In Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, there are demonic beings called Rasetsu 羅刹.
Some call them man-eaters.
You may be surprised to hear that demons are a huge part of Buddhism,
especially female demons who seduce men.
Old Japanese Buddhist writings are full of stories about men falling to temptation.
Medieval monks thought of women the way school shooters think of women: with absolute terror.
[secksy demons]
It has long been a fantasy of men to travel to a land inhabited by beautiful and seductive women,
ready and willing to ignore them just like in real life.
Hot.
These fantasies were common, but in Japanese Buddhist writings,
they were morality tales used to teach monks to stay away from the coochie.
In one tale of the cooch, some men went to a land of women and became prostitutes.
At first, life was great, but since they were the only men,
they served thousands of women day and night.
They all died from exhaustion. Death by snu snu.
Writers didn’t pull any punches. A common saying went,
“women are the emissaries of hell; they cut off forever the seeds of buddhahood.
On the outside they have the faces of bodhisattvas, but on the inside they have the hearts of demons.”
The rasetsu was part of this tradition of morality tales.
Now there are male rasetsu, but who gives a s--t.
The female rasetsu is a creature that can change into a scorching hot woman who starts Australian wildfires.
If you’re a man and you meet one, this cannibalistic creature would seduce you,
and then she would swallow you.
That’s the good news. But then she would eat you too.
Now it’s hard to imagine a society of islanders so seksually perverted and degenerate,
but the Japanese do exist.
Next to them, though, is a fictional island called Rasetsukoku 羅刹国, or Land of the Rasetsu.
This is where most female rasetsu live.
["Tell me a bedtime story, father." "Sure, I know a good one."]
The first Japanese mention of the Island of the Rasetsu was in a story from the 1100s called
“How Sōkara and 500 Merchants Went to the Land of the Rasetsu.”
It was an Indian story that made its way to Japan.
One day a merchant named Sōkara and 500 of his merchant buddies set sail looking for treasure.
Unfortunately all they found was a strong wind that made their ship crash onto an unknown island.
They were all, “Oh no we’re going to die.” Then they were like, “Well hold on a minute”
when a group of women came to the beach, singing.
Their voices were like those of the best opera singers, because no one listened to them.
They were all busy looking at how beautiful the women were.
The ladies beckoned them to follow, and follow they did, right into this cool mansion.
Turns out, they had crashed on some fantasy island of gorgeous women who were just waiting for men to come,
just waiting for a chance to satisfy their desires.
Each man was free to pick any woman to be his wife,
and for some time, they lived in bliss.
Now some of the men probably already had wives, but you know what they say.
What happens in Rasetsukoku stays in Rasetsukoku. And for things that don’t, there’s penicillin.
Only one man thought he smelled something fishy,
and it wasn’t between the island women’s legs.
The leader of the expedition, Sōkara, snooped around the island.
And in a place far from any undulating bodies, he found their secret.
It was a cave, and scattered on the ground were bones, bits of flesh, and entire corpses.
There were men locked behind bars, some of them missing limbs.
He had found a prison for men.
One prisoner told Sōkara that he too used to be a merchant.
His ship crashed and the women welcomed him and his crew.
They lived in seksual pleasure. All their needs were met.
Until another ship crashed.
He and his men were thrown in prison.
The women cut the tendons on their feet so they could not run, kept them there for food.
It’s all fun and games until someone gets eaten.
He warned Sōkara that the women were rasetsu demons, and they should run away.
Sōkara told his men what he saw. But their ship was wrecked, how could they escape?
Some of the merchants fell down and prayed to the bodhisattva Kannon. And she actually responded.
Surprising, because nowadays, now that she’s all famous, she never responds.
You’ve changed, bodhisattva.
A great white horse galloped by.
Sōkara and some of his men grabbed on as it flew over the waters.
The women saw this and changed to their true demonic forms to chase after them.
One of the men on the horse made the mistake of thinking of his new wife’s beautiful face and lost his grip.
He fell into the sea and was gobbled up by the demons.
Two years later, Sōkara was at home. He thought his little adventure long ago was behind him,
but while he was in bed, his rasetsu wife appeared.
She looked beautiful and told him to return to the island, but Sōkara had a good head on his shoulders,
and he thought with it.
“I will kill you if you don’t go away,” he said.
His wife stormed off to the palace to complain to the king,
and the king fell madly in lust with her.
Sōkara heard the news and ran over to warn the king.
“She’s a man-eater, Your Dumb Majesty!” He said.
Unfortunately, His Dumb Majesty had given in to desire and spent 3 days in bed with the demon.
After 3 days, the rasetsu woman exited the room with blood flowing down her lips.
All that was left of the king was a pool of crimson and hair.
Having your king slayed usually makes you mad, just ask any chess player.
Sōkara gathered an army and attacked the island, killing all the rasetsu.
Afterwards, he became king of the island, and his descendants live on it to this day.
There are many versions of this story in Buddhist writings.
Some say it’s an origin story of Sri Lanka.
Some say Sōkara was the Buddha in a past life, and the story was an allegory
of him escaping his desires and ascending to nirvana.
The island is even in the Lotus Sutra, one of the main Buddhist texts.
In it, the bodhisattva Kannon is supposed to protect you from 10 great dangers,
one of them is the danger of being shipwrecked on an island of man-eating demons.
Very specific, for some reason.
In the Lotus Sutra, the demons are actually male, not female.
Later stories changed it to an island of female demons,
which stuck when the stories traveled to China and Japan.
[help me find it, pls]
If you asked people in ancient times where Rasetsu Island was, they would’ve gestured vaguely south
like they were American and you just asked them where Bolivia was.
The island was always somewhere down yonder south.
People saw it as a mysterious land at the southern edge of the world.
Since the stories began in India, people thought it was Sri Lanka.
But when the stories came to Japan, the Japanese thought it was an island to the south of Japan,
because Japan was the center of the world of course.
The Japanese even started drawing it in their maps.
The earliest example is this map from 1305.
South is up on this map, if you’re confused.
It’s labeled “Land of Rasetsu”
and has the text “Women here, those who enter never return.”
But this map also has the Ryūkyū islands, and says its inhabitants have the bodies of humans
and the heads of birds, so we probably shouldn’t be using it for navigation.
Fun fact: the word rasetsu 羅刹 is written like this.
It can also be written like this: 羅切, which means castration, leading to fun double entendres.
“My ex was such a rasetsu.” “Oh I’m sorry to hear about your dick.”
The island started appearing in more and more maps.
It was never drawn fully, only one side was visible,
because people thought it was a place of the unknown, yet to be explored.
In some maps in the 1400s drawn by Koreans but using information from the Japanese,
the island was sometimes right next to Japan, or much further away.
You can also see another island on this map called the Land of Women,
which is a different place where women become pregnant
by spreading their legs to the wind, but you probably don’t wanna hear about that.
For much of the Edo Period, Rasetsu Island became standard in all maps of Japan.
This island from the old stories became a real island in Japanese minds.
Alright, for more Japanese Buddhist Lore, check out these videos.
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