Yaoyorozu: A World Where Everything Has a Spirit

On a back street in an ordinary suburb there is a stone about the size of a washing machine, and someone has tied a rope around it. The rope is thick, twisted rice straw, and from it hang folded paper zigzags that have gone soft in the rain. There is no sign. Nobody in the neighbourhood could tell you exactly when the rope was first put there. A woman walking past with shopping bags dips her head toward it, barely, the way you might nod to a neighbour.

The stone is a kami. Or the stone has a kami, or is inhabited by one, or is the place where one is likely to be — the grammar is deliberately loose. It is one of the yaoyorozu no kami (八百万の神), the "eight million gods," and the phrase is the closest thing Shinto has to a creed.

Eight million is not a number

The first thing to say about yaoyorozu is that nobody counted. The word is a poetic figure, like "a thousand thanks" or "a hundred and one uses." Yao is eight hundred, yorozu is ten thousand, and in classical Japanese the number eight — 八 — carried the sense of "very many" or "all of them." Yaoyorozu means innumerable. Countless. Everywhere you look.

That last sense is the important one. The phrase is not making a claim about how many gods there are. It is making a claim about where they are, which is: anywhere. In the mountain and in the specific tree on the mountain. In the rice field and in the rice. In the well, the hearth, the outhouse. In the kitchen knife, once it has been used long enough. In the ancestors. In the emperor, until 1946, when he formally said otherwise. In a stone on a back street.

What a kami is, roughly

The word kami (神) is usually translated as "god," and this causes more confusion than almost any other translation from Japanese.

A god, in the Western sense, is a person: a being with intentions, a personality, a will. Some kami are like that — the sun goddess Amaterasu, the storm god Susanoo, the figures in the eighth-century chronicles who quarrel and hide and are coaxed out of caves. But most are not. Most kami are closer to what the eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga described when he tried to pin the word down: anything that inspires a sense of awe or strangeness. Anything that strikes you as more than ordinary. A waterfall qualifies. So does a very old tree, an unusually shaped rock, a fox seen at dusk, a place where something terrible once happened.

A kami is not necessarily good. It is not necessarily interested in you. It is simply there, and the appropriate response to its being there is respect: a small nod, a clap of the hands, a rope to mark the spot.

This is why the word "animism" fits better than "polytheism." Polytheism is many gods. Animism is a world in which the line between things and beings is blurry, and where attention is owed to both.

The ritual side

Most of what a visitor sees of Shinto is the etiquette that follows from this. You pass through a torii gate, which marks the boundary between the everyday and the kami's ground. You rinse your hands and mouth at a stone basin. You approach the shrine, toss a coin, ring a bell, bow twice, clap twice, bow once more. The claps are not a summons. They are closer to a knock: a way of announcing yourself politely to something that may or may not be paying attention.

And then, beyond the big shrines, there are the small ones. Japan has an estimated eighty thousand registered shrines and a vastly larger number of unregistered ones — roadside altars, shelf shrines in shops, a miniature torii at the base of a tree in a car park. There is a shrine in the corner of many kitchens. There are shrines to the kami of the toilet, the kami of the gate, the kami of the rice cooker in some old farmhouses. The sushi chef bows to the counter before he starts. The carpenter blesses the site before the first post goes in.

None of this is superstition, exactly, in the way the word is usually meant. Ask the sushi chef whether he believes there is a spirit in the counter and he will probably shrug. The bow is not a statement of belief. It is a habit of regard.

The needles and the dolls

Two rituals show the idea more clearly than any definition.

Hari-kuyō, the needle memorial, takes place at temples and shrines in February. Seamstresses and tailors bring their worn and broken sewing needles and press them gently into a block of tofu or konnyaku, so that the needles, which have spent their working lives being pushed through hard cloth, can finally rest in something soft. Prayers are said. The needles are then buried or enshrined.

Ningyō-kuyō does something similar for dolls. Old dolls — especially the ornamental ones displayed for children's festivals — are not thrown away in Japan without some unease, because a doll that has been looked at and loved for decades has taken on something. So they are brought to a temple, thanked, and ritually burned.

Both rituals are practical answers to a question that a yaoyorozu worldview makes unavoidable: if things can carry spirit, how do you dispose of a thing? The answer is: carefully, and with thanks. This is the root of mottainai, the sense that wasting a thing denies its worth, and the root, too, of the small everyday tenderness toward objects — the phone case, the mended cup, the old car — that visitors to Japan notice without quite being able to name.

Living inside it

What does it feel like to live in a world of eight million gods? I think it feels mainly like a mild, constant, low-level attentiveness. Not reverence — that is too strong, and most Japanese people would find it embarrassing. More like courtesy extended past its usual boundary.

You are a little careful how you speak near a very old tree. You do not step on the threshold of a shrine building, because the threshold is a kami too. You say itadakimasu before eating — "I humbly receive" — and it is not really a prayer, but it is not nothing either. You wash the rice cooker before you put it away.

Nothing in this requires belief. That is what makes it portable. You can walk out of a Shinto shrine an atheist and still find, a week later, that you have started nodding at the big oak on your corner. The kami does not need you to believe in it. It only asks that you notice it is there.

The stone

I went back to the stone on the back street a year later. The rope had been replaced — someone had done it in the New Year, when ropes are replaced — and the paper zigzags were crisp and white. A child had left a small yellow flower at the base. Cars went by. The woman with the shopping bags was probably long gone. The stone was exactly where it had been for a very long time, being a stone, being noticed.