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zashikiwarashi, the ghost that is saving JaPan

lindA kinsey sPetter

Zashikiwarashi is a ghost which is well known in Japan but not well known in the 
western world. Richard Dorson did briefly mention this ghost in his Folk Legends 
of Japan (1962), a book that he began with high praise of Kunio Yanagita, the 
“father of Japanese folklore,” who first wrote about Zashikiwarashi in 1910 in his 
Tono Monogatari (which translates Legends of Tono). Michiko Iwasaka and Barre 
Toelken also mentioned the ghost briefly in their book Ghosts and the Japanese 
(1994), and they pointed out that the spirit of Zashikiwarashi has been associated 
with the spirit of unborn children, either through abortion or through mabiki, 
which was an old practice of killing some children right after they were born so 
there would not be too many mouths to feed. Even though Zashikiwarashi is not 
well known outside of Japan, for the past few years Japanese culture has been 
inundated with Zashikiwarashi stories in numerous manga, anime, TV dramas, 
novels, movies, stage plays, musicals, computer games, short stories, newspaper 
articles, magazines, Internet websites, folklore books and children’s books. In my 
opinion, these stories relate to a number of social problems that Japan is now 
experiencing: a low birth rate because 
young people do not marry until they are 
almost 30, a high suicide rate, bullying, 
a phenomenon known as “hikkikomori” 
(young men and women who withdraw 
from society to stay in their rooms because 
of their inability to interact with society), 
and the economic necessity of families 
often having to live apart because of their 
jobs. This is not to even mention the 
depression and despair of the 2011 tsunami 
which killed more than 15,000 people and 
displaced more than 340,000 people in 
Japan.

Zashikiwarashi literally means “tatami 
mat child.” Tatami mats are the traditional 
flooring made of woven rice straw in most 
Japanese homes. In the older versions of 
this tale, Zashikiwarashi is a child ghost 
only seen by children; it brings good luck 
to the homes it visits and bad luck to the 
homes it leaves. The oldest, most traditional 
version of Zashikiwarashi is of a little girl, 
dressed in a kimono, with a topknot on 
her head (see Figure 1). Sometimes an 
extra child in the counting of children is 
Zashikiwarashi. 

Figure 1. The traditional form 
of Zashikiwarashi, a little girl in 
kimono with a topknot on her head. 
Sketch by Kiyomi Nakano.

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Always, the spirit of Zashikiwarashi has been associated with abandoned or 
aborted or lost children. In recent versions, there seems to be a thematic element 
emphasizing the desire of the child to be born or taken in. An example of this 
kind of story can be seen in the 2007 anime film, Mononoke: Zashikiwarashi, by 
Takashi Hashimoto. A pregnant woman is traveling and is caught in a rainstorm. 
She begs the people at an old hotel to let her stay there, but they refuse because 
the hotel is full. She keeps begging for the sake of her unborn child, so at last 
they put her in “that” room which is usually never used because it is full of 
Zashikiwarashi spirits. The hotel had previously been a brothel, and prostitutes 
had buried their unwanted children below the tatami mats in that room. All night 
long, the Zashikiwarashi spirits haunt and torment the woman, until at last she 
agrees to give birth to them, removing the talisman from her stomach that had 

prevented their entry into her body.
In an earlier manga comic book 

story entitled “Enai Enai Baa,” 
published in 1981 by Osamu Tezuka, 
probably the most beloved manga artist 
ever in Japan, a man goes to a resort 
hotel to study for his exams, but he is 
constantly tormented by a mischievous 
Zashikiwarashi ghost baby, who wants 
to play (see Figure 2). Finally the man 
gives up trying to study, and plays with 
the ghost. Magically, the man does very 
well on his exams, and he credits it 
to the lucky ghost. The ghost gets the 
man to promise that he will one day 
marry and allow the ghost’s spirit to 
enter his baby. The man marries and 
takes his bride on a honeymoon to 
the same resort hotel. When the hotel 
catches on fire, the couple escapes, but 
the man rushes back into the burning 
hotel to rescue the tatami mat which 
houses the Zashikiwarashi spirit, even 
though everyone thinks he is crazy to 

risk his life for a tatami mat. He takes the smelly tatami mat to his home, and his 
wife often tries to throw it away, but he rescues it every time, leading the wife 
to wonder what kind of crazy man she has married. She becomes pregnant, and 
at the hospital he drags the smelly tatami mat into the hospital room, and as she 
gives birth to the child, we can see that the spirit of Zashikiwarashi has happily 
entered the child, and the ending is quite happy for everyone. Again, in this story 
we see the desire of children to be born.

In a 2006 young people’s novel, Yuta and His Strange Friends (Yuta to 
Fushigina Nakamatachi), by Tetsuro Miura, a young boy is being bullied by 
many of his classmates. He becomes friends with five Zashikiwarashi, who teach 

Figure 2. Zashikiwarashi portrayed as 
a baby, as in Osamu Tezuka’s 1974 
manga “Enai Enai Baa.” Sketch by 
Kiyomi Nakano.

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him self-defense. They like him because his friend is a girl who always carries 
a baby doll on her back. The Zashikiwarashi like her because she seems to like 
babies. In the young people’s novel, a Zashikiwarashi who befriends Yuta is a 
wild-haired boy (see Figure 3). However, in the 2008 musical stage play from the 
same novel, the Zashikiwarashi are not in the form of young children but rather 
look like old men (see Figure 4). They are still wearing diapers, and since their 
diapers have never been changed, their rumps have grown big and they smell 
bad. Because they like the bullied boy, they encourage him and teach him how to 
defend himself against the bullies. When he fights with the bullies, their fighting 
magically changes into a dance every time, and the bullies find that dancing is 
more fun than fighting. The musical stage version of this novel was presented by 
the famous Shiki Theatre Company all over Japan, and I was lucky to see one of 
the presentations in Kitakyushu City. It was fun watching the five Zashikiwarashi 
fly through the air above the audience. In the novel and the stage play, Yuta the 
boy learns that rather than withdrawing from society, he can become a positive 
force in society. This story seems to address the current Japanese problem of 
“hikkikomori.” Hikkikomori is a social phenomenon which is said to be affecting 
as many as 20 percent of Japanese adolescents now; the young people withdraw 

Figure 3. Zashikiwarashi as a wild-
haired boy, as in the 2006 children’s 
novel Yuta to Fushigina Nakamatachi 
(Yuta and His Strange Friends). Sketch 
by Kiyomi Nakano.

Figure 4. Zashikiwarashi as an old 
man, as in the 2008 musical stage play 
of Yuta to Fushigina Nakamatachi (Yuta 
and His Strange Friends). Sketch by 
Kiyomi Nakano.

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from society into their rooms and do not emerge, possibly because of some 
perceived socially devastating experience they have suffered. The story about Yuta 
and his experiences with the Zashikiwarashi teaches children to make themselves 
strong and to value their lives.

Another film version of a Zashikiwarashi story, “Natsushojo” by Gyo Hayasaka, 
has been shown in private audiences since 1995 but has never been distributed 
in theaters. I learned about it in a book called Atomic Bomb Cinema by Jerome 
F. Shapiro, a Hiroshima University professor (Shapiro 2002, 258-59, 261-63). In 
this film, a link between Zashikiwarashi and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima 
is made. A man and his wife were caught in the bombing. They were separated, 
but they both survived. The man saw his high school classmate, a young woman, 
dying in the burning river. There was nothing he could do to save her. His wife, 
who was pregnant, lost her baby. Later, they moved to an island near Hiroshima. 
When a very young little girl came to their door a few years later looking for a 
place to find shelter, both the man and woman thought she was a Zashikiwarashi. 
The man thought she was the spirit of his lost classmate whom he felt guilty about 
for not being able to help. The woman thought the child was the spirit of her lost 
baby. The man seems not to value his own life and behaves recklessly, while the 
mother learns to value her life even more and gladly accepts the little girl as her 
own child. 

Incidentally, after the atomic bombing at Hiroshima, the abortion rate in 
Japan was the highest it has ever been. People were worried about the effects 
of radiation on their unborn children. Now, in modern times, the abortion rate is 
again high. Birth control pills are illegal in Japan; they can only be prescribed to 
help a woman regulate her period. So, aside from using condoms and the rhythm 
method, abortion is the most common form of birth control, and Japan’s current 
birth rate is the lowest or second 
lowest in the world. Recently I have 
been collecting information about 
mizuko kuyou, which is a religious 
ceremony to honor the spirit of an 
aborted baby. Mizuko literally means 
“water baby” and refers to a child 
that has been aborted or otherwise 
died before birth. Single motherhood 
is still a stigma in Japan, so abortion 
often seems the only choice for young 
girls who become pregnant. After 
the abortion, girls usually contact a 
Buddhist temple on their own without 
their families’ knowledge to purchase 
a small mizuko jizo god in the shape 
of an infant. These actions are usually 
pursued not so much because of guilt 
but because of a fear that the spirit 
of the dead infant will come back to 

Figure 5. Zashikiwarashi in the form of a 
mizuko statue. Mothers often place such 
statues at temples in memory of their lost 
children. Sketch by Kiyomi Nakano.

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haunt and cause trouble in the person’s life, so annual visits to the mizuko jizo 
to deliver presents, and to dress it up in baby clothes, are ways that women who 
have aborted their children can appease their spirits. You can see many of these 
when you visit a temple, little statues of babies lined up side by side, usually in 
red hoods and bibs. In the Mononoke anime film which I mentioned earlier, in 
which the pregnant woman stayed in a room full of Zashikiwarashi spirits, the 
spirits were in the form of small mizuko statues (see Figure 5). 

Not to be confused with the playful child ghost Zashikiwarashi is another 
Zashiki figure called “Zashikionna” (Zashiki Woman). This creepy female ghost, 
as portrayed in a graphic 1993 manga 
novel by Mochizuki Minetaro, does 
not bring joy or luck, but rather 
stalks young men in classic horror 
fashion (see Figure 6). She seems to 
be a modern blend of an inverted 
Zashikiwarashi and the vengeful 
Japanese demon ghost Oiwa. 

A new movie about the traditional 
Zashikiwarashi came out in 
April 2012. The movie is entitled 
“Home: Itoshi no Zashikiwarashi” 
which translates Home: Our Dear 
Zashikiwarashi. It is based on the 
2008 novel, Itoshi no Zashikiwarashi, 
by Hiroshi Ogiwara. In this story, a 
family with many problems is forced 
to move to the country because of 
the father’s job transfer. The father 
is having troubles with his new 
supervisor, the boy has asthma, the 
girl is being bullied at school, the 
mother is overwhelmed with caring 
for the huge, old-fashioned house, 
and the grandmother is showing 
signs of dementia. But gradually, 
Zashikiwarashi, the ghost of the 
house, a mysterious little girl in 
kimono with a topknot on her head, 
makes herself known first to the 
boy, then the grandmother, then the girl, and finally the mother. The family’s 
luck begins to improve in every aspect. In one of the most touching scenes of 
the movie, the child ghost is seen sleeping on the mother’s back as the mother is 
cooking. The father is offered a chance to go back to Tokyo with a big promotion, 
and at a family meeting, the group decides they should stay together and so they 
agree to go as a family group. Guess who goes with them? Even though the father 
himself has never seen the ghost, he accepts the ghost, and at a restaurant on 

Figure 6. Zashikionna (“Zashiki 
Woman”), who seems to be an inverted 
variant of Zashikiwarashi combined 
with the demon spirit Oiwa. This evil 
ghost stalks young men. Sketch by Kiyomi 
Nakano.

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their way back to Tokyo, he asks for a table for six, and after the family of five 
has been seated, he pulls out the sixth chair for Zashikiwarashi, a fully accepted 
member of the family. In ordinary Japanese life, when a family has children well 
situated in schools, the father normally would have gone on to his new job alone 
and commuted to home on weekends, but this film emphasizes the importance of 
a family living together.

One of the elements in this story is that as the grandmother descends into 
dementia, she begins to think that the Zashikiwarashi ghost is the embodiment of 
her brother who died as a child, just as the Hiroshima film characters also saw the 
ghost as the embodiment of an abandoned friend or lost child in their lives. Thus, 
Zashikiwarashi comes to be very personal for people who have lost someone. 
At the same time, Zashikiwarashi spreads joy and happiness everywhere. The 
people who are willing to accept Zashikiwarashi into their lives have good luck. 
This element is exaggerated in one of the manga cartoon magazines called “Jigoku 
Sensei Nube (Hell Teacher Nube)” in a story by Shou Makura, in which a little 
Zashikiwarashi girl (Figure 1) just walks down the street and everything she passes 
suddenly turns to good: a dog that had just died from eating insecticide suddenly 
springs back to life, a couple with their baby suddenly sees the baby stand for 
the first time, children who only had mudpies for their party suddenly have a real 
cake, and a man discovers he has a winning lottery ticket (Makura and Okano 
1996). Good luck is certainly something that the people of Japan need right now, 
and it seems that this friendly ghost is being called upon to deal with many of 
Japan’s current social problems. The problems of hikkikomori, the young men and 
women who withdraw from society, and also the phenomenon of young women 
who decline to marry and who choose to stay in their parents’ home without 
beginning new families of their own, are contributing to talk about “Japan’s lost 
generation,” i.e., a generation of babies not being born. The Japanese government 
is actually working on ways to induce women to marry and have babies, as the 
old-age pension system will eventually collapse without the birth of new babies. 
One of the results is that companies are being encouraged to build day care 
centers so that mothers can work and have their children cared for at their place 
of work. I cannot help but think that the proliferation of Zashikiwarashi stories 
at this time is somehow functioning in a special way to help Japan deal with its 
current social problems. 

WORKS CITED

Dorson, Richard M. 1962. Folk Legends of Japan. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle.
Home: Itoshi no Zashikiwarashi (愛しの座敷わらし) (Home: Our Dear 

Zashikiwarashi). 2012. Screenplay by Narito Kaneko based on the novel by 
Hiroshi Ogiwara. Director Seiji Izumi. Toei. Film.

Iwasaka, Michiko and Barre Toelken. 1994. Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural 
Experience in Japanese Death Legends. Logan, Utah: Utah State University 
Press.

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Makura, Shou (writer) and Tsuyoshi Okano (artist). 2007 [1996]. Jigoku Sensei Nube 
(地獄先生ぬ～べ～) (Hell Teacher Nube) (Volume 15: Zashiki Warashi no 
Kanashiki Kako no Maki (座敷童子の悲しき過去の巻) (Zashiki Warashi’s 
Sorrowful Past) 128: 119–138.

Minetaro, Mochizuki. 1993. Zashikionna (座敷女) (Zashiki Woman). Tokyo: 
Kodansha. Manga.

Miura, Tetsuro (writer) and Minami Midorikawa (artist). 2006. Yuta to Fushigina 
Nakamatachi. (ユタとふしぎな仲間たち) (Yuta and His Strange Friends.) 
Tokyo: Kodansha. Illustrated children’s novel.

Mononoke: Zashikiwarashi. (モノノ怪「座敷童子」) 2007. Screenplay by Ikuko 
Takahashi. Director Kenji Nakamura. Animation Director Takashi Hashimoto. 
Mononoke Film Partners. DVD. Originally broadcast as two episodes in a 
television series about Mononoke in 2007 on the Fuji Network System.

Ogiwara, Hiroshi. 2008. Itoshi no Zashikiwarashi (愛しの座敷わらし). Tokyo: Asahi. 
Shapiro, Jerome F. 2002. Atomic Bomb Cinema. New York: Routledge.
Tezuka, Osamu. 1974. “Inai Inai Baa.” (いないいないばあ) Big Comic August 25, 

1974: 125–160. Pub. Shogakukan. Manga.
Yanagita, Kunio. 1975. The Legends of Tono, trans. Ronald A. Morse. Tokyo: The 

Japan Foundation. (Originally published as Tono Monogatari (遠野物語) by 
Kunio Yanagita in 1910.)

Yuta to Fushigina Nakamatachi. (ユタと不思議な仲間たち). (Yuta and His Strange 
Friends). 2008. Stage play by Shiki Theatre Company (Gekidan Shiki). 
Director Asari Keita. Based on the 2006 novel by Tetsuro Miura.

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