Japanese ghosts and Yokai: haunting and anxiety by Dr Atsuhide Ito

This free online session leads us through two traditional Japanese ghost stories. Anthropology has historically encountered many ghost stories and images as folkloric expressions of a value system, conveyers of historic and collective trauma. In the case of Japan, ghost stories in traditional theatres, literature, film and painting are structured in the form of haunting. Both 'The Ghost of Kasane' and 'The Story of O-Iwa' are stories of injustice inflicted on women in the early Modern period. A generationally inherited sense of injustice forms a structure of haunting. A similar narrative is made in the more recent ghost story of the Ring made popular through both Japanese and Hollywood adaptations in film.

Different from ghost, a Yokai, or a non-human being who inhabits the same physical world as the one humans do, tends to cause nuisance to humans. They tend to have an appearance of a monster with a feature of grotesque. Some contemporary reinventions appear frequently in popular animations such as in Demon Slayers, and Studio Ghibli films including Spirited Away. The session returns to one of the most popular Yokais Nopperabo as an earlier expression of anxiety about change, and political and cultural instability. The session also introduces the recent manga series Mushishi or the insect doctor who treats patients suffering from a spirit possession. Through the medium of ghosts and Yokais, the session explores the possibility of working with injustice through time, and how visual culture and storytelling convey invisible forces including the imaginaries of non-human others. Finally, the session concludes with participants’ ghost storytelling as practiced in the medieval Japan.