Japanese Ghost Stories: Spirits, Hauntings, and Paranormal Phenomena Read online

  Today, Otemachi businessmen remain guarded about this tomb in their midst. Supposedly nobody wants to work with his or her back toward the tomb, nor does anyone like to directly face it. Even the mass media takes precautions. Whenever mention is made of Taira no Masakado or his tomb on television programs, for example, the film crew visits the site to pray. Japan may be an economic juggernaut, but Japanese leaders, at least in this business center, seem determined to ensure that one unhappy ghost will not disturb international wheeling and dealing. He may have failed to make himself emperor, but more than one thousand years after his death Taira no Masakado is still wielding his influence.

  What’s more, this influence may be extending far beyond Tokyo. In the small town of Tazawako, in Akita Prefecture, stands the tomb of Taira no Masakado’s daughter, Princess Takiyasha. The Tohoku area became a refuge for members of the Taira clan seeking safety, and Princess Takiyasha was buried here in this sheltered spot. Now, visitors to the tomb say that after sleeping for more than one thousand years, she is beginning to appear again, with her likeness materializing on one of the small, wooden memorial tablets, or kifuda, at the grave.

  In December 1992, for example, someone named Sato Chuji videotaped what he and many other visitors believe is an image of a beautiful woman, with palms pointed upward in prayer and wearing a white kimono. On either side of the figure stand what look like two retainers, and people seem convinced that the image is that of Princess Takiyasha, and that it has considerable drawing power. According to Nakamura Meiko, the nun who serves as the head monk of the faraway Ryugenji temple, in Koide, Niigata Prefecture, a figure stood by her pillow one night, asking Nakamura to come to the grave in Akita, and to bring her monk’s robes. Nakamura obeyed, and has reported that standing at the grave, she felt compelled to kneel down and say, “I am here now.” As she did so, the image appeared, a woman with long hair and red lips, in a white kimono. The nun asked the age of the image, and a voice replied, “I am seventeen years old.” More surprised than frightened, people are now speculating as to why Princess Takiyasha should have awakened after more than ten centuries of silence in her tomb.

  Another breaker of silence is the ghostly weeping in the Diet building, the seat of Japan’s central government. After World War II, the eighth floor of the Diet was used by U.S. occupation forces as a dance floor and school for office workers. According to the story, one woman, disappointed in her love for a man at the dance club, jumped from a window, breaking her neck. Shortly after that the weeping could be heard. The eighth floor was then closed off under the pretext that it was for the purpose of “defense of public morals.” Until 1977, there was a red aircraft alert on the ninth floor, and security personnel used to check this every month. After the taller Kasumigaseki Building was constructed, however, the light was removed. Today, few people venture up to the eighth or ninth floors, so there is almost no one to listen for the sad weeping for unrequited love.

  Another Tokyo building with supernatural links is the 240-meter-high Sunshine Building, completed in 1978, in Ikebukuro. In August 1979, around the anniversary of the end of World War II, fireballs reportedly appeared above the Sunshine Building’s open area. The fireballs were sighted by a third-year high school student who looked up around 10 P. M. and saw three fireballs, which he thought at first were UFOs. Two additional fireballs then appeared, hovering in the sky. After about five minutes, all five fireballs disappeared. In Japan, fireballs are thought to symbolize the dead, and before the practice of cremation became so widespread, they were often sighted, especially in or around cemeteries.

  The Sunshine Building and the six-thousand-square-meter Higashi Ikebukuro Central Park stand on the site of the former prison where seven Japanese war criminals, including Tojo Hideki, were executed on December 23, 1948. After the executions, a memorial was built. In 1964 it was designated a historical ruin, and two years later the Tokyo Metropolitan Government decided to convert it into a park. The actual prison facilities were moved to a new location at Kosuge, in Saitama Prefecture, in 1971.

  For several years, however, construction was delayed because no company was willing to accept the work, which was considered potentially unlucky. Work finally started in earnest in 1978, but during the construction there were many troubling incidents. Three workers were hurt while taking down a thick concrete wall. Another worker heard a ghostly, groaning voice. Yet another who had to work at a tomb ran away from the construction site and was eventually hospitalized in a mental institution. One worker took a picture of the old prison wall before it was destroyed, and the photo contained an extra image, of a Buddha statue wearing a military cap. Construction of the park was completed in 1980 and a stone monument erected, wishing eternal peace. So far the spirits seem appeased, although fireballs are still seen from time to time.

  Until the mid 1970’s the Nichigeki, near Yurakucho, was a popular entertainment hall. Able to seat more than three thousand, it featured a variety of shows such as chorus girls dancing the can-can. In 1970, a dancer known as Suzuki (neither name in this anecdote is real), was cast as the lead. She had joined the show along with 250 other women, but only six from the original group remained. The day before the first scheduled performance, Suzuki died in a traffic accident. “The curtain will rise shortly,” were her dying words. Her close friend, Kimura, completely cleared out Suzuki’s dressing table, but when she returned later she was shocked to find a photograph of Suzuki there. The next day Kimura, arriving early at the Nichigeki, encountered another dancer, dressed and ready to perform. It was Suzuki, her clothing covered in blood, making sure she was there when the curtain rose.

  Iwanami Hall, in Kanda, is also known for the many strange mishaps that occurred while Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (related in detail in Chapter VII) was being staged there in 1976. First, in the November before the play’s premiere, the playwright Uchiai Kiyohiko was hospitalized with what began with stomach pains and toothaches. A subsequent fall in the hospital resulted in a head wound that required stitching. In January, one of the main actors was leaving home for a meeting about the play when he fell down and was brought to hospital in an ambulance. The following month, the actress playing Oiwa felt something amiss when she was eating in a sushi restaurant with four other members of the cast and the waiter brought six cups of tea. When six sets of sushi were also brought, she asked why, and was told that the sixth set was for the other woman sitting there. Incident followed incident, with actors and actresses either falling or being affected by sudden and unusual swellings on their hands. One actor was riding his bicycle at night when a woman emerged suddenly from the shadows, causing him to fall. When he got up she was gone. Badly frightened, he quit the show. Just before the play’s opening, another actor contracted measles, and the day before the opening, the mother of the actor playing Oiwa-san’s husband died suddenly. Then a young scene shifter had his hands mysteriously trampled on, breaking his bones. Of course, the entire cast and related personnel knew they would have to keep praying at and visiting the shrine of Oiwa-san in Yotsuya. It was a year when the spirit of Oiwa-san was particularly restless.

  Close to Yotsuya was a Shinjuku supper club, Stardust, run by Shibata Toku. A well-known singer, she opened the club in 1979, and of course invited many entertainers. The door to the club was quite heavy, and creaked loudly on its hinges when opened. Often the door creaked although nobody was there. At other times, people saw a shadow, but heard no sound. Shibata is said to have declared that she frequently felt that someone was watching while she worked. She saw shadows, too. These phenomena only happened on rainy nights, around 1 A. M. At such times the heater refused to work. Gradually, the shadow at the front door materialized to the point that one night a customer asked about another customer sitting there; the club owner could see no one else.

  On May 14, 1979, it had been raining very hard and was quite cold. There was only one customer at the club when just after 1 A.M., the front door creaked and banged, and a short-haired, middle-aged man
wearing a yellow cardigan entered. Upon being greeted by a hostess, he vanished. Later, there was again running water in the empty men’s toilet. The next day, just past midnight, a customer pointed out that a new customer had just entered, a woman with long hair and wearing a black dress. When the owner went to look, there was no one. One hostess, recalling the previous night’s events, became thoroughly frightened. Everyone began to sing folk songs to gather courage. But it had been too much to tolerate. In the morning, the owner called a moving company and shifted everything out of the club, which was subsequently destroyed.

  In the Hongo area, now home of Tokyo University, there used to be, in the Edo era, a vegetable shop named after the owner’s daughter, Oshichi. In December 1682 there was a big fire in Edo, and Oshichi escaped to a temple, where she spent the night with its caretaker. Returning home, she began to reason that if there were another fire she could run off to the temple again. She then set a number of fires until she was found out and arrested. The following year, at age sixteen, she was burned to death at the stake for arson, a punishment deemed appropriate for what was seen as a heinous crime. Fires were so common in old Tokyo that they were rather proudly referred to as the “flowers of Edo,” but cramped wooden housing conditions meant that such flowers could be deadly. Her tomb was placed in the Enjoji temple, at Hakusan, but during the air raids of World War II, this temple burned down. Later, a book-binding company was built nearby and workers thought they heard a door creaking and the sound of geta. Even NHK came to record the sound, but failed to do so, and the subsequent release of the program resulted in several letters from viewers saying that they, too, had heard the sound of geta. A popular NHK quiz show, “Twenty Doors,” would ask questions of participants, and immediately the correct answers would be written on strips of paper and revealed to the audience. At a show staged at the Matsuya department store in Asakusa, one of the answers written was “The Ghost of Oshichi.” When the paper was displayed, the audience fussed aloud, so that the NHK show host went to investigate. The message mentioning Oshichi had mysteriously disappeared, leaving only a blank strip of paper to be held up to the audience.

  Mystery also surrounded the Kawasaki City Gyokusen branch of the Nakahara Fire Station, about fifteen minutes on foot from Hirama Station. On October 29, 1980, fifty-two-year-old Okuma Isamu was sleeping as usual in the lower bunk on a second floor area. He was awakened around 2 A. M. by someone pressing against the right side of his chest. At almost the same moment, someone entered the bed from where his left foot was. This person gave Okuma a distinctly unpleasant feeling. At the time, Okuma did not really know what was happening, and later joked with a coworker about the man and woman who had entered his bed. Two days later, the same thing happened again, this time around 4 A. M. He tried asking his colleague to turn on the light, but found he could not speak or move. He then saw a man and a woman who looked at him for a while before disappearing into the wall. The man was in his mid-thirties, with a longish face. His naked upper body was muscular, but he had no legs. The woman, of average height and build, wore kimono, and had a round, expressionless face, her head held to one side. She, too, had no legs. Okuma felt that the man, who gave a severe impression, belonged to the early Showa period.

  In 1982, Okuma wrote about his experiences in the newsletter Fire Kawasaki. An overwhelming response from colleagues showed that many others had had similar experiences. Out of thirty-two firemen at that time, for example, one-third had seen the ghosts. The next year, on January 29, a twenty-five-year-old foreman, Akiyama Mikio, saw the torso of a ghost, and when Fire Chief Nakajima reported it to the head fire office, they in turn recounted the background history.

  The fire station and its twenty-meter-high watchtower were built in 1959, right at the edge of the cemetery attached to the Hottaji temple. The hauntings are said to have started almost immediately thereafter. A middle-aged woman wearing a white kimono was seen climbing the tower, and the sound of ascending footsteps could be heard at midnight. When the ground was cleared for the tower’s construction, many human bones were dug up. At that time, all the firemen prayed at Hottaji and held a special service for the dead before each of the tombs. The tower was destroyed in 1980, but a new building was erected in its stead. Ghosts again appeared in the spot where the watchtower once stood, now a sleeping area for firemen. New construction had resulted in the collection of two cement bags’ worth full of human bones which people believed belonged to unknown persons, or the families of tombs interred in Hottaji’s tombs. Old-timers, however, said that there were wetlands as well as rice farms here before, and that the bones could have shifted a long way in the soft ground.

  Wealth had come to this town originally because it could supply gravel and small pebbles, or jari-jari. People had come from afar just to work in the pebble industry, which was so important that even the babies here are said to have cried jari-jari. The bones may have belonged to migrant workers. Once again, the fire station held a service, and in 1982 raised a memorial stone over a square hole dug four meters deep and filled with pebbles. All money for the stone had been donated, and it was decided to offer incense, flowers, and food on the first and fifteenth day of each month. The ghosts were laid to rest.

  A peace of sorts is also believed to have come to the Tokyo horse racing tracks near Fuchu. The tracks were moved from Meguro to Fuchu in 1933, and right from the start people said that the third curve was demonic. Between 1965 and 1974 especially, numerous serious accidents took place there. In 1966, three horses collided on the third curve, and crashed into the barrier. In 1971, Suinoza, ridden by the jockey Marume, attacked another horse, badly injuring Marume, who had to retire. During the Emperor’s Cup race in 1972 the first and second favorites to win suddenly lost their energy at the third curve and could not run. The same thing happened to top horses at exactly the same spot in 1973 and 1974.

  People in the horse racing business can be very superstitious anyway, and the incidents convinced many that the third curve was haunted or manifested some supernatural activity that was spooking the horses. For one thing, nearby were thirty-two old tombs belonging to the Ida family. The Idas served the prestigious Hojo family based at Odawara, and when the Hojos came under siege the Idas escaped to Fuchu. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government purchased the racetrack land through various real estate agents and requested the landowners to move the tombs. This was strongly refused. In the end, the city opted to preserve the tombs as a type of historic ruin. Horse trainers swore that horses would always stop abruptly at the zelkova trees near the tombs and then bolt in fright. This was credited to animal intelligence and the fact that horses have a keen “sixth sense” which enables them to perceive psychic phenomena.

  One by one, the big zelkova trees were cut down, until only the largest was left standing. It had three thick branching limbs, and it was planned to cut these one after the other, and finally the massive tree trunk itself. When the gardener who sawed off the first limb died suddenly of unknown causes, no second gardener would come forward. After several years, the second limb was removed. That gardener also died immediately afterward. At last the zelkova tree toppled over by itself in a typhoon in 1978.

  Long-time residents here also say that the area was once a marsh containing many white snakes, which are considered sacred messengers of the gods. In the years following World War II, however, when food in Tokyo was extremely scarce, some people overcame their awe and ate even the white snakes. Those foolhardy folk are said to have died after their meal. To appease what might well be supernatural forces at the Fuchu racetrack, a statue of the horse god, Bato Kannon, was erected in the 1970’s. Things seem to have quieted down since.

  Slightly farther west is the long-established town of Hachioji, now a commuter suburb for Tokyo company workers. The name Hachioji means eight princes, and one explanation of its origin is that Amaterasu and Susanoo together created five gods and three goddesses. Another story says that Susanoo had eight children, five boys and three girls.
Whatever its etymological roots, Hachioji is acknowledged to be a gateway to limbo, and there are several easily accessible routes to the nether world. Among these is Shiroyama Rindo, a narrow, woodland track at the ruins of Hachioji Castle. A half-rotten wood marker points the way along a shady, usually deserted path, where the only sounds are a burbling stream and a rock occasionally falling.

  The former site of Hachioji Castle is itself another spot where the living can encounter the dead. Erected around 1570 by Hojo Ujiteru in Japan’s civil strife period, Hachioji Castle in its heyday extended over a vast 154-hectare area. Hojo was a powerful feudal lord who placed his foothold in Odawara (currently Odawara City, in Kanagawa Prefecture), and ruled the surrounding region, choosing as his supporting god the deity called Hachioji Gongen. Over time the surrounding village that grew up around the castle assumed the name Hachioji. In 1590 Hachioji Castle was invaded by an army under the command of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who later unified Japan as shogun. The castle was seized on June 23, and on that day many women leapt from the castle walls to their deaths, rather than fall into the hands of the enemy. There was so much death and slaughter that blood was said to have run like a river into the waterfall, even turning the rocks red. The ruins of Hachioji Castle were left untouched for four hundred years, until they were designated a historically valuable site in 1951. Today it is designated a national relic, and excavation studies have been undertaken here since 1977. But much grudge and resentment are believed to have lingered on. On June 23 of each year, the surface of the water is said to turn red, a reminder of a fateful day of loss.