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Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire ed. by Fabio Rambelli (review)

Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan navigates a proliferation of beliefs and practices regarding “the invisible realm” in present-day Japan. The evidence, laid out in eleven single-authored essays (plus an Introduction), performs two important tasks for the field of Japanese religions, particularly Shinto, with implications for religious studies more broadly. First, it attests that in a society often problematically regarded as secular, “animism is anything but a single, homogenous discourse” but rather, manifests in a vivid landscape of ideas and applications among a wide sector of the population (10). Second, that landscape rarely correlates with historical precedents, as the contributors frequently point out. While much of the content here overlaps with Shinto, its origins in the last century are a reminder that neither realm constitutes the remnants of an ancient form of nature worship, as Shinto is often portrayed. The book joins a number of incisive volumes on overlooked topics in Japanese religions—others include sea religion and the mountain tradition of Shugendō—that proceed from international symposia organized by Fabio Rambelli at the University of California, Santa Barbara. First presented in 2017, the essays here are oriented around three subjects: historical context on spirits and animism in Japan (particularly useful for non-specialists), contemporary representations and practices, and the spirit realm in literature, media art, and anime. The book begins with some historical perspective that demonstrates the recent emergence of concepts like animism and related areas of thought in Japan. Following Fabio Rambelli’s Introduction, in which he lays out the influence of nativist Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) and more recent intellectuals in establishing a sort of “neo-animism,” Hiroo Satō contextualizes rapidly-changing funeral rites (resulting from demographic shifts) within a long history of evolving notions about the afterlife. Jason Josephson-Storm in turn compares sentiments, simultaneously enthusiastic and pejorative, about the spirit world among Japanese intellectuals and their European counterparts. On the European side, theorists such as Auguste Comte and E. B. Tylor, he notes, associated animism with societies they deemed primitive (Japan included) yet may have unconsciously subscribed to the worldview themselves. Finally, Rambelli explores how the philosopher and naturalist Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941) merged the realms of material and spiritual with modern science and Buddhism to argue that, for example, atoms arose from the Cosmic Buddha (Dainichi) or that the molecular processes of slime molds could explain the inner workings of the mind. Reviews