Demons, Spirits, and Folklore

Just a listing of demons, ghosts or spirits, and other supernatural folklore of Japan. There’s so many! So, let’s get started!

Gaki (or Hungry Ghost)

Since 657, some Japanese Buddhists have observed a special day in mid-August to remember the gaki. Through such offerings and remembrances (segaki), it is believed that the hungry ghosts may be released from their torment.

In the modern Japanese language, the word gaki is often used to mean spoiled child, or brat. In a game of tag, the person who is “it” may be known as the “gaki.”

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Jikininki (Human Eating Ghost)

 

 

 

In Japanese Buddhism, jikininki (Japanese: 食尸鬼, “human-eating ghosts“) are the spirits of greedy, selfish or impious individuals who are cursed after death to seek out and eat human corpses. They do this at night, scavenging for newly dead bodies and food offerings left for the dead. They sometimes also loot the corpses they eat for valuables, which they use to bribe local officials to leave them in peace. Nevertheless, jikininki lament their condition and hate their repugnant cravings for dead human flesh.

Often, jikininki are said to look like decomposing cadavers, perhaps with a few inhuman features such as sharp claws or glowing eyes. They are a horrifying sight, and any mortal who views one finds themself frozen in fear. However, several stories give them the ability to magically disguise themselves as normal human beings and even to lead normal “lives” by day.

Jikininki are preta of the 26th class in Japanese Buddhism. They are also sometimes considered a form of rakshasa or gaki (“hungry ghosts”). In the latter case, they may be freed from their deplorable existence through remembrances and offerings (segaki).

Jikininki is also the title of a feature film directed by Ted Geoghegan.

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Tongue- cut sparrow

Shita-kiri Suzume (舌切り雀　shitakirisuzume), translated literally into “Tongue-Cut Sparrow,” is a traditional Japanese fable, telling of a kind old man, his avaricious wife, and an injured sparrow. The story explores the effects of greed, friendship, and jealousy on the characters.

Andrew Lang included it as The Sparrow with the Slit Tongue in The Pink Fairy Book.^[1]

The basic form of the tale is common throughout the world.

An old man went on his usual hike into the mountains to cut timber one morning and came upon an injured sparrow crying for help. Feeling sorry for the creature, the man takes it back to his home and feeds it some rice to try to help it recover. His wife, being very greedy and ill-natured, is annoyed that he would waste precious food on such a filthy little thing as the sparrow. The old man, however, continued caring for the bird.

The man had to return to the mountain one day and left the bird in the care of the old woman, who had no intention of feeding it. After her husband left, she went out fishing. While she was gone, the sparrow got into some starch that was left out and eventually ate it all. The old woman was so outraged upon her return that she cut out the bird’s tongue, sending it flying back into the mountains from whence it came.

The old man went searching for the bird and, with the help of other sparrows, found his way into a bamboo grove in which the sparrow’s inn was located. A multitude of sparrows greeted him and led him to his friend, the little sparrow he saved. The others brought him food and sang and danced for him.

Upon his departure, they presented him with a choice of a large basket or a small basket as a prize. Being old, he chose the small basket since he figured it would be the least heavy. When he arrived home, he opened the basket and an enormous amount of treasure was found inside. The wife, finding out there was a larger basket, then runs to the inn, hoping to gain more treasure for herself. Immediately, she chooses the larger basket but is warned not to open it before getting home.

Being the greedy woman she was, however, she couldn’t resist opening the basket on the way home. Much to her surprise, the box was full of ogres, snakes, and other monsters. They scared her so badly that she tumbled completely down the mountain, presumably to her death.

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Lucky Tea Kettle

Bunbuku Chagama (Japanese: ぶんぶく茶釜) is a Japanese folktale about a raccoon-dog, or tanuki, that uses its shapeshifting powers to reward its rescuer for his kindness.

Bunbuku Chagama roughly translates to “happiness bubbling over like a tea pot.” The story tells of a poor man who finds a tanuki caught in a trap. Feeling sorry for the animal, he sets it free. That night, the tanuki comes to the poor man’s house to thank him for his kindness. The tanuki transforms itself into a chagama and tells the man to sell him for money.

The man sells the tanuki-teapot to a monk, who takes it home and, after scrubbing it harshly, sets it over the fire to boil water. Unable to stand the heat, the tanuki teapot sprouts legs and, in its half-transformed state, makes a run for it.

The tanuki returns to the poor man with another idea. The man would set up a ‘roadside attraction’ (a little circus-like setup) and charge admission for people to see a teapot walking a tightrope. The plan works, and each gains something good from the other–the man is no longer poor and the tanuki has a new friend and home.

In a variant of the story, the tanuki-teapot does not run and returns to its transformed state. The shocked monk decides to leave the teapot as an offering to the poor temple where he lives, choosing not to use it for making tea again. The temple eventually becomes famous for its supposed dancing teapot.

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Crackling Mountain

Kachi-Kachi Yama (Japanese: かちかち山, kachi-kachi being an onomatopoeia of the sound a fire makes and yama meaning “mountain“, roughly translates to “Fire-Crackle Mountain”), is one of the few Japanese folktales in which a tanuki is the villain, rather than the boisterous and well-endowed alcoholic.

The trouble-making tanuki

As the story goes, a man caught a troublesome tanuki in his fields, and tied it to a tree to kill and cook it later. When the man left for town, the tanuki cried and begged the man’s wife to set him free, promising never to bother the fields again. After much convincing, the wife set the animal free, only to have it turn on her and kill her. But instead of just running off, the tanuki planned a foul trick.

Using its shapeshifting abilities, the tanuki took on the form of the wife and cooked up a soup, using the dead woman’s flesh. When the man came home, the tanuki served him the soup. After the meal, the man remarked that the soup was good, and the tanuki, shifting back to his normal self, cried out mockingly, “It was me that you were going to eat, but you’ve just eaten your own wife instead!” With that, the cruel creature ran off, leaving the poor man in shock and horrible grief.

[edit] Enter the rabbit

It just so happened that the unfortunate couple had been good friends with a rabbit that lived nearby. When the rabbit heard about what happened, he immediately came to the man and told him, “I’ll avenge the death of your wife for you!” So the rabbit set out and soon found the villainous tanuki. Pretending to befriend the tanuki, the rabbit did all sorts of unpleasant things to him, from dropping a bee‘s nest on him to ‘treating’ the stings with a peppery poultice that burned.

The title of the story comes from the especially painful trick that the rabbit played. The tanuki was carrying a heavy load of kindling on his back to make a campfire for the night. He was so burdened that he did not immediately notice when the rabbit set fire to the kindling. Soon, the crackling sound reached his ears.

“What is that sound?” the tanuki asked.

“It is Kachi-Kachi Yama” the rabbit replied. “We are not far from it, so it is no surprise that you can hear it!”

Eventually, the fire reached the tanuki’s back, burning him badly, but without killing him.

[edit] Boat of mud

After all the horrible things that the rabbit had put him through, the tanuki challenged the rabbit to a life or death contest to prove who was the better creature. They were each to build a boat, and race across a lake in them. The rabbit carved his boat out of a fallen tree trunk, but the foolish tanuki fashioned his out of mud.

The two competitors each got off to a great start, but as they approached the middle of the lake, the tanuki’s mud boat dissolved and came apart. As the tanuki was struggling to stay afloat, the rabbit proclaimed that he was a friend of the human couple, and that this was the tanuki’s punishment for his horrible deeds. His boat gone, the tanuki drowned.

[edit] Modern-day references

There is a railway station in Japan, called the Shikoku Tanuki Train Line, that adopts the slogan, “Our trains aren’t made of mud”, a direct reference to the “Kachi-Kachi Yama” tale.

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Vampire Cat

Here’s a classic Japanese tale dating back to the Hizen daimyo of the Sengoku Era (1568-1615). It presents a Shinto perspective of the spiritual dimension of Nature itself, here depicted in the form of a large cat who not only consumes humans, but then supernaturally changes its form to become that human, after which it interacts and easily deceives everyone it encounters.

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