Ecological disaster, consumerism, animism and Japan's Ritual for the Souls of Broken Needles

February 8th is the day of the Broken Needle Festival in Japan. For more than 1500 years, people have come to temples, where in a combination of Shinto animism and Buddhist rituals for the dead, they say prayers to thank and propitiate the souls of needles used throughout the year that have broken. Why say these prayers? The Japanese believe that to simply discard a tool you have used; a tool that has given you good use; a tool that has put its soul to work for you, would be to invite the anger and rage of that soul.

 
Of course, this belief would mean that Japan is free of discarded consumerist trash. And nothing could be further from the truth. A writer over at 3yen.com noted last year that there should be a ceremony for the souls of discarded toner cartridges. This animist belief in the anger of discarded tools is at the center of one of my favorite Japanese films: Yokai Dai Senso — The Great Yokai War.

Directed by the great Takaashi Miike, the film opens on a vision of a post apocalyptic Tokyo. And shows the film's villain standing on a mountain of discarded electronics and machinery that extends to the horizon. Chanting a spell, he raises the souls of all the detritus of this throwaway culture and gives power to their rage, unleashing a very different kind of monster on the oft monster-destroyed islands of Nippon.

This villain, one Lord Kato, has been capturing the traditional spirits, the local tutelary gods and creatures of Japanese folklore and using their life force to animate and give power to Transformer-like monster mash-ups of machinery. These traditional spirits and creatures, known as Yokai, go to war against Lord Kato to save themselves, and all Japan.

The film is as brilliant an ecological allegory as Wall-E, and much more fun from my point of view. Lord Kato's lead assistant is played by Chiaki Kuriyama, known in the U.S. for her role in Kill Bill, and notoriously famous in Japan for her role in Battle Royale.

The film has all the motifs and elements found in the most popular western stories, from the Wizard of Oz, the story of King Arthur, The Never Ending Story, Peter Pan, The Lord of the Rings. You can find parallels throughout. But these motifs are shared by all humanity — you can find them cataloged in the Aarne-Thompson motif index of world folktales. And this film puts them together masterfully.

Which brings me back to the Needle Festival — known as Harikuyo. One of the Yokai is Kasabake, the umbrella monster. There are Yokai shoji screens, Yokai lamps, Yokai towels (yes, Towely from South Park has an actual folklore heritage!) and the list goes on. Of course, Yokai include animal creatures like the Kappa. And the Kirin. But because today is the Needle Festival, I wanted to take a moment to speak of the soul in the machine, the soul that lives in everyday objects.

If as a people, we truly believed in such a soul, the sea would not be filled with plastic trash, choking marine life and soiling our beaches. If as a people, we acted on such a belief, recycling — a kind of reincarnation for our tools — would be commonplace.

Yes, in the U.S. we hold no such beliefs. And in Japan, where they supposedly do hold these beliefs, the problem is only marginally better. In fact, there is little market for anything previously owned in Japan because it is believed that something of the spirit of the previous owner adheres to the object. And the object's soul takes its anger at abandonment out on the new owner. Which is why it's a steal to buy anything second-hand in Japan.

So before you throw anything away today, stop for a moment, even if you are not animist in the least, and take a moment of thanks for what use this object has given you. And consider how to give its remains back to the earth in a way that is respectful of all life on the planet. And then go to Netflix and rent The Great Yokai War.

Comments

[NYCGuy]

I assume there's a connection with their wonderful concept of honoring unique craftspersons & artists as living treasures. The Japanese look as landfilling as a form of recycling (well, sort of ... but with pitfalls like the Kansai Airport subsidence). They've yet to appreciate the importance of historic preservation of non-sacred places - like the machiya - the old merchant's houses in the center of Kyoto. That said, this honoring needles does strike me as a parallel to Jewish genizot for sacred texts (a definition that is fairly broad). The closest we get in NYC to honoring needles is to mark the site & annually commemorate the loss of overwhelmingly young women garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaste Fire in Greenwich Village. Their deaths gave birth to the 1st US national worker safety laws. Perhaps the cosmopolitan spirits of New York & Tokyo - the world's 1st designated sister cities - have somewhat entwined?

[M.]

Thanks for the post -- having lived in Japan for a few years myself, I can attest to having seen the same things. Yet I would point out that "recycle shops" and businesses like Book Off are hardly unpopular in Japan, either. In premodern Japan, there was a lot of recycling because non-elites had to deal with such a scarcity of resources: old kimonos were taken apart and made into bedding; the backs of paper had to be written on; etc.

[donna]

Far from being the fan of japanese movie, I accidentally came across this one http://file.sh/the+great+yokai+war+torrent.html and watched it - not bad ;)