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Uncanny Japan - Japanese Folklore, Folktales, Myths and Language title: Uncanny Japan - Japanese Folklore, Folktales, Myths and Language
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In Japan, ghosts don’t wait for October.
Summer—especially the hot, humid weeks around Obon—has long been the season for ghost stories, strange encounters, and deliberately scaring yourself silly.
In this episode of Uncanny Japan, we’ll sit down for hyakumonogatari, the old practice of telling one hundred frightening stories while extinguishing candles one by on...
Every Obon, Japan’s ancestral spirits return home—guided by tiny fires and carried on cucumber horses. This year, for the first time, I’m responsible for preparing my father-in-law’s family altar. Join me for cauldron lids, lost ghosts, strange noises in an old house, eggplant cows, and the rituals used to welcome the dead home and send them safely away again.
On the final days of Obon, fishermen along Japan’s western coast once believed the sea belonged to the dead.
In this episode, I read Lafcadio Hearn’s eerie and beautiful essay “By the Japanese Sea.” Along the journey, we encounter drowned spirits rising from the waves, cats carried aboard fishing boats to ward off ghosts, delicate straw vessels made for lost souls, and...
A short Tanabata tale from the Uncanny Vault: Orihime the weaving princess, Hikoboshi the cowherd, and the river of stars that keeps them apart. On the seventh night of the seventh month, wishes are written on colorful strips of paper, tied to bamboo, and sent into the summer sky.
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Two little boys find a dead bird on a mountain path. One accidentally touches it with his shoe, and suddenly the invisible contagion begins. Fingers cross. A circle is made. A hand chops through it. “Engacho!”
In this episode of Uncanny Japan, we explore the everyday magic words and protective spells of childhood in Japan. There’s engacho, used to cut away contaminatio...