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

by Drazen, Patrick

  This particular story is pretty intense for Minoru. It tells of a young and disrespectful student at a shrine, who asks to go to the nearby woods to pick chestnuts which are just ready for harvest. The priest gives the boy three ofuda with which to protect himself, and he ends up needing all three. While he’s in the grove, the boy meets an old woman who offers to cook the chestnuts for him at her house. While he’s there, he realized that she’s an evil witch who is planning to kill him; he sees her sharpening a large knife.

  At this point in the story most of the toddlers, not just Minoru, start screaming and crying. Minoru has gone so far as to wet his pants, and has to be taken home.[70] The story leaves Minoru more nervous than usual, especially at night.

  For the rest of the manga episode, Minoru is stuck home alone with his brother Takuya while their father goes on a business trip. Minoru asks Takuya to stand guard as he uses the bathroom; he then sees water-spots on the bathroom wall as the glaring eyes of the evil witch.

  This all continued the next day, when a friend of Minoru’s tripped and fell in school. When she stood up with Minoru’s help, her hair was hanging in front of her face, which made her look like Sayako in Ringu (or any number of other Japanese female ghosts, including Oiwa in Yotsuya Kaidan), which set Minoru off again.

  That night, with the wind howling outside, Minoru watches a television program: “The Mystery Horror Hour,” one of many supernaturally based TV programs in Japan. This sends Minoru under the bed, and reminds Takuya of the time he had a similar reaction to a televised showing of A Nightmare on Elm Street. At the time, Takuya had two parents to comfort him; this night, he’s alone with Minoru. Things get “worse” when father comes home, having lost his key and realized that the doorbell isn’t working. Knocking on the boys’ bedroom window sets Minoru off yet again, but at least they’re able to laugh about it afterwards. What finally calms Minoru, however, is Takuya holding his hand as he falls asleep.

  The Japanese have a word for this: “skinship.” Despite all the media monsters on the Japanese landscape, from legendary ghosts to prehistoric monsters, the most healing phenomenon is through direct touch. Minoru finds this as he holds his brother’s hand, as Takuya’s parents did the same for him. In this context, it’s no accident that Kaoru was desperate to hang onto the umbilical cord that connected him to his mother. And it probably was no accident that, when Japanese citizens who had been kidnapped by North Korea were repatriated after decades away from home, they were not able to loosen up mentally and feel that they were home again until they bathed in a hot springs with family they hadn’t seen in years. (WSJ story, spring 2003)

  Skinship also is the ultimate reality of a situation, since the skin has been described as the largest sense organ of the human body, including not only the skin itself but the entire neural network of feeling, of temperature and pain. Perhaps it is in this context that spirit photography is especially disturbing. It offers “evidence” of something that can (under the proper conditions) be seen, but not felt (or, in the case of the ghost attacking Momoko in Gakkou no Kaidan, something felt but not seen). The notion that something (or someone) can be so physically close, without one being aware of it through any of the senses, certainly generates more anxiety than most fears, especially in a culture which places such a high value on what can be felt.

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  60. Preserve the Moment

  Yuko Ichihara in xxxHolic runs a curio shop in which some of the items are helpful, some are downright dangerous, and some are so mysterious that they seem to transcend the whole notion of good and evil. In one story, however, a customer brings a curious item to the shop.

  The customer is a thin, tall, black-haired woman who asks Yuuko’s help with something in an envelope—an envelope wrapped in string as if to keep something from escaping. Yuko, whose totem animal is a butterfly, offers a small wrought-metal picture frame that looks like a butterfly, with the implication that it would limit whatever was in the envelope. The woman opens it and takes out a photograph of a woman with light wavy hair in a summer dress, with her back to the camera.

  As Yuko’s assistant Watanuki watches, the frame begins to melt; not only that, the woman in the picture begins to move. The movement is very slow at first, but gradually she turns to face the viewer and show herself to be a rather pretty woman. She smiles as the customer comes into the picture and stands next to the other woman. They seem to be friends; there is a sudden movement, and the light haired woman drops out of sight below the bottom of the picture. The customer, now alone in the picture, turns so that Watanuki can see the hideous smirk on her face. The customer is talking to herself, accusing the light haired woman of stealing the man who loved her, and saying that the police had decided that the other woman simply slipped on the edge of the cliff.

  This was what terrified the customer: letting someone else see the picture, and guess at the truth. She asks Yuko’s help in destroying the picture, and Yuko agrees, on one condition: the customer would have to go through life never allowing herself to be photographed again. When the customer agrees, Yuko takes the photograph, which dissolves into the air like sand.

  Later, Yuko tells Watanuki that her condition may be impossible for the customer to meet, with surveillance cameras, film crews, and so many other ways in the modern world of having one’s picture taken unawares. The customer will have to stay in her house for the rest of her life if she wants to avoid being photographed altogether, and even then, Yuko suggests, there are no guarantees. The episode leaves the unanswered question of which is worse: the customer’s fear of what the picture revealed, or what she would have to do to keep it from happening.

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  61. A Yukionna

  A yukionna figures in one of the episodes of Gakkou no Kaidan, as does a photo which drips blood.

  In early winter the five children take a train up into the mountains, to a town called Satoyama. They’ve been invited to an inn run by a distant relative; the inn is a ski resort but is currently closed and the kids can have the run of the place. This perfect arrangement has a few problems, and one is that the daughter of the household, Miyuki, was supposed to meet their train but never did. The kids arrive at the inn with nobody to meet them there, except the younger daughter Yuki. The inn is old and traditional; the lobby contains stuffed animals and paintings, including the figure of a woman they mistake at first for a yukionna. Yuki’s clothes are also old and traditional: kimono with snow-boots made of reeds.

  As they wait, Yuki takes them to their rooms and tells them the history of the place: that the inn sits on the shore of Bloodstained Lake, whose blue waters turn blood-red when some disaster is about to occur. After lunch, Yuki shows up and tells them that Miyuki is dead. Not only has the lake turned red, but Yuki points to a picture of Miyuki; blood is dripping from the top of the frame.

  As Satsuki tries to call the police from the lobby phone, Miyuki appears at the front door. Yuki has the others bar the door to her. When Miyuki goes to the back door, Yuki runs away. Hajime tries to follow her but gets locked in a closet by the yukionna. A heavy blizzard comes up, which almost pushes Miyuki into the lake. Hajime explains, since the closet he was locked in conveniently had a 40 year old newspaper which told of the daughter of a waitress at the inn who fell into the lake and drowned, that child was Yuki. Because she died alone, Yuki’s spirit developed a grudge against the living; however, before she can kill anyone and take them with her, the very spell she taught them to ward off a yukionna works against her. As she vanishes, so does the snow, and the lake’s color returns to blue.

  At the end, the children gather by the lake to pay their respects to Yuki. According to the newspaper, Yuki wasn’t merely at the inn: her mother had abandoned her there. Yuki spent a lot of her time waiting by the lake for her mother to return; she also spent a lot of time in the lake before her body was discovered. As she reads the article, Momoko’s eyes fill with tears, which should be as clear a signal as the fact that Yuki was capable of runn
ing barefoot through the snow. The young yukionna can now rest in peace.

  CHAPTER 21: SCHOOL GHOSTS

  The so-called “ghosts in school” have made up some well-known old and new anime and manga titles, including Gakkou no Kaidan, Jigoku Sensei Nube and Haunted Junction. Actually, they’re well known but still relative newcomers to Japan’s ghost world. (There were no western-style schools in Japan 200 years ago, but many ghost legends had already existed before the Edo era and were simply transferred and updated to the school system.)

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  Gakkou no kaidan (School Ghost Stories)

  This series (more accurately, a series of series) includes books and live-action feature films as well as several weekly anime series, with one of the latter being noteworthy (or notorious) because of the way it was adapted to American audiences.

  To begin at the beginning: in 1985 a middle school teacher named Toru Tsunemitsu decided to collect some of the “urban legends” he overheard his students telling each other. As he gathered these stories, he was surprised to find that many of the stories were about ghosts, and that many of these ghosts haunted schools.

  The scenario in many gakkou no kaidan would have been common in the immediate postwar years: a new concrete school built next to an old and abandoned pre-war wooden school. Rumors about what goes on in the abandoned school after hours are bound to spread. In retrospect, it seems natural that the haunted school would serve Japan the way that the haunted house serves the west; real estate is in such short supply in Japan, and generations live in houses so continuously, that there probably would be more abandoned schools than abandoned houses.[71]

  Many of the stories focus on a death at the school in the past, which brings about a continuing ghost problem. A child drowns in the school swimming pool, for example, and other swimmers can sometimes feel the ghost pulling at their legs to drag them underwater.

  In 1995 a film appeared which caused a sensation, touching off a wave of school kaidan in Japanese movies. There was one difference: Gakkou no Kaidan (School Ghost Stories), directed by Hideyuki Hirayama, was for, and mostly starred, children. The scares were there, since they’re the point of any good ghost story, but the overall tone of the film was child-friendly, fun, and wholesome without becoming unbelievable or watered-down.[72] The movie spawned three sequels, with Hirayama directing the second and fourth films as well. The third film was directed by Noriyuki Abe, and the anime series actually starts here.

  In 2000 Abe was credited as director and storyboard creator (and, oddly enough, as Music Director) of the anime series Gakkou no Kaidan. Co-produced by Fuji Television and Aniplex and animated by Studio Pierrot, the series credits the books by Tsunemitsu as the basis of the series. The scripts’ actual author is Hiroshi Hashimoto. It’s the story of the Miyanoshita family: widower father and two children, Satsuki (fifth-grader) and Keiichiro (first-grader).

  As for the dub…

  To quote from a company press release by ADV, which adapted the series for western marketing, “ADV’s English dub of Ghost Stories follows the plot of the original exactly. But in place of a written script, [director Steven] Foster simply blocked out scenes and let the actors go. It’s the anime equivalent of [the Home Box Office cable television comedy series] Curb Your Enthusiasm, in that the actors have freedom to riff off one another instead of simply following a prewritten script.” Foster, the press release goes on, “took a perfectly nice kids’ show about modern children who take on supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore and brought in the best voice talent in anime to create a hip, funny action-comedy.”

  The operative word, it seems, is “hip:” the original series was deemed to be “hipness-challenged,” apparently, and ADV decided to fix that. But did they succeed?

  When the father drives away from the Amanogawa school after dropping off his children for their first day, in the original he tells his kids “Be sure to pay your respects to the principal.” This gets turned into, “Remember, just say ‘no’ to… everything.” Not only is this not exactly the world’s funniest joke, it’s utterly out of character in a Japanese setting, where new students would be expected both to show respect to the adults and to seek out classmates with similar interests. It’s even more important here in the family’s furusato (homeland), since as children the father and his late wife had attended the very same school, where the maternal grandmother was the principal.

  Besides, a staple of school anime and manga is the scene where the new kid is introduced to the homeroom and makes a speech about her/himself. This moves the socialization process forward in a culture where social relations are vital. Another Satsuki, the older sister in My Neighbor Totoro, is befriended by a girl named Michiko almost as soon as she moves to her new home (and school) in the country. In Hiroyuki Takei’s manga Shaman King, gang-leader Ryu is defended by one of his gang: “Remember that spring day when I came to a new school with no friends—and you came over and talked to me!?”

  The Miyanoshita family has had to move from Tokyo back to their parents’ old home town following the death of the kids’ mother. As they move into the home that had belonged to the Kamiyamas (the late wife’s family), the husband’s parents are on hand. Specifically, the paternal grandfather makes an offer that would have been expected out of family feeling and sheer politeness, “You shouldn’t have to move into the home of your wife’s family. You could move in with us.” After an interruption from the children, the old man changes his tune: “I guess this house has more room.” He had to recognize, however grudgingly, that he wasn’t equipped to take in two grade school kids along with his son.

  The English lines for the old man start by putting a negative spin on the entire move: “I don’t see why you have to live in your dead wife’s house. It’s sick! You’re sick!” Then, referring to the wife standing next to him, he delivers the unbelievable line: “When this bitch kicks (kicks the bucket; i.e., dies), I’m moving to Vegas.” This is a reading that says much more about Americans than Japanese, and none of it is flattering.

  When Satsuki and her brother first enter the old deserted school to look for Kaya, their odd-eyed black cat, Satsuki originally keeps repeating, “This isn’t scary! This isn’t scary!” In the dub, what comes out is: “Monsters only attack bad people like Republicans, and we’re not even old enough to vote!” All partisanship aside, no fifth-grade girl, in Japan or the United States, would say anything even remotely like this to her kid brother. The key to these school ghost stories, as with all ghost stories, is plausibility. They have to seem as if they could happen in order to be scary.[73] Take away the element of plausibility, make them blatantly impossible, and the stories tip into the realm of comic absurdity, as in the Haunted Junction series. That’s a completely different sub-genre.

  Plus, the line is just not funny, precisely because it tries to be funny. An English line that would have preserved both the sense and the mood of the original Japanese while amusing an American audience would perhaps have had Satsuki say, “I don’t believe in spooks! I don’t believe in spooks! I don’t I don’t I don’t…” For those who absolutely have to have a hip, pop culture reference, this is, of course, an inversion of a line by the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. But the cast was given general instructions and told to improvise.

  In the old school building the two children meet a third, Leo Kakinoki, who calls himself the school’s expert on psychic research. This, at least, is plausible. The dub Leo also proclaims that he’s Jewish, which in Japan is pretty unlikely.

  We also meet a sixth-grade girl named Momoko Koigakubo. Satsuki being in fifth grade, she refers to Momoko as “oneesan”—”big sister”. Momoko tells the other kids that “I seem to have a strong sense for detecting spirits.” Again, this is a plausible part of many school ghost stories: someone with at least a sense, right or wrong, that he/she has psychic abilities. In the dub, however, she announces that she got this sense after she was “saved.” Yes, for no apparent reason, in the English dub, Mo
moko is a born-again Christian in a country where Christians (born-again or otherwise) are less than one percent of the population.

  It is, however, entirely consistent that a Japanese character would attribute qualities to the Christian religion that western Christians would find, to put it mildly, puzzling. Faith was part of the training regimen of the boxer in the manga series Kamisama wa Sausupo (God is a Southpaw), which was itself mildly parodied in another manga mixing Christianity and boxing, Rumiko Takahashi’s Ippondo no Fukuin (The One-Pound Gospel). The Nomura investment house opened its doors on Christmas Day, seeing it as a good omen rather than as a day of rest.

  Why go to all this trouble dubbing a kid-oriented anime? Americans have played fast and loose on occasion with dubbing Japanese films (animated or otherwise) for a number of reasons. Sometimes humor is the reason, although it helps if the humor is purposeful as well as funny. Perhaps the best-known example was when Woody Allen and some friends got a 1960s Japanese James Bond-style film, Kagi no Kagi (The Key to the Key), and turned it into What’s Up, Tiger Lily? The jokes were uneven but generally funny, and also mocked the spy-thriller conventions that were the basis of the Bond films. There is, of course, a villain seeking world domination, but the key to this domination is a recipe for the world’s tastiest egg salad. (As one character helpfully explains it, “Don’t ask me why egg salad; I’ve got enough aggravation.”)

  At other times, scripts were changed by dubbing because they had to be. Early American television, like baseball after the 1919 World Series game-fixing scandal and like American comic books after the outcry against crime and horror comics in the 1950s, announced that it would police itself rather than risk Congressional investigation and possible federal legislation. The result was the Television Code of the National Association of Broadcasters, which tried to limit the content of television, from news broadcasts to children’s programming. The guidelines for the latter include the following: