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, warfare moved from daily reality to historical memory, and a vibrant Genroku culture was able to emerge (Mansfield 37). Known for its arts, the Genroku—or early Edo period—included a burgeoning publishing industry as artists and writers like Sekien adopted the medium of woodblock printing, the affordability of which improved rates of literacy and learning. Many of the pieces published during this time were almanacs, guidebooks, and encyclopedias, which accommodated Japan’s goal to develop a cohesive national identity.
A defining factor in shaping this new identity was the rise of neo-Confucianism. Promoted by the founder of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), according to Neo-Confucianism, 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 used this strain of thought to defend the strict class hierarchy he enforced in Japan, 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 to be the first 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 his text 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). By focusing on yōkai, Sekien’s encyclopedias can be read as an allegory that demonstrates the constructed nature of classifications, including those used to divide Japanese society. As 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 they used 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 participated in the artistic movement known 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). Grotesque artists looked at the body in a period of transformation to raise uncertainty and undermine hierarchies (Li 2), including the social divisions that the shogun proclaimed to be predetermined. In Sekien’s illustration of the ubume, he draws from grotesque conventions when he blurs the bottom half of her with the river. Without a line or shadow to indicate that the ubume is a distinct entity, she defies boundaries and remains open and connected to the water beneath her.
The grotesque nature of the ubume highlights the interconnected nature of humans and their environment, and her evolving portrayal is indicative of a change in humans’ relationship with the land. Prior to Japan’s commercialization, the most frightening parts of the land were considered to be the dark, dense forests and woods where yōkai were traditionally said to reside. However, by 1700, most of Japan’s land and resources had been exploited as much as possible, and the archipelago was unable to sustain “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). As a result, rather than the undeveloped parts of the land, those that began to provoke the most fear were the still-developing cities, and in parallel, the yōkai that “persisted for centuries throughout the archipelago, [now] appeared in Edo/Tokyo with alarming gusto and new social significance” (Figal 24). Yōkai may not be a threat to humans who do not intrude upon them (Komastu 15), but without any land left to claim as their own, human interaction would have been inevitable. Reminiscent to the frightening stories we hear today about alligator attacks in Florida or the coyotes who wander the streets of Chicago, the increased proximity between humans and yōkai led to an increased risk associated risk with the latter. And so, rather than creatures whose dangers could be avoided, the urban-dwelling yōkai became something to permanently fear.
Sekien invoked that fear. According to myth, on Hyakki Yagyō—the namesake for Sekien’s collection—thousands of yōkai would leave their territories to parade into the city. While interactions with yōkai were dangerous for humans during this time, those dangers were assumed to be temporary. The yōkai are presented as invaders—they signified an eruption of the supernatural into the corporeal—and if humans stayed in their house until the night was over, the yōkai would be return to their rural environments by morning. When Sekien titled his book after the myth, however, he solidified the creatures’ presence in the city, and the dangers imposed by such a transition can be seen in the artist’s entry on the ubume. Sekien illustrates her according to what is described in earlier Japanese setsuwa collections—a sorrowful woman standing in the river and clutching her child—but he refers to the Chinese scholarly encyclopedia Wakan Sansaizue when he labels the ubume as the ubume-dori, or ubume-bird. Regarded as an evil deity, it is said that when the ubume-dori 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). Unlike the prior Japanese iterations of the ubume, in Sekien’s version, the figure can swoop in at any moment to harm children if parents do not keep a watchful eye.
While it is dangerous for anyone to come across a yōkai during Hyakki Yagyō, the myth illustrates how some had less power than others to defend themselves from such risks. In one tale from the Ōkagami (The Great Mirror), a fictionalized history from late 11th or early 12th century, Fujiwara Morosuke is traveling through Kyoto at night when he runs into a parade of demons. Morosuke closes the blinds in his carriage and demands his attendants keep watch outside without offering any explanation (Nicolae). Morosuke is able to thwart the dangers with a Buddhist incantation, but as he dose so, he expresses concern only for his wellbeing, not that of his escorts: he does not offer them safety inside his carriage nor any information as to how they, too, could protect themselves. A similar response can be found during Sekien’s period by the elite who could avert their eyes from the damage they were causing the land and its people. Because of massive land clearance, population growth, and a construction boom, Japan had massive construction and fuel demands, and it replaced its use of wood for the more accessible coal to meet those demands. Such a transition not only resulted in inferior products—its “user mostly [employing] it from necessity rather than choice”— it polluted the downstream rice fields, rendered potable water poisonous, and fouled irrigation systems, thereby destroying rice crops as well as marine ecosystems (Totman 174, 172). Villagers would protest the opening of new mines, only to 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).
The commercial boom seen within the Edo period enabled Sekien and many other merchants to live beyond their class title; it also created many of the issues that made Sekien’s work so desirable. As farmers were forced to live on poisoned land, and the common people who resided in the city did so in squalor, 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). Rather than face the horrors of industrialization, people yearned for familiar monsters, creatures said to reside within the untouched parts of the land that no longer existed. This longing for the past proved profitable for Sekien. His encyclopedias critiqued the shogun’s social orders, but they also ushered in a new, commercially-driven order, one in which the artist and the ubume would find great demand.
