My Life in Brush with Ghosts

I had been living in a small town outside of Osaka, Japan for over a year before someone finally told me the ground beneath my apartment was haunted. I suspected something was amiss with that part of town since my room’s florescent bulb was the only light flickering in the area at night, and the apartment (which consisted of not much beyond my small room, a hot plate, a sink and a cabinet-sized bathroom) was perched atop a pipe-cutting factory and frequently used fertilizer storage shed. The nearest homes were a few blocks away.

Everyone in town apparently knew the history of the land beneath the factory, the parking lot, and the private school where I taught English classes across the street. No one except an ignorant foreigner would willingly agree to live anywhere near there. The land was haunted because it was layered with skeletons from battles fought in the nearby swamps and rice fields hundreds of years before. Everyone who dug a foundation eventually hit bone. The spirits of all the soldiers, villagers and bandits who lost their lives on that land were said to wander the shadows at night sending the chill of death scampering down the spine of anyone unlucky enough to encounter them.

It hadn’t taken me long to discover that my adopted small town was alive with the idea of ghosts. My young students all knew and loved telling stories of local ghosts, zombies and spirits that haunted every part of town from the grape vineyards up in the hills down to the warehouses along the river. My middle-aged students told me about their disturbing and vivid dreams of ghostly ancestors choking them in their sleep every time they considered doing something unconventional. Then one night, in a small adult class, my oldest student quietly told the class, in nearly perfect English, that she had been haunted by the ghost of her young daughter for over thirty years. The five year old girl had been riding in the backseat of a car that was hit broadside by a truck, killing the little girl instantly. Ever since then, when the weather was hot and close as it was the night the girl died (and as it was the night we heard this story), the girl's ghost would briefly appear in the shadows of her neighborhood, drifiting from doorstep to doorstep, as if the little girl was trying to find her way home. After the woman finished her story we sat in silence for quite a while with no idea what to say next.

Nearly every inch of Japan is marked by its past and its spirits, they seep up from the land into the culture and become part of the language itself. Most open patches of ground are mapped by shrines, temples, family headstones and historical markers of all size and description, and most commercial land has reserved space for spiritual, political and personal recognitions of the past (Addiss). The countryside is similarly spotted with markers of the history that has passed across it. The ghosts of a community’s ancestors and past institutions drift through every conversation and influence nearly every personal interaction (Heinrich, Matsumoto).

Because the Japanese sense of place and sense of responsibility for personal and family history is so distinctly different from how modern American culture deals with its past and sense of place, ghosts stories and family history became the center of many of the discussions with my students; ghosts of all kinds floated through many of our classroom exchanges. Ghosts, and the stories that accompanied them, became the medium I used for teaching about English syntax and grammar. Ghosts were the starting point for many of my classes about English literature, and ghosts played a prominent role in our discussions about modern American culture.

It was during one of these ghost-inspired English classes that a student inadvertently revealed I was living and working on haunted ground. This student claimed that the fact I was living in the presence of so many ghosts is quite likely why my school didn’t charge me for my room—a way of assuaging the school director’s guilt should anything awful happen to me. After my students assured me nothing would happen since I was a foreigner and was therefore essentially invisible to local spirits, we returned to exploring the differences between American and Japanese ghosts.

The oldest student in the room, a woman in her early 70s said that Japanese ghosts were part of the earth and existed in all the natural elements around us. She asked me where American ghosts lived. With the movie Poltergeist in mind, I said, with what I thought was obvious deadpan humor, that because America was obsessed with technology and because Americans kept moving and were always tearing down buildings and putting up new ones, American ghosts were no longer rooted to a specific house or piece of land, and had instead begun to haunt the one "place" that all Americans visted every day, the electronic airwaves; I said that American ghosts lived in the blank channels between television stations. My students nodded as they seriously considered what I had told them, then the youngest student in the room, a secretary in her early 20s said, “They live in the TV here too, and in my purse.” She pulled a tomogachi toy from her purse and proceeded to show us how she had been keeping alive a small electronic ghost of a child she called Anne-chan who lived in the pager-sized device in her hand.