Episode 29: The Fire Maiden in Love

Listen to learn more about:

•  How the Japanese fear and respect flames.

• The crimes of Yaoya Oshichi, and how they changed the history of Japan forever.

• How the writer, Ihara Saikaku, single handedly rewrote history. 

SOURCES

This is the My Dark Path podcast.

I have a lifelong love for Japan, and a lifelong fascination. From the outside, the world sees a small, island nation that is both progressive and ancient; with a captivating history and culture that traces back thousands of years, while being a modern leader in technology and entertainment. Every country has it own community filled with passionate fans of Japanese culture – they refer to themselves as otakus, and they consume Japanese manga, anime, films, and television shows with ecstatic enthusiasm. Japan is the birthplace of cosplay, where fans are inspired to dress up as fantastical characters from their favorite stories; while leading designers and celebrities around the world have taken inspiration from the eclectic fashions of Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood. And as one of the pioneers in video-gaming; they helped turn little electronic amusements into an industry worth tens of billions of dollars.

But to really understand Japan from the inside, you need to understand fire. Because this island nation was literally born from it. In Japanese mythology, the god Izanagi and his consort, Izanami, created the islands of Japan by dipping a spear into the ocean from atop the rainbow bridge of Heaven. The drops of water which fell from the tip of the spear became the nation we know today. Izanagi and Izanami then had many children who became the ancient gods and goddesses. But it was the Fire God, born last, who killed Izanami by his birth. Izanagi attempted to retrieve his love from the underworld, but her body had decayed too much, and she was forever lost to him. Remember this legend of lost love as we dig into today’s story.

As with many ancient myths, there’s an uncanny connection to the truth. Japan sits precariously on a rift in the ocean floor that goes five miles down; it’s known as the Tuscadora Deep, and it means that this nation is one of the most seismically-active places on Earth. It’s part of what’s known as the Ring of Fire; the greatest concentration of volcanoes anywhere. Its land is almost all mountainous, only 17 percent of it can actually be farmed. As with the Hawaiian islands, cooled lava defines the terrain. And while the famous Mt. Fuji is one of the volcanoes which has gone extinct; there are many others which are very much alive. In many of Japan’s greatest cities, there’s a mist in the atmosphere that makes the air and the light different from anywhere else I’ve been; this mist is the steam of active volcanoes.

And where there are volcanoes, there are also earthquakes and tsunamis, which have toppled cities and cost countless lives throughout the history of Japan. Their modern skyscrapers are among the most resilient buildings on Earth, able to withstand devastating tremors. But in traditional Japanese construction, the primary materials for any home were wood and paper. Fire is both the origin of Japan and its greatest fear; the symbol of nature’s greatest power, and the fragility of our mortal lives. We touched on this in our episode about Japan’s attempt to start forest fires in America during World War II with the Fu-go Balloons – memories of the devastation wrought by fire are passed down and reinforced generation after generation with the Japanese.

So you might easily understand why one of the worst crimes in Japanese society is arson. The ability of one small fire to grow into an all-consuming cataclysm means that anyone playing recklessly with fire faces severe punishment. Which brings us to today’s story, about a real-life fire which grew into a legend that helps us understand Japan better than any statistic. 

The fire was an act of arson; and the person who started it was a grocer’s daughter named Yaoya Oshichi. For her crime she was executed; at the age of just 16. But what made the story of Yaoya Oshichi live on was not what she did, but why. The fire she started, which spread great destruction and brought about her death, she started for love.

***

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and welcome to Season Two of the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. We hope you’ll check us out on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, or just send an email to us at explore@mydarkpath.com. And now in 2022 we’re launching our Patreon, where subscribers will have access to exclusive full episodes starting with our special miniseries, a My Dark Path tour of history, science, and the paranormal in Cold War Moscow.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 3 of Season 2: The Fire Maiden in Love

PART ONE

In the 6th century, Buddhism as it was evolving in China made the leap across the water to Japan, where the native Japanese had their own spiritual system known as Shintoism. Practitioners of Shinto worship kami, godly spirits which surround us everywhere. There are kami in wind, in storms, in roads, on the shoreline, it’s kami who create waterfalls and usher in the autumn. Their world is hidden to us, but the beauty and power of nature are their work, and deserve our respect and gratitude. Meanwhile, Buddhism teaches that this world is an illusion, that our bodies are vessels for an immortal spirit that will be reborn here until it transcends Earthly desires and appetites and moves on to the spirit world. You can see how these two religions resonate with one another, and they have evolved into an inseparable form unique to Japan.

The virtues of Japanese culture are wisdom, patience, and excellence in all things. Everyday activities can be elevated to deeds of religious significance; it’s how Japanese calligraphy can be worthy of a museum, how the simple preparation and drinking of tea can become a beautiful and reverent ceremony, how the act of arranging flowers is treated as a high art form, known as ikebana. To be cultured in Japan, educated in literature and the classics, to have the discipline and humility to invest so much of yourself in these everyday activities, makes you worthy of the highest esteem. If you see a Japanese word which ends in “-do”, such as judo or aikido, that “-do” has a dual meaning. Roughly translated, it can mean both “to talk about”, as well as “the road” or “the way”. So a -do can be both a philosophy, and a path. For Buddhists, it is a path to enlightenment. 

And it’s important to note, that in the Japanese practice of Buddhism, the bodies of the dead are cremated, a ritual which completes the destruction of their temporary vessel, and sets their spirit free into the Universe, to either return again or stay in the world of the kami. Here again, we see the inevitability of fire in the collective consciousness of the Japanese.

***

In 1923, an earthquake struck Tokyo which sounds like something out of an apocalyptic movie. Cracks opened up in the ground which were so large and deep that people fell to their deaths. Uncontrollable blazes ravaged the paper and wood homes across the city, leaving almost two million residents homeless. When the chaos finally settled, more than 140,000 people were either dead or missing. 

Much like the horrific fires in the American cities of Chicago and San Francisco that wiped out many of their original buildings, this disaster in Tokyo led the Japanese people to rebuild their city with modern ideas and materials, in concrete and steel instead of wood. Other major cities in the country soon followed – while traditional buildings are still everywhere as a part of its history and charm, the look of the modern Japanese skyline is forever linked to the memory of that blaze.

And one of the most terrible contemporary disasters in Japan also carries that element of fire. In March of 2011, an earthquake, and the tsunami it produced, led directly to the meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant. 

The plant’s failsafe systems shut down the three active reactors, which is just what they were designed to do. But the loss of power shorted out the plant’s cooling system; and without it, nuclear residue couldn’t be flushed out of those reactors. The fuel rods inside began to liquify, dripping into the containing vessels and melting giant holes. The nuclear material leaked out through these holes, and the hydrogen in the outer containment buildings heated up until the pressure was unsustainable, causing explosions.

Plant workers rushed into the disaster in an attempt to stabilize the reactors; knowing full well that they were exposing themselves to a fatal dose of radiation. How they managed to do such complex technical work in the face of this kind of terror fills me with awe. This was a meltdown on the scale of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster; but for the Japanese, it also brought up memories of the years of sickness and death that followed in the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The local government evacuated the area immediately around Fukushima, then created a quarantine zone of thirty kilometers, requiring all residents to stay inside. Eventually, over 150,000 Japanese citizens had to be evacuated. The meltdown continued for months, with fires and radiation leaks always on the brink of breaking out. Over ten years after the disaster, many residents still have not been able to move back to their homes.

The managers of the plant are the Tokyo Electric and Power Company also known as TEPCO; and they have been sued for the suicides related to the disaster. In one striking case, a woman named Hamako Watanabe, a resident of a town near the plant, was forced to move from her home, she and her husband lost their jobs, and the twin prospects of unemployment and homeless crippled her mental health. She doused herself in kerosene and lit herself on fire. The court case was the first to hold TEPCO directly responsible for damages to an individual. 

The tragedy of death by suicide ties deeply into Japanese culture and tradition. It was a part of the samurai code, to be willing to lay down one’s life for one’s Lord. It was even considered that ritual suicide was the way to recover your honor after a shameful failure. The so-called Kamikaze pilots of World War II knowingly threw away their lives to inflict damage on American targets.

To this day, the country has the seventh highest suicide rate in the world. 70% of the victims of suicide are men; it’s the leading cause of death for Japanese men aged 20-44. News reports regularly feature accounts of people throwing themselves in front of trains to end their lives. 

There is a strong belief in Japan that all things are transitory, that this life is just a brief chapter in the story of our immortal spirit. And, for all the emphasis on dutifulness and excellence and service, the downside is that any failure or disappointment feels catastrophic, unforgivable. There’s no rational analysis in which Hamako Watanabe’s losses were her own fault. That wasn’t enough to save her

***

PART TWO

To find our way into the story of Yaoya Oshichi, we have to talk about the Tokugawa Shogunate. We went into some detail about this transformative period in Japanese history in our Season 1 finale, about the so-called tomb of Jesus in northern Japan. After over 80 years of war between Japan’s many rival states, the nation was finally unified under the rule of the Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. It was effectively a military dictatorship, with the samurai acting as the honored knights enforcing their master’s rule. It saw Japan isolating itself from the world, purging the country of missionaries and diplomats. They created an offshore port so that any foreigners they did business with would never set foot on Japanese soil.

There were a lot of similarities to the feudal system in Europe – a network of lords owned and ruled the land, with subordinate lords holding local titles. In order to live on the land, tenants performed all the labor of farming and harvesting, providing goods and food and paying taxes and tributes to the owners. As the enforcers, the samurai pledged their loyalties until their deaths – a samurai without a master was considered an outcast, cut loose from purpose and prosperity; they were known as ronin.

In one sense, it was a time of prosperity and peace, with no threats from the outside, and the few significant rebellions quashed quickly and ruthlessly. The nobles in the good graces of the Shogun and his successors became very wealthy indeed. But seen from another angle, Japan under the two centuries of the Shogunate was an unyielding police state, with severe punishments meted out to those who broke the law. Samurai had the legal right to kill any Japanese citizen – this privilege was known as kirisute, and a samurai faced no consequences for any death they deemed necessary. You could die for a crime as small as not making way and prostrating yourself on the ground when the daimyo, the local Lord, paraded through town.

And in a country where most homes were made of wood and paper, and fire represented the greatest nightmare in their shared cultural memory, the penalty for arson was death. This was the crime that our subject today, Yaoya Oshichi, died for.

***

Under Tokugawa, the city of Edo became the effective capital of Japan. Nowadays, we know it as Tokyo. And this is where Yaoya Oshichi was born, in the neighborhood of Hongo in the year 1666. Remember that year for later. Her father was a greengrocer In Hongo, well respected within the community.

The closest we have to verifiable history is this: There was a massive fire in her family’s temple, Shosen-in, and a temple page named Ikuta Shonosuke came to fight the fire – this was their first meeting, and they fell in love. And whatever happened next, it was hard enough for the infatuated teenager to meet again with her love that she lit a second fire on purpose; believing it would bring him back to her.

At the time, Japan would not execute anyone under the age of 16. Oshichi was 16, but there are indications that the local magistrate gave her repeated opportunities to say instead that she was 15, and therefore be spared the death penalty. But Oshichi refused to lie, and so the magistrate fulfilled the duties of his office, and sentenced her to die. The method would be both ironic, and horrifying – she was burned at the stake.

Again, the parallels to medieval Europe are startling. During the reign of Mary I, nicknamed “Bloody Mary”, burning at the stake was the primary method Protestants in Europe used to execute suspected witches. Japan under Tokugawa had plenty of experience with the technique; they had already burned more than 700 suspected Christians. We know now that nearly all victims of this cruelty die of smoke inhalation before they burn; but in the end, their life is just as gone. 

***

A 17th Century writer named Ihara Saikaku recounted the story of Yaoya Oshichi in a work titled Five Women Who Loved Love; and this is the beginning of a process by which these brief, sad facts of a tragedy brought about by teenage infatuation became an influential folk story in Japanese culture. One reason may be a powerful detail Saikaku included that, true or not, only added to the symbolic power of the tale. Oshichi, the author claims, held a cherry blossom in her hand as she died.

In Japan, there is no more potent and universal a symbol of the fragility of life as the sakura, the cherry blossom. The delicate and tiny blossoms only last for a brief season each year; and the entire country of Japan throws a festival centered around it. During Cherry Blossom seasons, thousands of employees in Tokyo and other major cities will devote their lunch breaks to looking at the precious flowers. Every popular business chain gets in on the celebration with seasonal bento boxes, cherry blossom mochi donuts, even cherry blossom sake. As you can imagine, it’s a floral, slightly sweet flavor, subtler than the aggressive cherry syrups Americans get on their desserts. My personal favorite are the sweets made by the venerable candy-making institution, Minamoto Kitchoan. They look like little clouds, made from red and white adzuki beans, colored pink on the outside and crowned with a dried sakura.

In Tokugawa’s time, the samurai embraced the cherry blossom as a symbol of their own lives, which could be cut short on any given day. But by adding it to the tableau of Yaoya Oshichi’s execution, it gives the 16-year old girl, facing death for the reckless deeds she did for love, a larger-than-life stoicism. It implies that she’s facing this tragic fate with acceptance; even a sense of honor. None of us could really know what she was feeling as the flames caught below her; but this is the power of storytelling – one little extra detail about the beautiful fragility of life, and we have an enduring legend about love.

Let’s look at this version of the story in a little more detail, since it lays a lot of groundwork for interpretations and re-imaginings that followed.

Ihara Saikaku titled their version “The Greengrocer’s Daughter With a Bundle of Love.” It opens with preparations for the New Year in the neighborhood of Hongo –merchants peddle firewood, sandals, socks, seafood, toys, arrows, and roasted nuts, while children play in the street around them.

Suddenly a great fire breaks out, and quickly engulfs the entire block. People grab whatever belongings they can and scramble for safety. Yaoya Oshichi is with her mother, and together they and many others flee to the family’s temple. This is how Saikaku describes the young woman: "as beautiful as the blossoms of Ueno, as delicately radiant as the moon shining on Sumida-Gawa" and "the woman of almost every man's desire."  

In the temple, there is chaos, bodies packed in so tightly that people must step over one another, or even sleep on top of each other. Even worse, after the fire, a terrible storm strikes the temple; and those who have been driven out of their homes must temporarily depend on aid from the temple monks for survival. A refugee gives Oshichi a gift – a fine black silk kimono with a red lining. The young woman ponders this gift, how useless it is in the midst of the current crisis, and what this means about the fleeting nature of life. She says:  "Life is a dream in which nothing has value, and only the awakening, the life hereafter, is real." This is one of those moments where a myth or folk tale makes a connection with its audience, by reflecting the values of their own culture. In this version of the story, Oshichi is already espousing the core beliefs of Japanese Buddhism, already seeing life the way her nation sees the cherry blossom.

In the midst of a prayer, Oshichi discovers a young man, struggling to remove a splinter from his hand. It would not be considered modest of a young woman to volunteer to help, but Oshichi’s mother asks her to do it, which makes it all more proper. The author gives the young man the name Kichisaburo – a change from his real name of Shonosuke. He also gets a change of job; instead of a temple page as he was in real life, he’s an apprentice samurai; someone for whom honor would be foremost in his mind. Nevertheless, Kichisaburo and Yaoya Oshichi fall passionately in love at that first meeting.

As the crisis passes, they are separated, but they begin to secretly exchange letters, brimming with the sentiments of young love. With each exchange, their desperation to see one another again grows stronger.

After the New Year, there is another storm. The author describes the women in this world as easily panicked, and as the storm intensifies, Oshichi’s mother tells her to hide under her blankets and cover her ears from the thunder. But Oshichi, fueled by her determination to see her love once again, proclaims, “I was ready to die in the fire. I am not going to fear for my life now.” Again, the author creates both foreshadowing, and a sense of destiny.

The temple cook reveals to Oshichi where her love sleeps. He shares a room with another novice samurai; but when she unties her hair and sash, the roommate is powerless to stop her from entering. Still, he wants to yell out what she is doing, until she offers him any bribe he wishes to keep quiet. He asks for cash, playing cards, and candy. Oshichi promises to deliver them; and with that, the path is clear for her to be with Kichisaburo.

He’s sleeping, but she lays beside him and he stirs awake to see her. They each confess that they are not yet even 16 years old, but they make love nonetheless. They can only hope that the sounds don’t reach through the thin walls to the boy’s superiors.

At dawn, a bell rings, and the lovers must part. It reminds me of the morning after Romeo and Juliet marry in Shakespeare’s play, where they joke about whether or not the sun has really come out, because they want to prolong this moment together.

Oshichi’s mother, though, had noticed that her daughter was missing in the night, and became determined to keep her away from the boy. Meanwhile, Kichisaburo’s roommate continues to threaten to expose the couple of Oshichi is not able to come up with the bribe he demanded. Again, the lovers are forced to communicate only in letters, delivered by a temple maid.

One day, a country peddler comes to Oshichi’s home, bearing baskets full of truffles and horsetails. Oshichi buys them from him, to give to her mother. Then the peddler laments that he does not want to make the long walk home in the snow, so Oshichi’s father permits him to spend the night in the courtyard. But soon, the damp ground and freezing wind make the peddler ill; Oshichi sees his suffering and asks her maid to bring the young man hot water. Then, her mother shuts her away in her room for the night.

But the family is distracted by Oshichi’s cousin giving birth to a baby. When Oshichi goes to the peddler and feels his garments, she realizes that he’s wearing the same silk undergarments she felt on her lover – the peddler is really Kichisaburo in disguise. She smuggles her young lover into a spare room, giving him medicine and warming him up. It’s too risky for them to even make a sound, so they communicate in written notes, as they did when they were apart. And then they make love again.

After this second encounter, it gets more difficult for both of them to slip away and see one another. Oshichi is desperate to see her lover again. She recalls how it was a disaster which brought them together. And this is when she decides to light a fire, for the chance it might bring Kichisaburo back to her again.

She is quickly caught, and confesses willingly to the crime of arson. She is sentenced to die, and as she crosses a bridge to the place of execution, witnesses feel pity for her, while knowing that she must be punished for the wrong she did.

Saikaku, the author, adds that the young woman displays no sense of guilt, and that, even when facing death, she is lovely to behold. A supporter hands her a cherry blossom. As her final moments approach, she declares “It is all a dream, an illusion.” She prays to Amida Buddha to save her soul, and looks upon the lovely, fragile cherry blossom in her arm. And the condemned girl sings:  "How sad a world it is, when I must fall today like the last blossoms of the cherry and leave my ill fame to blow about in the winds of spring." And then, in real life, she is burned at the stake. The execution happens at dawn, and Saikaku describes Oshichi joining, quote “wisps of smoke that hovered in the morning air.” I never imaged death by fire described so poetically.

After Oshichi's death, travelers passing through Hongo hear her story, and leave offerings at her grave. Others plant anise, the plant whose sweet seeds add a licorice-like flavor to candies and liquors all over the world. Kichisaburo somehow isn’t aware of her arrest and execution – when he finally hears, he becomes obsessed with taking his own life; and it seems to be what everyone expects he will do. But there’s a final twist – on the advice of his benefactor and the monks of the Temple, he leaves behind his samurai studies and becomes a Buddhist monk himself. He proclaims that Oshichi made him a slave to her desires, and that by pursuing the path of transcendence, in the next world, their love will not die. Interestingly, Oshichi’s parents claim that this is the path their daughter would have wanted him to follow.

In conclusion, the author writes, “Death, the smoke of life, lies waiting at the end of every road. Nothing is so certain, nothing so sad.” I can’t help but draw a connection between that imagery of smoke, and the Buddhist idea of life being an illusion, ephemeral and temporary. 

***

PART THREE

I’m certainly going to remember the story as Saikaku tells it – it’s a wonderful folk tale, marrying passion and symbolism, tragedy and thematic resonance. But it’s crucial to remember that a lot of the details aren’t verified by history; and many of them, particularly relating to Oschichi’s state of mind, would have been simply impossible for the author to know. In the hands of this author, she becomes a kind of martyr for love, bravely sacrificing her body on a journey to a place where her romantic wishes can finally be fulfilled. Did a real 16-year-old girl facing real flames have such transcendent thoughts? Probably not. And this is where the door opens to this true incident planting a seed which would blossom in the imaginations of many more storytellers in the years to come.

Twenty years after Oshichi’s death, a playwright named Ki No Kaion wrote a bunraku play, a beautiful, highly stylized form of puppetry, based on the girl’s life, romance, and death by fire. Decades later, this play inspired a trio of fellow playwrights – Suga Sensuke, Matsusa Wkichi, and Wakatake Fuemi, - to write a kabuki play called “Date Musume Koi No Higanoko”. That translates to “The Valiant Maiden and the Fire-red Fabric of Love.”

One huge difference up front – in these versions of the story, Yaoya Oshichi doesn’t light a fire – instead, she breaks a curfew, climbs a fire tower on a snowy night, and rings the fire warning bell in order to save her lover. She is sentenced to death for the false alarm, not for arson.

In this version, she hesitates repeatedly before climbing the fire tower. She even considers taking her own life with a sword rather than go through with the dishonorable deed she is pondering. But she does climb and, as in another version of the story, she faces her execution honestly and fearlessly.

This interests me because it changes the nature of Oshichi as a character. She’s not reckless and impulsive, endangering others because of a foolish idea that fire will bring her lover to her. She’s willingly breaking the law to save his life. 

As far as we know from history, she really did start a fire, but you can see already that different writers in Japanese culture want to explore the intersection this story sits at between love, the law, the nature of life, and the role of women. 

As you can imagine, in the rigid and militant culture of the Tokugawa Shogunate, women were expected to be virtuous, graceful, and, above all else, obedient. The ideal Japanese woman was referred to as the “yamato nadeskiho” – a delicate, pink wildflower. A yamato nadeshiko embodies what they considered the feminine virtues – patience and charity. In the version of Yaoya Oshichi’s story written by Saikaku, a key moment is when she brings hot water to the freezing peddler who is secretly Kichisaburo in disguise.

And yet, at their first encounter, when he has a splinter in his hand, she does not move to touch him without first getting her mother’s permission. So, at least at first, she has charity but also modesty. Seen through this lens, maybe the story is a cautionary tale like Red Riding Hood – warning young women of the dangers ahead if they are not properly modest and obedient. Loving Kichisaburo is not what leads to her death; it is the immodesty with which she pursues him that sets the fatal chain of events into motion. Not to mention her disobedience to her parents – another no-no for anyone aspiring to the ideal of the pink wildflower.

We’ve talked about the combination of Shinto and Buddhism inseparable from Japanese history and culture. But another strong influence during the era of the Shogunate was Confucianism. This is an ideology evolved from the teachings of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius. It’s much more humanistic than the leading Japanese systems, concerning itself with social order, ethical ways of governing, and the structure of the family and the community. At first, this would seem incompatible with Japanese concerns, but it seems to have filled a missing gap in the otherworldly beliefs of their dominant religion. After all, while people were pursuing their ascent to immortality among the spirits, they also needed guidelines for getting along with each other in more everyday circumstances.

The Shogunate used many Confucian concepts as the basis for law, and enforced such laws, let’s say, fiercely for some, and not so fiercely for others. Women were expected to be chaste before marriage and unfailingly loyal after. For them, the price of adultery was death. But no man needed to fear the law for keeping a mistress or patronizing a local brothel. Again we see parallels with Europe – as two of King Henry VIII’s wives, Anne Bolyen and Catherine Howard, were condemned to death for adultery; a crime which was practically his full-time occupation.

We often zoom too far out, and hope to see the progress of women and minorities in a society as a steady march upwards. But history is far more complex, and this is especially true in Japan. During the 2nd through 8th centuries, a number of Japan’s supreme rulers were women, and women had the right to own and inherit property up through 1338. For most of this era, women were expected to be educated, with a particular emphasis on the literary arts – in fact, what’s considered one of history’s first novels, The Tale of Genji, was written in the early 11th century by noblewoman Murasaki Shibiku.

But the Tokugawa Shogunate represented a severe backlash towards this kind of equality. The rights of women were reduced, the law was used as an instrument to restrict their behavior and freedom, and they were expected to receive only the most basic education. Their primary job was to get married, and produce a male offspring for her husband. He had the right to divorce her if this didn’t happen. He also had the right to divorce her simply by claiming that he considered her lazy, or that she talked too much. Women had no such right to leave a marriage.

As the daughter of a merchant, Yaoya Oshichi would have had a good dowry in place to support herself and her future husband. Her life at that time presented her essentially three options – marry and be a dutiful spouse, become a Buddhist nun devoted to a life of chastity and self-denial, or turn to prostitution. Her life story, however brief, shows a passionate, violent rebellion against a society which gave her so little freedom. In mythical storytelling, there’s a common phrase, the tragic flaw – the element in someone’s nature that predicts their doom even if they are a perfect hero of their culture’s values in every other respect. A sense of romance, even adolescent romance, proves to be Oshichi’s tragic flaw.

To this day, her legend is still a large part of Japanese culture. In 2014, the NHK network created a television mini-series based on her life. It was called Asaki yumemishi - yaoya oshichi ibun; and in this version of the story, Oshichi is sent to the Daijo-Iji Temple after the fire to await the rebuilding of her home and family store. This is where she meets her love; who in this version is named Kichisa. He’s no longer an apprentice samurai, though; he’s back to being a temple page as the real-life Shonosuke was. In this miniseries, there is a rival for Oshichi’s love, a man named Tedai who works for her father. Her father wants her to marry Tedai, but this only deepens her rebellion, and her passion for Kichisa. Once again, the parallels abound with Romeo & Juliet – Juliet’s parents also had a husband picked out for their teenage daughter.

Oshichi even appears as an enemy character in a video game, part of the Megami Tensei. But in the game, she isn’t a tragic lover or an exemplar of Japanese beauty and virtue, she is a demon in the shape of a harpy with flaming wings, and she has the power to drive her enemies into a frenzy. It’s a more bombastic version of the lament Kichisaburo makes in that first novel – that it was her willfulness and seduction which compelled him to betray his honor.

As we’ve seen in so many cases in this podcast, the story being told often reveals more about the storyteller than the history they draw from.

***

PART FOUR

Even as Japan entered the modern era, there were significant backslides – especially in World War II. Any progress towards full rights for women, including the right to vote, came to a halt. Women were once again expected to be obedient to and in service of the men who were fighting and dying for their Emperor. Interestingly, women on the homefront were often assigned the role of fire marshals. And, despite the old image of the delicate wildflower, Japanese women in World War II got their hands as dirty as Rosie the Riveter did in America. They dug trenches, led search-and-rescue missions for bombing victims, they worked shifts of up to 20 hours a day in aircraft factories; all while being expected to keep their families together and raise their children. And, after the war, with so many young men of their generation dead, it was on Japan’s women that the burden of rebuilding their nation fell.

A great deal of progress has been made since then. Women in Japan have achieved, on paper at least, the rights and equality they deserve in a modern civilization. But as modern Japan struggles with decreasing marriage and falling fertility rates, of higher costs of living and children forced to live longer with their families, there is still immense cultural pressure on women to be the wives and childbearers. It’s a common belief that women over 25 are too old for marriage; the slang term for them is “expired Christmas cake”. And we have certainly seen versions of this belief in America’s past.

The history of Japan is one of mingling influences – of a country creating its own versions of Chinese religions and philosophies which complemented their existing beliefs. And it’s in those open and inquisitive times that the nation seemed to make its greatest cultural progress. 

Yet through all these phases of history, core elements endure. The awesome and terrifying power of fire. The code of honor which is held more valuable than our own mortal lives. And the captivating but fleeing beauty of the cherry blossom.

There’s another constant in Japanese society which we haven’t discussed, but which ties in to the power of Oshichi’s story. The Japanese calendar is partially inspired by the Chinese Zodiac, and consists of five elements and twelve animals, creating a cycle of sixty years. Yaoya Oshichi, it’s believed, was born in the year 1666 – and on the Japanese calendar, this is known as Hinue Uma: the Year of the Fire Horse. To this day, fewer children are born in Fire Horse Years than in the Years before or after; it’s considered an omen of a life of violence and misfortune to be born then, especially if you’re a woman.

In the early 20th century, a young woman named Sada Abe failed at becoming a geisha, the uniquely Japanese combination of artistic performer and ceremonial host. Turning to prostitution, she contracted syphilis. She became the mistress of a married restaurant owner named Kichizo Ishida, and there are outlandish stories of their sake-fueled sexual marathons. But when Ishida returned to his wife, Sada Abe became enraged and jealous. Inspired by a geisha play in which a scorned woman threatens her lover with a knife, she sold some of her clothing to buy a knife of her own. But rather than reacting with fear, Ishida found her jealousy to be highly arousing, and the two drank heavily and went to bed. This is where Sada Abe subjected him to erotic asphyxiation, cut off his genitals, and hid them in a magazine cover to take with her. She fled to an inn in Shinagawa, with a plan to leap to her death off of Mount Ikoma, still holding the severed organs of her lover. But she was arrested before she could complete her plan. She was convicted of second-degree murder and mutilation of a corpse, and served five years in prison. And as her story became a nationwide sensation, inspiring lurid film adaptations, the story went that this was to be expected, as she was born in the year of the Fire Horse.

That detail isn’t true, by the way. The Year of the Fire Horse was 1906, and Sada Abe was proven to be born in 1905. But that the connotation of that year, the connection with the legend of Yaoya Oshichi, could be so readily applied to this sensational crime, shows that it still resonates powerfully when applied to stories of forbidden love, and a woman’s role in Japanese culture. There’s even a modern organization, the Hinoe Uma Association, founded by a group of six women who were all born in Japan in 1966, the most recent Year of the Fire Horse. The superstition is still so prevalent that this organization dedicates itself to dispelling the legend. In a way, it’s another fight for freedom – freedom not just from their gender, but freedom from the time when they were born. 

If she had been born in a time of true freedom, who knows what kind of life Yaoya Oshichi might have lived? Maybe it would have been a very long, and very ordinary one. One we wouldn’t still be talking about today. But instead, she was born on a dark path that started long before her and still runs through her nation today. I think that many folk tales and myths are set a long time ago for a reason, because the setting creates and instant comparison with ours – either it was a more enlightened, fantastical time, or it was like the Tokugawa Shogunate, violent and repressive. It’s the violence of her rebellion that stands out, plus its ultimate cost. And maybe, in the fictional version of her that sees beyond her death, that faces the flames with total courage and a sakura tucked in her arm, we find some solace and inspiration as we continue looking for those same things in our lives – freedom, transcendence, and love. Ultimately what we remember is not the fire she started or the fire which killed her, but the fire she carried inside.

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with Ashley Whitesides and Evadne Hendrix; and our creative director is Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Anna Sahlstrom; it’s her first with our team so thank you, Anna, and welcome aboard. Our Senior Story Editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you. 

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.

-END-