Spiritual Power

Aside from the prerequisite essentials like arigato (thankyou), sumimasen (excuse me), and gambatte (try your best!), the first Japanese word I learned was Kami. Japanese love to give nicknames, which take the form of the first part of someone’s name followed by chan (for both genders) or kun (for men - specifically boys). You can almost place chan, which translates as little (in an affectionate way, like little wayne), after anyone’s name and you have instant kinship. It’s quite handy. I am known as Came-chan. Little Mr. Cameron. How sweet. That was until I found out that pronouncing my nickname as Kami-chan could also mean anything from little Mr. Turtle to little Mr. God and little Mr. Paper too, but that never really stuck.

In the Shinto religion, the main religion practiced in Japan, kami is not a word representing a singular god figure, but the life force in all things, the essence of a physical thing, it’s spirit. The moon, sun and foxes all have powerful kami. But it not only includes flora, fauna, and the heavenly bodies; even inanimate objects like rocks have kami, so do some occupations, and even cooking ovens have kami. So where does kami end? Does a pencil have a kami? What about a robot, or a plastic replication of a robot? What about a little plastic bean with a face?

When I asked my friend Chiharu about it she was perplexed and seemed to indicate that either my questions were ridiculous or she wasn’t sure. She said, it’s more about nature, but she did also mention that dolls can sometimes carry curses, which means that if you want to get rid of them you have to burn them in shrines with a special ritual. Just so you know.

Somehow I feel that this transcendental personification of god in all things relates to the myriad of copies or replications you see in Japan. Replications come as cartoon characters on television, tiny objects you can put on your keitei (cellphone), sometimes they masquerade as shoes (the classic frog face slippers), and often they are edible (the infamous ‘taco weiner’ - a sausage made to look like an octopus). They are not hard to find.

Ridley Scott and his scientist daughter invented the term ‘replicant’ to describe engineered human clones for the film Blade Runner, but it’s possible to take a wider view of that term. Replicant seems like an appropriate phrase to describe the millions of imitated things which Japan produces and loves because it denotes a careful copying, a deliberate engineering to grant something of the same spirit (not just the same form) as the original, just like the cyborgs in Blade Runner were almost indistinguishable from humans.

I almost wonder whether these modern replications might be a hangover from a time when Shinto was more integral in peoples lives. From a time when animistic, transcendental and pantheistic ideas (ideas about spiritual power coming from nature) were common and normal. A time when people would create wooden, clay or stone fetishes to represent the kami they were paying respect to. Not ‘fetish’ in the Freudian sense of sexual perversion, but fetish in the original sense: an object which holds spiritual power. Like tikis or voodoo masks.

Of course it’s a self fulfilling prophecy but I am starting to see evidence of this everywhere. Maybe it’s possible to see these replicants (Japan’s copying, imitating, and replication) as modern gestures with forgotten ancestors. Then again, maybe not, perhaps I should just accept that it’s only ‘about nature’, and leave the Repli-chans to enjoy themselves, without the disapproving glare of their forefathers.