I don't particularly understand the items used in Far Eastern house shrines or home altars outside the Catholic/Orthodox practice. The whole point for us is that the objects are visual sign of God's grace and are to uplift the senses to the things of God. I was thinking on the video that the long item looked more like a peace pipe to smoke some mind altering drugs. And certainly there are some religions that support this type of experimentation. What is the purpose of the video show someone's collection of Japanese katana? I might think the person was just as much into Japanese manga and anime. My wife is Japanese and the home altar at her parents house is something dedicated to the memory of her deceased grandparents. In essence, I relate the shrine at her parent's house as being similar in nature to our asking intercessory prayer from the saints. Just because there are similarities does not necessary mean equivalency. To those Christians here, it is almost the same type of argument that evolutionists make in comparison of mankind to apes. As Christians, we do not believe in macro-evolution just because an ape has similarities to our species. It is the same here, not all things done in establishing a place of solitude for the purpose of prayer and meditation stem from copying another religion. Nor is copying another religion necessarily mean that all things within that religion are evil. The easiest way for getting a person to eat poison is to mask it with real food to cover the taste.