Imagine an August night in old Edo, Japan. The heat is still clinging to the walls, the cicadas are screaming outside, and there is no air conditioner or electric fan. You’re sitting there as the sun goes down, no breeze to be had. What do you do?
Well, you could light one hundred candles. Invite a couple of friends over, and take turns telling ghost tales. After each story, the teller blows out a candle. One by one, the room gets darker. The stories get darker.
And somewhere along the way, the air begins to feel different. A chill runs up your back. Was there movement in the shadowed corner? The hairs on your arm rise. You wonder if maybe you’ve called something from the other side. Suddenly on this miserably hot summer night, you feel just a little bit cooler.
In today’s episode, we’re going to find out why summer is ghost season in Japan, why and how people purposefully do things to frighten themselves, we’ll wander through an obake-yashiki, or Japanese haunted house. And I’ll end with a nice chilly ghost story from the 1800s to cool you off.
Hey hey.
Hey hey, this is Thersa Matsuura and you’re listening to Uncanny Japan. The place where I talk about all the more obscure parts of Japanese culture. Dig a little deeper into weird creatures, interesting superstitions, and creepy tales.
Patrons, I love you. You’re all the best. Sorry, I just had to put that out there. You know, maybe I’m old fashioned. But I just don’t say it enough.
Listen. Hear those cicada crying. These aren’t the standard behind-my-house cicada. The ones you heard on the last episode about obon and family altars were abura zemi (oil cicadas) because they sound like oil frying in a pan. Jii jii jii. But these are not them. No, I drove into the mountains to record some different fellas.
I’m not sure if you can tell the difference, but these are higurashi-zemi mostly, sometimes they’re called evening cicada. They’re not quite as harsh and have an almost mournful kana kana kana call. I know many people who think they are the soundtrack for a hot summer night in Japan and much easier on the ears.
Actually, if you listen carefully you can hear the occasional min mini cicada mixed in. I think min min-zemi are the most comical in the lot. They go: Min min min miiiiii. Kind of sputtering out for a minute before starting back up. I don’t know, it’s funny to me.
Okay, let’s get into today’s show. First, go ahead and turn off the lights if you’d like. You can light a candle or two. Or a hundred if you got them. Get comfortable. Let me try to convince you why summer is a great time for frightful things.
So first, in Western culture it’s autumn that we consider spooky season. And that makes sense. The world is visibly dying back. The weather starts to cool off, days grow shorter, chilly nights, fallen leaves crunching underfoot, bare trees scratching at your window. Crops are harvested and livestock slaughtered for winter. Because traditionally everyone is getting ready for the most part, to shut themselves inside during these cold months and hope the food holds out and no one goes stir crazy and takes out the whole family before spring. Oh, sorry. That went dark.
Anyway, in Japan it’s different. The scariest time of year is August. Summer. But why? Hear me out.
There are a couple of reasons. Let’s start with the obvious answer. How hearing a good frightening tale makes you shiver and sends chills up your spine. And that really is a reason.
I don’t think I can overstate just how oppressively hot and humid Japanese summers are. And from way back people have come up with all kinds of clever ways to get relief from the heat. And many if not most of these traditions are still around.
Sprinkling water outside the house to cool things down, hanging bamboo blinds called sudare to keep the sun off, stringing up wind chimes, and eating all the awesome summer foods like cold sōmen noodles and shaved ice topped with strawberry sauce and condensed milk. But there’s another way to make you shiver. A good scary tale.
And apparently one scary story wasn’t always enough.
By the Edo period, there was a popular pastime called hyakumonogatari, literally One hundred stories. Or hyakumonogatari kaidan. A group of people would gather on a hot summer night — and remember it’s too hot to even sleep, so everyone is staying up for a long while, it’s gonna get late — and this group would light one hundred candles, or symbolically, a lot of candles. Everyone takes turns telling a strange or frightening tale and after each telling, one candle would be extinguished.
I’ve heard they were placed in a circle, or just randomly set about the room, or (and this is brilliant creepy) set in a separate room along with a mirror or two. So when the storyteller finishes, they get to go alone into the darkened room lit only by candles to blow one out. And you just know they’re going to glance at the mirror, see movement, or something otherworldly and freak out. Yeah, I’d love to meet the person who first thought that up.
So story by story, the mood is getting a little creepier, the room a little darker, the time a little later. And, yes, you’re feeling a little cooler, too. It’s almost as if you are summoning something into the room with you. As if this were a kind of ritual. Story by story, candle by candle, calling something not of this world to join you.
Before we get to the climax, let’s back up one second. Where did it all start? Certainly before this, but by the seventeenth century, collections of strange and frightening stories were appearing in print. One early example was Tonoigusa, or roughly ‘Tales for the Night Watch,’ a collection filled with ghosts, monsters and uncanny encounters. There’s even an early version of the jorogumo (harlot spider)tale in there — Episode 150, by the way! This one isn’t the beautiful woman entices a man version either. It’s a little more rough.
Another important work came out in 1677. Shokoku Hyakumonogatari—One Hundred Tales from Various Provinces— And this one surely helped turn the hundred-story game into a genuine craze. I’ve read that the idea was born from samurai as a way to test their courage. So it started from the Kamakura Era at least.
And doesn’t this sound like fun. A bunch of rugged men sitting around in a darkened room telling ghost stories and trying to act tough. You just know once the room starts darkening someone’s going to reach over and touch a friend on the shoulder, scaring the bejeezus out of him.
You know when people ask, if you could go back in time and witness something…well, sorry pyramid building, I now wanna sit in a darkened corner of a room in the 18th century and watch a bunch of manly samurai scare the crap out of each other.
So with the release of Shokoku HyakuMonogatari the creepy late night parlor game became a craze even among normal folk.
And what happens when that last candle is blown out? When all the sudden the room falls into complete darkness? Well, someone or something truly terrifying is believed to appear.
Another thing that helped turn summer into spooky season was kabuki. There was something called Suzumi shibai or cooling plays. Because that’s what we’re talking about here.
So where telling a story is scary in it’s own right actually showing the ghosts was an even better way to garner a shudder.
And it all worked out well. The summer was a slower theatrical season. But if you put on ghost tales you could hire different actors (so you don’t need the biggies who are probably taking a much needed vacation). And you can play with all kinds of spectacular effects like trapdoors, eerie lighting and sounds. Just have fun basically.
The folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi insists that it’s because of these summertime kabuki performances that the hot months really became associated with ghosts and scary tales.
Of course, sitting around in a room telling ghost stories or going to a play is one thing. But at some point, though, someone is going to say: Oh yeah? If you’re so brave, let’s go outside and prove it.
Which brings me to kimodameshi. Lovely word that literally means “testing the liver”. But think of it like courage, nerve, or guts. A test of your guts.
Probably been around since the beginning of time, but there is record of Fujiwara no Kaneie in the 12th century (Heian Era), challenging his three sons to go out in the middle of the night to frightening locations around Kyoto that were said to be haunted by oni. Two of the sons are like, no way, uh uh, nope. But the third son, Fujiwara no Michinaga took ol’ pa up on his dare, and did go and hacked a piece of wood from a wooden pillar as proof that he’d made in there and back.
And that’s basically what kimodameshi is, and surely it’s practiced everywhere all over the world. Go somewhere frightening, complete some task, and bring something back to prove you did it.
In Japan places to do kimodameshi could be cemeteries, forests, old schools, temple grounds, or tunnels.
I was thinking why Japanese scary places are so much scarier to me that the haunted places I grew up with in the States, and I think I figured it out. It’s because back in the US the idea was basically if you can outrun the ghost or whatever it is, you win. You escaped. Yay, you.
In Japan the truly horrifying part is you don’t escape. It follows you home. You think you get out of there okay. The false sense of, Wew. I made it. Then you get home, safe and sound, and strange things start to happen: At night you hear the peta peta peta of footsteps down the hall. You see a the shadow of a figure behind the shoji paper screen. Or, yes, something knocks over your zabuton towers. Just sayin.
I heard one story, maybe I told this one to you before, can’t remember. But some teens went out to do kimodameshi in a cemetery. It just happened to be a haunted one where no one would go at night because something-something curse something. Well, they return and of course really frightening things start happening to them.
They end up going to a woman who deals with things like possessions and evil spirits, and long story short, she learns that while out there one or more of them had peed on some graves and really offended the spirits. Yeah. Don’t do that. Jeez.
Anyway. Of course there are also the kinds of kimodameshi that are set up on purpose, too. One common type is the person is supposed to walk along a secluded path through a cemetery to a temple and retrieve something (like a card) and return proving they had completed the scary task. A group of people gather and take turns going along the trail.
The organizers know exactly what scares have been planted a long a route. Someone dressed in a white kimono waiting behind a tree, someone else crouching behind some grave stone. Etc. The brave soul sets out, gets to the temple, retrieves the card and runs all the back.
They made it! Everyone’s laughing and congratulating them. And they say, that it was pretty scary, but the woman by the stones steps was the worst!
Except no one was stationed by the stone steps. There were only supposed to be three people dressed as ghosts. But they saw four.
Or another version, when everyone returns from their kimodameshi, the organizers count the group and there’s one person too few or worse, too many.
Eep.
Okay, another summer activity and a perfectly valid way to send chills across your skin. How about obake yashiki? Haunted houses.
So if walking through an actual cemetery at night seems a little inconvenient or too “real”, you can visit a haunted house.
These are surprisingly old and probably had their roots in the old misemono spectacle shows from again Edo era. Misemono are wild, you have to go back to episode 84 to learn about them if you even a little interested.
Some early obakeyashiki:
In 1830 in the city of Omori, Edo, a doctor built what he called the omori no bakeyashiki chaya or The Omori Haunted Tea house.
Then a little later in 1836 there came Terashima Jikomi Bakemono Donya, staged at the Ekō-in Temple in Ryōgoku. It was a ghost-themed side-show attraction using clever mechanisms and puppets to recreate famous scenes from ghost and monster-themed kabuki plays.
The flavor of these bakeyashiki is a bit different that in the West. While these days they do borrow from western horror tropes, a good example being when I was in the PTA when my son was in elementary school and us moms were constructing some haunted classrooms for the summer festival. I mentioned I had a Scream mask at home and was asked to go get it so we could hang it in the corner.
So where in north America you might have a lot of jump scares, zombies, dudes with chainsaws chasing you, and relentless startling effects, traditionally the obakeyashiki would lean more into dread, ghosts, curse imagery and just something being “off”.
I think it’s safe to say there aren’t any any psychotic killer clowns in traditional Japanese haunted houses. But you will find monks chanting somberly in flickering lamplight with their backs to you only to turn around suddenly and reveal they only have one large eye in the middle of their face. Ahh!
There could be people acting out the parts or borrowing farther back, the karakuri dolls that used interesting mechanisms to move. So more a creepy atmosphere where anything could happen than, stab stab stab, run run run.
But don’t forget Japan is not stranger to the grotesque.
And even today, to get with the thrill of summer, you find obakeyashiki popping up all over the place, schools, neighborhoods, temples. There is one that is put on every summer at a big shrine a city or two over from me.
I’ve never been, but I think I’m going to risk it this year. Bringing my bestie because I’m a big baby. But they give you a a scary story to read first. Then you make your reservation, and go. Somewhat like a kimodameshi you don’t just walk through and you’re done. You have to read various clues set up throughout the haunted house to find something, I think it’s a photo of a woman in the story. Hey! I’ve never done an escape room. But sounds similar, maybe?
Anyway, let me end by reading you a story that appeared in the 1677 collection, Shokoku Hyakumonogatari. The creature in it is sometimes linked today to the yōkai Tenome, the ‘eyes-in-the-hands’ monster, but in this original story, it has no name. Also, one of the stories I wrote for Dark Tales from Japan is about the te-no-me and in my total reimagining based on this exact story.
I love this story because I kind of think it’s the reason I got the book deal. I pitched the idea to my editor (who had never read horror before) and she was like, Oh, yes. This. Send more and let me run them by the team.
Oh, and remember those one hundred candles from the beginning of the show? Go ahead and blow all out but one.
So here we go:
In Kyoto, there was said to be a monster haunting the graveyard at Shichijō-gawara. A group of young men were talking about it and, being young men, naturally decided to turn it into a bet.
Could one of them go into the cemetery alone, at midnight?
To prove he had actually done it, the challenger would have to drive a stake into the ground and attach a paper marker to it. In other words, it’s practically an Edo-period kimodameshi complete with a checkpoint.
One young man accepts.
He reaches the cemetery, drives in the stake, attaches the paper and starts back.
Then an old man appears.
Except there is something very wrong with him.
He looks perhaps eighty years old. His hair is white. His face is pale and wasted, traditionally compared to the whiteness of a yūgao flower. And he is enormous—eight shaku tall, roughly 2.4 meters.
His front teeth protrude horribly.
And in the palms of his hands are eyes.
The young man realizes immediately that this is no ordinary old man and bolts.
The creature comes after him.
He reaches a nearby temple and begs the resident monk to hide him. The monk opens a nagamochi, one of those long wooden storage chests used for clothing and possessions, puts the young man inside and closes the lid.
Then the monster arrives.
It looks around.
Apparently it cannot find the young man.
For a moment it seems as though the hiding place has worked.
But then the monk hears something coming from around the chest.
The old text likens it to a dog sucking or gnawing on a bone.
And mixed in with that sound…
the young man is groaning.
The monk is terrified and doesn’t dare interfere.
Eventually the creature disappears.
The monk waits, then finally goes to the chest and lifts the lid.
Inside is the young man.
Except every bone in his body has been removed.
Nothing remains but his skin.
Next
