Miyagiみやぎ

Amazake-babaa was told as a visitor who heralds the arrival of epidemics. She knocks at midnight and asks whether there is sweet sake; the very act is a test of taboo, and answering is understood as a conduit for misfortune. People hung apotropaic symbols—cedar sprigs, nandina, and chili peppers—at their gates and avoided replying. Across Edo, people visited images of an old woman said to calm coughs, linking petitions to folk belief. The tradition overlaps memories of smallpox outbreaks; some view her as a guise of the smallpox deity, while others absorbed the image of a peddler woman on cold nights, creating regional variation. The yokai is transmitted with the taboo structure of “answer and you fall ill,” accompanied by threshold-warding rites, and is positioned as a portent tale that signals the presence of disease.

This version frames the Hidden Zato as a blind minstrel-yokai lurking in the mountains and caverns of Tohoku and Kanto. At midnight it pounds out sounds like a foot-operated mortar or rapid rice polishing, yet the source stays unseen and household tools are said to be “borrowed.” In some tales, peeking reveals the noise coming from a neighbor’s house. Some regions call it a child-snatcher, while others give it a benevolent face as a dispenser of mochi or treasure to the honest, making them prosperous. From early modern times, the idea of hidden villages merged with a mystique around blind guilds, recasting it as an unseen people dwelling in caves. Modern folk explanations liken the racket to insect wingbeats, but as a bearer of the uncanny it endures as a spirit in the form of a zato.

Maki-onna is a demon-woman figure found in temple chronicles and local histories around Ishinomaki, paired with the ogre Ōtakemaru of Mt. Nōgatake. While the slaying tales center on Ōtakemaru, she appears as his consort and later becomes an object of memorial rites and pacification. In the legend where General Tamura subdues various demons with a Kannon image attributed to Enchin and installs Kannon statues on each mountain, Makiyama preserves a tale of dedicating Maki-onna’s cut hair. Place-name and temple-name origin lore (Magiyama to Makiyama) and the transfer of Kannon images are recounted as religious history. Her concrete figure remains understated, yet she stands as a symbol of mountain dread fused with Kannon devotion. Anecdotes with strong fictional color are avoided, and some sources omit her entirely, showing the range of the tradition.