Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Seven Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Sign up now at the zone.com Welcome to Southern Demonology, the wonderful month of Spooktober, and our very first episode that commemorates this month. As always, I'm your host, JJ. And boy do I have something special lined up for this episode. Recently I finished porting over all of my past episodes to YouTube, and as part of that effort, I created specialty playlists that covered broad topics.
While the website has keywords that allow you to filter down to specific topics, I didn't have any anything for generalized broad issues such as demonology, ghosts, or horror that are covered on this podcast. And that was useful even for myself, as I identified more than a few items that haven't I really haven't discussed on this channel before. So today I am correcting one of those things as we're going to dive deep into the world of Yudei or Japanese ghosts. Now I have discussed my time in Japan previously, gone over the one experience I've had there that still cheer chills me to my core.
And if you haven't listened to that particular episode, then I encourage you to check out episode two. Further, I have gone over Japanese horror and curses, and though I have mentioned ghosts in passing, I've neglected to really go into detail about them or monsters from the land of the rising sun. Largely speaking, there are two categories of otherworldly entities Yude and Yokai. And while the lines can definitely be blurred between the two of them, they do stand as distinct categories ghosts and monsters.
And yet that's far too much information to cover if we try to go over both of those very broad things. So we're going to hone into the former here and hopefully keep you coming back for more to hear a future discussion about Yokai. Now most horror fans are aware of Yude through such movies as Ringu with Yamamura Sarako or Juan with Saiki Kayakole. There are even uh there's even that disastrous crossover movie that featured the two battling out very much like Freddie vs. Jason. As Zach Davison wrote in his book Yude the Japanese Ghost, highly recommended if you haven't read it.
It's strange uh that Yude films have become so popular in the West, considering how few people actually realize the significance of what they're watching. The white faced ghost girl is interesting, yes, and scary, definitely. But what is she? Why is she wet? Why does she look the same in every film? What's with the hair? If you understand what you're seeing, then the story becomes deeper and more enjoyable. Unquote. Yes, you day are the subject of countless films, literary works, no and kabuki plays, but they are not fictional. Most Japanese fervently believe in them. My family does, so do I.
They're not just fables or vehicles to induce fear. They are reality and they have a very real reach. In many ways, the dead are much more powerful than the living. They have their place in the home, at family altars. They have their own festival au bon, where they are shepherded to the world of the living and then returned there after three days. They have been responsible for changing the seat of power in the country. Heck, they even have an impact upon the current real estate market.
There is an entire segment of Apato and Manshin apartments and condos, as they're called in Japanese, that are suspiciously cheap. And I mean ridiculously cheap. Many have sat there unoccupied for months, sometimes years. And the reason? They are infested with Yudei. As mister Davidson writes, quote, uh Kishi Kishigami Bunka, the name of our new apartment, was an old two story wooden ram shamble building built sometime in the nineteen twenties.
It was a dusty, run down place called a quote cultural apartment, unquote, due to its old style of living, including woven totami mats, flooring and lack of hot running water, not to mention the tiny trough that passed for a toilet. The rent was absurdly cheap, only twenty thousand in or around one hundred and eighty dollars a month. I thought we were getting a bargain, but Kishigami Bonka had an odd atmosphere, something sensed by almost every visitor. It just felt weird. The unease wasn't helped by the strange red marks all over the ceiling, almost like a small child's hand and footprints.
The marks didn't want to wash off, no matter how much we scrubbed. We even tried bleach. And then there were the unusual bumps and noises, especially the ones coming from the kitchen wall. Stranger still was the door in the living room that led to nowhere. My wife and I had been commanded not told commanded by the landlord to never open that door. He gave no reason for this, offered no explanation, and unlike fullish paper and horror movies, we did as we were told.
There were few outright scares other than brief glimpses out of the corner of our eyes, and the sometimes overwhelming sensation that we were not alone in that particular room. And we took to turning our mirrors toward the wall at night due to an inexplicable yet unavoidable feeling that looking in the mirrors in the dark was a very bad idea. In fact, he goes on to write that other Japanese visitors could and did put a name to the situation. They would remark Ah Urega Detao or there's a year here. And his story is not unfamiliar or even surprising.
In fact, there are a few TV shows by the names of Haunted Real Estate and Cheap Rent on the J Edge Amazon Prime channel that documents quite a few stories of this which are very, very normal. One more case in point. They go around trying to capture monsters on film. And in the first episode, when the director is trying to explain the premise, he says that he had previously been working on a series that captured Yudei on film. But one episode he happened to film a monster. And so he was tasked by his higher ups with filming more of them.
And the line that jumped out to me was quote, however, finding and filming a yokai is much harder than a Yudei. Unquote. This just goes to show how prevalent ghosts are in Japanese society. So let's go through mister Davidson's questions about Yude. He covers a ton of ground in his book, which we'll need to pare down quite a bit. But we can definitely answer the questions that he posed. First up, what are Yude? The term literally translates to dim spirit. Yes, they are ghosts, but they carry a very long history behind them.
One of the first and still extremely famous depictions of Yude comes from an artist named Madoyama Okyo in the year seventeen fifty. He was a young man who had loved his mistress, a geisha at the Tominaga Geisha house in Otsu City by the name of Oki. Unfortunately she had died young, though the circumstances of her passing were not recorded. Yet she would be immortalized. One fitful night Okyo awakened and saw his love, but the vision wasn't a peaceful one. Unnaturally drained of color, her bloodless skin peaked from her loose bone white burial kimono.
Her bleached appearance was contrasted only by the thin slits of her black eyes and by the long black hair that hung disheaved across her shoulders. She had no feet, unquote. And while she gazed at him for a moment, she then quickly disappeared. The artist grabbed his brushes and a roll of silk and then painted the very first Yude or ghost portrait. In fact, this Yude became his most famous painting. And if you've seen any Jehoar that depicts Yude, then this imagery is quite familiar.
Oki became a template that has imprinted itself upon the Japanese psyche, and the three great Yudei tales from the Aido period Oiwa, Otsuyu, and Okiku, also known as the San Ory, further cemented Yudei in Japan. Oyowa's tale, part real world mystery and part ripped from the headlines real world murders, were first told in eighteen twenty five in a kabuki play, and it's not a pretty one. In fact, that kind of fits Oywa as she was reputed to not be very pretty either. Historical feminine names were often preceded by the honorific O sound, which usually enhanced their elegance.
For example, Oyuki means snow, O Kiku means chrysanthemum on flower. Owa's name wasn't quite as helped along as it essentially means the rock. Oywa's married to a Ronan named Iamon. In the play, Iamon wasn't happy with Oiwa. In fact, he had a mistress whom he wanted to marry instead. So in order to dispose of his current wife, he poisoned her. However, the dose wasn't strong enough, and it paralyzed the left side of her face. In fact, in many depictions, it's not just paralyzed like a stroke victim, it rather looks like her face is made of dripping wax.
More, uh, when she goes to brush her hair for the first time after her transformation, half of it falls out. This in particular. Event contract trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Calci products are not available in all jurisdictions. Prices, values, and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, see Calci.com/slash regulatory.
Yet Eomon, for all of his bumbling, finally succeeds in killing his poor wife by nailing her body to a board and then dumping it into a fast flowing river. In this way, Oiwa becomes a Yude of pure unadulterated hate and on real. In many of the stories, she even uses her hair as the weapon to take revenge upon her hapless killer. The second of the great Yude is Otsuyu, and she is a polar opposite to Oywa. She is a ghost bound by love itself. Her tale is also much older, having been first told in 1666.
It um I happen to have run across um Otsuyu's tale from an old nineteen sixties TV show that depicted the story of described in the Botan Doro or the Peony Lantern. Otsuyu's tale is one of a forb as is one of the forbidden as it involved sex and death. Somehow Otsuyu met a handsome samurai named uh Shinsaburo and fell madly in love with him. However, she passes away. In some retailing she wastes away from the lack of his presence. And that's actually a pretty common theme that you're finding in a lot of not just Japanese horror movies but in romance novels as well.
Um regardless, one night she appears at Shinsaburo's dwelling, her way lit by a lantern with the peony on top. And he welcomes her in, excited uh that in exclaiming that he thought that she was dead. Elated, he happily spends the night with her. And yes, that means exactly what you think it does. Um yet in the morning she's gone. A monk friend warns him that his happy news is a fiction, and that he just spent the dead night with a dead body. Even more if the samurai continues, then he will suffer the same fate.
Yet in the end, Shinsaburo cannot resist, either through trickery or through his own loins, and he is found dead on the third morning, his body intertwined with that of a rotting corpse. The final great Yude is Okiku, and while her tale is more sad than scary, the concept her story introduces is by and far the scariest idea of Yude. Like with the other two, there were many variations, but the basic story is largely the same.
Okiku is a serving girl from the house Aoyama, and the family she serves in is in possession of a set of ten plates, and yes, dinner plates, believe it or not, that are rarer and much more expensive than mere money. Some say they come from a very far off land, some say that they were an irreplaceable gift that are incalculable in price. In some tales, Ariyama tries to seduce Okiku and hides one of the plates unless she complies with his demands. In others one of the plates is broken, and Okiku becomes a scapegoat.
Regardless, her fate is sealed, as she is either thrown down or commits suicide by jumping down a well. And on eerie nights one can hear her counting the plates one, two, three, hoping to get to ten, but never succeeding. So from the great the from the three great Uday, we've covered a few of the basics, namely the hair and the hatred. But how about the water? You know, uh Davidson had asked, Why is this girl wet? And don't take that in the sexual way, please.
Well, Okiku's story does cover the well full of water, obviously, um, but there is another aspect of death itself, which that spectrum touches. In Japanese, the world of the dead is referred to as anoyo, while the R world is called konoyo. To those familiar with the language, that will ring a bell bell, even if you don't know this particular word. Uh you know, English does have kind of a sc similar concept of describing the placement of something. You know, a thing could be here, there, or over yonder. In Japanese it's a little bit different.
Um, so for example The word Kono refers to a thing that is near me. Sono refers to a thing that's not far away from me, but is rather near to you. So there is actually kind of being replaced by a different type of uh of space concept. And ano is something that is far away from both you and I. So the world of the living is near to us, Konoyo, but Anoyo is far away. And typically the pathway to Anoyo is via water or a river.
In fact, during the festival of Oban, the festival of the dead, which celebrates the return of the dead coming back, people advise against swimming of any kind, as the dead just may take you with them. But you may be asking yourself why I said that something about Okiku's story is the scariest of them all. And that's because she is a true haunting. As Davidson puts it, quote, haunting is not a word that occurs easily in the Japanese language. The most common way to describe the appearance of a Yude is to say Yude God Dataru, meaning a Yude has come forth or appeal appeared.
The phrase can be used in almost any circumstance. There is another word, however, which is uh more appropriately captures the feeling of what Westerners call a haunting, and that word is Tatati. Tatati is a terrifying word in Japanese. It's a corruption of an ancient word tachiati, uh which translated as something like manifestation of a deity, which with the understanding that when a deity appeared in front of you, it probably wasn't going to be good. In modern Japan, tatari has come to mean something along the lines of cursed, unquote.
In fact, if you have listened to episode 23, Curses and Dreams, you'll find an overview of this topic and how it compares to the normal word for curse in Japanese, which is noroi. I fell in love with Japanese horror a long time ago by watching an anthology series of horror called Tokyo Tales of Terror that I somehow found at a yard cell. I don't even remember where. And if you are, then your life is over. Or if not, then you will probably wish it were.
Speaking of Tokyo Tales of Terror for a small tangent, if you ever get the chance to watch the episode Shadow Sitting by Their Feet, I highly recommend it. Uh it's probably my favorite of the entire entire long series, and it has so many good episodes. Um in fact, I nearly didn't finish writing this episode as once I got to this part I started searching up some of my favorite horror shorts and got distracted for at least an hour. Um and I'm saying an hour and I'm hoping to goodness it's actually not more than that.
Um The last item we really haven't covered yet is the white kimono from Davidson's original list. If you ever get the chance to visit a Japanese haunted house or watch an anime or drama that depicts one, then one of the most iconic figures you'll see is a Yude or ghost wearing a white kimono and a headband that has an inverted triangle in the front. Some will argue that while black is the color of death in the west, white is that for the east. But that's not exactly true. White has two particular connotations to it celebration and in this particular case purification.
The dead undergo a full purification ritual and are therefore qualified to wear a pure white kimono. The origins of the headband, also called the Tenkan or Heaven's Crown, or just San Kaku no Shiro Boshi, aka white triangle hat. Um though the exact origin of this headgear isn't quite known, the two prevailing theories for it is that it's either placed on the head of the dead to signify their newly acquired status, or is a ward to prevent evil spirits or demons from entering the empty body. And there we have it, a brief or not so brief look at the history of Yude.
Um through the s uh stories of the three great UD have had numerous retellings and variations over the centuries. One of the most amazing things is that the visual representation of the Yude still holds true to the seventeen fifty UDA of Oyuki. It's as if our comic depiction of a ghost here in the West covered in a bed sheet with holes cut out for eyes is how we come to envision spirits for the next couple of hundred years. As always, thank you very much for joining me on this journey.
I've had a ton of fun doing the research for this episode, and of course, getting an excuse to read books about you day, or watch videos about them, or delving back into Tokyo Tales of Terror. Always so much fun. It's one of my favorite topics of all time. Uh, I really hope that you've liked it too. Um, join us back again uh hopefully next week uh where we'll have another fantastic or at least in my mind uh topic that helps to celebrate the upcoming Halloween um uh day. So uh again, really appreciate it. Hope everyone's staying safe out there. And until next time, take care.