Spirits and Animism in

Contemporary Japan

The Invisible Empire

Edited by
Fabio Rambelli

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 7

Came Back Hounded: A Spectrum of

Experiences with Spirits and Inugami Possession
in Contemporary Japan
Andrea De Antoni

The long and winding road leading to the shrine offered beautiful mountain scenery.
The taxi slowly climbed up among the trees, passed through a bunch of houses, and
left me in a small parking area, from where I could see all the surrounding valleys and
slopes. That was as far as cars could go. The cold and clean air that invaded my nostrils
as I stepped out of the taxi gave me the shivering feeling that the sky was close. I walked
the short paved path, flanked on the left by a small hill with a cemetery on top and by
some houses on the right. A small vertical flag waved in front of the gray cement torii
鳥居 (traditional Japanese gate), crowned by a shimenawa 注連縄 (enclosing rope),
letting me know that I had reached my destination: Kenmi jinja 賢見神社 (shrine).
The shrine is located in Shikoku. Although, administratively speaking, it is in
Tokushima Prefecture (Miyoshi-shi, Yamashiro-chō Terano 三好市山城町寺野), it
stands at the border between Tokushima, Kagawa, and Ehime prefectures. As I walked
past the torii, the path led me to a small wooden building—the information office—
from which I could see the main hall. The rhythmic tingle of bells reached me from
there. I found only later on that it was the sound of the ritual of deliverance (exorcism)
from evil spirits that characterizes the shrine. In fact, Kenmi shrine is quite uncommon,
not only because it is independent and does not belong to any Shinto organization,
but also because it specializes in healing from spirit possession and, specifically, from
inugami 犬神 (dog-god or dog-spirit) possession.
In this chapter I provide an account of the variety of experiences with spirits in
contemporary Japan. After reviewing the literature on related phenomena and
clarifying my own methodological standpoint, I will focus particularly on the
“symptoms” of spirits, that is, on what they do within the social, with particular
attention to spirit attachment and possession (tsuki 憑き, see below). In order to do so,
I rely on ethnographic data I gathered through fieldwork. I focus particularly on the
accounts of visitors and specialists at Kenmi shrine, but I also rely on data collected
during my previous projects as well as through literature and internet research.1 In
doing so, my goal is to provide a “spectrum of specters” in contemporary Japan, mainly
based on bodily perceptions or feelings of spirits, in the hope to lay some foundation
for further comparative investigations.

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 110 Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire

Spirit possession and, more generally, spirits, monsters, the supernatural, and the
realm of the “weird” or “fantastic” (fushigi 不思議) in Japan, have long been the subject
of scholarly research. Yet, focusing on “spirits” in Japan is not as obvious as it may
seem and, indeed, all the studies on these topics present two fundamental aspects as
central to their approaches: the first is the definition of the phenomena and of the field
of investigation; the second is the problem of translating the terms involved, which
follows the definitions. Although discussing these issues goes beyond the scope of this
chapter, I believe that clarifying my own standpoint in this respect might be helpful to
shed light on my argument and approach.

Spirits in Action

The presence of a great variety of spirits throughout Japanese history has created issues
in grasping them from a scholarly perspective. This is not only due to the obvious fact
that spirits and related practices and beliefs have changed over time. It is also due to a
tendency in scholarship to lean toward taxonomy and categorization. As a consequence,
there is a general effort in looking at and trying to grasp spirits and related phenomena
for what they are (or were), going through a definitional process that moves from the
general to the particular, thus eventually focusing on the specificities of each of them.
For instance Komatsu Kazuhiko, probably the greatest living researcher on spirits,
monsters, and related phenomena in Japan, begins his Introduction to Yōkai Culture
(2017) with the following definition of the term yōkai 妖怪: “generally speaking, it
means creatures, presences, or phenomena that could be described as mysterious or
eerie.” He continues specifying that this describes something that “isn’t unique to Japan:
things of this sort are seen in every society. The interesting thing about Japanese yōkai
is that they were developed into a unique culture” (Komatsu 2017: 12). Subsequently,
he tries to “eliminate some ambiguity while retaining this broad definition by
dividing the term’s meaning into three ‘domains’: yōkai as incidents or phenomena,
yōkai as supernatural entities or presences, and yōkai as depictions” (12). The first of
these domains refers to yōkai that “arise from fear, awe, or wonder,” as a means to
explain and name unusual phenomena, which become entangled in narratives and
storytelling. The second domain includes “the mysterious presences (or creatures) that
cause strange phenomena, rather than the phenomena themselves”; these presences
are embedded in an “animistic worldview” (15). The third category encompasses the
depictions and representations of yōkai that developed especially from the medieval
period on, particularly in the form of painted scrolls (emaki 絵巻).
In the following chapters Komatsu further distinguishes tsukimono 憑き物 (entities
that “attach” to or possess human beings) from the more general categories of yōkai
(among which he focuses on kappa 河童, oni 鬼, tengu 天狗, and yamauba 山姥) and yūrei
幽霊, before devoting the last two chapters to explain his theories on the historical relations
between yōkai as symbolic representations and outsiders, as well as the negotiation of
borders. In each chapter, the author describes the historical trends in research about yōkai
in Japan, in a painstaking and thorough attempt to provide readers with glimpses of what
Japanese yōkai and their related cultural representations are or were.

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 Came Back Hounded 111

Similar efforts in grasping what yōkai are become fundamental also when non-
Japanese scholars try to translate the term. Indeed, as Foster points out, the word yōkai
has been “variously translated as monster, spirit, goblin, ghost, demon, phantom,
specter, fantastic being, lower-order deity, or, more amorphously, as any unexplainable
experience or numinous occurrence” (Foster 2009: 2). Ultimately, Foster decided
to keep the Japanese term, whereas Figal (1999)—another author who published in
English on the history of yōkai—opted for the more general “mysterious” (fushigi
不思議), in order to refer to unexplainable phenomena and related experiences. An
attempt was carried out also, for instance, in Italian, with the translation “monsters”
(mostri) by Miyake (2014).
All these studies share some commonalities: they shed light on and provide
analyses of representations of yōkai, also because of their focus on premodern or
modern cultural history. Even in cases in which they analyze Pokémon or yōkai as
contemporary developments of the monstrous in Japan, they focus on its cultural and
representational aspects, thus analyzing them in relation to “longing for something
which is immediately visible and available” (Foster 2009: 214), or to processes of (self-)
orientalism (Miyake 2014). These studies and their arguments are rather different, but
they all tend to focus on the specificities of Japan, thus narrowing down the possibility
for cross-cultural comparisons. Although I believe that an attention to local specificities
is fundamental, I also think that enhancing the potential for a comparative perspective
is equally important. In this chapter, therefore, I will refer to the entities I am going to
take into consideration with the general term “spirits,” while drawing some parallels
with anthropological research in contexts other than Japan.
In fact, the focus on spirits from a representational perspective through discourse
analysis has characterized anthropological research in general and, consequently, tracing
parallels with the Japanese context is neither too complex nor necessarily new, although
the cases in which it has been done are rather rare (e.g., Eguchi 1991; Komatsu 1994;
Matsuoka 1991). As for the focus on Japan, these approaches, centering particularly
on the cultural history of spirits and related beliefs, have shed light especially on their
functions and meanings in the broader context of Japanese society. For instance,
Komatsu (1995) pointed out that from the Nara period until modern times, an “other
world”—demonic or monstrous—associated with the dark outer lands of the realm was
managed by emperors and shoguns through (religious) symbolic practices, in order to
secure and display power and authority. This relation was inverted in case of protests in
premodern Japan, when discontented groups (such as peasants, disgruntled samurai,
religious groups, opposition parties) used the same symbolic paradigm as a means of
protest. When this happened, monsters were appropriated by the rebellion through
reversal processes, while giving birth to carnivalesque practices and parody, or directly
representing authorities in demonic terms (see also Figal 1999; Wilson 1992).
Moreover, the modern history of spirits in Japan, not to mention their very
existence, is deeply entangled with state power. As several studies have shown, spirits
underwent systematic debunking starting with Inoue Enryō and his “monsterology”
(yōkaigaku 妖怪学) and followed by an educational campaign aimed at eradicating local
cults and religious practices related to spirits which were considered inappropriate to
a country—such as Meiji Japan—that was pursuing the light of modernization and

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 112 Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire

“civilization” (Figal 1999; Foster 2009; Josephson 2012; Kawamura 2007). Buddhism—
as a consequence of the haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈 repression movement—also had
to make efforts to imitate “modern” Protestant Christianity and, in so doing, rebuild
itself as a “religion,” in opposition to “superstitions,” which had to be eradicated (see
Josephson 2006, 2012).
These attitudes toward the mysterious continued in the early Showa period:

in the dominant discourse of the early twentieth century, yōkai were no longer
considered part of the living present; rather, they were an embarrassing reminder
of the premodern past […] Spirit possession and similar forms of mystic practices
were marginalized, and the supernatural entertainments that took their place—
such as the hypnosis craze […]—were subsumed within the expanding realm of
the sciences and increasingly divorced from the yōkai tradition. (Foster 2009: 116)

These efforts in debunking spirits through scientific materialism or psychologization

(Harding 2015) resulted in the eradication of the very reality of spirits and related
phenomena that, consequently, started being seen as representations, ways of making
sense of the world, or a matter of belief.
An exception to the establishment of this modern “regime of truth” (Foucault
1984) was constituted by untamed spirits or ghosts (yūrei). Among other reasons, this
was because, being spirits of the dead, directly debunking them would have meant
negating the existence of the human spirit and, consequently, challenging more or less
directly the cult of ancestors, on which the whole Meiji imperial system apparatus was
based (De Antoni 2015). This, however, created the possibility for ghosts not to be
erased but to also continue existing and being experienced in contemporary Japan,
as I will show below. Similarly, possession is also a current phenomenon, revamped
particularly after the film The Exorcist (1974), which became extremely popular in
Japan and contributed to the creation of the so-called “occult boom” (okaruto būmu オ
カルトブーム) (De Antoni 2015; Taniguchi 2006).
Although “there are some doubts about the general applicability of Komatsu’s
paradigm” (Figal 1999: 23), some cases of connections between ghosts and liminal
figures or outsiders can also be observed in contemporary Japan. For instance, in Mutsu
(Aomori Prefecture)—the closest city to the important sacred mountain Osorezan—
the highest number of ghost sightings was reported in what used to be the area where
Koreans lived up until the Second World War (De Antoni 2010), and scholars cite
cases of local shamans in Okinawa healing people from or being possessed by spirits of
Ryukyuan people who were mistreated by the Japanese and, consequently, reinforcing
Okinawan local identity (Allen 2002a, 2002b; Sasaki 1984; Shiotsuki 2006). Similarly,
there are also reports of sightings of ghosts of Japanese soldiers who died during the
Second World War (Oda 2011).
Outside the specific context of Japan, anthropological studies have highlighted
the relationships between beliefs and practices related to the occult with resistance
to changes in socioeconomic systems; spirits have been interpreted as forms of
protest against colonialism, capitalism, globalization, and related outcomes that were
considered immoral by certain groups (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2002; Ong 1987;

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 Came Back Hounded 113

Taussig 1980). Such approaches shed light on the relations between spirits and power,
but have become so much of a standard in anthropology that they have “come to form
a deep-seated and seductive anthropological analytic” (Sanders 2008: 109). Indeed,
“notwithstanding their significant differences, these diverse approaches are broadly
similar in one sense: they depict spiritual beings as primarily reactive” (Jensen, Ishii,
and Swift 2016: 150); it may be necessary to search for “new ways of getting spirit
worlds […] into view” by “repopulating the field of inquiry with more than beliefs,
socioeconomic realities, and politics” (150; original emphasis).
Resonating at least to a certain extent with the so-called “ontological turn” (see
Holbraad, Pedersen, and de Castro 2014; Pickering 2017), recent anthropological
scholarship has begun to provide accounts of the experiences from which the reality of
spirits emerge, rather than on explaining them from a symbolic perspective. As Csordas
points out, “meaning is not attached to experience, but is constituted by the way in which
a subject attends to experience” (2002: 57, original emphasis), seeing the body not as
the object of culture, but as “the existential ground of culture and self ” (Csordas 1994).
He proposes to focus on “somatic modes of attention,” that is, “culturally elaborated
attention to and with the body in the immediacy of an intersubjective milieu” (Csordas
1993: 139, original emphasis), and, with his later work, he demonstrates the centrality
of bodily feelings and sensory perceptions in religious healing—including deliverance
from evil spirits and demons—in the Catholic Charismatic movement. Similarly, others
have given accounts of the importance of bodily perceptions and affective dimensions
in interactions with spirits in a variety of contexts (e.g., Cassaniti 2015; Desjarlais 1992;
Iida 2015, 2017; Laderman and Roseman 1996), although almost no studies from this
perspective have been carried out on Japan.2
Research on spirits has witnessed a renewed interest, based on approaches more
or less inspired by cognitive science. For instance, studies induced apparitions of
ghosts through experiments with humans and robots, pointing out that “the illusion
of feeling another person nearby is caused by misperceiving the source and identity
of sensorimotor […] signals of one’s own body,” emphasizing the brain mechanisms
generating experiences of “self ” and “other” (Blanke et al. 2014:1). Similarly,
possession has been assimilated to dissociative symptoms and related to traumatic
experiences (Hecker, Braitmayer, and Van Duijl 2015; Van Duijl et al. 2010),
whereas Cohen (2008: 103) argues that “what constitutes possession and the paths
by which possession concepts and practices are transmitted […], are informed
and constrained by recurrent features of evolved human cognition.” Moreover,
Cassaniti and Luhrmann (2014)—who propose “a field guide to identify spiritual
experiences across traditions and cultures”—suggest “that there are at least three
different kinds of phenomena that might be compared: 1. Named phenomena
without fixed mental or bodily events. […] 2. Bodily affordances. […] 3. Striking
anomalous events” (334).
These approaches provide a very useful ground for cross-cultural comparison, but
as a consequence of their focus on the body or cognition, they end up “internalizing”
and “psychologizing”—if not even “pathologizing”—spirits and related experiences, or
make them the result of embodied memories and imagination, thus resonating with
standard approaches based on representation and meaning-making.

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 114 Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire

Nevertheless, such approaches focusing on perceptions can be generally seen as

attempts to elicit the spirits’ voices in ethnographic accounts, along with other analyses
of the reality of spirit entities as it emerges within the social through practice, as the
result of particular ways of interaction among humans and nonhumans, of perceiving
bodies moving with things (Ishii 2007, 2012; Ochoa 2010), or specific environments
(see De Antoni 2011, 2013). In line with these approaches, therefore, rather than
focusing on what spirits are, in this article I propose to focus on what they do, how
they intrude upon reality, and are perceived. In other words, my proposal is to look
at how the “agency of the intangibles” and the “social life of spirits” (Espirito-Santo
and Blanes 2014) emerge; to understand spirits as active “things” rather than “objects”
(Ingold 2011a), entangled in materiality and social practice, experienced by the body,
and in constant change. Indeed, my suggestion is nothing different from following
the direction indicated by the Japanese general category that has defined them since
the Edo period, bakemono 化け物: “changing things.” I will also show that spirits and
related phenomena are not fixed things but, rather, “meshworks,” entanglements of
“lines of life, growth and movement” (64), emerging from attunements among humans
and nonhumans, which include specific “symptoms,” feelings, and perception skills,
and go “beyond the body proper” (Lock and Farquhar 2007). I see “feelings” as “a
mode of active, perceptual engagement, a way of being literally ‘in touch’ with the
world” (Ingold 2000: 23; see also De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017). In fact, there is
much more to spirits than belief: their actions intrude upon reality, influence the social
through perceptions and, as I will show below, they may cause suffering.

Every Time I Feel the Spirit

Recent research in folklore studies about urban legends regarding ghosts (yūrei)
suggest that they are a phenomenon that followed urbanization in the modern period
and that ghosts developed in cities, in opposition to yōkai, associated with feelings
about the natural environment. Following the disappearance of yōkai, ghosts took
their place as entities that also manifest themselves outside of cities in general, in places
such as tunnels, mountain ridges, bridges, hospitals, and schools and, thus, marking
these spaces’ alterity (Takaoka 2006). Nevertheless, particularly after 2005, urban
legends seem to have lost their focus on places and ghosts stopped telling their stories,
while a focus on reikan 霊感—the ability or skill to perceive spirits3—has become
preponderant. Since reikan is a skill that an individual has (or not), this shift of focus
in urban legends has been interpreted as reflecting the progressive individualization of
Japanese society (Takaoka 2015).
Although I would be careful about generalizing these conclusions, this research
pointed out the centrality of bodily perceptions, skills, and experiences in relationships
with ghosts. Even though urban legends seem to have lost interest in specifying places
and memories, there exists a flourishing mediascape of publications, blogs, and
websites that provide information on haunted places (shinrei supotto 心霊スポット),4
around which social practices such as “courage testing” (kimodameshi 肝試し) and
even tourism revolve. Furthermore, the number of ghost sightings have been

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 Came Back Hounded 115

reportedly increasing in the Tohoku area—particularly in specific places in the city

of Ishinomaki—following the 3/11 disaster (Kudō 2016). The webmaster of one of
the biggest websites on this subject also acknowledged the centrality of localized
experiences, when explaining to me what haunted places are:

Places that are called “shinrei supotto” are in several locations: ruins, graveyards,
the sea, tunnels, or even at the corner of a residential area. These places don’t
become haunted only because they are eerie. They start to be called haunted
because there are several people who had experiences like feeling a presence,
feeling or hearing something, seeing a ghost […] I think that the reason why a
place becomes haunted is that two conditions: a place in which someone died,
and an eerie place, are superimposed. (email interview with Okaruto Jōhōkan
Webmaster, December 17, 2010)

Indeed, “haunting itself is merely or only affect: it has no existence without affect”
(Heholt 2016: 5; original emphasis) and, as I also mentioned above, the reality of
those experiences emerges as a result of the body moving in certain environments
with specific material features (De Antoni 2011, 2013). Rumors that construct haunted
places tend to describe hauntings and the presence of ghosts as a matter of fact and,
although there are mentions of sounds such as steps, screams, or sutra chanting,
rumors heavily rely on the visual dimension: ghosts appear in those places with specific
forms, related to their histories. Even a simple survey of the first links in the results of
a Google search with the query “haunted places in Kyoto” (Kyōto no shinrei supotto 京
都の心霊スポット) can shed light on this aspect.5 For instance, the first description of
Kiyotaki tunnel, one of the most famous—if not the most famous—haunted places in
Kyoto, reads: “when you arrive at Kiyotaki tunnel you must not enter, because if the
traffic light is green you are being invited by ghosts. They say that, if you enter, the
spirit of a woman will fall on your car’s bonnet,” because a woman allegedly committed
suicide around the tunnel. Similarly, in Kazandō, another famous haunted place, “the
spirits [of people] who died during the war, wander.”6
Nevertheless, during my participant observation in a tour of haunted places in
Kyoto, I never witnessed anyone who saw anything nor saw anything myself. Yet, I
did witness some interactions with spirits. In both the previously mentioned Kiyotaki
tunnel and Kazandō, for instance, twice in front of the former and four times in front
of the latter, some people refused to enter. When I asked for explanations (tourist were
paying 6,000 yen for the tour, and the two places were the “highlights” of two different
routes, held on different days) they said that they felt something weird, stating that it
was creepy (kimiwarui 気味悪い), weird (okashii おかしい), and that they were feeling
“too heavy of an atmosphere” (kūki ga omosugiru 空気が重すぎる) or some ghastly
presence (rei wo kanjiru 霊を感じる). This happened already outside the tunnels,
indicating that spirits can be perceived by some people also without necessarily
entering the haunted place, and that those feelings are unpleasant and indicators of
something that should be avoided. Indeed, those people perceived the danger that
ghosts could attach to them, that they could “bring spirits home” (see below). When
I asked for specifications, however, these people could barely articulate what they felt

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 116 Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire

more than what they had already said. When I insisted and asked them if they could
explain to me what “feeling a ghost” meant, three of them gave me different answers:
a woman in her forties told me her shoulders had become heavier (kata ga omoi
肩が重い) and she felt cold, another woman in her fifties told me that she felt some
pressure at the chest and shoulder level, whereas another woman in the same age range,
told me that her head had started aching and she was feeling cold. Therefore, although
at the beginning their linguistic reactions pointed at the place as the external cause
(i.e., “creepy,” “weird,” or “heavy”), a further articulation highlighted a relationship
with perceptions of temperature, as well as feelings related to tactility, proprioception,
and pain, with a particular focus on the upper part of the body.
As visitors walked through Kiyotaki tunnel, two people told me that they heard
some sounds similar to a woman’s voice, whereas in Kazandō three times people
claimed that they heard some whispers or small squealing voices coming from afar.
At two different times, moreover, two people suddenly moved toward the wall with
a small scream, claiming that they felt something touching their shoulder or as if
something had swiftly brushed past them at the center of the tunnel. In these cases,
these experiences were more linked to hearing and tactility and were interpreted as
more “direct” than the ones of the people who, in fact, decided to stay out in order not
to be directly involved.
There were also people who did not feel any presence, but they tended to attribute
this to their own lack of reikan, whereas all the people who decided to stay outside
claimed that their reikan was strong. I never found anyone who claimed to have reikan
among the people who did not sense anything and, conversely, even among those who
claimed not to have a particular sense for the supernatural, some were feeling that the
place was “heavy.”
The ways in which these experiences emerge in the engagement of the lived and
moving body with certain affordances of the environment have already been analyzed
through the concept of “affective correspondences” (De Antoni 2017b, forthcoming).
Yet, here, there are some points that can be highlighted: (1) There seemed to be a
recurrence of feelings particularly related to the haptic sphere and the (motor-)senses
(temperature, tactility, proprioception, exteroception, and kinesthesia) that functioned
as “indicators” for spirits, such as in the case of the people who decided to stay outside.
These haptic experiences were also a means to directly—and quite literally—get in
touch with ghosts. (2) Hearing seemed to play a role in the engagements with spirits,
but nothing visual was mentioned. (3) Individual skills of feeling, corresponding, and
attuning with spirits also had a central role in the socialization of these experiences. (4)
In all these instances, spirits were “external,” something that lingered in that particular
place. Bodily feelings and skills were the mediators between visitors and entities; they
became the “symptoms” of spirits’ presence and the ways in which interactions took
place.
Although in these cases spirits did not manifest their visible shapes, during my
fieldwork I did talk with people who claimed they see or saw them.7 In these cases as
well, reikan played a central role. In fact, people who told me that they could see ghosts,
also typically claimed that it was because of the “strength” of their skill. In other words,
the ability to see spirits does not only contribute to the reality of the experience but also

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 Came Back Hounded 117

to prove the seer’s ability. Among these people, broadly speaking, I could identify two
categories. The first includes people who belong to religious institutions or practice as
local healers, shamans, or mediums. This category could be divided into two subgroups
of people: those who acquired reikan as a consequence of religious training, and those
who were born with the ability to see ghosts and underwent some religious training in
order to learn how to control their skills, such as in the case of Okinawan yuta ユタ,
itako イタコ in Osorezan, or mediums (reinōryokusha 霊能力者). The second category
encompasses people who claim that they can only sporadically see spirits and identified
such events as a problematic “symptom” that needed to be solved. The first category
has been widely investigated, especially in studies about “shamanism” (Blacker 1975;
Raveri [1984] 2006; Shiotsuki 2006) and the transformative power of ascetic practices
(Blacker 1975; Lobetti 2016; Raveri 1992), so I will not take them into consideration
here. Yet, I believe it is important to point out that, in the case of people who learn these
skills, spirits continue to be external to the seer. The second category, however, points at
a group and—even more importantly—some experiences which have been barely taken
into consideration by scholars. I find these cases interesting because these people do not
become religious practitioners and, yet, they look for the help of religious practitioners
in order to alleviate what they perceive as “symptoms” of so-called spirit attachment
or possession (tsuki). In this sense, although seeing spirits is not the only symptom, it
becomes an indicator of a presence that starts losing its externality, becoming—at least
to a certain extent—part of the “victim,” as I will discuss below.

Spirits Attach

Scholarly works have pointed out that the Japanese word tsuki covers a broader
spectrum than the English “possession” (Komatsu 1994, 2017). “Possession” can be
broadly defined as “any altered or unusual state of consciousness and allied behaviour
that is indigenously understood in terms of the influence of an alien spirit, demon, or
deity. The possessed act as though another personality […] has entered their body and
taken control” (Crapanzano 2005: 86–87).8 Yet, in the Japanese context, phenomena of
attachment also seem to encompass a spectrum of experiences that do not necessarily
include altered states of consciousness. Indeed, Komatsu (1994) points out that tsuki
is a general term, whereas spirits possessing someone could also be called hyōrei
憑霊 and the above-defined “possession,” hyōi 憑依. He sees hyōi as a subset of the
more general tsuki, characterized by loss of consciousness and change of personality.
Yet, for the sake of clarity, he suggests to refer to all these terms as “attachment” or
“possession” (Komatsu 2017). I will also follow his suggestion here because, according
to my experience, all the different phenomena that I will list below were classified as
tsuki by the people in Kenmi shrine.
Research on spirit attachment in Japan has highlighted the complexity and variety
of possessing entities (tsukimono),9 leaning toward taxonomy and identification of
local differences. Generally speaking, possessing entities could be deities; spirits of
human beings, either living (ikiryō 生霊) or dead (shiryō, shirei 死霊, or yūrei); spirits
of animals such as foxes, snakes, badgers, dogs, cats, or monkeys; and even spirits of

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plants. Those causing most problems are the ikiryō and animal spirits (Komatsu 1994),
but I have also witnessed several issues related to yūrei and spirits of ancestors. However,
studies have tended to focus mainly on two aspects related to spirit attachment and
possession. The first is discrimination against certain family lineages (tsukimono tō
憑き物統 or keitō 系統, also tsukimono suji 憑き物筋 or tsukimono mochi 憑き物持ち),
identified as particularly susceptible to possession or, more often, as the more or less
voluntary cause of possession in other members of the community (Komatsu 1994).
These studies have highlighted that, because of historical reasons, mainly related to the
economy, these families have undergone exclusion from inter- or intra-village marriage
or community life (see Blacker 1975; Komatsu 1994). These findings resonate with
broader anthropological literature on witchcraft and related accusations, mainly based
on notions of limited good (Evans-Pritchard 1937; Favret-Saada 1980; Komatsu 1994).
The second main focus is the relationship between possession and mental illness or,
rather, efforts to categorize and explain phenomena of spirit attachment in medical
and psychiatric terms. Thus, at different times, attachment was classified as “invocation
psychosis” (kitōsei seishinbyō 祈祷性精神病)—caused by exorcising practices10—or as
mania, paranoia, hysteria, and schizophrenia (Eguchi 1991).
There are some exceptions to these trends, though they are few. For instance, in a
brilliant article that was also one of the works that set the beginning of transcultural
psychiatry in Japan, Eguchi (1991) reviewed three cases of fox possession in a mountain
village in Shiga Prefecture. Although his argument revolved around the difficulties
of classifying fox possession as a “culture-bound syndrome,” his accounts shed light
on the intricacy of the social dimensions of illness and treatment, as “a tangled mass
of the various subtly differing realities of the patient, the healer, and the people”
(Eguchi 1991: 442). Similarly, Matsuoka argued that fox possession needs to be seen
as “a metaphor of social, economic, political, and cosmological situations rather than
explaining it from a medical point of view” (Matsuoka 1991: 473).
These studies, however, strongly focus on symbolic aspects and socially shared
narratives revolving around illness, in line with other anthropological approaches
(Good 1994; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997), thus barely providing an account of
the individual feelings and experiences through which the reality of spirits emerge.
Moreover, although they relativize mental illness as much as possession, their main
focus is on the differences and similarities between the two; yet, the cases in which
they could be assimilated are just a small part of the larger phenomenon of tsuki.
For instance, reporting about snake possession in Shikoku, Blacker wrote that “the
principal symptom […] is a sudden and unbearable pain in the joints, similar to acute
rheumatism” (Blacker 1975: 38), and also in my own experience, cases involving
mainly physical symptoms were preponderant, as I will show below.

Feeling Attached
The following analysis is based on a sample of eighty-one people whom I interviewed
in Kenmi jinja during my initial periods of fieldwork. When people visited the shrine
with their family or friends, I conducted group interviews. There were forty-eight

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 Came Back Hounded 119

females (59 percent) and thirty-three males (41 percent), and the majority of people
were in their forties and fifties, although all the ages were represented, including
teenagers and children. The majority of these people (53 percent) visited the shrine
from Kagawa Prefecture, followed by Tokushima (39 percent) and Kōchi (8 percent).11
The motives for visiting Kenmi shrine—most of the times after a drive of more
than one and a half hours—were rather variegated and included its uniqueness as a
shrine, the beauty of the environment, and family histories related to the shrine. Yet,
the majority of my informants (69 percent) visited for what could be summarized as
the attainment of worldly benefits, such as “to be protected by the god(s),” “to pass
entrance examinations at the university,” “hoping to solve troubles at work/in order
to find a better job,” “because of diseases that did not heal,” accidents, or explicitly to
“be delivered from possessing entities [tsukimono] or evil spirits/energies [jaki 邪気].”
Indeed, Kenmi shrine is renowned and promotes itself for its ritual of deliverance
from evil spirits and, particularly, from the dog-god (inugami). I report here the
narrative from the shrine’s webpage:

The only shrine in Japan [Nihon issha 日本一社]—Kenmi jinja, is the greatest
shrine to deliver people from inugami possession, and it is renown as a shrine that
facilitates recovery from illness, as well as safety and prosperity in the household.
It has several features that differ from general shrines, and exorcisms [go-kitō
ご祈祷] are carried out following a peculiar ritual style.12

The website explains that the peculiarities reside in its unique prayers (norito 祝詞) and
the way in which they are chanted, as well as the use of a peculiar tool (kinpei 金弊) for
the exorcism—the same tool as the ones usually used in shrines for purification rituals
but made in gold instead of paper and with small bells attached in the end. The officiant
repeatedly touches the supplicant’s head and shoulders with it during the ritual (see
Figure 7.1). The webpage also explicitly relates the shrine to deliverance from dog-god
possession, and explains its features as follows:

Particularly in the South-East part of Shikoku, from ancient times there have been
legends about possession and curses by the spirit of an animal called inugami. It is
thought that it causes illnesses that are difficult to explain from a medical perspective,
such as changes in one person’s character, shivering hands and legs, sudden fevers,
and so on. […] The inugami cult still remains very strong in certain areas and Kenmi
jinja, which is the only shrine able to exorcise it, is related to that cult.13

On the sheet with the explanation of the kinds of wishes and prayers one can ask
the ritual to be performed for, along with the usual items such as family safety, safe
pregancy and safety from traffic, protection against illness or for business, one could
find “deliverance from evil spirits/energies” (jaki taisan 邪気退散). The main priest told
me that this is what the vast majority of people ask for.
I have already pointed out elsewhere that the majority of people who underwent
the ritual were not concerned with what kind of entity was affecting them, as long
as they felt better after undergoing the ritual. This suggests that experiences of spirit

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Figure 7.1 The head priest (gūji) performing the ritual with a kinpei. Photograph by
Andrea De Antoni.

possession, although all very different from one another, were indeed bodily but went
“beyond the body proper” (Lock and Farquhar 2007), being always entangled with
nonbodily symptoms. This also proves that possessions tended to emerge according to
bodily perceptions and feelings, before involving “belief ” in spirits.14
Symptoms of possession were very diverse, and included issues related to social
relations (mainly with family, friends, and coworkers), diseases that did not heal through
medical treatment (persisting fever and weariness, chronic pains, wrist cutting, sudden
changes in character and becoming violent), accidents (mainly by car, but also several
cases of misfortune), feelings of oppression or dissatisfaction (including bad mood,
feeling depressed or nervous, also in relation to misfortunes and troubles at work),
and even events that were perceived as hindrances to visit the shrine and be exorcised
(getting lost on the way, getting stuck at the entrance of the shrine and not being able
to continue, vomiting, sudden and unexpected commitments). Yet, the centrality of
physical symptoms was very evident (33 percent of total mentions, including diseases
that did not heal), as shown in Figure 7.2. Therefore, here I would like to focus on these.

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 Came Back Hounded 121

Feelings of
Social Hindrances While
Symptoms Physical Accidents Oppression/
Relations Going to the Shrine
Dissatisfaction
Frequency 28 20 11 6 6
Percentage 33 24 13 7 7

Figure 7.2 General symptoms of attachment/possession. Table by Andrea De Antoni.

The relatively low frequency of each singular symptom shows that there were no
specific symptoms associated to or representative of one particular possessing
entity, but each and every individual would perceive their own physical conditions
(entangled with symptoms listed in other categories above) as possible symptoms of
some sort of attachment. As can be seen in the breakdown in Figure 7.3, the physical
symptoms that were mentioned the most were stomach-ache and sickness. From the
table, it can be concluded that (1) the majority of the symptoms involved either a
(chronic) generalized bad condition (such as weariness), or the upper part of the
body (head, shoulders, and torso), and (2) feeling or seeing ghastly presences was
mentioned relatively often. Below, I discuss some cases that illustrate the complexity
of the phenomena involved.

Case 1 (February 4, 2016): Woman in her fifties, with her daughter in her twenties,
from Kagawa.

They visit at least once a month. The mother told me that the daughter “has a very
strong sensitivity to spirits (reikan)” and that “she brings them home.” The mother
understands when the daughter has some spirit-related issue, because she becomes
pale and her eyes roll upwards. The daughter understands because she starts seeing
people’s faces or shapes hovering, mainly around her head. In those cases, the
mother feels heaviness on her shoulders, which confirms the spiritual origin of the
symptoms. The mother also suffers from chronic toothaches, which improve after
she undergoes the ritual. When the whole situation becomes unbearable (at least
once a month), they drive to Kenmi shrine, but they tend to experience hindrances
to their trip: “When we drive here, even though I have to turn right, I try to turn left,
or tend to get lost. I think ‘I come here every time and yet today it is weird … ’ They
[the spirits] don’t want us to come. [That’s the way] they say that they don’t want
to come. Because as soon as we arrive here, everything changes.” They also told me
that once, while driving to Kenmi jinja, the mother got paralyzed for a moment,
thus finding herself unable to brake and, consequently, crashing into the car in
front of them. They identified the possessing entities as malevolent spirits/energies
(jaki) or ghosts (yūrei).

In this case, the intersubjective dimension of the experiences was very clear: the reality
of spirits and possession emerged because mother and daughter both experienced
symptoms, though very different, at similar times. The daughter’s conditions might

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Feelings Emotions Change of

(motor-)senses, (bad mood, nervousness, character
temperature Seeing sadness)
Self

Hearing Misfortunes Physical

(accidents, social symptoms
Interactions relations) (illness, pain)
(external spirits)
Tsuki
(internal spirits)

Figure 7.3 A spectrum of experiences with spirits. Diagram by Andrea De Antoni.

be easily assimilated to certain psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, and they

actually told me that the father was undergoing psychiatric treatment (although
they did not specify for what disorder). This proves that they had familiarity with
pathological conditions and, yet, they did not perceive the daughter’s condition as
such. On the other hand, reducing the daughter’s condition to pathology would not
explain the relations to the mother’s experiences and the hindrances she encounters.
Seeing shapes seemed to be central in the identification of attachment. As I mentioned
above, seeing seems to mark the border between spirits as external and (to a certain
extent) internal entities that, although they did not completely take over the daughter’s
self and were perceived as something “other” and different from her, “moved” with
her, as she would “bring them home.” In this sense, spirits were originally external, not
belonging to the individual and, yet, once attached to the daughter, they were able to
influence not only the two women’s bodies but their environment as well.

Case 2 (February 4, 2016): Woman A, late forties, and woman B, early forties,
friends from Tokushima.

They visit once a year. They both defined themselves as the “easily-receiving
(moraiyasui もらいやすい) type.” A understood to have troubles related to spirits
from headaches and from her mood, which suddenly becomes “bad” (kibun ga
waruku naru 気分が悪くなる), and she becomes very nervous, “like … Don’t get
close to me!” B’s symptoms were turning pale, while her mood suddenly becomes
bad. Although they did not explicitly identify the entities possessing them, they
told me that they both work in day-care and that they “receive things” from their
customers or colleagues, thus implying that they were dealing with ikiryō.

In this case too, spirits manifested themselves by causing physical symptoms, associated
to moods and emotions that were perceived as bad and that, clearly, could be related to
social and work relationships, particularly in the case of woman A. These two women
“received” spirits from their customers and colleagues, thus showing that entities can
“move” from a person to another and be internalized.

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Case 3 (February 3, 2016): Married couple, mid-fifties, from Kōchi.

They have visited the shrine once a month in the last ten years, because the
husband’s father has suffered from what they explicitly identified as inugami
possession (hyōi). They reported that the father’s character and expression—
particularly his eyes (metsuki 目付き)—change abruptly, he suddenly becomes
angry and, in some cases, violent. He also experiences shivering of hands and
legs. He has undergone medical treatment, but with no improvements. The father
refuses to visit the shrine because, as the man stated, he does not believe in spirits.
The man also made explicit that he did not believe in spirits himself either, and
that he went there for the first time as a last resort. However, whenever the man
undergoes the exorcism, he notices improvements in the father’s conditions.

In this case, possession was experienced through symptoms involving physicality and
worsening social relations, but above all changes in personality; the man explicitly
defined the case as “possession.” These people did not mention the reason why the
father was possessed, so they clearly gave more importance to the fact that the spirit
was “internal” to the self rather than to the “internalization” process, different from
the previous cases. Moreover, this was the only case I could find in which possession
was explicitly ascribed to inugami and, indeed, the symptoms match the description
from the shrine’s website, showing that, possibly, in this case institutionalized
discourses on possession had an influence in the identification of the illness.

A Spectrum of Specters

In this chapter, I provided an account of the diversity of experiences with spirits in

contemporary Japan, with a particular focus on feelings. These experiences are all very
individual and have no common determined or determining feature—not to mention
“structure”—underlying them. Spirits here are not “objects” but “things” (Ingold
2011a), entangled in materiality and social practice, whose reality emerges and intrudes
people’s life experiences through the lived body. Moreover, they are not fixed things but
“meshworks” (Ingold 2011a: 64) of feelings, complexly entangled with other actors
that go “beyond the body proper” (Lock and Farquhar 2007) and include individual
skills (reikan), other humans (visitors to haunted places, webmasters, family members,
colleagues, etc.), social relations, and nonhumans (the internet, the environment,
squeaking voices, visible shapes, aching body parts, cars, etc.). In other words, spirits
go well beyond “simple” belief, for their reality and changes emerge within complex
arrays of intersubjective attunements.
Nevertheless, given the centrality of feelings and bodily perceptions involved, I
believe that the “symptoms” of spirit presence could be arranged along a spectrum, also
for the sake of future comparative research. I think this is useful in order to understand
the processes through which spirits are perceived as external or internal, as part of the
self, or other (Figure 7.4).

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Frequency
Symptoms
(mentions)
4 - Stomach ache/feeling sick
- Being pale
- Generalized weariness
3 - Different illnesses in a row
- Feeling/seeing ghastly presences
- Cough
- Headache
2
- Sense of heaviness on the shoulders
- Chronic pain in the lower back
- (Lower) back ache
- Cold
- Loss of control over eating
- Persisting fever
- Persisting weariness
- Belly ache (possible uterus-related issues after miscarriage
or abortion)
1
- Unspecified disorders identified as due to stress related to
social relations
- Chronic toothache
- High blood pressure
- Chronic pain in the knee
- (Father) change of character, with shivering hands and feet
- Wrist cutting

Figure 7.4 Breakdown of mentioned physical symptoms according to frequency. Table by

Andrea De Antoni.

On the left side of the spectrum in Figure 7.4 is a list of the perceptions that involve
interactions with spirits, those “symptoms” through which they make their presence
felt while remaining external. Among these the (motor-)senses, feelings of temperature,
and hearing appear. The first two tend to be related to feelings toward the external
environment in everyday life, as hearing also does. Interestingly, although hearing
voices could theoretically be a symptom of possession—of an internalization of the
cause of the voices into the individual (as it happens for some psychiatric disorders)—
and, indeed, it sporadically appears in literature as such (Eguchi 1991; Matsuoka
1991), it did not appear during my fieldwork at Kenmi shrine. This point needs further
investigation.
Seeing presences seems to mark the borderline between spirits perceived as external
or internal. Yet, this is not related to seeing itself but, rather, to the rest of the symptoms
with which such experience was entangled: if it happens in specific places, together
with feelings associated to external perceptions, the presence seems to be perceived as
external and “stays” in place. When seeing is entangled with misfortunes or accidents
(such as Case 1) it can become a symptom of attachment. In this case, the seen entities
were still perceived as external, but the cause of the seeing was internal and “brought
home” from outside. Moreover, the attached entity was perceived as “other” to the self,
though internalized to a certain extent.

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Specific moods and emotions, socially perceived as “bad,” were also symptoms of
attachment (Case 2). In this case, feelings usually conceived as internal to the self, were
perceived as caused by an internalized external presence, particularly when entangled
with other misfortunes. Furthermore, individual skills of feeling spirits and being
affected by them (reikan) were also central in the enmeshing of the symptom and the
creation of the modalities of interactions with spirits.
All these different experiences point at the construction of different “extended
selves” and personhoods that emerge through experience and need to be further
investigated, possibly also from a comparative perspective. Moreover, the interplay
between what is experienced as internal or external, self and other, also seems to
emerge as a consequence of the modalities of entanglement of different feelings with
other symptoms. There is the need for further investigations in this direction, in order
to understand the experiences and the dangers of “bringing spirits home,” to “come
back haunted” from somewhere, or to be “hounded” by the dog-god.

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