Spooky fun from Japan

The ridiculously frightening world of Japanese spooks | The Japan Times Online

Well, what a fun article this is about old supernatural tales and games in Japan. For example, this is how samurai would sometimes amuse themselves:

During the Edo Period, for example, there was a popular game among the samurai called Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai (A Gathering of One Hundred Supernatural Tales). The players gathered in a room at night and, after lighting 100 candles, took turns telling scary stories. After each tale a candle was extinguished, and the room steadily grew darker and darker. It was believed that when the room was pitch black, a ghost would appear.

Pretty good fun before TV was invented.

The Japanese do have amusingly strange folkloric creatures. The one mentioned in the last paragraph is particularly impressive:

Another distinctive feature of Japanese folklore is a quite large gang of oddball demons and spirits called yōkai that walk a thin line between horror and ridiculousness. Not exactly human but capable of a wide range of human emotions, these creatures tend to be neither good nor bad but are certainly mischievous, often getting their kicks by playing tricks on their victims.

Matt Alt, an American yokai expert whose book "Yokai Attack!" is a guide to surviving an encounter with these monsters, says that their shape-shifting powers make them particularly hard to recognize. "Probably the easiest to grasp are the kappa (water goblin), the tengu (mountain goblin), the kitsune (fox) and the tanuki (raccoon dog)," he says.

The most famous Tokyo-specific yokai are probably the Nopperabo ("faceless ones"), which Lafcadio Hearn wrote about in his 1904 story "Mujina," and the huge leg featured in "Ashiarai Yashiki."

"The Nopperabo are normal-seeming humans but with horrifyingly smooth and featureless faces," explains Alt. "A century and a half ago they were often seen in Akasaka's Kiinokuni slope, once considered one of the scariest places in the city."

"Ashiarai Yashiki," on the other hand, is the tale of an enormous, disembodied leg and foot that smashes through ceilings without warning in the dead of night, demanding to be washed. "Legend has it that the first 'big foot' appeared in a royal mansion in the Edo district of Honjo, corresponding to Sumida Ward in present-day Tokyo," Alt says.