Another day another spider yōkai to ruin a good night’s sleep.
Sure, to learn about these things you can go read a book or browse Reddit or something,
but you know, there are those who browse Reddit all day and think they’re smart,
and then there are those who are productive members of society, and neither group is watching this video.
Tsuchigumo 土蜘蛛 means “earth spider.”
Spiders can be scary, but they’re easy to get rid of.
However, the tsuchigumo can grow as big as a building.
To get rid of them, you’ll need to find a bigger boyfriend.
Sometimes they’ll have a normal cute spider head,
sometimes they’ll have the head of an oni, or a demon.
And sometimes they’ll even have the body of a tiger but the legs of a spider,
like some last-minute Halloween costume.
The tsuchigumo can shapeshift and conjure illusions.
One story told of a woman who led an entire army of yōkai into battle.
When she was struck down, the entire army poofed.
It was all an illusion and she turned out to be a big spider whose dreams got stepped on.
Shapeshifting into a smoking hot woman who could boil a pot in 5 seconds
is a common way to distract a man before killing him, but they can shift into other people too.
They can also make you sick.
They’ve been known to come to a person’s bed nightly, as a Buddhist priest,
to cast some spider thread magic to keep the victim sick.
Enough of these nightly rituals and it could be fatal.
The tsuchigumo is similar to the jorōgumo 絡新婦, which I already did a video about.
They both can shapeshift, they can eat people, and they spend a ton on shoes.
The difference is in their motivations.
A jorōgumo just wants to eat handsome men, a tsuchigumo can eat or kill any person for any reason.
Doesn’t have to be a man, doesn’t have to be good-looking.
They might want to kill a famous hero for the clout,
or they might be feeling bored that day.
A word can accumulate different meanings over time,
and can be interpreted in different ways depending on context.
Take the word “daddy.”
In real life, it’s perfectly fine for a daughter to call her father daddy,
but on the internet it has a totally different vibe.
The word tsuchigumo has traveled a long journey, a journey that began in Japan’s origin story.
The oldest known texts in Japan are the Kojiki and Nihon shoki,
which talk about Japanese mythology.
In them, the first emperor, Emperor Jimmu, was going around conquering people
in his quest to claim Japan.
There was a village of these short people that they called tsuchigumo, earth spiders.
Kind of rude to call them that.
And it was ruder when Jimmu and his men killed them all.
Over time, tsuchigumo became like the word “barbarian,” a nasty word that meant the
native, less “civilized” people living on the Japanese islands,
people who were not part of the main Japanese state.
And then, over more time, the word evolved to mean any weirdo who lived differently from normal society.
The oldest mention of a giant supernatural spider comes from this picture scroll called
tsuchigumo zōshi 土蜘蛛草紙 made in the 1300s.
It tells a story of one Minamoto no Raikō 源 頼光, a popular folk hero.
He was a real dude, he actually existed, but he’s mostly famous for the legends that
formed around him.
One day Raikō is walking down a road with his follower, Watanabe no Tsuna 渡邊 綱,
when they see a skull floating in the air.
He’s surprised. He has never seen a floating skull before.
Usually they traveled on foot.
The two follow the skull to a mountain.
It leads them to this broken down mansion, and then disappears.
Now this mansion looks like it was once grand, but is now as empty and dead as
anti-vax talk show hosts.
Before entering the house, Raikō tells Tsuna to stay at the gate to keep a lookout.
Inside, he runs into the strangest old woman with hair as white as snow and a demeanor
as black as snow that someone spilled ink on.
Her eyelids are flipped over her head like a hat, a long hairpin keeps her mouth open,
and her overly plump lips are tied around her neck.
Her breasts sag to her lap like two flesh pendulums keeping time of her life,
and right now they’re showing 11:59 PM.
The woman says she is 290 years old.
She has served 9 lords of the mansion with pride, but now her youth has vanished and
her misery is eternal.
She begs him to drive a sword into her and end it.
Raikō ignores the crazy lady and walks further into the house.
He can hear her droning on about her sad life.
As day turns to night, a thunderstorm bursts from the clouds.
Tsuna rushes inside, but can’t find his lord.
He’s afraid. This is when monsters attack.
The thought of running away peeks into his consciousness,
but Tsuna decapitates it and stays put, waiting for his lord to return.
Meanwhile, Raikō enters a room lit by a single lamp.
A group of yōkai of different shapes and sizes enters the room, laughs at him, then leaves.
Raikō thinks this mansion is getting weirder, but a synonym of weird is interesting.
A three-foot tall creature enters the room, dressed as a nun.
She has a huge face and short body, with little stubby legs.
She tries to blow out the lamp, but Raikō glares at her and she disappears.
What next, he thought?
A lovely woman enters.
Her beauty stuns him as blood leaves the part of his brain responsible for movement and
travels to another part of his body.
But being a great hero, Raikō snaps out of it and slashes down at her.
Apparently his response to any beautiful woman.
His blade swishes through the air and lands on the floor,
breaking the wood and cracking the stone foundation.
The commotion makes Tsuna run in.
It seems like the woman had vanished before his sword hit,
but the tip of Raikō’s sword is missing,
plus they see a trail of white blood on the floor.
Following it leads them to a cave, where they run into a 200 foot behemoth.
A giant spider.
Something shiny falls from the spider’s body, and as it lands, they see that it’s
the tip of a sword and realize that this monster is the same woman from before.
When a hero meets a monster, they make acquaintances through battle.
The spider is strong, but Raikō prays to the gods and cuts off its head.
The two men, being experienced warriors, inspect the corpse for loot.
They see 1990 skulls pour out from the gash that Raikō had made on the spider’s body in the mansion.
They make another cut and out comes a bunch of smaller spiders the size of little kids.
Deeper in its belly, they find 20 smaller skulls.
“Okay that’s enough looking,” they say.
They bury the skulls and burn the monster’s home.
All in a day’s work.
When the emperor hears of what happened, he is so impressed
that he gives them each the governorship of a province.
So, is there a moral to this story?
Sure, judging from what I know about people back then, the moral is you should be careful
of beautiful women, because they can trick even the strongest of men.
For more yōkai videos, check these out.
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Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge.