Today’s entry has appeared on my blog before. He is well known all across Japan. In fact, today, he is a very popular character, though he is not as well known for his destructive tendencies as for his better ones. He is better known as Tenjin-sama, the god of scholarship.

Tenjin-sama was not always a god. In fact, he was once a bureaucrat named Sugawara no Michizane. He was wronged greatly by the state, and when he died, his spirit turned into a powerful onryo, which returned to Kyoto and wreaked havoc upon the imperial court.

Sugawara no Michizane is a perfect example of a tatarigami, yesterday’s yokai-a-day. And a successful example, for that matter. Through posthumous promotions, establishing shrines and festivals, and worshiping him as a state-sponsored god, his wrath-filled tatarigami was appeased. Today, Tenjin-sama is a very popular god, worshipped all over the country. Many houses even have wall scrolls of him like the one on the right, which they display in January.

But underneath all of that honor and worship lies the sleeping wrath of a tatarigami… hopefully never to be provoked.

Click on the angry ghost to visit yokai.com and read all about his history!

There is only 1 day left until Halloween, and only 1 more yokai until the final one. You can help support my artwork, translation, and the creation of more yokai in the yokai.com database by joining my Patreon project!

I came across this on the internet recently: an article from the Daily Mail in 1933 comparing Japanese ghosts with British ones. It’s done with the usual sense of British Empire superiority, and quickly finds a way to dismiss Japanese ghosts as inferior (no feet, haunt “flimsy wood and paper” houses), but it does at least concede that Japan does have scary ghosts! I think today, most people around the world would agree that no country rivals Japan when it comes to ghosts and monsters, but in 1933 I guess the national rivalries were just too strong to get past. Here is the text from the article:

There seem to be no bounds to this Japanese competition with Britain. The latest exhibition to be organised in Tokio is a direct challenge to a British institution of the remotest antiquity (write J. Ward Price in the “Daily Mail”).

If there is one staple commodity of ours which has hitherto feared no comparison with foreign rivals it is the British ghost. He seemed a natural by product of our Tudor architecture. The panelled walls and stone-flagged passages of the moated granges and turreted castles of Britain provided an environment most favourable for his development, which was assisted by the gloomy and predominantly misty character of our climate. It might have been thought impossible for a country whose houses are built of flimsy wood and paper to compete with us in this respect. After two visits to the Tokyo Ghost Exhibition I regret to report, however, that in eeriness, blood-curdling horror, malevolence, and general spookiness the Japanese ghost is in no way inferior to the British article.

Fortunately for our native spectres, however, the otherwise most efficient phantoms of Japan have a structural defect which renders them instantly recognisable. No attempt at Japanese spirit-dumping can possibly delude British ghost-hunters into the belief that they are being offered a genuine homebred apparition. The difference lies in the fact that Japanese ghosts have no legs. Down to the waist they correspond to the best European models. The form is generally cadaverous, and of a graveyard pallor. The dank hair’ falls in matted disorder over eyes that smoulder with a baleful glow. The hands are long, and skeletonised, and are carried breast-high. But the legs merely taper off into a wisp of greyish vapour. Thus the Japanese ghost cannot walk; he merely floats along. Such traditional British effects as phantom footsteps or the dragging of chains are impossible for him.

On the other hand the returned spirits of Japan have some, special characteristics of their own. One of these consists of a streamer of phosphorescent light, known as the hitodama. This trail of violet-tinted luminosity embodies the soul of the dead person, and always accompanies the earthly form that he resumes. I am told that at the present day there are many people in Japan who claim that when a death occurs they can see the hitodama, like an elongated balloon of purple fire, pass through the roof of the house at the moment that the soul leaves the body. These “corpse-lights,” as the Irish call them, are frequently to be noticed drifting about burial-grounds at night.

Short of meeting an actual wraith, the Tokyo Ghost Exhibition is the severest trial for one’s nerves imaginable. It is held in a huge amphitheatre, the inside of which has been cut up into rooms connected by dimly-lighted passages. Each of these rooms is furnished to represent the scene of some historic Japanese ghost-story. Life-size wax images in natural attitudes represent the human beings concerned, but the ghost is a mechanical figure which suddenly appears while you watch. Sometimes it glides out from behind a screen with a red light glowing inside the eye-sockets of its gibbering skull; or it may swoop down from the ceiling with dishevelled, trailing hair and clawing, bony fingers. Every one of the phantoms reproduced has its place in Japanese legend. Japan is a country which until sixty-five years ago had been completely cut off from the rest of the world for three centuries. There is no possibility of these spook-tales having been borrowed or adapted from, other countries. Yet their character is exactly similar to that of the ghost-stories of Europe, as if the incidents they commemorate had their origin in identical but independent experience.

Grimmest of all the horrors shown at the Tokyo Ghost Exhibition are the representations of the banshees and evil spirits that infest desolate and inaccessible places. You enter a reproduction of bamboo thicket and find gnome-like figures lurking in its depths, while hairy, snatching hands shoot out from among the leaves as you pass through.

Speaking of scary ghosts, it doesn’t get much scarier than today’s yokai, the tatarigami. This is a ghost that is so pissed off that it comes back as a great god of vengeance and destruction. These things are so powerful that shrines are built to appease them, festivals are held to honor them, and people all across Japan worship them as gods just so they won’t come back and ruin everything. A tatarigami would surely give a stuffy old British ghost something to think about… Click below to learn more about this awesome yokai:

Today’s yokai, while not a ghost (the feet are a dead giveaway), is painted up to look like one. Like yesterday’s, today’s entry is about not a creature, but an act. In this case, a curse. This is the most infamous of all the curses in Japan: the shrine visit at the hour of the ox.

The details are all on yokai.com, so I won’t go into them here. However, one very interesting fact is that, while this is an ancient curse, some people still do perform it today! Despite laws forbidding its practice, police and shrine officials still find the remnants of this curse—nails in trees, straw dolls with curses written on them, and so on—littered about shrines from time to time.

The sale of certain implements for this curse are also banned. For example, it is very hard to find nails of the proper length in your local hardware store. However, that doesn’t stop certain websites from selling “curse kits” containing all of the tools you need to perform this nasty ritual. According to their website, the good folks at noroi.com have been supplying the internet with curse supplies for over 13 years. I guess it must be a profitable business!

Click below to read about Japan’s most infamous curse.

I just noticed that, as of this post, there are now two pillar yokai on yokai.com! That just seems odd, doesn’t it? More than one yokai based on a pillar…? (The other one being sakabashira.)

Hitobashira is slightly different than all of the other yokai we have ever looked at on this site, for a very important reason: it is one that is created by humans, not formed on its own. What’s more, it is created on purpose!

I specifically chose hitobashira in order to go in the final chapter of The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, which is dedicated to onmyoji and black magic (that is the chapter which gives the book its subtitle: An Encyclopedia of Mononoke and Magic). The book is not solely dedicated to imaginary monsters, but also to the real monstrous things that actual people have done to each other, such as curses and, well, this.

I chose the legend of Maruoka castle in Fukui to include in this entry because I lived only a few miles from it. In fact, there were more than just a couple placed rumored to have hitobashira near my home in Fukui prefecture. A tunnel through a mountain nearby, constructed in the 20th century, is widely rumored to have people interred within the walls in order to act as supports to spiritually protect the tunnel from collapse.

We tend to feel fascinated by these sorts of stories when they are separated from us by hundreds or even a thousand years, but when they happen within recent memory the true horror of it sinks in. It’s one thing to imagine a tragic young girl in a beautiful ancient kimono being sacrificed to appease the unknown gods… it’s another altogether to picture a young construction worker, fresh out of school, with his hardhat, gloves, and safety vest cemented into a tunnel that we drive through every day. Aren’t we more enlightened than that? Apparently not…

Monsters are still with us even today.

Click above to read the legends about hitobashira, also available in paperback and Kindle as well. And there is still time to get involved with my Patreon for this month. Don’t miss out on regular yokai updates and insider access to the creation of all of these entries!

Imagine this situation: you drive downtown for a summer fireworks festival. You find an awesome parking spot, with an elevated view over the river, where you will be able to see the sky and the reflection of the fireworks in the water. Just as you start backing into your place, some jerk pulls forward into the space and dings your car pretty bad. Today’s yokai is so relate-able to today that even though it takes place long ago, it feels fresh.

Rewind the above story 1000 years. Oboroguruma is from the Tale of Genji, one of the oldest novels ever written, and one of Japan’s most famous and treasured pieces of literature. One of the stories depicts a scene in which a noblewoman has her really good parking spot taken from her, and has her carriage dinged up, and ultimately loses the parknig spot to a younger, prettier woman.

The yokai part comes later, when the anger of that night settles into her carriage, and it turns into a ghost-like spirit of a cart. From then on, on certain nights, the ghost cart would roam the street, animated by its owners jealousy and rage…

Interestingly, oboroguruma doesn’t actually appear in the Tale of Genji. It was actually created centuries after the novel and first existed just as a picture of a cart with a spooky face, perhaps a tsukumogami. Later, that illustration became attached to the famous cart story in the Tale of Genji. In essense, it is a piece of fanfiction that has become canon!

There’s just a week left of daily yokai, and I wanted to let all the readers know of an upcoming event. This Wednesday the 28th, I will be giving a talk at 3pm at Villanova University. The topic is yokai and Japanese ghosts. Anyone in the area, please come on down to Villanova and show your support for yokai! For more information, visit Villanova’s event calendar here.

I will also have copies of both of my books available, as well as postcards and bookmarks featuring yokai. I will be signing the books with my special brush pen which I got at the Abe no Seimei Shrine in Kyoto—the perfect pen to sign a yokai book with!

If you already bought the books, bring them in and I will sign them. Or, you can buy them there and I will sign them for you.

Okay, on to today’s yokai!

Haka no hi is one of those yokai for which almost no information at all exists. I’ve mentioned a number of times on my blog and in my talks how for most yokai, all that exists is a short tale of a few sentences. And then there are yokai even shorter than that—for which all that exists is a single illustration or a one sentence description; not even a story. Haka no hi is one of these super minimalistic yokai.

This yokai was introduced by Toriyama Sekien and given an illustration with just the description of what it does. Very minimal. No legends, no references, nothing. It’s very likely he invented it just to pad his books. However, that said, it is not entirely without folklore. I actually met some priests in Japan who told me that late at night they saw mysterious fires coming from underneath the graves in their temples. They had a more (pseudo)scientific explanation—they explained it off as gases escaping the decaying bones in the graves causing some phantom illumination. But whatever the explanation is, many people report claiming some kind of mysterious phosphorescence around graveyards. So even though there are no ghost tales about it, it is not a totally unknown phenomenon, and it is very much a weird mystery. And that is the essence of yokai.

Click below to read the (very short) entry on yokai.com!

Today’s yokai is a little bit late! It takes a while to do the writeups in addition to the illustration, so I won’t say too much on the blog here about it. I do like this ghost, as it is both creepy and sad at the same time, yet a little heartwarming too. It’s similar to an ubume, but not nearly as scary.

This was done by request of my Patreon backers, who love Japanese ghosts! I hope you guys enjoy it. Remember, you can become a Patreon backer too! $1 per month helps support the creation of yokai and the maintenance of yokai.com!

Click below to read today’s yokai!