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

by Drazen, Patrick

  Television is responsible for insuring that programs of all sorts which occur during the times of day when children may normally be expected to have the opportunity of viewing television shall exercise care in the following regards:

  (a) In affording opportunities for cultural growth as well as for wholesome entertainment.

  (b) In developing programs to foster and promote the commonly accepted moral, social, and ethical ideals characteristic of American life.

  (c) In reflecting respect for parents, for honorable behavior, and for the constituted authorities of the American community.

  (d) In eliminating reference to kidnapping of children or threats of kidnapping.

  (e) In avoiding material which is excessively violent or would create morbid suspense, or other undesirable reactions in children.

  This last clause was taken in part to mean that cartoon characters could not refer to death or dying. (Let the record show that the Disney film Bambi, made in 1942 and containing a character death necessary to the plot, did not receive its network television premiere until 2005.) When the anime series Go Lion was broadcast in the U.S. as Voltron, references to dead characters were written out—despite on-screen imagery that would confirm a death to someone with enough experience to decode the symbols (a drop of dew rolling off of a leaf, a sunset, falling blossoms). Even the alien monsters were re-christened “ro-beasts”—implying that they were part animal, part robot, and therefore unlikely to “die” in any meaningful sense.

  Occasionally, a Japanese studio would create its own dub into English, with results that could not always be predicted. One famous example (from a Reiji Matsumoto space opera), had an alien utter the immortal line: “This isn’t a human; it’s a woman!” This would be a literal translation of the Japanese, but a rather strange one to western ears.

  Sometimes, the script is so inherently culture-specific, so laden with satiric or serious references to history and puns opaque to all western non-scholars, that liberties have to be taken. This is certainly the case with madcap anime comedies like Haunted Junction, BoBoBo-Bo Bo-BoBo or Excel Saga. The 1991 series Kyatto Ninden Teyandee (Cat Bunch Secret History Teyandee) was a sci-fi parody of life during the Edo period (1600 to 1850), assuming Edo to have been populated by cyborg ninja animals, some of whom ran a pizza delivery service. It was also a satire on contemporary Japanese events and personalities; the references, in any event, were so outside of most Americans’ experience or knowledge that the dubbed series was radically altered by creating scripts that stuck to the basics of the visuals and turning it into Samurai Pizza Cats. Sometimes a juvenile series is rewritten, leaving the basic story intact but somewhat retold, recognizing the limitations of the intended audience. The conversion of Ojamajo DoReMi into Magical DoReMi may not have been literal, but at least it was respectful of both its source material and its western viewers (at least, for the one season of episodes broadcast in the United States; the original series, which included Doremi’s mother telling her daughter how she once wanted to commit suicide, ran for four seasons). The anime feature Windaria was edited for a younger audience by editing out the sex and some of the violence, and renaming it Once Upon a Time.

  On a more serious subject, the 1954 Japanese science fiction film Gojira told of a dinosaur awakened by atomic bomb testing, which proceeded to lay waste to Tokyo and thereby establish a popular movie template copied dozens of times. The original, however, occurred shortly after the H-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, and scared American government officials with its potential as anti-bomb propaganda. The script even singled out one incident in which a real fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon, had been contaminated by fallout from the blast. Hollywood optioned the movie, showing it only in Japanese-American neighborhood theaters, then in 1958 threw half of the original on the cutting-room floor, and filmed entirely new scenes with narration from a reporter (actually actor Raymond Burr). It would be fifty years before the Japanese original was available on home video in America.

  With Ghost Stories, though, ADV may have decided to boost sales by fixing something that wasn’t really broken. Perhaps they thought that the “perfectly nice children’s series” had to appeal to a broader audience that would be too jaded to accept the familiar school ghosts in a post-Ringu environment. Unfortunately, they needed to realize that, unlike science-fiction anime set in some distant future or on a faraway planet with social rules built from the ground up, this series was nested so deeply in Japanese culture that attempts to Americanize the story would simply cause it to fall between the two cultures. Fortunately the DVD includes the original Japanese soundtrack, permitting the series, with all apologies due to ADV and Curb Your Enthusiasm, to be seen as it was meant to be seen.

  The opening shot of the title animation is a portrait of the major characters in the series: Satsuki, her brother, their friends, their father and his parents, the teachers, and (although this isn’t clear at first) the children’s dead mother. Early in the series they find a notebook she had kept; this turns out to be a detailed guide to the local ghosts, spirits and demons. Not only that, but at times Momoko goes into a trance and apparently channels the spirit of the mother to help the children deal with whatever demon is threatening them (although afterwards Momoko doesn’t remember any of it). This not only establishes Momoko as at least a potential itako (spiritual medium), but that the late Mrs. Miyanoshita also had a fair share of psychic powers. This plot device allowed the series to fuse the old beliefs in spirits with the newer ghost stories, and put them all in a modern context.

  One more important narrative piece of the puzzle: the land around the town is being developed. This construction activity created a lot of destruction of the forest, including one large camphor tree that was part of an old Shinto shrine. Just the mention of a camphor tree should have set off alarm bells in the anime fan’s head; a giant camphor tree marked the shrine in the country next to the house rented by Professor Kusakaba for himself and his daughters in Hayao Miyazaki’s signature film Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) and a camphor tree was communication channel to Ayako Matsuzaki, the self-proclaimed miko in the Ghost Hunt series; and there’s a large tree on the grounds of the shrine run by the family of Kagome Higurashi in Rumiko Takahashi’s InuYasha. The second episode of Gakkou no Kaidan kicks off the ghostly activity at the school when the viewer learns that, with the destruction of the camphor tree, local spirits imprisoned by it (and by Satsuki and Keiichi’s mother in her youth) are loose again, and the rest of the series involves trying to round them up. It’s a simple and elegant plot device that allows the original series of books, which was basically a catalogue of ghosts and rumors about ghosts, to be given a dramatic structure.

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  When anime and manga examine school ghosts, the number seven comes up, whether there are more or fewer than seven actual ghosts. Each haunted school is declared to have its own “seven wonders of the world,” a phrase originally referencing some of the great achievements of ancient western civilization (the great pyramid of Giza, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the lighthouse at Alexandria, etc.)

  The anime series CLAMP Campus Detectives takes place in a large self-contained world that can hold schools from elementary school through graduate school, plus house students, faculty, their families, and support personnel—ten thousand people in all. Of course, this mega-campus has its own Seven Wonders, which include The Nightwalking Beauty. The story revolves around a picture in the campus art gallery, of a young woman in kimono with a kitten. According to rumor, the painting memorializes a woman and her pet who died in a fire. Still, the ghost reportedly walks by night; hence the name. The ghost turned out to be a rumor, triggered by the sound of stray kittens .

  Saito High School has far more than seven resident ghosts, but the principal seven in Haunted Junction, based on a manga by Nemu Mukudori, are known as the Seven Wonders. Student Nobuhiro Watanuki, who inherited his family’s ability to see spirits, is asked during the manga xxxHolic by CLAMP if t
his gift makes him one of the seven wonders of his school. And in the second anime episode of Mythic Detective Loki Ragnarok, one of the deities of the Norse pantheon, trapped in the body of a young boy in Japan, is given a guided tour of his new school’s “seven wonders.” These tend to be rather lame “wonders” with perfectly normal explanations: a skeleton, for example, that moves by itself is actually just hanging in front of a hole in the wall and is pushed around by a draft. Only the last wonder, a suit of armor inhabited by a spirit, turns out to be very real and very dangerous.

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  Ghost Hunt

  Ghost Hunt is a ghost manga (art by Shiho Inada, story by Fuyumi Ono based on a series of teen novels she wrote; akin to the Goosebumps series in the U.S.) where many of the ghosts are encountered in schools. The manga ran beginning in 1998 in the shojo manga (comics aimed at a readership of shojo—adolescent girls) magazine Nakayoshi. An anime version of the manga premiered in Japan in October 2006 and immediately became one of the Top Twenty anime series in Japan. One odd occurrence: an announcement appeared in Nakayoshi that, although the magazine would stop publishing Ghost Hunt, the manga would continue to be published in paperback tankobon editions.[74] The eleventh and apparently final volume made it into English late in 2010. In any event, life would continue for this school ghost story that’s solidly shojo.

  Students in a girls’ high school are visited by a bishie[75] boy, Kazuya Shibuya, who happens to be the head of Shibuya Psychic Research[76]. He and his eclectic ghost-busting staff begin the series by investigating the goings-on at an abandoned, supposedly haunted high school. Of course, ghosts are only part of the story; Shibuya has a “cute meet” with one of the girls, Mai Taniyama, and they seem to hate each other almost immediately. Of course, this state of affairs doesn’t last; after she breaks one of his cameras and sidelines Shibuya’s assistant, Mai ends up working for Shibuya (let the love-hate relationship begin). Because of his aloof manner, Mai gives Kazuya a private nickname: “Naru,” because she thinks of him as a narcissist. She’s not, as it turns out, the only one.

  They start by investigating possible psychic activity in the old school next to Mai’s. The old school was to be demolished when the new one was built, but demolition could never be finished. Something always happened: workmen were injured; a teacher committed suicide; a truck went out of control, ran onto the schoolyard and killed three students. All of these things could be explained by other than psychic causes, but… Joining the Shibuya Psychic Research company in the investigation (at the request of the rather panicky school principal) are a haughty miko (a Shinto shrine maiden, although this one isn’t associated with a particular shrine), a Buddhist monk on leave from his monastery, a popular television “medium,” and an Australian Catholic exorcism student named John Brown. He’s well-meaning but has a few flaws. For one, he speaks Kansai, the dialect of western Japan, which makes it hard for the Tokyo-bred agency members to take him seriously.[77] Another time, he discusses the funding of Naru’s agency; however, the word he uses for “sponsor” is a very different term, one applied to the patron of a prostitute.

  Even one of Mai’s classmates, a girl who insists that she’s receptive to psychic phenomena, gets into the act. In the end, the school’s problems are traced to… land subsidence. It may be a let-down for that particular ghost story, but it’s only the first in a series of psychic investigations.

  Mai, by the way, has some sort of psychic ability, although it’s hard to determine what it is at first, and it’s only “discovered” at the end of the third volume in a roundabout way. Naru administers a test for ESP abilities to Mai: a thousand responses, and she gets all of them wrong. Statistically, this is impossible: she would have gotten a quarter of them right by mere chance. According to Naru, this means that Mai has “latent sensitivity… to harmful outside influences.” In a way, it’s a shame that the story goes off in this direction, attributing Mai’s good-hearted compassion to latent psychic powers instead of her intrinsically yasashii nature, as would happen in more conventional shoujo stories. Still, that nature comes through: in the long story reprinted in volumes 6 and 7 of the manga, Mai enters a trance and makes contact with the spirits of people murdered in a grotesque haunted house. Mai is also the only member of Shibuya Psychic Research to shed a tear for these spirits, and (despite her abilities) she comes to represent the point of view of “Ms. Average.”

  Haunted Junction

  One of the ghost stories told at the very beginning of the Ghost Hunt manga recalls Red Mantle, but doesn’t quite tell the whole story:

  Someone standing outside a public toilet at night (although other locations and times of day come up in other versions of the legend) is asked a question by what seems at first to be a disembodied voice: “The red cloak or the blue cloak?” The only acceptable answer is to run away at top speed, because at least that way you’d stay alive. If you asked for a red cloak, your throat would be slashed from ear to ear, and you’d be left to die in a pool of your own blood (the red cloak). The blue cloak isn’t a much better end: death by strangulation, leaving a body with a blue-tinted face.

  This time around, however, Red Mantle is a drop-dead bishounen, not unlike Tuxedo Mask in Sailor Moon. He doesn’t kill anyone, nor do the other ghosts in Haunted Junction, a “late-night” anime of 12 episodes broadcast in Japan in 1997.

  The seven principal ghosts haunting Saito High School are a motley crew, but mostly inspired by school ghost legends. Along with Red Mantle (his sister, Blue Mantle, appears in one episode), there is the Mirror Girl, a child who appears in (and travels through) mirrors, evoking the story “In a Cup of Tea” from Hearn’s Kwaidan.

  On the more modern side, there’s the statue of Sontoku Ninomiya[78] which used to stand on the grounds of every Japanese school. Ninomiya (1787-1856) was a prominent agrarian reformer, but was also remembered (and still is today) for setting an example for Japanese youth: the school statues showed a young Ninomiya reading a book while carrying a bundle of firewood on his back. School kaidan maintain that the Ninomiya statue can be found running around the school grounds at night; in this case, one member of Saito High’s Holy Student Council, a Shinto miko, tries to make the ghostly statue her love-slave.

  Parallel to this is Kazumi Ryudo, a young Buddhist monk, and his interest in the ghost of Toilet Hanako. Toilet ghosts have a long history in Japan, predating the building of modern schools. The ghost is responsible for toilet stall doors opening and closing by themselves. Calling Hanako’s name causes her to appear, as she does in Gakkou no Kaidan asking, “Shall we play?”—the rest is often too frightening to tell.[79]

  While ghosts in elementary school are all about scaring people, this Toilet Hanako is in Saito High School’s boys’ bathroom and, with her very revealing schoolgirl uniform, appeals to the sexual side of the male students. She especially appeals to Ryudo, a young Buddhist monk like his father. This teen monk has a thing for Hanako-san, and tries to hook up with her (and any and every other young attractive female toilet ghost in Japan) every chance he gets.[80] Things get in the way, though, including the spirits of various dogs and cats near Saito High; Ryudo is so sensitive to ghosts that he often gets possessed by random passing spirits—even the non-human ones.

  Two of the ghosts live in the school science lab. Bones is, as his name suggests, an animated skeleton. Its partner Haruo is also an animated teaching tool; specifically, the “living boy” cutaway statue with removable wooden “organs”. Those statues can be creepy enough during daylight hours; it makes sense that the image of this statue, like the Ninomiya statue, moving around a school after dark on its own, would become part of modern ghost lore. These two ghosts, however, are rather lame; their big “scare” in the anime consists of breaking into a Russian folk-dance.

  The school gymnasium is haunted by a nameless giant, who’s so big that all anyone ever sees of him is his foot.

  The Chairman rounds off the list of school spirits; yes, a ghost runs the haunted schoo
l, which accounts for most of the ghostly goings-on. He collects occult objects, which brings unwanted spirit phenomena into the school time and again.

  While the ghosts often drive the action, with the resident ghosts having either to assist or protect the school and/or each other from outsider ghosts, the story centers on three human high school students. These make up the Holy Student Council, and they’re all exorcists out of different traditions, as in Ghost Hunt. We’ve already met Buddhist monk Kazumi Ryudo and Shinto miko Asahina Mutsuki; the third member, and often the focus of the series, is Haruto Hojuko. He’s a Christian, who sometimes appears in a white variation of Catholic clerical garb—as do both his father and mother. (Perhaps this is part of the joke, that a woman would wear priest’s robes, given the Catholic Church’s antipathy toward women in the priesthood, as compared to the tradition of Shinto priestesses and Buddhist nuns in Japan.) Unlike John Brown in Ghost Hunt, Haruto’s exorcist technique isn’t orthodox, and is handled almost like a superpower.

  Still, throughout the 12 episodes, Haruto bemoans his school, his place on the Holy Student Council, and every eccentric thing in his life. He repeatedly complains that his life isn’t normal. All he wants is to finish school, get a job, get a girlfriend—all of the mundane things that seem to happen at every other school to every other teenager but never to him. It isn’t until the final episode that he gets to see how lucky he is that his life isn’t normal (which in this case is defined as dull, gray, and faceless).