A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (7 page)

That’s more like it. Unlike the
Kousetsu
Hyaku
Monogatari
, this time the ghosts are real, and threaten to break through from their realm to that of the humans. This is part of the attraction of ghost stories: the lingering thought in the back of the mind, “But what if it’s true?” Besides, as CLAMP artist Satsuki Igarashi points out, “Just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

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Sidebar:
Shi

Once the quartet has arrived for the telling of ghost stories, Yuko suggests that things be shortened: each of the four people should tell four stories. This doesn’t exactly make things better, and the problem is in the number four.

There are two ways of counting in Japanese, one of which is borrowed from the Chinese. In both countries, using this system causes problems when one gets to four. Ichi, ni, san; they’re fine. Then comes shi—which happens to sound like the Chinese and Japanese word for “death.”

Does it make a difference? According to one study conducted in 2002 at the University of California La Jolla, cardiac deaths for Chinese and Japanese Americans spike 7 percent on the fourth of each month.
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In addition, some Japanese buildings (especially hospitals) refuse to list their fourth floor, as some American buildings don’t mention having a thirteenth floor. The room numbers also leave off the numeral four, as a way of avoiding an omen of bad luck.

Like many superstitions, this one isn’t easy to change. Another sound (yon) has been given to the number four, but yon has yet to replace shi.

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Even ghosts aren’t immune to this belief, as illustrated by this encounter from the series
Gakkou
no
Kaidan
.
[17]

 17. Dead Air

Both the old and new schools in the village of Miyanoshita are equipped with radio studios. Students with an aptitude for broadcasting can get some in-house experience with announcements, music, and interviews. Unfortunately, they also gain experience dealing with malevolent spirits. Back in the day, Satsuki and Keiichiro’s mother had trapped one spirit in the broadcast booth of the old school. Unfortunately, it’s gotten loose and invaded the new school.

Satsuki finds herself locked in the broadcast booth with the ghost one night. Until now, she’s has a diary written by her mother detailing how all of the various spirits were subdued. This time, the book is outside the booth; she’ll have to figure it out on her own.

She figures it out when the ghost starts counting down her last thirty seconds. However, the spirit skips the numbers twenty-four and fourteen. This tells Satsuki the ghost itself is superstitious, and she yells “Four! Four!” again and again until the final second has passed without the ghost getting to zero, and it vanishes.

 CHAPTER 7: CEMETERIES IN JAPAN

Shaman
King
hero Yoh Asakura has grown up seeing spirits all of his life, and thinks nothing of loafing around in cemeteries and goofing off with the ghosts. However, his second battle for the position of Shaman King takes place in what the manga calls “Chokohama Foreigners Cemetery”. There is, of course, a major difference between Japanese and non-Japanese burial grounds: corpses. In Japan the tombstone serves as a channel of communication with the deceased. A person’s cremated ashes may rest beneath the stone, or there may be no trace of a person at all. Anyone bringing offerings of flowers or food or drink or personal effects knows that the living will benefit from these gifts rather than the dead. (In Satoshi Kon’s anime feature
Tokyo
Godfathers
, the three homeless heroes who find an infant abandoned in a dumpster also find an offering of disposable diapers in a cemetery.) Even if the deceased’s ashes are buried there, the spirit in the other world is what’s important.

The Judeo-Christian tradition, by comparison, venerates the body of the deceased and inters it, either as it was in life or in as close to lifelike as mortuary science can get. The dominant myth in the Judeo-Christian religion involves the resurrection of the physical body after death. To the Japanese, this way of doing things, keeping corpses nearby and ready to walk again, is creepy.

Chokohama Foreigners Cemetery is a rather obvious stand-in for Yokohama’s Foreign General Cemetery. The similar name is the first clue; the second is the information that the cemetery was founded when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 on orders from President Millard Fillmore. (The mission was to keep an eye on the British, with whom America had an uneasy truce after the War of 1812 and who established a major foothold in China after the Opium War of 1839.) When one of Perry’s sailors died in 1854, he was entombed on the grounds of the Zotokuin Temple. While one of Perry’s company is indeed buried at Zotokuin, this isn’t the only version of the cemetery’s founding. Two Russian sailors died in Yokohama in 1859, according to another account, and were buried there.

One of the more important foreigners buried there was Charles Richardson, a British merchant based in Shanghai. In 1862 Richardson was part of a group of foreigners who were traveling through Japan. In the village of Namamugi, which was long ago absorbed into Yokohama, the entourage of the father of the Daimyo of Satsuma, including a thousand soldiers, came down the road. The foreigners were ordered to dismount to show respect; Richardson refused, for reasons that are not clear, although Richardson was quoted as saying “I know how to deal with these people.” Samurai, who by Japanese law could kill with impunity, attacked the foreigners, killing Richardson and two other men. This led to a brief but costly bombardment of the village by the British Navy in 1863 and the payment of reparations to Britain. Ironically, within a few years, the Tokugawa shogunate would end, and the Meiji period would begin its emphasis on catching up to the west in all respects.

The third clue, that about 4,500 foreigners are buried in Chokohama, establishes the cemetery as Yokohama, which has a similar number of graves.

Yokohama’s is merely the most famous foreigner cemetery in Japan. There are others: in Hakodate, on the northern island of Hokkaido, where another one of Perry’s crew is buried; the Aoyama cemetery in Tokyo, where some of the more illustrious dead are westerners brought to Japan during the Meiji era to give the nation a technological upgrade after 250 years of isolation; and the port cities of Kobe and Nagasaki. Nagasaki is home for the earliest known burial of a westerner: an official of the Dutch East India Company, Hendrik Duurkoop, who was buried in 1778 in a cemetery where foreigners were already being buried. That cemetery was on the grounds of the Goshinji Buddhist temple overlooking the harbor.

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Christianity itself came to Japan in the mid 1500s, and the few Christian churches tended to be built in the southern part of Japan, where ships from Christian nations traded. Nagasaki is heavily populated with churches (compared to the rest of Japan), and this included the largest Catholic cathedral in Asia at the time: the Urakami Cathedral. The cathedral, and the convent of nuns attached to it, happened to be at Ground Zero on August 9, 1945, when the second atomic bomb of World War II went off.

Manga and anime set in Nagasaki often show Christian churches; examples range from the Nagasaki story in the dating sim-inspired series
Sentimental
Journey
to Yoko Matsushita’s
Yami
no
Matsuei
manga/anime about psychic investigators who happen to be ghosts themselves (more about them in the “Ghostbusters” chapter). A Christmas special in the
Ghost
Hunt
manga (art by Shiho Inada, based on a series of young adult novels by Fuyumi Ono) takes place in a Christian church in southern Japan. While it may not have what the west would call a happy ending, the mystery is solved and a ghost is granted peace.

 18. “Daddy will find me.”

The members of Shibuya Psychic Research are offered a job at a Catholic church; Father Toujo knows the group’s Australian exorcist, John Brown, and has contacted him about strange happenings at the church, including spiritual possessions. In this case, the possessed ones are children: Father Toujo has a day-care and orphanage at the church, and cares for children of various nationalities and races. The strange activity started thirty years before, as the church was being built, and Father Toujo and the children were preparing to move out of their old church. All things considered, the old priest seems rather blasé about it all, comparing the spirit possession to a game of hide-and-seek. The possessed children take on other personalities, then forget what happened when they return to themselves.

At the time the paranormal activity started, it seemed to focus on a child named Kenji Nagano. His father brought him to the church at age five, at which time the boy had stopped talking, and tapped with a stick to answer questions. (Although the manga never uses the word “autism” in describing Kenji, it suggests that this may have been part of his problem; for whatever reason, Kenji’s father abandoned the boy at the orphanage.) One day the children were playing hide-and-seek at the church under construction; Kenji was never found. His spirit has persisted at the church, possessing other children more and more often.

While the group is there Kenji first possesses a young boy, then Mai Taniyama, the heroine of the series. The possessed Mai acts as if boss “Naru” Shibuya’s Chinese assistant Rin is her father. When Rin gets upset and yells at Mai, she runs away; her disappearance is followed by the ghostly tapping Kenji would use to signal that he was ready to play hide-and-seek. After an exhaustive search, the former Buddhist monk, Houshou Takigawa, realizes that the children searching for Mai never look above eye-level. Sure enough, on the church grounds they find Kenji/Mai hiding up in a tree. However, finding her doesn’t free Kenji’s spirit. That happens when Naru goes back into the church and looks up at the angelic statues, set in alcoves high up on the walls. One of the angels seems to have one foot resting on a skull, but then the searchers realize: that skull wasn’t part of the sculpture. Thirty years before, while playing hide and seek, Kenji had climbed construction scaffolding and hidden behind the statue of the angel; while he was up there, the scaffolding collapsed, trapping the unspeaking boy behind the statue, where he died. When construction was completed on the church, nobody thought to investigate the sculpture; but, when Naru and company realize the truth of the matter, Mai tells Naru, in Kenji’s voice, “Thank you” before the boy’s spirit leaves Mai’s body.

This ghost wasn’t especially malicious; Mai remembered that he “seemed pretty happy”. Not all Japanese ghosts are threatening; sometimes they’re just out of their place, like Kenji and the girl under the hydrangea, and may need some help getting home.

 CHAPTER 8: SUICIDE

Of all of the different beliefs between east and west, perhaps the greatest difference is in the attitude toward taking one’s own life. In the Judeo-Christian west, suicide is never considered an acceptable option. In the second scene of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, the title character, upset nearly to suicide by the sudden death of his father and his mother’s hasty marriage to her dead husband’s brother, wishes that “the everlasting had not fixed/His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter.” (I, ii, 131-132) Put simply, the Old Testament commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has been interpreted as rejecting suicide as well as murder: Thou shalt not kill oneself.

Since the Bible didn’t get to Japan until the 1500s, there simply is no history of specifically religious injunctions against suicide. Buddhism, with its belief in the rebirth of the soul after death, generally doesn’t share the Judeo-Christian rejection of suicide. It’s still not a common means of ending one’s life, but is common enough: Japan, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), has the ninth highest suicide rate in the world—more than 30,000 per year.
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Much has been made of Japan’s prolonged economic troubles, since the real estate bubble burst around 1990, as a reason to commit suicide; sensational reports have also appeared of “suicide clubs” on the Japanese internet. According to the WHO, however, things in Japan are more personal: most modern Japanese suicides seemed to be driven first by health problems, then by money problems and unemployment.

In classic Japanese lore, and even in the pop culture of anime and manga, there are many more reasons for suicide, involving everything from romance to schoolyard bullying. The Buddha, in an early incarnation as a rabbit, killed himself by jumping into a fire so that an elderly sage might find nourishment in him. Love is usually high on the list of reasons, as in this ghost tale from the 14
^th
century collection known as
Shintoushuu
(Tales
of
the
Gods
):

 19. The Glorious Princess

Back in the fifth century, an elderly childless couple lived at the foot of Mount Fuji. One day, the old man was wandering through the bamboo grove behind their house when he met a beautiful little girl. She seemed to have no idea where she came from, so the old couple took her in. They named her Kaguya-hime (Princess Glory) because she seemed to give off a beautiful light of her own.

As she grew older, she also grew more beautiful. Word spread of this lovely woman, and men from all over the province sought her hand in marriage. At last, she agreed to marry the governor of the province. They lived together happily, but, soon after the girl’s adoptive parents had died, she surprised her husband by telling him that she was not human. “I am the Immortal Lady of Mount Fuji,” she told him, “and I came down to earth to bring happiness to the old couple who raised me. Now I must go home.”

She gave her husband a small wooden box. “You can find me at the top of Mount Fuji; come and look for me there if you miss me. Or, look inside this box.” And, saying nothing else, she disappeared.

The governor, who loved her deeply, could not be consoled. He looked in the box, which contained the special incense known as Incense to Recall the Soul. However, when he looked into the box after burning the incense, he did not see Kaguya, but only a shadowy spirit. He climbed to the top of Mount Fuji, where he found a small lake with an island in the middle. However, steam rose up from the lake, so that he could not see Kaguya on the island either. With this final disappointment, the governor walked to a cliff, held the box of incense to his heart, and threw himself off.

Still, the governor and his princess were reunited in death; the two of them became the god of the mountain. Even though there is only one god of Mount Fuji, sometimes it would appear as a man and sometimes it would appear as a woman. And, when the governor threw himself off the cliff, the box of incense burst into flame, and the clouds of burning incense became the smoky clouds that stay near the summit of Mount Fuji, symbolizing love and longing for many people.
[19]

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Suicide is generally considered one of those sensitive subjects in the west that are kept away from children. However, the subject often appears in Japanese pop culture, and is presented with a surprising frankness even to a very young audience. The anime series
Ojamajo
DoReMi
, a sunny little comedy about a group of grade school girls who are also witches in training, has a scene in the second episode of the so-called “Sharp” season
[20]
that is jarring to someone who isn’t ready for it. The witches have spent the better part of a day trying to care for a baby for the first time, and as fifth-graders they were worn out very quickly; they had to call for help from the mother of the main witch-child Doremi. When the exhausted Doremi comes home, she skips dinner and goes to soak in a hot bath. While she’s in there, her mother comes into the bathroom and gets into the tub with her daughter.
[21]
When Doremi asks her mother if she was such a handful as a baby, the mother tells her that she had dreams of being a concert pianist, and that, when she injured her hand in an accident, she was so depressed at abandoning her dream that she wanted to commit suicide. The only thing that saved her, she said, was getting pregnant with Doremi. No matter how much Doremi cried, her mother said, she heard those cries and even regarded Doremi’s kicks in utero as an encouragement: “Mother, do your best; I’ll always be beside you.”

One of the most popular manga in Japan in recent years had a main character who became a ghost after committing suicide. And this suicide-ghost, who befriends a sixth grade boy, was not driven to death by health concerns or romantic or financial problems, although he had recently lost his job under unfair circumstances. This man committed suicide over a game.

 20. For the love of the game

Hikaru Shindo is eleven years old, doesn’t do well at school; the word “slacker” applies here. At least it did, until Hikaru found a game board in his grandfather’s attic while rummaging around for antiques to sell (his grades being so bad his parents cut off his allowance). The small wooden table was meant for playing go, an ancient Japanese territory-capture game. At first, Hikaru sees stains on the board that others cannot see, then hears a voice that others cannot hear.

Enter the ghost: Fujiwara no Sai. Dressed in elaborate courtly robes of the Heian period, he was no less than a go instructor to the Emperor and his household. A jealous rival, however, challenged Sai to a game, and not only cheated but accused Sai of cheating. Sai lost his composure, lost the match, lost his position at court and his reputation; two days later, he threw himself into the river. Death, however, was not the end.

Sai is clearly a wronged servant in the Okiku mold (Okiku’s story is featured in chapter 10). But his ghost doesn’t stick around in order to see justice done or to wallow in misery. Sai loved the game of go so much that he could never get enough of it. He especially longed for the chance to make one specific play, the so-called “Divine Move”. However, being tied to a game board, Sai’s ghost was at the mercy of whoever owned the board, even if it meant the owner seldom or never played the game.

When Hikaru lets him out and about, staying close to Hikaru by taking up residence “in a corner of his soul,” Sai sometimes reacts with the amazement and even childishness of someone trying to take in centuries of change. Jet planes, push-button umbrellas, vending machines, the Internet—these are just some of the changes Sai observes and absorbs (some changes more easily than others).

Sai had previously waited in the go board for hundreds of years, until he was discovered by a very different child from Hikaru, Honinbo Shusaku.

Sidebar:
Honinbo
Shusaku

Honinbo Shusaku (1829-1862) is considered by many to be the greatest go player of the 19th century, if not in the entire history of the game. Shusaku was born Kuwahara Torajiro on June 6, 1829, the son of a merchant in a village north of Hiroshima. By the age of six he was already known as a prodigy. Lord Asano, the daimyo (lord) of the region, heard of the child’s abilities. After playing a game with him, Asano became his patron, and allowed him to get lessons from his own personal trainer.

In November 1837 Shusaku was sent to Tokyo (then still called Edo) to become a student of the Honinbo school. Two years later, Shusaku was awarded a diploma at age 10. In 1840, during a visit back home, he was awarded a yearly stipend by Lord Asano. Arriving back in Edo in September 1841, Shusaku was given the name we now know him under. In 1844 he left for another stay at Onomichi, this time staying there for eighteen months.

In July 1846, at age 17, during his travel back to Edo, Shusaku met Gennan Inseki, of whom it is said that he was strong but had the bad luck of living in a time when there were several other extremely strong players.

Back in Edo, Shusaku was asked to become the heir of Shuwa, who was to become the next head of the Honinbo house, but he refused because of his obligations towards Lord Asano and towards his own family. After some mediation, the Asano clan relinquished its claim, so in early 1847 Shusaku could become Shuwa’s heir.

Later that year, Josaku died, and Shuwa became the new leader of the Honinbo house. Shuwa was already recognized as the strongest player of the day. In 1848 Shusaku was officially recognized as Shuwa’s heir, still no more than 19 years old.

In 1862, a cholera epidemic broke out in Edo, and several disciples of the Honinbo house caught the disease. Shusaku was active in caring for the sick, which resulted in his catching the disease himself. On August 10, 1862, only 33 years old, he died.

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All this would seem to confirm Hikaru’s original hunch: that the go board in his grandfather’s attic was an antique. After all, he can see where the wood was stained by the blood of the dying Shusaku. However, he’s the only one who can see those stains.

At first, Hikaru would seem to be the least likely person to help Sai reach his goal. He doesn’t know anything about go; furthermore, he doesn’t care. But, in order to keep Sai from pestering him, Hikaru begins taking go lessons (in exchange for Sai’s help with his history homework), and is gradually drawn into the game on his own. This is another example of a common theme in Japanese pop culture: young people would do well to look to their history and revive the arts and traditions of the past.

The shifting relationship between Hikaru and Sai is the backbone of the series. Sai is eager to return to his roles as player and teacher, and sometimes throws Hikaru in over his head. But, as Hikaru gains understanding of go, he begins to assert himself, needing Sai’s guidance less and less (although Hikaru is perfectly capable of getting himself in too deep at times). This leaves Sai with decidedly mixed feelings: pleased that the pupil is successful, but uneasy about his new place in this new Japan once Hikaru no longer needs him. But that’s a much later installment in the story.

While Hikaru and Sai seem an unlikely couple brought together by fate, the similarly unlikely team that created the manga was brought together by an editor at
Shonen
Jump
. Like Hikaru, writer Yumi Hotta knew little about go, but, while playing a game one time against her father-in-law, she thought that a manga about go had possibilities. She drafted a scenario and sent it to
Shonen
Jump
’s annual Story King Award. It didn’t win—and neither did the artwork of Takeshi Obata, who was a runner-up for the Tezuka-Akatsuka Award, also sponsored by
Shonen
Jump
. An editor assigned to Obata found Hotta’s story, and realized that the two artists would complement each other. The addition of go master Yukari Umezawa as a technical advisor completed the creative team.

The manga debuted in late 1998 and ran for 189 episodes, giving rise to a popular 75-episode anime series broadcast on Japanese television from 2001 to 2003. Once the series ended, Obata struck gold with the popular, edgier manga series
Death
Note
.

Entertaining as well as educational,
Hikaru
no
Go
also inspired what one writer called a “micro-renaissance” for go in Japan and other Asian countries, even generating interest in go in the United States. It’s a tribute to the manga/anime that, since the series appeared, anime conventions in America, in addition to spaces for screening anime, playing video games, and selling and displaying fan artwork, usually set a room aside as a go parlor.

Sai is certainly one of the most “kid-friendly” ghosts, in every sense of that word. Knowledgeable yet emotional, wise and naïve at the same time, understanding of both the game of go and the way to think while playing it, he is a ghost who poses no threat at all to Hikaru.

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In another story from the anime series
Gakkou
no
Kaidan
[22]
, the suicidal ghost is hardly as benevolent as Sai.