Uncanny Japan

Once, wolves roamed the mountains of Japan—not simply as predators, but as protectors, messengers of the gods, and sometimes gods themselves.

For this special archive episode, I’ve combined two earlier Uncanny Japan episodes into one extended journey through the history and folklore of the Japanese wolf, or ōkami. We’ll explore their extinction, old wolf shrines and wolf worship, Yamato Takeru’s mysterious white wolf, the eerie okuri-inu that follows travelers through the mountains, and stories of wolves that protected, warned, guided…and occasionally ate those who weren’t careful.

And then there’s the question some people are still asking today:

Are Japan’s wolves really gone?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The cicadas are fading, the bell crickets are singing, and autumn is beginning to creep into Japan. There’s an old saying: aki no hi wa tsurube otoshi—“an autumn day falls like a well bucket”—describing how suddenly darkness arrives this time of year.

But Tsurube Otoshi is also the name of a very strange yōkai.

Depending on where you are, it might be a well bucket dropping from an old tree, a mysterious ball of fire, a severed head, or something waiting above the road to haul unlucky travelers into the branches and eat them.

This episode: bell crickets, autumn insect listening, old Japanese sayings, and one wonderfully bizarre yōkai that gives you another reason to look up.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is story time. We’re traveling to the remote Oki Islands in the Sea of Japan for an old Japanese tale collected by Richard Gordon Smith in his 1908 book Ancient Tales and Folk-Lore of Japan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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