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 soon 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.
This, however, was not the birth of Momo. Nor was the 2018 viral hoax that swept across Latin America. It wasn’t even Keisuke Aiso’s 2006 art-horror sculpture “Mother Bird,” which would be photographed and used as the face for the challenge. No, Momo’s roots stretch back much further than all that. She just went by a different name back then.
The ubume.
According to Japanese and Chinese folklore, when a woman dies in childbirth, the spiritual attachment to her child is capable of manifesting into what is known as the ubume. While there are numerous varying iterations of the ubume, in Japanese folklore, most present her as a woman who stands in rivers, drenched in blood from the waist down, holding what appears to be her child. If someone comes across her, she will ask them to hold the child, which they 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.
Yōkai such as the ubume have proliferated in popular culture for centuries, and recently, they 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 insight into the role the supernatural has played in Japan; however, given the scale of their subject matter and the comprehensive nature of their studies, the specifics these works pay to each individual yōkai is minimal, and when the ubume is mentioned, she rarely receives more than a paragraph. Texts like Hank Glassman’s The Religious Construction of Motherhood in Medieval Japan offer slightly more information on the ubume, but again, the text covers a large topic, and 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 exotification Japanese culture is in the United States, historicizing Momo—who might otherwise be dismissed as a pop culture fad—proves particularly significant. Unlike the violent stereotypes applied to many populations of color, when some Asian Americans began to succeed economically and assimilate to the nuclear family, they were deemed the “Model Minority”—a label that has been used to deny racism in an effort to promote white supremacist ideologies. Under this narrative, racist WWII depictions of Japan faded to make room for a new image of the country, one filled with objects like the yōkai-descendant Pokémon that Americans felt free to collect. Many individuals in the U.S. readily accepted this new picture of Japan, 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.
In the United States, discussions about whitewashing and appropriating Japanese culture rarely occur, and when they do, they seem to posit less weight. Many Americans appear to be unsure as to whether one can be racist against Japanese Americans, arguing that 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 that encourages the very offenses they claim 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. 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 felt no different than 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. Why the ubume? What about this folkloric figure has caused us to return to her again and again?
As a framework to answer this question, I turned to literary critic Fredric Jameson. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Jameson references anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to argue that the myth functions as an imagined solution to “unresolvable social contradictions” (79). When applied to “The Momo Challenge,” 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 do we know the environmental consequences that will follow its trajectory. As children and younger generations are the populations set to be most affected by new technologies, Momo offers parents an “imagined solution” in the distraction she offers: parents may not understand what to do about our climate crisis, but they can, at the very least, protect their children from Momo. In this way, easy-to-avoid monsters such as Momo create a false sense of agency that distracts from the larger social problems that need to be addressed. Children safe from Momo, we can all return to our devices and lose ourselves in a world free from the pollution accumulating outside.
Technology will not allow us to escape indefinitely, however, and many populations are unable to afford to do so even now. While offering a solution for this issue is beyond the scope of this project, I do 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 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." (Latour 11).
