Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Hello and welcome back to the third episode of Southern Demonology. So for the past couple of episodes we've been hitting the academic track pretty hard. And I thought that we would switch things up and go for more of an experiential tale this time around. In fact, this episode is all about Japan. I lived there for close to two years, had a lot of really interesting experiences, but there is one in particular that is perfect for this particular topic. So what I thought I'd do is go over how I fell in love with uh all things Japanese.
Um and then go over the uh experience itself and then finally wrap up with a discussion on how Western ghost stories or spirits differ from uh Japanese ones. My odyssey into the interest of the land of the rising sun, I can directly trace back to graduate school. So during the day uh I was in my second year, I was able to arrange my schedule so that I got back well before I think three or four o'clock in the afternoon.
And the only good thing about the apartment complex that uh I found myself living in was a amenity room that it had, uh, which had a pretty decent sized TV and uh had a lot of space. Uh occasionally we would have parties or something else in there, but by and far it was my chill out time where I could just turn off my brain and uh veg out and try to recoup a little bit from the harrowing experiences. Well, not really harrowing, but still. So I would come back and I would immediately turn on the TV to Cartoon Network and watch two shows that had um really intrigued me.
Uh the first was Dragon Ball Z, and the second was Gundam Wing. For those who are not in the know about anime, um these are both Japanese anime. Dragon Ball Z is really basic. Uh it is probably the most drawn out of all episodic shows that you could see. Something that would take maybe an hour is suddenly drawn out into uh fifteen different episodes. So it can get pretty boring, but it's great for being able to turn off your brain and just relax some. But the one that really intrigued me was Gundam Wing. Um first giant mechs. I mean, you really can't do any better than that.
But it was really the characters themselves that got me because they would react in such strange and interesting ways. Even though these episodes were dubbed into English, it was the most un-American thing that I have ever encountered, and I don't mean that in a negative way, I simply mean that the responses and cultural norms that I have grown up with and were intimately familiar with were completely absent within the show.
And that is to be expected, but it it was something about the the character that these that these animated people exhibited to each other that baffled me, fascinated me, and really made me want to learn more. And so that's exactly what I did. Um Gundam Wing was kind of my gateway drug, you could actually say, because I began to consume anything and everything that I could. Um I progressed on to dharamas, uh, namely like uh Densho, Toko, uh train man, and a couple of others.
And that really being able to watch the live actions, it began to teach me more and more about the culture and the country and the and the just the spirit of the Japanese people, and I found myself slowly but surely falling in love. So I then progressed to learning the language, because language is kind of where I am. Uh that's what I studied all throughout graduate school. I got the chance to learn, you know, 14 ancient languages, but my modern experience was pretty dim.
I mean, I had two years of Spanish in high school, and I had two years of Russian in college, but I never really got anything out of them. I mean, from the Russian side, I can I can still read the Cyrillic alphabet, but our teacher, although absolutely brilliant, was not the best at imparting knowledge, or maybe it was completely my fault. I I'm not really sure. But regardless, I walked away with that class with uh very little practical knowledge of Russian.
In fact, uh we had three uh female students from Russia come and sit in on our class, and after they left, they were just absolutely amazed at how little we actually knew. So maybe it wasn't just me, but still, I I I still always look back at that as a squandered opportunity, unfortunately. But I ordered uh Japanese for busy people, which is a really great, albeit simplified, uh approach uh to the Japanese language. It's nice in that it doesn't present things to you in Romanji or in romanization.
It actually presents everything to you within Katakana and Hidragana and it later on some limited kanji. Uh and my knowledge of the alphabet was pretty bad, so I actually started playing Slime Forest, uh, which is a great game that teaches you the characters, and it's amazing how fast you pick that up. Um I went from playing for maybe three or four hours, and I had the basics of Katakana and Hiragata down. Uh whereas if I would have actually tried uh to just learn them by writing them down or by rote memorization, it would have taken me a phenomenal amount of time more to do so.
And then I uh actually combined my love of programming with uh my love of language. Luckily at the time I had a GP2X, which was a uh miniature Linux console that was really made for gaming. It was kind of like the open source version of a uh Nintendo 3DS, and you could install Pygame upon that. So I picked up my Python skills and created a flashcard application so that I could take all of the words that I was learning from uh Slime Forest and uh take it with me while I was at work.
So this proceeded onward for a couple of years and actually started listening to more and more music um until I finally got the chance I was truly hoping for. Uh the place that I was working at at the time in Nashville, Tennessee, uh wasn't really doing it for me anymore. So I quit and uh went to um AOL, which had just purchased a really small development studio in Nashville, and a few months in I was bored out of my uh skull. It just was not the right opportunity for me.
Um, and luckily at that point, my old company had contacted me and said, Hey, we would love to have you back because we're about to set up a brand new product line in Japan, and uh we want you uh to lend your uh skills to that effort. I agreed, and at the start of September of 2011, I rejoined my old company, and a month later I found the airplane I was riding on touched down at Narita Airport. We're gonna take a 30-second little interlude here so everyone can uh rest up and relax a little bit more, and we will be right back. So where I lived in Tokyo was fantastic. It was kind of near Satsa.
I could step out onto my balcony at the time and see Tokyo Tower just right over uh the hills. It was amazing. And I also got to, if I looked straight down, see a pretty sizable graveyard right outside of my door. Now there are many superstitions in Japan where if you walk by a graveyard, then you either buy purified salt uh in order to keep spirits from following you home, or you simply don't do it. I never really paid those warnings too much attention. Um after all I had spent a lot of my life in graveyards, so I wasn't exactly too worried about it. But I think I probably should have been.
Have you ever heard a voice calling to you? And I don't mean some sound that you may have heard that you could roughly interpret to be something ominous or scary or out of place. I mean a voice that is talking straight to you and is even called your name. I've heard that a few times in my life. And it's usually right when I'm drifting off to sleep and sometimes it's accompanied by a mental image and sometimes not, but I have heard a feminine voice call my name.
And the voice was sickly sweet, but yet it contained such malice and hatred that I knew it wasn't just my life in danger, but more so my soul. And I'm I'm not saying that this is not a dream. It it could have been. But it's something that felt so radically different that I have no explanation for it. But I'll tell you this, um the few times that I have experienced that, I did not sleep again for those nights. Well this experience is a little similar, but vastly, vastly different to anything else that I've ever experienced before.
So I had uh been um communicating with some uh friends back in the States, and I had uh it's been very late. So it's probably I think it was a Saturday night. Uh it was probably around 5 a.m. in the morning at this point. Uh had had a really chaotic week at work and was exhausted and but really couldn't sleep. But finally I got to the point where I could doze off, so I lay down on my bed and quickly fell asleep. Whereupon I had a dream. I dreamed that I would ProFootball is back, and so are the predictions.
Looking outside of my balcony door, which was window, which was pure glass, and that there was something out there. But I heard a voice. And that voice it did not speak into my ears. It was rather something that spoke directly into my thoughts themselves. I had never experienced anything like that before, and I pray to goodness gracious that I don't ever again. But it whatever it said, it lodged into my thoughts. And what it said was simply one word, just repeat it. Hideu. Haidu. And with each repetition it got stronger and louder.
But again, this isn't a loudness that can be felt in decibels. Every time it got louder, it literally hurt my head because suddenly think of it like uh you have a severe sinus infection, you feel this pressure kind of building up uh uh under or between your eyes. It was kinda like that, but straight into your brain. And the more it said hideo, haidu, hideo, hideo, the more the pain became acute. And suddenly on the last hideo that it said, I woke up. And I woke up to an earthquake alarm going off on my phone.
If you've never had the experience of a lovely earthquake, it's uh quite scary, um, and especially the earthquake alarm. So uh I had an HTC phone uh that was manufactured in Japan, um, and every phone in Japan uh it comes with an earthquake alarm. So if they detect one, then they will send out an emergency broadcast signal, and it's kind of like what you hear on TV uh before major uh uh testing or something else. Anyway, I woke up with that thing going off. And so I snapped awake from one of the strangest experiences I ever had to an earthquake alarm.
It was not what we would call a good morning. But that word stuck in my head. So I went to my trusty uh Japanese dictionary and looked it up because I did not know what that word meant. And looking at the entry in the dictionary, it was as if someone was running their hands up and down my spine. Because the meaning of the word hideo means to enter. So essentially, this thing was saying, Let me in. And I knew in that moment, and I knew this in the dream, that if I had somehow opened that balcony door, then that would have been the end of me.
And I don't care if it was in a dream or if it wasn't, I knew for a certain that my life would have been forfeit. And if it was a made up word or a something complete. Nonsensical, then I could maybe more easily write it off as just something stupid that my brain happened to conjure up. But because it said a word that I was not aware of, and it actually meant something in that context, combined with the kind of psychic pressure that had built up into my head, it was perhaps the strangest experience I have ever had. And I will tell you this right now.
From that point on, if I was ever going to find myself walking near a graveyard, I found another path or I made sure to have purified salt in the apartment so that I could then place it by the um entrances and and exits in the in the uh apartment itself just to help protect. Because although I never experienced anything like that again, it was never far from my head that it could happen. And that was one of the strangest things I had ever experienced. So we're gonna have one last little musical interlude here, and then we will uh wrap up the show. I hope you will return with us. Thank you.
One of the best trips that I got to take was to Okigahata, uh, which is probably more famously known as the Jukin or the Suicide Forest. It is the wooded area at the base of Mount Fuji that extends for about thirty-three kilometers. It's a beautiful place. But it's also perhaps one of the eeries locations I have ever stepped foot into. There are these amazing caves there, um called the the lava cave and the ice cave, but all of um all of this area uh has at its base um volcanic glass because Mount Fuji is a volcano, so it makes total sense.
But uh there are these caves which are um they're essentially small little death traps uh that uh that is uh ran by a family or something else and they will allow you to to go in and they have these beautiful cardboard cutouts of all the ways that you can injure yourself or die in these caves. I mean if these locations existed in the US, they would be sued out of existence on day one um because someone didn't pay attention. Uh but even beyond that, the forest itself, all of the trees form a natural wind barrier.
So when we stopped at one of these small caves, we went through it, and then we decided to go into the forest itself, and we didn't walk very far, only probably about uh ten-fifteen minutes or so. But the moment you cross into the forest, there is no wind. There is there are no outside sounds of any kind. You just hear the forest and it is a freaky place.
I mean this is the location where in more ancient times the story goes at least that uh Japanese families would take the elderly and the infirm and just dump them there in the forest if they didn't have enough food to support the rest of the community. And it's pretty easy to see that. In fact, uh so it's called the Suicide Forest now because it this location is the second highest suicide spot in the world right after the Golden Gate Bridge. And people will go into the forest and they actually have these rotations of people that will go and look for bodies.
Uh people will go, they will bring a tent, and they'll decide if they want to die or not. And it I mean, there are tons of shows and whatnot that tried to go over some of these explorations. In fact, there was the really horrible movie of the forest which tried to take into account some of this stuff. Um it was a mess. And it was a really sad thing. Uh when I heard about that movie, I was really excited because you have the greatest source material you could ever want in a horror movie. And then they butchered it, and I um not just in a small way, I mean in the worst way imaginable.
It was really sad. But the moment that we walked into the forest, I kept hearing this sound. And it was something that I've never heard before, and it kept preceding us, to the point where I got so freaked out that I I called all of my friends who were with me back, and we went back uh to the Ryokan that we were staying in, the the Japanese inn. But you know, uh I think that the the Jukin really kind of highlights some of the differences uh that you find in spirits between the West and the East. In the West, if you hear a ghost story, then that's normally what it is.
You know, it's a it's a story. And I'm not saying that it didn't happen or not, but what I'm saying is is that if you ever encounter a a spirit or a ghost, then that's normally something that you're going to walk away from uh pretty easily. That's not so much the case in Japan. You know, you have two different kinds of categories of um uh of things. Uh you have uh yokai, which are monsters, and you have Yude, which are ghosts. And uh uh both of them are equally deadly to people.
Uh so for example you've got Kuchisakeona, uh the s uh slit mouth woman, uh, which is a vengeful uh spirit that likes to wear a um uh a sickness mask uh over their face. And they were normally uh like young men and boys will encounter this woman and she'll ask, um, Keday, uh am I beautiful? And if you uh there there's no good answer to that question. Uh answer one way and she will take out a gigantic pair of scissors and she will slit your mouth wide open into like a joker face, and the other answer is uh she'll kill you, just straight out murder you.
And so they always say uh if you ever answered that, then you can ask her, Are you beautiful? and that usually confuses her. Some other places recommend uh carrying cinnamon on you and throw it at her, and that confuses her. But regardless, it kind of shows kind of the typical interaction that one can have with a spirit um or a monster or anything else. Uh, usually those are extremely deadly. And it doesn't matter if you are ignorant on the topic or the subject, uh, doesn't matter if you are learned.
If you if your life happens to take you in a direction in which you have an encounter with one of these things, then that is probably where your life is going to end. Whereas in the US, if you encounter a spirit, then you encounter one. Um unless it's something d demonic, which is a whole different category in and of itself, um your life is probably going to be okay. Whereas with anything related to the supernatural in Japan, that's normally the end of you. So I'm not really sure why that might be.
It could be for any number of reasons, but uh whether it's a curse or a spirit or a demon or something else, they will just flat out take you. So I think that's one of the other reasons why my experience kind of left me extremely jarred. Because I knew that if one thing had happened incorrectly, then that was probably going to be the end of uh of me as I know it. Again, thank you so much for joining us this time around. Uh, you can always feel free to reach out uh at southerndemonology at gmail.com and I look forward to uh having you again for episode four coming up.
This has been Southern Demonology. Please feel free to contact us at Southern Demonology at gmail.com. We hope that you join us again for our next episode.