Japanese Demons

The Japanese mythology has more demons that any other mythology. When I just think of our European Pagan mythologies, we have max 30, the Japanese has several hundreds. Japan has always been at war, and this has given rise to many cruel fantasies. I loved to watch Inu Yasha because of this, and I played Throne of Darkness (a rather unknown game), but I never studied the Japanese mythology in greater detail. Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the thought of soldiers overrunning a town at night, butchering the inhabitants, burning the houses, while the woman are committing jigai, or trying at least. And all of this in a chaos of fear, flames, and violence.

So, does anyone know a good source for learning about Japanese demons, and their connections to Japan's history? Does anyone know any Animes/Mangas that deal with those topics? Or even computer games?

Feel free to discuss anything that has something to do with Japanese demons here.

Thank you in advance!

You have no idea, do you?
For first, there's the Catholic mythology with more than 30 saints, and there that's a pantheon all of its own... with dozens of angels, devils, etc. etc. (though frankly these were pagan spirits, rituals, whatsoever that the Church absorbed and redressed in its own flavour. So when the people converted they could still hold their traditions, it was just "retconned" to be "Chritian").

Then you have the Norse and Greeco-Roman mythology which is pretty much the same, except the gods had different names over the ages... and different legends and myths were told about them, since a fucking 1000 years have passed.

Except just your garden variety "children's" Greek Mythology book, try and read something authentic, like one of the Viking Sagas or a book written by historians or culture antropologists.... hundreds of dwarfs (dark elves), elves, spritis, fey, minor gods, rivalizing pantheons (ie. the Irish vs. the Viking)...

...it's just as complicated and intricate as the Japanese.

All around the world, people saw weird shit they couldn't explain, and to be frank life and world's weird and idiosyncratic as-is. Today we have enough science (and it's beyond the grasp of most people) so that scientific detail can be a new mantra for the mindless masses... or JEEEHSUS!

[font=Courier New]Lots of pagan pantheons out there; I don't think that Japanese demon hierarchies are solely the most complicated in existence. They are pretty interesting given their 'exotic' nature I suppose.

@Flaser's pic: I lol'd. [/font]

Kinda off-topic, but whatever:
This is the first time I've seen someone else even mention Throne of Darkness.
Used to play it for a bit like 10 years ago when it was released (might be more or less than 10 years, too lazy to check), but I managed to lose one of the CD's and couldn't be bothered downloading it so didn't get to play it alot.

I'm hoping to study Heian literature incorporating on the studies of Mythology in Japan.

@All:
Stay on topic please, and the topic is clearly demons, in particular Japanese ones.

@Flaser:
There is a obviously a big difference between demons and saints, dwarfs, or gods. You want to act educated, but "a book written by historians or culture antropologists" is the only reference that comes to your mind? And you even spelled anthropologists wrong!

Either your brain is very empty, so that the only thing you can associate with Japanese demons are the Catholic church and Norse Mythology (!?), or you are just a western European chauvinist, so that you can't stand that the culture of someone else is in the spotlight. Either way, since you are inapt to contribute to the topic, please refrain yourself from posting and especially spamming huge, OT images without a spoiler.

@RanmaSyaoran:
Sounds very interesting! Do you have already researched any specific books, and do you know where to get them?

Fuck you and the horse you rode on, you grammar nazi!

Can't you get it in your mind that supernatural beings are just that - supernatural. Bohoo! They're not saints or dwarfs, these are fuckin' DEMONS!

I can't believe you're trying to pick a fight on the genealogy of imaginary creatures as if they've existed. You believe non of the western nations had anything similar to what the Japanese have? No, I'm not some fucking European chauvinist, I'm just pointing out that humans all around the globe are a lot more similar than we'd be given to think... we even dreamed up similar fantasies practically worlds apart in those ages when a man would likely never see the other side of the globe.

I could list some historian authors, but given that all of the ones I read were Hungarian that would be really helpful, right? There is good (well researched) *fiction* though that I can recommend in English from Robert Graves, titled "Greek Myths" (1955).

...and yeah, I need to swear a lot, it makes my prose flow more freely as I'm not bogged down by the need to write concise polite sentences for a fucktard who takes each and every critical reaction as an attack on his person and his beliefs.

... or not Flaser. Or not...

I don't know about Japanese mythology too much, but as was explained to me by several people is that Japan has so many entities because there was not a great deal of culture sharing way back in history (you can even see that reflected today in Japan by the many different kinds of shrines, legends, and even vastly different dialects that people use). This lead to each region having its own legends, beliefs, and deities come into existence. However, there was still one overarching system of belief - Shinto mixed in with some Buddhism later on.

When there was a more unified country, these different deities, spirits, demons, ect, all sort of started to mesh together. If your town had a demon that lived under a lake, when the town far away heard about it they might incorporate it into their mythology. Likewise, you would maybe remember that their town had a spirit that lived in the mountain overlooking their village.

The isolation between areas gave rise to so many differentiating ideas that there are now a huge number of legends an characters in Japanese mythology.

Dude, you can just google that shit and there's all your answers.

Actually I didn't say that *sharing* was going, I was just commenting that some parallel evolution of beliefs has produced quite similar results. All around the world, people imagined other-worldly, spiritual beings around them and frequently they ascribed special meaning to natural phenomena and the "deity" behind them.

Though yes, Shinto is quite special in the way that it ascribes kami to literally everything. Even a weirdly shaped rock, an old tree or a piece of art.

Tribal or nomadic people also often have a lot of deities as there religion is not centrally organized.

The original Hungarian mythology also had lots of spirits, it even had a whole spirit world with a world tree (like the Norse mythologies).

When my ancestors conquered the Carpatian basin they mingled with the local Slav people and took up some of their customs and tried to emulate the more advanced western kingdoms. Arpad the leader of the seven Hungarian tribes probably did this to cement the rule of his family, adopting primogeniture (the crown goes to the first born son, then the second born, etc.) So his son Istvan the 1st was crowned king... and had to fight a bloody internal strife with the conservatives who still wished to follow seniority (leadership goes to the eldest tribal leader). Istvan took up Christianity as this earned him the support of western kingdoms - and their knights.

Subsequently almost all knowledge of our original mythology was lost, and only a fragmented picture could be pieced together by later historians.

Since Japan was divided for so long, it could be a reason why religion survived in its "proto-form".

In some ways this is a remnant of the most primitive form of worship possible, but interestingly it is also tempered by a mature understanding and wisdom born of reason not mere mysticism or superstition that I find astounding. Even in their spirituality, there's an earthy understanding of what people are, what makes us a tick, a solid collection of understanding of how the human psyche deals with the world around it.

...or am I ascribing all these enlightened ideas to the base that is in fact the result of the later tempering by Buddhist influences?

Back on cross-cultural comparisions:
Just because a central authority arose - and certain aspects of worship have been canonized and regulated - doesn't mean a religion will loose all of its earlier local quirks.

As I wrote earlier, when Christianity spread it often absorbed local folklore and mythology, redressing it to fit its own tenets but otherwise not trying (initially) to eradicate them entirely.

Why do I keep thinking you get more and more stupid as I see your posts?

The vast majority of Japanese demons? They are just supernatural spirits and beings. They are not the same thing as Hell demons that you find in Western beliefs. If you're going to be a weeaboo, at least know this basic shit.

So yeah, they are comparable to things like elves, and gods, and saints because that's what they fucking are. The Japanese just call them demons. Actually, they don't call them demons. They call them youkai, tenyuu's, and onis. We just translate it as demon.

Seriously, why did you come back? Go whine and leave again.

im content with seeing the oni carrying its tetsubo and raijin\raiden (dunno if the lightning thing's a demon or a god)

I'm not commenting in here because I don't know enough about it yet.

But to answer a question, I've been accepted to Oxford Brookes University, but I'm hoping to get to SOAS.

Semantics. It isn't like a Japanese person is going to say, "Nuh-uh! We don't have demons! They are something else!" For all intents and purposes, they are demonic equivalents.

[font=Verdana][color=green]I normally had a lot more respect for your posts. But, following this post, I'm a bit annoyed by it. I do hope that you return back to your normal ways. Personal attacks on other members is something that I will not allow to go unnoticed, and I'll continue to call anyone up on it when they don't retract their statements.

But yes, there certainly seems to be a high amount of Japanese Demons which, may I add, do not include Saints, Angels or other supernatural beings. There is a difference between the two, and if he had meant to include them, he would have stipulated in the first place.

Hinduism has over 330 million gods.

No, they call them something else. We just translate it as demon in an attempt to find something relevant.

Yes they have demons that are like say, Christianity's demons but not all of the "demons" are like that. They have things like Youkai which the closest thing you would find in western lore is Elves and the Fey.

The point is that they don't call them just demons. They have a variety of names for the various supernatural creatures, just like in western lore.

What this is doing would be the equivalent of taking angels, elves, and monsters from western lore, and just using just one umbrella term when being translated to describe all of them that means one specific thing in the language it's being translated in.

What part of the topic "JAPANESE DEMONS" included asking for details on Christianity?

Topic is related to Japanese demons.

E.g,

Yuki-onna = Snow Woman that lured men lost in the mountains to their graves (she'd be seen as beautiful, feed them and then EAT them).

So you just completely skipped over everything didn't you.

The simplest way for anyone to get more knowledgeable on the area without signing up for a course in Japanese folklore would be to read a book "written by historians or culture anthropologists". I can't give any examples of such books, but take a trip to your local library and with a bit of luck you'll find something.

I can agree that demons, saints and gods are not really comparable to the Japanese "demons" that are deemed quite a bit less abstract than our western supernatural beings, but not they Dwarfs. As Kalistean pointed out the closest thing that western mythology have is the creatures of the Fay, and surely the Dwarfs of old Germanic folklore would fall into that category.

And on the matter that western mythology have at the most two dozen of "demons" I'd call bullshit, the only comparable thing would be our fairy creatures and the closest you would get is probably Norse and old Germanic mythology, that have at the very least a hundred wights of different sorts, and that's not counting the gods, the Valkyries, the giants and all that stuff.

Edit: Don't care enough to make a new post.

@The dude below: I thought this thread kinda established a difference between a Deity/God and a demon/fairy-creature already?