Creepy Kids Songs Part 2: Kagome Kagome

Our second dreadful dirge warns of murderous in-laws, global conspiracies, and treasure best left buried. You're never too young to learn that someone is always watching you, so fit in or pay the price. 

Basket basket / Bird in a cage

When will it go free / At the eve of the dawn

The crane and turtle slipped

Who's that behind me?

Beware: Children at play! (Source)

Kagome Kagome is a cryptic nursery rhyme in the vein of Ring Around the Roses. Children join hands and slowly circle around the blindfolded “it” while chanting. When the singing stops, the “it” tries to guess who is standing behind them. If they’re correct, the two swap places and the game continues.

The song’s mysterious origin and vague lyrics have made it a topic of tireless speculation, with each analysis more macabre than the last. It all hinges on how you interpret the eponymous kagome.

Public execution like ikido dissuades others from falling out of line.

Typically kagome means "basket," though it can also be a perversion of kakome, “to surround.” This makes the bird in a cage a prisoner in jail. Written with different kanji characters, “at the eve of dawn” reads “the dawn patrol” (夜明けの番人) who have come to escort the accused to their execution—if the crane and turtle, symbols of longevity, take a fall, then death is certainly not far behind.

Or kagome may derived from kagomi (籠女) for "pregnant woman"—literally ”basket lady” for the extra abdominal baggage. In this gruesome interpretation, the unborn child (bird in a cage) becomes a ticking time bomb in an inheritance squabble. Rather than risk sharing the windfall with their family member to-be, the in-laws plot to push the wife down the stairs in a forced abortion. Be sure you can trust those at your back.

The Four Symbols from Chinese constellations. (Source)

The rabbit hole only gets deeper from here. Viewed through the lens of New Age spirituality, the bird becomes the soul confined to the trappings of flesh, yearning for escape. The eve of the dawn will usher in the next stage of human existence incited by a world-changing event prophesied by Chinese astrology—namely, Genbu, the Black Tortoise of the North and Suzaku, the Vermillion Bird of the South slipping, a metaphor for the inevitable shift of the earth's magnetic poles and ensuing chaos.

The kagome-mon pattern.

Don't be so fast to write this off as mere tinfoil-hat speculation—the Zionist threat is real! Though what it represents is up for debate. The hexagon cross-work pattern of kagome wicker basket coincides with the Star of David, conjuring up images of Illuminati plots or the Committee of Three Hundred's hidden hand corralling us into cages of the mind like the cattle we are.

A more likely conspiracy theory posits that the kagome acts as a treasure map to the buried gold of the Tokugawa clan. In 1868, the shogunate abdicated rule to the emperor, thus bringing a close to the bloodless Meiji Restoration. Though ousted from his castle and stripped of power, Tokugawa had the last laugh—the penniless new government was banking on funds from the war chest to rebuild the country, only to find that the riches of the vaults had been moved elsewhere!

Connecting the dots between Sado Kinzan Gold Mine, Edo Castle, and Toki Shrine, then Akechi Shrine, Senpu Castle, and Nikko Tosho-gu Shrine.

The search to uncover this lost fortune continues through the present, fruitless even with the help of modern science. Kagome Kagome may be the secret tech in cracking the mystery. Draw a line between the six areas closely connected to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, and the points form a hexagram—this narrows down the search.

Next, assume that the bird in a cage hints at the location of the treasure. Logically it would be in the center of the hexagram, though once again wordplay offers a different interpretation. Tori meaning "bird" is nearly a homonym for torii shrine gate. This makes the most likely location Nikko Tosho-gu Shrine where Ieyasu is entombed. The final puzzle pieces are the tortoise and crane statues in the shrine's southern park. At the eve of the dawn, their sunrise shadows will converge, revealing the precise location of the treasure.

Follow your nose to history-altering revelations. (Source)

With the answer so obvious, what's keeping work crews from excavating the site? If you are willing to believe in the truth in the rhyme, you must also accept its warning. On an etymological level, kagome is derived from kago no me—"the eyes of the cage." Someone is watching to make sure that the secrets of the shogunate remain deep in the ground. Someone standing right behind you.

Whose eyes are those eyes? (Source)

Creepy Kids Songs Part 1: Toryanse

Summertime in Japan belongs to the ghouls. Dead ancestors return to visit the living during the O-Bon festival, and spine chilling ghost stories are the best way to beat the heat. Cut the air conditioning and turn off your fan, because TSB has a trifecta of  eerie nursery rhymes guaranteed to keep your teeth chattering through the humid nights.  

Pass through, pass through

Where does this narrow path lead?

It leads to Tenjin shrine

Won't you please let me pass?

Those without business may not pass

I have come with my child

To present an offering celebrating their seven years

Though going be easy, the return be frightful

Frightful it may be
Pass through, pass through

Illustration by Morohoshi Daijiro.

Toryanse, or Pass Through, is played much like to London's Bridge. Two children sing as they join hands to form an arch that the others duck under. When the song stops, the arch comes down and anyone trapped inbetween switches places with one of the arches. 

The narrow path still stands. (Source)

At face value, the song is about a family convincing the gate keeper to let them inside Kawagoe castle north of Tokyo. The shrine refers to the Miyoshino shrine north of Tokyo, one of the fourteen thousand holy sites dedicated to the poet Sugawara no Michizane who was deified as Tenjin at the end of 10th century AD.  During the Edo period, peasants were only allowed into the castle for auspicious occasions, in this case the Shichi-Go-San festival celebrating a child’s third, fifth, and seventh birthdays, all joyous benchmarks in a time fraught with high infant mortality rates. 

This commotion also made it easy for spies and thieves to sneak in with the revelers. Sneaking out was another story. Visitors were waved through, only to face strict interrogation as they tried to leave. Though going be easy, the return be frightful, in more ways than one.

Send your daughters to the slaughter at the Shici-Go-San festival. (Source)

Some macabre wordplay turns this simple caution into a warning from beyond the grave. In Japanese, "to go" (行く) is homonym for “to pass away” (逝く). Similarly, kaeru for “to return home” (帰る) can be perverted into “return from the dead” (甦る). Dying’s the easy part, getting back is the problem. Take care when passing through. 

This urban legend has taken up residence at cross walks in major cities. Busy intersections play folk tunes during green lights to let pedestrians know that they have the right of way, the most infamous being Toryanse. Here's the creepy bit—after Though going be easy, the return be frightful, the high notes in the last stanza segue perfectly into wailing ambulance sirens. The subliminal message urges you to look both ways when passing through, least you fail to make it across.

Another interpretation brings the danger much closer to home. A forgotten tradition of Shichi-Go-San involves hanging a paper charm in the shrine to pray for the child's safety. As the old saying goes, “children are property of the Gods until they turn seven” (七つまでは神のうち), making the talisman a proxy sacrifice that hopes to sate the Gods in keeping them from abducting the village youth.

Even today, missing children are said to be the victims of kamikakushi (神隠し), literally to be “spirited away” by the Gods. Kamikakushi was also a euphemism for mabiki (間引き), the practice of weeding out weak sprouts to give strong ones room to grow—which is to say, planned infanticide to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Toryanse may describe parents agonizing over a life-or-death decision. Do they make their offering at the shrine one of paper, or one of their own flesh and blood?

In other cases, being spirited away is more literal than metaphor. And when those abducted make the difficult trip back from the other side, they don’t return alone. 

Folklore horror author Morohoshi Daijiro writes about a variation of Toryanse, Kaeryanse, or Return Home. In his manga "Tenjin-Sama", the song acts as a key between our world and a shadow zone populated by forgotten deities. When this gate at the Tenjin shrine is accidentally unlocked, a young girl dressed in traditional shichi-go-san ornamentation passes through it, together with the demon who first kidnapped her. With the portal left open, the Old Gods have free reign to claim their right—unattended children under seven. 

Yokai hunter Hieda Reijiro is there to save the day in typical anthropologist fashion. If Kaeryanse is a song of summoning, than Tooryanse must be a song of banishment. Hieda sends the monster into the void, though not for the first time. Recall that Tenjin shrines were originally dedicated to other Gods before Sugawara no Michizane usurped them a century ago. Our demon is one of the many beings pushed out of reality by the current Japanese pantheon. Who can speculate the intentions of these Great Old Ones, or the vengeance they will unleash when freed from their prisons to pass though, pass through?