What says “Halloween” more than an evil cat, right? Well, if you thought witches’ black cats were scary, you haven’t seen anything! Japanese cats are far scarier than anything the West has cooked up, and today’s is a perfect example. I also think it’s a good counterbalance to all of the bird yokai we’ve looked at recently…

Kasha (火車, かしゃ)

Kasha is a kind of bake-neko, or monster cat. It’s name translates into “fire cart,” which is a more than little confusing… not only is there no cart made of fire, there are a number of other yokai who seem to be much more deserving of the name “fire cart;” wanyuudou, for one, and its cousin the katawaguruma come to mind, as well as a yokai not yet featured on this blog called hi-no-kuruma, which actually translates into “fire cart” as well, and is even written with the exact same kanji as kasha!

Nevertheless, the yokai most commonly referred to as kasha is this one. It is a large, roughly man-sized demonic cat who preys on newly deceased corpses, stealing them and dragging them to… somewhere. To hell? To the land of the dead? Or do they just eat them up? Similar yokai like the ones I mentioned above take their victims back to hell… while other bake-neko like to eat humans. Some stories refer to them as messengers of hell, or as messengers of gods, others imply that they are acting on their own… So it could be any of those reasons. Kasha generally tend to target people who were wicked in life and thus perhaps deserve whatever that fate is, but there are always exceptions to any rule…

Kasha are found all over in Japan. They are fast and strong, and can leap from rooftop to rooftop with their snatched corpses. They can appear in the middle of a thunderstorm, and vanish with the corpse in a flash of lightning. It is pretty much impossible to retrieve one’s remains after they have been taken by a kasha; the best defense against them is to be prepared. As such, temples all over Japan in areas where kasha are said to prowl have devised their own ways of defending against these monster cats:

In Yamagata prefecture, clever priests have taken to holding two funeral ceremonies for the deceased. The first ceremony is a fake: the casket is filled only with rocks, so if a kasha comes for the body it will end up with nothing. In Ehime prefecture, a head shaver is placed on top of the coffin as a ward to keep kasha away. In Miyazaki prefecture, the funeral procession chants “Baku ni wa kuwasen” and “Kasha ni wa kuwasen” (“Don’t be eaten by a baku, don’t be eaten by a kasha”) two times in front of the coffin, which supposedly keeps kasha away. (I don’t know why baku, who eat bad dreams, would be included in this chant…) In Okayama prefecture, the priests play myohachi, a type of cymbal used in religious ceremonies, in order to keep the kasha away.

Whatever their true nature, it is pretty undeniable that kasha are bad. Cats, in fact, have long been considered evil beings in Japan. Since ancient times, folk wisdom tells us, “Don’t let cats near dead bodies,” and, “If a cat jumps over the coffin, the corpse inside the coffin will rise!” If a simple house cat is evil enough to raise the dead, just imagine what a giant monster cat like the kasha could potentially do…

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Now, on to today’s yokai:

Ubagabi (姥ヶ火, うばがび)

Ubagabi is another kind of hi-no-tama, or fireball yokai, a topic we’ve seen quite a few of on this blog. The name literally means “old hag fire.” Ubagabi is found on rainy nights in Osaka, and appears as a 1 foot diameter ball of flame with, just as the name suggests, the face of an old woman in it. There are a couple of stories connected to it:

According to one account from Osaka, a man was walking the road late at night when an Ubagabi flew out of the darkness and hit him in the face. Afterwards, when he got a closer look at the thing that hit him, it turned out to be a chicken… However, while he was inspecting the chicken closer, it turned back into an ubagabi and flew away.

The story ends there, but while it may seem that the man got away safely, he probably didn’t. According to legend, ubagabi have the uncanny ability to fly up to 4 kilometers in the blink of an eye, bounce off of someone’s shoulder, and then carry on into the darkness. However, anyone they bounce off of like that ends up dying within three years. However, if you are quick, and you shout “Abura-sashi!” (oil thief) just as she comes flying at you, she will vanish. The reason for that follows:

Long ago there was an old woman in Osaka who stole the precious lamp oil from the Hiraoka shrine. (You’ll remember from Sōgenbi the other day how terrible a crime it is to steal oil!) She was caught by the shrine’s priest and her crime was exposed, and after that the people of her village shunned her for being an oil thief. So great was her shame that she went to the pond behind Hiraoka shrine and committed suicide, after which she turned into an ubagabi. To this day, the pond behind Hiraoka shrine is called “Ubagabi-ike” (the pond of the Ubagabi). And that is why if you see an ubagabi and accuse it of being an oil thief, it will vanish out of shame and embarrassment.

Today’s yokai is another bird-like one. I kind of want one as a pet… except for the whole flames and vengeful curse thing…

Furaribi (ふらり火, ふらりび)

Furaribi appears in a number of old yokai picture scrolls as well as in Toriyama Sekien’s Gazu Hyakki Yagyō. It appears as a bird-like creature wreathed in flame, floating about aimlessly in the night sky. While it has the body of a bird, its face resembles a mix between a dog and the Hindu god Garuda. It is a type of hi-no-tama, or fireball yokai, and is said to be born from the remains of a soul which has not properly passed on to the next life, most likely due to not receiving the proper ceremonial services after dying. In Japan you don’t just get a funeral, you have a number of services commemorating your death and praying for your soul which repeat on certain days, months, and years after your death — missing even one of these could spell doom for your soul (so the priests tell us…).

One legend about Furaribi comes from Toyama city in Toyama prefecture. In the late 16th century, this area was ruled by a samurai named Sassa Narimasa. Narimasa had very beautiful concubine named Sayuri, who was not well liked by the other female servants in Narimasa’s innermost circle. One day, these women conspired against Sayuri and started a rumor that she had cheated on Narimasa with one of his men. Narimasa, in a fit of jealous rage, murdered Sayuri, then took her down to the Jinzū river, hung her corpse from a tree, then proceeded to carve it into pieces with his sword. On top of that, he captured Sayuri’s entire extended family, 18 people in all, and executed them in the same manner. Afterwards, their tortured souls aimlessly wandered the riverbanks every night as furaribi.

It is said if you go down to the riverside and call out “Sayuri, Sayuri!” late at night, the floating, severed head of a woman will appear, pulling and tearing at her hair in a vengeful fury. As for Sassa Narimasa, he was later defeated by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Some have attributed his defeat by Hideyoshi to the vengeful curse of Sayuri’s ghost.

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Today’s yokai is so wonderfully silly that it speaks for itself. There is no wonder it is counted among the most beloved yokai in Japan…

Shirime (尻目, しりめ)

Literally, “butt eye,” this yokai is practically self explanatory.

It first appeared in a picture scroll by Yosa no Buson, an Edo period poet. Most likely it was made up by him, as no other folklore exists. It’s one of those yokai that literally has two sentences to its name, and yet those two sentences seems to be enough:

京、かたびらが辻ぬっぽり坊主のばけもの。 めはなもなく、一ツの眼、尻の穴に有りて、 光ることいなづまのごとし。

“In Kyoto, at the Katabira crossroads, there is a monster called nuppori-bōzu. It has no eyes or nose, but a single eyeball, located in its butthole, which shines like lightning.”

There you have it folks, the making of a legend! The passage refers to it as the “nupperi-bōzu,” so this yokai is certainly a kind of noppera-bō, a kind of faceless yokai which is a popular form taken by mujina (shapeshifting badgers).

Mizuki Shigeru expanded upon the story a little bit in his yokai anthology Mujara, and has this to say:

Long ago, a samurai was traveling on the road to Kyoto, and a man in a kimono stepped out in front of him and blocked his path.

“Who goes there!” cried the samurai.

“Excuse me, sir, do you have a moment?” replied to man.

Before the samurai could reply, the man shed his kimono and bent over. His butt opened wide, revealing a huge, glowing eye which shone with a strange light.

The samurai screamed and fled…

You can’t make this stuff up, folks!

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When we associate Halloween with broomsticks, we are usually talking about witches riding them in front of the moon at night. Japan, on the other hand, ditches the witches and leaves the broom all to itself. Today’s yokai is another tsukumogami — this time it is made from a haunted broom!

Hahakigami (箒神, ははきがみ)

Literally translated as “broom spirit,” hahakigami is not the ordinary broom that you and I use to clean the house. Long, long ago in Japan, the broom was not a tool for cleaning trash and brushing dust out of houses; it was a holy instrument used for purification. If you have ever seen a Shinto purification ceremony where they shake an ōnusa (a stick covered in strips of paper), that may be somewhat of spiritual successor (no pun intended) of this ancient broom tradition. The shaking of the ōnusa purifies the space around a shrine (and makes a beautiful sound!), and long ago a broom would be used in much the same way. Although today brooms are pretty much entirely used for cleaning dirt.

A hahakigami is not simply an animated broom, however. It has specific meaning. One is as a charm for safe childbirth. Because brooms are used to “sweep out” evil energy from the air and purify a room, the hahakigami is used as a sort of totem to “sweep out” the baby from the mother safely.

They are also supposedly charms to keep guests from overstaying their visit. Again, when someone has overstayed their welcome, you just want to “sweep them out” don’t you?

Finally, even though old Japanese brooms were not used for simply cleaning, it seems that the hahakigami does, in fact, enjoy running around chaotically on windy days in late autumn, sweeping the dead leaves around.

If you liked this yokai and want to see more, please become a backer of my Kickstarter project: The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits!

One popular request I’ve been getting since Night Parade came out is “more tsukumogami!” For those who do not know, a tsukumogami is a kind of yokai born from common household things. The name means “99-year god,” and the idea is that an object which has been in use for 99 years (or else a very very long time) grows a soul and takes on a life of its own. Also, an item which has long stopped being used may sometimes grow sad or resentful that it is collecting dust in some closet somewhere, and develop a soul of its own.

This folk belief has led to all kinds of neat yokai based on shoes, broken umbrellas, kimonos, broken dishes, dirty kitchen rags, antique instruments, and just about anything else you can think of. They are often silly and cute, and sometimes can be scary too. Today, let’s take a look at a tsukumogami:

Shōgorō (鉦五郎, しょうごろう)

Shōgorō is an animated shōgo (鉦吾), a kind of miniature gong which is used in Buddhist services. If you’ve ever visited a temple in Japan, you have no doubt heard their distinctive ring. They are also sometimes called kane, as we will see later in our story.

A shōgo gets a lot of use, being used multiple times every day. They are made of metal, and so can last a long time. And they belong to temples, so there is a likely chance they will stay with the temple for many years. It is pretty easy to see that shōgo are ideal candidates for turning into tsukumogami. Perhaps a gong has long worn out and stopped playing its note pleasantly, and gets put into storage until it is forgotten… or perhaps one is the witness to some horrible crime, and that awakens it into a yokai.

There is a famous story of a shōgo turning into a shōgorō in Osaka in the early 18th century. Back then, there was a merchant family known as the Yodoya living in Osaka. For many generations, they were the kings of the rice trade, and raked in unbelievable amounts of cash. In fact, the 5th generation boss, Yodoya Tatsugorō,  had so much money that his wealth attracted the attention of the bakufu (the regional shogunate officials, something like military police).

The bakufu decided that the Yodoya family had accumulated enough wealth — too much wealth in fact. They were only a merchant family, after all, and it was improper for them to hold so much wealth. It was above their station in life. And so, the bakufu stripped Yodoya Tatsugorō of everything he had: his rice, his business, his house, his every last rich possession. The Yodoya family fell into ruin, and Tatsugorō became destitute. The straw that broke the camels back, so to speak, was the loss of his favorite possession: an unbelievably rich and indescribably splendid golden chicken called Kogane no Niwatori (金の鶏, literally “golden chicken”). The loss of his precious golden chicken caused Tatsugorō so much grief that he died, and because of the unhappy circumstances of his death, his ghost lingered on.

Normally, when a ghost lingers like this, it attaches itself to the object of its desire — whether it be a person, a place, or (in this case) a thing. Tatsugorō’s soul was meant to attach itself to his precious kogane no niwatori. But as I said earlier, a shōgo is also called a kane, and because the words kane 鉦 and kogane 金 can both be written with the kanji for metal, 金, poor Tatsugorō’s ghost must have gotten confused, and it attached itself to a nearby shōgo instead, turning the instrument into an animated yokai.

From that day on, the shōgo was called Shogorō — a kind of portmanteau of shōgo and Tatsugorō. (The name can also be read as a portmanteau of shōgo and goryō, 御霊, which is the ghost of a high social rank or very rich person. Goryō play a large part in other ghost stories, such as the Tale of the Heike and Lafcadio Hearn’s famous Miminashi Hoichi.) Toriyama Sekien really loves his puns and wordplay!

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There are lots of different animal-type yokai, and a great deal more bestial yokai that resemble animals in some way or another. Out of these, though, there don’t seem to be all that many bird yokai. As a bird lover, I thought I’d even the scales a bit today by introducing a bird yokai, specifically a great spotted woodpecker yokai. It comes with a free history lesson too. Enjoy!

Tera-tsutsuki (寺つつき, てらつつき)

Long long ago, back when Japanese historical records blur with legends and mythology, there was a man named Mononobe no Moriya. He lived in the 500’s CE, back when Japan was still called Yamato, and the capital was located in what is today Nara. Mononobe no Moriya was the leader of the a Mononobe clan and a Muraji, one of the two most high-ranking hereditary titles of nobility in old Japan. The Mononobe clan, along with a few other clans, had held their nobility since time immemorial, and were said to be descended from the gods. As a result, they were chief keepers of the old ways and supported Shinto when it was challenged by Buddhism, newly brought over from China in the 6 century CE. Buddhism was supported by the clans descended from the imperial line (and opposed by the clans descended from the gods). The leaders of these clans were called Omi — the other highest-ranking noble rank — and frequently came into conflict with the clans led by Muraji.

Mononobe no Moriya, the Ō-Muraji (great Muraji) of the Mononobe clan, had a powerful rival in Soga no Umako, the Ō-Omi (great Omi) of the Soga clan. These two nobles held considerable power in the imperial court. During the reign of Emperor Bidatsu (572-585), Mononobe no Moriya held higher favor with the emperor, who supported Shinto. When Emperor Yōmei took power in 585, Moriya’s favor fell and Soga no Umako’s rose, as the new emperor supported Buddhism over Shinto.

Whem Emperor Yōmei died in 587, the two rivals each tried their best to influence the succession of the imperial title. The two clans went to war with each other, and Mononobe no Moriya set out to purge Buddhism from Japan, setting fire to temples and throwing the very first statues of the Buddha brought to the country into the canals of Naniwa. The two clans finally met on the battlefields in Kawachi, at Mount Shigi. There, at the Battle of Mount Shigi, Soga no Umako and Prince Shōtoku killed Mononobe no Moriya, and nearly exterminated the entire Mononobe clan. Afterwards, the Soga clan rose to even higher prominence, and Prince Shōtoku, a devout Buddhist, began the construction many new Buddhist temples in Japan.

The story doesn’t end there. The spirit of defeated Mononobe no Moriya, as he lay dying in hatred and resent, transformed into an onryō. His ghost took the form of a woodpecker, and could later be seen at Hōryū-ji and Shitennō-ji temples in Osaka, pecking furiously at the buildings constructed by Prince Shōtoku, still trying to destroy the heretical faith even in death. Prince Shōtoku was finally able to defeat the tera-tsutsuki (“temple-pecker“) by magically transforming into a hawk and attacking it. After that, the tera-tsutsuki was never seen again.

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