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Eurasian Journal of English Language and Literature

Yamauba, also known as yamamba, is a witch-like hag in Japanese mythology, who lives in the mountain. She is an empowered woman who threatens men. Such powerful evil woman images and figures are similarly represented in Western culture as the counterpart of yamauba. In Greek mythology, it is possible to see the same empowered but horrifying women archetype that shares the similar yamauba-topos especially in the depiction of witches such as Medusa and Medea. In this regard, what makes yamauba popular is the very fact that she is fearful and avenging, which causes terror and horror. Therefore, yamauba and her ravenous mythological existence will be analysed in this study in terms of deconstructing the authority of patriarchy. The purpose of this study is, hence, to discuss the terrifying place of yamauba as an empowered, and yet an evil woman, who is depicted rather dreadful and alarmingly dark.

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References

• Bethe, M., Brazell, K. (1978). Nō as Performance: An Analysis of the Kuse Scene of Yamamba. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Copeland, R. (2005). “Mythical Bad Girls: The Corpse, the Crone, and the Snake.” In Bad Girls of Japan, ed. Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, pp. 15–31. Palgrave.
• Hamilton, E. (1999). Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, New York: Grand Central Publishing.
• Hulvey, SY. (2000). “Myths and Monsters: The Female Body as the Site for Political Agendas”, ed. Debra Walker King, Body Politics and The Fictional Double, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp.71-88.
• Komatsu, K. (2000). “Kaisetsu: Tengu to yamauba” [Explanations of tengu and yamauba]. In Kaii no minzokugaku [Folklore of the strange], vol. 5, edited by Komatsu Kazuhiko, 417–434. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō.
• Miyake, H. (2001). Shugendō: Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan.
• Mizuta, N. (2002). 水田宗子. “Yamauba no yume: joron to shite” 山姥の夢: 序論として. In Yamauba tachi no monogatari: josei no genkei to katarinaoshi 山姥たちの物語: 女性の原型と語りなお し. Ed. Mizuta Noriko and Kitada Sachie 北田幸恵, pp. 7–37. Gakugei Shorin.
• Reider, N. (2005).“Spirited Away: Film of the Fantastic and Evolving Japanese Folk Symbols.” Film Criticism, 29(4), 4-27. Web. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44019178
• ---. (2010). Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present. Utah State University Press.
• ---. (2019). “Yamauba and Oni-Women Devouring and Helping Yamauba are Two Sides of the Same Coin.” Asian Ethnology, 78(2), 403–427. Web. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26845333
• ---. (2021). Mountain Witches: Yamauba. Utah State University Press.
• Sebastian-Jones, M. (2013). “Preface to the Special Issue on the Fairy Tale in Japan.” Marvels & Tales, 27(2), 172-178. Web. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss2/2
• Yamaguchi, M. (2009). Yamanba. Yama o oriru: gendai ni sumau mukashi-banashi. Tōkyō: Kōdansha.

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Çelik EKMEKÇİ BARTIN UNIVERSITY, FACULTY OF LETTERS, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSLATION STUDIES 0000-0002-7123-2621 Türkiye

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Witchcraft in Japan

In many ways Japanese who choose to follow Witchcraft are the mirror opposite of Westerners who choose to practise Shinto. Both look to distant countries with alien customs for spiritual inspiration. Both might be considered oddities for not following the rich religious traditions of their own cultures.

Ever since the Meiji Restoration, Japanese have taken to exploring Westernisation in virtually every single aspect. It is no surprise then that with the extraordinary rise of paganism in the West, Wicca in particular, there should not be those drawn to learning more. The interest was given an enormous boost by Harry Potter, as evidenced by the number of Japanese visitors to associated film sites as well as to the historical Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.

The passage below is excerpted from an article by a Japanese academic entitled ‘The Western Witchcraft in contemporary Japan’ (click here). The paper, given at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting 2018, centres around interviews with 16 self-described Japanese pagans in the Kansai area. With a myriad kami and an indigenous tradition of sympathetic magic in Shinto rites, Japanese have their own ‘pagan’ past to explore. This makes the crosscultural borrowings all the more intriguing, particularly as to the kind of deity from which the practitioners draw inspiration.

The pentagram unites east and west, symbol of both Yin-yang Wizardry and witchcraft. (photo John Dougill)

Quote from the paper begins….

Discussion
What can we say from these interviews?

1) Not many witches chose Japanese deities, but rather Western deities. Many do not have a specific image, but understand deity as a concept, which is similar to Western Pagans. I suppose Japanese witches are influenced by books which are translated from English or written by witches who studied in the West.

2) Although there are many deities in Japan, witches do not mention their names and do not choose deities for different purposes…. However, they do not say something like, “there are many names of goddesses, but they are all one Goddess,” like Western Pagans. For them, deities are separated figures, as in Japanese tradition.

3) Their idea of deity is influenced by their family religious situation. We hardly study religion at school, even Japanese mythology, since WWII. For many of us, the idea of deity is different from God, but there is no clearly shared concept of deity.

Conclusion
Japanese witchcraft does not take a role of alternative faith or social movement, such as feminism or nationalism. Witches are involved in art, healing, therapy, divination or the occult, so the number of people who are interested in witchcraft is limited. If they go to the US or the UK, they are usually surprised that witchcraft attracts a wider range of people there.

I suppose it is not easy for Japanese to understand the concepts of deity and faith of Western witchcraft, which was developed in Judeo-Christian countries. A lady who stopped calling herself witch said, “I have a feeling that there are deities in many places, not like monotheism, but I’m not enthusiastic about one deity, or two or three. (…) So I don’t have faith. I’ve been to shrines and temples since I was a child, it’s like a custom. I’m not conscious of deity. I cannot forget this kind of idea.”

Like her, many Japanese people do not think “deity” consciously but just accept something there. Therefore if they are in situation where they can think about a deity consciously, Japanese witches realize deities, using their experience. Or if not, they accept the Western idea more straightforwardly.

Japanese witches might be similar to the ancient Celts, Greeks or Scandinavians who probably understood each deity separately. To be honest, deities are personified and have become popular game and anime characters in Japan. The idea of one deity with many names, which is probably coming from Hindu concept of one deity with several avatars, might be a way of understanding polytheism in a monotheistic world.

Further links…
For an interview with a Japanese witch, please see here. For an interview with someone who combines Shinto and pagan practice, please see here. For a series of 8 posts on the pagan past, start with this one. For similarities between pagan Britain and Shinto, please see here, and for the common elements of Wicca practice with Shinto rites, click here. For a series of 12 postings about Pagan connections with Shinto, start with this one.

Spirit trees are celebrated throughout East Asia – and in Western paganism, as here at Glastonbury
(photo John Dougill)

Related posts:

1. Free spirits and power spots
2. Pagan connections 3) Sacred water
3. Pagan connections 10) Earth energy
4. Pagan solstice

Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch

The Yamamba – the mountain witch, crone, or hag, part of the widely recognised “old woman in the woods” folklore – can be traced back to the Muromachi period (1336-1573), a time of rapid population growth when merchants and villagers began to travel more frequently into the mountains. Solitary women who had moved to the mountains, driven by illness or in seek of solitude, became more visible to the wider population, inspiring stories of fear and hope as merchants met both helpful and hostile women during their travels. Tales emerged associating the Yamamba with fertility, nature, and temperamentality, from devouring men, to endowing travellers with gifts, to birthing thousands of children at once.

Through creative writing and scholarly analysis, Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich’s anthology examines mythologies around the Yamamba. Incorporating voices from Japan and the USA, the anthology shows how the Yamamba, ‘less constrained by the tradition, customs, and social norms expected for a woman’, reflects not just disgust and rejection of women who dismissed these expectations, but also shows how these women enacted agency in their rebellion of these norms. The Yamamba is thus located in old and new folktales, as well as in real-life manifestations such as in the gyaru subculture of the 1990s.

One example of the Yamamba explored in the anthology is the Noh play, Yamamba, written in the 1400s. Ann Sherif interviews the Noh performers Uzawa Hisa and Uzawa Hikaru, who bring the depth, physicality, and contradictions of the Yamamba to the fore. Hisa recalls during her lessons that she was taught ‘that the yamamba embodies an unimaginable amount of energy … it should be like a mountain moving … The performer has to conceive of that level of strength and energy’.

Underlying the book is the notion that the Yamamba’s sex must be “female”, given her associations with fertility, her unconventional lifestyle and rejection of typical beauty, and connection with nature, delusion and attachment. Echoing this, Hisa reflects that ‘if the yamamba were a man, it would be a very boring play … [lacking] in the scale or weight implicit in the demon role’.

In the interview, the discussion hints towards broader commentary on gender fluidity, adding a new dimension to discourse around the Yamamba’s gender. Sherif probes the Noh performers on their viewpoints on twenty-first century perspectives on the topic, and they observe that performers of Yamamba do not perform her as a woman. Hisa states that ‘what is important is where the energy comes from, not who the character is’, and so, ‘when we perform Yamamba, we don’t think of it as performing woman … The performer can’t conceive of it that way’.

However, the discussion does not move beyond this, and the question remains: how does the Yamamba fit into twenty-first century – and historical – conceptions of gender? A complementary chapter would be welcome, perhaps exploring how the Yamamba’s sex and gender have come to be understood, and how gender is challenged, or reinforced, by these manifestations. Without such chapters examining themes brought up in interviews and short stories, the anthology remains slightly unbalanced, romanticising the Yamamba, her mythologies, and the discourses which surround her.

A similar critique can be made of Laura Miller’s chapter, ‘In A Yamamba’s Shrinebox’, which briefly touches on how the mythology manifested in the kogyaru or gyaru subculture and fashion trend of the 1990s. Young women who challenged mainstream beauty norms were nicknamed Yamamba for their appearance: they wore short skirts and bleached their hair, while their makeup consisted of bright eyeshadow and lipstick, with white paint around the eyes and mouth emphasising deep tans from tanning salons and creams. Thus, we learn that while Yamamba was used as an insult, the use of the word shows both how women rejected gender expectations by embracing alternative fashion and makeup trends, and also how they were rejected from society for this style, suffering abuse from men repulsed by their image.

Contention appears when Miller describes the process of fake tanning: emulating Black American culture, and also driven by their wish to reject Japanese beauty norms, gyaru darkened their skin through intensive tanning. The colourism and racism of this practice is not mentioned and appears to be actively sidestepped, with Miller translating the nickname derived from skin darkening, ganguro, as ‘face black’, rather than the more common translation of ‘blackface’. With dark-skinned and/or mixed-race Japanese people suffering harassment and discrimination, darkening one’s skin through a perverse appropriation of “coolness” can only be looked on critically. Failure to mention this context builds an uncritical, over-romanticisation of the Yamamba mythology, and also feels outdated given the plethora of literature and cultural commentary on the practice of blackface in gyaru culture.

A final critique would be David Holloway’s short story on Aokigahara, suicide and the Yamamba. To K, a student in Japanese Studies, ‘the Japanese just seemed comfortable with suicide’, and inspired by ‘the legacy of seppuku on the battlefields during the middle ages’, K sets out to Aokigahara to kill himself, only to be saved, in some sort of way, by an encounter with the Yamamba. It is unclear what the story brings to the anthology beyond reinforcing outdated tropes tying suicide to a Japanese historical legacy and an innate Japanese sensibility. While it seems that links are being drawn with an ancient mythology and a newer ‘flashpoint of curiosity and controversy’, Aokigahara, the chapter nonetheless comes at odds to the other contributions, as the relevance of the Yamamba, aside from the general relationship with forests and nature, is unclear.

Without venturing beyond an introduction to the mythology itself, the anthology remains at a slightly superficial level: more in-depth analysis could complement the interviews and creative writing pieces, while commentary could have included more references to wider literature on the subject. Despite this, the anthology is a creative exploration and rich introduction to key texts and artists exploring the Yamamba.

Anime Witches in Japanese Culture

In anime witches are often depicted as Magical Girls who wear cute outfits and own cats. Could the origins of their power be something more sinister?

Over the years, Magical Girls and witches have become a popular genre in anime. But…what if I told you that Magical Girls gained their powers based on principles of Buddhist and Shinto spiritual philosophies in Japanese Culture?

Witchcraft in Japanese culture is a tricky thing.

Based on beliefs firmly rooted in Shintoism and Buddhism, yokai (as tsukimono) are thought to be the cause of supernatural phenomena and magical powers.

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What Are Spirits Called in Japanese?

Yokai (Youkai, 妖怪) are a supernatural class of monsters prevalent throughout many Japanese myths and folklore tales. Goblins, demons (oni), monsters, phantoms, and ghostly apparitions can all fit into the category of yokai.

Natsume’s friend with spiritual ability (tsukimono) Tanuma Kaname is possessed by Master of the Marsh Sasame

Yokai, or spirits are attributed to illness or even prosperity in Japan. Based on a mix of Buddhist and Shinto folk beliefs, there is often possession caused by evil spirits.

This is what we popularly associate with witchcraft in the west.

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