Traversing the Uncanny Valley with Mindar

About once every two or three months, an American media outlet runs a human interest story that trades in predictable tropes about Japan, land of contrasts. Temple cafés promise patrons relaxing urban retreats and stimulating pour-over coffee. Buddhist bars pair the sweet nectar of the dharma with delectable cocktails. Temple discos layer resonant sutras over four-to-the-floor beats. Like clockwork, these journalistic accounts typically use religious clergy and institutions as markers of “traditional Japan,” building their predictable narratives around an implied contrast between ancient tradition and Japan’s restlessly consumerist, relentlessly technological future. 

Mobilizing the idea of the “uncanny valley” (in which the robotic Other is sufficiently similar to, and different from, the Self so as to overcome feelings of unease), I use recent reportage on Kōdai Temple’s android bodhisattva “Mindar” to show how journalists and Japanese roboticists put religion in place while simultaneously reifying notions of Japanese cultural uniqueness. In the ceaselessly circulating discourse fetishizing the putative Japanese love of robots, religion appears to be both past and future, ubiquitous and nowhere. Field notes from a March 2019 visit to Mindar’s homily on the Heart Sūtra frame my remarks.