We know that the Western mall is obviously a sort temple, yes, but in Asia, the level of attachment to and pseudo-religious integration of brands in the form of something akin to familiar spirits seems to have been taken to a whole different level.
As a poignant example, there’s this café in Shibuya dedicated to... Pompompurin. A Sanryo (Hello Kitty) character, marketed to children from the 90s onwards.
He’s a dog. A yellow dog. And also a pudding. Yes.
So this café was unintentionally horrifying in its violent and spiritualized cuteness.
It was indeed almost entirely indistinguishable from a temple or a shrine. From an actual religious institution. A huge plastic idol representing this dog sat in the centre of the place, exactly where the altar should normally have been. Everything within the space was reminiscent of the dog, from the lamps to the tables, everything on the menu was thematically related to him, and the entire staff wore costumes connected to the franchise.
Even the generally invisible cooks out in the kitchen wore Pompompurin costumes.
The music, the incessantly playing music, inevitably consisted of the character’s theme songs and marketing jingles.
And of course, they also had literature on hand, both children's books featuring the character, and actual historical material detailing its emergence and design and so on, and they naturally sold merchandise portraying the dog and his associates. Little magical amulets and trinkets.
All of this was, in effect, a kind of temple. A ritual space dedicated to this... Cartoon animal or whatever the fuck it really is.
I swear, if some Vesuvian disaster wiped out the city and preserved this café, future generations would without any uncertainty assume the place had a religious function.
And not without very good reasons either.
For what is religion apart from a set of symbols, creeds and rituals for setting apart the sacred and for forming our identities, lived experiences, patterns of behaviour and worldviews in relation to it?
Disregarding the aspect of proper religion with regard to offering worship to the actual living God, everything in this example can be considered religious in accordance with almost all accepted set of definitions.
The only thing missing is that most people (likely) do not actually pray to Pompompurin, or approach him intentionally as a living agent or familiar spirit - but the concrete practice taken as a whole does actually perform this function.
To put it differently, average Pompompurin fans who visit this place and derive some level of contentment from the myth are just as religious as the more or less secularized Shinto temple visitors who offhandedly make a wish by leaving an ema plate behind. Or as post-Christian Westerners who have their children baptized out of some vague notion of tradition or for social approval.
And even more so are then the actual “zealots” who collect all of the Pompompurin merch and always keep the plushies within reach.
There’s a sense in which culture is always religious, since it indicates and connects with the sacred, and allows us to orient ourselves and our identities in relation thereto. And the impoverished popular culture of the secular West plays this role as much as any other society’s enacted body of myth, whether or not we are able to acknowledge this.
Why did people “spontaneously” dress up in pink to go and see the hyper-marketed Barbie movie? Nobody forced or shamed them to. Nobody paid them to or in any way incentivized them.
No, this was a manifestation of popular piety. Of a collective devotion to a beloved brand and the values discursively associated to it, made manifest through a visible expression of allegiance.
Of course, this also means you’re taking part in worshipping the emperor, unintentionally or not.
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Yet a quite different sort of enterprise on Izu peninsula deliberately and carefully tries to dig down to the very ruddy end of these issues, and actually manages to explore the disjointed religious connotations of Western/industrial popular culture and spectacular consumer society to an extent I’ve never experienced anything remotely akin to.
Here are some reflections on my visit to that incredibly inspirational site.
In a sense, the Maboroshi Hakurankai exemplifies something I would describe the emergence of a self-aware religiosity of spectacular consumer society specifically sacralizing its loss of meaning as such. And people actually prayed here.
Within the premises there was even a shrine literally dedicated to shit.
The entire “museum” or ritual space somehow amounted to this naive yet devastatingly honest representation of the fundamental loss of meaning at the heart of consumerism and capitalist culture. It was as if Dadaism had been stripped of all of its political implications and turned into a naked commodity - and as such, it was profoundly revealing of the contradictions and conceptual dead-ends in this society's self-understanding.
Basically, the exhibition showcased the impotency of a metaphysical reductionism in terms of ever reconstituting meaning from the "ground up", and of the utter nihilism of a spectacular mass culture disconnected from a relational and local reality and predicated on that very same reductionist physicalism.
What was more - the entire location was, intentionally or not, framed by various manifestations of decay. Kudzu and weeds invaded the exhibits which were often placed outdoors, while the huge indoor spaces were mostly derelict and in various stages of disrepair.
In certain ways, many of the exhibits amounted to a very concrete manifestation of the hauntology phenomenon.
Everything was a sort of ritual space designed for the worship of consumer society as a substitute for actual culture, for actual religion, showcasing its fruitless attempts to build meaning out of meaningless parts, which inadvertently gave you the clearest possible image of the unholy insanity at the heart of it all.
And quite accordingly, and much to my astonishment and surprise, I tried the handle of a nondescript, almost hidden door right at the heart of this weird establishment, within which was found a secret shrine explicitly dedicated to evil and pop culture’s legacy aesthetics of murder and madness.
To the perversity of reductionist physicalism in concert with violent commodification.
I left my rosary behind at that very spot before going home.
'... and the people stopped and prayed... to the neon Gods they'd made'...
Remarkable. Having been born and raised in England and then lived for many years in the United States, I always had an outsiders view of North America from the inside. The social imprints are different, obviously, and I found superficial materialism to be the driving force of American life and culture on a subconscious consensual level, almost autonomous. Shopping not just acquisition but ritual. As you rightly pointed out, going to the mall became a quasi-religious experience, worshipping at the church of capitalism. Aside from its tribal nature, the ritual and religious aspect an effort to imbibe spiritual meaning in the spiritually meaningless. The need for ritual and meaning has been exploited to embrace mass injection of toxic material, the sacrificial blood ritual of a religion. Given the accelerating injury and mortality rate, the sacrifice is truly underway. Could it be the climax of capitalism and the desparate grasp for meaning in the meaningless? Our bio-digital replacements will surely have no need of such a thing in their robotic obedience. Pass the salt.