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Kondo Animism
Kondo Animism
Kondo Animism
Animist
February 8, 2019
by Jolyon Baraka Thomas
S hortly after midnight on the first day of this year, my wife and I joined a
string of couples and young families streaming up the hill to our local Shintō
shrine. After ritually purifying ourselves with water at the
small temizuya fountain, we walked up a short flight of steps and waited in line
behind people as they tossed coins into the offering box and stumbled through
the “official” method of venerating the deities known as kami: two bows, two
claps, leave hands together in a prayer position, another deep bow.
Many of the people in front of us got the protocol wrong. They ribbed each
other about it as they stepped away to let those behind them go through the
motions in turn. Some of our neighbors appeared quite earnest in making
wishes for the New Year. Others were perfunctory and indifferent. My spouse
and I surreptitiously high-fived each other after getting the synchronization of
our bows and claps down almost perfectly. We’re not devotees, but we
regularly stop by local shrines and pay our respects to the deities who may or
may not reside there. I guess you could say that we practice.
The ritual expressions that take place at shrines in the Japanese new year
provide the impression of timeless tradition. As one queues before the
ornate haiden, or worship hall, one can easily feel connected to generations of
Japanese people who have been doing the same thing for millennia.
But while it builds on earlier communal rituals, the hoary tradition
of hatsumōde, or New Year’s shrine visits, actually began in the late nineteenth
century through advertising campaigns run by train corporations aiming to
boost ticket sales. Whereas visits to major shrines had previously been
sporadic and largely associated with sex tourism (major shrines invariably had
brothels conveniently located adjacent to them, and historians have
documented how pilgrims often rhapsodized about the sex workers more than
they did the deities), shrines now represented a type of leisure travel
destination accessible via a glamorous new mode of transport. Hoteliers built
inns close to rail stations to facilitate, and capitalize on, the brand-new
tradition.
I start with this story about the relatively recent and very capitalist origins of
Since Kondo’s show first appeared on Netflix, some people have taken
umbrage at her mild suggestion that books can be clutter. A writer in
the Guardian described her decluttering method as “woo-woo nonsense,” a
comment that came off to some as unnecessarily dismissive of Kondo and her
many devotees.
However, popular defenses of Kondo are even more problematic. Specifically,
well-intentioned people dismiss the critics as racists who denigrate Kondo’s
“Shintō animism.” (A few also link Kondo’s aesthetic sensibilities to Zen
Buddhism, but I’ll simply note that for most Americans today uncapitalized
“zen” works as an adjective rather than the proper noun it actually is, and has
ironically proven to be a really effective tool for selling the very sort of
tchotchkes that Kondo says her audience should release.)
The reality is, the concepts of “Shintō” and “gentle animism” that Kondo’s
defenders deploy instantiate the very racism they seek to challenge. Her
defenders are trading in shockingly Orientalist fantasies about timeless Asian
wisdom and white ignorance, and some of them seem to have little awareness
of how Japanese auto-narratives perform political work.
Kondo physically embodies Orientalist fantasies about the Asian sage. With
her spritely appearance, heavily accented English, diminutive stature, and
ritualized methods of communing with her clients’ possessions, she seems to
have tapped into some sort of magical power. Indeed, Kondo’s Japanese-
language publications refer to the “magic” (mahō) of her method, and her
clients evidently seek transformation: “I want it to be strong enough to change
me,” says her frazzled female devotee in Episode 1.
When people describe Kondo’s method as “animistic,” they reproduce the
contestable notion that Japanese people unanimously believe that all objects
are endowed with spirits. This positive, recuperative usage of the term masks
the long, sordid history of anthropologists using “animism” to dismiss non-
Europeans’ ritual practices as either bad religion, bad science, or both. So
when Kondo’s defenders call her “an animist hero,” they use a term that
undermines the very points they are trying to make about race and religion.
A n additional irony lies in the fact that “animism” only exists in the