How to Welcome the Dead Home: Obon in Japan (Ep. 196)

In Japan, ghosts don’t wait for October. Summer—especially the hot, humid weeks around Obon—has long been the season for ghost stories, strange encounters, and deliberately scaring yourself silly. In this episode of Uncanny Japan, we’ll sit down for hyakumonogatari, the old practice of telling one hundred frightening stories while extinguishing candles one by one. We’ll look at summer ghost plays on the kabuki stage, venture out for a kimodameshi test of courage, and step inside an obakeyashiki, Japan’s own style of haunted house. Along the way: cicadas, cemeteries, mysterious extra ghosts, haunted tea houses, and some very questionable decisions made after midnight. Then we’ll finish with a wonderfully gruesome story from the 1677 collection Shokoku Hyakumonogatari, featuring a nameless creature with eyes in the palms of its hands—and a young man who really should have stayed home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every Obon, Japan’s ancestral spirits return home—guided by tiny fires and carried on cucumber horses. This year, for the first time, I’m responsible for preparing my father-in-law’s family altar. Join me for cauldron lids, lost ghosts, strange noises in an old house, eggplant cows, and the rituals used to welcome the dead home and send them safely away again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the final days of Obon, fishermen along Japan’s western coast once believed the sea belonged to the dead. In this episode, I read Lafcadio Hearn’s eerie and beautiful essay “By the Japanese Sea.” Along the journey, we encounter drowned spirits rising from the waves, cats carried aboard fishing boats to ward off ghosts, delicate straw vessels made for lost souls, and a haunted futon whispering in the voices of two freezing children. This reading originally appeared as one of the bedtime stories shared with Uncanny Japan Patreon supporters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A short Tanabata tale from the Uncanny Vault: Orihime the weaving princess, Hikoboshi the cowherd, and the river of stars that keeps them apart. On the seventh night of the seventh month, wishes are written on colorful strips of paper, tied to bamboo, and sent into the summer sky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two little boys find a dead bird on a mountain path. One accidentally touches it with his shoe, and suddenly the invisible contagion begins. Fingers cross. A circle is made. A hand chops through it. “Engacho!” In this episode of Uncanny Japan, we explore the everyday magic words and protective spells of childhood in Japan. There’s engacho, used to cut away contamination, bad luck, and all things spiritually “yucky.” There’s kuwabara kuwabara, a charm against thunder and lightning. Tsuru kame tsuru kame cancels out bad omens, while yubikiri genman turns a pinky promise into something surprisingly violent. And finally, chichin pui pui makes pain fly away. Part playground game, part folk magic, part tiny exorcism, these little phrases show how children turn fear, disgust, pain, danger, and promises into ritual. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1803, fishermen on Japan’s Hitachi coast spotted something round and unfamiliar drifting offshore. They hauled the hollow vessel onto the beach—and discovered a mysterious young woman inside. Step into the story as one of those fishermen. Examine the vessel’s clouded windows and iron-plated hull, hear the woman speak in a language no one understands, and watch as she fiercely protects a box she refuses to surrender. Who was she, what was hidden inside—and why did the villagers send her back out to sea? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Japan’s 1970s UFO boom gave us some wonderfully strange cases: children capturing a tiny hat-shaped UFO in Kōchi, two boys encountering wrinkled aliens in a Yamanashi vineyard, and a Hokkaidō farmer who claimed repeated abductions, spoon-bending powers, and telepathic contact with beings from the Samon Call Galactic Planetary Federation. In this episode, we look at Japan’s “Big Three” UFO incidents — Kera, Kōfu, and Nikoro — plus one especially intriguing 1980s case involving the Kaiyō Maru, a government research vessel whose crew recorded strange lights and radar-only objects moving at impossible speeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not all Japanese revenge ghosts are wronged women. Meet Kohada Koheiji: a failed Edo-period actor who became famous for playing ghosts, only to be murdered, drowned, and returned as the very thing he once performed. In this episode, we explore the tangled history of the “real” Koheiji, Santō Kyōden’s gruesome tale, Nanboku’s kabuki adaptation, strange actor superstitions, severed fingers, rotten revenge, and one very silly sushi pun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Uncanny Japan, we follow Benzaiten — also known as Benten — from her origins as Saraswati to her place among Japan’s Seven Lucky Gods. Along the way: Enoshima’s five-headed dragon, white snakes as divine messengers, snake-skin wallets, house snakes, and Ugajin, the wonderfully strange human-headed snake deity linked to rice, water, fertility, fortune, and wealth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever heard of the nodo-hotoke, or “throat Buddha”? In everyday Japanese, it usually refers to the Adam’s apple. But after death, especially in the context of cremation, the nodo-hotoke becomes something else entirely, the actual seat of your soul. In this episode of Uncanny Japan, I talk about the fascinating and beautiful funeral custom of gathering bones after cremation, using long chopsticks to place them into the urn from feet to head, with the nodo-hotoke placed last. I’ll also touch on the taboo against passing food from chopsticks to chopsticks, the role of the crematorium attendant, and the belief that this Buddha-shaped bone can be connected to the soul, the life lived, or rebirth into the Pure Land. After that, I read my dark story “The Buddha Bone,” originally published in Weird Horror Issue 7 by Undertow Publications. I also explain a couple of story-context words: hifuki-take, a bamboo tube used to blow into and stoke a fire, and hyottoko, the puckered-mouth comic figure associated with fire-blowing imagery. Content warning: this episode discusses death, cremation, funerary ritual, and contains a dark fictional story on those themes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices