I’m off to Osaka for a few days, but here are a few interesting sites I’ve been meaning to write about for a while:
1. To start off, here’s a great blog called Bastish.net, about an American guy and his Japanese wife living the country life in Nagano Prefecture. They own an organic farm and have a business guiding hikers and showing people around their corner of rural Japan. He’s a really good photographer, and writes interestingly about his neighbors, customers, and family. The blog is at: http://www.bastish.net/index_2.html and if you’d like to try a rural getaway focused on outdoor adventure or immersing yourself in village life with some help from English speakers, check out his One Life Japan website: http://www.onelifejapan.com/index.html.
2. Babies who lick the oil out of lamps, umbrella monsters, and ceiling lickers. They’re all at the Obakemono Project, a very well-done website about Japanese monsters. URL: http://www.obakemono.com/index.php
3. Calories in Japanese foods – This simple but fact-filled homepage is the place to go if you’re curious about whether miso, soy, or tonkotsu ramen will make you the fattest, or what kind of sushi has the least calories. Here’s the URL: http://www.eiyoukeisan.com/JapaneseFoodCalorie/index.html
4. Bukkake of the Gods: Japan’s Insane Creation Myths is brought to you by the good people at Cracked.com, describing Japan’s vomit and urine gods, gods having sex with corpses, and more.
“What country has the honor to say that part of their homeland is basically godly spunk? Well, Japan does. The story of Japan’s creation is the god Izanagi pushed his “jewel encrusted spear” into “the primal ooze of our planet” and, when pulling out, “spilled a salty substance” that created the Japanese island of Onogoro. If you can’t spot the innuendo there, don’t worry, it only gets less subtle from here…”
Here’s the link: http://www.cracked.com/article_16962_bukkake-gods-japans-insane-creation-myths.html
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We are not here to condemn Japanese culture, with its terrifying game shows and tentacle rape. Who are we to judge? But we do want to understand it. They say you can learn everything about a people from their mythology and while this may not always be true, Japanese myths seem to explain a lot about the culture that coined the term “bukkake.” #5.
The Myth of Spunk Island and the Poop Gods
What country has the honor to say that part of their homeland is basically godly spunk? Well, Japan does. The story of Japan’s creation is the god Izanagi pushed his “jewel encrusted spear” into “the primal ooze of our planet” and, when pulling out, “spilled a salty substance” that created the Japanese island of Onogoro. If you can’t spot the innuendo there, don’t worry, it only gets less subtle from here. The story goes that when Izanagi finally decided to stop metaphorically “raping” the underage Earth below, he took his soon-to-be wife Izanami and descended on the huge island of dried ejaculate where they married and settled. After having sex on Spunk Island the woman gave birth to eight more Japanese islands. Not too weird, right? Hang on: Izanami continued to get pregnant and squeezed out more babies into the world. One of them was Homusubi (Kagututi), the incarnation of fire. A literal fireball. Learning first hand that fire is hot, Izanami suffered the worst burning sensation down there… and basically everywhere.
Being horribly burned from the inside she suffered agony for a couple of days, losing complete control of her bodily functions (what kind of gods are they?), vomiting, urinating and shitting uncontrollably. Her dying spasms of bodily functions gave birth to new gods, a pair for each substance that flew out of her body: The Vomit Gods: Kanayamahiko Kanayamahime The Urine Gods: Mitsuha no me Wakumusubi The Feces Gods: Haniyasuhiko Haniyasuhime
So the next time you find yourself on the floor of the bathroom after a night of tacos and tequila, feel free to add these to the list of deities you will be praying to. #4.
The Rotting Bride
Japanese mythology says that after the untimely god-pooping death of his wife, Izanagi decided he was too old for the bar scene and did the only logical thing – go down to Yomi, the Underworld, to get his wife back. It’s not necrophilia when the gods do it. In pitch darkness he finally found his beloved but she refused to come back with him, explaining that she has already eaten the food of the Underworld (tacos and tequila no doubt) and must stay there. Still, being the clingy bastard that he was, Izanagi insisted, so Izanami agreed that she would try to work out a return as long as he wouldn’t try to look at her in the mean time.
Per the usual when such a request is made, Izanagi completely ignored it. Once he became tired of waiting, he went to his dead wife and lit a torch in the darkness. There he saw his maggot-ridden decomposing corpse of a bride. Apparently corpse brides are not as charming as Tim Burton wants you to believe, so Izanagi took a good two-second look at his ex-wife before screaming his head off in terror and making a run for it. Offended by this, Izanami lost her shit and then sent the Hell Hags to kill him.
After a spirited action movie-worthy escape, Izanagi finally got to the exit and created a river out of his own piss to divide the Underworld and the real world. After which he sealed off the entrance and, by uttering a single sentence, divorced Izanami. So to summarize: Izanagi came unannounced to his defacto ex-girlfriend’s house and begged her to come back to him. While she was actually considering it, the bastard caught her without her make-up, started screaming, whipped out his dong and left a trail of piss out of her apartment. Japanese myths, ladies and gentlemen! #3.
Susanoo, the Snot God
The authors of these myths weren’t done with the whole “god born from bodily fluids” thing, not by a long shot. Thus the story goes, when Izanagi emerged from the Underworld, all that contact with death and his ex-wife trying to murder his ass made him feel a bit unclean. So while taking a dip in the old swimming hole, Izanagi washed his left eye, and gave birth to Amaterasu, the goddess of the Sun, the most important deity in Japanese mythology. Hey, it’s better than the pooping thing. While washing his right eye, Tsukiyomi, the god of the Moon came to be. And while blowing his nose, Izanagi created Susanoo, the god of wind and storms. We can only imagine how the writers must have been kicking themselves for not having the wind god farted into existence. Anyway, Susanoo entered Japanese Heaven, where he immediately started to piss everyone off. The story goes that he looked down at his sister, Amaterasu, on Earth, and promptly took a shit in her temple.
He deservedly got kicked out of Heaven shortly after that, and later Susanoo sired a number of children, including a daughter, Suseri-hime. Some time later a man named Okuninushi fell in love with her and asked Susanoo for her hand in marriage. Being the stereotypical overprotective dad, Susanoo locked the boy in a room full of snakes, then locked him in a room full of wasps and centipedes and finally, apparently having run out of rooms, sent him to look for his arrow in the middle of a meadow. Which he quickly set on fire, in case you forgot what a dick he was. #2.
Kachi Kachi Yama and the Magical Nutsack Beast
Let’s move on from the shitting gods to the tanuki. You may have seen statues of these guys if you’ve ever been to Japan. They kind of look like raccoons carrying bottles of booze. Oh, and they have enormous nutsacks. The character of the tanuki is a bit like your drunk grandpa: always borrowing money off of you, getting hammered and dragging his sagging scrotum through your freshly mopped kitchen floor. The tanuki are also magical tricksters, and in many tales were said to turn horse excrements into delicious looking meals and serve it to travelers or transform into humans, get drunk, visit whore houses and buy stuff with leaves temporarily transformed into money, adding a bit of counterfeit charges to their long list of felonies. In this particular legend a farmer found a tanuki in his vegetable field, probably doing something dickish like hollowing out his carrots and pooping inside them. Catching the tanuki, he tied it to a tree and decided to go all Gargamel on the bastard and eat the animal. But first he had to take care of some errands in town (like pick up some sweet and sour sauce), leaving his wife to guard the animal. But the tanuki cried and begged to be let go, so the woman decided to set it free. After which the tanuki killed her in gratitude. Probably also copped a feel while he was at it. If you’re trying to figure out what the moral of that story is, perhaps you should hear the rest first. Deciding that he still did not meet his daily dick quota, the tanuki turned himself into the farmer’s wife and cooked her body in a stew, serving it to the husband when he came back. When the man complimented the stew, the creature transformed back and told the man he had just eaten his dead wife’s flesh. The tanuki left, at which point a rabbit who was a friend of the couple found the tanuki, and slowly tortured and killed him out of revenge. The moral of the story is that you should probably not go looking for life lessons in Japanese magical giant testicle raccoon myths. #1.
The Shittiest Place in Japan (Literally)
Emperor Sujin (circa 3rd/4th century) is widely regarded as the first emperor whose existence can be verified through actual historical evidence, though there is not really much to be said about the man. He founded some temples, boned a few princesses and fought a prince that rebelled against him… oh, and apparently his actions are responsible for the best named city in the entire world. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Kusobakama. Translated: Shit Pants. As the legend goes, back in the days of Sujin, a rival noble named Take Haniyasu decided that the best way to make an imprint on history was to collect a huge army and march against the emperor. Surprisingly, Sujin was not too keen on that and, having the good fortune of being informed of the amassing army beforehand, scraped together his own impressive military force. His army wore down Haniyasu’s forces over a period of weeks, until finally Sujin’s general shot Haniyasu with an arrow. Without their leader, the enemy scattered, ready for the slaughter. And slaughtered they were. Sujin’s army tore through them like a badger in a bathtub full of hamburgers, slashing and killing the lot of them in a moment’s notice. The slaughter was apparently so horrible that some of the soldiers threw away their armor, dropped to their knees, begged for mercy and, when it was apparent they would not receive it, shit their pants out of fear. To commemorate this epic event, three local towns were named Kawara (Armor), Agimi (Oh, lord!) and Kusobakama (Shit Pants).
You might be wondering why you have never heard of this city, even on the Internet. The reason for it is because it was renamed to Kusuba, an apparent and pretty much meaningless corruption of the original name. And thus the town of Shit Pants threw away countless millions they could have made from souvenirs. For more wildly imaginative myths, check out Gay Bigfoot & the 7 Weirdest Mythical Creatures in the World. Or learn about some more cultures that believe crazy shit in 5 Inspiring Religions That Worship Penises. And bring yourself back to reality with Cracked.com’s Top Picks. |