Japan has always been a place where the visible and the invisible coexist, and though August is the traditional period here when the worlds of the living and the dead overlap, who’s to say spirits don’t make an exception when Halloween rolls around — especially in a city with as long and grisly a history as Kyoto?
One such vengeful spirit long associated with the city is Sugawara no Michizane, a scholar and politician in the mid-Heian Period (794-1185). After a conflict with the powerful Fujiwara clan got him banished to Kyushu in 901, Sugawara died there two years later. Across the country, it was said that plague and drought quickly followed, and to appease his spirit, Sugawara was deified as Tenjin, originally a kami (god) of sky and storms but since repackaged into the more benevolent kami of scholarship.
The principal shrine dedicated to this kami is Kyoto’s Kitano Tenmangu, which oversees 12,000 smaller affiliate shrines nationwide, at which students can often be seen in prayer. Kitano Tenmangu also hosts a lively flea market the 25th of every month — if you’re looking to placate this spirit once more with a timely Halloween purchase.
Not all spirits can be so easily appeased, though. On Mount Oe in Kyoto’s far western outskirts is a shrine consecrated to one of Japan's top three malevolent yōkai spirits. Legend has it that in life he was known as Shuten-doji, leader of a clan of oni (ogres) who terrorized the area. When a large number of women went missing in the old capital, the famous onmyōdō geomancer Abe no Seimei identified Shuten-doji as responsible. After being incapacitated by his beloved sake, the oni king was decapitated — though his head continued to snap its jaws at the five warriors sent by the emperor to subdue him.
Not wanting to bring the head back into Kyoto, the warriors buried it here in 995 beneath a small mound of gravel at the back of the shrine.
When it wasn’t oni kings but common criminals that warranted capital punishment, these took place at the execution grounds that stood near the Awataguchi, one of the seven gates of the old city. Now, as the old Tokaido highway has been converted into the modern-day Sanjo-dori road, but the display of corpses once seen here — including those of Akechi Mitsuhide, the assassin of Oda Nobunaga — to travelers entering the capital was a clear warning: behave or perish.
During the Edo Period (1603-1868), executions were carried out here three times a year. An estimated 15,000 people were executed before the grounds were abolished in the Meiji Era (1868-1912). However, a dissection laboratory was established here in 1872, with autopsies performed on executed men in a building glassed-in on four sides.
Another execution site was Rokujo-gawara, located on the site of an 1184 battlefield beside the Kamo River. Ishida Mitsunari was brought here after his defeat at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, and those generals who maintained loyalty to Toyotomi Hideyoshi were dispatched here after his clan’s ultimate collapse at Osaka Castle 15 years later. A massive collection of graves stretches up the adjacent hillside, and atop stands both Kiyomizu Temple and its neighbor Jisshu Shrine, where women betrayed by lovers curse them by nailing straw dolls to trees.
I suppose it is little surprise that the area’s bloody history gave rise to the belief that the well at the nearby Rokudo Chinno Temple is a passageway to the underworld. The temple is named for the six paths of reincarnation in Buddhism, each path representing a different realm. In the Heian Period, it was said that calligrapher and poet Ono no Takamura climbed down the well at night to judge the souls of the newly dead. His near contemporary Murasaki Shikibu supposedly descended to hell from here as well — atonement for writing her lustful book, “The Tale of Genji.”
A more benign legend was born around the corner at Minatoya Yurei Kosodate-Ame Honpo, Japan’s oldest candy shop. For seven consecutive nights, it is said, a pale woman came to the shop to buy millet jelly, but without money to spend, the ghostly woman traded her haori jacket, which was later recognized by a neighbor as belonging to his recently deceased daughter. Upon digging up her grave, they found a crying baby feeding on the shop’s candy. Visitors can try this same candy, unchanged since the shop opened in 1599.
Surely, Kyoto’s most popular spooky sites are the blood-stained ceilings of a handful of temples, notably Genko-an, Hosen-in, Yogen-in and Shoden-ji.
The Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 stands as the most influential battle in Japanese history. A narrow pass threads through the mountains between Sekigahara and Kyoto, and whoever controlled the capital controlled the emperor. Tokugawa Ieyasu placed 1,800 men at Fushimi Momoyama Castle in order to slow Ishida Mitsunari’s approach from the west, buying time to establish better positions on the battlefield. This small contingent had no hope of defeating Mitsunari’s 40,000-strong army, but they stalled them for long enough until the castle was set ablaze, trapping 380 defenders. The men committed ritual suicide, with the surviving blood-stained floorboards later placed into the ceilings of Kyoto’s temples, a gesture to honor and appease their spirits.
One of the supposedly most haunted places in Kyoto, however, is decidedly more contemporary. The 444-meter-long Kiyotaki Tunnel north of Arashiyama was built for a rail line in 1928, when harsh working conditions led to a number of worker fatalities and suicides. Today, nighttime drivers claim to have seen ghostly figures in their mirrors or bore witness to the ghost of a woman jumping onto the hood of their car. On some nights, the screams of this woman are said to penetrate the dark of the surrounding forest — certainly one place trick or treaters best avoid.
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