Appeals from the Other Side

In Heian-kyō—the capital of ninth-century Japan, laid out with mathematical regularity like a goban board for the game of go—politics did not smell of samurai steel, but of court ink, incense, and hinoki wood. This is Japan before the domination of the warriors: a court of poets, offices for everything, official rank measured by one’s distance from a folding screen, a ritsuryō state that believes in the absolute power of documents… and at the same time knows that documents are not enough when a city begins to die. In the early summer of Jōgan 5 (i.e., 863 CE), an epidemic was decimating the inhabitants of Heian-kyō, and the danger became real: the people might begin to ask whether the authorities were truly “doing their job,” if everyone around them was dying. Or perhaps someone had been wronged, and now the people were paying the penalty for injustice? And then something happens that overturns the European imagination of “superstition”: the court launches a goryōe in Shinsen’en—a public ritual as an administrative tool in the face of catastrophe, with logistics, protocol, the authority of monks, music, and a crowd, as if the state wished to say: “we do not only rule; we also negotiate with what returns.”

For the vengeful onryō (怨霊)—the spirit of grievance—is not, in this world, merely a specter from a tale. It was believed that if those who rule wronged someone in an exceptionally unjust and painful way, that person would return after death as a blood-soaked onryō—and their anger and despair would sow death among the ruler’s lineage, among his courtiers, and finally among all his people. This was a form of pressure—an “appeal” filed after death—that the state cannot simply throw into the wastebasket if it wants to survive. That is why the court prefers to say “goryō” (御霊)—“venerable spirits”—because this language is diplomacy: it softens wrath with a title and translates dread into procedure. It is a system that writes an edict with one hand and holds incense with the other—and does so without the faintest irony, because it knows that social fear is a political fact, not a superstition.

From this perspective, the history of Heian Japan begins to look like a series of trials in which “the dead” can force a correction of the verdict: Prince Sawara dies after exile, and then returns through misfortunes until the state retracts its violence and posthumously elevates him to imperial dignity; Sugawara no Michizane is destroyed by intrigue, and later the fury of his onryō spirit blows apart the very center of power, until the court institutionalizes his cult and turns the exiled official into a deity meant to protect order. These are not “ghost stories.” They describe how a state learns that certain wrongs will not be forgotten until amends are made—and that sometimes the toughest technology of governance is the one capable of turning guilt into ritual. And it is precisely this political-historical dimension of onryō in Heian—not fantastic, but rather clerical—that we will encounter in today’s text.

At the court of Heian-kyō

— 貞観五年五月二十日

(5th month, 20th day of Jōgan 5)
(10 June 863 CE)

Spring in Heian-kyō usually smelled of hope and life: the damp earth of gardens, incense smoke drifting beneath wide eaves, the plum that could bloom even in the chill. That year the scent was different—as if beneath the layer of perfumes and fragrant woods there lurked the sour odor of fever. The city that was meant to be a geometric ideal, drawn like a goban board for the game of i-go, began to sicken—and it did so unevenly: now along a canal, now in a single quarter, now in densely populated alleys behind aristocratic residences. At first, people spoke in half-voices of “spring ailments,” of “bad air,” of “an illness that passes like a shadow.” Then the half-voice became a whisper, the whisper a rumor, and the rumor a number that no one wanted to say aloud.

In the palace—where boards of hinoki-scented wood gleamed like polished amber, and walls of sliding screens and curtains could turn people in the next room into a theater of shadows—unease began to accompany rituals. The Heian court lived in ceremony as a fish lives in water: every movement had its order, every bow its angle, every distance its rank. Even intimacy was ritualized: a lady did not show her face to a strange man, and a man, though he was a minister, spoke to her while looking at the pattern of a curtain’s fabric or from behind bamboo sudare blinds (簾), at portable curtains/screens, rather than into her eyes. If he dared to pass behind the screen without invitation—he would violate her honor and expose himself to far-reaching and difficult-to-predict consequences.

On an ordinary day, the palace resembled an instrument: it was enough to touch a single string—to walk a corridor, slide a door, pass a fan—and at once the music of etiquette would sound.

But now that instrument began to go out of tune. A servant coughed behind a screen, and suddenly the silence grew too dense. Someone failed to appear at a council session, and the weather could not explain it. In letters that had once smelled of a blend of aloe and cinnamon, short, nervous sentences began to appear, as if scratched out in haste: “...fever in the house...,” “...don’t go out...,” “...they’re talking about a curse....” The court was a master of subtlety, but illness knows no subtlety; it came through every crack, even those usually protected by ritual.

One morning, while mist still hung over the gardens and dew beaded on roofs of hinoki bark, a messenger ran to one of the officials. He did not rush in—that would have been too violent for the palace—but his steps were too quick, his breath too short. Not in keeping with etiquette. The official’s fan froze mid-gesture.

— From the provinces… and from the southern quarters… — the messenger began, then broke off, as if merely speaking the directions of the world were an invocation of misfortune. — People are dropping. They say it isn’t just an illness.

“They say.” The phrase was the key. For at the Heian court, rumor was no trifle; it was a barometer. When the people spoke with one voice, authority heard not a cry but a signal. And a signal could be more dangerous than a cry, because it meant something had begun to live a life of its own.

In the halls where the highest dignitaries gathered, it smelled of paper, freshly ground ink, and costly incense meant not only to beautify the air but to “order” it, the way one orders sentences in a letter. On mats laid over wooden floors sat men in garments so voluminous that every movement looked like a wave: sleeves falling like sails, caps whose lacquered black both reflected and swallowed light, sashes tied with the same certainty with which decisions are tied. Before them, on lacquered stands, lay notes. The words on which the fate of the country hung were written with a brush, with the elegance expected of men of power.

It began with reports: of a growing number of deaths, of panic, of the fact that even near the palace gates people were appearing with paper talismans—gofu (護符) and ofuda (御札), narrow cards bearing the name of a deity or a protective formula—and with hitogata/katashiro (形代), paper “substitutes” for a human being, rubbed over the body to transfer illness and impurity, then given to water or burned. Someone mentioned that feasts had been suspended in certain residences. Someone else said that some houses had begun to burn more incense than usual, as if smoke were meant to weave a curtain between the world of the living and the world of what was now encroaching upon Heian-kyō.

At one point a word was spoken—not as an ordinary noun, but as a warning: tatari (祟り)—“reprisal,” “curse,” “sent punishment.” And immediately, as if the word were a key in a lock, a second drawer of thought slid open—less official, but just as real.

— “This is not an ordinary epidemic,” — someone said quietly, as if afraid the walls had ears. — “The people see anger in it… the anger of those who were wronged.”

At that moment the palace behaved like a person who hears footsteps behind his back. He does not turn at once—first he tenses his shoulders, holds his breath, pretends it is nothing. The Heian court could pretend perfectly, because pretending was part of its language. But when another official, less cautious, spoke the word enkon (冤魂)—“a spirit of injustice,” “the spirit of one wrongly harmed”—pretending became increasingly impossible.

They did not yet say “onryō” in the way theater and storytelling would later say it. Here they used words more courtly, more “official” in sound: goryō (御霊)—“venerable spirits.” The very honorific prefix was telling. It was an attempt: since we cannot deny their existence, let us give them a title. Name them with dignity, so that anger has no pretext. Power in Japan had long understood that language is not merely a description of reality—language is one of the tools by which it is built.

— If these are goryō… — the oldest among them spoke, and in his voice there was both piety and the pragmatism of a man who had seen more crises than he wished to remember. — If these are the spirits of those our decisions have harmed… we will not calm this with the letter of the law alone.

For a moment silence fell in the hall, but it was not contemplative silence. It was the silence of calculation. The court was counting: not only the dead, not only the rice in granaries, not only the costs. It was also counting fear. For the epidemic was a crisis of health and order. And the conviction that illness sprang from the anger of wronged spirits was a crisis of legitimacy—as if an invisible finger were undermining the palace’s foundations.

Then a proposal was voiced that sounded like an administrative decision, though it concerned the otherworld: goryōe—a public ritual of pacifying spirits. Not a “folk custom,” not a “story,” not a “superstition,” but an act of state: to organize it, summon monks, prepare space, provide music, offerings, order. To make anger into a problem that could be handled by procedure.

Someone immediately asked about the location. And then Shinsen’en was named—the gardens within the palace grounds, famed for water, for space, for the fact that nature had been subdued there into a shape suited to the court’s imagination. It was a choice both symbolic and practical. Symbolic, because a goryōe at the heart of political geometry meant one thing: the state takes responsibility for the crisis, even if its language is ritual. Practical, because Shinsen’en was a space where one could gather people, conduct ceremonies, and at the same time keep court hierarchy in check.

At last someone said the sentence that mattered most at that moment: that the ritual must join what the court considered “high”—prayers, incantations, the teachings of monks—with what the people had long done: soothe spirits with song, dance, sound, collective movement. It was a political decision dressed in religious robes: to seize the energy of belief, give it form, and fold it into the state’s order.

Once the decision was made, the palace immediately returned to its natural shape: a ceremonial machine. Words began to align into commands. The brush’s movements—into edicts. Seals were handled carefully, like amulets: their red imprint carried power not only legal but symbolic. The appropriate monks were summoned—those who knew prayers and formulas, and also those whose very reputation worked like medicine. Musicians were selected, because in Heian sound was not decoration; it was an instrument of harmony. A date was set. A list of offerings was set. Even in the face of death, the court did not renounce aesthetics: aesthetics were its way of holding the world in place.

The day of the ritual arrived quickly. Shinsen’en looked different than in times of carefree walks. The pond’s water was darker, as if reflecting a sky without light. Along wooden walkways officials moved with a gravity that on an ordinary day would have seemed excessive. Places were arranged so that no one could mistake their distance from the center. The court was ruthless about this: even when the world burned with fever, hierarchy had to endure. It was the skeleton that kept everything upright.

Dignitaries arrived in garments that rippled with each step. The fabrics were heavy but soft; the colors subdued, chosen with that sensitivity which at the Heian court was almost instinct. Formality dominated among men: blacks, browns, deep greens. Women, hidden behind curtains, were like living paintings: layered color combinations were visible in the glimpse of sleeves, as if each lady wore an entire season arranged in strata. Even in crisis they did not abandon “kasane no irome” (重ねの色目, literally “layering of colors”)—that poetry of hues that spoke of taste, education, and rank.

The scent of incense was so thick it seemed to have a texture. It carried something sharp and purifying, and at the same time sweet. Smoke drifted among people like an additional curtain, a safe boundary. On low lacquered tables offerings were set: rice, fruit, dried fish—simple things, but served as if for kami deities. Nearby a place was prepared for the monks. Their presence differed from that of courtiers: less ornate, more focused. Monastic robes did not need to dazzle; what needed to dazzle was efficacy.

When it began, first came a sound like the opening of a gate: the tone of a bell, metallic and pure, and then recitation—a voice that does not tell a story but arranges the world. The monks intoned sutras and formulas, performing gestures that looked like drawing invisible signs in the air. At a certain moment court music joined this “high” register. Gagaku was not entertainment; it was the mathematical elegance of sound. The instruments sounded like the breathing of an old palace: drawn-out, piercing, slightly melancholic. And then dances began—just as refined as every bow in the council halls. Even children of aristocratic houses danced, light, as if their innocence were meant to placate what had been wronged.

And here, in this moment, the entire peculiarity of political fear was visible. The court did not dance for spirits as for a fairy-tale audience. The court danced because it believed spirits were part of the same order as offices, edicts, and seals. That a wronged dead person—one pushed aside, exiled, humiliated “for political reasons”—could return not as a shadow in a corridor, but as illness in the body of the country. That anger could flow through society like water through the capital’s canals. And if so, it had to be “cooled,” “calmed,” “closed” within ritual, the way one closes a storm inside a tale.

Within the circle of the most important people a whisper could be heard—almost imperceptible, yet present: the names of those whose wrong might carry weight. No one said it outright, because the court hated simplicity. They said rather: “the innocent,” “the wronged,” “the victims.” That was what was most piercing: the state did not confess guilt officially. But in the ritual, the mere admission that the epidemic might be the work of “spirits transformed by political machinations” was like a crack in lacquer. Small, thin, barely visible—and yet saying that beneath the surface something living existed.

Somewhere behind curtains, perhaps nearby, the ruler himself was present—seen not directly but through signs: the arrangement of people, the rhythm of the ceremony, the point toward which gestures were directed. In Heian the ruler was often like the sun behind clouds: he did not need to be visible for his presence to regulate everything. It reveals the paradox: the country’s most powerful institution stands by water in a palace garden and does something that from outside looks like a religious spectacle, while inside it is hard crisis politics.

While the ritual continued, Heian-kyō outside still coughed and shivered. In the streets people hung amulets, avoided certain places, lit fires, whispered about spirits. In the palace, however, everything was tightened like a cord in ceremony: music had its time, prayer its rhythm, offering its place. The state tried to do what it knew best: to give dread a form. To set it in frames, in protocol, in beauty—in which even fear becomes elegant.

And yet in the air, beneath incense, beneath lacquer, beneath the sound of gagaku, lurked a question no one dared to ask aloud: what if the footsteps behind one’s back do not fall silent? What if the spirits of those wrongly judged in life now become the judgment themselves—and in their verdict the whole city sickens?

A Glossary of Court Politics

We are in Heian-kyō—“the Capital of Peace and Order,” founded in 794 and planned with mathematical regularity: broad arteries, straight cross-streets, districts with clear boundaries. This is Japan still “before the samurai”: the state’s axis is the court, ceremonial form, ritsuryō administration, and fragile alliances of aristocratic lineages. Power here is above all style, rhythm, and language—decisions are made amid curtains and screens, in the shadow of incense, to the sound of gagaku, in a world where a person is visible only as a sleeve, a shadow, a fragment of profile. And yet this “delicate” civilization contains something steel-like: it can turn fear into protocol, guilt into ritual, catastrophe into document.

And here is the year 863, the era the chroniclers call Jōgan (貞観). In the city, news circulates of pestilence, of death, of incomprehensible coincidences—which in such a world are never “mere” coincidences. The court decides on a public goryōe (御霊会) in the palace gardens of Shinsen’en (神泉苑)—an event so large that it opens the gates even to a crowd of townspeople. In the official record that day has a precise shape: Jōgan 5, 5th month, 20th day, mizunoe-uma (壬午). This matters: we are not speaking of “folk panic,” but of a state that activates a crisis-management mechanism—only its tools are sutras, monastic lectures, music, dance, and the procedure of “pacifying spirits.”

At this point we need a small glossary of concepts, because in Japan—especially courtly Japan—words do not describe the world; words position it. Let us begin with a pair that sounds similar but makes an enormous difference.

Onryō (怨霊) is a “spirit of grievance”: 怨 (urami—about the feelings of urami I wrote more psychologically here: Urami: the Silenced Wrong, All-Encompassing Grief, Fury — What Emotions Are Encoded in the Character “怨”) is resentment, sorrow, the vengeful memory of harm, and 霊 is spirit, spiritual power. Today this word is loud, cinematic, strongly “genre.” But if we step into Heian documents, we quickly notice that the court more often works with another category: goryō (御霊).

This writing is politics in itself: 御 (go) is an honorific prefix (“venerable,” “state,” “due”), and 霊 again is spirit. The court therefore says not “vengeful spirit” but “venerable spirit.” Not because it wants to be “nice,” but because it turns dread into diplomacy. A goryō is a spirit to be treated like someone with rank: named with dignity, invited into procedure, placed within frames, given a seat—because in this world “the dead” can be a political partner, even if a dangerous one. Scholarship on Heian emphasizes a key point: the term onryō appears in sources, but it is not as dominant as goryō in court records—and this is not an accident, but an institutional choice of language.

Behind this stands yet another word that functions in chronicles like an alarm siren: tatari (祟り). The kanji 祟 carries the sense of “haunting,” “curse,” “punishment”—but not in the sense of abstract bad luck. Tatari is the language of catastrophe: the conviction that misfortune is the world’s response (or the response of beings from the other side, which at that time can essentially be treated as the same) to a violation of order: to harm, neglect, desecration, political violence, the lack of ritual. That is why epidemics, famine, or fires can be read as tatari—not because people “don’t know medicine” (as we will explain it in the twenty-first century), but because for them illness has a moral and cosmic grammar. As the Japanese historian Kobayashi Norihiko (小林宣彦) shows in an extensive study* published in “Kokugakuin Japan Studies,” the path to the public goryōe of 863 (and many other such cases up to the twelfth century) does not look like an “outburst of superstition,” but like a consciously calculated court response to a social crisis.

*(小林宣彦「日本古代における死者の霊と祟り・災害に関する考察―貞観御霊会に至る背景を中心に―」 )

Now the word most “Heian” in style, because the most elusive, underdefined, “slippery”: mononoke (物の怪). In our imagination it is a figure—a specter in white (sometimes it also looks like a girl raised by wolves—see here: Wild San: Who Really is Princess Mononoke?). Meanwhile in Heian, mononoke is often something closer to a phenomenon than to a “person.” The history of the writing itself shows this: today one gladly writes 物の怪 (the mystery / “uncanniness” of things), but in Nara and Heian one also encounters the writing 鬼の気—literally “ki (气/気) of a demon/hidden being.” This is not yet theater with masks; it is energy, presence, “something” in the air that can enter the body as illness and enter a house as unease. Mononoke can be an umbrella category: it contains goryō, oni, and other forms of an “invisible perpetrator”—precisely because in the experience of the time, the boundary between “spirit,” “demon,” “illness,” and “possession” could be fluid.

And since all of this circulates, power needs a key-word that sounds like closing a door: chinkon (鎮魂)—“the calming/stabilizing of the soul.” The kanji are legible like an instruction: 鎮 means “to calm, stabilize, suppress,” and 魂 is soul. Kuroda Toshio (黒田俊雄, a well-known historian of medieval Japan) shows that chinkon is not merely a “religious curiosity,” but a phenomenon intertwined with political power, social organization, and the state–religion relationship. In other words: the state not only “believes,” it governs—and governing means translating the anger of the dead into actions that have social effect.

And here we reach a truth that reveals the genius (and dread) of the Japanese form: Japan likes to give fear a procedure. In the record concerning the goryōe in Shinsen’en we see almost an event script: the naming of specific spirits, preparation of places (mats, tables), abundance of flowers and fruit, a monk’s lecture (Etatsu) on sutras considered effective in preventing catastrophes, performances by musicians from the gagaku bureau, and dances—and to this a symbolically breakthrough moment: opening the garden gates to commoners, an enormous crowd, a communal “safety valve.” Kuroda even emphasizes* that the chronicle (Nihon sandai jitsuroku) sees in this a reference to “folk customs” that the state at some point appropriates because it recognizes their social effectiveness. Dread is harnessed into the rhythm of a public event. There is no “hysteria” here—there is logistics.

*(in the excellent: “The World of Spirit Pacification: Issues of State and Religion,” which is also in English)

Why would power fear the dead at all? Because in Heian Japan (and long after) a mechanism operates that is simultaneously psychological, social, and political. Someone is publicly broken: exile, demotion, stripping of titles, erasure from society, sometimes an “execution of reputation”—that is, something that at court is a social death. Then a series of misfortunes follows: epidemic, storm, fire, sudden deaths in the ruler’s family, a provincial rebellion. And suddenly these events begin to arrange themselves into a narrative that sounds like an indictment signed by the dead. This is not irrationality—it is the logic of a world in which political and cosmic order are communicating vessels, and catastrophe is a message: “something has been violated.” Kobayashi shows that the goryō that become targets of rituals are often spirits of people who died with resentment because of political downfall—and that Heian is precisely the moment when this template begins to spread widely.

It is enough to look at the archetypal example: Prince Sawara. Caught in court violence, pushed toward exile, he dies “on the way”—and then misfortunes begin to be read as traces of his restless spirit. The state’s reaction is telling: Sawara is posthumously elevated to imperial rank (as Emperor Sudō). This is not merely a “pious gesture.” It is a political correction carried out after death—as if the court were trying to repair its own verdict before anger returned in another wave.

Even more clearly this appears in the story of Michizane (which I described in more detail here: Tenjin – Thanks to his talents, he got a high position despite being an outsider. They destroyed him. He avenged himself from beyond the grave.): when “posthumous promotions” alone stop working, elites reach for heavier artillery of pacification—a temple, a cult, an institution. It reads like the treatment of a rising fever: pardon, restoration, further posthumous promotions—and yet further misfortunes and the fear that the spirit has become a dangerous symbol beyond the court’s control. Power does not fear “ghosts” in the fairy-tale sense. Power fears that the spirit—understood as social belief in tatari—tears apart the court narrative of legitimacy. Because if the dead “return” in the form of catastrophes, it means the rulers made a mistake. So perhaps they should no longer rule?

And that is why the story of onryō does not begin with a specter in a white robe, but with a chancellery. With the decision that something must be “regulated”: to call the spirits more politely—goryō (御霊); to activate chinkon (鎮魂); to perform goryōe (御霊会); and to describe misfortune as tatari (祟り), a message to which one must respond. To dress the whole thing in a ceremony of diplomatic rituals. The Heian court does not flee from dread—it administers it. And herein lie both its strength and its fear: it administers something that cannot be fully sealed beneath a stamp, however red it may be.

The State as Ritual: Institutions That Spoke with the Otherworld

The Heian court did not “believe” in ritual the way one believes in private consolation. The court worked with ritual as an administrative tool: in the same space where orders and rank lists were written, the order of contact with the invisible was also arranged. The ritsuryō state of order had its secular offices, but it also had offices for “omens” and “reading signs”: Jingikan (神祇官)—the department of kami cult and official prayers, and Onmyōryō (陰陽寮)—the bureau of yin-yang, the calendar, divination, and recommendations: what one may do today, and what one must not even touch, because the direction is “bad” and the moment “polluted.”

Sources contain information that after a report by the Onmyōryō Bureau, imperial commands were issued to conduct readings and lectures on sutras “to stop the epidemic” throughout the country. The mechanics of action are visible here: sign → official diagnosis → order → mobilization of temples, shrines, and monks. The historian Kuroda Toshio mentioned earlier describes explicitly that before the great ritual in Shinsen’en the state activated successive measures: prayers in the palace, ceremonies in the capital and provinces, recommendations for the entire country—using every agency it had at hand, from Buddhist institutions to kami cult and the onmyōdō apparatus.

Let us imagine it as an instruction manual for operating the world. In one hand a brush and seal, in the other incense. On one side: state order, annals, protocols, bans on gatherings. On the other: awareness that crisis—an epidemic, famine, a series of sudden deaths—is not only a biological problem, but also a problem of meaning, because society reads misfortune as a communication. Japanese historians demonstrate that in the old system the state’s official prayers focused primarily on deities, not on the spirits of the dead; that is, by default the state “spoke to heaven” through the kami channel, not through the channel of wronged dead. And yet in Heian a crack begins that in time becomes a new norm: the spirits of politically broken people begin to be treated as a real source of misfortune, and they must be included in the repertoire of state measures.

This moment of “the dead entering the protocol” later has institutional consequences. When in the later Heian period the spirit of Sugawara no Michizane receives its own place of cult (Kitano), and that cult over time becomes an element of official public rites and enters the system of the most important court shrines (nijūnisha), it is a sign that the state acknowledged: yes, the spirit of the wronged can become an administrative category.

Returning to our opening scene—863 (Jōgan 5) is the moment when this “switching logic” becomes evident. The source clearly and matter-of-factly gives: the twentieth day of the fifth month, Shinsen’en—the imperial garden by the palace complex—and the decision to hold a goryōe (御霊会). Nihon sandai jitsuroku records it like an operations report: high-ranking officials dispatched to supervise, the aristocracy gathered, and in front of the “seats of the spirits” mats and tables set out, with flowers and fruit piled in abundance.

Then sources provide details that show how “contact with the otherworld” is realized here as a state project. In the role of lecturer: the monk Etatsu (慧達), and the texts are not accidental: Konkōmyōkyō (金光明経, the Sutra of Golden Light) and Hannya shingyō (般若心経, the Heart Sutra), writings associated with the effectiveness of protecting the state and the “remission of sins”—Buddhist words with a political function. Added to this is a musical-ritual apparatus: musicians from the gagaku bureau, dances performed by children from the court’s circle and good families, and also spectacular forms (gigaku, sangaku).

And finally a gesture that is politically most important: opening the four gates of Shinsen’en to the common people, the crowd (during an epidemic, I know…), the public spectacle and public relief. This is not a folkloristic detail, but a deliberate move: a ritual performed by the state, yet celebrated “before a mass audience,” because it is precisely here that a new kind of coupling begins between the religious consciousness of the people and that of the elites.

Here one can see how “custom” turns into “politics.” Goryōe looks like a ritual that originally was a practice of the people, and only later was taken over and staged by the court—in response to the epidemic. This move makes sense: when crisis intensifies and unofficial rituals multiply, the state sees in them not only religiosity but also social risk—a crowd, a story about the guilt of elites, the suggestion that power does not control the world. Such bottom-up practices could function as an indirect critique of aristocratic hegemony; therefore, taking control of this ritual was a tool of stabilization.

Thus one of the most Japanese paradoxes is born: a state that fears an uncontrolled gathering responds to it… with an even larger gathering—only now under its own banner.

5 Things in Which Onryō Truly Defeated the Office

There are moments in Japan’s history when the entire state behaves like an ordinary frightened person: it quickens its pace because it feels something lurking behind. In such moments, law, office, and ceremonial form enter into an arrangement with belief in spirits. Several times in Japan’s history, onryō spirits filed an appeal; the authorities heard it—and expressed remorse, officially acknowledging the right of the wronged onryō spirit. Let us look at a few selected cases from history.

Sugawara no Michizane
An exiled official -> a vengeful god of education

First comes political mechanics: the court can break a man without a sword—an accusation, a demotion, an exile are enough. Michizane is accused in 901 and sent far from the capital; he dies in exile in 903.

Then comes the second phase, the one no chancellery can “void”: a chain of misfortunes. Court sources and later compilations note, in the following years, fires, epidemics, floods, violent deaths among people connected with his downfall—as if someone were keeping a private ledger of accounts to be settled. The court begins to react like an institution that quietly admits it made a mistake in an important matter. At first cautiously: rehabilitations and promotions around the Sugawara, as if the state were testing whether “it is enough to return what was taken.”

When that fails, politics of the highest weight enters: after two sudden deaths of crown princes (923 and 925) come thunder and a palace fire (930), courtiers die, and Emperor Daigo himself—the one who approved the exile—declines in health, takes the tonsure, and dies. This is no longer a city rumor; it is a series of blows to the center of power.

Then the state does something characteristic: it turns dread into procedure. If posthumous promotions do not “extinguish” the tension, a durable safety valve must be built—in 947 Kitano Tenjin appears, and Michizane is rewritten from the role of accuser into the role of guardian (a kami of learning and education). The exiled official is posthumously recognized as a deity.

Emperor Sutoku:
Emperor -> a guilty conscience

After the Hōgen disturbances (Hōgen no ran, 1156), Japan enters an era in which the struggle for the throne ceases to be a purely “court dispute” and becomes a wound in the very idea of legitimacy. Emperor Sutoku loses the succession conflict, is pushed aside, and finally exiled. In political logic this was to be the end of the problem: the loser vanishes from the center, the victor cements order.

But in the imagination of the age such stories do not end with a verdict. Sutoku dies in exile, and later tradition begins to read subsequent misfortunes and shocks as tatari (祟り)—“the world’s response” to violence against a defeated ruler. Over time Sutoku (often alongside Fujiwara no Yorinaga, another defeated figure) is remembered as an angry spirit: not because he “haunts,” but because his fate is too inconvenient to be closed inside a single chronicle paragraph. Such spirits function in politics like an alarm system: they do not allow one to pretend that violence was “clean” and without consequences.

And it is precisely here that we see what onryō can truly be: a language of memory and accusation. If the state cannot name its own guilt, the story of a spirit does it in its place—because the spirit is a form through which society can say: “what you did has not been accounted for.” Sutoku’s shadow is therefore political not because it possesses the power of “magic,” but because it reminds: proclaiming a winner does not close a case—sometimes it only opens it.

Taira no Masakado
A rebel -> a yōkai

Masakado begins “secularly”: with clan conflict and provincial violence, which the capital still tries to adjudicate like an administrative matter (you can find more about these events and about Masakado himself in our article here: Ancient warrior, false emperor, vengeful onryō demon – Why does Taira no Masakado's grave stand in the very center of Tokyo?). In 939 something extraordinary happens: Masakado seizes offices in the province, declares himself “the new emperor,” and the Council of State issues an edict calling for the suppression of the self-proclaimed ruler’s rebellion. In 940 the revolt is crushed and Masakado dies. Formally—end of story.

Except that legend (and fear) immediately enters the politics of symbols. In Shōmonki a motif appears that for the court is like a spark in a granary: Masakado is to receive a “decree of enthronement” from Hachiman, and the intermediary is… the spirit of Sugawara no Michizane. In other words: goryō not only takes revenge after death—it can lend authority to rebellion. For the authorities this is the worst scenario: “the dead” becomes the patron of an anti-court movement, thus binding metaphysics to political reality.

And here lies the essence: such an opponent is not defeated by punishment alone. Sometimes one must place him—in topography, in cult, in memory—so that he ceases to circulate like an unsigned verdict. The state does not always destroy the rebel’s symbol; sometimes it builds him a frame so it can “hold” him within the bounds of order. Masakado’s head comes back to life, is transported to another region of the island (where Edo will later arise), and the rebel becomes a yōkai who over the centuries will punish the city (Edo, later Tokyo) for dishonorable deeds of its inhabitants and authorities.

Sawara
An exile -> an emperor

Sawara’s story is almost a textbook example of the logic of pacifying an evil spirit through the institution of the state. Sawara was the younger son of Emperor Kōnin and became crown prince after Kanmu ascended the throne—and a moment later he was entangled in a political affair: accused of participating in the murder of Fujiwara no Tanetsugu (785). He was exiled and dies “on the way,” in circumstances that almost beg for later interpretations.

And then begins what, for the state, is a message: deaths, illnesses, misfortunes in the court’s circle are attributed to his restless spirit. And in 800 a gesture occurs that is simultaneously ritual and political decision: Sawara is posthumously elevated to the rank of emperor (Sudō). This is not a “keepsake”—it is a correction of history carried out after death, because only such a correction has a chance to stop the sequence of misfortunes.

In an even more “state” version, this story shows that apologies, acknowledging the grave, dispatching officials, divinations, the rituals of onmyōji and monks—all of this can function as an administrative response to crisis, only now the addressee is no longer a province or a clan, but a soul.

Emperor Go-Toba
Deposition -> divination

If Michizane shows a “trial of an official,” and Sawara a “trial of a crown prince,” then Go-Toba closes the circle: the state learns that a deposed/exiled emperor too may after death return as a destabilizing force. Medieval tradition attributes to his angry spirit a series of “inexplicable” deaths of important people—as if exile and humiliation did not end on an island, but dragged their shadow behind the institution.

And again: the response is institutional. Go-Toba is framed within cult and commemoration—not to “worship” him, but to pacify him. It is brutally pragmatic: even divine majesty can after death become a management problem.

A Shift of Power – the Samurai

In the Heian era the state behaves toward spirits like an official toward a complaint: it must be received, stamped, calmed, otherwise it will blow the order apart from within. But when the weight of power shifts toward the samurai and military lineages, the “spirit” ceases to be merely a risk to be defused. Over time it becomes a resource: something that can be formed into a durable sign of continuity, a sanction of heaven, and the “eternity” of a house. In other words: if the court learned how to silence anger, the shoguns learn how to kindle it and pay it homage.

In this logic, apotheosis—deification of a leader—functions like the architecture of the state. Instead of an ad hoc pacifying ritual (chinkon), a system of memory arises: mausolea, shrines, anniversary rites, posthumous titles, networks of patronage. The Japanese Japanologist Bernhard Scheid of the ÖAW shows in “Death at Court” (a book on the theme of death at the courts of rulers in various countries) that “death at court” and what happens after death can in Japan be an element of political technology: power not only rules in life, it also arranges for itself a safe (and useful) posthumous existence. This is not metaphysics “beside” politics—it is metaphysics as a tool of stabilization.

The most moving moment of this shift appears when military power begins to speak to subjects not only by edict, but also by cult: “our house is protected, our order bears heaven’s seal, our founder keeps watch.” In such an arrangement, the spirit of the ruler (no longer the emperor, but a shogun or daimyō) acts like an eternal presence on the boundary of sacrum and administration—and syncretic forms such as gongen (a manifestation of a deity) make it possible to incorporate that presence into the country’s ritual and institutional landscape.

And then one sees a paradox that is both Japanese and universal: the spirits of avengers teach power humility, but they also teach it cunning. If the dead person’s anger can topple order, that means order can be strengthened if the dead are made guardians of that order. Kuroda, writing about the “world of spirit pacification,” suggests precisely this long-duration logic: state and religious institutions do not so much “believe in spirits” as develop a language and tools through which misfortune, guilt, and fear can be gathered into a coherent system.

In the end a simple question remains: does power ever stop having its spirits? In Heian, they were harm returning like an epidemic. In the age of the samurai, they become genealogy, sanction, and a project of endurance—an “eternity” of a house built from ritual, memory, and fear tamed for the needs of the state. Onryō—regardless of whether one believes in spirits or not—constitute a very real and significant part of Japan’s history, and precisely its practical part: politics and administration.

>> SEE ALSO SIMILAR ARTICLES:

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How Did Japan Become the Land of the Samurai? – The Pirate King Fujiwara no Sumitomo’s Rebellion at the End of the Heian Era

The Last Leader of Japan’s Samurai-Era Pirates – Murakami Takeyoshi

The Sorcerer at the Heian Emperor's Court: Abe no Seimei, Master of Onmyōdō

"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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