The Ubume in the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō
The demand for Sekien's encyclopedias reflect a trend of commercialization that was occurring within Japan. When the country closed its borders, and warfare moved from daily reality to historical memory, one result was the emergence of a vibrant Genroku culture (Mansfield 37). Known for its arts, the Genroku—or early Edo period—included a burgeoning publishing industry as artists and writers like Sekien adopted woodblock printing, the affordability of which improved rates of literacy and learning. In accordance with Japan's goal to develop a cohesive national identity, many of the pieces published included almanacs, guidebooks, and encyclopedias, all of which were encouraged by the rise of neo-Confucianism.
Promoted by the founder of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), it is the neo-Confucian notion that there is a true reality, and “through the careful examination of all things…order can be achieved both personally and politically (Foster 32-33). Ieyasu defended the strict class hierarchy he enforced in Japan with this strain of thought, promoting Confucian doctrines that supported his and other rulers' rights to exert authority over the masses (Hein 46). It is through this spread of neo-Confucianism in the unified Edo state that illustrated encyclopedias (which had a long history in China) gained traction in Japan. Inspired by the Chinese Sansaizue, the Kinmōzui (Collected Illustrations to Instruct the Unenlightened) is considered the first such illustrated encyclopedia in Japan. Given the centralized power structure of the shogun, the Kinmōzui's aim to introduce “people to things they might not otherwise know about and [acquaint] them with the ‘proper’ names of thing for which they might know only a local term” (Foster 35) offered rulers a valuable method to assimilate different regional knowledge bases.
While Sekien may have used a favorite form of the shogun, he populates it with yōkai—figures which are by definition uncategorizable. As Michel Foucault states in The Order of Things, “that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance…” (xx). Hence, by focusing on yōkai, Sekien's encyclopedias offer an allegory that demonstrates the constructed nature of classifications, including those used to divide Japanese society. Particularly as some merchants began to accumulate wealth that surpassed their and even some samurai's social status, the structure of the shogun's hierarchy was proving more and more faulty. Writers and artists like Sekien saw this and relied on poetic allusions, ghost stories, ancient history, and monsters (Yoda and Alt xi) to critique the hypocrisy while remaining safe from the jail time or more severe punishment such criticism of the hierarchy could result in.
Often, these artists were participants in the artistic movement know as "grotesque." According to this movement, "The grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world…The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it" (Li 43). In Sekien’s illustration, he blurs the bottom of the ubume into the river, nothing to indicate any separation between her and the water below. Such fluidity between the body and the land further illustrates the artificiality Sekien observed in what the shogun proclaimed to be predetermined social divisions.
And the more Japan industrialized, the more the boundary between "natural" and "constructed" weakened, the influence of which we can see in the yōkai's change in habitats. Whereas before the most frightening parts of the land may have been the dark, dense forests and woods, by 1700, most of Japan's land and resources had been exploited as much as possible: “the archipelago could sustain no more than the 30 million humans then resident, given their levels of material consumption and the technology and social organization of the day” (Totman 175). And so, rather than the undeveloped parts of the land, those that began to provoke the most fear were the cities still developing, and the yōkai that had "persisted for centuries throughout the archipelago, [now] appeared in Edo/Tokyo with alarming gusto and new social significance" (Figal 24).
A parallel in this integration between 'natural' and 'urban' landscape can be seen in Sekien’s reference to Hyakki Yagyō, a myth about the one hundred yōkai who parade into the city of Kyoto. While the myth relied on Kyoto (where the emperor resided) as its setting, had the texts been written during Sekien's time, they likely would have chosen to feature Edo (where both the shogun and merchants resided), the city's bustling industry a better symbol for the transition the land was undergoing. By cataloging the creatures into an encyclopedia and titling it Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, Sekien turns what once was a rare occurrence—encountering a yōkai in the city—into an experience one could own.
Previously, yōkai had their territory, and it was one they did not leave apart from on Hyakki Yagyō. They therefore posed no threat to humans who did not intrude upon them (Komastu 15). However, without any land left for the yōkai to claim as their own, increased human interaction would be inevitable. Reminiscent to what we see in the U.S. today when alligators who end up in swimming pools or the coyotes wandering the streets of Chicago, the increased danger in this new relationship between humans and yōkai can be seen in Sekien’s entry on the ubume. In it, the artist uses the label from the earlier Chinese scholarly encyclopedia Wakan Sansaizue, which depicts the ubume as the ubume-dori, or ubume-bird. Regarded as an evil deity, in this version, it is said when the ubume puts on feathers, she turns into a bird, and when she takes them off, she turns into a woman: “For this reason, the bird has breasts and takes pleasure in snatching people’s children and making them its own (Shimazaki 201). However, unlike the Wakan Sansaizue, which shows an image of a bird for the ubume, Sekien illustrates her according to the form described in the earlier Japanese setsuwa collections—that of a sorrowful woman standing in the river and clutching her child. The juxtaposition of the Chinese characters against the mournful Japanese depiction presents the ubume as far more devious than the prior Japanese iterations of her; in Sekien's version, the ubume can swoop in to harm children at any moment if parents do not keep a watchful eye.
Some, however, chose to look away from such dangers. According to the Hyakki Yagyō myth, it's understood to be dangerous and potentially fatal for nobility to look upon the yōkai, and aristocratic families like the Fujiwara were portrayed as turning away afraid or upset by having been shown the creatures. A similar response can be found during Sekien's period by the elite who averted their eyes from the damage they were causing the land and its people. Because of massive land clearance, population growth, and construction boom, Japan had to substitute coal for wood in order to meet its construction and fuel demands. Coal mining not only resulted in inferior products—its "user mostly [employing] it from necessity rather than choice” (Totman 174)—it polluted the downstream rice fields, and, as it advanced, rendered potable water poisonous and fouled irrigation systems, thereby destroying rice crops as well as marine ecosystems (Totman 172). When villagers would protest the opening of new mines, they would be met with "bakuhan authorities [who] would avert their eyes to the damage, commonly siding with mine operators, who provided the government with the metal it needed" (Totman 172). With such little control over the future of the land, it is no wonder that encyclopedias identifying threats like ubume would prove appealing, their pages filled with dangers readers could prepare for and defend against.
During this commercial boom, Sekien and many other merchants found successes that allowed them to live on spacious parts the streets their class title may not have otherwise allowed. At the same time, however, farmers had their land poisoned, and the common people who lived in the city did so in squalor where they “[craved] all manner of diversion and [preferred] to spend the little money they had on pleasures and aesthetically pleasing possessions than to save for an uncertain future” (Mansfield 28). In such an environment, rather than face the horrors of industrialization, people turned to more familiar monsters, creatures said to reside within the untouched parts of the land that no longer existed. This yearning for the past proved profitable for Sekien whose encyclopedias may have critiqued the shogun's social orders, but abetted the creation of a new, commercially-driven order in which the artist and the ubume would find great demand.
