Japan Behind the Scenes

Japan is believed to be one of the most haunted places on Earth : Japanese people have been telling stories about vengeful "demons" (yōkai 妖怪) and "ghosts" (yūrei 幽霊) for centuries and, even now, in Tokyo, there are many haunted places (  shinrei supotto  心霊スポット). Edo period (1603-1868) was the Golden Age of Japanese ghost stories (Kaidan 怪談). Ghost stories were originally based on Buddhist moral tales and became a summer pastime; in fact, the traditional season for ghost stories is in August, when the spirits of the dead come back to the living world according to the Buddhist Obon festival (Obon お盆). A popular pastime in the Edo period was the game " A gathering of one hundred supernatural tales " (Hyaku monogatari Kaidan kai 百物語怪談会). Originally conceived as a test of courage for samurai, this game was considered to be so dangerous that most people would leave before the end of it . How to play according to the book "History o...

Otemachi is Tokyo's financial district, a forest of skyscrapers sitting on among world’s most valuable real estate.  However, in Otemachi we can  surprisingly  bump into a small plot with few maples, some flowers and a stele.  It is the site of the rebellious warlord Taira no Masakado 平将門  's grave, a man who died 1000 years ago but has his own bank account, opened by the most popular Japanese bank, Mitsubishi.  Tokyoites still believe that Masakado's malevolent spirit haunts Tokyo and salarymen are regular visitors to his shrine. In the 10th century, the warlord Taira no Masakado failed to fight against the emperor and in 940 he was executed: his severed head paraded through the streets of the capital, Kyoto. Tradition has it that Masakado's head - whose spirit was full of anger and hate - took flight and landed in Tokyo's Otemachi, at the time a small village of fishermen, who decided to bury his head and build a small shrine. I...

ENGL (Please find below the Italian and French versions) Mysterious sounds. Lights flitting through the graveyard. A flood that destroys one village. A feeling that someone is watching you in the darkness. All these diverse inexplicable phenomena and weird "things" have come to be called Yōkai 妖怪, literally "mysterious" (kai 怪) "calamity" (yō 妖), and cannot be reduced to Western ideas of "spirits", "demons", or "the supernatural". It is the modern term for more ancient words as   mono no ke 物の怪 used to describe what rationality cannot explain. Yōkai fits somewhere in between our world and the hereafter and usually appears between 00 and 00:30 at night. They can be divided in three categories: - Yōkai as incidents or phenomena: a specific phenomena is named yōkai after an experience of fear or wonder. For example: a man hears the sound of wood being chopped and a tree crashing to the ground. The...

ENGL (Please find below the Italian and French versions) These beautiful scarlet flowers are not the ideal bouquet for your lover.  Higanbana , called "red spider lily" in English (official name Lycoris radiata), is an Asian red flower blooming in late summer and early autumn  after the heavy rainfall of the monsoon season, exactly during the Autumnal equinox, a special period for Buddhism. "Hi 彼" means "the other", "gan 岸" means "shore": higan refers to the arriving of the dead in the afterworld, symbolised by the day of the Autumnal equinox (Shūbun no hi 秋分の日), usually on the 22nd or 23 of September. It is a Japanese national holiday during which people traditionally reconnect with their ancestors by tending to their graves and by plating higanbana on the graveyards to show a tribute to the dead.  Since the red spider lily is mostly associated with death, the higanbana is also called with many sad names surrounded by ...