Creepy Kids Songs Part 3: Satchan

Our songs up until now have been fairly innocuous ditties dragged into dark places by BBS denizens with the free time to match their sadistic imaginations. The final installment is something more raw—this true tale of sadness is a knife to the heart twisted by internet muck raking. 

That Satchan / Is really named Sachiko

But she calls herself Satchan / 'cuz she's so small

I feel silly with / Satchan

That Satchan / She really loves bananas

But she can only eat half / 'cuz she's so small

I feel sorry for / Satchan

That Satchan / Is she really going far away?

But she'll forget about me / 'cuz she's so small

I feel sad without / Satchan

Memorial to Satchan at Minami Osaka Kindergarten.

Satchan was penned in 1959 by Osaka-born Sakata Hiroo(阪田寛夫),  author of children's books known for his Japanese translations of The Adventures of Tintin. Years later in an interview with literary magazine Shunkan Bunshun, he admitted that TV personality and estranged boyhood friend Agawa Sawako (阿川佐和子) was the inspiration for the lyrics. He soon backpedaled, stating that Satchan was actually a transfer student from his preschool that had health problems.

This is where Satchan gains a life, or rather an un-life, of her own.

The lyrics reveal that Satchan was a sickly child. Everything starts fine with the first stanza. By the second, she's too feeble to handle an entire banana. And at the end of the song, she goes far away—recall from Toryanse that “to go” is a homonym for “to pass away.” I feel sorry for Satchan. I feel sad without Satchan. These genuine feelings of emptiness are the foundation of Japanese ghost stories and transmit clearly to their recipient beyond the grave.

Satchan is no longer an inhabitant of this world, if she even was to begin with. Kid's names are normally written using the round, friendly hiragana system, but the “Sa” in Satchan is inexplicably rendered with sharp, aggressive hiragana characters, suggesting the cramped scribblings or claw marks of some foreign entity imitating human script. 

From Teke-Teke, starring AKB48's Oshima Yuko. The horror!

All signs point to Satchan being an incarnation of the yokai Teke-Teke. Satchan is so small and can only eat half a banana because she herself is only half a body. As the Teke-Teke story goes, a young girl has her legs run over by a train, either from slipping off the platform or in a botched suicide attempt. She survives the dismemberment only to suffer a slow, agonizing death. The lower body is never recovered.

Hence the vengeful spirit of the Teke-Teke haunts suburbia at night in search of her lost legs, a torso scuttling on its arms at speeds of up to 150kph. Those unfortunate enough to be caught meet the same fate as her—she slices the victim in half at the waist with a wicked scythe.

Satchan's transformation from benevolent childhood playmate to relentless wraith seems to be a recent one. Her backstory shares too much in common with other urban yokai to be an organic creation—bullet train speeds of the human-faced dog Jinmenken, leg-stealing ala the Red Shoes ghost story, bladed weaponry borrowed from the purse of a split mouth Kuchisake Onna.

There's even a rumored fourth verse inviting Satchan to come out and play, a chain letter element obviously cribbed from the blockbuster hit The Ring. It goes something like this:

That Satchan/ A train took her legs

But she's coming back / 'cuz she wants yours

I'll see you tonight / Satchan

I should have mentioned this earlier. Satchan will pay a midnight visit to whoever lays eyes on these cursed lyrics—unless they can find the hidden fifth and final verse within three days to put her spirit to rest. The clock is ticking, dear reader.

From Hell Teacher Nube, a favorite of our buddy Velocitron.

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?

The World Kaikan in Nakano

Conventional reasoning dictates that a building cannot qualify as abandoned if it still has inhabitants. After gazing up at the towering mess that is the World Kaikan, however, I’m no longer sure that such logic applies.



For over half a century, the World Kaikan has loomed over the back streets of Nakano, a five story edifice of decayed mystery whose very secrets have been eaten by the worms of time. Abandoned neon signs litter the grounds like the toppled gravestones of businesses that failed long ago. The front entrance is flanked by mounds of ripe garbage to the left and the fossilized remains of abandoned bikes to the right. Mutant cats dart through the rusted underbrush as if spying for their necromantic masters who stir within the crypt.


Hino Hideshi's pet cat.

Even vagrants know better than to stay out of its unsettling underground. The stairs are left unguarded for those with enough gall to brave the musty basement. Down here, door frames grow organically from the wall like fungus, derelict bars remain suspiciously intact, and a phantasmal old woman purportedly stalks the bathroom. The lights illuminate the sickly checkerboard pattern on the floor, which terminates at the mouth of a hallway swallowed by the darkness.



FUN FACTS ABOUT THE WORLD KAIKAN

1) Urban legend has it that the building was a hotel in its past life, a theory given credence by the piles of rotting furniture that line the stairs. Rusted box springs poke their heads through the debris like the first flower after a nuclear winter.


This ancient unicycle is one of the building's more benign mysteries.

2) The remaining pubs and watering holes evolved to survive the harsh conditions surrounding the building. Darwin would be delighted by Vow, a bar run by an ordained monk (Jodo Shinshu, if you're keeping track,) where you can imbibe in a sutra-specific cocktail while ingesting the words of the Buddha.



There is also Dio, the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure themed bar. If you need an explanation as to what Dio is doing at The World Kaikan, then navigating the Stance-themed menu would be muda muda!

3) Kuroki Kaoru, 80's porn starlet famous for her au naturel underarms and no-nonsense public persona, attempted suicide in 1994 after ditching director and collaborator Toru Muranishi when the bum refused to pay out her fair share of the profits. She survived the plunge from a building that is only described as "a hotel in Nakano."


Considering that a person could survive a five-story fall, and coupled with eyewitness reports of a burnt-out Kuroki wandering the halls of Broadway like a reject from The Ring, it stands to reason that The World Kaikan could have been the very building that she threw herself from.

4) The previous building owner ran away overnight with his family back to Taiwan, their room on the top floor untouched since. Rumors would have you believe that the yakuza got to him first, and that his rotting skeleton now inhabits the broken elevator. The only legitimate residents these days are Korean exchange students living in a makeshift dorm converted from the hotel rooms on the top floor.



Shinjuku has Golden Street, its shanty town of old-timey bars thick with the ambiance of the good ‘ol days of post-war poverty and the national zeitgeist fueling Japan’s rise to the top. The Nakano equivalent could be called Bronze Street—Tarnished, third-rate, yet beautifully compelling in its decay. The World Kaikan stands as the frayed banner that other ramshackle buildings rally under. Around it you can find storefronts whose broken windows are mended by crumbling movie fliers and whose doorsteps echo with the footfalls of more vibrant times.



The old hands who remain have seen Nakano's rise as the country's busiest shopping center to it's fall at the hands of subsequent stylish, youth-oriented districts. Yet the World Kaikan still maintains watchful vigilance as a reminder of a time when consumerism meshed seamlessly with the community. Broadway itself is a living museum, and it's curators call these rusted streets home, with all roads running to the World Kaikan.

Ugly Legend

(DISCLAIMER: The following is the English approximation of an article which was originally published in the November 10th issue of Spa! Direct your disgust towards them. The only thing we're guilty of is not bringing it to you sooner!)

Weekly men’s entertainment magazine Spa! enlists the help of science to put an end to the age-old question: Why do so many white guys date fugly Japanese girls? Beginning with Yoko Ono, Westerners have continued to show a preference for women outside of the spectrum of beauty accepted by Japanese society as a whole. You know the type—Long, straight black hair, squinty eyes, flat face. Or maybe, as recent research suggests, you don’t know, hence the problem.

Ever wake up next to this?

Obviously there must be something wrong with the Gaijin brain that keeps them from being able to tell the difference between girls that look like living woodblock prints and CanCan models, so scientists ran two white dudes infamous for their questionable taste in women through an MRI-scan to check for loose wiring. The results? Our friendly foreigners showed lower brain activity than 70 year-old women!

"Journey inside the brains of the white men who love gross girls!"

Let's meet tonight's guinea pigs. Zidi from France is new to Japan and infamous in his circle of friends for picking up slags in Roppongi. We also have Phillip from England, who during his seven years in the country has grown out of the "so long as it's breathing" phase that seems to affect many foreigners. The MRIs will be conducted by PhD Hideo Nakajima.

The lack of activity in the occipital lobe, which controls visual processing and thus face recognition, would suggest that the two men’s brains lack the processing power to differentiate between butter faces and beautiful babies.

"His big honkey nose almost gets caught on the machine!"

Stepping off the plane for the first time, all Japanese look the same. The traditional image of Orientals with black hair and narrow eyes has been planted deep into the Western psyche by movies and other media. Men come to Japan with a permanent set of beer goggles, and the problem is intensified by this inexplicable sense of familiarity.

“Hey, I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before…”

The part of the lobe that handles facial recognition is extremely active while we are young children but slows down as we age. Therefore we can conclude that Zidi, who dates ugly girls, has low brain activity because this region has yet to kick in, while Philip, who has since refined his taste in women, has low brain activity because it has been trained over the years and can now differentiate faces even from a state of rest.

Dr. Nakajima explains. “Monkeys all look the same at first, but after careful observation you can begin to see the small differences between them.” The aesthetic eye can be trained. There’s still hope! Your days of being ridiculed as “Beast Master” may soon be at an end.

He concludes, “It takes courage to walk outside with a skank on your arm. I’d like to do further research to see if the men’s brains are releasing serotonin—they’d have to be doped up to stay with these butter faces. But then again, if the find these girls pleasant enough company to release serotonin, then their brains must truly be broken.”

The Hairy Butt Burger Incident (ケツ毛バーガー事件）

Submitted for the approval of the October 2009 Japan Blog Matsuri, I call this story...

Those of you living in Japan or studying Japanese are likely familiar with the social networking site, Mixi. Mixi is similar to Myspace with a few important differences. New users need an invite from a preexisting member to enter the network. There is a “footprints” system that tracks other users who have visited your profile. Also, while the search system allows you to find people by name and location, most people are registered under a pseudonym, making it nearly impossible to zero in on a particular person. Compare this to Myspace’s service which accurately locate people within minutes using only their zip code and last name!

My Japanese friends are amazed at how much information us Westerners voluntarily put up in plain view for anyone with a Yahoo account to peruse. Even with the safeguards afforded by Mixi’s closed network, Japanese people tend to be hesitant about putting traceable personal information online. While this could be chalked up to cultural differences, urban legends such as the Hairy Butt Burger Incident play an important part as well.

Image courtesy of the fiends at Uncyclopedia

Flashback to October 2006. Mixi had finally his its stride after launching in April 2004 and was attracting around one million new users per quarter. Users still felt secure in their digital backyards, some even registering under their real names. For a certain unwitting young couple, this powder keg of complacency was primed to explode and take everything precious to them with it.

The boyfriend received a computer virus over the file sharing program Winny, which then leaked compromising pictures he had taken of his girlfriend to other users. The pictures immediately found their way onto 2channel, the world's largest anonymous BBS and home to a rogue's gallery of ruthless Internet trolls. The denizens of 2channel took time out of their busy schedule of organizing phone bombing and slander campaigns to find the boyfriend's Mixi, registered under his real name, using information leaked from his Winny account. From there all it took was a click to find his girlfriend’s profile, also registered under her real name.

There they found details about her job as a juvenile parole officer. The trolls smelled blood. In their Internet feeding frenzy they stripped the couple of every last shred of decency, resulting in a veritable dung heap of posts that encouraged users to torment the couple's friends on Mixi by posting the illicit pictures in question along with defamatory messages, not to mention the obligatory threatening phone calls to their places of employment. Sleazy weekly tabloids jumped on the story, and there were even unconfirmed rumors that the girlfriend committed suicide after losing her job over the incident.


Mixi was quick to respond with a mighty swing of their ban hammer, excommunicating not only the users directly involved, but everyone on their friends list as well. Hundreds of accounts vanished overnight. After the dust settled, both users and the media alike called the responsibility of social networking site moderators into question. Mixi denied all involvement, and while stock prices temporarily dropped, registration numbers continues to climb. The incident has since become an Internet meme of sorts, and has even spawned an independent comic!

The only loose end in this unfortunate tale is, well, where did the name Hairy Butt Burger come from? As such graphic imagery would violate the rules of the Japan Blog Matsuri I'm not at liberty to say, but curious readers can Google their way to the truth. But we warned. Once you sink your teeth into those juicy buns, there's no forgetting the flavor.