☆The 'Occult and Psychical Sciences' on DK☆
is a fun spooky group here on DK.
We enjoy sharing stories about the spooky and scary, personal anecdotes, and general paranormal, philosophical, metaphysical, arcane, esoteric, and existential information, and conversation about the unexplained in the world and universe. Any and all religion also is welcome here in this space.
This group's aim is polite philosophical debate. Can also be about folklore, history, art, literature, fantasy, sci fi, or scientific developments.
The group is named after "Complete illustrated Book of the Psychic Sciences" (1966), an influential childhood favorite of Angmar's. Its author, Walter Brown Gibson (1897–1985) was an American writer and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow.
Having explained the origin of the title, please refrain from coming in here to complain that ghost stories, occult or metaphysical speculation aren't science. We know! Please enjoy for what it is. ;-)
People are welcome to share their own personal spooky experiences, speculations, philosophy, and similar influences. (Please contact Angmar in kmail if you wish to join us!) Open thread!
Some say the samurai
invented this practice among themselves as a test of courage. Tonight, it's just a party game. But still, scary.
Full night has descended. Surrounded with the glow of one hundred candles, a kimono-clad crowd have met to share an evening of supernatural yokai stories.
Ghosts, monsters, spirits, shape-shifters, animated corpses, demons, magical animals, mysterious lights, unclassifiable beings, inanimate objects that have come to life, all will take their place in this festival of shivers. Preliminary chatter dies down.
Chiyo takes the floor. Everyone gives her their full attention as artfully she unwinds a classic tale of a ghost girl who seduced a young man, leading him to perish mysteriously on her grave.
In the appreciative silence that follows, Chiyo takes a long look at her own face in a mirror that stands on a table. Then she reaches out and pinches the wick of one candle to extinguish it.
A young man goes next. He tells a story about a bakeneko, a magical cat with an extra-long tail, and how it took revenge when mistreated by its owner. He glances in the mirror and pinches out another candle.
One by one more stories are spun, one by one the candles go dark. Shadows pool deeper and deeper in the corners. Candlelight flickers fitfully on the paper room-dividers. The storytellers' reflections in the table mirror grow ghostlike.
One last candle remains. A hush of held breath.
It is the host's turn. Suddenly he jumps up, breaking the spell. “In this house we always leave one candle burning,” he tells the guests, “so evil things cannot cross the last barrier and harm anyone here."
Everyone adjourns to another room for a cup of wine before they make their way home. Passing a graveyard on the road, though, they may glance nervously this way and that, and even tremble.
The entertainment called Hyakumonogataru Kaidankai, usually translated One Hundred Ghost Stories, was a custom of Edo (or Takagawa) period Japan (1603-1868).
(I'm no expert on Japan, not even a well-educated amateur. So the above little story is just a fictionalization of how I imagine one such typical evening might have unfolded.)
Edo Japan. A tightly structured, formalized feudal society, flourishing in deliberate isolation from the outside world.
The Emperor was a figurehead. Effective power rested with the Shogun, Japan's most powerful lord. Subordinate lords, or daimyo, administered regions; their castles housed many samurai and servants. Education became widespread, with many children of samurai families growing up to join an expanding civilian government. In the capital of Tokugawa (now Tokyo), literacy in the Edo period has been estimated as high as 80%.
Daimyo had to spend alternate years in the capital, where they did bureaucratic work under the Shogun's eye. This system checked their power--and created a burgeoning demand for luxuries and entertainment in the capital city. The profession of geisha, the Noh drama, Kabuki theater, music, painting, wood-block printing, many fine crafts, horticulture, literature--all flourished. These refinements filtered back to the provinces.
Ladies and gentlemen were expected to dress artistically, adhere to a complex code of manners, be skilled in music and calligraphy, engage in clever conversation, and improvise poetry on many occasions. It was in this setting that the Hundred Ghost Stories found its place.
Known under the general name of yokai, many types of strange supernatural beings always haunted the landscape of Japan. By the Edo period, yokai fitted into a complex structure of myths, legends and religious beliefs.
A native religion surviving down to our day, Shinto comprised polytheistic and animistic beliefs. Major sacred powers, called kami, included gods well as revered ancestors, spiritual principles, outstanding landscape features, and forces of nature. The folkoric yokai were lesser beings, ultimately subject to the greater powers of kami.
Overlying Shinto was the Buddhist faith. Originating in India, this religion had already reached Japan hundreds of years before the Edo period. There it blended with Shinto and diversified into varied sects. Meanwhile neo-Confucianism, stemming from a Chinese import, arrived to emphasize social stability, the family, rules, duties, and proper roles.
Aside from pure entertainment, yokai stories could illustrate Buddhist principles or warn of supernatural consequences from bad behavior.
Yokai became a popular subject in art. A number of highly-skilled artists painted scrolls on the theme of "Hyakki Yako," a nighttime hundred-yokai parade, showcasing dozens of different types. One of these I used for the header art on the diary, but with the colors reversed to make it look more nocturnal. Here is part of another example in the British Museum.
The British Museum website warns:
For anyone foolish enough to be outside, or even to peek out of their window, an encounter with the pandemonium of the dreaded night parade will result in death, or bring spirited away by monsters. In order to protect yourself from danger you can either chant a magic spell or obtain handwritten exorcism scrolls from onmyoji spell-casters. Best of all is to stay inside!
How many kinds of yokai
are there? Probably no one knows.
A fascinating English-language website, Yokai.com, lists--by my rough count--500 or more historically documented "species"; its author, Japan-based artist and folklorist Matthew Meyer, keeps on adding to them. [To explore there, open the home page menu at upper left; it's alphabetical.]
Here is a very small sample of yokai types:
Yurei (rhymes with Blu-ray) are ghosts of deceased persons who cannot move on from life because of unfinished business or attachments. They are typically translucent and may appear legless.
Nurikabe: a vast creature, confronting travelers in the form of an invisible, impenetrable wall. According to some, there is no way to skirt around it. Others claim that it can be made to vanish by tapping with a stick at its lower left. If you can find the lower left!
Kubikajiri: ghost that eats the heads of corpses or living victims.
Mushi: tiny yokai that can invade the body, take up residence, and cause discomfort or disease.
A medical manuscript called Harikikigaki, written in Osaka in 1568, describes and depicts 63 of them.
The Ashiarai Yashiki: a giant, filthy, hairy foot that suddenly emerges from the ceiling, demanding to be washed.
Tengu: several subspecies of flying demons, some of which however have morphed over time into fierce protective spirits of mountains and forests, according to Wikipedia. They typically wear the garb of a particular sect of Buddhist priests. Some have bird heads; others look more human or grotesque.
Rokurokubi: a yokai that superficially appears to be a normal woman, but turns out to have an extremely extendable neck.
Kitsune comprise several species of magical foxes with multiple tails. They may eventually grow as many as nine.
Accounts of kitsune are highly varied.
On the one hand, kitsune are the pets and messengers of a benevolent kami -- Inari Okami. Inari is patron, among other things, of fertility, rice, tea, sake, agriculture and general prosperity. Inari has both male and female aspects. Depicted as male, Inari is a guardian of blacksmiths and warriors. As female, Inari is described as having arrived in Japan during a famine, direct from Heaven, riding a white fox and carrying bunches of wild grain. Inari can also occasionally appear as a cluster of three to five individuals. Fluid!
Other kitsune, however, can be mischievous. By running through the fields, for example, they are blamed for setting stands of grain on fire.
Kitsune are also tricksters and shape-shifters. Any stranger you encounter alone on a dark night, city or country, could turn out to be a disguised kitsune, possibly up to no good.
One story tells of a man marrying a beautiful woman who, unknown to him, was a kitsune. It was a loving marriage and they had a child, but the man's dog growled at and harassed the lady until she could stand it no longer and told her husband the truth. After that, the kitsune wife would take to the woods and fields during the day in fox form. At night she would return to the house in human form to be with her husband--after he put the dog out!
Tsukumogami: "artifact spirits," inanimate objects that after 100 years of existence, develop souls of a sort and come to life. If they have been subject to neglect, tsukumogami may turn out malicious. Others are depicted more humorously.
After 1867,
political power in Japan returned to the Emperor, beginning a period of rapid modernization that re-opened the nation to Western trade and travel.
As part of the process, Shinto and Buddhism underwent a systematic separation, while interest in yokai gradually went out of fashion.
Simultaneously, however, the West became fascinated by Japanese art and culture. And Japan's supernatural world became known to the West via the globe-trotting journalist Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904).
Hearn deserves an article to himself, or a book! Half-Irish, half-Greek, serially abandoned in youth by one family member after another, blinded in one eye by an accident in his teens, Hearn commenced a prolific and varied writing career in -- of all places -- Cincinnati. After further stints in New Orleans and the French West Indies, a fresh assignment sent him to Japan in 1890.
In Japan at last Hearn found a real home. There he eventually married, became a citizen, changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo, had four children, and became a Buddhist. He supported himself and his family mainly by teaching but continued to write; a book about Japan gained attention in the West. Among his correspondents was William Butler Yeats.
In 1904, shortly before his death, Hearn completed Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, a collection of some 17 Japanese tales of the supernatural, as well as three essays on insect symbolism in Japanese culture. It became a classic and is still in print.
In Japan itself, yokai began a comeback around the mid-20th century.
Shigero Mizuki (1922-2015) originally earned a meager living as a writer and illustrator. He created manga (Japanese graphic serials, at that time usually rented by readers rather than purchased). He also drew picture-cards for travelling storytellers.
In 1960 Mizuki started a series of manga stories featuring a one-eyed yokai boy named Kitaro, who lives in a graveyard and uses his exceptional powers to help people.
Kitaro made it big!
Kitaro is usually accompanied by his father, who is a....a....a....uh, an eyeball on legs, okay?
As a foil, Kitaro also has a sheet-wearing, bewhiskered friend, who is more shady; in one early story, for example, Nezumi Otoko tries to grift a group of elderly people by promising them eternal life if they just follow his special no-food diet. Nezumi Otoko's schemes tend to land him in funny predicaments. He generally accepts the consequences in good part, but can't seem to resist the next apparent chance to trick or cheat somebody.
Kitaro and his yokai allies have dealt with multitudes of dangerous yokai, but also such threats as gangsters, dishonest businessmen, bullies, and Western imports including witches and werewolves.
Among the most beloved characters in Japan, Kitaro has more recently been reimagined in anime and live-action video.
The Japanese title of the manga series is GeGeGe no Kitaro. GeGeGe represents the cry of creatures such as crickets and frogs that accompany the yokai boy and celebrate each of Kitaro's victories.
Video with more details and more yokai follows:
NOTE: for anyone who may find snakes or eels disturbing, the video includes a photographic image at 0:07-0:13 and again near the end at about 6:09-6:14. (The image is not relevant, apparently just part of the producer's "signature.")
BUT, herpetophobes can safely start the video and then close their eyes until the narrator says "character named Kitaro." At that point it will be safe. Close eyes again near the end, when the "Like" graphic comes up, or just stop the video at that point.
Kitaro of the Graveyard, by The Unagi Observer
6:19
.
As the video notes, Kitaro has not been embraced in the West, except by certain enthusiasts of manga. (I discovered him while locked down during the covid pandemic!)
Another evocation of supernatural beings in Japanese culture, better known in the West, is Studio Ghibli's 2001 multi-award-winning animated feature, Spirited Away, created by the truly great Hayao Miyazaki (1941- ).
Released in English by Disney in 2002, Spirited Away introduced the Anglophone world to a crowd of supernatural Japanese beings. Some are kami, such as river spirits, while others appear more like yokai, such No-Face, or the multi-armed bathhouse employee Kamaji and his living sootballs.
If there is anyone who has not seen Spirited Away, IMO it's not to be missed. While the uncanny characters may not all be strictly canonical in Japanese folklore, the total effect seems just right. And the story is full of surprises, especially for an audience conditioned to Western tropes.
.
Spirited Away, official trailer
2:26
In recent times
Japan has playfully adopted the Western celebration of Halloween, marking it with costumed parades, elaborate haunted houses, and even special menus. (Scroll down at the link for photos and details. They may exceed us Americans!)
But Japan has its own traditional and more more serious festival of of the dead, called Obon. It takes place in August.
Festivals -- Obon, by The Japan Society
3:51
The next video -- despite its title -- won't actually teach you the dance, but offers a more intimate look at the costumes, crafts and training that go into traditional Obon dances to honor the dead.
Learn How to Dance the Famous Japanese Bon Odori Dance
1:58
.
Yokai evidently also share the Japanese liking for parades! So if you join in a street celebration this Halloween, just make sure that the other participants are people!
More resources:
Further closeups of yokai, from a "Night Parade of 100 Demons" scroll that was advertised for sale on eBay back in 2009: PinkTentacle.com
More about yokai on Wikipedia
Survey article about yokai on TVTropes
Patreon page of Matthew Meyer, whose website, Yokai.com , was mentioned earlier. Patreon page is free to view. I owe a lot of my interest in yokai to Meyer's wonderful illustrations. He does a-yokai-a-day in October (held up exactly one day this year by breaking an arm!) On Yokai.com, the drop-down menu at upper left of the home page accesses an alphabetical roster of yokai types.
The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore by Michael Dylan Foster, illustrated by Shinonome Kijin (2015). I haven't read this, but looks interesting and has been well-rated.
Lafcadio Hearn:
In The New Yorker
At nippon.com