Zashikiwarashi, The Ghost that is Saving Japan

Abstract

Zashikiwarashi is a ghost which is well known in Japan but not well known in the western world. Richard Dorson did briefly mention this ghost in his Folk Legends of Japan (1962), a book that he began with high praise of Kunio Yanagita, the “father of Japanese folklore,” who first wrote about Zashikiwarashi in 1910 in his Tono Monogatari (which translates Legends of Tono). Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken also mentioned the ghost briefly in their book Ghosts and the Japanese (1994), and they pointed out that the spirit of Zashikiwarashi has been associated with the spirit of unborn children, either through abortion or through mabiki, which was an old practice of killing some children right after they were born so there would not be too many mouths to feed. Even though Zashikiwarashi is not well known outside of Japan, for the past few years Japanese culture has been inundated with Zashikiwarashi stories in numerous manga, anime, TV dramas, novels, movies, stage plays, musicals, computer games, short stories, newspaper articles, magazines, Internet websites, folklore books and children’s books. In my opinion, these stories relate to a number of social problems that Japan is now experiencing: a low birth rate because young people do not marry until they are almost 30, a high suicide rate, bullying, a phenomenon known as “hikkikomori” (young men and women who withdraw from society to stay in their rooms because of their inability to interact with society), and the economic necessity of families often having to live apart because of their jobs. This is not to even mention the depression and despair of the 2011 tsunami which killed more than 15,000 people and displaced more than 340,000 people in Japan.