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!

Today’s yokai is one of the scarier ones to be sure, but it is not scary like the previous ones. This is a special kind of scary; a creepy kind that gets under your skin, but also makes you laugh. Like a B-horror movie, maybe?

Japan does seem to have a fascination with toilet monsters, and today’s is an example of one of these. Unlike Hanako-san or Aka manto, Kanbari nyudo doesn’t slice you open or strangle you or kill you… he just watches you. And a big hairy priest watching you on the toilet is definitely a scary thing!

Interestingly, this was one of the hardest yokai to research for my book. Like Tamamo no Mae, his history has a lot of strange connections to China, and also like Tamamo no Mae, it is based on misinterpretations by Japanese authors long ago. The details of kanbari nyudo:s Chinese connection are written on yokai.com, so I won’t go into them here, but needless to say it took some effort to uncover the invented history behind the yokai, untangle it from the actual Chinese history it was based on, and then present it in a manner that makes sense.

I hope you enjoy reading it, and be careful when you use the toilet!

Click the above link to read about kanbari nyudo, and get the book on amazon.com!

Today’s yokai also comes to us from Indian folklore, brought to Japan with the coming of Buddhism, just as the ashuras were. In fact, you could almost consider this yokai to be the opposite of an ashura.

In Buddhism, there are 6 “realms” of rebirth: heaven, ashura/asura, humans, animals, gaki (or hungry ghosts), and hell. When you die, you will be reincarnated in one of these realms.

Where you are rebord depends on the karma you earn during your life. The ranking changes from tradition to tradition—some put humans above ashura—but this is one commonly accepted ranking of the favorability of the realms. Some of these realms are familiar to us; the gods in heaven and the suffering denizens of hell are no stranger to us, even though the Buddhist versions of them differ slightly from Western customs. (I did a writeup on hell a while back which can also be found The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits.) The realm of humans and animals are pretty easy to understand, of course. And we learned about ashura yesterday. Today, I’ll tell you a bit about gaki. But first…

Of all of these realms, heaven is of course the most pleasant. Gods have nearly unlimited power and live lives of sheer pleasure. They live for uncountable aeons and enjoy so much. However, the downside to being a god is that eventually, when your time is up, you are almost guaranteed to go waaaay down to hell for the next life. Gods have very little concept of justice, you see. They get whatever they want whenever they want. Life goes so well for them that they earn an awful lot of bad karma, which comes back to bite them in the butt.

Ashura are similar to gods. They are super powerful, and have subjects to rule over. They are kind of like demi-gods. But, like gods, they are not able to concentrate on the better things in life. They are constantly jealous of the power that gods have which they don’t. They are always fighting and destroying and overcome with feelings of wrath and jealousy. So when they die, they tend to go to hell as well.

Hell, of course, is the worst place of all to be. Unlike in Western cosmology, Buddhist hell is not eternal. It may last for trillions of years… but you will get out eventually, after you have burned off all your bad karma. Then you get a respin at the wheel of reincarnation for a chance at something a little milder.

The realm of animals isn’t so bad… you get a fairly decent life. However, you are constantly at the mercy of the weather, of other animals, of lack of food and water… you don’t get to enjoy much, but you don’t suffer like those in hell either. Ultimately, though, the animal realm is not the best place for reincarnation.

The human realm is considered by Buddhists to be the best place to be reborn. It’s not the most pleasurable, of course; heaven is far nicer than the human realm. However, the human realm has just the right amount of pleasure and pain that humans can have a shot at controlling their karma. The gods have too much pleasure, the denizens of hell have too much pain, ashura are too violent, animals are too dumb… It is believed that only in the human realm can one succeed at finally producing no karma, and thus no longer being reborn; i.e. ascending into Buddhahood.

Lastly, there is the realm of gaki. This is commonly known in English as the realm of hungry ghosts, or by its Sankrit term, preta. These are lost spirits that didn’t have enough karma to be reborn into the animal realm, but were not bad enough to go to hell. It’s not a pleasant place. They are constantly hungry, and forced to eat excrement, blood, dirt… anything, as they try to sate their hunger. However, they can never be sated, and always suffer. A gaki is not tortured like a hell-being is, but a gaki is always suffering from the most basic life instincts, and lives its entire life in misery. Obviously, also not a good place to learn how to become a Buddha.

One question that often comes up is where do yokai fit in in all of this? Are they gaki or ashura, or something else?

Yokai are not Buddhist, and so there is no official ruling on what exactly they are. I’m sure some priests would say they exist somewhere in these realms. Certainly yurei are strongly connected with Buddhism in Japan… but yokai? Not so much. In fact, most folklorists say that yokai don’t fit in at all. They don’t live in a realm of reincarnation. Yokai live in ikai, the “otherworld,” and do not reincarnate, or maybe don’t even die. I haven’t really heard any Buddhist doctrine on yokai, except for one example:

Did you guess tengu? If so, good job! Tengu have long been considered the main enemies of Buddhism in Japan. Tengu are one kind of yokai which there is a direct path to becoming: a human that is so wicked, so evil, that they do not even deserve hell can become a tengu. They are reborn in Tengu-do, or the realm of tengu—a place outside of the wheel of reincarnation from which there is no escape. Tengu never get a chance at becoming a Buddha or being reborn in a better world. They are stuck there forever, as a yokai, forever apart from happiness and barred from enlightenment.

So even while the gaki seems like an awful existence, remember that it could be worse. You could be a tengu!

Gaki – http://yokai.com/gaki/

Click on those miserable gaki to visit yokai.com and read all about them! And pick up your copy of The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits to read about gaki, ashura, the underworld and hell!