor for the appeal
of the fantastic hesitation.
Marie also lives in the area and attends watashi’s afternoon drawing classes after
school. Highly intelligent and slightly sociopathic, Marie is reminiscent of many of
Murakami’s novels’ teenage girl characters, like May Kasahara in The Wind-up Bird
Chronicle or Fukaeri in 1Q84. Predictably, Marie becomes very close to the narrator,
confiding in him her thoughts, including the suspicion that Menshiki might be spying
on her from his house across the valley. Halfway through the making of the portrait,
Marie mysteriously disappears and is only found after the narrator, with the help of
Commendatore and two other characters from the painting, journeys to achiragawa
through a “tunnel of metaphors” and re-emerges in the two-meter-deep hole near his
house, where he is found and rescued by Menshiki. The journey is described as both
physically and psychologically challenging, as watashi walks through a desert space
that has no smells, drinks magical water that turns him into “something made of the
same substance of that place” (vol 2: 351), and crawls through an increasingly narrow
tunnel while fighting “double metaphors” that are trying to drive him insane.
Achiragawa thus plays a central role in the novel, as a plot driver, as a source of
reflection for the characters, and as a way for them to connect to each other. The bond
between the narrator and Marie is consolidated by the fact that she, too, is able to
see Commendatore (vol. 2: 442). Menshiki and the narrator share the experience of
finding the underground hole and knowing that there is something inexplicable about
it, and that enables them to find a connection with each other. When Marie disappears,
watashi and Menshiki immediately agree that it would be better not to involve the
police, because if they do, they will have to explain things that are clearly supernatural,
and trouble will ensue. The social bond between the main characters in the story is
based on their shared belief in the supernatural and their shared experience of it.
Furthermore, journeying into achiragawa is what enables the narrator to bring
Marie back, bringing that plotline to a happy conclusion. At the same time, the text
also offers a rational explanation for her disappearance and reappearance. In the last
chapters of the novel, Marie confesses to watashi that for the four days in which she
was missing, she was hiding in Menshiki’s house, which she had sneaked into in order
to find out whether he was spying on her and why. However, the rational explanation
also bleeds into a supernatural one: Marie tells watashi that Commendatore manifested
himself to her in Menshiki’s house, and helped her hide for four full days in an unused
room feeding on emergency supplies of water and food stored in the basement for
disaster management, informing her of Menshiki’s movements so that she knew when
to lie still and when to access the supplies and the bathroom. The story thus constantly
oscillates between rational and supernatural explanations of the events and their
connection.
A third plotline that intersects with Amada/Commendatore’s and Menshiki/Marie’s
stories concerns the narrator and his wife, Yuzu, who has become pregnant after the
narrator, during his travels to Tōhoku, had a vivid dream of having sex with her in
their old apartment. While Yuzu has since started a relationship with another man,
she is convinced that the child cannot have been conceived with him, as she has always
been extremely careful with birth control. In the end, the narrator is able to repair
his relationship with Yuzu, and raises the daughter as his own, without disclosing his
dream to his wife. This plotline is mostly in the background of the main narrative,
which is dominated by Menshiki, Marie, Amada, and Commendatore. At the same

time, watashi’s relationship with Yuzu is also what opens and closes the whole novel,
and the narrator’s longing for her is repeatedly hinted at throughout the narrative,
reinforcing the sense of narrative closure generated by their eventual reconciliation.
But since in this case, too, an event that happens in achiragawa—a dream that felt
uncannily real—functions as a plot driver and as a narrative device that generates
ambiguity and hesitation, this closure feel less than definitive and less than reassuring,
ending the novel on a note of fantastic hesitation.
Conclusion
Published over the span of a century and varying significantly in length, style, and
critical reception, the three texts I discussed in this chapter are arguably quite different
in many respects. However, as I have shown through my analysis, they display a
remarkable consistency in their use of the supernatural, particularly the way in which
they all feature a fantastic hesitation between rational and supernatural, psychological
and spiritual, personal and political explanations of the events they portray. This
hesitation is multiplied by a number of elements of ambiguity in the texts, from the
moral complexity of the issues at stake to the liminal nature of the settings and characters
portrayed, which make the texts particularly rich and nuanced, open to multiple
interpretations, and relatable for readers on many different levels. In this hesitation
and ambiguity, I argue, lie both the entertainment value and the critical potential
of the supernatural in modern Japanese literature. For this reason, the fundamental
ambiguity of literary yūrei, yōkai, and achiragawa makes them an expression of the
“spirit” of modern Japan and, at the same time, turns them into effective means of
coming to terms with the anxieties of modernity through the literary medium.
142
9
Techno-Animism: Japanese Media Artists and

their Buddhist and Shinto Legacy
Mauro Arrighi
Introduction
The peculiar approach of Japanese media artists toward developing technologies might
be better understood by referring to what Masahiro Mori 森政弘 originally wrote in
1974:
From the Buddha’s viewpoint, there is no master-slave relationship between human

beings and machines. The two are fused together in an interlocking entity. Man
achieves dignity not by subjugating his mechanical inventions, but by recognizing
in machines and robots the same Buddha-nature that pervades his own inner self.
When he does that, he acquires the ability to design good machines and to operate
them for good and proper purposes. In this way harmony between human beings
and machines is achieved. (Mori 1989: 179–180)
In this chapter I argue that animism functions as one of the primary sources for the
newly evolving mediascape of Japan. I will explore this hypothesis by discussing
artworks that deal with animism from a practice-based perspective. My goal is to
analyze the historical and theoretical frameworks that inform Japanese media art; in
order to do that, I will be focusing on the influence of a diverse mix constituted by
religion, folklore, manga 漫画, anime アニメ, and otaku おたく/オタク subculture
on Japanese artists who create either narrative or interactive works mainly with the
aid of computers, software, sensors, and actuators. My assumption is that there
is a relationship between Shinto, what is currently understood as the indigenous
spirituality of the Japanese people, and Japanese contemporary art, in the form of
media art specifically. I will present as case studies the artworks of the following artists:
Shinto priest Tanahashi Nobuyuki 棚橋信之, AEO (Jō Kazuhiro 城一裕, Sawai Taeji 澤
井妙冶, and Yamatsuka Eye [Ai] 山塚アイ), Ogawa Hideaki 小川秀明, Tabei Masaru 田
部井勝, Yamakawa Kroiden Hisako 山川 K. 尚子, and Hayakawa Takahiro 早川貴泰.
I suggest that these artists represent the latest embodiment of contemporary Shinto
belief and practices. All these artists share the following traits: all their works situate
themselves at the convergence of Shinto, Buddhism, and Japanese folklore; they include
in their works elements borrowed from manga and anime; they often use the same
hardware and software (i.e., Arduino microcontrollers and Max software);1 and the
majority of them graduated from the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences
(Jōhō kagaku geijutsu daigakuin daigaku 情報科学芸術大学院大学 or IAMAS) or have
a connection with it.2
Anne Allison (2006) coined the term “techno-animism” to refer to the cultural
environment in which these practitioners operate; in her view, the Japanese mediascape
is an intermixture of ancient spirituality with the new digital and virtual media.
Allison describes Japan as a place where contemporary technology and commodities
are animated with spirits, recuperating older cultural traditions and infusing them
with New Age practices. In addition, techno-animism merges with posthumanism
in Japanese visual culture; as Steven Brown (2010) suggests, Japanese visual culture
(including art, design, anime, manga, and science fiction movies) today should be
understood in the context of posthumanism, which differs in its Japanese embodiment
from its Western counterpart. As Oliver Grau writes:
The history of technological visions is the history of our dreams, our vagaries,
and our errors. Media utopias fluctuate, often originating in a magical or occult
ambience. After the collapse of the twentieth century’s utopias, it is no coincidence
that religion and ethnic identity are once again coming to the fore and that the
most advanced media technology is also the projection screen for our utopian
visions. (Grau 2004: 291)
Historical and Theoretical Frameworks that Inform Japanese

Media Art
Japanese curators and art historians such as Moriyama Tomoe 森山朋絵, Kusahara
Machiko 草原真知子, and Yoshioka Hiroshi 吉岡洋 group together videogames, mobile
applications, manga, anime, digital art, video, feature animated movies, and interactive art
under the definition of media art when referring to Japanese artists and designers, who
may or may not make use of digital technologies (Hasegawa et al. 2007). In fact, while
“new media art” is implicitly understood as a form of expression based on computers and
relying on computers for its inception, creation, and distribution (now including also Bio-
Art), “media art” does not necessarily include computational technologies, and is often
narrative and not interactive.3 This is evident in the annual Japan Media Arts Festival,
organized by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs since 1997, which gives awards in
four categories: art (formerly called noninteractive digital art), entertainment (formerly
called interactive art; it includes video games, and websites), animation, and manga.4
The origin of media art in Japan can be traced back to the Osaka World Exposition
in 1970 (also known as Expo’70). Kusahara and Moriyama argue that Expo’70 has had
a tremendous impact on the collective psyche of the Japanese people and fostered the
creation of what will be later known as media art (Kusahara 1995). More specifically,
for H. P. Schwarz (2008), this event marked the beginning of Japanese artists’ interest in
cybernetics and digital creations. The main reference became the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion,
Techno-Animism 145
organized by the E.A.T. Group around Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg. Randall
Packer writes that the Pepsi Pavilion should be intended as a stepping stone in the
process of dissolving all traditional distinctions between performers, stage, set, and
audience (Shaw and Weibel 2003: 144).
Chronologically, the Japanese media artists I refer to in this chapter were born
between 1968 and 1988 and were students of the artists and engineers who were the
first to be influenced by Expo’70. As Cyrille-Paul Bertrand (2012) notes, the Pepsi
Pavilion expressed the creative tension between the union of art and science, and art
and technology, largely because it was designed and implemented by a group of artists
and engineers known as Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). E.A.T., originally
founded in 1967 by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, and artists Robert
Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, led to the creation of the Osaka Pepsi Pavilion in
collaboration with about eighty artists and engineers from Japan and the United States.
The immersive, kaleidoscopic, and kinetic experience they orchestrated left a mark in
contemporary Japanese art; this can be considered the beginning of media art in Japan.
However, the approach of Japanese media artists seems to differ from that of Western
authors. As Ueno Toshiya points out, “in Japan, media artists are generally not interested
in politics and especially not in Japanese politics. On the other hand, most of the leftist
intellectuals have never heard of media art or media activism” (quoted in Lovink 2004: 271).
Suzuki Nobuya at the 2006 Ogaki Biennale further explained the Japanese attitude as
follows: “In Japan today, media art seems cloistered, plagued by insecurity about how it
should relate to society at large. […] European artists prioritize the conceptual, whereas
one might say that ‘Asian’ element should be to emphasize procedural expression” (quoted
in Yoshioka 2006: 88). Indeed, Hans Belting notes regarding contemporary art:
A special case in today’s world art is the alliance of non-Western art with Western
media culture. This has created a meeting place for artists from different cultures,
who use ubiquitous technology of networking to produce works without reference
to place or time and to participate in joint artists’ events everywhere and at any
time. (Belting 2003: 69–70)
Japanese media art and the environment that comprises manga, anime, and videogames
are not assimilated in this process even though, as Belting writes, “Non-Western cultures
are retreating in a kind of countermovement into their own histories in order to rescue
a part of their identity” (69–70). It is my opinion, in fact, that what we witness in the
Japanese creative production is a process of rumination over traditional indigenous
motifs combined with American science-fiction themes of the fifties. Along these lines,
the interactive installations produced by Japanese media art studios such as Naked
Inc.5 teamLab,6 Rhizomatiks,7 and W0W Inc.8 can be better understood through the
perspective proposed by Daniel Bell, and especially the key-concept he calls “the eclipse of
distance,” defined as “the effort to achieve immediacy, impact, simultaneity, and sensation
by eliminating aesthetic and psychic distance. In diminishing aesthetic distance, one
annihilates contemplation and envelops the spectator in the experience” (Bell “Call to
Order” [1978] quoted in Harrison and Wood 2002: 1117). Daniel Bell in his seminal
article “Call to Order” (1978) expressed his fear toward what media art is achieving: “By
eliminating psychic distance, one emphasizes (in Freudian terms) the ‘primary process’
of dream and hallucination, of instinct and impulse” (Harrison and Wood 2002: 1118).
Referring to Daniel Bell, who noted a peculiar aspect of modernism, namely,
“the preoccupation with the medium,” I suggest that media art can be understood
as the latest embodiment of modernism. Peculiarly, in the case of interactive art, the
medium often prevails over the message. The interface through which the visitor/
user manipulates the (art)work assumes primary relevance—including for the jury
members of the various festivals who are challenged to choose the most representative
work of the category to be displayed.
Bell refers to artworks realized between 1850 and 1930, but his description seems
pertinent to many works categorized under the definition of media art today:
In all periods of cultural history, artists have been conscious of the nature and
complexity of the medium as a formal problem in transmuting the “pre-figured”
into the “figured” result. In the last twenty-five years, we have seen a preoccupation
not with the content or form (i.e., style and genre), but with the medium of art
itself. (Harrison and Wood 2002: 1118–1119)
While Bell was referring to paintings, musical compositions, and narrative forms of
art, we can extend his evaluation to computer-generated works. In fact, Bell remarks
that: “the distinction between art and life became blurred so that was once permitted
in the imagination (the novels of murder, lust, perversity) has often passed over into
fantasy, and it is acted out by individuals who want to make their lives a work of art”
(Harrison and Wood 2002: 1118–1119).
Jean M. Ippolito (2007) writes with regards to the works of internationally
renowned digital media artists such as Kawaguchi Yoichiro 河口洋一郎, Fujihata
Masaki 藤幡正樹, and Tosa Naoko土佐尚子: “One can think of the object as a product
of society, something that belongs to and reflects society as a whole. In this respect,
the work of art is a conduit of both cultural and societal influences.” Ippolito sees
contemporary Japanese media artists as the depositaries of innovative and daring
avant-garde groups of the 1960s and 1970s such as Gutai and Mono-Ha, whose ideas
and procedures predate those of the New York avant-garde schools, including those
outside of the technological milieu.
Based on Ippolito’s analysis, I suggest that there are two main groups in the
Japanese media arts: (1) non-narrative artists, whose works are concept-based and
have as reference the Japanese avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s; and (2)
narrative artists whose works have roots in the popular arts of Japan. Both groups, as
in the case of their predecessors, produce works with references to Buddhism, Shinto,
and other Asian religions and systems of thought.
“Oriental Orientalism” at the Basis of Japanese Media Art
Edward W. Said in his classic book Orientalism ([1978] 1994) was mainly concerned
with the way in which the West created distorted images of the “Oriental”; Yuko
Techno-Animism 147
Kikuchi takes that analysis a stage further when she examines the way in which the
“Orient” “Orientalizes” itself. The process of self-orientalization is crucial for Japanese
media artists to encapsulate into their creations themes and aesthetics related to the
Shinto and Buddhist traditions. Kikuchi focuses on Yanagi Sōetsu (柳宗悦, 1889–1961),
philosopher and founder of the Mingei movement in Japan in the late 1920s and 1930s.
She argues that Mingei (民芸, “folk arts” or “arts of the people,” with the implication
“hand-crafted art of ordinary people” [minshūteki kōgei 民衆的工芸]) was an explicit
form of “Oriental Orientalism” (a philosophical theory and craft practice born in
Japan)—in contrast to nineteenth-century Western “Orientalism”—that aimed to
export to the West a Japanese (fictional) identity characterized by the “Buddhist idea
of Beauty” and the “Japanese approach to the crafts” (Kikuchi 2004: 244).
Kikuchi argues that “Oriental Orientalism” is itself a practice aimed at satisfying the
expectations of the West regarding its own definition and understanding of Japanese
culture. Since what the West seeks is an image of the East barely resembling any truth,
at the core of Yanagi’s project there is the attempt to create a fictional image that can
function in the transactions with the West. In this sense, instead of being labeled
by the other, Japanese authors created a label themselves and let Westerners use it.
The supposedly original/native/genuine Japanese style, as defined in Mingei theory
by Yanagi, could thus be interpreted as a byproduct of Western modern theory as
applied to the formation of an “indigenous” Orientalism made in Japan. One could
even question, more radically, if there is such a thing as a “traditional” aesthetics in
Japan, since what is commonly understood as such could well be another instance
of an “Oriental Orientalist” construct to be opposed to supposedly Euro-American
opposite/antithetic aesthetic values. Kikuchi suggests that the Mingei movement
“consolidated the dichotomous cultural national identities as complementary, by
ensuring an acknowledgment of Japanese neo-traditionalism and Oriental essentialism
in Euroamerica” (Kikuchi 2004: 244).
To a certain extent, the manga/anime phenomenon also revolves around the
creation of Japanese cultural identity—analogously to what characterized the Mingei
movement. In order to acquire a stronger sense of cultural identity, to be eventually
marketed and exported abroad, manga and anime intensify certain themes. Thus, in
the narratives channeled via the Japanese entertainment industry (which comprises
manga, anime, videogames, and media art), we observe a crystallization of two
paradigms in dialectical opposition with each other. After the Second World War,
some Japanese authors hypothesized what they thought was the Western paradigm
(Western aesthetic, moral, and social values) and opposed to it a supposedly Oriental
paradigm as the genuine core of what they saw as the indigenous Japanese culture. In
this regard, Kikuchi points out that in order to “create its own identity, the Occident
designated the Orient as ‘Other.’ Japan, in turn, made the rest of the ‘Orient’ as
‘Other’ in order to create its own identity somewhere between the Occident and the
Orient” (244).
In addition to this, we should consider another idea proposed by Yanagi Sōetsu,
namely, the adoption of Western elements through a Japanese form or kata (型 or 形);
Sōetsu writes specifically about a “coffee ceremony.” As Kikuchi points out, Yanagi’s idea
of a genuine continuity of tradition goes through the digestion of the modern. Thus,
“Orientalism” was projected on to the Orient from the West. Japan absorbed this, then
projected “Oriental Orientalism” on to the other Oriental countries, and finally projected
“Oriental Orientalism” back to the West (244). In the works produced in Japan by
Japanese artists, the process of assimilation and permutation of stereotypes from the West
might be summed up by a remark made by philosopher and art critic Yoshioka Hiroshi.
Commenting about how stereotypes function in the way Japanese culture is perceived
from abroad, especially in media art, Yoshioka writes: “these Asian representations are
first desired from outside, and then internalized by the Japanese” (Yoshioka 2006: 88).
Yoshioka suggests taking advantage and making use of these stereotypical
representations of “Japan-ness”; for him, Japanese artists and authors should embrace
it and use it as a strategy to gain academic, artistic, and economic success. In fact, I
would argue that media art in Japan encapsulates inborn and out-born cultural memes
presenting those as chronicles and history, not as fiction. While Kikuchi and Yoshioka
present a very critical view of the uses of a supposed Japaneseness in the arts, the very
same media artists addressed by Yoshioka, and whom I will discuss below, seem to
have a very naïve and uncritical understanding of Japanese culture, arts, and above all
religion. It would seem that the critical perspective, which is formulated by Yoshioka
among others, is undermined by the artists themselves.
The Role of IAMAS in Shaping Media Art in Japan
According to art historian Sarah M. Schlachetzki, it is impossible to talk about media

art in Japan without taking into consideration two major sites of art creation and
promotion such as the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in
Ogaki City (Gifu Prefecture) and the Yamaguchi Centre of the Art and Media (in
Yamaguchi City, Yamaguchi Prefecture), established, respectively, in 1996 and 2003. As
Sarah Schlachetzki writes: “both places are important breeding grounds for media art
and its proliferation not only in Japan, but also internationally” (Schlachetzki 2012: 71).
The IAMAS is a unique academic environment, not only in comparison with other
educational institutions worldwide but also because its functioning sets it apart from
other Japanese universities. IAMAS is now a public graduate school with only one
department and one master course (Media Creation). It opened in 1996 under the
direction of Sakane Itsuo 坂根厳夫, as a European-style advanced vocational school;
later, it began to offer the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree and then only a master’s
degree. Sakane is a central character in the development of the current state of media
art in Japan; as curator, he has organized several exhibitions and written seminal books
about media art. As an indicator of the success of IAMAS, a significant number of
its students, graduates, and instructors regularly receive awards for their works at
the most prestigious venues for media art, such as the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz,
Austria) and Siggraph (North America and Asia).
The artists I discuss in this chapter are all directly related either to IAMAS
(Tanahashi, Tabei, Yamakawa, and Hayakawa, who graduated between 2007 and
2010) or the Yamaguchi Centre of the Arts and Media where they have performed or
exhibited (Hayakawa in 2004, Yamakawa in 2007, and AEO in 2009).9
Techno-Animism 149
Techno-Animist Media Artists
Hayakawa Takahiro 早川貴泰

Hayakawa, who graduated from IAMAS in 2007, while still a student, received
an honorary mention in the “Computer Animation/Visual Effects” section of Ars
Electronica 2005 for his digital animation Kashikokimono, which in English means
“numinous things or beings”;10 this is his most notable work to date. He has received
prizes, held solo exhibitions, participated in screenings, and done collaborations
both in Japan and abroad. Hayakawa says that he draws inspiration from Shinto
and Buddhist beliefs. During an interview, he told me that his artistic discourse is
clearly related to animism: “Animism is at the core of my animation; I believe that
animation equals animism, and my animations are expressions of that belief.” His work
is explicitly based on an analysis of animism (Hayakawa, pers. comm., June 4, 2017,
Tokyo). He says:
The words “animation” and “animism” both derive from the Latin word anima,
which means “life principle” or “soul.” Kashikokimono is a visual piece that exists
within the triangular realm formed by these three terms. Animism here represents
Japan’s ancient religion, and the title Kashikokimono in this case stands for the
innumerable gods and deities of Japan. With this work, I have tried to create
images that express this profusion of gods representing all of creation.11
Hayakawa further explained his own theological positions and how they are related
to his artistic creations. Below is a long excerpt from my interview with him on the
subject.
After pondering the question “What is God?” I think that I came to grasp concepts
such as awe and the supernatural. Thinking back about it now, you could say that
I was feeling the presence of the innumerable gods in various places; perhaps, all
Japanese people have had similar experiences. In any case, I have a strong interest
in the gods that inspire belief in various countries. Everybody is thankful to or
worshipful of these gods, but what are these gods, exactly?
Does God exist? That’s what I wanted to know. Regarding my own religiosity,
I’m an agnostic. I believe that, despite scientific inquiries into the existence of
God, we still don’t know if God exists. In other words, it’s not that I believe in a
god or not, but that I don’t know what to believe despite having tried to examine
the issue in various ways. Fundamentally, I don’t know what God is. Perhaps,
there is something about the human brain and about the capacity of the human
organism, which tend to create religious beliefs and the belief in something like
a god. Perhaps, there is a part of the brain that functions as a “god generator.”
Or perhaps it’s not that, but something supernatural exists. In other words, since
there are many things that cannot yet be explained scientifically and some of those
things potentially can’t be comprehended without some yet-to-be-developed
non-scientific paradigm, perhaps there are transcendental entities that would only
be revealed at such a time … Clearly, this is just speculation. Still, I do believe that
something holy, or in other words, something that serves as a kind of model for
God, probably exists.
In my mind, I imagine that God equals all of creation, that the universe exists
as the sum of all things, and that the universe itself—or something like the laws of
the universe—is what we call God. For example, the human body is made up of
billions of cells. It is an aggregation of countless minute parts. If each cell is a life,
then our bodies are a collection of organic entities. I think that the universe itself
might function in a similar way. This is just an arbitrary idea of mine. Perhaps, the
enormous accumulation of organic life forms or their energy is what we call “God.”
I believe that the apex of a religion, or the focus of it, what we call “God,” might be
a way to express this accumulated entity or its governing laws in a way that is easy
for other people to understand.
Originally, I got into the world of animation because I loved anime and wanted
to work on Gundam or something like that (laughs), but then I realized that I don’t
have any talent for that kind of thing. This became clear to me around 2003, but
at the same time, I thought it might be possible to create a new kind of animation
with a more Japanese, or a more artistically oriented, style. Somehow, I was able
to find new hope in the midst of my despair, and this is the result. What brought
me from despair to hope was the moment I realized that, in essence, animation
is “animism”: spirit worship. In other words, an animation is not a story; the
animation itself is fundamentally an organic/divine entity. This is another one
of my arbitrary ideas. Norman McLaren once said: “Animation is not the art of
drawings that move, but rather the art of movements that are drawn.” When I first
heard these words, what occurred to me was: “Oh, all things are an accumulation
of movement; all existence is fluid.” In essence, the pictures in an animation exist
in service of movement—movement is the primary thing—and an animation is
the accumulation of these movements. I thought this was similar to the idea that
life equals a body made up of an accumulation of those small living units known as
cells. I read a book that said, “Life is defined by fluidity,” and I think that’s exactly
right! Then, I thought that if I kept accumulating simple and organic animations,
which in my understanding are expression of Life themselves, something might
emerge that could have been close to entities such as Life, the Universe, and God.
In essence, I wanted to create a new style of animation.
The word “animation” originally contains the meaning of breathing life
into something, or giving movement to what is essentially immobile. This is
why I think animation isn’t just a technical thing, but something a little more
spiritual. I think it is rather fascinating that both the words “animation” and
“animism” share the same root: “anima,” which means “life” or “soul.” Basically,
all my animations are inspired by the relationship between these three words:
animation, animism, and anima. I believe that the enjoyment we get from
watching an animation is not only the product of a great character or plot, but is
also the product of our ability to sense something like the “anima,” life, and the
soul, within the animation itself.
Techno-Animism 151
Also, as I mentioned before, humans tend to envisage movement and life as a

sequence of pictures. It’s my belief that the imagination required for this process of
filling in the gaps between the frames is close to the imagination that causes us to
envision a god-like entity. (Hayakawa, pers. comm., June 4, 2017, Tokyo)
This is a clear indication that there is a relationship between animism and Japanese
media art also based on a process of reinterpretation of the content of the system of
belief by the artists involved.
Tanahashi Nobuyuki
Tanahashi is an ordained Shinto priest who carries out creative research at the
intersection between digital media and Japanese traditional culture (IAMAS 2001).12
He studied media art at IAMAS in order to, in his own words, create new rituals in the
spirit of Shinto. Emblematic in this regard is a work that Tanahashi created in 2000
entitled Chinju no mori purojekuto: kagura matsuri 鎮守の杜プロジェクト・神楽祭.
The performance shows the interaction between digital media and Japanese traditional
culture. At Kumano shrine 熊野神社, a ceremony performed by Shinto priests is
enhanced using computer technology, specifically the software Max/Msp installed in
an Apple MacBook Pro connected to an audio mixer and a series of loudspeakers and
microphones. Part of the ceremony is a kagura 神楽 performed by four miko 巫女,
alongside the reading of Man’yōshū 万葉集 ancient poems; according to Tanahashi, this
gives the participant a sense of otherworldly powers. In several conversations, which I
had with him at IAMAS, Tanahashi discussed shamanistic elements in Shinto, such as
the magical power of words (kotodama) and explained how nature is perceived as the
abode of spirits; indeed, Tanahashi ultimately sees Shinto closer to pantheism than to
shamanism. What follows is a selection of Takahashi’s statements about Shinto and his
own art works.
Shinto is about something that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Instead of
paintings, what we find in the most important halls of the shrines, are objects such
as mirrors and swords: the kami live there. The importance lays on kotodama言霊,
the act of speaking certain words, and not on the images of the gods.
I am interested in the interface between Shinto and the new digital media.
On the other hand, most Japanese families are not very familiar with Japanese
traditional culture; we are influenced from the western civilization now. Let’s say
that Shinto can be seen as an operative system which is two thousand and five
hundred years old; on top of it other beliefs run as applications. (Tanahashi, pers.
comm., April 16–July 6, 2009)
AEO
AEO is a sound collective formed by Jō Kazuhiro 城一裕, Sawai Taeji 澤井妙冶, and
Yamatsuka Eye (Ai) 山塚アイ (born Yamatsuka Tetsurō 山塚徹郎).13 Yamatsuka
describes one of AEO’s performances as having been inspired by the O-bon お盆
festival.14 At the core of the performance is the use of two hand-held spherical units. The
static field formed between the two units is controlled by Yamatsuka’s movements. The
two luminescent spheres are equipped with microphones and sensors (three-axis gyro,
accelerometer, proximity sensor) to trace their position and speed in space. Through
the performer’s movements and voice, the orbs, which are connected with cables to
computers equipped with Max software, are capable of producing a variety of audio
textures, from harsh glitches and fiery streams of white noise, to some subtler tones.
I think it is possible to see formal similarities between this AEO performance and
two important fire festivals, the Chinka sai 鎮火祭 (for the control and neutralization
of fire) and the Hi matsuri 火祭りat Kurama 鞍馬 in Kyoto. I also believe that AEO has
among its predecessors the Gutai group 具体美術協会. Referring to Tanaka Atsuko 田
中敦子 wearing the Electric Dress at the second Gutai Art Exhibition (Ōhara Kaikan,
Tokyo, 1956), Silvia Eiblmayr writes:
The work broke with past convention and courageously attempted a new
experimental approach; it created an object of clothing with more than one hundred
round and tubular electric light bulbs, alternately switching on and off, and was an
unprecedented idea. Even the fact that a small slim woman made and actually wore
a work that was so heavy a well-built man would hesitate to carry it, places it in the
realm of the avant-garde. She entered the work as it was suspended from the ceiling
by a rope, undaunted by the threat of electrical shock. (Eiblmayr 2003: 33)
Tanaka Atsuko described her work in this way: “what interests me most during the
creative process is the switching on and off of the electric light bulbs. When I turn the
switch and the motor is started the electric bulbs that I’ve installed take on an unreal
beauty as if they were not made by human hands” (Tanaka 1957: 292).
Tabei Masaru 田部井勝

An interesting example of the connections between Shinto imagery and media art in
Japan, is the interactive installation Wakuraba—Ethereal Encounters『邂逅わくらば』
by Masaru Tabei (Figure 9.1).15 Tabei realized this work in 2007 and presented it at the
Ogaki Biennale 2008.16 The central idea comes from the ancient Japanese belief that
stones can grow, multiply, and move by themselves. In the installation Wakuraba, when
a visitor walks over the carpet made of pebbles, the pebbles begin to move as though
they are following that person. Sometimes the pebbles move after visitors have left, and
the footsteps that reappear make the new visitor sense others who are no longer there.
Other works by Tabei are inspired by the komochi magatama, ancient stone artifacts
dating back to the Kofun period, possibly related to fertility cults and ideas about the
animated nature of stones.
Ogawa Hideaki 小川秀明

The artist, designer, and academic Ogawa Hideaki17 is the author of Small Connections,
a series of tools developed to reinforce and maintain long-distance intimate
Techno-Animism 153
Figure 9.1 Wakuraba—Ethereal Encounters (2007) by Masaru Tabei. Interactive

installation. Photograph courtesy of Masaru Tabei.
connections.18 Small Connections consists of four different “smart objects” named,

respectively, Air, One, Anemo, and Comado. Air is in fact a set of two lamps; when
one is touched by someone both turn on thus showing that one human partner is
thinking about the other. In this sense Air makes use of light to represent a symbolic
communication. One follows the same principle, but it employs instead a physical
reaction. It consists of two twin hemispherical objects placed as far as possible from
each other. When a button is pressed on one device, its twin located elsewhere reacts
by protruding the same button. Imagine that a One is given to you by your partner
before taking a long journey; once you are settled, you see the One coming alive.
The yellow button is protruding from the core of the hemisphere, you could touch
and press it: force feedback makes you feel your partner while pushing the button
as if to touch you; both partners can feel it. Anemo reacts to the sound produced
by a person(s) nearby, and its twin object starts to spin its wheel. Comado is a wall-
mounted device based on the idea that small windows or small doors are openings to
ones’ world. Through a Comado, you can see your partner if his/her door on the twin
device is also open (Figure 9.2).
Ogawa relies on the idea that all things, and especially technological tools among
the communication media, are sentient; they have a mind and are connected one to
another. Even though Ogawa does not refer to spiritual, divine forces, he alludes to the
idea of ma 間 in his creations. In his interpretation, ma expresses the idea of a “negative
space,” a gap, a pause, and “the space in between.” It is by virtue of this in-between-ness,
which encompasses all, that it is possible to act from distance. In a sense, Ogawa’s work
reminds one of the laws of contiguity, one of the three laws of sympathy as described
Figure 9.2 Comado—Small Connections (2004) by h.o (Ogawa Hideaki studio). Interactive
installation. Photograph used with permission of Ogawa Hideaki.
by Marcel Mauss. Using objects that have been in contact with the targeted person
in order to act upon them from a distance is a practice that belongs to magic. Ogawa
believes that the exchange of objects between people builds relationships between
them; he understands the object given as a gift from which the connection between
the giver and the receiver is ignited by a sort of magical power. Even though Mauss
was envisioning “archaic societies” in his study (1990), the magical power supposedly
subsumed by Ogawa’s objects is enacted by using network technologies.
I would like to emphasize that device art,19 a subgenre of media art to which Ogawa’s
works belong, often presents objects that are able to connect with each other from a long
distance, and thus enable a sentimental communication between the objects’ owners;
these are all elements pertinent to magical practices. A common feature of artists
operating in device art is their belief in the sympathetic influence exerted on each other
by persons or things at a distance. The premise of Ogawa’s Small Connection is precisely
that objects possess special powers and that by manipulating objects, which belong to a
person, it is possible to affect that person in his/her behaviors and mental/physical state.
In Shinto it is thought that, through specific actions and by using certain words, it is
possible to summon the deities to come to the place where the ritual is enacted; part of
the “body” of the kami will then be enshrined in a human being or into an object for a
certain amount of time. Ogawa believes that it is possible to refer to computers, games-
consoles, and mobile phones as contemporary torimono (執物 or 取物) or yorishiro
Techno-Animism 155
(依り代 or 憑り代), respectively; objects used in Shinto rituals to summon the gods and
objects where the gods come to abide (Ogawa, pers. comm., October 1, 2014).
Yamakawa Kroiden Hisako

Yamakawa20 has created interactive installations with Shinto and Japanese folklore
as their main references. Tellingly, two of her most notable and successful works are
entitled Kotodama and Kodama. Yamakawa says:
Human spoken voices are not visible in themselves and it is easy to forget the
existence of the voice in the conversations, yet I often have the subjective feeling
that they are somewhat tactile and occupy a certain space that one could artistically
represent as various volumes or solid shapes. To show my sensation of solidified
human voices in conversations, I created the interactive system Kotodama.
(Yamakawa, pers. comm., May 1, 2009)
Kotodama consists in a series of polyester and rubber spherical objects, resembling the
shape of the voice balloons in comics, which are suspended from the ceiling. These
bubbles can record and playback the voices of the visitors and change their aspects
while doing so: when a voice is recorded into the object, it inflates growing in size,
whereas it deflates when a special stethoscope is used to listen to the previously
recorded sounds.
The magical-sacred power of the words which human beings use in order to shape
the world is also the subject of another work by Yamakawa, Kodama (Jp. kodama 木霊)
means “echo” but also “tree spirit.” Yamakawa writes:
I created Kodama to demonstrate my sensation of solidified human voices in

conversation. Kodama is an interactive installation. The Kodama are tree fairies
that live in the forest who listen to human voices and mimic their sounds. They are
visually depicted as bubbles or pockets of air that move around a projection of the
forest. Their movement on screen is controlled by the movement of the audience
detected by motion sensors. The audience’s voices are captured and re-played by
the Kodama. (Yamakawa 2005)
Yamakawa imagines tree fairies living in the forest and quietly listening to people. The
installation Kodama is able to sense the presence of the visitors: first, the tree spirits
capture the conversation of the humans visiting and then, when the people have left the
room, start to play with those words. From this interactive video-installation, people can
perceive their own voice in a visible—not only audible—representation and feel that their
breath has taken a life of its own. As Yamakawa emphasizes, Kodama was not inspired
by Miyazaki Hayao’s 宮崎駿 movie Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime もののけ姫,
1997) with which it nonetheless shares some aspects. In particular, Yamakawa imagines
that nature is the abode of kami and addresses them in her interactive installation
Kodama. There is, in the poetics of Yamakawa, an overlapping between nature and what
she interprets as Shinto (Yamakawa is herself Roman Catholic).
Conclusion
The understanding of Shinto by the Japanese media artists I discussed in this chapter is
rather distant from academic explanations. Instead, their approach to spirituality seems
to be closer to the idealized version of Shinto and Buddhism that is found in manga,
anime, TV dramas, feature films, and animated movies, rather than to actual forms of
beliefs and cults. This attitude, I argue, is due to a certain cultural self-awareness, which
implies the use of self-orientalism as a strategy to reinforce the dichotomy East–West
and which, in addition, gives the possibility to Japanese artists to draw from sources
they may otherwise feel ashamed to use, due to the stigma derived from being judged
as “archaic” by the modern West, which they perceive as superior. Some Japanese
media artists may also prefer to look naïve and playful in their attitude toward their
own cultural tradition in their acts of appropriation and partial mismatching and
apparent misinterpretation of symbols, rituals, and narratives—something that they
prefer to being considered as religious believers or authors of explicitly “religious art”
by the Western art-criticism apparatus.
The artists I presented here share a common feature: they refer to some kind of
animism as the source of their inspiration. They believe (or suppose, or feel) that
objects—especially technological tools and, more specifically, their own creations—
possess a soul. None of them goes further in analyzing and explaining which kind of
soul it could be, they vaguely refer to it as either a natural or a technological spirit, as if
nature and technology were specific entities whose super-souls inhabit moving images,
technological gadgets, and artistic creations. On a psychological level it is interesting
to note that these media artists project into their creations a separate personality as
to deliberately avoid any responsibility regarding the inception of the work itself.
Believing and/or making believe that their creations have an agency of themselves has
a twofold effect: it ignites a relationship with another (perceived) new entity, and it
enables them to distance themselves from the role of the author by pointing instead to
supernatural and/or otherworldly creative forces.
10
Spirit/Medium: Critically Examining the

Relationship between Animism and Animation
Jolyon Baraka Thomas
Is it possible that Japanese anime have a connection with animism? Does the shared
Latin root (anima = “life” or “soul”) of the two loan words animēshon and animizumu
bear some significance beyond etymological similarity (Masaki 2002: 90–91)? Is it true
that anime directors help Japanese audiences reconnect with their animistic cultural
roots (Ogihara-Schuck 2014)?
It seems to me that the answer to all of these questions must be a firm “No.”
I argue in this chapter that we should not mistake the shared etymology of the words
“animation” and “animism” for functional equivalence, nor should we assume that
anime are vehicles for connecting audiences with “animistic” cultural traditions that
are supposedly endemic to Japan. I do not deny that anime frequently feature spirits
and deities. Many anime depict beautiful natural settings and stress the importance
of human connections with nature; some imply or imagine the interpenetration of
natural, social, and spiritual worlds.
Nevertheless, I do not think that “animism” is a good term for describing what anime
directors do in a technical sense (animation), nor is “animism” a good descriptor of
the multifarious reactions and dispositions directors aim to elicit from their audiences.
Trying to describe anime content or audience reception with the vague concept of
“animism” invites confusion because this seemingly simple word actually means
many different things: “Animism” can be a pejorative descriptor of unsophisticated
natives’ mental worlds, can feature as part of hortatory calls to rectify environmental
degradation, or can serve as obfuscatory language that places cultural essentialist claims
beyond analysis or critique.1
I make my argument in five parts. I first provide a survey of the landscape of
contemporary Japanese religion and discuss how anime fits within it. I then build on
My thanks to the following: Kimberley Thomas, Fabio Rambelli, Katherine Saltzman-Li, Jason
Josephson-Storm, Tianran Hang, Marcos Novak, Rebecca Suter, Andrea Castiglioni, Mauro Arrighi,
Ellen Van Goethem, Carina Roth Al-Eid, Darryl Wilkinson, J. Keith Vincent, Aike Rots, Andrew
Bernstein, Jessica Starling, Kendall Marchman, N. Eric Dickman, Yulia Frumer, Erin Chung, Caleb
Carter, Yumi Kim, Jeremy Sather, and audiences at UC-Santa Barbara, Illinois Wesleyan University,
Johns Hopkins University, Grinnell College, Lewis & Clark College, and Young Harris College.
some recent critical literature to show that the concept of animism does not accurately
describe Japan’s idyllic premodern past. Rather, “animism” is a quintessentially
modern category that posits an insurmountable divide between nature and culture
rather than erasing it (Latour 1993). The concept of animism as it appears in
scholarly discourse on anime reflects romanticized ideas about overcoming a
perceived gulf between humans and nonhumans and environmentalist ideas about
the problem of ecological degradation (Ingold 2011b; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004;
Wilkinson 2017; Willerslev 2013a). If “animism” finds its way into scholarly
discourse about animated films, I argue that it is not because films themselves are
repositories for ancient dispositions but, rather, because contemporary filmmakers
and their audiences use animated spirits to fill in the spaces between buffered selves
and estranged natures.
This is an important point, but I quickly move from this functionalist claim to
conduct a constructivist analysis of how specific stakeholders make the ambiguous
concept of animism serve their particular interpretive purposes. In a nonexhaustive
typology I describe these as “pejorative,” “recuperative,” and “obscurantist” animism.
Against the temptation to read the preponderance of spirits in Japanese animated film
as evidence of a timeless animistic tradition, I show that a focus on spirits as a type of
content may distract from seeing how the anime medium elicits a certain kind of vision
and can occasionally prompt ritual behavior that would seemingly be closer in spirit to
the concept of “animism.”
I then look at several animated films and television series featuring spirits. I use
Nagahama Hiroshi’s 2005–2006 animated series Mushi-shi as an example featuring
mysterious entities found in the natural world. Morita Shūhei’s 2013 short Tsukumo
(aptly translated as Possessions) exemplifies the trope of objects coming to life. Finally,
Shinkai Makoto’s 2016 smash hit Kimi no na wa. (Your Name.) does not visually depict
spirits, but the mysterious activity of the deity Musubi provides the explanatory principle
for the magic that drives the narrative. Having shown that the existence of spirits in
these recent anime films and series is not sufficient to say that they are “animistic,” I
conclude with a call to jettison that term in favor of more precise terminology. The
films and television series that seemingly promote “animism” through the trope of
spirits mediating between socially distant humans and humans estranged from nature
actually seem to celebrate a sort of cultivated vulnerability that can be easily described
without the confusing concept of animism.
The Place of Anime in Contemporary Japanese Religious Life

Contemporary Japanese society is notoriously nonreligious. Professions of religious
belief are low, declarations of religious affiliation lower still, and the numbers of people
who acknowledge the importance of religion are particularly meager among Japan’s
rapidly diminishing youth population. Somewhat paradoxically, Japan has a high
number of religious edifices per capita, and according to official government statistics
there is approximately one religious juridical person for every 700 people in Japan.
Due to sample bias, the number of reported adherents in annual government surveys
Spirit/Medium 159
regularly exceeds the population of Japan by about one and a half times, even though
nongovernmental surveys suggest that the majority of individuals in Japan do not
profess religious affiliation or belief (Roemer 2009).
This perplexing situation is further complicated by the fact that while few
Japanese people admit to religious belief, many acknowledge the existence of ghosts,
spirits, or deities. Even people who are relatively skeptical of the existence of such
numinous entities will purchase apotropaic amulets and talismans or undergo
periodic ritual purifications “just in case” the deities might intervene in their lives
(Reader and Tanabe 1998). Horror films and popular comic book series regularly
depict the trope of the wronged dead wreaking vengeance upon the living, a tradition
that can be traced back to canonical Japanese literature and that also featured in the
golden age of postwar Japanese cinema. Japanese bookstores feature “spirit world”
sections that are often larger than the sections devoted to “religion,” and popular
television programs of the last two decades have featured charismatic spirit mediums
(Baffelli 2016: 19–22).
There is an understandable temptation to see these contemporary popular
culture portrayals of ghosts and spirits as manifestations of a timeless set of
Japanese folk beliefs about death and the afterlife (Okuyama 2015; Reider 2005).
Indeed, a cottage industry of scholarship traces how films, novels, and illustrated
fiction like manga and anime preserve the vast Japanese pantheon of numinous
entities in popular consciousness (Foster 2015; Masaki 2002; Reider 2005;
Wright 2005). However, the idea that anime preserve classical “folk beliefs” in
audience consciousness is difficult to prove. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, it
is doubtful that classical religious and folkloric content can be maintained without
also being transformed (Thomas 2007). Famed anime director Miyazaki Hayao,
for example, may depict spirits who feature in Edo-period encyclopedias (such as
kodama tree spirits) but he just as readily invents his own (e.g., Totoro). In many
cases, an anime spirit cannot be traced to any specific religious tradition, mythic
cycle, or classical text because characters appear for a variety of narratological
reasons that have little to do with “official” doctrines (endowing characters with
magical powers, providing a deus ex machina denouement, imbuing a story with
comic relief; see Thomas 2012).
Faced with this ambiguity but seemingly eager to show that anime are conveyors of
venerable cultural content, many professional observers have said that anime connect
audiences with Japan’s animistic traditions, if not with “religion.” The concept of
animism allows analysts to argue that films and television series tap into a substratum
of Japanese cultural beliefs, a claim that is superficially persuasive but ultimately
difficult to prove. Here are a few examples from a broader scholarly discourse on the
creation and reception of Miyazaki Hayao’s films:
Japanese people of the past believed that almost all things that exist in this world
have spirits residing in them […] in religious studies we call this “animism.” […]
Now, a work like [Miyazaki Hayao’s] My Neighbor Totoro is called anime, but [like
animism, the Latin] anima is the root word. […] So if we translate “animation”
directly, the meaning becomes “something which has been given life.” […] If you
ask why I am discussing such things, it is precisely because the world of Totoro is
this animism. (Masaki 2002: 90–91)
When watching the fantastic anime (animation) of Japanese director Hayao
Miyazaki, it soon becomes apparent that he has infused his richly detailed worlds
with an animistic ontology that references ancient Japanese beliefs, practices and
myths. His films describe an intriguing mixture of earthy spirituality particularly
drawn from the Shinto tradition. (Wright 2005: 2)
Miyazaki [Hayao] is a distinctive anime creator in that in his films he deeply
engaged his own animistic thought, but these thoughts themselves have a long
history in Japan. (Ogihara-Schuck 2014: 38)
Through his anime, [Miyazaki] attempts to revive the enchantment of storytelling
that the traditional folktales once had. […] [H]e incorporates traditional folklore
motifs … as well as Shinto and Animism signifiers including torii gate [sic] and the
tree spirits of kodama to send his messages in allegorical ways. (Okuyama 2015: 122)
Some of these scholarly claims are internally inconsistent. Others are frustratingly
unclear. Collectively, they suggest that animism is a useful category for understanding
animated film in a way that religion is not, presumably because Japanese directors and
audiences are notoriously allergic to the category of religion. Some of these authors
go a step further, arguing that non-Japanese audiences cannot understand Japanese
films because they cannot connect with the intuitive “animistic” epistemology
purportedly shared by all Japanese (Ogihara-Schuck 2014; Okuyama 2015: 170–172).
Such ethnocentric claims make films into inert vehicles that transmit timeless cultural
values to passive audiences, obscuring the ways that directors and audiences interpret
films according to their own historical circumstances. These appeals to hoary tradition
mask the politics of the present.
The Politics of “Animism” versus “Animist Politics”
There is no shortage of scholarly analysis that takes the existence of spirits in anime
as evidence of “animism” in contemporary Japan. Indeed, some authors have argued
that Japan provides a perfect case for putting to work the insights of Bruno Latour’s
actor-network-theory (Latour 2005) and/or the “new animism” literature generated
by anthropologists such as Tim Ingold, Nurit Bird-David, and Eduardo Vivieros do
Castro (Jensen and Blok 2013). In such arguments, Japan exemplifies the fusion of
spirits and technology, with robotic pets, memorials for laboratory animals, amulets
for scientific equipment, and Miyazaki Hayao’s anime serving as examples of Japan’s
“techno-animism” (Allison 2006: 9–14).
Yet as Darryl Wilkinson has argued in a compelling article critiquing the “new
animism” literature and the related concept of “relational ontology,” the concept of
animism as used in the contemporary humanities and social sciences describes the
dispositions and epistemologies of secular humanists far better than it describes the
Spirit/Medium 161
ideas or practices of ancient or indigenous peoples (Wilkinson 2017). While the

concept of animism fell out of vogue in the twentieth century as anthropologists and
scholars of religion recognized its supercilious conceits and imperialist overtones, the
rise of environmentalist critique in the last decades of that century prompted some
anthropologists to embrace the term once again as a way of recuperating connections
with the natural world that had purportedly been lost. Indigenous peoples could
teach secular humanists a thing or two about how to be at one with the world, and
animistic thinking could serve as a way to repair humanity’s fractured relationship
with nature in the time now known as the Anthropocene. Wilkinson also shows that
while proponents of relational ontology have been quick to embrace animism, they
have not been so quick to embrace the related concept of fetishism, which describes
the attribution of agency to particular objects. Wilkinson furthermore argues that
proponents of the new animism have made a category mistake by treating native
claims about the personhood of inanimate objects as claims about persons and objects,
when in fact indigenous claims operate in a different metaphorical register and only
appear to be making claims like “that rock is a person” (Wilkinson 2017). I will come
back to this point when discussing the specter of the “real animist” below.
Three Types of “Animism”

Taking inspiration from Wilkinson’s first and third points, I want to disambiguate
“animism” by disaggregating what I see as three distinct uses of it in the scholarly
literature on anime. The classical anthropological understanding of animism, as the
belief that spirits reside in objects and nature, is decidedly not the understanding
that scholars bring to bear when they say that anime directors connect Japanese and
global audiences with Japan’s animistic traditions. Upon investigation, “animism” is
not particularly useful as an analytic term not only because it originally represented
a supercilious distinction between “primitive” and “advanced” religion (what I call
“pejorative animism”), but also because it reflects a late capitalist, Anthropocene-era
politics that sees connections between humans and an externalized and romanticized
Nature as woefully attenuated (I call this “recuperative animism”).2
The situation is further complicated because many proponents of the idea that anime
and animism are related seem to deploy the term precisely because of its mystifying
quality. Describing a film or its reception as “animistic” allows the observer to imply
that something meaningful is taking place, but the term simultaneously suggests
that the event in question is resistant to rational description. I call this “obscurantist
animism,” and I operate on the assumption that it functions primarily as an apologetic
strategy that places a particular intellectual position beyond critique.
To be clear, all three of the above are redescriptive categories. I am not particularly
concerned with whether animists “actually” exist in the world, but I am concerned with
the language politics of adopting the adjective “animist” to describe an epistemology,
an attitude, or an identity. In other words, I want to explore who describes whom or
what as animist and why. Near the end of this chapter, it will therefore be necessary
to proffer a fourth term, “real animism,” as a rhetorical foil that can be used to clarify
the stances of the proponents of “animism” in the three senses mentioned immediately
above. I do not think that “real animism” exists (the same is true for “real religion”),
but I find it helpful to explore how competing interest groups deploy the idea of
authenticity in support of their claims.
Intriguingly, whereas the now-outmoded pejorative animism approach described
premodern Japanese ritual practices and intellectual orientations as benighted or
confused, what I call recuperative animism celebrates ancient Japanese epistemology
(whatever that is) as a panacea for contemporary ills such as social alienation,
crass consumerism, and environmental degradation. While I am personally very
sympathetic to the causes of mitigating the impacts of global climate change, reducing
pollution, preserving biodiversity, fostering solidarity between humans, and rendering
relationships between humans and nonhumans as noninstrumentalist as possible,
I find it odd that professional observers would turn to an “animistic” tradition to
solve contemporary problems characteristic of capitalistic excess and environmental
degradation. In the case of obscurantist animism, this invented tradition comes to serve
as part of a nationalistic project that curiously renders Japanese “animism” as both
crucial for the survival of the human species as a whole and as solely intelligible to
those who are born Japanese (Reitan 2017).
At any rate, when scholars, anime directors, cultural critics, and audience members
use the term “animism” to describe how directors create compelling illustrated worlds
and how audiences interact with them, they ironically reinforce the divide between
humans and nonhumans that they presumably intend to problematize. On close
investigation, the very media that supposedly bind audiences to their “animistic”
cultural roots through portrayals of humans interacting with spirits, deities, and
the natural world turn out to actually reinforce the notion that humans are forever
sundered from nature. Anime that supposedly depict a communitarian, eco-friendly
utopia actually illustrate a fall from grace. Moreover, the worlds depicted in anime are,
of course, hardly “natural.” They are produced through a combination of technologies
and artificial mediating agents (cameras, ink, celluloid, computers, screens, Blu-ray
discs, theaters) that are quite distant from—although of course not unrelated to—
the “natural” world of things like soil, water, and sunshine. Furthermore, the word
“animism” has no indigenous equivalent in the Japanese language: it is exclusively
rendered in the katakana syllabary reserved for foreign loan words. Animism is an
“invented tradition” if ever there was one.
Spirit/Medium
By describing anime as repositories of classical religious information and as transmitters
of ancient epistemologies, scholarship on anime tends to hypostatize an ancient
substratum of cultural knowledge and/or practice which directors and audiences can
tap into through film. Focusing on the presence of spirits in film, most of the authors
I cited above overlook aspects of the anime medium that would seem to support their
points: they describe spirits as diegetic characters, but the technical wizardry required
to bring those spirits to life receives no attention. They seem concerned with the power
Spirit/Medium 163
of anime to preserve animistic worldviews, but they eschew discussing whether an

“animistic” disposition is best described as a worldview at all. By focusing on content and
characters, their arguments also tend to leave out how anime can serve as a model for
behavior and how the medium itself becomes agentive (directors’ tools can themselves be
mediators and agents; see Latour 2005). This focus on narrative content is ironic, given that
an “animistic” approach would presumably recognize the agency—even the personhood—
of apparatuses such as multiplane cameras, screens, and cables that directors use to make
anime. With this in mind, in this section I offer a nonexhaustive typology of ways we might
approach the spirits and the medium of anime as a way of setting up further discussion of
whether anime really have anything to do with “animism” at all.
The storehouse
What I call the “storehouse paradigm” treats deities and spirits as entities that
storytellers draw from a common repertoire of religious vocabulary and imagery
(Kimbrough and Glassman 2009). This approach traces the spirits of anime back to
their original sources in folklore and myth, showing that contemporary entertainment
keeps Japanese audiences in touch with premodern traditions (Hirafuji 2007). For
example, in the 1994 anime Heisei tanuki gassen pom poko (Pom Poko hereafter),
director Takahata Isao reproduced medieval picture scrolls and paintings such as the
Hyakki yagyō emaki (Night Parade of Myriad Goblins) and the Amida shōju raigō zu
(Arrival of Amida and Retinue to Greet the Deceased) in a story featuring the trickster
characters of the tanuki and the fox that feature in Japanese folklore (Ortabasi 2013).
The database
Another paradigm treats characters as fungible entities that can be exchanged at will
according to creator whim and viewer preference. Building on previous work by Ōtsuka
Eiji (2010) that argued that manga and anime fans are drawn not so much to grand
narratives but, rather, to smaller bits of information that can create a larger narrative
world when juxtaposed with one another, Azuma Hiroki has argued that audience
members tend to be attracted not to characters but, rather, to specific character attributes
(Azuma 2009: 25–62). Similarly, Ian Condry has shown that anime directors and artists
begin making series not by developing plots but, rather, by establishing worlds (Condry
2009, 2013). Anime creators select characters based on their appealing attributes such as
physical attractiveness, magical powers, and so forth. The appearance of spirits in anime
is therefore less about directors “having something to say” about numinous entities than
it is about creatively finding new ways to capture audience attention.
One example of this database paradigm is Hōzuki’s Coolheadedness, an anime series
that features the trials and tribulations of Hōzuki, a competent functionary in Japan’s
inefficient infernal bureaucracy. The 2015 anime series directed by Kaburaki Hiro pulls
together various deities and spirits from Japan’s robust narrative tradition of hell tours
and folklore for comedic effect (on hell tours, see Kimbrough 2006; Hirasawa 2008).
Replete with puns and irreverent portrayals of classical religious figures, Hōzuki’s
Coolheadedness depicts hell as hilarious.
The model
Both the storehouse and database paradigms show that characters or character attributes
can be deployed or remixed for the purposes of telling a compelling story. But neither
really addresses an assumption shared by many of the authors cited above, namely that
anime films and television series prompt changes in audience behavior or reinforce deep-
seated cultural beliefs. This oversight is perplexing, especially because there is a surfeit
of data showing that viewers of anime frequently treat animated worlds as contiguous
with, if not identical to, empirical reality. For example, some fans dress up as fictional
characters (cosplay), and some travel to locales that are the real-world inspirations for
illustrated settings (Buljan and Cusack 2015: 181–208; Seaton and Yamamura 2014). Fans’
illustrated votive plaques can change the appearance of shrine grounds (Andrews 2014),
and fan “contents tourism” has changed the economic fortunes of otherwise struggling
communities (Yamamura 2014). Such examples show that anime not only foster changes
in outlook but also elicit changes in behavior that have “real world” effects.
The medium
Because the authors cited above seem to be interested in how anime can create animistic
outlooks, it behooves us to pay attention to embodied practices such as cosplay and
contents tourism. But how is this sort of behavior even possible? What would make
audiences commit themselves so fully to illustrated worlds? In a previous publication
I used the animation technique of compositing as a metaphor for how audiences
imaginatively superimpose spiritual worlds and illustrated settings onto empirical
reality (Thomas 2012). Briefly, by breaking apart components of an image into layers
(foreground, middle layers of varying depths, background) and by applying these
layers to different cels that can be manipulated independently, cel animators are able to
give animated film a sense of three-dimensional depth. Depth is revealed rather than
penetrated: layers slide away to show distant backdrops (Lamarre 2006). Motion also
looks different in cel animation, as does perspective (Bolton 2014). Rather than showing
objects moving through space, cel animation shows spaces moving around objects.
I mention these technical aspects of the anime medium because I think that
they draw attention to a simple but crucial point: if anime have anything to do with
“animism,” then we should not just focus on narrative content. Rather, we should see
how the apparatus used for making animated films works on and through audiences
and directors. We should note how audiences respond by imaginatively superimposing
illustrated worlds on top of existing topography. We should furthermore assume that
anime are not “spiritual” because spirits feature as characters but because the apparatus
used to make them could itself be possessed.
Anime Animism?
It is now time to turn to the relationship between anime and animism in earnest,
using several recent works to highlight what I think observers are seeing when they
Spirit/Medium 165
describe anime as animistic. I use one televised series (Mushi-shi, dir. Nagahama, aired
2005–2006), one award-winning animated short film (Tsukumo, dir. Morita 2013), and
a 2016 smash hit (Kimi no na wa., dir. Shinkai) to illustrate my points. These anime
show how widespread the “nature spirits” trope is, but they also show that even though
spirits appear in anime in a wide variety of ways, anime are not necessarily “animistic.”
Mushi-shi (2005–2006)
In a series of loosely related stories featuring the wandering master of eerie phenomena,
Ginko, director Nagahama Hiroshi’s series Mushi-shi depicts a world in which humans
interact with elemental beings called mushi 蟲. Mushi are neither plant nor animal.
They are sometimes visible, sometimes not. They can grant humans mysterious powers,
but they can also cause unimaginable suffering. In the softly lit opening sequence, the
unadulterated acoustic guitar of the theme song (Ally Kerr’s “The Sore Feet Song”)
accompanies rotoscoped images of photorealistic trees that fade into a soothing, abstract
green background as a slight phase effect warps the final notes of Kerr’s arpeggiated
chords. Nagahama’s direction also reinforces the notion that viewers are close to nature.
Panning shots track panoramic views of mountains and valleys. Close-ups focus on
drops of water on leaves. Sound effects indicate a faint rustling in the underbrush or
an unusual ripple in the water. The audience follows the protagonist Ginko as he walks
through a world that is awe-inspiring and nevertheless subject to his expert gaze.
Is Mushi-shi animist? Each episode features an expository section in which Ginko
explains to an interlocutor (and therefore to the audience) a specific type of mushi that
is responsible for an eerie phenomenon. Swamps wander through forests (Episode 5,
“The Traveling Swamp”). The character 鳥 (tori, bird) flaps its wings and flies off a page
(Episode 1, “The Green Seat”). The same girl ages, dies, and is reborn day after day
(Episode 6, “Those Who Inhale the Dew”). Ignorant humans worship mushi as deities
or fear them as ghosts.
Ginko explains these elemental life-forms to his interlocutors in matter-of-fact terms.
For example, in “The Green Seat,” he describes mushi to the boy Ioroi Shinra as follows:
Ginko [T]hese [apparitions that you can see] are all mushi.
Shinra Mushi?
Ginko Yeah, you can distinguish them from insects and reptiles. Generally
speaking, it’s like this.
Ginko points to his hand.
Let’s say that these four fingers represent all animal life, and your thumb
represents plant life. If we say so, then humans are here, at the point
farthest from your heart near the tip of your middle finger. The farther you
go down your palm from there, the lower the life forms become. And as
you go lower, your blood vessels combine into one near your wrist, right?
Shinra Yeah.
Ginko Fungi and microorganisms would be here. Once you get to that point, it
becomes difficult to distinguish between plant and animal life. But there
is still life far past that point.
Ginko traces his thumb up his forearm.

Go up your arm, past your shoulder, and the beings that are around
here (Ginko’s thumb rests on his chest) are called mushi, or, alternatively,
“the green ones.” They are similar to life itself. Because they are so close
to life itself, their shapes and existence are ambiguous. Some have the
quality of being visible, and others do not.
Shinra Yeah. Some are transparent, like ghosts.
Ginko Many so-called ghosts are actually mushi, since some mushi can take
on the appearance of humans.
Ginko Your grandmother was probably unable to see mushi. It’s difficult to
share a sensory experience. Just as it is impossible to describe the
texture and feel of something to someone who has never touched it.
(Nagahama 2005–2006)
These expository sections of each episode provide rational explanations for mysterious
phenomena even as they subtly reinforce the notion that the actions of mushi surpass
explanation. While technically the mushi are not spirits, Nagahama uses verdant
backgrounds, haunting melodies played on hollow percussion instruments, and
abstract images to reinforce the oft-repeated claim that “Japanese people believe that
spirits exist in everything.” Mushi-shi imbues the world with mystery even as it renders
the mysterious comprehensible and comforting.
Possessions (Morita Shūhei 2013)

In Morita Shūhei’s award-winning animated short Tsukumo (Possessions), a different
sort of “animism” appears in the trope of possessed objects. The opening title card
attributes to the Tsukumogami Records the following: “According to The Miscellaneous
Records of Yin and Yang, after 100 years tools and other instruments will change,
acquiring souls and deceiving people. These are called tsukumogami.” For those in the
know, this indicates that the film is a new take on an old companion tale (otogizōshi;
see Reider 2009a, 2009b).
As the title card text fades out, the camera follows a traveling handyman as he
takes shelter in a small hilltop shrine to wait out a fierce thunderstorm. Entering the
ramshackle building to dry, he begs forgiveness of the deities and asks permission
to spend the night after losing his way in the rain. Just as he begins to doze off, he
suddenly finds himself in a new-looking Japanese-style room (washitsu) surrounded
by a host of dancing umbrellas who gaze at him with plaintive eyes. A tiny frog hops
around on the tatami and leads them in a chant: “Here, and there, use and throw away!
If you get torn, you’re useless!”
Recognizing the pitiable umbrellas’ value, the handyman pulls out his gear and sets
to work patching them up. A similar scene greets him in an adjacent room, where
ghostly kimono apparitions claw at him until he stitches them up into fresh bolts of
cloth. Finally, he enters a third room where he encounters a foul stench as a pile of
refuse rises up and then swoops toward him in the form of a frightful dragon. Rather
than losing his nerve, the repairman claps his hands in front of him in an attitude of
Spirit/Medium 167
reverence and says: “You served us well until you were battered and broken. Your effort
is appreciated.” The trash dragon blows past the handyman in a loud rush, leaving him
sitting alone in the tiny shrine. Stepping out into the morning sunshine, the protagonist
glances down to see a freshly patched umbrella and a rich bolt of cloth. Striding down
the hill to continue on his way, he holds aloft his fine new umbrella as the rich cloth sits
like a multicolored cape across his back.
If there is a takeaway message in Tsukumo, it is certainly not the sectarian
championing of Shingon Buddhism described by Noriko Reider in her analysis of the
didactic tale on which it is loosely based (Reider 2009a, 2009b). Whereas the classic tale
used the story of marauding “tool specters” to demonstrate the soteriological power of
the Shingon sect and the relative weakness of other forms of Buddhism, Morita’s short
film focuses audience attention on the tsukai-sute (use and throw away) culture of
contemporary Japan. The traveling handyman cannot bear to see beautiful materials
go to waste, so he repurposes everything he can salvage. Moreover, he demonstrates
an attitude of gratitude toward the worn-out objects, thanking them and respectfully
paying them reverence when they have finally outlived their usefulness.
So is this “animist”? Morita’s film features animated objects and suggests that
viewers should treat the objects and implements around them with care. Certainly this
seems akin to a worldview that sees objects as endowed with personhood. But arguably
Morita’s short reflects the politics of Japan’s capitalist present more than it recapitulates
the “animism” of the hoary past. The last shot reinforces the anti-consumerist message
by panning out from the traveler to show the iconic cone of Mount Fuji, an abiding
topographical presence that implicitly connects his experiences in the premodern past
with the contemporary present.
The ties that bind

Shinkai Makoto’s 2016 smash hit Your Name. (Kimi no na wa.) features two star-crossed
lovers who periodically switch bodies: Taki is a nerdy and timid Tokyo high-schooler
who cannot muster the courage to ask his coworker crush out on a date; Mitsuha is the
descendant of a shrine family who is torn between the demands of tradition and her
selfish desire to flee the countryside for Tokyo. Although the bulk of the film focuses on
the trials and tribulations of the teenaged pair as they negotiate the hilarious problems
engendered by switching male and female bodies, the story actually begins with shots
of the two living as young, single professionals in Tokyo. Moving through the city’s
labyrinthine train system, they each yearn for connection:
Once in a while when I wake up, I find myself crying. I can never recall the dream
I must have had. But the sensation that I’ve lost something lingers for a long time
after I wake up. I’m always searching for something, for someone. This feeling has
possessed me, I think, from that day. (Shinkai 2016)
Most of the film takes place not in this lonely “present” but actually in the past when
Taki and Mitsuha were teens. In the world of the film, spirits are the ties that bind these
distant humans to one another across time and space. The deity Musubi (written with
the characters “to produce” and “spirit” 産霊, but homophonous with the verb “to tie”:
結び) is the kami venerated at the shrine where Mitsuha works as a miko. Although
the deity never appears in embodied form, Musubi provides the “magic” that enables
Mitsuha’s and Taki’s body-swapping.
In an expository scene that takes place while Taki is inhabiting Mitsuha’s body,
Mitsuha’s grandmother explains to Mitsuha and her sister Yotsuha the meaning of musubi.
Grandmother Mitsuha, Yotsuha, do you know “musubi”?

Mitsuha “Musubi?”
Grandmother M usubi is the old way of referring to the local guardian deity [tochi
no ujigamisama]. There is profound significance in this word.
Tying thread is musubi. Connecting people is also musubi. The
flow of time is musubi. This is the power of the omnipotent deity
[zennō kamisama no chikara ya]. The braided cords that we make
are the work of the god, and represent the flow of time itself. [The
threads] converge and take shape. They twist, tangle, sometimes
unravel, break, and then reconnect. That is musubi. That is time.
The trio stops for a picnic, and the grandmother laughs as the girls share a cup of tea.
That is also musubi! Whether it be water, rice, or sake, when
something enters a person’s body and joins their soul [tamashii
to musubitsuku koto], that is also musubi. So today’s offering
[of chewed-rice wine, or kuchikamezake, to the local deity]
is an important custom that connects the god with humans.
(Shinkai 2016)
This expository section of the film helps the body-switching, time-traveling aspects of
the narrative make sense. Without addressing significant aspects of the plot that are
best left unspoiled for those who have not seen it, suffice it to say that the inconvenience
of switching bodies eventually gives way to intimacy as Taki and Mitsuha become
concerned for each other’s well-being. Their connection is attenuated, however, by the
fact that the very magic that binds them also keeps them apart. At crucial points in the
film they just miss each other, or one will recognize the other without being recognized
in turn. Walking past a stranger on the street, they each turn at just the wrong moment.
Is it her? Was that him? Who was it that I was looking for again? When the film draws
to its somewhat predictable conclusion, the audience knows that the deity Musubi has
served all along as the tie holding the star-crossed lovers together.
The Specter of the “Real Animist”
With the foregoing summaries in mind, my point that contemporary anime does not
represent ancient animism should stand because of a simple fact. The concept of animism
is always already dependent on an epistemological sundering of nature from culture of
the sort that “animism” in the classical sense (what I call “pejorative animism”) would
never allow. Whether the anime in question depicts “nature spirits” (as in Your Name.)
Spirit/Medium 169
or whether it depicts the “spirits of objects” (as in the 2013 animated short Tsukumo), the
anime I discussed above all seem to treat the nature-culture divide as only temporarily
traversable if it is traversable at all. Even if we were to say that audiences respond to
anime by professing belief that spirits reside in objects, such a belief would certainly not
be understood by its proponent as a category mistake (pejorative animism), nor would
any behavior based on reactions to the film (such as pilgrimage) be easily categorized
as “animistic” because audience members’ behaviors would still take place in a world in
which humans and nonhumans are regularly differentiated.
My point is that the very act of calling something “animistic” means that one
assumes that the divide between humans and nonhumans is real. If we assume the
existence of a “real animist,” then we can assume that she would have no use for the
category. A “real animist” would not recognize the term “animism,” and she certainly
would not apply it reflexively. Moreover, our “real animist” would presumably look past
the narrative of a given anime to view the spirits in the medium itself. The screen, the
power cables, the celluloid, the camera: all of these objects could capture the attention
of a “real animist” as potentially being persons.
I am somewhat overstating my case for rhetorical effect. I do not deny that there
are people in the world today who think of themselves as animists, nor do I intend
to downplay the postcolonial predicament of peoples who have adopted the term
“animism” as a way of defining and defending their traditions in a world characterized
by the sundering of nature and culture, religion and science. I simply mean that anyone
reading this chapter will always already occupy a world where that epistemological
break has taken place. We cannot think ourselves out of it.
Academic approaches that treat films as sites for animistic practice therefore miss
the point when it comes to describing the complicated relationships between directors,
audiences, characters, settings, and empirical experience. The anime described above
may all deal in some way or another with humanity’s connection with nature and the
spirits that inhabit the natural environment, but they all seem to assume a sharp division
between humans and nature that needs to be rectified. Morita Shūhei’s award-winning
2013 short Tsukumo may redeploy classic folk tales about possessed objects, but it does
so in critique of unthinking consumerism, not as a celebration of an undifferentiated
nature-culture. In sum, the spirits of anime are rooted in late capitalist modernity with
its attendant pleasures and woes: urbanization and anomie, atomization and alienation,
rampant material extraction and environmental degradation.
Pressing Pause
My modest proposal in this chapter is to jettison the term “animism.” Granted, there
is no real way for scholars to police how language is used in everyday speech, and
arguably that is not our job. But we can be more precise with the language that we use
in academic work.
The foregoing has shown that the fraught politics of the word “animism” militate
against using it to describe animated films and television series. What I have called
pejorative animism describes natives as incapable of distinguishing between humans
and nonhumans, suggesting that they make a category mistake by attributing agency
and vitality to objects. By contrast, recuperative animism finds in animism the tools for
combating the ills of our age: alienation, ennui, and environmental degradation. While
this seems to be the usage preferred by the authors I cited above, it easily slips into the
nationalistic project of describing Japanese traditions as uniquely apt for combating
problems of global scale. In obscurantist fashion, it also uses the ambiguous language
of animism to make claims that are difficult to verify or prove: How can we know that
the existence of a nature spirit in an illustrated film definitively serves as evidence of a
longstanding animistic tradition? What kind of animism are we imagining in the first
place? Does it assume that humans and nonhumans are always-already separate? If
so, does it not reproduce the problem of treating the material world as universal and
personhood as particular, when in fact a “real animist” would experience things the
other way around (Wilkinson 2017)?
Having now spent many pages tearing the concept of animism apart, I would like
to conclude more constructively. In closing I provide alternative terminology that can
describe how anime characters develop stronger interpersonal relationships through
the salubrious mediating function of invisible entities, beautiful natural settings, and
vivified objects. I think the authors I cited above are onto something, even if I disagree
with them that “animism” is the best word for it.
***
Pause for a moment. Think about yourself on a crowded city street. Can you look a
stranger in the eye? Can you hold her gaze without looking away in embarrassment?
Can you walk up to her and, against all of your deeply ingrained socialization, say:
“Hey, isn’t your name … ?” Can you experience intimacy? Can you enjoy true solidarity
with other humans?
Pause for a moment. Who are you holding? On whom are you sitting? How can you
structure your relationship with the nonhuman others around you in terms of care? Do
you unconditionally want the best for them? What would it be like to know and feel
that this book has its own way of knowing, its own way of existing in the world? Can
you be noninstrumentalist in your relationships with nonhumans?
Pause for a moment. Can you see without cynicism? Can you embrace the
unexpected? Forget, for a moment, everything that you think you know. There is a
whole universe under a rock in your garden; there is a cast of thousands marching
across your houseplant. There is magic around you if you know to look for it. Can
you be enchanted? Are you prepared to live a life of radical wonder? Can you practice
deliberate naiveté?
Intimacy. Care. Wonder. These are not fancy words or concepts. They are simple
emotions and basic dispositions. To describe these things does not require cultural
essentialist claims, nor does it require elaborate theories of epistemology and ontology.
It is enough to simply say that our authors and the films they discuss all highlight a
cultivated vulnerability: a willingness to eschew cynicism in favor of enchantment, awe,
and togetherness. This is the spirit of the anime medium as they describe it. In the end,
we do not need the concept of animism to say as much.
11
From Your Name. to Shin-Gojira: Spiritual

Crisscrossing, Spatial Soteriology, and
Catastrophic Identity in Contemporary Japanese
Visual Culture
Andrea Castiglioni
All so-called educated people have ceased to believe, officially at any rate, that the
dead can become visible as spirits.
Sigmund Freud, The “Uncanny”
Restless Spirits in Restless Nature
In this chapter, I address some aspects of the interpretative discourses on invisibility,

spirits, and landscape as they are represented in both a contemporary animation movie,
Kimi no na ha. 君の名は。(Your Name.) directed by Shinkai Makoto 新海誠 in 2016,1
and a catastrophic-horror film, Shin-Gojira シン・ゴジラ (Shin-Godzilla) directed by
Anno Hideaki 庵野秀明 in the same year.2 In analyzing these visual materials I argue
that it is possible to point out four major characteristics of the realm of invisibility,
spirits, and those specific landscapes that trigger the experience of such phenomena.
First, in contemporary Japan a considerable part of the hermeneutics about
invisible entities focuses on human spirits (tamashii 魂), which are endowed with the
capability to inhabit different bodies (male spirits can possess female bodies and vice
versa), travel through different spaces (from metropolis to countryside and vice versa),
and move through different times (from future to past and vice versa).
Second, a considerable part of current visual productions on invisibility focuses on
the temperament of the gods (kami 神), which tend to be increasingly represented as
violent and destructive deities (aragami 荒神) rather than protective ones. The age of
the benevolent kami “ȧ la Totoro” seems to be definitively over. Every epiphany of kami
corresponds to a threat for the humans, who had to deactivate the impending divine
menace by pacifying the kami (chinkon 鎮魂), very often with dubious results.3
Third, there is a redefinition of the cultural role assigned to the landscape in which
the kami manifest themselves. For example, the Japanese countryside is progressively
represented as a matrix of catastrophic and lethal events against which the urban
landscape—namely Tokyo—has to react in order to find possible solutions. In other

words, the cultural paradigm according to which the countryside (inaka 田舎) and the
native village (furusato 故郷) are depicted as an oasis of natural purity and spiritual
harmony capable of saving, or at least healing, the degenerated and perverted landscape
of the metropolis (tokai 都会) is turned upside down. Recent visual productions
increasingly show the urban landscape of Tokyo involved in a harsh struggle against
threats coming from outside the borders of the city. The metropolis thus becomes the
last bastion for trying to pacify an irremediably lost and dangerous countryside.
Fourth, all this rethinking of the characteristics attributed to human spirits,
kami, and landscapes lead to a recreation of discourses about national identity. The
fictionalization of catastrophic events, which are put in connection with abrupt
manifestations of kami and extraordinary crisscrossings of human spirits, can be
seen as attempts to memorialize the most recent environmental and social crisis
embodied by the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, which culminated with the partial
meltdown of the reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011
(san ichi-ichi 3.11). The Japanese archipelago is now described as a site characterized
by a continuous alternation of natural disasters and subsequent regenerations of life.
This characterization denies the received discourse of Japan as a country in perennial
harmony with nature and the Japanese as custodians of this mystical equilibrium. In
recent visual discourses natural cataclysms—rather than natural stability—are exploited
to emphasize the uniqueness of Japan and the Japanese vis-à-vis the other countries of
the world: Japan is Japan because there are earthquakes, tsunamis, and radioactive
threats. Since the Japanese are used to being attacked by nature, they are the most
qualified human actors to deactivate these threats. Therefore, this disharmony with
nature—rather than a harmonic privileged relationship with it—entitles the Japanese
to produce an idealized self-portrait in which they are experts in dealing with the lethal
face of nature, which is often described as the destructive power of a manifesting kami.
Kimi no na ha.: The Haunted Countryside
It is interesting to start this reflection from an anime, which—as suggested by the

etymology of the term—involves the notion of anima and the animation processes
of human and nonhuman characters.4 For example, the plot of the 2016 box office
blockbuster Kimi no na ha. shows the love story between Tachibana Taki 立花瀧, a
seventeen-year-old high school student residing in Tokyo, and Miyamizu Mitsuha
宮水三葉, a high school student of the same age living in Itomori 糸守, a small town in
the Gifu Prefecture. During the night of the Tanabata 七夕 festival (July 7), Mitsuha’s
spirit exits her body while she is sleeping and penetrates Taki’s body, whose spirit
does the same thing with Mitsuha’s body. The two youths start to know each other
by experiencing a physical mismatch in which the spirit of Mitsuha meets only with
Taki’s body but not with his spirit, and Taki’s spirit meets with Mitsuha’s body but
never with her spirit. It can be said that the bodies (karada 体) of the two protagonists
of Kimi no na ha. are interpreted as shells, containers, or receptacles in which human
spirits momentarily establish their residence. Therefore, the ultimate protagonists of
From Your Name. to Shin-Gojira 173
this anime are in fact the two invisible male and female spirits that interact with the
audience entering and exiting from external carapaces, which are the male or female
bodies. From this point of view, in Kimi no na ha. bodies perform the same function
of provisional abodes (yorishiro 依代) that usually host the spirits of the kami within
a material vessel during religious rituals—with the difference that, in the case of the
anime, bodies are used as shelters for wandering human spirits.
A further complication to the love story between Mitsuha and Taki is that the
young man lives three years ahead of Mitsuha. Therefore, Taki’s present is Mitsuha’s
future and Mitsuha’s present is Taki’s past. Accordingly, the transfers between human
spirits not only blur the sexual frames in which the body is inscribed (female spirit in
male body; male spirit in female body) but contest even the alleged linearity of time.
When human spirits exchange temporal abodes their present time can alternatively
take place in the future or in the past, subverting the notion of nonreversibility of time.
There is only a specific moment during the day in which Taki and Mitsuha can
breathily meet each other while being in synch with their respective spirits and bodies.
This magical time is the twilight, which is defined by a reference to the ancient term
tasokare 誰そ彼. In classical Japanese tasokare does not simply indicate the dusk as an
in-between period transitioning from day to night, but also a hybrid moment in which
visible entities become invisible and hidden presences momentarily reveal themselves.
The anxiety of the encounters that take place during this liminal time is emphasized
by the expression of surprise—“who is that!” (dare da, are ha 誰だ、あれは)—which
constitutes the origin of this term. Therefore, in Kimi no na ha. the transfers between
human spirits take place at night during the oneiric activities of the protagonists, but
the possibility of a real encounter is limited to the ephemeral time of dusk.
This work of Shinkai Makoto is labeled as world-type anime (sekai-kei anime
セカイ系アニメ) because the plot is not restricted to the intimate dimension of the
love between two teenagers but propels individual emotions toward a more universal
and complex sphere of events (Sayawaka 2016: 73). After a while Taki realizes that
the spirit of Mitsuha, which occasionally penetrates his body, belongs to a girl who
died three years before during the impact of a meteorite, which detached from the
Tiamat Comet (Tiamato suisei ティアマト彗星) and erased the village of Itomori.
The very existence of Mitsuha’s village is described as deeply dependent on the
insurgence of this type of natural disaster. The lake in front of the village, which
sustains the fishing and agricultural activities of the Itomori residents, is nothing
other than an enormous caldera-lake provoked by the crash of a meteorite that fell
down 1,200 years before. In other terms, the ecosystem of Itomori is generated from
cosmic destruction in a sort of never ending alternation between extinction and
reconstitution of life.
The agency of the local kami of Itomori, which is venerated in the shrine (Miyamizu
jinja 宮水神社) administered by Mitsuha’s Miyamizu family, is also deeply related with
the occurrence of catastrophes. In July during the Tanabata festival, the clan-god
(ujigami 氏神) of the Miyamizu is worshiped through the offering of a special type of
sake called kuchi-kami zake 口噛み酒, which is obtained by having two shrine maidens
(miko 巫女)—in this case, Mitsuha and her younger sister Yotsuba 四葉—chewing
some rice gruel and then pouring it into a sake bottle directly from the mouth.5
This sake brewed with human saliva is donated to the Itomori kami, which is called
with the appellative of musubi 産霊. The Chinese characters of this compound refer to
the creative power of the kami that is defined as a “generating divine spirit” (umu rei
産む霊); at the same time, the reading of these characters is a reminder of the ability
of the kami to create ties or knots (musubi 結び) between everything. Ichiha 一葉, the
grandmother of Mitsuha, explains the meaning of the name of the local kami, saying
that: “To bind threads means musubi, to bind people together means musubi, the flow
of time is also musubi. The same word applies to all these things. This represents the
name of the kami and also its power” (Shinkai 2016: 88, my translation).
The divine body (goshintai 御神体) of this binding kami is located in the middle
of a crater, which was also formed after the impact of yet another meteorite, on the
summit of the mountain behind the Miyamizu shrine. Ichiha defines this sacred site
with the classical terms of “hidden world” (kakuri-yo 隠り世) or “other world” (ano yo
あの世), but in the book version of the anime this area is also called “spiritual peak”
(reihō 霊峰), power spot (pawā supotto パワースポット), and save point (sēbu pointo
セーブポイント) (90). There are two natural elements that mark the presence of the
goshintai within the crater: a gigantic tree (kyoboku 巨木) and a boulder (ichimai iwa
一枚岩). The tree grows on the top of the boulder, which is embraced by the roots of
the plant. It is not clear if the spirit of the kami resides within the tree or the stone
or, alternatively, in both. What is interesting to note is that there is an intermediate
space between the tree’s roots and the upper part of the boulder, which creates a sort
of hidden chamber where the bottles of kuchi-kami zake are ultimately enshrined as
offerings to the kami. On the stone wall of this secret room there is a painting, which
shows a swarm of meteorites emitting colorful beams of light. This painting testifies
that the kami of Itomori is actually a celestial deity whose real form corresponds
to Comet Tiamat, which periodically strikes the village. Moreover, Tiamat is the
name of a Mesopotamian goddess (Tiamat) that represents the primordial sea and
controls rain and rivers (Tanaka 2016: 189). It is possible to think that the gender of
this contemporary destructive kami, whose origins extend far beyond the Japanese
borders, all the way to the Middle East, is more feminine than masculine.
In order to save Mitsuha and the entire Itomori community, Taki succeeds in
finding the location of the goshintai within the crater, enters the hidden chamber
between the tree and the stone, drinks the kuchi-kami zake prepared three years
before by Mitsuha, and expresses the vow (gan 願) to the kami to let his spirit enter
Mitsuha’s body one more time to carry out an evacuation plan before the meteorite
actually wipes out the village. The kami allows this last exchange between the spirits of
Taki and Mitsuha, thanks to which the Itomori villagers are saved—even though the
infrastructure is entirely destroyed. After accomplishing the plan, dusk arrives and the
two youths become conscious that this is their last occasion to meet and that in a few
moments they will be irremediably separated, each one stuck in a different temporality.
What is relevant to point out is that the salvation of a doomed countryside—Itomori—
is entirely attributed to the resolutive intervention of the city—Tokyo. The spirit of
Taki, which comes from the future and is associated with Tokyo, enters the body of
Mitsuha, which is linked to the past and the rural community of Itomori, and succeeds
in partially reducing the deadly effects of the kami’s destructive power.
The conclusion of the anime takes place after a narrative caesura of eight years.
Taki has graduated from university and is now a young adult looking for a job.
Taki’s spirit has a vague memory of a distant and important event—the encounter
with Mitsuha—whose presence is expressed through its irreversible absence. Taki is
looking for someone but does not exactly know whom. At this moment of the anime,
the real protagonist of the scene becomes the very urban fabric of Tokyo, whose tangle
of railway tracks, crossovers, mainlines, and rushing trains designs a new network
of mechanical and steel threads around Taki and Mitsuha. It seems that the ultimate
example of the binding power expressed by the musubi no kami 結びの神 of Itomori is
reified in the knots of Tokyo railway tracks, which allow the protagonists to meet again
even beyond the gap of space and time.
If the countryside of Kimi no na ha. is depicted as the location of an imminent
natural disaster—the scene of the impact of the meteorite on Itomori village is an
incredible reminder of the post-tsunami landscape at Fukushima—the metropolis—
Tokyo and its railways, highways, and machines—displays a strong nonhuman
agency upon which the destiny of the entire country depends. Trains, for example,
are not simply “intermediaries” for human actors’ commutes but become authentic
“mediators”—in the Latourian meaning of the term—which create original events
setting up new networks and intersections among people.6
The anime’s title itself evokes a vast range of expectations for a possible romantic
encounter between a man and a woman, which may or may not take place. To boost
this sensation in the spectator, Shinkai wisely chose to borrow the name of his new
work from the title of a very famous radio drama, Kimi no na ha 君の名は, which
was broadcast by the NHK from 1952 to 1954.7 This Shōwa period Kimi no na ha
is still associated in the collective memory of the nation with a mix of surprise and
heart-pounding feelings (hara-hara doki-doki ハラハラドキドキ), which are due to
the failures of the two protagonists in meeting each other because of a continuous
series of accidents and misunderstandings.
In a similar way, Shinkai’s Kimi no na ha. also goes over the difficulties of Mitsuha
and Taki communicating with each other and establishing a proper relationship. In
the anime, the frustration for a fragmented communicative experience is even more
amplified by the fact that Taki and Mitsuha live in the age of social networks, chats,
cloud-diaries, text messages, and emails. Yet all of these forms of virtual and fast
writing ultimately fail in securing the emotional ties between the two youths. After the
last twilight, which announces the impact of the meteorite on Mitsuha’s village, their
spirits stop crisscrossing in each other’s body. At the same time, all the databases of the
texts that Taki and Mitsuha exchanged via mobile phones, paper massages, or writing
directly on each other’s bodies during their previous encounters, abruptly fade away.
The quality of the media is irrelevant. It does not matter if a memory is fixed on a piece
of paper, the screen of a mobile phone, or human skin. It is doomed to disappear and
the protagonists have to face the inescapable anxiety of forgetting everything about
each other, beginning with each other’s names.
Yet, the main difference between the 1952 Kimi no na ha and the 2016 Kimi no
na ha. resides in the interpretation of this reciprocal loss. For Shinkai, loss becomes
an essential consequence of an encounter, and oblivion is just the beginning of a
recollection. After losing each other, Mitsuha and Taki are actually running into each
other. This resurfacing of a memory, which apparently seemed to be irremediably lost,
is visually displayed by the dot—the period—at the end of the title. The affirmative
tone of Kimi no na ha., which is properly translated in English as Your Name. (without
question mark), serves to emphasize the fact that the two protagonists have always
preserved a reciprocal memory even in the most adverse conditions. In the last
scene of the anime, when Taki and Mitsuha finally meet on a concrete stair close to
Sendagaya Station, they do not need to ask each other’s name because their spirits have
always remembered it thanks to the paradox that this memory was once forgotten.
This is the reason why at the end Mitsuha and Taki state—not inquire—with one voice
that their reciprocal names are what they have always remembered them to be. This
detail underlines another characteristic of the spirits, which are portrayed in Kimi no
na ha. as special black boxes of a circular memory that is based on the interweaving
of remembrance (Gr. hypomnesis) and oblivion (Gr. anamnesis) beyond spaces and
times.8
Not only is the essential plot of Kimi no na ha. articulated on the mutual fertilization
between remembering and forgetting, the graphic structure of the frames, which
compose the film, is likewise realized through an innovative technique that exalts the
same concept of coincidence of opposites. Each frame of this anime is the result of a
HDR (high dynamic range) process, which forms extremely bright and detailed images
by overlapping multiple pictures of the same subject taken in different conditions of
light. In other words, the same subject is photographed various times in order to cover
the entire range of light from extreme luminosity to extreme darkness. The HDR process
puts together all these shots in a single frame, which displays the maximum contrast
between the bright and the dark zones (Arakawa 2016: 215–216). At the same time, the
chromatic selection, which characterizes the frames of Kimi no na ha., does not derive
from the classic RGB (red, green, blue) scale but is classified as “intermediate colors”
because it privileges intermediate and blurred tonalities (217–218). Therefore, all the
visual data embedded in the frame are generated from the integration of the HDR
photographic process with an “intermediate colors” chromatic scale, the high optical
resolution of which is based on their intrinsic obscurity. As oblivion is a necessary
step toward remembrance in the relationship between Taki and Mitsuha, darkness
and indefinite colors also become sources of light and sharpness for the frames of
the anime. A superb aspect in Shikai’s work is precisely his ability to reintroduce the
same conceptual discourse about the alternation between loss and unity, presence and
absence, on multiple levels, which uninterruptedly extend from the narrative to the
technical one.
Shin-Gojira: Reactive Cityscape
The epiphany of a destructive kami and the subsequent actions taken by humans to
pacify the rough god is the link between Kimi no na ha. and another extremely popular
movie for the Japanese audience: Shin-Gojira. The title of this work is purposely written
in katakana phonetic alphabet in order to emphasize the hybridity of the terms. The
sound shin シンcan refer to three different, but interrelated, concepts (Egawa 2016: 297).
Shin as “new” means that this 2016 Gojira is different from all the other Gojiras of the
past. The biological structure of this Gojira is similar to a DNA vortex, which is in
perennial evolution (shinka suru 進化する) and is therefore characterized by instability
and continuous metamorphosis. Shin as “real” refers to the fact that this movie is a
remake of the first Gojira movie directed in 1954 by Honda Ishirō 本多猪四郎 (1911–
1993), which narrates the origin of Gojira and is different from the other more recent
episodes of the saga.9 The third meaning that can be associated with the sound shin is
kami 神, which serves to emphasize the divine nature of Gojira.
Not only the word shin but also the proper name Gojira can be taken as a floating
signifier. According to the 1954 version of the movie, the first person to call this
mysterious creature abruptly emerging from the abysses of the sea by name is the
old head of a small fishing village on Ōdo island (Ōdo-shima 大戸島), somewhere in
the Pacific Ocean south of Tokyo. The undersea abode of this marvelous amphibian
was destroyed in a nuclear test after the launch of a hydrogen bomb by a US aircraft.
Thereafter, the monster started attacking the inhabitants of Ōdo island, who named it
Gojira 呉爾羅 using three Chinese characters as pronunciation markers (ateji 当字).
The villagers tried to pacify the violent spirit of Gojira by staging a kagura 神楽 dance
and even by making a sacrificial offering of a young girl on its behalf.
When the Japanese Department of Interior passed the top-secret files on Gojira to
the officers of the American Department of Energy, they revised the name of Gojira
by rewriting it in Roman characters as Godzilla, which includes a clear reference to
the Christian god. After this last name change the Japanese government decided to
make a blend of the two versions of the name—one in Chinese characters created
by the Japanese and the other in Roman characters created by the Americans—
writing the name of Gojira ゴジラ in the katakana alphabet as a definitive mediation
between the two scriptural and spiritual interpretations (Tanaka 2016: 186). As kami,
Gojira is endowed with an amphibious body, which is empowered by the radiations
of the hydrogen bomb dropped by the United States and has supernatural powers
such as the ability to emit destructive beams of white light from the throat and the
dorsal fins. Moreover, the divine nature of Gojira seems to be based on an upgrade
of the classic combinatory paradigm between Buddhas and kami (shinbutsu shūgō
神仏習合), which can be defined as shin-alpha 神アルファ習合. According to this
new amalgamation model, a kami merges with any other type of god—even from
Mesopotamia as in the case of the goddess Tiamat or the Christian god as conceived
by the officers of the American Department of Energy—and becomes a totally new
hybrid deity.
The 2001 movie Gojira-Mosura-Kingu Gidora daikaijū sōkōgeki ゴジラ・モスラ・
キングギドラ　大怪獣総攻撃 (Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters
All-Out Attack), directed by Kaneko Shūsuke 金子修介, adds a new element to the
hermeneutics of Gojira’s body, which is now said to be constituted by the spirits of the
dead Japanese soldiers (heishi no bōrei 兵士の亡霊) who perished during the maritime
battles in the Second World War.10 This conglomerate of vengeful spirits, which
empower the body of Gojira, haunts the living because of the ritual oblivion in which
they are relegated and tries to go back to the Japanese archipelago to receive a proper
veneration. It is interesting to note that the same connection between Gojira and the
spirits of those who met a violent death at war was already implicitly represented in the
1954 Gojira’s lethal walk through the metropolitan area of Tokyo. During its ghastly
visits home (satogaeri 里帰り), Gojira usually entered and exited the city from the sea
facing Shinagawa Station. After destroying Ginza and the Diet building, Gojira pointed
toward the northern direction, assaulted Ueno, then Asakusa, and slowly returned to
the sea following the Sumida River to its delta.
Gojira’s very movement becomes the most dreadful aspect of this scene because
its kinetic presence is not restrained by any obstacle and does not stop in front of
anything. Gojira and all the memories associated with it reclaim their legitimate space
of influence within society, engraving on the architectural body of the city and on the
flesh bodies of the humans indelible marks of destruction. In particular, the image of
Gojira half-soaked in the waters of the Sumida River and surrounded by a burning
cityscape is a visual allusion to the painful death met by many inhabitants of Tokyo
who tried to escape the fierce heat of the incendiary bombs dropped on the city in the
last year of the Second World War. The renovation of agony, which is caused by Gojira’s
destructive power against Tokyo and its population, works as a sort of catharsis for the
audience. In this purification process, the suffering and the horror experienced by the
living who face Gojira’s fury in the present serve to pacify the anger of the dead spirits
who met a violent death in the past war. When the cathartic destruction is completed,
Gojira disappears in the ocean waves and the anthropo-poiesis of the living can finally
take place through the reconstruction of the city.11
It is also important to take into account that the monstrous body of Gojira cannot
be constrained within the boundaries of a single interpretation. Gojira’s greatest power
resides in the fact that it can be compared to a monstrous archive of contrasting and,
at the same time, unifying memories. As archive, Gojira tends toward an impossible
indexation and remembrance of a primordial origin, which is permanently doomed to
be blurred by a continuous proliferation and fragmentation of interpretive discourses
about its essence, none of which ultimately prevails over the others.12 For instance,
over many years the archive-body of Gojira has been variously interpreted as a
conglomerate of soldier spirits; as a sorrowful mass of spirits of civilians who died in
the Second World War; as the incarnation of the Japanese fear of the incendiary bombs
dropped by the US Air Force on Tokyo; as a punishment for the violence perpetrated
by the Japanese soldiers against other Asian populations; and as the nuclear power
that destroys Japan or, vice versa, the nuclear power that saves Japan—as in the case
of movies about Gojira produced in the sixties and seventies in which a benevolent
Gojira shields Japan from the mortal attacks of other malevolent creatures.13
It is impossible to reach a univocal interpretation of Gojira because it does not
deliver any message that is not centered on Gojira itself. The last movie Shin Gojira,
in particular, can be analyzed as a sort of filmic archive in which Gojira reenacts its
past—including its own death—expanding the memories of the first episode of the
saga in order to be in tune with the present. It does not matter if all the memories
and interpretations, which never stop overflowing from the archive-body of Gojira,
contradict each other. What is crucial is that all these discourses invariably end
up generating zones of agreement between social actors. From this point of view,
Gojira has a unifying effect on Japanese society because each person can freely bend
the archival messages, embedded in Gojira’s physicality and behavior, to his or her
analytical sensibility, with the certainty to find other people who share similar ideas.
The most recent Gojira differs from the old one because its supernatural power
does not derive from radiation from military nuclear activities such as the hydrogen
bomb, but is the result of radioactive contamination caused by waste from nuclear
plants producing energy for civilians. Moreover, the new Gojira is a mutant that can
develop wings and fly to other countries of the world. Therefore, Gojira’s threat is not
limited to the local scenario of the Japanese archipelago but takes a global perspective.
In the attempt to understand the functioning modalities of Gojira’s anatomy, which is
compared to a “chemical mandala” (kagakutekina mandara 化学的な曼荼羅), the task
force of experts studying its movements define the creature as an “immortal” (sennin
仙人) that can survive simply by ingesting water and oxygen. In another instance,
Gojira is explicitly associated with the violent power of a god (kami no araburu chikara
神の荒ぶる力), which humans must stop before being annihilated. The visual proof
of Gojira’s supernatural power includes the beams of light emanating from his dorsal
fins and throat, characterized—for the first time in this new film—by a blue and violet
tonality. Like the colorful glitter of the meteorites in Kimi no na ha., the rays of light
emitted by Gojira are beautiful and, at the same time, lethal.
After the unsuccessful attempt by the United States to kill Gojira with massive
ordnance penetrator bombs (MOP II), which only incite further its destructive fury
against the city, Gojira reaches Tokyo Station and stops moving. At this moment,
the United Nations passes a resolution allowing the United States to hit Gojira with
a nuclear missile. In order to avoid the use of a nuclear weapon in the urban area of
Tokyo, the Japanese government decides to delay the diffusion of sensitive data about
Gojira to the allies in order to proceed with an alternative plan to eliminate Gojira,
freezing its body with an injection of a lethal mix of coagulant chemical components
through its throat. The name of this operation, “Yashiori operation” (Yashiori sakusen
ヤシオリ作戦), derives from the special “eightfold-brewed” (yashiori 八塩折) sake used
by the kami Susanoo no mikoto 須佐男命 to first intoxicate and then behead the eight-
head and eight-tail serpent Yamata no orochi 八保遠呂智, as reported in the Kojiki 古
事記 (712) and the Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (720).
It is interesting to note that in ancient mythological narrative the body of Yamata
no orochi is not simply represented as an obstacle to be annihilated at all costs, but
actually becomes a precious source of power and legitimacy, which Susanoo is ready
to exploit on his behalf. In fact, while cutting one tail of the serpent, Susanoo discovers
inside a magical sword (Kusanagi 草薙), which he immediately presents as a gift to his
sister, sun goddess Amaterasu no ōmikami 天照大神 (Philippi 1968: 88–90). In Shin-
Gojira, the Yashiori operation proposed by the Japanese government differs from the
military strategy orchestrated by the United States with regards to the treatment being
reserved for Gojira’s body in order to deactivate its threat. While the United States
pushes for a thermic solution, which is supposed to end with the complete meltdown
of Gojira in the heat emanated from the nuclear warhead contained in a missile, Japan
opts for a cryogenic solution, which aims to kill Gojira and, at the same time, preserve
its body intact as long as possible.
As soon as the Yashiori operation obtains the necessary political endorsement,

Gojira is first stunned by a synchronized attack of multiple unmanned Shinkansen
and other trains, which simultaneously converge and explode against Gojira’s legs. The
second phase of the plan consists in making two skyscrapers on the Marunouchi side
of Tokyo Station collapse directly on the back of Gojira in order to knock it down to the
ground. The third and final phase sees the alternation of small squads of Self-Defense
Forces that inject thousands of liters of chemical solution into Gojira’s throat to freeze
its biological activities. These squads work by taking short turns of a few minutes each
due to the high level of radiation emanating from Gojira’s body. To reach Gojira’s
throat and spray the cooling solution inside it, the Self-Defense Forces use dozens
of industrial trucks with special extensible arms—exact reproductions of trucks sent
from Tokyo to Fukushima in order to pour water over the plutonium bars inside the
devastated reactors of the nuclear plant. After this operation concludes successfully,
Gojira remains motionless and its frozen body stops in the middle of Tokyo Station.
Like Kimi no na ha., Shin-Gojira also presents a fictionalized visual rethinking of the
catastrophic events of March 2011, which are associated with unpredictable epiphanies
of two different kami: a celestial kami in the case of the anime and Gojira in the case
of the movie. In Kimi no na ha. the disaster impacts only the countryside symbolized
by the Itomori village of Mitsuha, which is saved by the decisive intervention of the
metropolis—Tokyo, where Taki comes from. In Shin-Gojira the catastrophe arrives
from the ocean directly to the city in the guise of a violent kami (Gojira), whose
destructive power is not completely tamed but only momentarily stopped. Shin-Gojira
is the first movie in which Gojira does not make a return to the sea after destroying
Tōkyō (Inomata 2016: 50). There is no catharsis in Shin-Gojira and therefore there is
no definitive anthropopoietic hope for a better future. In contrast to Taki and Mitsuha,
the human actors of Shin-Gojira cannot provide a stable solution to the anxieties and
baleful events embodied by Gojira, which remains in the center of Tokyo as a gloomy
monument. In this context, it is interesting to consider that the words “monument”
(Lat. monumentum) and “monster” (Lat. monstrum) share the same etymology;
Gojira is a real monster because it is associated with the onset of an inauspicious
event (Lat. monstrum) and, at the same time, is a gloomy monument that admonishes
(Lat. monĕo) the living.
If we think about Gojira as a cursing kami (tatari-gami 祟り神) that assaults human
society, we should also ask what is the ultimate target of its manifestation. In other
words, what is Gojira looking for while wandering around Tokyo? Gojira is probably
looking for the only thing that it never destroys in all its incursions: the Imperial
Palace. The attractive presence of this particular space for Gojira is emphasized
through its very absence, because the movie’s syntax voluntarily avoids mentioning it.
Nevertheless, it is evident that when Gojira collapses on the ground of Tokyo Station
its jaws and eyes furiously point toward Nijūbashi, where the main gate of the Imperial
Palace is located. The behavior of Gojira if it should succeed in reaching the Imperial
Palace is unpredictable, but it is undeniable that this site seems to exert a fascination
on the monster.
In one of the conclusive scenes of Shin-Gojira a group of Japanese politicians
conclude that the arrival of Gojira marks the beginning of a new era for Japan, which
should start taking independent decisions about national security matters even
in contrast with United Nations resolutions, or without prior consultations with
historical partners such as the United States. Japan is characterized as a country in
which the violent power of kami such as the Tiamat Comet of Kimi no na ha. or Gojira
provokes immense natural disasters that punctuate a unique alternation between life,
death, and regeneration of life. Japanese such as Taki, Mitsuha, or the special anti-
Gojira task force members are the only people possessing the know-how to prevent
(or at least to limit) the damage caused by these catastrophic events. Therefore, we can
see here a new discourse about Japan’s national identity that no longer relies on the
paradigm of a “naturalistic utopia” but on a sort of “naturalistic dystopia.” Although
Kimi no na ha. presents a more successful resolution of an interior natural crisis
compared to Shin-Gojira, in which the threat could be lethal for foreign countries as
well as for Japan and is only partially resolved, it seems that the projection of Japan
on the international arena is specifically associated with its leading role in dealing
with catastrophes.
Tokyo’s Body and Phantom
It is interesting to note that in both Kimi no na ha. and in Shin-Gojira the urban
landscape of Tokyo is represented as an entity endowed with an autonomous agency.
This active power of the city is primarily embodied by its trains. For examples, in Kimi
no na ha. trains—alias mechanical musubi—allow Mitsuha and Taki to meet again.
In the 1954 Gojira, trains and tracks were simply imagined as inanimate objects
which were mercilessly stomped on or devoured by Gojira, but in Shin-Gojira trains,
platforms, streets, and industrial trucks are all envisioned as animated objects that
actively modify reality as a sort of reified expression of the metropolis’s spirit.
This representation of Tokyo as an enormous living organism, the spirit of which
shows as many different faces as the districts of the city, is also sharply exemplified by
the work of contemporary photographer Moriyama Daidō 森山大道, whose images
of Tokyo’s external reality always serve as reminders of Tokyo’s internal or spiritual
agency. The shown/visible aspect of the photo is supposed to bridge the gap with
the unseen/invisible aspect of the photographed subject. While standing in front of
the picture, the observer is urged to contemplate the invisible through the visible.
For Moriyama, Shinjuku area, more than any other place in the city, channels in its
architectural body the spiritual power of Tokyo. The energy of Shinjuku reveals itself
in multiple forms through the photographic work, independently of the specificity of
the subjects at which the camera’s lens is aimed. Describing what he calls the phantom
(fantomuファントム) of Shinjuku, Moriyama writes:
At night, when I pick up my camera and walk from Kabukichō to Kuyakusho

Street, and then from Ōkubo Street to Shin-Ōkubo Station, I sometimes feel cold
shivers running down my spine. Although nothing unusual has happened, I have
a sense of myself existing somewhere. In the darkness of back streets illuminated
with neon signs and other lights, people become shadowy entities that appear
to wriggle about like insects. The sensitive response of the shadowy, insect-like
people is conveyed like an electrical current to the gaze of the small camera in my
hand. In the tense atmosphere, the cells of my body begin to stir, and I perceive
a turbulence in the air all around me. […] This monster [monsutā モンスター]
called Shinjuku obscures any fixed point and time. It is an uncanny living being
[bukimina ikimono 不気味な生き物] whose skin is constantly vermiculating and
exfoliating while incorporating every sort of thing. Who knows why it does not
hunt time. (Moriyama and Araki 2005: 116)14
The street photography of Moriyama and the cinematic by Anno in Shin-Gojira share
many similarities because both deal with a hyperrealistic representation of reality. As
a visual medium, photography derives much of its legitimacy from the misleading
impression that each picture is a faithful mirror of reality. A similar rhetoric also
applies to the documentary, which is the cinematographic genre that has exerted the
biggest influence on the film structure of all Gojira movies since 1954. Like Moriyama,
Anno also uses a visual language based on the representation of meta-real phenomena
such as Gojira (or the phantom of Shinjuku in the case of Moriyama), by adopting
the same shooting techniques of the documentary/reportage, which is considered
to be the visual narration of reality par excellence. In this way extraordinary subjects
such as Gojira appear to be realistic and acceptable thanks to a detailed representation
of the ordinary world surrounding them. In other words, it is the reproduction of
reality’s ordinariness through the language of the documentary which creates the
extraordinariness of spirits, monsters, and gods. Such a documentary vision, which is
constantly deployed in the filmic description of Gojira, ends up creating hyperreal gaps
or fractures within the sphere of reality, whose actuality and authority are eventually
exposed to contestation and criticism.
Furthermore, the promotional brochure for the launch of Shin-Gojira deliberately
plays with the idea of a mixture between the real and the unreal in the movie’s plot. For
instance, the catchphrase written below the movie’s title says: “reality versus fiction”
(genjitsu tai kyokō 現実対虚構), with the pronunciation characters (rubi ルビ) “Japan”
(Nippon ニッポン) placed on the top of genjitsu and “Gojira” on the top of kyokō. At
a first glance, Japan seems to be the embodiment of reality and Gojira seems to be
relegated to a fictive dimension. Nevertheless, thanks to the adoption of a documentary
style (reality) of filming for a meta-real phenomena such as Gojira (fiction), it becomes
clear that toward the end of the movie the relationship between the two terminological
poles is definitely turned upside down. Gojira becomes a real monster and the
metropolis of Tokyo transforms into a fantastic organism throbbing with life (Tsujita
2016: 102).
In addition to the advertising campaign and the filmic technique, the soundtrack
of Shin-Gojira is also composed to emphasize the continuous incursions of alterity
within the boundaries of normality. Anno and his music director Sagisu Shirō 鷺巣詩
郎 consciously dot the film with melodic quotations from the compositions of Ifukube
Akira 伊福部昭 (1914–2006), who wrote among other pieces the famous theme “Fear
of Gojira” (Gojira no kyōfu ゴジラの恐怖) for the first episode of the saga. Ifukube
included in his musical language numerous sonorities and rhythms borrowed from the
sounds of traditional instruments played by peasants in northeastern Japan, members

of Ainu groups in Hokkaidō, and even local populations in the Sakhalin peninsula.
The calculated insertions of cacophonies or guttural sounds belonging to different
musical contexts within the canon of classical Western compositions creates a sort of
antinomian and dystopian harmony that perfectly accompanies the destructive effects
of Gojira on the nomothetic illusions of human society.
The transitory nature of Gojira between real and unreal is also amplified by
the special acoustic effects by Ifukube. Anno decided to keep them unchanged,
reproducing them in the original monophonic quality instead of stereo. Thus, the
main sense involved in the perception of Gojira is not sight but hearing, as the ear
is immediately struck by the massive sound of Gojira’s steps from the very start of
the movie when the title appears on the black background of the screen. Ifukube
realized the sound effect for Gojira’s steps by recording the deflagration of an aircraft
bomb, while Gojira’s roar was obtained by overlapping multiple recordings of the
sounds produced by a slack cord of a contrabass (Fukuda 2016: 126). It is interesting
to note that the rumble of Gojira’s steps is always heard even when the monster
is immersed in water. This aural strategy together with other strategies mentioned
before help to reinforce the image of Gojira as kami, which overcomes and deceives
all human senses by making itself audible or visible even in the most unlikely natural
conditions.
In Shin-Gojira the tail of the monster receives a peculiar narrative attention and
the last shot is entirely dedicated to a close-up of its tip, on which it is possible to
distinguish the generation of humanoid silhouettes emerging from a mysterious
forest of gray filaments. If Gojira’s physicality represents an alternative ecosystem,
then its tail already symbolizes the future expansions and transformations of such an
ecosystem even beyond the possible annihilation of Gojira’s body by humans. This
sort of equation between Gojira and an alternative bio-environment has already been
addressed in the first movie of the series, when Professor Yamane (Yamane hakase
山根博士) discovers a marine trilobite fossil in the imprint left by Gojira on the ground
of Ōdo island. In that situation, Gojira is conceptualized as an enormous incubator
in which biological forms that belong to a prehistorical past are brought back to our
present to generate a future Gojirian ecosystem where there may not be a place for
humans.
Gojira is then the dawn of an ecological environment that aims to expand itself
in order to extinguish our habitat and generate a different one, the biological
reality of which could be based on the mingling between animals and plants. The
body of Gojira itself presents various commonalities with the arboreal realm such
as the rugosity of the skin, based on the irregular peel of the balsam apple (gōya
ゴーヤ), and the shape of the dorsal fins, which look like a forest of holly tree
leaves (hiiragi ヒイラギ).15 For example, in the first movie Gojira abruptly appears
behind the luxuriant crest of a mountain at Ōdo island and starts hunting the
humans gathered there. To communicate the atmosphere of excitement and fear,
the camera captures rapid sequences of human feet and legs rushing on a dusty
path striated by the shadows of various trees. Because Gojira stands very close to
the mountain path, it would be natural to see his huge shadow together with those
of the trees, but that does not happen. The reason is precisely because Gojira’s body
is a sort of zone of complexity where the forest trees are completely integrated
within its physicality so much that the taxonomical boundaries between the two
cease existing (Ōhashi 2016: 306–307).
Even in Shin-Gojira the monster incarnates, at the same time, the threat for
human extinction and the hope for the realization of a totally new environment
where humans have learned to coexist with radioactivity, using it to protect their lives
like Gojira seems able to do. For example, as soon as the politician Yaguchi realizes
that Gojira managed to survive radiation, using it to maximize the potentialities
of its organism, he says: “[Gojira] brings humanity towards destruction and, at the
same time, is a gospel towards a future humanity” (jinrui wo hakai saseru mono de
ari, katsu mirai no jinrui e no fukuin de aru 人類を破壊させるものであり、かつ未
来の人類への福音である). Like a veritable kami of obstacles, Gojira bestows either
death or immortality (or both) to the humans who stand in front of its Janus-like
face, simultaneously manifesting terrible and benevolent traits. The body of Gojira
represents then the quest for immortality because it can be shocked, shattered, and
annihilated with a whole range of devices, from the oxygen destroyer of the first movie
to the coagulating solution deployed in the Yashiori Operation, but it always resurges
more powerful than before. Like a bestial Saint Sebastian or the female protagonists of
Sade’s novels, the more Gojira’s body is tortured and pierced the more its beauty and
vital energy are unrestrained.
At this point we can return to the fundamental question of the relationship
between Gojira and the infinite significations surrounding its existence. Tanaka Jun
proposes to use Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of “signature” (Lat. signatura) to
describe Gojira and the proliferation of meanings associated with it (Tanaka 2016:
189). For Agamben the signature precedes the sign (Lat. signum) and differs from
both the sign-maker (Lat. signans) and the signed (Lat. signatum). Therefore, the
signature is not subjected to semiotics because it anticipates the sign, and is not
limited to semantics because it creates an indistinguishable loop and interpenetration
between signifiers and what they signify. If Gojira is analyzed as a “zero-degree sign”
(that is, a “pre-sign” or a signature), it becomes clear that its ultimate power derives
from a substantial undecidability, which is generated from “an infinite signification
that cannot be exhausted by any signified” (Agamben 2009: 78). The analogy between
Gojira and a kami probably resides in the fact that both are vessels of unconsciousness
and undecidability, which oppose any type of unidirectional attribution of meaning
and keep attracting a perpetual stream of floating signifiers without displaying any
fixed signified.
Coda
The reflection of Moriyama Daidō on the phantom of Shinjuku ends with a crucial
question: why does this uncanny monster called Shinjuku not hunt time? We can
extend the same question to the relationship between time and all the various spirits
and extraordinary entities we have encountered so far. Gojira, like the crisscrossing
spirits of Kimi no na ha., can be considered as a chronotope opposing the alleged

linearity of time and collapses together past, present, and future in a sort of infinite
loop. According to this interpretation, spirits becomes authentic makers of tradition,
as they have the capacity to manipulate time as they please. This mechanism is evident
also in the etymology of the term tradition (Lat. traditio), which derives from the verb
“to transmit” (Lat. tradĕre), the vox media of which means “to betray” (It. tradire). In
other words, spirits, monsters, and kami do not hunt time because they use it to create
the ultimate structure of tradition, which is based on a systematic betrayal of the past
and its alleged linearity in order to fragment it and attune it to the present. A tradition
that is not able to cheat on the past is not a living phenomenon but a cadaver. On the
contrary, Gojira and Kimi no na ha. spirits choose to not attack time but transform it,
acting as blackboxes or magnetic archives that actualize memories from the past by
merging them with the needs of the present. This operation, according to the analysis
of Eric Hobsbawn (1917–2012), corresponds to the invention of tradition (Hobsbawn
1983: 1–3).
Not only time but also space plays a pivotal role in the discourses about spiritual
and invisible presences. In the specific cases of Kimi no na ha. and Shin-Gojira, the
countryside and the metropolis are marked with different significations. The extra-
urban landscape is described as the source of catastrophes carried out by aggressive
kami, against which the city, i.e., Tokyo, must find a solution. The metropolitan maze of
streets, cables, tracks, and trains develops a sort of spiritual aspect, which understands
and reacts to external stimuli by turning into an enormous infrastructural body
similar to a living organism. Nevertheless, meta-real entities are not limited by the
boundaries of a given landscape but become themselves sources of new ecosystems.
From a mere human perspective, these unknown biological networks that overlap
with the epiphany of violent kami like Gojira or the Tiamat Comet in Kimi no na
ha. resemble more an eco-dystopia than an eco-utopia. Plants, animals, waters,
humanoids, and perhaps bacteria are the best candidates to survive by adapting
their biological rhythms to the post-destruction environment incarnated by the
unpredictable bodies of amphibian and celestial kami. Human society and human
actors seem to be left outside the frame in a precarious condition, which may end up
being a total extinction.
It is in the midst of such environmental and biological catastrophes that the Japanese
try to imagine themselves by creating a new national identity. The natural landscape
of the archipelago seems to have definitely turned its back on its inhabitants, who
are no longer blessed by a benign nature but are instead surrounded by a malevolent
and violent environment made of falling meteorites, tsunamis, and nuclear radiation.
In spite of these complicated premises, both Kimi no na ha. and, to a lesser extent,
Shin-Gojira envisage the formation of task forces constituted by a new generation
of Japanese who have enough proficiency to deal with and eventually deactivate the
threats of all cataclysms provoked by natural, human, or divine forces.
In Kimi no na ha. and Shin-Gojira this prototype of a novel Japanese national
identity emerges through a process of memorialization of recent destructive events
(above all, the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear incident),
which unfolds following the language of fictionalization. Invisible entities, spirits, and
monsters help the Japanese to metabolize a painful past in order to create a possible
present in which social actors could try to reaffirm their role, even though without a
complete catharsis and with uncertain results. It is relevant to note that the success
in deactivating destructive events is always achieved by members of Japanese society
alone without intervention of, or even in opposition to, foreign historical allies such the
United States or international organizations such as the United Nations. This feature
can be taken as an attempt by contemporary Japan to create a more independent
decisional authority within the context of established international relations. It seems
clear that the crisscrossing of spirits in Kimi no na ha. and Gojira itself may perhaps
be considered as evanescent or unreal but their impact on Japanese anthropopoietic
mechanisms is anything but invisible or fictional.
Notes
Introduction
1 The Japanese original is slightly different, especially in the passages where “souls” and
“spirits” are mentioned. In any case, Prime Minister Abe refers to “spirits” (mitama
み霊) and souls (tamashii 魂). See “Abe Shushō no Shinjuwan de no enzetsu zenbun
阿部首相の真珠湾での演説全文,” Nihon keizai shinbun 日本経済新聞 (December 28,
2016), at https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXLASFS27H41_X21C16A2905E00/
[accessed November 21, 2018].
2 There is a growing interest in anthropology on the ontology of spiritual and/or
intangible entities, most of which is, however, unrelated to Japanese phenomena. On
this, see pp. 10–11 below, and especially Chapter 7 by Andrea De Antoni.
3 On Nakazawa Shin’ichi and other Japanese “spiritual intellectuals,” see Prohl 2000,
2002, 2007.
4 Before Hirafuji, Inken Prohl (2002) already singled out Iwata as the initiator of a
discourse on Japanese animism with his book Animizumu no jidai (1993); however, I
agree with Hirafuji that that intellectual tendency can be dated back to the 1970s.
5 Okinawa (formerly, Kingdom of the Ryukyu), formally annexed to the Japanese
Empire in 1879, has been reimagined since the early twentieth century as a sort of
living fossil of Japan’s remote past.
6 See in particular its official position on nature worship and ancestor cults at Jinja
Honcho (2011), “Spiritual Beliefs: Nature Worship,’ at www.jinjahoncho.or.jp/en/
spiritual/index.html [accessed January 4, 2019].
7 A recent book (Yoneyama 2018) discusses the approaches to animism by four
Japanese intellectuals within the new conceptual framework of the Anthropocene
and in the context of a renewed awareness of environmentalist themes.
Chapter 1
1 Kaimyō are Buddhist posthumous names. While the custom began in China and
became the preferred way of referring to rulers after death throughout much of the
Chinese cultural sphere, today they are primarily conferred in Japan to most of the
dead (Translator’s note).
2 For more on the transformation of views on life and death in the Japanese
archipelago, see Satō 2008.
3 Folklorist Yanagita Kunio 柳田国男 treats the notion of the deceased staying nearby
as a Japanese tradition “since the beginning of time” (世の始め) in Sosen no hanashi
(Stories about Our Ancestors; 1946), but the concept seems to have actually been
established in the early modern period.
4 The family register (koseki 戸籍) system was instituted in 1872 following the Meiji
Restoration, although various forms of population census have existed in Japan since
188 Notes
the sixth century. The koseki centers on the nuclear family and records birth, death,
marriage, adoption, and residence information (Translator’s note).
5 Buddhist memorials, and therefore most funerals in Japan, generally involve far
more than a wake and a funeral. While customs differ regionally (and according
to denomination), there are usually memorial services on the seventh and forty-
ninth day after death, as well as the first, seventh, and thirteenth year and so on,
until the thirtieth or even fiftieth year after death. Thus, these memorials, even
if imperfectly kept, often constitute an obligation that transcends generations
(Translator’s note).
6 The danka seido or temple registry system was originally one of voluntary and long-
term association of households with a Buddhist temple, where affiliated household
members received religious guidance and services in return for financial support.
Although this temple registry system was in existence as early as the Heian period
(794–1183), it is most well known in its Edo period form, when it served as a
mandatory citizen registration system and a means to control the population and
their beliefs (Translator’s note).
7 Hōmyō are dharma names or priest names, granted after death in similar fashion to
kaimyō, generally in the Zen tradition (Translator’s note).
8 On Kumano mandara, see also Moerman 2005 (Translator’s note).
9 Inoue Haruyo 井上治代 calls the development of death rituals undertaken by support
networks which include people outside the family “the externalization of rituals for
the dead” and considers their meaning and significance (Inoue 2003).
10 “A Thousand Winds” is the Japanese translation of “Do not stand at my grave and
weep,” a poem written in 1936 by Mary Elizabeth Frye that likens the dead to
natural phenomena rather than resident at a gravesite. The Japanese translation
stems from the third line of the poem, which reads, “I am a thousand winds that
blow.” This poem was translated and put to music by singer Arai Man 新井満 in 2001
11 Hatsune Miku 初音ミク is a humanoid or “vocaloid” performer, depicted in the
form of a sixteen-year-old girl with distinctive turquoise pigtails, created by Crypton
Future Media. Her synthesized voice is not only available via her app, but she even
holds concerts that are well attended, attesting to her considerable popularity
Chapter 2
1 See Fukurai 1913, 1916, 1931; Nakazawa 1986; Numajiri 1999; Takasuna 2012;
Yoshinaga 2006.
2 For Bergson, the Curies, and James, see Josephson-Storm 2017: 1–3.
3 For an analysis, see for instance, Goto-Jones 2016; King 1999; Mehta 1979; Said
[1978] 1994.
4 For another example, see Lowell 1894.
5 For a fuller discussion of Japanese anti-superstition campaigns, see Josephson 2012:
esp. 164–91, 224–44.
6 For Besant, see Anesaki 1974: 92. For his membership in the British Society for
Psychical Research, see Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, new members
(October 1902).
Notes 189
7 See for example, Anesaki 2014: 9. For his lectures, Fukasawa 2001. Thanks to Avery
Morrow for drawing my attention to this lecture and the source above. See Morrow
2018.
8 For more on Edmunds, see Tweed 2005.
9 Interestingly, Shinkōsha 新光社 published a series of translated European and
American spiritualist writings under the intriguing header Shinrei mondai sōsho
心霊問題叢書.
10 See Algeo 2005; Tweed 2005; Yoshinaga 2014.
11 Kasai 2012; Yoshinaga 2009, 2010.
12 Morse 1990: 43, 140; Wilson 1969: 59–60; Yanagita 1970.
13 See Kurachi 1991; Mori 1994: 476; Stalker 2008: 81. On Sōseki, see Chapter 8 in this
book.
14 References to such things can also be found in Wagahai wa Neko de aru 吾輩は猫で
ある (1905–1906), Rondon tō 倫敦塔 (1905), Yume jūya 夢十夜 (1908), Meian 明暗
(1916); I am sure there are more.
15 For a fuller discussion of Tsubouchi’s Shōsetsu shinzui, see Josephson 2012: 143–144.
16 See Figal 1999; Foster 2009.
17 See Numajiri 1999; Stalker 2008: 76–107; Hardacre 1998.
18 For more on Inoue, see Figal 1999; Foster 2009; Josephson 2006; Josephson-Storm 2017.
19 See Braude 2001; Carroll 1997; McGarry 2008; Modern 2011; Nelson 1969; Sword
2002; Taves 1999.
20 See Bassler and Châtellier 1998; Godwin 1994; Hanegraaff 1998a; Owen 2007.
21 For the expression “vibratory modernism,” see Enns and Trower 2013.
22 Comte was inspired by Henri de Saint-Simon and he returned to this notion
repeatedly in his writings, producing slightly different variations.
23 Comte 1851, vol. 4: 531. Épuisement, which I translated as “collapse,” might be more
literally “exhaustion.”
24 See Bourdeau 2003; Pickering 1993–2009; Wernick 2001.
Chapter 3
1 On Minakata, see in English, Blacker 1983; Figal 1999: 52–73; Godart 2017: 92–103;
Little 2012. In Japanese, Iikura 2006; Karasawa 2014, 2015; Matsui and Tamura 2012;
Nakazawa 1992; Tsurumi 1981.
2 It is possible that Minakata adopts the term busshin from Inoue Enryō.
3 It is not clear, however, what Minakata exactly means by the term shirusu in this
context, except for a vague sense of semiotic impact.
4 Minakata’s notes on the twelve Chinese zodiac signs (jūnishi 十二支), a subject he
worked on between 1914 and 1924, are fine visual representations of his method.
5 On tact and yariate, see also Figal 1999: 61–65.
6 On Peirce’s abduction, see Eco and Sebeok 1988. Minakata was in the United States at
the time Peirce was developing his theory of abduction, but so far no solid proof has
been identified of Minakata’s knowledge of Peirce’s work.
7 For a preliminary introduction to this subject, see Macfarlane 2016;
Wohlleben 2016.
8 This is a reference from Da banniepan jing 大般涅槃経 (Jp. Daihatsu nehangyō,
Sk. Mahāparinirvāṇa sūtra). T 12, 374: 535b.
190 Notes
Chapter 4
1 In the case of living individuals, Ōkawa usually “contacts” the guardian spirit of that
person. Recently, the group has published Ōkawa’s discussions with the spirits of
human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, Donald Trump vs Kim Jong-un, Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Malala Yousafzai, and Bruce Lee.
2 See also “Charles ‘a devil’: Psychic’s ‘afterlife interview’ with Princess Diana released” 2017.
3 See, for instance, Amazon (1996–2018), ‘ダイアナ元皇太子妃のスピリチュアル・メ
ッセージ ―没後20年目の真実― 単行本 – 2017/8/31,’ at http://www.amazon.co.jp/ダ
イアナ元皇太子妃のスピリチュアル・メッセージ-―没後20年目の真実―-大川-隆法/
dp/4863959346 [accessed November 21, 2018].
4 The classic example is the use of Hayao Miyazaki’s films to talk about and even teach
about religion in Japan. As Thomas (2012: 122) has, however, pointed out: “Miyazaki’s
films demonstrate a view of religion that is simultaneously too skeptical and too
romanticized to be commensurate with most academic portrayals of Japanese religions.
The director disdains organized religion […] depicting […] his own idiosyncratic
vision of an idealized spiritual world and the fictional deities that populate it.”
5 Interestingly, Helen Hardacre’s substantial volume on Shinto (Hardacre 2017) does
not refer to the word “animism” anywhere.
6 The most popular doctrinal categorizations are Murakami Shigeyoshi’s 村上重良
distinction between groups influenced by the Lotus Sutra and/or Nichiren Buddhism,
and groups that have some syncretic Shinto foundation (Murakami 1980a), and
Nishiyama Shigeru’s 西山茂 division between “technique (jutsu 術) religions” (focusing
on spiritual/magical practices) and “faith (shin 信) religions” (focusing on doctrine)
(Ōmura and Nishiyama 1988). Nishiyama’s extensive studies on NRMs in Japan have
perhaps produced the most influential theories on Japanese NRMs to date.
7 It is considered so authoritative that in a recent symposium it was said to be the
cause of the decline of research on Japanese NRMs because it had (allegedly) already
exhausted all possible material and theories on the matter.
8 The partial overlap between Hardacre’s four-phase history of relations between
religions and the media, with Chris Harding’s four-phase view of the relation between
religion and psychotherapy in Japan (Harding 2015: 25–50) is worthy of note.
9 Interestingly, Miyazaki Hayao, whose films are so often considered as expressions
of Japanese animism, had direct conversations with at least one of these spiritual
intellectuals, Yamaori Tetsuo, agreeing with him on the existence of a Japanese
pantheism (banbutsu seimei kyō 万物生命教, lit. “pan-animatism”) which recognizes
life in every living and nonliving thing, and if forgotten civilization will wither
(Ogihara-Schuck 2014: 40–41).
10 See Chugainippoh (2019), ‘メディアの目から見た宗教界　宗教報道担当記者座談
会(2/5ページ),’ at www.chugainippoh.co.jp/rensai/shinsou/20140917-002.html.
[accessed 14 December 2018]
Chapter 5
1 These four guardians are mythical creatures that are believed to protect an
auspicious site in each of its (cardinal) directions. They are the Black Turtle-Snake
(玄武 Ch. xuán wǔ, Jp. genbu) of the north/back, the Azure Dragon (青龍 Ch. qīng
Notes 191
lóng, Jp. seiryū) of the east/left, the Vermilion Sparrow (朱雀 Ch. zhū què, Jp. suzaku)
of the south/front, and the White Tiger (白虎, Ch. bái hǔ, Jp. byakko) of the west/
right.
2 “Kesa Kyōto eki zenshō けさ京都驛　全焼.” Asahi Shinbun Seibu 朝日新聞　西部,
November 18, 1950 (extra edition): 1.“Kyōto eki kinō zenshō su: Shōnen kyūji no
shikka, airon tsuke wasurete 京都駅きのう全焼す　少年給仕の失火　アイロンつ
け忘れて.” Asahi Shinbun Tōkyō 朝日新聞　東京, November 19, 1950 (morning
edition): 3.
3 For a very brief timeline of the current Kyoto Station building, see Kyoto Station
Building, n.d., https://www.kyoto-station-building.co.jp/corporate/history/ [accessed
December 9, 2017]; Okada and Kyōto Daigaku Keizaigakubu Okada Zemināru 1999: 6.
4 A case in point would be JR Central’s “Sō da Kyōto, ikō そうだ京都、行こう”
campaign that ran in print and on TV from 1993 until 2016 when it was superseded
by today’s “Sō da Kyōto wa, ima da そうだ京都は、今だ” campaign. On the “Sō da
Kyōto, ikō” campaign, see, for example, Tankōsha 2004 and Wedge 2014.
5 The tangle of parties concerned is nearly impossible to unravel but the most
important organizations behind the new Kyoto Station project were the National
Railways Kyoto Station Reconstruction Council (Kokutetsu Kyōtoeki Kaichiku
Kyōgikai 国鉄京都駅改築協議会), established in 1985, and the Kyoto Station Building
Development Co., Ltd. (Kyōtoekibiru Kaihatsu Kabushikigaisha 京都駅ビル開発株
式会社), established in 1990. Both organizations consisted of four partners: Kyoto
City, Kyoto Prefecture, Japanese National Railways / JR, and the Kyoto Chamber of
Commerce and Industry. See Heian Kento 1200nen Kinen Kyōkai 1996: 8–9, 12–13;
Okada 1999: 5; and Nagata and Sugiman 1993: 52.
6 Tsukamoto was at the time also involved in the establishment of a Kyoto Economic
Center (Kyōto Keizai Sentā 京都経済センター), a plan that was included in the 1984
list of commemorative projects but one that was not realized at the time. The Kyoto
Economic Center project was picked up again a few years ago and is currently under
construction; it is slated to open in 2019.
7 In 2011, the building was further expanded to include even more restaurants and
shopping facilities and is now best known under its nickname “South Gate Building”
サウスゲートビルディング.
8 Whereas the 1950s station building had a floor area of about 10,000 m2, the current
station building is approximately twenty-four times larger at 235,247 m2.
9 In the Building Standards Act (kenchiku kijun hō 建築基準法), the prerogative of
designating such “specified blocks” is given to the local governments who only
need to seek the consent (dōi 同意) of the prefectural government. An exception on
building height restrictions in the vicinity of Kyoto Station had already been made in
the 1960s when permission was granted for the construction of Kyoto Tower, which
stands 131 meters tall.
10 These were, however, open international competitions in contrast to the invited
competition in the case of Kyoto Station.
11 The four other architects were Ikehara Yoshirō 池原義郎, professor of architecture
at Waseda University; Hara Hiroshi, the eventual winner; James Stirling from
the UK; and Peter Busmann from Germany. For a brief pictorial overview of the
seven submitted designs, see Heian Kento 1200nen Kinen Kyōkai 1996: 27, more
detailed information on the selection process, submitted plans, and explanatory
texts is available in “JR Kyōto eki kaichiku sekkei kyōgi kekka happyō” 1991:
193–212.
192 Notes
12 The head of the jury was Kyoto University professor of architecture Kawasaki Kiyoshi
川崎清 who had been involved in the Kyoto Station project since at least 1989. The
rest of the jury consisted of architects Isozaki Arata 磯崎新, Uchii Shōzō 内井昭蔵,
Sasada Tsuyoshi 笹田剛, Eugene F. Benda, Hans Hollein, and Renzo Piano; Wacoal
founder Tsukamoto Kōichi; professor of philosophy Umehara Takeshi, then head of
the recently established Nichibunken; and, finally, two representatives of JR West,
Tsunoda Tatsuo 角田達郎 and Ide Masataka 井手正敬.
13 For the jury’s full official verdict, see “JR Kyōto eki kaichiku sekkei kyōgi kekka
happyō” 1991: 199.
14 There is no causal relationship, but it is interesting to note that a similar boom can
be observed around the same time in Korea as evidenced by an increased number
of publications on the topic of fengshui. In the case of Korea, Hong-key Yoon (2007:
211–212) connects this surge in interest for fengshui to the newfound wealth and
increased leisure time stemming from an improved economy, which allowed people
to invest both money and time in these practices.
15 The entire program is available on YouTube, see Iwan Anec (2015), “NHK,” at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odNa4LlPvvA [accessed November 21, 2018].
The analysis of Kyoto’s landforms starts about midway through the documentary.
16 Specific geomantic practices vary throughout time and throughout East Asia. In
general, however, landforms, watercourses, and cosmological directions are all
believed to influence the auspiciousness of a site. Surrounding hills and mountains,
identified by geomancy specialists as “dragons” because of their undulating shape,
function to calm the winds and channel the qi toward the dragon cave. Water in front
of an auspicious site helps to retain the qi, but it cannot be stagnant. Instead, streams
and rivers should flow away from the geomancy cave and head toward a more
inauspicious direction. Moreover, they should do so slowly and in an undulating
manner to prevent a fast scattering of qi.
17 An analysis of articles published in Asahi Shinbun 朝日新聞 shows that until the
mid-1990s, the term fengshui (or rather its Japanese equivalent, fūsui 風水) was only
used to describe the type of geomantic practices carried out in China, Hong Kong,
or Macau. In the second half of the 1990s, however, the term became mainstream
on Japanese TV and in (mostly women’s) magazines, and its meaning was expanded
to include a range of practices to increase one’s fortunes through interior design,
purchasing certain goods, or using certain colors such as yellow for financial luck.
See Miyauchi 2011.
18 The full Japanese version of this text is available in the June 1991 issue of
Shinkenchiku (“JR Kyōto eki kaichiku sekkei kyōgi kekka happyō” 1991: 195). It is
also on display, together with a translation into English, on a number of panels set up
in Kyoto Station.
19 Umebayashi Katsu, email correspondence (February 2017), and Takamatsu Shin 高松
伸, personal communication (January 2006).
20 The other opening lines up with Muromachi 室町 Street, a less important north-
south thoroughfare in today’s Kyoto.
21 Whereas the idea that Kyoto is geomantically auspicious and protected by the
four mythical creatures is now ubiquitous, in the 1980s and early 1990s that was
by no means the case. For example, in an exhibition catalog produced for the
1,200th anniversary of the city, only fleeting mention is made of “correspondence
to the four deities” (shijin sōō 四神相応), a term that is often used to describe
the practice of site divination in Japan (Kyōto-shi 1994: 68). Instead, Kyoto’s
Notes 193
abundant temples and shrines are presented as the city’s guardians in this catalog
(82–95). For a detailed discussion on the principle of “correspondence to the four
deities” and its relationship to Chinese and Korean practices, see Van Goethem
2011, 2016.
22 Kitakyushu Central Library (Kitakyūshū Shiritsu Chūō Toshokan 北九州市立中央図
書館) and Kitakyushu Literature Museum (Kitakyūshū Shiritsu Bungakukan 北九州
市立文学館), both completed in 1974.
23 Seen from the outside, the window is an exact copy of Baien’s “combined diagram
of division and contrast, opposition and contrast” (bōtsuihanhizu ichigō 剖対反比図
一合); from the inside, the stained-glass window is a combination of various other
drawings by Baien and Isozaki’s own designs. For Baien’s diagrams, see Shimada
and Taguchi 1982: 548–601, esp. 550. For a discussion in English of Baien’s Gengo,
see Mercer 1994, 1998.
24 See, for example, the Isozaki Arata exhibition room at Art Plaza in Ōita, Isozaki’s
hometown.
25 Kawamura 1994. Since the completion of Art Tower Mito, it seems that the city
of Mito, like Kyoto, has capitalized on the fengshui boom. Mito continues to
portray itself as being situated in an ideal fengshui site and in April 1994, a forum
on fengshui with Chinese and Japanese participants, including Isozaki and Wang
Qiheng 王其亨, professor of architecture at Tianjin University and one of foremost
fengshui experts, was held at Art Tower Mito. For further details on the forum, see
Art Tower Mito (n.d.), ‘美術の地域連携プログラムフォーラム：風水,’ at
http://www.arttowermito.or.jp/gallery/gallery02_min.html?id=638 [accessed
November 21, 2018].
26 Kyoto Concert Hall officially opened in 1995. Other architects invited to participate
in the competition include Takamatsu Shin, a Kyoto architect famous for his
machine-like futuristic designs, and Pritzker Prize winner Maki Fumihiko 槇文彦.
For details on the Kyoto Concert Hall competition, see “Kyōto konsāto hōru (kashō)
sekkei kyōgi kekka happyō” 1991.
27 The two shrines are collectively known as the Kamo shrines 賀茂神社. Shimogamo
shrine 下鴨神社 (formally known as Kamo mioya jinja 賀茂御祖神社 and located due
east of Mt. Funaoka) has a history longer than that of Kyoto and may have existed
as early as the sixth or seventh century. The other, slightly younger, half of the pair
is Kamigamo shrine 上賀茂神社 (formally known as Kamo wake ikazuchi jinja 賀
茂別雷神社). The Shimogamo shrine precincts comprise subshrines dedicated to
the twelve earthly branches, whereas the Kamigamo shrine is famous for its two
sand cones (tatezuna 立砂), which are sometimes said to represent yin and yang,
respectively (see, for example, Nelson 2000: 249). Moreover, since 2007 Kamigamo
shrine appears in tourism advertising as the Black Turtle-Snake, the geomantic
protector of the north. This publicity campaign, mainly run by Heian Jingū 平
安神宮 shrine, attempts to promote five Kyoto shrines as the age-old geomantic
protectors of the city even though some of the shrines did not exist at the time
of the capital’s founding. The three other shrines in this configuration are Yasaka
Jinja 八坂神社, representing the Azure Dragon; Jōnangū 城南宮, representing the
Vermilion Sparrow; and Matsunoo Taisha 松尾大社, representing the White Tiger.
Although not explicitly stated, Heian Jingū appears to have taken up the position of
Yellow Dragon (黄龍 Ch. huáng lóng, Jp. ōryū) of the center, a directional guardian
that is usually not found in Japanese adaptations of ancient Chinese cosmology
(Van Goethem 2017).
194 Notes
28 Umebayashi, personal communication and email correspondence (February 2017).

29 Two of these are the left and right daimonji, piles of stacked pinewood arranged in
the shape of the character for 大 “large, great,” on the hills deemed instrumental to
Kyoto’s great auspiciousness by fengshui master Liu.
Chapter 6
1 On religion and ecology, see, for example, Gottlieb 2006; Jenkins, Tucker, and Grim
2017.
2 While such a difference is not necessarily perceptible to onlookers, methods have
been devised for its measurement (Merz 1985, 1997).
3 The English version is so predominant that it is mostly considered a wasei eigo 和製英
語, i.e., a Japan-born English term (Horie 2017: 192).
4 Horie Norichika suggests that by the mid-1980s, the expression “power spot”
was already well established among Japanese adepts of the New Age movement,
particularly in connection with Tenkawa Benzaiten 天川弁財天 shrine in Nara
Prefecture, which was promoted by its priest as a “super psychic spot” in 1986 (Horie
2017: 193–4).
5 On the emergence of feng shui in Japanese media via a survey comparable to Suga’s
on power spots, see Miyauchi 2011; on feng shui, see Chapter 5 in this volume.
6 The lead of the article reads as follows: “Recently, so-called ‘power spots’ have been
popular among women; throngs of women pray for prosperity at shrines, women
magazines release special issues indexing national spots; what brings them to turn to
power spots?” (Suga 2010: 132).
7 Throughout her study, Suga herself repeatedly uses the composite term jinja bukkaku
神社仏閣 (shrines and temples) to describe favored places for power spots.
8 Katō Kiyomasa 加藤清正 (1562–1611) was a warlord and castle-builder. He was a
general in Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s army and took part in the latter’s Korean campaigns
(Rots 2014: 44, note 9).
9 Some magazines published posters of the well for the benefit of readers living in
remote areas (Tsukada and Ōmi 2011: 34), a modus operandi reminiscent of that of
mitate 見立て, the transposition process through which important symbolic places or
objects may be replicated in different places, often on a smaller scale (on this topic,
see Tanaka 1995).
10 The expression genze riyaku, of Buddhist origin, designates benefits in this
world and life, usually of a material nature, given to worshippers by buddhas,
bodhisattvas, and kami in exchange for spiritual devotion, offerings, chantings,
etc. On this and the concept of “common religion” in Japan, see Reader and
Tanabe 1998.
11 Meiji shrine officials commenting on Kiyomasa’s well craze state that “the idea of a
power spot where you can make your dreams come true is problematic” (Tsukada
and Ōmi 2011: 34). The authors of the report also describe the unease of a local
shrine in Takachiho (Miyazaki), where a shrine-related event had to be cancelled
because of the large affluence caused by a recently “discovered” power spot in the
same location (35).
12 The power spot trend is seen as promoting vulgar, “practical” benefits rather than the
true meaning of a visit to a shrine (Dorman 2016: 93).
Notes 195
13 See for example the inclusion of Shinto in the Alliance of Religions and Conservation
(ARC), a global nonprofit organization founded in 1995 by Prince Philip of England
(www.arcworld.org). On the recent and tentative internationalization of Shinto, see
Rots 2015b.
14 Living icons and statues, animated or de-animated through “eye-opening” and
“eye-closing” ceremonies, come to mind, as do the many instances of “mandalized”
landscape throughout Japan (on the former, see Sharf and Sharf 2001; Brinker 2011,
on the latter, see Grapard 1982; Roth 2014).
15 Among others, fortune-teller and astrologist Hosoki Kazuko 細木数子 (b.1938), New
Age psychic Kiyota Masuaki 清田益章 (b.1962), spiritual counselor Ehara Hiroyuki 江
原啓之 (b.1964), TV historian Kanaya Shun’ichirō 金谷俊一郎 (b.1967), palm-reader
Shimada Shūhei 島田秀平 (b.1977), and fengshui specialist Rinoie Yūchiku 李家幽竹.
16 On such scenarios, see, for example, Miyake 1985: 492–518; Roth 2014: 64–73.
17 In that, forest therapy follows a now well-entrenched worldwide trend of spa- and
wellness-culture.
18 See Forest Therapy Society (n.d.), at http://www.fo-society.jp/therapy/index.html
19 See ANFT (n.d.), at http://www.natureandforesttherapy.org [accessed November 21,
2018].
20 See Shinrin-Yoku (n.d.), at http://www.shinrin-yoku.org/shinrin-yoku.html [accessed
November 21, 2018].
21 All emphasis on timeless continuity notwithstanding, the expression chinju no
mori (tutelary forests) was coined by late nineteenth century novelist Tayama Katai
田山花袋 (1872–1930) (Rots 2015a: 217). The association between chinju no mori,
ecology, and nature dates back to the late 1970s. It was picked up and embraced
by various circles, among which the so-called “spiritual intellectuals” (reiseiteki
chishikijin 霊性的知識人) (on this subject, see Rots 2014: 36–39; Prohl 2000).
22 However, the association’s positive attitude toward environmental issues seems to
be particularly accentuated in its publications in English as a means to improve its
international image (Rots 2015a: 209). On the growing internationalization of Shinto,
see Rots 2015b.
23 Two other venues involving new or differentiated usages of forest environments and
presenting the same potential for “international exchange” or globalization as forest
therapy are the fast-growing trends of forest schools and forest burials, be it in Japan,
the USA, or Europe (on forest burials in Japan, see Boret 2016).
24 On the New Age movement in Japan, see Haga and Kisala 1995b.
25 On repercussions of the Aum incident twenty years later, see Baffelli and Reader 2012.
26 Shugendō was forbidden under the religious reforms of the Meiji Restoration, and
Shugendō priests were asked to defrock or join Shintō or Buddhist ranks, in the
latter case either Tendai or Shingon. The new constitution after the end of the Second
World War guarantees freedom of religion, and Shugendō was reinstated, although
in a much reduced and scattered manner. Despite these tribulations, Shugendō
has retained several of its historical centers. In central Japan, the two major shugen
temples are Shōgoin, linked to Tendai Buddhism, and Daigoji, linked to Shingon
Buddhism, both located in Kyōto.
27 For a recent history of Shugendō, see Tokieda, Hasegawa, and Hayashi 2015. For a
comprehensive presentation of Shugendō in English, see Miyake 2001, 2005.
28 Shugenja, “persons of power,” and yamabushi, “those who lie down in the mountains,”
are the two most common denominations given to Shugendō pracitioners.
196 Notes
29 Kaji 加持 (Skr. adhiṣṭhāna), “enhanced support,” is a Buddhist term denoting a transfer

of powers from a Buddhist deity to a practitioner, essentially for the purpose of healing
or realization of a vow. Prayers recited in order to secure that support are called kitō 祈
祷, hence the common expression kaji kitō “prayers for enhanced support.”
30 Takigyō, “waterfall practice,” is one of the most widespread ascetic practices in
Japan. It is commonly performed as part of Shugendō rituals, as a means for bodily
and spiritual purification, and involves standing under a waterfall while reciting
incantations and performing mudrā (ritual hand gestures).
31 The practice of kuji-kiri designates a sequence of ritual words and gestures aiming at
dispelling demons and harmful forces. It is mostly used before entering a waterfall
for ritual practice.
32 In the wake of interpersonal conflict, Tateishi’s Kinpusenji license has been recently
withdrawn, and he is now developing his own Shugendō school (Sanshu Sangakurin
山修山学林) (Tateishi, pers. comm., May 2017).
33 “A felt sense is not a mental experience, but a physical one, a bodily awareness
of a situation or a person or an event. [It is] an internal aura that encompasses
everything you feel and know about a given subject at any time—encompasses it and
communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail” (Gendlin, Experiencing
and the Creation of Meaning [1962], quoted in Gordon-Lennox 2017: 83).
34 Cipriani coined these two expressions, and I quote them as his here. It might,
however, be preferable to use the adjective “diffuse,” rather than “diffused” to describe
a phenomenon that is not so much promoted or produced by a given agency as
denoting a presence marked by a vague and fuzzy quality.
35 For a synthetic overview of the concept of secularization, see Tschannen 1991; Swatos
and Cristiano 1999.
36 Most research on secularization theories has been done in Western Europe, hence
its being often critiqued as Eurocentrist, all the more so because if Europe can be
seen as mainly secularized, it is not the case for the USA. Japan is often considered
as the ideal comparison point, as a non-Western example of a modern nation. On
secularism in Japan, see Tamaru 1979; Reed 2007; Nelson 2012; Reader 2012a.
37 In that sense, “diffused religion” is comparable to a “religion of values” (Cipriani
1993: 92), or a “faith without dogma” (Ferrarotti 1990).
38 Carried further, this line of thought leads to seeing “religions as brands,” as in the
title of Stolz and Usinier’s study, which analyzes religions in terms of marketing, and
as one element of consumer society (Stolz and Usinier 2014).
39 In the case of forest therapy, it actually extends to branding.
40 It could be interesting to consider Shugendō as a historical ecospiritual movement
and, therefore, as a particular welcome lens for assessing trends such as power
spots, forest therapy, and the invisible world. All three pertain to Shugendō’s basic
vocabulary, albeit couched in different formulations. Moreover, Shugendō, by relying
primarily on Esoteric Buddhist doctrine, while borrowing practices from a great
variety of traditions without ever creating a fixed corpus, has historically been a
laboratory for the manifold combinatory aspects of Japanese religions.
Chapter 7
1 This article is based on two of my latest research projects: the first is my postdoctoral
project on haunted places and tourism in contemporary Kyoto, the second a
Notes 197
comparative research on exorcism and spirit possession in contemporary Japan,

Italy, and Austria. I am deeply grateful to the Japanese Society for the Promotion
of Science, which funded both of these projects (JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for
Overseas Researchers 2010–2012, Kyoto University, and JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Young
Scientists 2015–2018).
2 An exception to this trend is my own research on hauntings in Kyoto (De Antoni
2011, 2013, 2017a), on which part of this article relies.
3 The typical verb in Japanese for having or not having reikan is reikan ga aru/nai. As an
individual skill, there are different levels, which are graded on a scale on the spectrum of
“strong” (tsuyoi 強い) or “weak” (yowai 弱い). Yet, I have never encountered people who
defined their reikan as weak. Rather, people who emphasize the aspect of having “a bit”
of it, or “not much” (e.g., Kagawa 2006: 230). In my own experience, having this ability,
even in the case someone states it is strong, is generally perceived as socially acceptable:
I talked freely about this topic not only with people in my field sites, but with people I
met in bars, cafés, and restaurants, and I never witnessed any forms of social sanctions,
stigma, or discrimination attached to it, not even in terms of kidding or joking.
4 As for guidebooks of haunted places in Japan, see, for example, Miki (2007), Namiki
(2010), Yamaguchi (2013). As for websites, suffice it to say, a simple Google search for
“haunted places in Japan” (Nihon no shinrei supotto 日本の心霊スポット) performed
at the time of writing this article (December 2017) gave 169,000 results, and the
biggest websites, such as Okaruto Jōhōkan オカルト情報館 (2017) at www.occultic.
net/occult/shinnreisupotto/kyouto.html [accessed July 31, 2018], provide information
categorized into single prefectures.
5 Studies pointed out that Google users tend not to go beyond the second page in the
result list and that they tend to click on the first links on the list, even though the
results seem less relevant to their query than the following ones (e.g., Pan et al. 2007).
Consequently, the first websites or blogs that appear on the list become particularly
powerful in the creation of the discourse on specific haunted places.
6 Tsunomon (2017), “【閲覧注意】京都にあるガチでヤバイ最恐心霊スポットまとめ15
選！.” Manukeまぬけブログ [blog], August 26, 2017, https://manuke.jp/kyoto-spot/
These characteristics of rumors related to hauntings are not limited to Kyoto and can
be generalized, as, for instance, research on Osorezan has shown (e.g., De Antoni
2010; Ivy 1995; Minami 2012).
7 On the history of the relationships between the visual dimension and spirits, see
Takaoka (2016: 49–77).
8 Although this definition is generally accepted, it was recently problematized in
relation to its general applicability (Cohen 2008).
9 For a discussion and definition of the term, see Komatsu (1994: 19–43).
10 The fundamental role played by religious healers and exorcists (kitōshi 祈祷師) in the
identification, definition, and, consequently, the creation of possession also has been
central in research in folklore studies (Komatsu 1994, 2017).
11 During my fieldwork I also met people from the Kansai area, but they are not
included in this sample because I met them at a later time.
12 Kenmi Jinja 賢見神社 (2017), “Home,” at http://kenmi-shrine.s1.bindsite.jp/ [accessed
November 21, 2018].
13 Ibid.
14 This analysis can be found in a chapter titled “Call Me a Dog: Feeling (Inugami)
Possession in Contemporary Tokushima Prefecture,” in a volume edited by Irina
Holca and Carmen Săpunaru Tămaș, currently under review.
198 Notes
Chapter 8
1 While there is a very good annotated translation of Ten Nights of Dreams by Takumi
Kashima and Loretta Lorenz (Natsume [1908] 2000) for this passage and the
following I have provided my own translation in order to highlight the word choice
of some passages that are significant for the purpose of my analysis. My translation
is based on Aozora Bunko, the original can be accessed on Aozora Bunko (n.d.), at
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000148/card799.html [accessed November 21, 2018]
and of course in several different print editions.
2 While there is a very good translation of the story by Geoffrey Bownas (Akutagawa [1927]
1970) for this passage I have chosen to provide my own translation in order to highlight
the word choice of some sentences that are significant for the purpose of my analysis.
Chapter 9
1 Arduino is an open-source computer hardware and software company, project, and
user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and
microcontroller kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense
and control objects in the physical world. It was founded in 2003 in Italy from a project
started at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea; see Ardunio (2018), “Home,” at
www.arduino.cc [accessed November 10, 2018]. Max is a visual programming language
for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software
company Cycling ‘74. Miller Puckette, associate director of the Center for Research in
Computing and the Arts and professor of music at the University of California (San
Diego), originally wrote Max at Paris’ IRCAM in the mid-1980s; see Cyling ‘74 (n.d.),
at https://cycling74.com/products/max [accessed November 10, 2018].
2 Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences or International Academy of Media
Arts and Sciences, IAMAS is a public university in Ogaki (Gifu Prefecture), founded
in 2001.
3 Examples of new media art include: websites, mobile apps, virtual worlds,
multimedia, computer games, human–computer interface, computer animation,
interactive computer installations, computer-aided performances (augmented
theatre), digital art, computer graphics, virtual reality, internet art, interactive art,
video games, computer robotics, 3D-printing, cyborg art, and art as biotechnology.
4 See Japan Media Arts Festival (2018), “Japan Media Arts Festival Overview,” at
http://j-mediaarts.jp/en.php [accessed November 10, 2018].
5 See Naked (2018), “Naked,” at http://naked-inc.com [accessed November 10, 2018].
6 See teamLab (n.d.), “teamLab,” at www.teamlab.art [accessed November 10, 2018].
7 See Rhizomatiks (n.d.), “rhizomatiks,” at https://rhizomatiks.com [accessed
November 10, 2018].
8 See W0W (2018), “W0W,” at www.w0w.co.jp [accessed November 10, 2018].
9 See Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (2012.), “Kodama,” [video] Vimeo,
December 25, 2012. https://vimeo.com/56275965 [accessed November 10, 2018];
Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (2018a), “Hisako K. Yamakawa,” at www.ycam.
jp/archive/profile/k-hisako-yamakawa.html [accessed November 10, 2018]; Yamaguchi
Center for Arts and Media (2018b), “Scopic Measure #1: Kodama,” at www.ycam.jp/
events/2007/scopic-measure-1/ [accessed November 10, 2018].
Notes 199
10 For images, see YohamaArtNavi (2009), “「Kashikokimono」早川貴泰アニ

メーション作品 Kashikokimono, Takahiro Hayakawa,” at www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Hc6RXQcAXCE; 「Kashikokimono」 (2004), “「Kashikokimono」,” at
www.iamas.ac.jp/~haya-02/kashikokimonoE.html; and Ars Electronica (2005a),
“Computer Animation/Visual Arts: Honorary Mention,” at http://90.146.8.18/en/archives/
prix_archive/prix_projekt.asp?iProjectID=13334# [all accessed November 21, 2018].
11 See Ars Electronica (2005b), “Computer Animation/Visual Arts: Honorary
Mention – Kashikokimono,” at http://archive.aec.at/submission/2005/CA/4961/
12 See IAMAS (2001), “The 4th IAMAS Graduate Exhibition,” at www.iamas.ac.jp/
exhibit01/ [accessed November 10, 2018].
13 See Gutierrez 2008.
14 Eye Yamatsuka, interview by Andy Battaglia, April 29, 2008, at www.avclub.com/
articles/boredoms,14234/ [accessed November 28, 2018].
15 See Masaru Tabei (2007), “Wakuraba – Ethereal Encounters,” YouTube, May 29,
2007, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_OtH5-wCA; Masaru Tabei (2011), “行雲
流水 Like the Clouds, Like the Rivers,” YouTube, May 4, 2011, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=z-N7EVxiQH4 [both accessed November 28, 2018].
16 See Kyoko Tachibana (2008), “第13回学生CGコンテスト.” Shift, January 21, 2008, at
www.shift.jp.org/ja/archives/2008/01/13th_scgc.html [both accessed November 28,
2018].
17 See H.O. (n.d.-b) “H.O.,” at www.howeb.org/; and Siva001 (2007), “Interview with
Hieaki Ogawa,” YouTube, September 23, 2007, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqQuM-
Es5vQ [both accessed November 28, 2018].
18 For images of this object, see Hdoto (2009) “Small Connection (2004) h.o.,” YouTube,
November 10, 2009, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SyAWyfWhAk; and H.O. (n.d.-a)
“Albums,” Flickr, www.flickr.com/photos/hdoto/sets/ [both accessed November 21, 2018].
19 On device art, see Kusahara 2006, Rekimoto 2008, Schlachetzki 2012.
20 See https://www.ycam.jp/events/2007/scopic-measure-1/ [accessed January 21, 2019].
Chapter 10
1 Fabio Rambelli has critiqued the latter two attitudes (taking them together) in his
2007 book Buddhist Materiality. Also see Aike P. Rots’s description of the “Shinto
spiritual paradigm” and the “Shinto environmentalist paradigm” in his 2017 book.
2 On problems with “nature,” see Castree 2014. A critique of the modernist
presuppositions of what I am terming “pejorative animism” can be found in Bird-
David (1999) but also see the critical response by Viveiros de Castro in the same piece.
For an overview of “animism” and “new animism” literature, see Willerslev 2013a.
Chapter 11
1 Director: Shinkai Makoto; producers: Kawamura Genki 河村元気, Kawaguchi
Noritaka 川口典孝; distributor: Tōhō 東宝; 106 minutes. Color. 2016.
2 Director: Anno Hideaki; producers: Satō Yoshihirō 佐藤善宏, Shibusawa Masaya 澁澤
匡哉, Wadakura Kazutoshi 和田倉和利; distributor: Tōhō; 100 minutes. Color. 2016.
200 Notes
3 This antinomic and dystopic trend in anime production was inaugurated toward
the end of the eighties with the post nuclear nightmarish scenario represented in
the famous work Akira アキラ directed by Ōtomo Katsuhiro 大友克洋 (Producers:
Suzuki Ryōhei 鈴木良平, Katō Shunzō 加藤俊三; distributors: Tōhō; 124 minutes.
Color. 1988). Nevertheless, there is a difference between Ōtomo and Anno in the
approach toward the concept of total destruction. Akira opens with the blast of an
atomic bomb on the ruins of which a new metropolis called Neo-Tokyo ネオ東京
resurges. In Shin-Gojira Anno refuses to show the drop of an atomic device on Tokyo,
the possible salvation or annihilation of which remains suspended and deferred to a
future time.
4 On the connection between anime and animism, see Chapter 10 in this volume.
5 The first reference to the kuchi-kami zake ritual appears in a fragment of the Ōsumi
no kuni fūdoki 大隅国風土記 (eighth century), in which we find a description
of the way in which water and rice were prepared for the brewing of sake in the
Kagoshima area. According to this description, women and men from important
families in the village gathered together to chew rice and spit it out into a special
container (sakabune 酒ぶね) where the liquid was then left for fermentation. When
the sake’s smell indicated that it had reached the desired level of fermentation, the
families in the village received a portion of the drink, starting with those whose
members had first chewed the rice. The Kuchi-kami zake ritual was used to make
offerings to deities and also served as a means of symbolically displaying one’s
political authority. This latter political-social function derives from the fact that
local Japanese elites often adopted Chinese and Korean brewing techniques and
sake-related ceremonies in order to increase their social prestige and institutional
legitimacy (Sakaguchi 1997: 23; See also Hanai 1998: 259–260). For the original text
see Hisamatsu 1960: 354.
6 Bruno Latour provides the following definition of the difference between intermediaries
and mediators: “An intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or
force without transformation: defining its input is enough to define its outputs. […]
Mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they
are supposed to carry. No matter how complicated an intermediary is, it may, for all
practical purposes, count for just one—or even for nothing at all because it can easily
forgotten. No matter how apparently simple a mediator may look, it may become
complex; it may lead in multiple directions which will modify all the contradictory
accounts attributed to its role” (Latour 2005: 39; emphasis in the original).
7 Kimi no na ha. and Shin-Gojira share the fact that they are two Tōhō movies which
contain strong references to the Showa period (1925–1989) and subliminally
promote in the audience a sort of nostalgia for the postwar Japan of the fifties in
opposition to the fully modernized Japan of the seventies (Shimizu and Sukegawa
2017: 126–127).
8 In “Plato’s Pharmacy” Jacques Derrida (1930–2014) describes the indissoluble
relationship between the two apparently oppositional acts of memorization
and forgetting. In the same text Derrida criticizes the illusion of a permanent
memory, which is given by “surrogates” of memory itself, such as monuments
(Gr. hypomnēmata), archives, citations, or genealogies (Derrida 2013: 109–113).
9 Gojira (Godzilla), director: Honda Ishirō; producer: Tanaka Tomoyuki 田中友幸;
distributor: Tōhō; 96 minutes. Black and white. 1954.
10 Director: Kaneko Shūsuke; producer: Honma Hideyuki 本間英行; distributor: Tōhō;
105 minutes. Color. 2001.
Notes 201
11 The term anthropopoiesis indicates the human commitment to create (Gr. poiéo) new
projects for improving common life, cultural heritage, and identity consolidation
in society. Anthropopoietic behaviors aim to overcome any contemporary crisis
projecting consolatory and powerful visions of the future, which is represented as a
linear and benign evolution of social transformations (Remotti 2013: 8–14).
12 Jacques Derrida specifically describes the archive as a “structural breakdown” of
memory based on a fallacious research of an elusive origin (Derrida 1998: 11).
13 For a detailed presentation of the various interpretations of Gojira’s body see
Hayashida 2016: 210.
14 For the original text see Moriyama 2014: 102.
15 Also in the Kojiki the body of the eight-headed hydra Yamata no orochi is described
as a living landscape: “His eyes are like red ground cherries; his one body has eight
heads and eight tales. On his body grow moss and cypress and cryptomeria trees. His
length is such that he spans eight valleys and eight mountain peaks. If you look at his
belly, you see that blood is oozing out all over it” (Philippi 1968: 89).
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Index
Abe Shinzō 安倍晋三 2 Belting, Hans 145

achiragawa あちら側 (the other side) 128, Benz, Ernst 35–6
135–41 Bertrand, Cyrille-Paul 145
AEO (sound collective) 151–2 Bird-David, Nurit 42
Agamben, Giorgio 184 Blacker, Carmen 118
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 芥川龍之介 Blavatsky, Helena (1831–1891) 46
(1892–1927) 33, 132–5 Bouchy, Anne 100
Albert, Jean-Pierre 106 Breen, John 2
Allison, Anne 144, 160 Bruun, Ole 82
ancestors (senzo 先祖 or sosen 祖先) and buddhas (as related to the dead and the
ancestor worship 3, 6, 21, 25, 68–9 afterlife) 20–1, 24
Andō Tadao 安藤忠雄 84 butsudan 仏壇 (family Buddhist altar) 26
Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治 (1873–1949)
29, 32 Carter, Caleb 98–9
anime and animation 5, 144, 147, 149, Chidester, David 9
150–1, 157–70, 172–6 Chinese literature (early modern) 4–5
animism (animizumu アニミズム), Comte, Auguste (1798–1857) 36–41
definitions 3, 6–9, 10, 43, 66–9, Condry, Ian 163
78–9, 110, 149, 156, 158, 161–2, Confucianism 4
168–9 cosmology 35, 49, 63–4
and animation 150–1, 162–8 Crookes, William 35
and colonialism 9
and Japan 30–1 Dainichi Nyorai 大日如来 49, 52, 53, 57, 63
and mediascape 143–56 Daoism 8
and politics 9, 10, 160–1 dead, the 6, 17–28, 40, 48, 52, 54
and “primitive peoples” 9 De Antoni, Andrea 112
as media discourse 78–9 de Brosses, Charles 36
genealogy 35–42, 71 de Parville, Henri 35
Aramata Hiroshi 荒俣宏 7, 86 Deguchi Nao 出口なお 74
arts (and representations of the invisible Deguchi Onisaburō 出口王仁三郎
reality) 5, 9 (1871–1948) 4, 74
architecture and spiritual forces 81–94 “diffused religiosity” 104–6
literature 127–41 Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253) 7
media art 5, 143–56 Doki Hōryū 土宜法龍 (1854–1922) 46
Asano Wasaburō 浅野和三郎 33 dolls (as brides and grooms for the dead) 19
Aum Shinrikyō オウム真理教 72, 76–7 Dorman, Ben 71–2, 75
Azuma Hiroki 163 Durkheim, Émil (1858–1917) 9
Baffelli, Erica 65–6 Ehara Hiroyuki 江原啓之 97–8

Barthes, Roland 14–15 Eiblmayr, Silvia 152
Bell, Daniel 145–6 electricity and magnetism 34–5, 36, 54, 152
Index 227
environmentalism 8, 9, 45, 95, 99, 107 Hamaguchi Eshun 浜口恵俊 68

Esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō 密教) 7, 102, Hanegraaff, Wouter 66
167 Hara Hiroshi 原広司 85–6, 88
“Esoteric mandala of Judaism” (Yudaikyō no Harootunian, Harry 8
mikkyō no mandara 猶太教の密教の Harvey, Graham 81–2
曼陀羅) 49–53, 63. See also Kabbalah haunted places (shinrei supotto 心霊スポッ
The Exorcist (movie, 1974) 112 ト) 114, 115
experience (of spiritual entities) 32, 46–8, Hayakawa Takahiro 早川貴泰 149–51
102–4, 106, 109–25, 149–56, 170 healing 74, 75, 95, 99–101
Hirafuji Kikuko 平藤喜久子 6
family (ie 家) 25–7, 28 Hirai Kinzō 平井金三 33
fantastic, the 127–8, 133. See also fushigi Hirata Atsutane 平田篤胤 (1776–1843) 4,
fengshui (Jp. fūsui) 風水 7, 81–2, 86–94, 97 5, 69–70, 74
Fenollosa, Ernest 31 Hirata Motokichi 平田元吉 33
fetishism 11, 31, 36, 37, 39–41 Hisanaga Masatoshi 久永雅敏 86
Figal, Gerald 69, 111 Hobsbawn, Eric 185
forest bathing (shinrin’yoku 森林浴) 95 Honda Ishirō 本多猪四郎 (1911–1993)
forest therapy (fōresuto serapi フォーレス 177
トセラピー) 95, 99–101 Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212) 20
Foster, Michael 35, 111, 112 Hosokawa Ryōichi 細川涼一 3–4
Frazer, J. G. (1854–1941) 9 Humboldt, Alexander von (1769–1859) 7
Freud, Sigmund 129–30 Huxley, Thomas 39
Fujita Shōichi 藤田庄市 72
Fukurai Tomokichi 福来友吉(1869–1952) Inoue Enryō 井上円了 (1858–1919) 10,
29, 30, 32 111
Fukushima disaster (March 11, 2011) 1, Inoue Nobutaka 井上順孝 73–4
172, 175, 185 Inoue Tetsujirō 井上哲次郎 (1855–1944)
funerals 4, 22, 25–6 29
fushigi 不思議 (fantastic, mysterious, Institute of Advanced Media Arts and
wondrous, uncanny, paranormal) Sciences (Jōhō Kagaku Geijutsu
34, 57–8, 110, 111 Daigakuin Daigaku 情報科学芸術大
学院大学, IAMAS) 144, 148
Gakizōshi 餓鬼草紙 (painted book of “intangibles” 11, 46–7, 114
hungry ghosts) 20 “intermediary human facts” (koto 事 or こ
ghosts. See yūrei と) 54–6
Gilmore, George Williams 30 inugami 犬神 (dog-god or dog-spirit) 109,
Gojira ゴジラ (Godzilla) 177–81, 182–4 119, 123
gorintō 五輪塔 (five-element funerary invisible world (meikai 冥界, yūmei 幽冥,
pagodas) 21 me ni mienai sekai 目に見えない世
Gotō Makita 後藤牧太 (1853–1930) 29 界, kakuri-yo 隠り世) 1–2–3–4, 48,
Grau, Oliver 144 95, 101–2, 114, 174
graves, graveyards (ohaka お墓) 20, 21–2, Ippolito, Jean M. 146
25, 28 Isozaki Arata 磯崎新 88–91
Griffis, William Elliot 31 Itō Seikō いとうせいこう 1
guardians of the four directions (“four Iwata Keiji 岩田慶治 (1922–2013) 6–7, 77
divinities”: Ch. sishen, Jp. shijin 四
神 or “four spirits”: Ch. siling, Jp. Jackson, Rosemary 127–8
shirei 四霊) 81–2. See also fengshui Jinja honchō 神社本庁 (Association of
Guthrie, Stewart 42 Shinto Shrines) 6, 9, 98, 101
228 Index
Jōmon prehistoric culture (and Masahiro Mori 森政弘 143

contemporary animism) 3, 7, 77 mass media 5, 6, 10, 56–79, 96–9
Josephson-Storm, Jason 66, 72 materiality 11
Jung, Carl Gustav 136–7 Mauss, Marcel 154
McLuhan, Marshall 71
Kabbalah 49, 52, 53 McNally, Mark 70
Kaburaki Hiro 163 Minakata Kumagusu 南方熊楠 (1867–1941)
Kakei Katsuhiko 筧克彦 (1872–1961) 29 5, 10, 45–64
kami (Shinto gods) 3, 6, 7, 11, 54, 149–50, Minakata Mandala 56–61
168, 171, 172, 173–4, 177, 179–81, Miura Baien 三浦梅園 (1723–1789) 88
184 Miyagi Tainen 宮城泰年 102
living gods (ikigami 生き神) 69 Miyake, Toshio 111
kappa 河童 110, 133, 134 Miyazaki Hayao 宮崎駿 155, 159–60
Kasai Kenta 葛西賢太 33 Modernity and modernization 42–4, 71,
Kenmi jinja 賢見神社 (shrine) 109, 118–21 111–12, 128, 132–3, 141
Kikuchi, Yuko 146–8 monsters. See yōkai
Kimi no na wa. 君の名は。(Your name.) 1, Mori Ōgai 森鷗外 (1862–1922) 33
167–8, 172–6 Morita Shūhei 166
Kiyota Masuaki 清田益章 96–7 Moriyama Daidō 森山大道 181–2, 184–5
kodama 木霊 155 mukasari ema ムカサリ絵馬 (votive
Kōfuku no Kagaku 幸福の科学 4, 65–7, 78 images of the dead) 18, 24
Kokugaku 国学 (National Learning) 4, 8, Murakami Haruki 村上春樹 1, 5, 135–41
9, 77, 78–9. See also Hirata Atsutane Mushi-shi 蟲師 165–6
Komatsu Kazuhiko 小松和彦 110, 111, Myers, Frederick W. H. (1843–1901) 32, 46
117, 118
Konkōkyō 金光教 69, 73 Nagahama Hiroshi 165
kotodama 言霊 (spirits of words) 151, 155 Nakamura Hajime 中村元 57
Kubo Yoshihide 久保良英 (1883–1942) 29 Nakayama Miki 中山みき 73
Kūkai 空海 (774–835) 7 Nakazawa Shin’ichi 中沢新一 5, 7, 8, 46, 77
Kumano kanjin jikkai mandara 熊野観心 Napier, Susan 129
十界曼陀羅 22–4 Natale, Simone 71, 78
Kurokawa Kishō 黒川紀章 85 Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916) 32,
Kurozumikyō 黒住教 69 33–4, 129–32
Kuwata Yoshizō 桑田芳蔵 (1882–1967) 29 nature 69, 97, 99, 101, 157, 172, 181, 185–6.
kuyōe 供養絵 or kuyōegaku 供養絵額 See also slime molds; Minakata
(votive images) 17–18, 24 Mandala
Kyoto Concert Hall 88–91 New Age 6, 43, 98, 99, 100, 101, 107, 144
Kyoto, haunted places 115–16 new religious movements (NRMs) 4, 9, 10,
Kyoto Station 82–8 65–79, 101
Kyoto, urban structure 87–8, 90–1. See Nichiren 日蓮 (1222–1282) 20
also fengshui Nihonjinron 日本人論 (also Nihon
bunkaron 日本文化論) 8–9, 68, 77
Latour, Bruno 160, 163 Nirvana Sutra 63–4
Leroi-Gourhan, André (1911–1986) 9 Nishide Takeshi 西出勇志 78
Noh drama 5, 129
Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862–1949) 33
Mahikari 真光 4 Obama, Barack 2
manga 5, 144, 147 Obon お盆 Festival 22
Maruyamakyō 丸山教 73 occultism and the occult 2, 46, 112
Index 229
Ogawa Hideaki 小川秀明 152–5 Satō Hiroo 佐藤弘夫 68, 69, 73

ōjōden 往生伝 (“Stories of Rebirth in the Sawada, Janine 70–1
Pure Land”) 20 Schlachetzki, Sarah M. 148
Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三 (1862–1913) 31 science and technology, Western (and
Okamoto Tarō 岡本太郎 (1911–1996) 8, 9 animism and spirits) 5, 6, 38, 54, 64
Ōkawa Ryūhō 大川隆法 65–8 secularization 105–8
Okinawa 7, 112 semiotics 15, 54, 56, 57, 59–61
Ōkuninushi 大国主 (Shinto god) 4 shamanism 117
Ōmotokyō 大本教 4, 70, 73, 74–5 Shimada Shūhei 島田秀平 98
oni 鬼 (demons) 110 Shimazono Susumu 島園進 9, 68, 77
Onmyōdō 陰陽道 7, 86 Shimizu Takashi 130–2
ontology 10–11, 56–64, 113 Shin-Gojira シン・ゴジラ (Shin-Godzilla)
Orientalism (including Neo-Orientalism, 171, 176–81, 182–4
“passionate Orientalism,” reverse Shinkai Makoto 新海誠 167, 173, 175
Orientalism, self-Orientalism, Shinnyoen 真如苑 4
Oriental Orientalism) 7, 8, 10, Shinto 30, 151, 155
14–15, 31, 66, 146–8 Shinto shrines merger policy (jinja gōshi
Osaka World Exposition (1970) 144–5 神社合祀) 45
Ōtsuka Eiji 大塚英志 76, 163 Shōkonsha 招魂社 (Shrines for Invoking
Ōtsuka Tomoaki 大塚友明 103 the Dead) 34
Ōya Sōichi 大宅壮一 75 Shugendō 修験道 95, 101–4, 108
SKIP House (Kyoto) 91–4
Papapetros, Spyros 9 slime molds 61–4
Peirce, Charles Sanders 57, 59 Smith, Hester Travers 78
Pettazzoni, Raffaele (1883–1959) 9 spiritism 20–44
Pokémon 111 spirits (tama 霊, tamashii 魂, reikon 霊魂)
popular culture 5 3, 43–4, 49–54, 66–7, 106, 110–14,
posthumous names (hōmyō 法名, kaimyō 117–25, 128–9, 159, 171, 172
戒名) 22 as metaphors 3
“power spots” (pawā supotto パワースポッ interviews 65, 68, 78
ト) 2, 95, 96–9, 103 of the war dead (eirei 英霊) 34, 72
primitive peoples 36, 39, 41 “spiritual intellectuals” 5, 9, 66, 77
Prohl, Inken 6, 9, 66 spiritualism 39, 41, 44, 69
psychics 65 Staemmler, Birgit 74
Pure Land (gokuraku jōdo 極楽浄土) Stahl, Georg Ernst (1659–1734) 36
(Buddhist paradise) 4, 19, 23–4 Stalker, Nancy K. 70, 74
Strecher, Matthew 135
Rambelli, Fabio 4, 66–7 Suga Naoko 菅直子 96–8
Reider, Noriko 167 “superstitions” (meishin 迷信) 34, 65, 73,
reikan 霊感 (ability to perceive spirits) 78–9, 112
114, 116, 121 Suzuki, D.T. (Daisetsu Teitarō) 鈴木大拙貞
Renmonkyō 蓮門教 70–1, 72–3 太郎 (1870–1966) 33
Risshō Kōseikai 立正佼成会 75 Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772) 33
Rots, Aike 9, 70, 99, 101
Ryōkan 良寛 (1758–1831) 7 Tabei Masaru 田部井勝 152, 153
Takahashi Sadako 高橋貞子 29
Said, Edward W. 146 Takahata Isao 163
Sartre, Jean-Paul 127–8 Tambiah, Stanley J. 6
Sasaki Kyūhei 佐々木九平 33 Tanahashi Nobuyuki 棚橋信之 151
230 Index
Tanaka Atsuko 田中敦子 152 Wakimoto Tsuneya 脇本平也 96

Tateishi Kōshō 立石光正 104 Wilkinson, Darryl 160–1
Techno-Animism 143–56, 160 Willerslev, Rane 42
temoto kuyō 手元供養 (“at hand World Mate ワールドメート 4
memorial”) 26
tengu 天狗 (goblin) 29, 34, 69, 110 Yamakawa Kenjirō 山川健次郎 (1854–1931)
Tenrikyō 天理教 69, 73 29
Theosophy 33, 35, 44, 46 Yamakawa Kroiden Hisako 山川 K. 尚子
Thomas, Jolyon 159, 164 155
Todorov, Tzvetan 127, 133 Yamaori Tetsuo 山折哲雄 77
Toriyama Sekien 鳥山石燕 (1712–1788) yamauba 山姥 110
69 Yanagi Sōetsu 柳宗悦 (1889–1961) 147
tourism 2, 115–16 Yanagita Kunio 柳田國男 (1875–1962) 25,
Tschumi, Bernard 85 33, 61, 132–3
Tsubouchi Shōyō 坪内逍遥 (1859–1935) 33 Yasuda Mutsuhiko 安田睦彦 25
Tsukada Hotaka 塚田穂高 67 Yasuda Yoshinori 安田喜憲 7–8
Tsukumo (Possessions) 166–7 Yasukuni Shrine 靖国神社 2
Tsurumi Kazuko 鶴見和子 57 yōkai 妖怪 (monsters) 2, 3, 5, 69, 110, 114,
Tsushima Michihito 対馬路人 68 128
Tylor, E. B. (Edward Burnett) (1832–1917) Yoshinaga Shin’ichi 吉永進一 33, 74
7, 9, 36, 41–2, 66 Yoshioka Hiroshi 148
Yuasa Yasuo 湯浅泰雄 77
ukiyoe 浮世絵 prints 2, 5 Yumemakura Baku 夢枕獏 86
Umebayashi Katsu 梅林克 91–3 yūrei 幽霊 (ghosts) 3, 5, 47–8, 110, 112,
Umehara Takeshi 梅原猛 3, 8, 70, 77 114, 128
urban landscape 5, 87–8, 90–1, 171–2,
181–5. See also fengshui Zen Buddhism 4
Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川国芳 (1798–1861) 2 Zhong, Yijiang 4

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Spirits and Animism in

The Invisible Empire

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo

First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Fabio Rambelli and Contributors 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-9709-4

Cover design by Maria Rajka

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt.Ltd.

Introduction: The Invisible Empire: Spirits and Animism in Contemporary

5.2 Stained glass window in the Kitakyushu Literature Museum. Photograph

Andrea Castiglioni is a lecturer of Japanese Studies in the Department of Intercultural

Andrea De Antoni is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at

Satō Hiroo is Professor of Japanese intellectual history at Tōhoku University in Sendai

Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm is Chair of Science & Technology Studies as well as Chair

Jolyon Baraka Thomas is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of

A striking aspect of contemporary Japanese culture is the pervasive nature of discussions

“traditional,” ancestral spirituality in their adaptations to contemporary society, or

A Brief History of Japanese Animism

It is obvious that animism refers to a range of different phenomena, entities, representations,

by new religious organizations in the twentieth century (Hosokawa 1991). In fact,

However, the sequence connecting Edo-period social transformations, Hirata

against superstition would have eradicated premodern beliefs in invisible agencies,

adds theoretical considerations, in an approving tone, on E. B. Tylor’s (1832–1917)

peoples. He argues that the civilizational ethos of monotheism requires expansion,

The Chapters in This Book

Chapter 1 by Satō Hiroo is an account of the transformations in Japanese visions

The “Invisible Empire”

The Dead Who Remain: Spirits and Changing

The Dead Who Leave and the Dead Who Stay

The Family Registers of the Dead

The Other Shore, Sans Buddha

New Directions in Funeral Rites

The Mystical “Occident” or the Vibrations of

William James (1842–1910), whose work Fukurai translated into Japanese.2 To be

Wherever mystery is possible, there man imagines non-human spirits to exist. A

Classical theories of modernization often presume that as a civilization gets more

Strikingly, as the trio of concepts—animism, fetishism, and ancestor worship—was

The Mystical Occident

It had been my belief that ghosts and [demonic] palanquin-bearers had

As mentioned above, one of the more famous participants in Fukurai Tomokichi’s

(including Shinrei no genshō 心霊の現象 by Hirai Kinzō 平井金三 (1909), Shinrei no

In the turn to notions of magnetism or electricity to explain Western spiritualism,

A Partial Genealogy of “Animism”

Everything around us is but vibration and hence radiation. Luminous radiations,

of electricity,” which interwove recent discoveries in magnetism, electricity, and

Third, and most importantly, to treat Comte as primarily a theorist of secularization

Perhaps more surprising is Tylor’s own attendance at séances. As I have discussed

Classical modernization theory often presumes that as a civilization modernizes it

A Metaphysics of the Invisible Realm: Minakata

Minakata Kumagusu 南方熊楠 (1867–1941) was one of the leading intellectuals

categories from Shingon Buddhism, in a stunningly creative attempt to use classical

Minakata and the Spirit World

life), which he tried to study scientifically by producing a sort of phenomenology of

The Study of Spirit Entities

More specifically, we can identify the following phases in the process:

When the spirit’s function is applied to atoms it produces physical force

In his Kabbalah mandala, Minakata also envisioned the emergence and

The Science of Intermediary Human “Facts” (koto no gaku)

Outline of a General Ontology: The “Minakata Mandala”

suiten 萃点 (focus, nodal point, point of concentration); it represents topologically the

Point HOホ is essentially the same as HA.

Slime Mold, Mandala, and the Mystery/Wonder of the Universe

The genius of Minakata consisted in his ability to combine and develop, in an