Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

largest island to the south. They will take their cameras, and go and photograph these blossoms, then follow the wave of pink as it washes over all of Japan, finally cresting in Hokkaido some time in May.
    When I was in Japan in 2013, the city of Sendai experienced a rare phenomenon when the cherry trees were not only in full bloom but also covered in snow. Photographers raced to snap pictures of the pale-pink beauties shivering in the cold.
    “The poor blossoms,” I said to my mother’s cousin.
    “No,” he said. “The snow is good for the flowers. It means they will stay on the trees longer. Like they are in a refrigerator.”
    The adoration of the flower is a quintessentially Japanese trait. A taxi driver in Kytonce said to me, “People who love flowers are kind people.” My mother, who was riding in the car with me, nodded vigorously; she understood this feeling implicitly. It’s anattitude pretty much every Japanese I have ever met will agree with, for the Japanese obsession with the beauty of nature, and the drive to cultivate it, has its roots in Shint, Japan’s indigenous religion.
    N O ONE KNOWS exactly how Shintgot its start. It most likely evolved over hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, as successive waves of immigration settled in the Japanese isles. Shintis thus not the inspired teaching of a single person in possession of a vision who wrote down one sacred text, but a collection of practices with regional variation.
    For the ancient Japanese, life was suffused with a marvelous power they called kami . I like to describe the kami as ancestor spirits, mythological creatures, gods, demons, the wind, unicorns, the Force—everything powerful but invisible—all wrapped into one. Sometimes a kami was felt especially strongly in a specific location: a tree, a rock, a waterfall. Occasionally, a human being could also house kami , since people are simply one part of the natural world. Over time, shrines were built on or near these locations to allow humans and kami to commune.
    It is commonly accepted that there are about eight million gods and demons operating in Shintat any one time. This is an awful lot of power, and if you consider that not all of the gods get along, and that some are in the air, and some under the earth, in the ocean, on the wind, and elsewhere, and that none are really good or bad, it makes for a land mine–laden spiritual terrain.
    Shintis the reason why, when Nissan first launched its Infiniti car, the advertising campaign included lots of shots of nature, without a single image of a car, a strategy that worked far better in Japan than in the United States. Shintis the reason why, when you are walking through the woods in Japan, you might see a particular rock or waterfall marked off by a rope and piece of white ricepaper, signaling that a god either lives there or once appeared there. Many gods fly in and out of shrines, the most famous of which is Ise, dedicated to Amaterasu, the sun goddess, and from whom the imperial family is said to be descended. But the gods of Japan can be sensitive, and if they are offended, they can cause humans harm.
    To ward off this kind of offense, Shintrequires its practitioners to behave properly and to be as clean as possible. Shintis why you remove your shoes before entering a home in Japan—to leave outside filth “outside.” It is why once a year needles and scissors are blessed in Ueno, so the unruly scissor and needle gods do not cause their owners mischief by unnecessary cutting or poking.
    The world is alive. If you listen to Japanese, it is full of onomatopoeia. A fire does not just burn; it burns kachi kachi . Ice is not crunchy; it is kori kori . Glue is not just sticky; it is beto beto . As my three-year-old son works his way through Japanese children’s books, he is learning a predictable array of cultural manners and customs, but he is also learning more than this. Everything has a face and a sound. Each of the Japanese letters he