Book reviews
Yoneyama, Shoko. 2019.
Animism in Contemporary Japan: Voices for
the Anthropocene from Post-Fukushima Japan. Abingdon: Routledge. xi + 250
pp. Hb.: £115.00.
ISBN: 9781138228030;
Ebook.: £20.00. ISBN: 9781315393902.
From the mid-1950s, people living in
fishing villages around Minamata in western Japan began dying terrible deaths
from mercury poisoning traced to wastewater from a factory in the town.
Thousands of people remain affected by one of the world’s worst criminal cases
of industrial pollution. The Minamata incident provides the starting point for
this new book by sociologist Shoko Yoneyama. Given that another awful case of
pollution began at Fukushima in March 2011, how are we to understand and
respond to such horrors? This book analyses four Japanese intellectuals, three
of whom have been directly involved with Minamata. In all four cases, the
author Yoneyama argues that “animism” has formed the basis of their responses
to Minamata and other crises of modernity.
This volume is published in Routledge’s Contemporary Japan Series, but the
author insists that her aim is not to ‘describe Japanese culture by using the
notion of animism or anything else for that matter’ (p. 24). Instead, Yoneyama
aims to focus on what she terms the “grassroots animism” of four individuals
who happen to be Japanese. We will discuss below whether Yoneyama succeeds in
this objective of escaping the overdetermined space (aka ideology) of Japanese
animism, but it will be useful to begin this review by attempting to explain
the significance of her approach. For many readers in Japanese Studies, the
term “animism” will immediately bring to mind the reactionary atavistic
writings of philosopher Takeshi Umehara (1925-2019), the first director of the
International Research Center for Japanese Studies (an institution known
colloquially as the Nichibunken).
From the 1980s, Umehara began to propound a vision of Japanese culture based on
deep animist roots. This vision was taken up by several of Umehara’s former
associates at the Nichibunken, especially Yoshinori Yasuda. In her
Introduction, Yoneyama (pp. 20-22) provides a short but incisive critique of
the writings of this group, which we might call the Alt-Nichibunken. Umehara’s animism was effectively an attempt at
building a ‘State Animism’. Even though Umehara himself was critical of the
appropriation of Japan’s cultural traditions by State Shinto in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, his response was to create the
fantasy of a homogenous “forest civilisation” closely linked to the Japanese
state and emperor. In this book, Yoneyama attempts to distance herself from this
view of animism as nationalist discourse; in fact, she chooses to analyse the
writings of four individuals who have taken “intellectual journeys” which have
positioned themselves ‘the furthest away one can get from presenting a national
discourse’ (p. 22).
The four substantive chapters of the volume discuss the
work of Masato Ogata (b. 1953), a fisherman, activist and writer in Minamata;
Michiko Ishimure (1927-2018), a writer best known for her Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease; sociologist
Kazuko Tsurumi (1918-2006); and film director Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1941). These
are all significant figures in post-war Japanese letters but do they, in fact,
share an animist worldview? As discussed below, Ogata’s view of the world could
certainly be called ecological, but
Yoneyama notes that he does not use the word “animism” (p. 54). Similarly,
Ishimure rarely refers to animism, though Yoneyama stresses that ‘an animistic
theme runs
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through her literary work’ (p. 81).
In contrast to Ogata and Ishimure, Miyazaki identifies his artistic philosophy
as influenced by animism, although he denies its religious nature, saying ‘I do
like animism. I can understand the idea of ascribing character to stones and
wind. But I don’t want to laud it as a religion’ (p. 180). Of the four
individuals discussed here, it is the academic Tsurumi who was most explicit
about her attempts to recover animism as a ‘disappearing “way of knowing” that [she] discovered in Minamata’ (p. 143) and to
use that animism to build a new type of social science. The animism discussed
in Yoneyama’s book is, as the author herself admits (p. 223), not a religion (however one defines
that) and rarely involves any rituals, although Ogata (p. 56) mentions several
customs performed by fishermen in Minamata. Rather than “religion”, Yoneyama
offers the term “postmodern animism”, defined as a ‘philosophy of the
life-world’ (p. 224). Suddenly, “animism in contemporary Japan” looks more like
an extension of phenomenology and the Romantic concern with the environment as
a world of experience.
What, then, if not animism? My view is that
analysing the four individuals in terms of ecology
would have been more interesting and might have brought their ideas further
away from the virally reproduced aura of Japanese Nature. The four individuals
possess rather different views on nature and ecology, although all share the
Romantic idea of the environment as a life-world that can transform self and society.
Kazuko Tsurumi has by far the most academic take of the four, discovering
animism in the beliefs of people in Minamata and being herself ‘spiritually
awakened’ (p. 116) to its potential in developing a critique of modernity.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Tsurumi’s work to appear in this volume
is her discussion of the ecologist Kumagusu Minakata (1867-1941). Minakata’s
work on slime moulds has potential to link with recent debates in environmental
philosophy—such as Timothy Morton’s writings on queer ecology and the “strange
stranger”—yet both Tsurumi and Yoneyama limit themselves to connections with
esoteric Buddhism and animism.
Hayao Miyazaki’s interest in nature began with him
reading Sasuke Nakao’s “broadleaf evergreen forest hypothesis”, first published
in 1966. This theory, which links western Japan with south China and Southeast
Asia in an Austrian ethnology-inspired Kulturkreis,
provided Miyazaki with a liberating means to understand that Japan ‘was
actually connected to the wider world beyond borders and ethnic groups’ (p.
177). As well as an escape from nationalism, the theory also stimulated
Miyazaki to ‘believe that greenery was beautiful’, in stark contrast to his
younger days when he ‘thought that greenery was nothing but a symbol of
poverty’ (p. 179). As a result, Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli attempts to
incorporate aspects of the landscape including ‘weather, time, rays of light,
plants, water, and wind’ in its films (p. 176). Miyazaki’s comment that, ‘Human
relationships are not the only thing that is interesting’ checks one of
Lawrence Buell’s boxes for classification as an environmental text, but his
overall approach seems to limit the environment to “greenery”, implying that,
say, the depicted urban landscapes or the un-depicted
train journeys in Yasujirō’s Ozu’s film Tokyo
Story do not equally constitute environment. One critic has said that
‘Miyazaki has “baptized a whole generation” with an animistic imagination’ (p.
159), but in what way is Totoro more animistic than Winnie the Pooh—except that
the former is portrayed within a Japanese context that invites
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Book reviews
cultural readings associated with animism
and folk Shinto?
Michiko Ishimure is well known as one of Japan’s foremost
environmental writers, and her work has been much discussed within
ecocriticism. Ishimure’s writings sometimes assign “personhood to nonhumans”
including “crow-women” and yamawaros
mountain spirits (pp. 82-84). The discussion here in Chapter 2 is unclear as to
how Ishimure perceived the relations between human and nonhuman persons.
Certain passages from her writings reproduced here suggest that nonhuman
persons inhabited another world deep in the mountains and dark forests.
Elsewhere, Ishimure claims that in the ‘pre-pollution era of the Shiranui Sea,
people, nature (including animals), and kami
coexisted closely and intermingled with each other’ (p. 83). The trajectory is
from living in the world to thinking about the world (p. 93), the implication
being that ecological relations only existed in a stage prior to modernity.
With his anxieties over consumerism, Masato Ogata is
perhaps the most ecological of the four thinkers discussed here. Throwing his
television out of his door into the front garden (‘You beast! How dare you
break into my house and order us around. Go there! Buy this!’ [p. 49]), Ogata
understands the close link between consumerism and ecology. Ogata’s book Chisso wa watashi de atta [‘I was
Chisso’] should be an essential text for the Anthropocene, encapsulating so
beautifully as it does the irony of the sudden realisation that it is we who
have been destroying the world all along.
Other readers will no doubt have different takes on the
ecology of the four people discussed in this volume, but my point is that
thinking about their differences tell us a great deal about views of the
environment in post-war Japan. By contrast, forcing all four into a box
labelled ‘animism’ misses much that is interesting. Animism in Contemporary Japan succeeds in breaking and entering the
‘State Animism’ of the Alt-Nichibunken, but in my view, it is unable to achieve
two of its objectives: escaping the dark star pull of Japanese culture and
changing the world.
Let us take Japanese culture first. Yoneyama insists that
her aim is not to critique the West or to develop binary East/West oppositions
of the type found in the works of Umehara and Yasuda. The book indeed adopts a
very different tone from the virulently anti-Western/anti-Christian tracts of
Yasuda in particular (cf. the quote on p. 21 of this volume). However, ‘the
West’ is primarily noticeable here by its absence; there is almost no
discussion of how the animism of the four individuals might resonate with
spiritual ideas beyond Japan. A rare exception is a brief mention of Saint
Francis of Assisi who Yoneyama mistakenly describes as a ‘medieval heretic’ (p.
24)—although his ideas may have been unusual for his time, he would hardly have
been canonised had he been a heretic! In assuming that the diverse writings and
ideas analysed here can be glossed as ‘animism in Japan’, Yoneyama plays down
the political functions of that phenomenon. Grassroots animism, like folk
Shinto, is assumed to be egalitarian and apolitical. For example, in Table 3.2
(p. 130), the “Ideological function” of folk Shinto is listed as “Irrelevant”.
Such characterisations seem to me to overlook the agency of individuals
participating in the social lives of local communities and local spirits. The
work of anthropologist Rane Willerslev, for example, shows how Yukaghir hunters
in Siberia regard animism as an ideology to be argued with and negotiated
within.
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What, then, about changing the world? Like many
before her, Yoneyama seems to believe that Japan’s unusual place within
modernity gives the country a unique role in responding to the crises of that
same modern system. Yoneyama claims that, ‘the extent to which Japan has “never
been modern” is greater than that of the advanced societies in the West’ (p.
4). Similarly, for Antonio Negri, ‘Japan’s powerful cultural traditions which
manage to co-exist with super-modernity have the potential to solve [the] conundrum’
of ‘finding a new way to coexist with nature’ (p. 205). That Japan’s amalgam of
old and new provides a privileged position from which to build a new world
order was exactly the point made by Umehara. Changing the world has always been
the holy grail of what Timothy Morton calls the “religious style” of being
ecological, but the grassroots animism of Japan—however important to those people at the level of the grassroots—is
unlikely to find a broader resonance without a fundamental reframing of its
terms of reference.
By now, it will be clear that I find this book’s use of
animism as a way of encapsulating the diverse and fascinating ideas discussed
here as rather unconvincing. A sociological analysis of animism as a response
to power or a focus on ecology (or environmental philosophy) would, in my view,
have given the book a wider appeal. Despite this reservation, however, I found Animism in Contemporary Japan to be a
stimulating and well-written work which provides a wonderful way to think
through many important issues about ecology, society and contemporary Japan.
The arguments of the volume resonate strongly with several key Anthropocene
debates, especially those about responsibility, poetics, and civil society. I
hope this book will be widely read and debated, both within Japanese Studies
and beyond.
MARK J. HUDSON
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Germany) 
narratives and state Shintoism, she posits a theory of endogenous development (p118, p125) based on ‘place consciousness’, its own ‘way of knowing’ (p143), honouring folk Shintoism and its spiritual connection to ‘little kami’ (spirits, deities) (p26). Animation director Miyazaki Hayao was inspired to make the anime film Nausicaä by the Minamata disaster (p4-5). 
