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Paper short abstract

This paper offers an insight into the forms how imaginaries and narratives about haunted places and wandering souls in Japan interact with Brazilian breadth and historical depth of the code and discourse about spirits and possession.

Paper long abstract

Afro-Brazilian religions spread in Japan after the migration of Brazilians – mostly Japanese descendants with their families – and count more than 30 religious centres and a great number of small groups that gather in private houses.

Afro-Brazilian religions are centred in ritual embodiment of spirits and a wide use of plants for healing. Many people enter Afro-Brazilian religions after experiences with spirits, exceptional event, or physical or psychological disorders that are later reinterpreted in terms of mediumship. Forms of sensing, feeling and attuning with other more-than-human beings (including the environment, plants, animals, other humans, spirits and energies) are further expanded through the development of mediumship and specific modes of attention and response-ability.

In Japan, the breadth and historical depth of the code and discourse about spirits and possession in Brazil interacts with Japanese widespread imaginary and deep cultural relationship with spirits, wandering souls, and sacred and haunted places. New relationships and forms of sensing, feeling, becoming and healing with the environment, plants, spirits and energies develop.

Because “radioactive ghosts” can blur the distinctions between visibility and invisibility and reveal the entanglements of the ontological and epistemological insecurities of the atomic age with the intimate ruptures of psychic life (Schwab 2020), Hiroshima represents an interesting case of analysis. It can shed light on how Afro-Brazilian religions interpret and heal wandering and suffering spirits, and memories imprinted in bodies and the landscape, and how they deal with the complex history, memories, meanings and local practices related to the atomic bomb.