What would you do if you thought a disease was afraid of a color?
Today on Yokai for Those Who Haven’t Died, I bring you a video about hosogami (疱瘡神),
the smallpox god, or the smallpox demon.
Here’s a bite-sized story that will tell us a lot about how the Japanese used to think
of diseases and how to fight them.
I’ll also tell you some old smallpox poems that you won’t want to miss.
Smallpox poems were pretty funny believe it or not, if you’re a horrible person.
Okay.
A man was away from home on a ferry.
One of the passengers with him was an old woman in rags.
There was something off about her, but he couldn’t figure out what.
When the ferry reached the other side of the river the old lady got off
and walked ahead of him.
Suddenly, a pack of dogs attacked her.
She tried to fend them off with her cane but it was obviously a low damage cane because
it did nothing to the dogs.
Being a decent person, the man ran over and scared the dogs away.
Old lady thanked him profusely, then went on her way.
Back at home, the man’s wife was taking care of her son when her son suddenly came
down with smallpox.
Smallpox was a deadly disease.
She took it seriously and did everything she could think of to fight it.
She put up an altar and placed on it things that would appease the gods, helpful things
like red paper, a red Daruma doll, a fire, some food, home remedies made from plants,
all kinds of very helpful things.
But no matter what she did, the boy’s fever only got hotter, and the smallpox sores spread
throughout his body and all over his face.
He cried and cried.
He threw his pillow and broke things around the house,
like her heart.
One day her husband finally returned and a strange thing happened.
When the boy saw his father, he immediately calmed.
He got on his knees and bowed.
At that moment a demon appeared, almost like she jumped out of the boy.
The demon said to the man,
“It’s you! I did not know this was your house!”
She explained that she was a smallpox demon.
She was also the old woman that he had saved from the dogs.
Smallpox demons were terrified of dogs.
She came to the village days ago
and had fun spreading disease and suffering around the area.
Their son was her latest victim.
He would’ve died within days.
But now she was going to return the man’s favor by taking away the son’s smallpox…
that she gave to him in the first place.
She told him to write his name in an abalone shell and hang it under the roof of the house.
Her demons-in-arms will see it and stay away.
With that, she vanished into smoke and wafted in the direction of the neighbor’s house.
He watched the smoke go and thought, “Thank the gods.”
When he turned back, the smallpox had disappeared from his son without even leaving a scar.
His wife, still standing there with mouth agape, yelled,
“What the hell just happened??”
So this little story shows us a lot about Japan and smallpox.
When the disease first visited Japan, it caused wanton destruction.
But it eventually became a disease of children, like chickenpox.
Smallpox was chickenpox’s older, meaner brother who everyone in the family thought
should really get psychiatric help after he kept beating kittens as a kid
but were too polite to say so, but now they’re like,
“Well we all knew he wasn’t right in the head now, didn’t we?”
Smallpox became the number one killer of Japanese children, but not of their parents.
The number one killer of Asian parents was and has always been disappointment.
Before the Japanese ever heard of the germ theory of disease, they subscribed to the
yokai theory of disease.
They thought smallpox was caused by these demons.
Here’s a painting of folk hero Minamoto no Tametomo chasing away a smallpox demon.
Little shrines to the smallpox gods still exist in Japan today.
When you think a disease is spread by a demon, you tend to come up with treatments that are
interesting, creative, and totally useless.
There were all kinds of remedies, and they could be different from village to village.
Let’s look at some of them.
One was the color red.
A color? Yep, just a color.
Red and smallpox went together like rock stars and depression.
When smallpox struck, they just put up red stuff everywhere.
People tied straw ropes called shimenawa 標縄 around the house, and hung on them red paper
streamers called shide 四手.
This also let people outside know to stay the hell away.
Inside, they hung long strips of red paper all over the place.
The sick and everyone around them wore red.
Even children’s toys would be red, like Daruma dolls.
It’s not clear why they chose red, it could be that it’s the color that the sick turned
when they developed a fever.
So did fighting smallpox with the color red work?
Why yes, if you count the placebo effect.
So no, it didn’t work at all.
Another thing people did was go on pilgrimages to shrines.
Shrines were pure places where smallpox could not enter.
People picked up small rocks from the shrine and brought them home.
The rocky magic was supposed to prevent smallpox or make it less severe.
Once the sick recovered, or died let’s be honest, they returned the rocks.
One phenomenon that happened, doo-doo-do-do-do, was that smallpox gave monks an infinite amount
of bamboo hats.
Why?
Because these hats were also supposed to fight off the disease.
People would borrow a bamboo hat from the shrine and place it in their home.
After the sickness passed, they would make a second hat and return both to the shrine.
So these hats kept multiplying.
And that’s why monks never ran out of stylish hats.
So why did people think these hats protected them from smallpox?
Well, this is the character for bamboo hats, kasa 笠.
And this is a different character but with the same sound, kasa 瘡.
It means a boil or some type of acne or pimple of the skin, the kind that smallpox makes.
Since they sound the same, they must be related.
Makes sense.
People also turned common household objects into magical ritual objects.
One method was to steal a broom from a childless couple and tie a red scarf around it, then
return the broom after the smallpox went away.
Another was to write the name of the sick child on an egg and bury it under the doorway
of the house, kind of like burying the disease, or burying your head in the sand.
People also pressed various beans and plants into a mixture and applied it to parts of
the body like eyebrows, cheeks, nose, palms, navel, and feet.
Another treatment was eel broth,
where they boiled an eel and washed the child in eel broth.
Dancing was a big thing, people would hold smallpox parties where they ate and danced.
The dancers moved out of the village, leading the smallpox demons away.
Now so far these were all harmless remedies, but in remote places, where smallpox hit the
hardest, sometimes they abandoned the sick children in the mountains.
It’s terrible I know, but maybe we can learn something from them.
It may help our current pandemic if we did abandon certain people in the mountains, like
people who hoard toilet paper.
It may work, I’ll report back.
They also told travelers to steer clear of sick villages, so even without modern science
they must have had some sense that the disease was contagious.
So yeah smallpox was deadly, but that didn’t mean people couldn’t laugh at it.
Which brings us to smallpox poems.
They’re very mean actually.
You can laugh at them, just make sure you feel bad afterwards.
In the embrace of the smallpox kami
the girl is devalued
So the girl has less value after she comes down with smallpox.
Why? Because of the scars.
Smallpox can leave a person’s face pockmarked and disfigured.
When smallpox is rampant the best thing to do:
Find your girl a husband
Meaning hey when there’s a smallpox epidemic, you better marry off your daughter quick before
she catches it and becomes ugly.
A wife’s jealousy when her face is pockmarked
can simply be ignored
Meaning a wife with a pockmarked face shouldn’t blame her husband for cheating.
Two hundred ryo in dowry.
Buy yourself a pockmarked wife.
Live high all your life.
So marrying a wife with a pockmarked face can net you a bigger dowry from the wife’s
family and you can live like a king.
But this next poem disagrees.
A hundred ryo in dowry are soon gone, but you keep
the pockmarked face.
Vicious.
Fortunately, they stopped writing these poems when the smallpox gods suffered genocide by
the hands of the dreaded vaccination gods.
That’s one genocide I support.
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Click here for a video about the history of smallpox in Japan.
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Alright much love, and spread the knowledge!