In Japan, where I’ve made my home for 33 years, I often see people bowing to a telephone as they speak into the receiver. Ceremonies are held in temples every year for sewing needles that have given themselves up to make a kimono. My Japanese wife, while growing up in Kyoto, was taught to apologise to a table if she kicked it in a fit of six-year-old pique. Nothing, in short, is unworthy of the humbled reverence we call attention. Objects have lives and the divisions we draw between animate and inanimate are a human-made creation; that’s one reason why the moon in Japan is offered the same honorific suffix as the emperor.
