Japanese folk beliefs

I just finished **December 6 **by Martin Cruz Smith and was amazed by the depth of the background. The story is set, as the title indicates, on the eve of the war in a rather disreputable area of Tokyo populated by whores, gamblers, drunks and police, including the Kempeitai; the equivalent of the Gestapo.

Now, IANJ, nor have I ever been to Japan and know little about folk beliefs, superstitions, etc. Several are mentioned in the book, and I wonder how strongly they were believed, at least in pre-war Japan.

The author mentions a seller of kittens, all of which have had their tails bobbed to prevent then from becoming goblins.

A character in the story says all women are shape-shifters and can become foxes, and vice-versa (I have heard this elsewhere).

He also mentions entering a building where dishes of salt have been left on either side of the front door, but doesn’t say why.

Can anyone comment on these beliefs? Compared to Western superstitions these don’t seem especially bizarre, but they are strange to me, and I would like to know more.

The book was excellent, by the way. I mentioned it in *Cafe Society *yesterday.

This one is a funeral custom; since salt purifies and evil spirits are impure it wards them away from ones home. Wiki on shapeshifting foxes.

Wiki has a list of Yokai, supernatural beings or occurrences. The biggest contrast with western folklore is that they are not necessarily malevolent, whereas ghosts and the like usually are in western mythology. My favourite is sandals coming to life on their 100th birthday.

Interestingly, it seems that by far the most common translation of “Youkai” I’ve encountered is “demon”. Occasionally you’ll get “spirit”, but it’s usually “demon”. It gets to the point where you revise your internal definition of “demon” to basically mean “presumably free-willed creature with freaky magic superpowers”. I’m not sure why it’s translated that way, but there’s really no good English analogue, “monster” may be closer than demon but has similar baggage. Overall, I’d put Youkai on the same tier as generic fantasy and mythological creatures: unicorns, centaurs, elves, wraiths, and so on. No real defining theme but there is a faint common thread.

Youkai can be normally inanimate objects too, like paper dressing screens with eyes, but it’s not hard to fit that into your mental framework with poltergeists and such which still vaguely fit under the “unicorns and elves” category. Likewise, ghostly spirits in Japan can range from Harry Potter to Paranormal Activity.

I find that as time marches on, translation companies are saying “fuck it” more and more and just throwing in the Japanese terms and expecting people to Google it if they care so much what the precise definition is. This trend seems to be relatively independent of medium (anime, video game, live action film, the odd translated song, etc), though obviously the setting has some bearing on the amount of translation done. I’m not sure how much of that is growing familiarity with Japanese culture vs the rise of the internet vs translator laziness*, but I thought it was worth noting.

  • Not sure about laziness, while I consume nowhere near as much Japanese media as I did like 10 years ago, I find translations becoming vaguely higher quality as time goes on.
    As for the foxes, this is a common East Asian myth, generally foxes that live to very old ages (100+) will gain extra tails and get, well, freaky superpowers. I can’t speak for China or Korea, but in Japan one of those powers is shapeshifting into women. Japan has some extra baggage in that they’re related to the god of success (originally the god of agriculture) Oinari-Ookami. Foxes were, obviously, the bane of livestock farmers, foxes like to kill small game, so the legends go that Inari would send foxes as his agents. Piss him off and he’ll send foxes to murder your crops.

Over time this morphed into a more general “foxes are his messengers” theme, not necessarily containing the vague “protection racket” connotation, but still having a bit of a mischievous nature.

That said, you can think of the foxes as being just like people. There are as many legends about them taking pity on a kid or widower and doing something really nice as there are stories about them being complete sociopaths or malevolent tricksters. Still, I feel the “trickster” archetype is more dominant, usually if you see a fox mask. I think there’s definitely an underpinning in Japanese culture that foxes are tricky and cunning (which is a European stereotype too, so it’s not that foreign).

I’ve heard it said that the “many-tailed fox” thing came about because female foxes breastfeeding their young were mistaken for having many tails (rather than babies), but I honestly have no idea if that’s accurate.

Both fairy and spirit used to mean the same sort of thing as youkai, but fairy has become a specific creature and spirit has come to mean something more along the lines of a ghost. “Fae” has started to be used to distinguish the various fantastical creatures that are believed to exist in nature.

Yes, that’s more or less from the original Chinese source. One twist is the Korean version of the fox spirit is basically a western style demon - it’s evil and will seduce and feed on humans.

This is a reference to nekomata - it was believed that when a cat reaches a certain age, and after its tail reaches a certain length, the cat will become a malevolent creature called a nekomata, its tail splitting in two, among other things.

Shape-shifting animals are common in Japanese folklore - kitsune (foxes), and tanuki (raccoon dogs) being most common. The idea that ALL women are foxes is not the usual belief, however.

These replies are fascinating, and I hope I have not offended anyone by bringing them up. As I mentioned, Western superstitions/beliefs are often even more weird.

Holy crap! I just read the Wiki article on Yokai, and if it is possible to be amused and horrified at the same time…can I trust anything in my closet? My clothes hamper?

I don’t think I am going to sleep very well tonight. The woman with the voracious second mouth at the back of her head…brrrr!

Oh pshah, you haven’t even read about onryo yet! Teke teke and Kuchisake onna are waiting for you!

(One thing I find with the malicious Japanese ghosts is that Japan seems to really like the “you’re fucked” angle. With vengeful spirits there seems to be a strong theme of “if you’re unlucky enough to meet up with them, there’s really not much you can do.” I feel like in American legends we tend to give our spooks weaknesses or means of foiling them)

Edit: I’d recommend looking up Akira Kurosawa’s film dreams. It’s not informative in that it’s art rather than a documentary, but it absolutely wonderfully invokes a lot of Japanese myths and legends. The first short in the film involves a fox wedding* and it’s simultaneously amazing and haunting.

  • In Japan and many Easy Asian countries, sunshowers are called “fox weddings”. The reason for this is that the conditions in which sun showers occur cause incandescent light in forests that westerners might call “will-o-the-wisps”. They happen to look a lot like paper lanterns used in wedding rituals, and thus the foxes are getting married!

> The author mentions a seller of kittens, all of which have had their tails bobbed to prevent then from becoming goblins.

Bob-tailed cats are really common in Japan, and the type has been known from antiquity; literally from before there was writing in Japan. The stereotypical alley cat is usually depicted as this type. Long tailed cats were sometimes considered to be dangerous spirits in disguise (猫又 nekomata) or capable of developing into those spirits over time.

The bobbing of the tails might have been a reference to a mythological origin story (like “how the leopard got its spots”) where an emperor decreed that — following a huge fire spread by a panicked cat with its tail on fire — all cats’ tails should be cut off to prevent it from happening again.

> A character in the story says all women are shape-shifters and can become foxes, and vice-versa (I have heard this elsewhere).

Kitsune (狐), or fox-spirit. Probably one of the most commonly-known yôkai (妖怪; monster, spirit, apparition, ghost) in traditional Japanese mythology. They are supposed to be able to disguise themselves as women and/or possess people. Any woman encountered after dark was a possible kitsune in disguise.

There’s at least one story that closely parallels an Irish tale about selkies, in which looking too closely at his wife’s past destroys the marriage.

Shapeshifting, particularly into human women form, is a really, really common power for yôkai in Japanese mythology. Cats are supposed to be able to shape-shift too, as are tanuki and many other animals.

> He also mentions entering a building where dishes of salt have been left on either side of the front door, but doesn’t say why.

Salt is one of the traditional protections against evil spirits in many cultures. In Japan, you use it for purification and protection after returning from a funeral, to prevent spirits from following you home or entering your house. In many places, people will leave a small pile of salt in a bowl (盛り塩 mori-shio) to one side of the door (usually the right) as a symbolic protection. You see salt-scattering in sumô matches as well.

These are all traditional beliefs. In pre-War Japan, given that state-sponsored Shintô was promoted to more than the status as a set of folk-beliefs and remnant of animism that it had from Japanese prehistory, they were probably given far more credence than they have now. Japan is very secularist in outlook, despite the integration of many little rituals of religious origin into daily life. Considering that in modern American culture you’ve still got a significant number of people who sincerely believe that the repetition of a translation of a second-century litany originally written in Greek, or invoking the appellation of a street-preacher who got nailed to a post in Roman-era Jerusalem can protect them from Satanic possession, you might want to calibrate your belief-o-meter appropriately.

As has been said, salt is believed to ward off evil spirits. Shinto is a animist religion, meaning that everything is a spirit, or god. Gods are immortal but death and decay is all around us. That’s because we live on the border between the world of the gods and the netherworlds. Death and decay are signs that our world has been polluted by the evil spirits of the netherworld. Shinto worships life and has nothing to do with death. There is no such thing as a Shinto funeral, and cemeteries are often built as far from Shinto shrines as possible. Salt wards off evil spirits because it keeps things from rotting, and rot is the mark of the netherworlds.

Little piles of salt near entrances, or on the corners of property are still a fairly common sight in Japan.

From the story “Chin Chin Kobakama”, we know that Japanese spirits can be frightened away not by Crucifixes but by razor-sharp katanas.

There are Shinto funeral rites, there’s definitely descriptions to that effect in the Kojiki. They fell by the wayside since the Edo period due to the Shogunate’s mandate that everyone be registered with a Buddhist temple. That said, yeah ever since then it’s been “Shinto has a monopoly on birth and life; Buddhism on death” I think shinsousai also had a brief resurgence during the period of State Shinto, but don’t quote me on that (I know that Shinto temples were authorized to perform funeral rites during that time, but I don’t know if they were just authorized to provide Buddhist death ceremonies).