Since my last post, Obon happened (as did some of my friends’ birthdays). I was about to ignore this, but just the other day, I was asked about the hitori kakurenbo ‘game’ superstition.
So this will be part of a series on spirits, tradition, and things that go bump in the night.
Imagine you’re a child, or a teenager. Stories go around schools quickly; someone heard something about saying a name three times into a mirror, and their friend who tried it got sick the next day. Or you wonder if there’s anything to stories of men knocking on doors, asking questions – that nobody can really remember, except that they were vaguely sinister human figures dressed in black. (Modern examples in media include the Gentlemen and Slenderman.)
In Japan, it’s much the same. There is a story of the game hitori kakurenbo, which translates to ‘playing hide-and-seek with yourself’. Like many of these stories, there are different versions.
But why is this game so creepy?
Things that resemble humans, but aren’t – dolls, zombies, robots, 3-D animated models – can freak us humans out. This is called the uncanny valley effect, and applies to video games just as well as dolls, zombie movies, and puppets. Freud described this as a two-stage process: at first, having something resembling a human gives us some assurance that somehow, we won’t decay and die. But then our mind switches to thinking that yes, we will – and that horrible things will happen to us.
Japan has a long tradition of making uncanny things; and a long tradition of yorishiro, also, coming from a centuries (millennia?) old shamanistic/animistic set of traditions.
Yorishiro ( 依代 ) can be defined as ‘an object or animal that a spirit is drawn to’. Beneficial forms of yorishiro are the goshintai (enshrined spirit-form, like a tree, or mirror) and the omamori – a talisman/amulet from a shrine or temple, carried for good luck. What the omamori often is said to do, however, is act as a sort of substitute – attracting any malicious forces to itself, instead of to the person carrying it. Omamori are also considered a link with the spirit world, and as such, can be installed as a reminder of the spirit world in household shrines.
However, not all spirits mean well, and in this case, a binding and dismissal/exorcism is called for. In the past, miko and priests would do this; the miko would act as a medium, go into trance or directly communicate with the malicious form in question, becoming a temporary yorishiro herself. The priest would supervise, help protect the miko, and do what he could to dismiss the spirit. If they were fortunate, the spirit might only want some of the favorite food it had in life – like a child throwing a tantrum. If the miko and priest were not fortunate…. the spirit could demand much, much more.
It makes sense that these two traditions can be both seen in the hitori kakurenbo stories.
So good night, dear readers. Good night.