Have you seen the movie Spirited Away?
If not, you’re dead to me--nah, but the idea of being spirited away is an old one
in Japan.
There was a famous case of a boy who was spirited away and reported what he saw when he returned.
This was the longest and most detailed account of someone being kidnapped by the gods.
Torakichi (寅吉) was a 7-year-old boy in the Edo Period.
One day, he spied an old man sitting in front of a shrine selling medicine in a bowl.
He seemed like a normal man, until he stepped into the bowl and flew away.
Torakichi was delighted, he had never seen an old man fly before.
He came back the next day and sure enough, the man did it again.
After a few days, the man noticed the creepy kid and asked Torakichi to come fly with him.
“I’ll show you many wondrous places,” the man said, kidnappingly.
Torakichi hesitated, but his young resolve crumbled under the man’s enticing offer
of cakes.
Torakichi stepped into the bowl with the man, and they flew into the air towards the mountains.
We’ll talk about Torakichi’s travels later, but wtf is this idea of being spirited away?
The word in Japan is kamikakushi (神隠し), literally abduction by a kami.
In the Shinto worldview, a kami is one of the bajillion gods or spirits that inhabit
the world with us.
Most are freeloaders.
Before the modern era, the Japanese saw young children as different from actual humans.
Not because they’re little self-centered monsters, but because they thought children
were gifts from the gods, and were in this gray area between human and kami.
Seven seemed to be the magic number.
Children under 7 were special, not fully of the human world, and could even act as vessels
for the gods to control.
Young children were not subject to the normal rules of society.
Infant mortality was high back in the day.
A rough estimate is that half of children in premodern Japan died before age 5.
This belief about children could have come about to explain why they kept dying.
Since the gods had just put them in the world, they could take them away more easily, their
lives were uncertain.
And the gods were dicks.
It may also explain the Japanese stories about children born from plants.
If the gods could put a baby in the womb, then putting a baby in a fruit was child’s
play.
Only after 7 years old do kids become full little humans for you to teach and annoy people
with.
Because of their closeness with the nonhuman world, people thought kids were prone to being
spirited away.
Parents often forbade children from playing the dangerous game of hide-and-seek, a child
hiding could be lost forever.
And instead of saying the child got lost, people would say the child got stolen.
When this happened, a whole village might have marched around at night making a bunch
of noise chanting “Bring him back!” or “Bring her back!”
If that foolproof method didn’t work, they might have requested a shrine maiden to come
and perform some persuasive magic.
If that didn’t work, then the child was truly stolen forever.
You could be abducted by all kinds of things, some not so bad, some very bad.
A local kami could possess a child to communicate with humans or to accept religious offerings.
There was a story of a boy who went missing for hours after a religious ceremony, but
was later found stuck in the ceiling of his home, his mouth covered with rice cake.
The family had put out rice cakes, or mochi, as offerings to the gods.
The boy explained that a strange man led him away, where they walked on treetops and visited
people’s houses and ate lots of rice cakes.
Then somehow he woke up stuck in the ceiling.
What clearly happened was a kami possessed the boy so that it could physically eat the
mochi, then un-possessed him some time later.
You could also be kidnapped by a yamaotoko (山男), or a mountain man.
These were tall, hairy humanoid creatures who lived in the mountains.
Unlike kami, these mountain men never took boys on magical journeys, they just took boys
to their lair and kept them as servants.
Or kept them for naughtier purposes.
Yeah...
They also kidnapped women to be their wives.
You could escape these mountain men if you were a clever dwarf from a well-to-do family.
Many other wonderful creatures could kidnap children, like kappa (河童) or kitsune (狐).
Sometimes these creatures together are called kakushigami (隠し神), or kidnapping gods.
One of the most feared creatures among these were tengu (天狗).
They’re usually depicted with a large beak or a long nose.
Tengu often hung around mountains disguised as yamabushi (山伏), or mountain ascetic
monks.
They would take children to magical realms, and often returned them near death or gone
mad.
The man who flew off with Torakichi in his bowl was probably a tengu.
This tengu took him on adventures for years.
We have detailed accounts of the boy’s descriptions of his travels thanks to a Shinto scholar
who heard about him.
The scholar interviewed the boy over years and took copious notes.
So for 5 years, the tengu took Torakichi to all kinds of places.
The adventures started out lasting less than a day, but eventually Torakichi would be gone
for days at a time.
Luckily, he was raised by those parents in Home Alone, they didn’t notice s--t.
The tengu said he would accept the boy as a disciple, but Torakichi had to prove himself.
He had to not eat anything for 100 days, which miraculously, he did.
He was near death, but he did it.
So over the years, Torakichi’s tengu master taught him all kinds of things, martial arts,
swordsmanship, weapon making, medicine, calligraphy, magic.
It seemed this tengu was one of the rare nice ones.
But most interesting of all were the strange worlds that Torakichi saw.
Let’s talk about 3 of them.
The land of dog people.
This place was disturbing, not gonna lie, especially if you like dogs.
Torakichi thought so too.
It was a society based around dogs.
The people had language that sounded like dogs barking.
Everyone had a bunch of dogs (aww, how cute) so they could eat them (f--k!).
They used dogs for everything.
For clothing, they cut down the belly of a dog and carefully skinned it so that the skin
was whole, with only the cut through the belly.
Then oh mah gah a person slipped into the skin and sewed up the belly, closing it.
Everyone wore this dog skin clothing, so everyone looked like dogs walking around on two legs.
The rich wore multiple layers of clothing.
They had a king and paid tribute to him in dogs.
The king must have worn a million dog robes.
Next we have the Island of Women.
Torakichi visited an island east of Japan inhabited only by women.
They dug holes in the mountainside to live in, covering the entrance with sticks and
seaweed to keep out the rain and the perverts.
They tied their hair in buns and wore tight clothing so they could easily dive into the
water to catch fish and seaweed.
Fire did not burn them.
Being an island of women, of course they were always hot for men.
Sometimes a ship would wreck on the island and all the women would come over and devour
them, in the best way possible.
I think.
So the source I read uses the word “devour,” which I assume has a naughty meaning.
But it could actually mean they ate the men.
This also makes sense because otherwise the men would live on the island and it would
no longer be an island of women.
Eating the men would cap the male population at the optimal amount of zero.
But more importantly, on an island of women, how do they reproduce?
With the sasa plant of course.
Two women would hold bundles of sasa leaves, bow to the west, and then play Hello Kitty.
Torakichi was hiding on this island for 10 days, which must have been exciting for a
young man.
Torakichi flew a lot.
He said flying felt like walking or running on cotton.
They flew so fast that most of the time the ringing in his ears drowned out all other
sounds.
The sky was bipolar, temperature-wise.
The higher he went, the colder it got… until he reached a transition height where the air
suddenly heated up.
Floating at this height, the bottom half of his body felt ice cold and the top half felt
burning hot.
He went even higher and his hair curled like Buddha.
Higher still, and the weather calmed.
There was no rain nor wind.
The moon got bigger the closer he got, real big.
He could see bright muddy oceans on it.
Now when the Japanese looked at the moon, they didn’t see a man on the moon like Westerners
do, they saw a rabbit pounding on a mortar making mochi.
But Torakichi said that’s not what he saw.
Up close, he saw that the rabbit was actually open holes that pierced through the moon,
all the way to the other side.
He could see stars on the other side of the holes.
Unfortunately, he did not get close enough to see clearly what was on the moon.
So Torakichi said a lot of things, but was he telling the truth or was he a dirty liar?
When people challenged the boy, like when someone said we don’t know of any holes
on the moon, he replied that he was right and they were wrong.
You see, they only read about those things in books.
How can that be accurate?
Torakichi said he didn’t know anything about books.
He was there so his words must be true.
Airtight argument.
After a few years, the Shinto scholar stopped writing about Torakichi so we don’t know
what happened to the boy.
Oh mah gah we’re at 94,000 subs, almost to 100K.
We may already be there by the time this video comes out.
Now is getting to 100K important?
Look, it’s only a number, it doesn’t actually affect the channel much.
It really only serves to inflate my ego,
so YES it’s important, let’s get there dammit.
I want to thank our new emperor this week, Chronophage.
He’s a virus that attacks time.
I also wanna thank our new patrons Lydia Jane and M Curtis.
Alright much love, guys, and spread the knowledge.