It seems like someone forgot to hang their teruteru bōzu this morning, because the weather forecast calls for rain!

Just like we learned yesterday that some yokai can cause nice, sunny weather, some yokai can also bring about rain. This is one of them.

This yokai is somewhat cute in a grotesque sort of manner. He is also a bit pathetic. This has caused him to be a very popular yokai throughout history. He is often conflated or confused with a similar-looking yokai called tōfu kozō, who is also a well-loved, pathetic little child yokai.

These two yokai were often portrayed as servant yokai who get beat up or made fun of by bigger, scarier yokai. They became super popular in the Edo period, when the first comics began to be published. The silly antics of these little kozō yokai helped propel both comics and yokai into mass popularity.

They are still popular yokai today, as evidenced by their appearance in recent animated movies, and their frequent inclusion among other yokai related works. Even though these little guys summon bad weather, somehow, everyone seems to love them!

Amefuri kozō / 雨降小僧 / あめふりこぞう

With Halloween fast approaching, one common thing you can see all over are tissue-paper ghosts.

These cute flying ghosts are a staple of American elementary schools, and if you are lucky you might even find a lollipop inside one of them on Halloween.

I’ve been seeing these ghosts hanging from windows and doors all around town. In Japan, though, one thing I thought was interesting is that I saw these ghosts all over the place too, only not during Halloween season!

It turns out, in Japan, these are also a popular kid’s craft. Only, instead of flying ghosts, they are a charm meant to bring out good weather, called teruteru bōzu. Kids hang them in their windows and pray to them for nice, sunny days.

It turns out that the teruteru bōzu has yokai origins! It actually originates in a yokai called hiyori bōzu. Click to read more:

Hiyoribou / 日和坊 / ひよりぼう

Today’s yokai is a rare one. This isn’t connected with Edo period ghost stories or Heian era superstitions. This—or these—yokai are actually connected to an obscure, esoteric folk religion that used to be popular in Japan. The religion is called Kōshin, and is a mixture of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, and other folk beliefs. It contains a lot of mysticism from Chinese philosophy, and is primarily based on the stems-and-branches calendar (aka the sexagenary cycle). This ancient calendar system revolved around groups of 60 days which were named by combining the Chinese elements, yin and yang, and the Chinese zodiac. It looks something like this:

In this ancient mysticism, everything is inter-related. Each one of those kanji you see above corresponds to a zodiacal animal, yin or yang, a season, a month, a cardinal direction, an element, and an hour. This, it is possible to say something like “the direction of the rat” or “the hour of the ox” (which, incidentally, plays an important role in my upcoming book!

This base-60 calendar system was calculated by cycling the 10 “celestial stems” with the 12 “earthly branches.” With each passing segment, both digits would rotate one character, giving a total of 60 different combinations. Depending on the pair of kanji you get, you would be able to divine certain things about the universe.

It just so happens that Kōshin is one of these combinations: 庚申. Kōshin is similar in most respects to Buddhism, but it has a very important aspect related to this calendar. Every kōshin night, the two kanji on the calendar date would be 庚 and 申. This would take place every 60 days. On that night something very important to the Kōshin faith would take place: three spiritual worms that live inside your body would sneak out while you slept and visit the Emperor of Heaven, where they would report all of your bad deeds to him. Depending on how bad you were, your lifespan would then be shorted by an appropriate amount.

The sanshi are not the only yokai related to Kōshin . I did one other yokai based on this superstition before, and you can see him at yokai.com/shoukera. For the full story on the sanshi, click below:

Sanshi / 三尸 / さんし

Today’s yokai is a silly one to be sure. Tales about ōkubi began popping up in the Edo period. They were sort of a contemporary urban legend (as many yokai were). The story would be that a friend of a friend knew somebody who discovered a giant head in his barn or warehouse, and when he came back with other people to show them, the head was gone. Or other silly stories like that.

In fact, most yokai stories are very much like that. While a few yokai have long, detailed story, the majority of them really amount to little more than “somebody in this town saw something really strange! It was a __________!” And then that’s the end of it.

While at first glance, that might seem kind of boring. However, to me they are a delight to read. The briefness of them leaves so much up to the imagination, and even gives them an feeling of being slightly more believable than if the story were overly detailed. They sound more like unexplainable accounts as opposed to novels or short stories design to scare. It especially works well for the sillier yokai like the one below.

If you want a great example of what I mean, you might want to read The Legends of Tono, which is one of the most famous books of Japanese folk tales (including ones about yokai). Some of the “legends” in the book are no more than a couple of sentences in length. They end abruptly but somehow they leave you feeling enchanted, rather than cheated.  A number of versions are available on Amazon.

Click to view the entry on yokai.com!

Ookubi / 大首 / おおくび

Today’s yokai is a really simple one! It’s one of the yokai that was clearly invented by Edo period illustrators; in this case, Toriyama Sekien.

Those of you familiar with Japanese will know that there are many many more onomatopoeia words in Japanese than in English. Many every day feelings and emotions are described in Japanese using onomatopoeia rather than adjectives, which adds quite a bit to the color of the language.

Fear, of course, is no exception to that rule. The “sound” of a chill that runs through your spine is “zo!” This is a word used frequently in connection with scary ghost stories. And the sound of the shivers that overtake your body when you feel scared is “buruburu.” Which of course is the name of today’s yokai!

Try saying that three times fast!

Rokujō no Miyasundokoro is an interesting name. From it we can tell a little bit about her. Those of you familiar with Kyoto will know that the town is divided into numbered neighborhoods (Ichijō, Nijō, Sanjō, Shijō, Gojō, Rokujō, Shichijō, Hachijō, Kujō, and Jūjō). You will probably recognize that her name means “6th street,” giving you an idea as to where she lived. The name Miyasundokoro starts with the kanji 御, which denotes a high rank; however, it is not the highest rank. In fact, her name (御息所) actually means “the place where the emperor sleeps.” It basically means “she who sleeps with the emperor.” In otherwords, she was one of many imperial concubines. Technically married to the emperor, and technically an aristocrat, she was not as high ranking as she might have wanted to be, and she would have been constantly competing with other wives for the favor of the court.

Lady Rokujō (I’ll call her that so you don’t have to keep trying to pronounce her name in your head as you read) is actually a character from Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. This book hold an extremely important position in Japanese literature. It was the first novel ever written (in the world, not just in Japan), it is considered one of the greatest works of classical Japanese literature, and it was written by a woman. To get an understanding of it’s significance, it is considered to be as important to Japan and the Japanese language as The Canterbury Tales is to England and English.

Murasaki Shikibu is something of an adopted daughter of my “hometown” in Japan, Echizen city. Her father was appointed to a government position there, so she moved to Echizen from Kyoto along with him. Although she hated Echizen and wrote poems about how miserable she was an wanted to return home, the town loves her anyway. Actually, scholars think that some of the scenes in her works were inspired by her life in Fukui, so that makes her work of particular interest to me anyway.

Lady Rokujō’s chief rival in The Tale of Genji is a woman named Lady Aoi. In Japanese, her name is written Aoi no Ue. Ue means “up” and was actually a title denoting a certain societal position, just as Lady Rokujō’s name was. Japanese readers of The Tale of Genji can get this little bit of extra information about the characters, which is totally lost in translation when they are just written as “Lady Aoi” and “Lady Rokujō.” This is just one of the many complicated ways that English and Japanese differ from each other.

Anyway, before I digress too much about linguistics and Heian period court rankings, let’s get to today’s yokai:

click me! click me!

Today’s yokai continues the theme of angry beautiful women. While we looked at the general concept of “hannya” yesterday, today we look at a specific hannya—the most famous one, in fact.

Kiyo-hime is what is known as a honnari hannya. They are the most powerful kind. Not only did she grow scary horns and develop magical powers, she pretty much entirely turned into a dragon.

Kiyo-hime is actually pretty interesting because of how famous her story it. The legend was adapted into a noh play which became very famous. There are a number of very old scroll paintings depicting her story as well. One of my favorite ukiyoe artists, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, also did a fantastic print of her, which you can see on the Wikipedia entry for Kiyo-hime.

Anyway, here is my take on Kiyo-hime. Click for the story: