Getting kicked in the balls hurts, but do you know what hurts more?
Getting kicked in the balls by your wife while she’s giving birth.
Childbirth is rough.
It can take hours and hours of sweat and tears, but all that suffering is worth it in the end,
when you are rewarded with a miraculous tax credit.
Unless you die, which happened a lot for most of history.
In Japan, they said that women who died in childbirth or late in the pregnancy became
a yōkai called ubume 産女, or birth-giving woman.
You can usually see an ubume sporting a white robe decorated with the blood from her delivery.
The white symbolizes death, and the blood, birth.
Monsters are very poetic.
Some ubume are pregnant, and some carry a baby in their arms, hoping to give it to someone.
The ubume looks like a bird in some paintings.
In Chinese folklore, there’s a bird creature that forms when a woman dies in childbirth.
Sometime in history, this idea merged with the ubume, giving us that ubume bird look.
For you amateur ghost hunters out there, you can find ubume hanging around the places where
they gave birth, or around rivers, often when it’s raining.
For you expert ghost hunters, you can find them in a blurry photograph.
At night, you may hear their mournful cries coming from the river.
In Japanese folklore, rivers and death are related.
Recently dead souls must cross the mythical Sanzu River 三途の川 to reach the other world.
Rivers carry things to the afterlife.
And rivers were seen as the border between this world and the next, or as a path to the next world.
People who were alive usually didn’t want a bunch of ubume walking around shoving babies
in people’s faces, so they had to come up with ways to prevent these yōkai from forming.
The idea was to separate the mother from her baby.
This meant cutting the umbilical cord, or if the mother died during pregnancy,
it meant cutting her open to remove the fetus, then burying both bodies in the same grave.
I’ve heard from sources that the walking simulator Death Stranding actually hired an
ubume as a consultant.
The game uses a lot of ubume lore, like passing babies to different people.
And in the game, one character has a ghost baby and you have to cut the ghost umbilical
cord to set it free, separating the mother and baby.
Buddhist priests saw this baby-separation practice and thought,
“Ew, that’s disgusting.
There’s a ritual we’re not involved with?”
So they created their own ritual.
It required writing spells on pieces of paper and a dash of prayers.
You no longer had to cut mama open, because the ritual symbolically separated the two bodies.
The priests said this was just as effective as physically doing it.
Technically true.
People still often chose the physical way though,
and the last time it happened was as late as 1950.
In stories where people didn’t separate the bodies,
the dead mother would give birth in her grave.
Her ubume self would go around stealing food and snacks for her child,
even stealing from temple offerings.
Villagers would find it odd that the Toblerones kept disappearing, and dig up the grave.
There they would find the corpses of the mother and her baby, with food strewn about the coffin.
Babies are messy, even in coffins.
You could take the food back at this point.
Stealing candy from a baby is bad, unless the baby is dead.
However, the more common situation is that you would find a live baby in its mother’s
dead arms, happily munching on food.
Ubume have been known to lead you to their graves so you can dig and find their babies,
waiting to be rescued.
It may seem weird to raise a baby you found in the ground, but as my mother always says,
don’t look a gift baby in the mouth.
When they grow up, they can sell for a lot.
In another delightful story, villagers dig up the corpse of a woman holding her live baby.
They try to take it, but she would not let go.
Finally, one woman opens her robe and bares her breast, showing that she indeed has milk.
Only then does the corpse release the baby, knowing that the woman would be able to
take care of the child.
If the mother died in childbirth but the baby survived, her ubume form might still try to
steal food for her baby.
The idea in all these stories is that a mother’s love for her kids is so strong that she would
care for them even in death.
Nowadays, when you die, you just get a coffin, some formaldehyde, and a bunch of people looking at you,
which is a bit inconsiderate because what if you’re an introvert?
But back then, when a woman died in childbirth or from some shocking event like suicide or murder,
she received a special ritual.
Next to a river, people wrote Buddhist scriptures on a piece of cloth.
They stuck 4 poles into the ground and hung the cloth across the poles.
People passing by, even strangers, would scoop some river water and pour it onto the cloth.
The ritual was complete when all the writing was washed away.
In ubume artwork, you often see this cloth-and-pole setup in the background.
The ritual was supposed to save her spirit in the afterlife.
It was a Japanese Buddhist belief that women who died in childbirth went to the Blood Pool Hell
because of the presence of all the menstrual and childbirth blood.
The Blood Pool Hell was not a pleasant hell.
They stuck you in a pool of blood, where insect creatures burrowed into your flesh to suck
your blood, then burrowed into your bones to suck your marrow.
Which sounds agonizing, until you hear about the other Buddhist hell for women,
the Farting Boyfriend Hell, where your boyfriend farts like an elephant every 2 minutes,
then laughs like a hyena.
The ritual was supposed to rescue you from these hells.
The ubume is not always dangerous.
There are stories of pregnant women being robbed and killed on the road,
then turning into an ubume.
At night, instead of hurting people, they just weep for their children.
Ubume can be vengeful though.
A violent husband who beats his pregnant wife to death may find himself driven to insanity
by his wife’s spirit.
If you see an ubume, she may try to hand you her baby.
If you take it, she vanishes and you get a dead baby. Congratulations.
Weirder things may happen.
The baby may become heavy, or turn into a heavy stone.
If you manage to keep holding the baby at this point, the ubume would make you pregnant
with possibilities.
That is, she would grant you a wish or give you a superpower like super strength.
Just remember to hold the baby facing the ubume, or the baby may open its mouth and
chomp down on your throat, killing you.
Yeah these ubume bebes are different from normal bebes.
One is evil and likes to bite you, and the other belongs to an ubume.
They can be dangerous little nipple biters.
An old saying goes, “Until the age of seven, a child belongs to the spirits.”
Ubume bebes haven’t gone through any rituals welcoming them to the human world.
They’re unpredictable, so don’t let them anywhere near your neck or your nipple.
For more yōkai videos, check these out.
I wanna thank some new people who just joined on Patreon:
Yui Minamoto of the Minamoto clan,
Jack of Tears,
Jayne Strange I can’t complain,
Melia,
Dragoncat the cutest dragon,
and Molasis Music.
Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge.