Japan’s Haunted History

More than 1,000 years after the death of samurai Masakado Taira, executives, homemakers and multinational corporations still worship and appease his vengeful ghost. Each day, residents leave food, mementos and money at his stone monument, wedged between skyscrapers in Tokyo’s financial district.

“As far as I know, he’s the only ghost in Japan with his own bank account, which is now worth around $190,000,” Masakado Preservation Society Chairman Tatsuzo Endo said. “That said, I’m not really sure ghosts need money.”

A few miles away, spirits of a lesser pedigree are said to haunt the 70-year-old residence of the prime minister, site of a bloody coup attempt in 1932. For two decades, premiers refused to live there.

Even recently, some residents have complained of shadowy military figures skulking around the courtyards. As late as 2000, then-Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori spoke of funny crawling sounds at night, door handles moving by themselves and strange problems with the electrical system. Last month, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi moved into a newly built residence, and Japanese are waiting to see if the ghosts follow.

“All of Japan is one big ghost home,” said Hitomi Yuki, a psychic who prefers direct contact but in a pinch will perform exorcisms over the Internet. “Sometimes I see so many, I have to avoid them or just zigzag around.”

The flip side of Japan’s belief in several hundred gods and at least two major religions is an equally rich and varied nether world. Spirits traipse the archipelago in forms ranging from deformed, tormented humans to quirky animal-like critters--one explanation, some say, for Japan’s deep-seated love of animation, Pokemon and cutesy characters.

Belief systems are always difficult to quantify, but scientists and folklore experts say ghosts tend to exert far greater sway over the Japanese than over Westerners. Tokyo has 100 designated haunted sites visited by summer bus tours, and ghost themes are almost as omnipresent on Japanese television as police dramas are in the United States.

Whereas American ghosts tend to appear around Halloween, their Japanese counterparts like the summer heat, especially mid-August, when people traditionally clean their ancestral graves. And whereas Western children tend to worry about seeing spooks under the bed, Japanese ghosts are more likely to be found in damp places, especially the toilet.

Japanese ghouls also tend to show up during times of uncertainty--and have impressive staying power. Take the ghost of Taira, an imperial wannabe who died in 940 after losing a nasty power struggle.

In 1872, his ghost threatened to wreak havoc on Tokyo just as the samurai class was losing its power. Only a visit by the emperor to Taira’s former spiritual haunt calmed things down.

In the aftermath of a massive earthquake that destroyed much of Tokyo in 1923, a plan to put up a government building on Taira’s memorial site was scrubbed after a minister and 13 senior officials died under mysterious circumstances.

In 1940, the 1,000-year anniversary of Taira’s death, the Finance Ministry, a short distance from the site, was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. And after World War II, the U.S. military dropped its idea for a parking lot on the site after a bulldozer operator suddenly died. Some even blame Taira for the 1998 bankruptcy of the Long-Term Credit Bank after the institution sold the land under his monument.

Today, employees at neighboring Mitsui Trading Co. still refuse to sit with their backs to his shrine, fearful of showing disrespect.

Few writings or artwork depict the earliest Japanese ghosts, but folk art experts suggest that they were friendly, nonthreatening and closely related to ancestor worship.

Buddhism’s spreading influence after the 6th century changed the hoary landscape, cultural historians say. Ghosts became scarier, reflecting a moral battle between good and evil.

Japan’s transition from a relatively simple rural society to a complicated urban court life of back-stabbing and petty jealousies by the 10th century is also reflected in the ghost world. “Japanese ghosts are increasingly linked to social ills rather than natural disasters,” said Haruo Suwa, a literature and folklore professor at Gakushuin University.

One of the first recorded home-grown ghost stories appeared around 1100 in Japan’s seminal Buddhist text, “Konjaku Monogatari,” when a low-ranking samurai dumps his wife for another woman. He soon has second thoughts and returns to sleep with her only to realize, on seeing her shriveled body in the morning, that he’s slept with her ghost.

As Japan entered the warring samurai period of the Middle Ages, ghosts became more straightforward and less concerned with social niceties. While there had always been some before, the vast majority of ghosts become female around this time, a reflection, experts say, of a feudal society that held women down and left them more likely to bear a grudge.

Sometime around the 17th century, Japanese ghosts lost their legs, a change attributed by some to evidence of hellish torment and by others to the influence of Kabuki, where actors’ legs are hidden beneath ornate kimonos.

Recent televised ghost tales find wandering spirits in cell phones, DNA and the Internet. “Mysterious phenomena never die even though society modernizes,” said Hideo Hanabe, a lecturer at Kokugakuin University.

No matter where they lurk, Japanese spirits generally fall into two broad categories. Those in human form, known as yurei, tend to be angry, emotionally complex and closely aligned with humans. Another world of strange animal shapes or half-human forms is known as yokai. These little characters abide by no particular logic and tend to be associated with places rather than people.

Noted author and comic illustrator Shigeru Mizuki says he draws much of his inspiration from their antics. As a Japanese Imperial Army soldier posted in Papua New Guinea during World War II, Mizuki says he was beaten by his commanding officer for wandering off in search of foreign yokai. “What kind of idiot soldier are you?” he recalls being asked.

The way Mizuki sees it, the whimsical yokai and the grudge-bearing yurei represent two sides of the Japanese spirit. Unfortunately, he says, the playful side linked to village life has all but lost out to the serious, stress-filled yurei world of bustling cities and harried businessmen.

A society without frivolity is fundamentally unhealthy, he said. “The yokai aren’t coming around much anymore,” he said. “Japan is losing its soul.”

Japanese culture places a premium on wa, or group harmony. The most powerful ghosts, therefore, reflect its opposite, a world of tortured souls who have angrily left the group of the living. In the Japanese context, it’s far less important what spurred the ghosts’ anger or whether it was justified than the imputed lack of consensus behind it, say ghost and folklore experts.

“Japan’s real religion is wa,” said Motohiko Izawa, managing director of the Mystery Writers Assn. of Japan. “The ultimate aim is to keep the wa so that powerful, grudge-laden ghosts don’t appear.”

This inordinate fear of grudges explains why Japanese appease their enemy’s spirits, no matter how dastardly their deeds in life, Izawa added. A notable example is the careful burials given to 13th century Mongols who died trying to invade.

The job of appeasing ghosts has traditionally fallen to Buddhist priests, who exorcise by clacking their beads and chanting sacred passages, often in return for sizable contributions. Sending the ghouls to infect someone else is no good, however. Ideally, the holy men help the tortured souls move on to a higher plane, out of humans’ way.

“I talk to them until they’re convinced to leave,” said Mudo Oda, a monk with the 1,300-year-old Enkoji Temple in Atsugi City.

In modern times, psychics have moved in on the action. Yuki, who charges $400 per appointment, said most of her exorcisms can be done in one sitting. Clients possessed by hundreds of powerful ghosts, however, may require several sessions.

“People can have up to 100 million ghosts inside,” she said, wearing a red dress and bright red lipstick in a room with red curtains, red cushions and a red table. “My rates are reasonable. Some other psychics charge by the ghost.”

While most psychics try not to speak ill of their competitors, the elbows can get pretty sharp. “All those psychics appearing on television are 100% fake,” said Sadao Mori, a psychic based in Aichi prefecture who charges a monthly $140 ghost-service retainer. “I’m the only real one in Japan.”

In the tiny town of Tomika, ghost-bedeviled contractor Tadanori Tanaka took a practical approach when it came to assessing would-be exorcists. “It was hard for me to choose which psychic was powerful,” he said. “So the first question I’d ask them is, ‘How much?’ ”

The problems at his 24-unit apartment building started the day after he moved in back in 1999. The curtains moved by themselves, and the footsteps of nonexistent children could be heard overhead, always running in the same direction, he said.

Neighbors soon chimed in with their own experiences--including flying plates, possessed hair dryers and levitating rice cookers. As word spread that the structure was built on an ancient, very bloody battlefield, the town was inundated by national media, onlookers and more than 30 psychics.

One psychic who asked for $160,000 to solve the problem was sent packing. Another agreed to do it for $400 but had to refund the money when the ghosts failed to disperse. And one borrowed the possessed hair dryer and never returned it. “Maybe he needed it,” Tanaka said. “He had pretty nice-looking hair.”

Finally, the haunted residents agreed to let another psychic, Yoshiko Shimo, give it a go. She arrived with 15 monks in tow, and after three days of almost nonstop chanting managed to drive away the spirits, at least to the satisfaction of residents. And she never asked them for money, Tanaka said.

“It’s so great to finally have our lives back again,” he said, sitting in his exorcised living room.

As you might expect, the Japanese public’s unworldly appetite for all things ghostly has given rise to abuses. In one of many such incidents, police in Kanagawa prefecture early this year arrested a 54-year-old man on charges of defrauding hundreds of victims. His scam involved accosting people outside train stations, telling them that ghosts were choking them and then relieving them of thousands of dollars in purification fees.

Yoshihiko Ohtsuki, a physics professor at Waseda University, has spent two decades debunking ghost stories and poltergeist tales.

Ohtsuki says the multibillion-dollar Japanese psychic industry does a huge disservice by leading astray gullible young people.

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Makiko Inoue of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.