How Mushishi Can Save the World

Like many, I’m jazzed that the anime, Mushishi, is getting a second season: no anime deserves it more. As the second season episodes begin to trickle in, I’ve been revisiting the first season and bits of the original manga by Yuki Urushibara, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Mushishi should be required reading/viewing in schools across the world. The attitudes it teaches are indispensible to the salvation of the Earth as we know it. This is not hyperbole; it is simply true.

Mushishi takes place in a fictionalized, rural Japan somewhere between the Edo and Meiji Periods. In this world, members of the local ecosystems include not only plants, animals, humans, etc. but also mushi. “Mushi” is Japanese for “bug,” but in this context it refers to a variety of life forms that exist somewhere between “life” and “death,” the physical and spiritual worlds. Mushi may be mindless or intelligent, tiny or huge, harmless or very dangerous. In this respect, they’re just like life forms in the real world.



Only certain people can see mushi, and they often take up the study of mushi as a vocation. These “mushishi” fill a variety of social roles as specialists helping communities and ecosystems with mushi-related phenomena. The series centers on the episodic adventures of one wandering mushishi, Ginko, and expresses its philosophy through his practice as a mushishi.

We All Live with Mushi

Mushi are fictional. And while sometimes they behave rather like real-world organisms, like bacteria, sometimes their action is pretty far out: altering time, turning people into spirits, etc. But if their specific actions feel magical, they, nonetheless, signify the way life forms actually interact in ecosystems.



Mushi are like real-world life forms in a variety of respects. They can be useful or harmful or neutral to humans, but they do not exist for us. First and foremost, they do their own thing according to their natures. They can have coherent thoughts and feelings or some minimal awareness or (as far as we can tell) no awareness at all. They can be as humble as earthworms or immense as a stampede of elephants. Whatever they’re like, they always exist in relation to their environment. Like all living things, they are embedded in an ecosystem: they need food; they have a habitat and a lifecycle. They fill a niche—and sometimes overfill it and cause problems, just as invasive plants and animals (including humans) often do. Mushi are metaphor for the life forms we live with every day, whether they are the bacteria in our guts, an ancient pine tree, a blue whale, or that crow that lives down the block and has decided to dive-bomb you whenever you walk by. By recasting life forms as mystical entities, Mushishi defamiliarizes the natural world and encourages us to see it fresh in all its wonder.

The Wisdom of the Mushishi

Ginko exemplifies the good mushshi. In his peregrinations, he manages mushi-human interactions with expertise and wisdom. His understanding balances concrete knowledge with philosophy. Ginko is a finely tuned observer, a man of great sensory awareness. He is always attuned to the world around him, sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, textures, changes to an environment, geography, weather, seasonality, local species and their relations to each other, soil types, compass directions, and behaviors (of all sorts of organisms, including humans). He is a sponge for information, obtaining it largely from observing his environment but also from talking to people and listening to their stories, as well as reading records by other mushishi. (He also writes records of his own.)



This lifetime of study of the world around him informs his ethics and underlying value system. First and foremost, he is highly conscious of the interrelatedness of things: forces affect each other, and changing one thing will change others. Second, he is strongly aware that humanity is not the center of the world; rather, it is one species existing alongside many others, each doing what it does naturally to survive. At one point, he reminds a boy who is fond of interacting with mushi that they are not his friends but living their own lives, but he adds that the boy is free to like them.

Based on these premises, he acts according to a value system that seeks to maintain balance and minimize harm (harm in toto, not just to humans). The foundational need is to preserve the health of the system: if the health of the system deteriorates, the participants in it will inevitably, progressively suffer. Thus, for example, he counsels that a group of mushi who appear to be one family’s human children must be killed because otherwise they will germinate into more mushi that will progressively infiltrate more human families. Preserving the health of the system sometimes comes at the cost of suffering to some participants, such as the grieving parents of the mushi children (and the mushi themselves). However, wherever possible, Ginko acts to minimize suffering for all participants, as when he cures people infected by a mushi living in an ink stone by taking them to an elevation that stimulates the mushi to leave their bodies. He would rather live in harmony with all life forms than kill or constrain them, but he recognizes that death is a part of life and that killing is sometimes necessary to preserving life and health elsewhere. In his speech, Ginko can sometimes be tactless, but in his actions, he consistently shows respect, awareness, and a morally mature perspective.

The World Needs Mushishi—A Lot of Them

Back in our 21st-century reality, we are facing (in fact, we are causing) cataclysmic climate change, resource exploitation and scarcity, overpopulation, and one of the great mass extinctions in the 4.5 billion-year history of the Earth (its severity comparable to the extinction of the dinosaurs). To any sane person, this should be terrifying.

Yet globally, we keep exacerbating these problems by certain ideological assumptions. Because they are deeply embedded cultural assumptions, we often act in accordance with them, even if we intellectually don’t agree with them or know the situation to be more complex. They describe not only philosophical systems but rote habits of mind. These assumptions include the following (in no particular order):

* Growth, by definition, is good.
* Competition and individual “success” are crucial virtues.
* The non-human world is only valuable as something for humans to use.
* The non-human world is best viewed as a material-energy system not to be invested with soul or sacredness, which would be merely superstitious.
* Economy is separable from ecology.
* Human society is (mostly) separate from nature.

The common denominator of these views is an approach to interacting with the natural world that justifies or trivializes resource exploitation and pollution in the name of maximizing growth and rewarding competitive economic “winners.”

Every episode of Mushishi is an illustration of why these values are deeply unhealthy and what values should replace them. In Mushishi, problems are solved, lives are often saved, and the health of the system is preserved by prioritizing balance over growth, coexistence over competition, respect and reverence over emotionless use, ecological interconnection over abstract economic theories, and enmeshment in nature over division between the human and non-human.

A mushishi practices all these salutary values and teaches them to others. Much of how a mushishi sees the world is akin to modern study of ecology. Indeed, Ginko uses tools of science, like a microscope, and studies mushi with some scientific methodology, including dissection. But a mushishi is more than just an ecological scientist. The world in which Ginko lives is steeped in Shinto tradition, which invests the world with spirit: places, objects, animals, etc. are often revered as sacred. Ginko himself is a fairly unsentimental person, but he shares this sense of reverence. Whether this sacredness is “true” or not, whether trees have spirits, etc., is beside the point. A sense of deep respect for the world is vital to treating the world well. We will always tend to exploit what we objectify. A mushishi, likewise, shares some characteristics with a doctor, using specialized knowledge, as well as caring and communication, to heal. And like a good family doctor, he or she also shares some traits with priest or minister: being aware of the role of psychology in health, listening and counseling. The combining of these healing, counseling, and mystical functions echoes roles often taken by a shaman.

A mushishi is, in essence, an ecological healer-counselor-priest-shaman, a “multidisciplinary” specialist combining advanced knowledge of ecology with caring and service for individuals and communities, human and non-human. St. Francis had something of the character of a mushishi, though he lived in a dualistic society that was losing its deep understanding of interrelations in the natural world. Writer and farmer, Wendell Berry, certainly acts as a “mushishi.” A contemporary example of formally incorporating a mushishi-like presence in human relations with the land is the inclusion of Maori representatives in natural resource management in New Zealand, a country that ranks high in quality of living across several different studies and measures. To be clear, it’s not my intention to conflate Maori culture or any other practice with a fantasy Japanese culture. Rather these are examples of the myriad ways that the values of understanding and respect for the natural world can be incorporated into 21st-century socio-ecological planning.

In the real world, people who fill a “mushishi” function may come from many walks of life. They may belong to any number of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, practice any number of religions or none. Their initiation into the “mushishi” vocation may come through traditional tribal learning, the family farm, love of science, or playing in the woods. We might find them in role(s) such as tribal elders, ecologists, science teachers and docents, counselors, doctors, researchers, writers, farmers, or advisors to government. But wherever they come from and whatever specific path they choose, it is vital that we nurture these people in pursuing their vocation and create meaningful spaces for their action in all our communities, including means to earn a living while devoting significant time to this work. We must honor them and listen to them. It is to the detriment of the world when we don’t.