Does Japan Believe in Ghosts?
And What IS 'Belief', Anyway...?
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Halloween is here. Are you scared yet?
Here in the UK the answer is - regretfully - ‘no.’ It’s the usual tidal wave of orange and black plastic, plus some cobwebs and flickery pumpkin lanterns.
Mind you, for those of us forced by our children to go trick-or-treating, it is a little unnerving: the combination of Haribo and bad jokes with skulls, skeletons, blanched corpse-faces and blood. I sympathise with Christian churches throwing ‘light parties’ around this time of year as an alternative: choosing illumination over fake darkness.
Does Japan do all this better? Yes.
In big cities like Tokyo, Halloween is an upbeat, alcohol-fuelled cosplay extravaganza (which nervous authorities in places like Shibuya have started shutting down). It’s kept completely separate from Japan’s day of the dead, Obon, which is held in the summer. This is a time when the border between our world and the next becomes thin and the spirits of deceased relatives return for a visit.
Those spirits are greeted, when they arrive, not with panicked screaming or sugar-heavy treats. Instead, the living gather at graveyards to tidy and sweep, drink together and have fun. ‘Bon Odori’ dancing, originally a means of welcoming the dead, features spectacular costumes, music and routines.
People celebrate at their homes, too, lighting fires to guide the spirits towards them. Miniature animals or vehicles are fashioned from vegetables - toothpicks stuck into cucumbers or aubergines - so that the spirits have something to ride on, or in, when they return to the other world.
Bon Odori at a festival near Nikko, which I visited this summer. At some festivals the dancing is professional and highly practiced. Here, everyone in the community is invited to take part.
I found my first Obon a little strange. The idea of drinking alcohol in a graveyard, while laughing and letting off fireworks, seemed more the kind of thing that naughty teenagers might get up to. It was a while before I appreciated the idea that a gentle, open playfulness is actually a very good way to approach the biggest questions in life. Joy, meanwhile, is a natural response to remembering or re-encountering loved ones.
But which is it? Remembrance - or re-encounter?
The first research interviews I conducted in Japan, touching on questions like these, were a complete failure. Employing an interview technique unconsciously borrowed from the famously harsh British broadcast journalist Jeremy Paxman, I was convinced that if I just kept hammering away with my questions then my interview subjects would eventually give up the goods.
I got absolutely nowhere, as you might expect. So I turned for answers to my Japanese girlfriend. Little did she know that this was the beginning of 20 years and counting of being made to serve as my one-woman survey of Japanese public opinion.
Sadly, that didn’t work either. But it taught me some valuable lessons about what - and how - people believe in Japan, when it comes to life, death, spirits and the afterlife.
First, I learned that outside of journalism and academia, demanding firm and specific answers on very personal questions like these is considered extraordinarily intrusive. I think the word my wife used was ‘interrogation.’
Second, the idea that one ought to be in possession of clear-cut answers to questions about gods, spirits and the hereafter isn’t as widely shared in Japan as in countries like the UK.
That’s a legacy, I think, of Christianity and the particular kinds of agnosticism and atheism to which it’s given rise. A conviction common to all three positions is that it’s possible to encapsulate truth-claims in words, whether in the case of the afterlife that’s yes, no, I don’t know or it’s too mysterious for words. Any Christian apologist worth their salt will jump on that last response and point out that to declare the subject too mysterious for words is still a truth-claim of a kind.
This is why international surveys of religious, supernatural or spiritual belief often feature Japan somewhere near the bottom, despite it being home to tens of thousands of Shintō shrines and Buddhist temples. It’s not that people have no sense of or time for these questions. It’s that they treat them more in terms of dispositions than propositions. In other words, less weight is placed on concrete ideas about deities, death and the afterlife. What matters is how people dispose themselves towards these things: in their feelings, intuitions and actions.
This approach to understanding belief in Japan can become annoying. Popular books on Japanese spirituality, dealing with things like forest-bathing or ikigai (your joy in life, your reason for existing) tend to take an idealistic and ahistorical approach to Japanese culture. The implication is often that having firm religious convictions has always been foreign to Japanese culture, and that this is a superior way to live - less bigoted, less naive about the complex mysteries of life.
It’s true that exclusive affiliation to a particular religious organisation and its teachings has been comparatively rare in Japan across the centuries, especially when compared with Christian and Muslim countries. And yet survey evidence from within Japan itself suggests a measurable and meaningful postwar decline in religious belief.
Reasons for this include the disestablishment of State Shintō during the Allied Occupation (1945 - 1952) and the banning of religious education under Japan’s postwar constitution. The sarin attacks on the Tokyo underground in 1995, perpetrated by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyō, badly damaged both trust in religious organisations and belief in kami and buddhas.
In common with other developed countries, Japan has moved more towards ‘spirituality’, loosely understood. It’s an easier shift than in countries like the UK and US. Spirituality emphasises pluralism and practice (over and above doctrine) and Japan has long been strong on both. Shintō and Buddhism share religious sites, devotees and even - in some cases - the same deities.
Sensō-ji, one of Tokyo’s best-known temples. Most Japanese would struggle to describe Buddhism’s Eight-Fold Path, but they understand very well the mix of reverence and play involved in visiting a place like this.
So - does Japan believe in ghosts? Bearing in mind that statistics on these things should be handled with care, here goes:
Around half of Japanese adults believe in ‘unseen beings’ and a similar proportion believe in kami inhabiting nature - mountains, rivers and trees, especially (Pew Research Center, 2024).
Around half of women, and just over a third of men, believe in rebirth (Pew Research Center, 2024).
Four in ten adults believe in heaven, and three in ten believe in hell (Pew Research Center, 2024).
Put this alongside pop culture offerings from Edo-era art to present-day Pokémon and Jujutsu Kaisen, all of which are shot through with ghosts, spirits and yōkai - monsters - of all kinds, and you have a spiritual landscape teeming with vitality and possibility.
One of the most moving themes in Japanese art, ubume are the ghosts of women who have died in childbirth and return to look out for their babies
Amidst all this possibility, there’s an important role for dispositions - feelings, intuitions, actions - over propositions. And this is where I think Japan has something to teach us.
The reductive religious commentary of the New Atheism era often defined ‘faith’ in terms of uncompromising assent to particular propositions. But I much prefer Rowan Williams’ suggestion, that faith is about constantly seeing more - not less - of reality. The psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist puts this beautifully, describing faith as ‘a disposition to the world as if God exists, in order to open the possibility of an encounter with whatever the word God designates.’
Substitute ‘God’ for ‘gods’ or ‘spirits’ here and you end up pretty close, I think, to the sort of relationship with other beings and worlds that Japanese culture helps to foster. It’s a relationship that makes it difficult to respond to Paxman-style interrogation or opinion surveys, because your sense of these things may be unclear and often changing - while at the same time being vividly real.
The danger, for at least some of us in the West, is that faith and belief becomes a switch that is either on or off; a decision that we make and then don’t feel inclined to revisit or remain curious about. Halloween leaves me cold because it hints at these things and then immediately gives up on them, in favour of irony and tack. Japan reminds me that it needn’t be this way.
Thanks for reading! If you’re in the mood for some viewing and want to find out about a particular kind of yōkai that may be lurking in your house right now, head over to this week’s YouTube video.