The Honjo Seven Wonders

The Honjo Seven Wonders^[1] are a cycle of strange tales from Edo's downtown district of Honjo, today the southern part of Sumida ward and the northern edge of Kōtō ward. Honjo lies on low marshy ground on the east bank of the Sumida; it was developed in the rush of building that followed the Great Meireki Fire of 1657, a new quarter for the expanding city. Low-grade samurai compounds and townhouses pressed in on one another; canals and waterways ran in every direction. City and outskirts, the human and the watery, all folded together at very close range. The marvels that gathered here came to be told as a single cluster, the 'Seven'.

The earliest record is in volume 46 of the sequel to Kasshi Yawa, the long miscellany kept by Matsuura Seizan (1760–1841) between the Bunsei and Tenpō eras (c. 1820–40). Seizan, ninth daimyō of Hirado in Hizen, had retired to a residence in Honjo and was, in effect, an eyewitness. Slightly later, the second-generation Ryūtei Tanehiko, in the preface to volume four of Shichi Fushigi Katsushika Monogatari (Genji 2 / 1865), set down a canonical seven: Kataha no Ashi, Oitekebori, Maizō no Mizo, Ashi-arai Yashiki, Okuri-chōchin, Akamame-baba, Akari-nashi Soba-ya. The Shintōist Kamo Norikiyo's Onmyō Gaiden Iwato-biraki added Baka-bayashi and Yūrei-bashi. The list of marvels differs from source to source — a defining feature of the cycle. Only the number seven holds still; what fills it shifts with the era and the teller.

The geography of the Seven sits very close to the ground of Honjo itself. Oitekebori lies in the canal-belt near Kinshichō. Akari-nashi Soba is set on the Minami-Warigesui — today Hokusai-dōri, around Kamezawa 1- and 2-chōme. Kataha no Ashi clings to Katahabori and Komatome-bashi, around Ryōgoku 1-chōme. Tanuki-bayashi drifts above the whole quarter. A single marvel mapped to a single place-name is the typical posture of urban folklore. When the place-name moves, the marvel moves with it; when the place-name is erased, the marvel falls out of memory. The Meiji-period reshaping of Tokyo filled in many of these canals, and the Seven receded from the surface of local life. The relief plaques the ward government has set along Ōyokogawa Shinsui Park^[9] are an attempt to pin a vanishing folklore back to the ground as a heritage walk.

Oitekebori. The most famous of the cycle. A fisherman lifts his basket out of a canal near Kinshichō in the late afternoon; a low voice rises from the water — leave it, leave it^[2]. He hurries home only to find the basket empty. The explanations multiply: a kappa, a tanuki, the call of the freshwater catfish gibachi misheard as a human voice. The modern Japanese idiom oitekebori — to be left behind, to be ditched — descends directly from this tale. A stele stands in the corner of Kinshi Park, near Kinshichō station.

Okuri-chōchin. A traveller walks a night road; in the distance a paper lantern bobs along as if pointing the way^[3]. Step closer and it slides further off; stand still and it disappears. A light-version of the more familiar 'escort wolf' — seems to guide but leads nowhere, fit only for stripping the walker of all sense of direction.

Okuri-hyōshigi. The sound-version of the escort lantern. On a night when no one else is about, the sharp clack-clack of wooden clappers comes up from behind. In Edo, the night watch struck clappers as they walked the wards on fire-watch; this is the noise of the watch with no watchman left, an after-echo that refuses to die.

Akari-nashi Soba. The marvel of the Minami-Warigesui canal, today's Kamezawa neighbourhood. On a cold night, a soba stand stands by the roadside, its paper lantern still burning, yet no proprietor, no customers. A passer-by reaches out to blow out the lamp; the flame will not be extinguished. He blows harder; misfortune duly follows. The late-Edo printmaker Utagawa Kuniteru engraved the scene as Honjo Shichi Fushigi no Uchi — Akari-nashi Soba — by which point the marvel had become a saleable commodity on the woodblock market.

Ashi-arai Yashiki. In a hatamoto residence in Honjo Mikasa-chō, every night a vast, hairy foot descended from the ceiling, ordering: wash me. A servant duly washed it with a bucket of water; the foot withdrew. Skip a night and the foot stamped about the rooms, crushing furniture. A type of marvel in which the outside world breaks into the closed interior of a samurai compound. The hierarchies of the warrior household — master and servant, command and obedience — extend, fascinatingly, even to the inhuman foot.

Kataha no Ashi. Around Katahabori and Komatome-bashi in Ryōgoku 1-chōme. The reeds along one stretch of canal put out leaves on only one side. The original explanation was prosaic — a prevailing wind bending growth — but in later tellings the story curdles. A man named Tomezō, rejected by a girl named Okoma, kills her and dumps the body in this canal; from then on the reeds grow leaves on only one side. A textbook case of natural observation being folded into a kaidan.

Ochiba-naki Shii / Tanuki-bayashi / Tsugaru no Taiko. The chinquapin tree at the Matsuura residence whose leaves do not fall in autumn. Tanuki-bayashi is festival music that drifts from nowhere on a windless, still night; follow the sound and it shifts to another direction^[4] — Matsuura Seizan himself records experiencing it at his own house. Tsugaru no Taiko is a drumbeat heard from the direction of the Tsugaru residence in Honjo Kamezawa-chō; the real residence did contain a drum tower, a historical fact that hardened into folklore. All three marvels happen inside samurai compounds — a function of the fact that Honjo was a low-grade samurai quarter at exactly this density.

Honjo did not invent the 'seven wonders' format. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the seven cardinal sins of medieval Christendom, the Seven Stones of Suwa, the Seven Mouths of Kamakura — seven is the standard tally for bundling the supernatural across cultures. In Japanese folklore, eight (yaoyorozu, 'the eight million') stands for fullness without limit, while seven names the unstable state of being almost full but short by one. Seven promises completion without delivering it — an ideal container for a set of marvels that refuses to be closed.

Medieval Japanese Buddhism had thoroughly domesticated the number. The seven calamities and seven blessings of the Ninnō-kyō, the seven stars of the Northern Dipper, the seventh day after death and the seven-sevens (forty-ninth day) that mark the intermediate state — the cosmology divided the boundary between the dead and the living into intervals of seven. That structure sits underneath the Honjo Seven as a quiet substrate. The crossings of death and life, of the natural and the human, get cut into seven and laid out side by side.

What separates the Honjo Seven from other 'sevens' is their geographical compactness. The Wonders of the Ancient World are scattered across continents. The calamities of the Ninnō-kyō descend on the cosmos at large. The Honjo Seven, by contrast, all happen inside a few square kilometres bounded by the Sumida, the Tatekawa, the Ōyokogawa and the Kitajikkengawa — seven marvels running in parallel in the same neighbourhood. This is the heart of urban kaidan: marvels not in some far country but next door. The road outside your house stays open, at all times, to the other world.

The documentary history of the Honjo Seven begins in the 1820s with Matsuura Seizan. Seizan (1760–1841) was the ninth daimyō of Hirado in Hizen; in retirement he settled in Honjo and compiled an extraordinary miscellany, Kasshi Yawa, in 100 volumes, with a 100-volume sequel and a 78-volume third series. Volume 46 of the sequel (Bunsei–Tenpō, c. 1820–40) sets down Baka-bayashi, that is, Tanuki-bayashi: 'In the precincts of my own lodge, when night comes I sometimes hear, in the distance, the beat of a drum.' A samurai recording, from inside his own residence, a marvel he has personally heard — the posture itself is precious.

The second-generation Ryūtei Tanehiko (1842–1907) was a disciple of the first. In the preface to volume four of Shichi Fushigi Katsushika Monogatari (Genji 2 / 1865), he set out his canonical seven: Kataha no Ashi, Oitekebori, Maizō no Mizo, Ashi-arai Yashiki, Okuri-chōchin, Akamame-baba, Akari-nashi Soba-ya. This is the first time 'the Seven' appear as a packaged set. Tanehiko was a writer of yomihon, exactly the kind of late-Edo author for whom the marvel-as-entertainment commodity made sense.

Kamo Norikiyo (1798–1861), in Onmyō Gaiden Iwato-biraki, comes at the material from a different angle — as a Shintōist conducting a kind of folklore inquiry. He records Baka-bayashi and Yūrei-bashi; his note on the former — 'on a windless, still night, the music of disordered measures' — is curiously specialist in its musical vocabulary, consistent with the demographic fact that Honjo was the residential quarter of festival musicians as well as of low-ranking samurai.

Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Kuniteru turned the cycle into prints. Kuniteru's Honjo Shichi Fushigi no Uchi — Akari-nashi Soba (late Edo) visualises the soba marvel. Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856–58) returns repeatedly to the bridges and canals of Honjo. The double identity of place and marvel travelled, through prints, to consumers across the country; a provincial reader who had never set foot in Honjo would still have known, in outline, what the Honjo Seven were.

The Meiji Restoration brought a wave of demolition through the samurai compounds, and a campaign of canal-filling that wore away the physical substrate of the Honjo Seven. The canals around Kinshichō were filled in the Taishō era and Kinshi Park opened on the site in 1924; the ground of Oitekebori is now a corner of the park, marked by a stele. The 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and the post-war rebuild completed the conversion of Honjo from samurai-ward to ordinary commercial district. The geography that had grown the marvels was gone.

The marvels themselves, however, moved house. The Meiji-era rakugo storyteller San'yūtei Enchō (1839–1900)^[5] made his name with long-form ghost stories — Shinkei Kasanegafuchi, Botan Dōrō — but his stage also held shorter routines drawn from the Honjo Seven. To lift marvels rooted in one specific neighbourhood and replant them in rakugo, an oral art that could be carried anywhere, was the survival strategy of urban kaidan in the Meiji era. The cycle lost its homeland and acquired a new home: the yose, the variety hall.

In the Taishō era, with the rise of newspapers and magazines, 'urban legend' settled in as a fixture of mass media. Marvels could now be detached from their place-names altogether and circulated in print. The Honjo Seven were promoted in this process, from a parochial bit of folklore to a category — 'the great kaidan of Edo'. They had lost their geography; they had gained a place in the market for nostalgia.

Between roughly 1970 and the late 1980s, a new 'seven wonders' was germinating inside Japanese primary schools. The anatomical model in the science room moves at night; the eyes in the Beethoven portrait in the music room follow you; the fourth-floor stairs add a step on the way down; a red kanchakanko jumper; and, above all, Hanako-san of the lavatory^[8]. Carried purely by word of mouth among children, the cycle moved through the country and across generations.

The folklorist Tsunemitsu Tōru^[6]'s Gakkō no Kaidan (Kōdansha KK Bunko, November 1990)^[7] was the first book to gather this material as folklore in its own right. The school seven is the Honjo Seven in modern dress: seven marvels in one bounded place, the place this time being not a downtown ward but a school. The school building is the new Honjo, the schoolchildren are the new townspeople, the urban Japan of the 1980s is the new Edo.

Hanako-san^[8] is the leading role of the school seven, the analogue of Oitekebori. Knock on the third stall of the girls' toilet, call 'Hanako-san, let's play' three times, and a small hand in red sleeves reaches out from inside. The legend spread through primary schools in the 1980s and from 1995 onwards became a franchise — films, anime, games. Hanako-san, like the voice in Oitekebori, is fixed to one specific location. The placename has migrated from canal to school lavatory; the underlying grammar of urban kaidan has not changed at all.

When Nakata Hideo's Ring (1998)^[10] put Japanese horror back on the global map, foreign critics put their finger on a feature that distinguishes it from the slasher tradition: Japanese ghosts live in places. The American slasher moves — between summer camps, suburbs, holiday cabins. The Japanese ghost stays put: at the bottom of a well, in a particular lavatory, in a particular school. The three-hundred-year line from the Honjo Seven to Hanako-san is exactly this tradition of the place-bound marvel.

What the Honjo Seven and the school seven share is a structural feature peculiar to urban folklore: many marvels coexist inside one bounded space. A single yokai encountered on a mountain path, a single 'master' inhabiting one lake — these are figures of the countryside, of nature. The Honjo Seven do something else; seven marvels share a single ward. This is urban density made supernatural: where people live packed together, the marvels they tell live packed together too.

The fixity of the number — seven, three, a hundred — is also a city-folkloric trait. Rural yokai resist counting; the country's kappa, foxes and tanuki, counted seriously, run to thousands. Urban kaidan, by contrast, snap to a tally: 'the seven', 'the three great vengeful spirits', 'the hundred stories'. The fixed number turns the cycle into a unit of cultural consumption. For an Edo print publisher, the Honjo Seven was the right size of product; for an 1980s primary-schooler, the school seven was the right size of rumour.

The same structure now drives the SCP Foundation (in English from 2007) and the major Japanese internet legends (Kunekune, the Eight-Foot-Tall Lady, born on the bulletin-board 2-channel). A place, a situation, a number — these three pin a marvel in the modern internet age. The Honjo Seven set out the grammar in the early nineteenth century; two hundred years later, the syntax of urban kaidan has not changed.

The principal walking route today is the run of relief plaques in Ōyokogawa Shinsui Park^[9], laid out by Sumida ward along the green ribbon that replaced the filled-in Ōyokogawa canal. Ten minutes on foot from Kinshichō station, plaques set into the path depict each of the Seven in turn. The canals themselves are gone, but the route preserves the sequence in which the marvels were once said to lie. It is a deliberate piece of folklore-as-heritage.

Oitekebori's stele stands in a corner of Kinshi Park, three minutes north of Kinshichō station. The Edo-period canal is filled and built over; an information board on the south edge of the park marks the spot. Akari-nashi Soba's Minami-Warigesui, today's Hokusai-dōri, is a fifteen-minute walk from Ryōgoku station, past the Sumida Hokusai Museum — Hokusai himself was born in Honjo and is a contemporary witness to the world of the Seven.

Kataha no Ashi's Komatome-bashi has lost the bridge but kept the crossing-name. A pedestrian route linking the Ryōgoku Kokugikan sumo arena, the Edo-Tokyo Museum and the Sumida Hokusai Museum threads the principal sites of the cycle and can be walked in half a day. The tourist information centre at the east exit of Ryōgoku station hands out a walking map that marks each of the Seven.

There is no need to come at night — the marvels no longer turn up. The geography that grew them — narrow crooked canals, the closed gardens of samurai compounds, marshland without street lighting — has been thoroughly erased by the Meiji and post-war rebuilds. What remains are steles, plaques, a few crossing-names. Even so, the walk has its value: as a place to set the imagination off, with the prompt that 'two hundred years ago, here, someone saw something.' The marvels have lost their ground; the place-names have not. Place-names are the last container of memory.