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)