Introduction
On February 26, 2019, Twitter user Wanda Maximoff posted “Warning! Please read, this is real. There is a thing called ‘Momo’ that’s instructing kids to kill themselves…INFORM EVERYONE YOU CAN.” Attached to the tweet was a screenshot of what would become known as “Momo,” a frightening figure with lidless eyes, an oversized smile and flattened nose, a body made up of nothing more than breasts attached to chicken legs.
The figure behind the “Momo Challenge,” however, was not born in 2019. Nor was it born in 2018 when the hoax swept across Latin America. It was not even born in 2006 when artist Keisuke Aiso created “Mother Bird,” the art-horror sculpture that would be photographed and become known as Momo. No, this figure has roots that stretch back centuries; she just went by a different name.
The ubume.
A character in Japanese and Chinese folklore, the ubume (“birthing-woman”) is said to emerge from a mother’s spiritual attachment to her child when the woman dies during birth. There are numerous iterations of the ubume; however, present her as a woman who stands in rivers, drenched in blood from the waist down, holding what appears to be her child. If you come across her, she will ask you to hold the child, which you will soon find is no longer a child but (and this is where the versions tend to differ) a pile of leaves or perhaps a stone that grows heavier and heavier.
The ubume is one of many yōkai (supernatural creatures) found in Japan that are associated with the uncertainties of the land. Such yōkai have proliferated in popular culture for centuries, and recently, have also begun to feature in the critical works of several North American scholars, including Michael Dylan Foster (Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai, 2009), Gerald Figal (Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, 1999), and Michelle Osterfeld Li (Ambiguous Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Japanese Setsuwa Tales, 2009). Each of these texts offers critical insight into the role the supernatural has played in Japan, but because of the scale of their subject matter and the comprehensive nature of these studies, the specifics paid to the individual yōkai is minimal, and when the ubume is mentioned, she rarely receives more than a paragraph. There is slightly more information on the ubume in texts like Hank Glassman’s The Religious Construction of Motherhood in Medieval Japan, but again, the text covers a large topic, in which the ubume serves as one example of many.
Rather than situate the ubume amongst other yōkai, I situate her in three of the time periods in which she appears. Given how prone to exoticization Japanese culture is in the United States, historicizing Momo—who might otherwise be dismissed as a pop culture fad—proves particularly significant, and it is a task the archival endeavors of the Digital Humanities is well-suited to address. Unlike the violent stereotypes applied to many populations of color, once some Japanese Americans began to succeed economically and assimilate to the nuclear family, they fell under the umbrella of the “model minority”—a tool that the white dominant classes used to “prove” the American Dream still exists. Under this supposed embrace, racist WWII depictions and their corresponding violence faded to make room for a new image of Japan, one filled with objects like the yōkai-descendant Pokémon for Americans to collect. And many did so readily, our commodification of the country perhaps best signified by the invention and prevalence of the term “weeaboo,” a typically derogatory name for a Western person “obsessed” with Japan.
Even as discussions of whitewashing and cultural appropriation arise in the United States, such conversations seem to hold less sway when applied to Japan, many Americans seemingly unsure as to whether one can be racist against Japanese Americans anymore, particularly when many participate in the commodification of their own culture. This “color-blind” perspective reflects a lack of historical awareness, one that makes such privileged Americans liable to support a society which encourages the very offenses they believe to be outdated. Similar to what Edward Said describes in Orientalism, the mainstream depiction of Japan in America is a narrative constructed to serve the dominant white power structure, and it's a narrative that changes as the needs change. Certainly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the needs changed. In search of an outlet to target their fears, many Americans returned to the more violent positioning of Asian Americans as “other,” and the sharp rise in hate crimes drew attention to the racism that was there all along.
While this project is not analyzing race relations, it is looking to make visible a piece of Japanese history. No different than most in the United States, when I first came across “The Momo Challenge,” I was not aware of any background behind the figure I was seeing: Momo blended in with numerous other faces that filled the American horror scene, many of which—The Ring, The Grudge, etc.—also possessed origins in Japanese folklore. However, once I read the “Mother Bird” sculpture had been inspired by the ubume, I began to wonder about the figure’s history and whether the contemporary fears she provoked bore any similarities to those she provoked in the past. As I began my research, I soon found that stories of the ubume have lived for centuries in Japan and China, and what struck me most was how even the most popular transmutations seemed to offer no true point of origin for the ubume. Rather than claim authorship of the figure, the sources this project analyzes (the setsuwa collection Konjaku Monogatarishū, the illustrated encyclopedia Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, and the viral hoax “The Momo Challenge”) present the ubume as though she is a figure whose existence predates any of the stories they have to offer about her.
A true product of her environment, when the ubume is reborn to fit each of these mediums, she expands from a regional to a national to an international figure. But why? What in particular about the ubume has caused us to return to her again and again? As a framework to answer this, I turned to literary critic Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, in which he references anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to argue that the myth functions as an imagined solution to "unresolvable social contradictions" (79). As “The Momo Challenge” was said to resonate with parents’ fear of technology and the ramifications it poses for their children, we see an “unresolvable social contradiction” arise in our correlation between technology and progress. While parents would not want to deny children access to the technology they are told is the way forward, we do not actually know where this “way forward” is leading, nor the environmental consequences posed by its trajectory. As children and younger generations are the populations to be most affected by technology and the world that inhabits it, the ubume’s association with land and reproduction offers parents an “imagined solution” in the distraction she offers; parents may not understand what to do about the climate crisis their children are set to live in, but they can, at the very least, protect their children from Momo. In this way, such easy-to-avoid monsters can create a false sense of agency that distracts from the larger social problems and perpetuates the cycle in which we need such distraction. Children safe from Momo, we can all return to our devices and lose ourselves in a world free from the pollution accumulating outside.
We cannot rely on the escape of technology forever, however, and many populations are unable to afford to do so even now. While offering a solution for this large issue remains beyond the scope of this project, I do intend to identify a pattern in the use of the ubume to show that our concerns with technology are not new: they were simply left out by those in charge of constructing our dominant historical narrative. History depends as much on where we position ourselves now as where we did in the past, and in this project, we look behind us to better understand the promises being made before us.
"Don't be fooled for a second by those who preach of wide-open spaces, of ‘risk-taking,’ those who abandon all protection and continue to point to the infinite horizon of modernization for all. Those good apostles take risks only if their own comfort is guaranteed. Instead of listening to what they are saying about what lies ahead, look instead at what lies behind them: you'll see the gleam of the carefully-folded golden parachutes, or everything that ensures them against the random hazards of existence." (11 italics added)
—Bruno Latour
