In the old Japanese imagination, the sacred was never a single figure to be counted. It was a multitude too vast to count at all.
More gods than can be counted
The phrase yaoyorozu no kami (八百万の神, literally "eight million gods," meaning "countless gods") appears already in the Kojiki, Japan's oldest chronicle, where deities are described gathering "in their eight hundred myriads" on the banks of the Heavenly River. Eight million was never meant as an arithmetic claim. The eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga, in his commentary on the Kojiki, glossed yaoyorozu simply as an expression for "the utmost profusion of number." The Association of Shinto Shrines describes the same idea in plain terms today: the deities of Shinto govern the sea, the mountains, the wind, the harvest, the founding of the land — so many, and so varied, that the tradition settled on a number meant to stand for "too many to count" rather than an actual sum.
This is the first thing to understand about kami (神, a Shinto deity or spirit): there was never any attempt to settle on how many there are, or to rank them into a single hierarchy under one supreme figure. New ones could always be recognized. A mountain could hold one. A particularly old tree could hold one. A person of great achievement, after death, could become one. The category was open-ended by design, because it was never really a census of gods. It was a way of saying that the sacred was distributed everywhere, in amounts no one needed to fix.
Spirits in tools, spirits in rice
That distribution reached further than mountains and rivers. It reached into the household.
Tsukumogami (付喪神, "a spirit inhabiting an old tool") is the folk belief that everyday implements — an umbrella, a sandal, a koto, a teakettle — could, after enough years of use, acquire a spirit of their own. The idea is preserved in the Tsukumogami Emaki, an illustrated scroll from the Muromachi period, which tells of household objects thrown out before their hundredth year, resentful at being discarded, rising up as spirits to take revenge on the people who abandoned them. The number was never literal, in the same spirit as yaoyorozu itself; the point of the story was that long use forms an attachment, and that attachment was imagined as something with its own will.
A Muromachi-period scroll depicting tsukumogami — household tools said to gain a spirit after long years of use.
A gentler version of the same idea survives in a saying still taught to children today: that a single grain of rice houses seven gods. Depending on who tells it, the seven stand for water, soil, wind, sun, insects, cloud, and the labor of the farmer who grew it — the full chain of conditions, human and otherwise, that had to align for that one grain to exist. Whether the number is exactly seven matters less than the habit of mind it encodes: nothing arrives at your table, or your workshop, or your garden, without a history of unseen contributions standing behind it.
Blessing and its opposite
None of this made kami into comfortable house spirits. A kami could bring a good harvest or a fair wind, and the same kami, offended or neglected, could just as easily bring drought, illness, or disaster. The Association of Shinto Shrines' own account of the tradition is direct on this point: the deities inhabit natural things too imposing or too uncanny to fully explain — towering peaks, ancient rocks, waterfalls — and are approached with a mixture of reverence and unease rather than simple affection.
This is worth pausing on, because it is easy to sentimentalize the idea of spirits in objects as merely charming. It was not only that. To live among yaoyorozu no kami was to live among presences that required care precisely because indifference toward them carried a cost. You did not neglect a tool, a well, or a tree because you liked it. You maintained the relationship because letting it lapse invited consequences you would rather not test.
Why nothing is treated as disposable
That mixture of reverence and risk is the root of mottainai (勿体無い, "what a waste," an expression of regret at wasting something of value). The word carries an implicit accusation: to discard something still capable of use is to fail a relationship the object was owed, not merely to waste money. Japan's National Tourism Organization traces the same instinct into calendar customs still observed today — hari-kuyō (針供養, a memorial service for broken sewing needles), typically held every February, in which needles that snapped or bent over a year of work are laid to rest in a block of soft tofu, in gratitude rather than simply thrown away. Comparable services exist for writing brushes and other well-worn tools, all following the same logic: an object that served faithfully is not simply garbage once it is spent. It is retired, thanked, and let go with a small ceremony of its own.
Bonsai inherits this instinct directly, in the literal materials of the practice. A cultivator does not replace a cracked ceramic pot without a thought, and does not treat a pair of concave cutters or a jin pliers as consumable tools to be discarded when a cheaper option appears. Pots are repaired. Tools are sharpened, oiled, and handed down. Wire is coiled and reused rather than thrown away after one training season. None of this is mere frugality. It follows from the same old sense that a thing which has served for years has accumulated something worth respecting — not unlike a tree itself, which in the best cases outlives the artist who trained it and is entrusted, tool and pot and all, to the next pair of hands. Azukari exists inside that same instinct: a tree kept in Japan, tended season after season, its pot and its history handed forward rather than replaced.
Two companion pieces continue this thread: Trees Where Gods Dwell, on the sacred trees of Japan's shrines, and One God or Eight Million, on how this way of seeing differs from the monotheistic one.
References
- Association of Shinto Shrines — "What is Shinto" — official explanation of yaoyorozu no kami, describing the multitude and variety of Shinto deities governing nature, livelihood, and land.
- Wikipedia — "Yaoyorozu no kami" — overview of the term's meaning as "too many gods to count" and its roots in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki.
- Wikipedia — "Tsukumogami" — history of the belief that tools gain a spirit after roughly a hundred years of use, and the Tsukumogami Emaki as its primary textual source.
- Japan National Tourism Organization — "Mottainai: Japan's Culture of Mindful Consumption" — official tourism-board account of mottainai and its expression in repair and reuse traditions.
- Wikipedia — "Hari-Kuyō" — description of the needle memorial service, its February 8 observance, and its connection to mottainai.