HUMAN JAPANESE WIKI PATCH

On the mountain of Iyayama, Miyoshi District, Tokushima Prefecture, the inugami type are called ' suikazura,' and they are said to be a bit larger than mice and warm themselves by the fireside. On the island of Aishima in the aforementioned Yamaguchi Prefecture, they are called 'inugami nezumi' (inugami mice), and like the long-nosed house mouse, they are said to form groups of 75 mice in a single house.

They also seem similar in appearance to house mouse, and their mouths are said be torn vertically with a pointy end, and in the Ōita Prefecture, they are said to resemble a dsinezumi shrew, and in Toyooka town, Hayami District, Ōita, they are said to be a weasel with black and white spots. In fact, it would seem more as if the main focus of these descriptions were imitations of the belief in fox spirits. Thus, they would seem to be more like kuda-gitsune or osaki rather than dogs, so it does not appear as if they were purely following the legends of kodō curses (such as the 'dog curse' found in the In Search of the Supernatural).

HUMAN JAPANESE WIKI PATCH

However, in descriptions of an inugami's appearance, it is said that they have a somewhat large patch of color around the size of a mouse, and they have split ends on their tail, and as they were a species of talpidae, their eyes cannot be seen, and moved in single file one after another. Ī depiction of an inugami from Oka Kumaomi's Chiriyahokori

In Yamaga, Hayami District, Ōita Prefecture (now Kitsuki), there were actual cases where a miko did cut off a dog's heads this way, dried the maggots that gathered at the heads, and sold them calling it inugami, and there were also people who were thankful for these and bought them. Another method was to set several dogs to fight against each other, give the one dog remaining alive some fish, cut off that dog's head, and eat the remaining fish. By doing so, it will spiritually possess that person forever, granting their wishes. The phenomenon of inugami spiritual possession was a kojutsu (also called 'kodō' or 'kodoku', a greatly feared ritual for employing the spirits of certain animals) that was already banned in the Heian period that was thought to have spread throughout the population, and it was known to involve cutting off the head of a starving dog and burying the dog at a crossroads to inflame its grudges as people pass over its head so that its spirit would turn into a curse that could be used.Īnother method was to bury the dog alive leaving only its head sticking out or attach the dog to a supporting pole, put some food in front of the dog, cut the dog's neck just when it is about to starve so that the head would fly towards and bite at the food, burn the dog into mere bones, put the remains into a vessel, and deify it. In the Miyazaki Prefecture, the Kuma District, Kumamoto Prefecture, and Yakushima, the local dialect pronounces it 'ingami' and in Tanegashima, they are called 'irigami.' It can also be written in kanji as 狗神. Furthermore, traces of belief in inugami exists in the Yamaguchi Prefecture, all of Kyushu, even going past the Satsunan Islands all the way to the Okinawa Prefecture. They have seemed firmly rooted until recent years in the eastern Ōita Prefecture, Shimane Prefecture, and a part of Kōchi Prefecture in northern Shikoku, and it is also theorized that Shikoku, where no foxes ( kitsune) could be found, is the main base of the inugami. Inugami ( 犬神, 'dog god/spirit'), like kitsunetsuki, is a spiritual possession by the spirit of a dog, widely known about in western Japan. Bruning Collection of Japanese Books and Manuscripts, L. Inugami (犬神) from Bakemono no e (化物之繪, c.

Human japanese wiki