Kokkuri-san came ashore at Shimoda, or so Inoue Enryō heard

In early May 1887 Inoue Enryō wrote that one strange affair had everyone talking, high and low, in the city and the country: kokkuri.⁵ Three people rested their hands on a lid balanced on bamboo sticks, called on Kokkuri-sama, and asked it questions, and the lid tipped to answer.⁶ The book that carries that preface, the first volume of his Yōkai gendan, gives a section to how kokkuri reached Japan.¹ Inoue was no casual reporter. He had helped found the Philosophy Society in 1884, and in September 1887 he opened a school, the Tetsugakukan.⁷

The paragraph says that an American sailing ship was damaged near Shimoda, in Izu, “around the year before the year before last, so I have heard”.² Counted from 1887 that is about 1884. When Inoue told the story again in lecture notes issued from December 1891, the ship had moved to about 1885.³⁸

Neither version names the ship or the American. Both give the story as something Inoue was told, and in the book of 1887 he builds a chain of reasoning on it.²³⁹

Playing kokkuri in 1886

The practice needed almost nothing. A reporter whom Inoue quotes describes three bamboo sticks tied at the middle into a tripod, the lid of a rice chest set on top, and three people seated round it with their hands lightly on the lid.⁶ One of them chants an invitation to Kokkuri-sama for about ten minutes; then the leader asks it, if it has come, to tilt toward a named person, and the lid tilts that way.⁶

By Inoue’s reading of the reports sent to him, the craze spread through Izu and the provinces round it from the autumn of 1885 to the spring of 1886.¹² During 1886 it spread west to Kyoto and Osaka and the San’yō, and east through the Bōsō and other eastern provinces; in 1887 it was entering Ōshū, and he had heard of none in Hokuriku.¹² He has it reaching Tokyo in the autumn of 1886 and in Ushigome and Koishikawa by the spring of 1887.¹³ Basil Hall Chamberlain’s handbook Things Japanese lists the fashionable crazes of Japan year by year, and for 1887 it gives “Mesmerism, table-turning, and planchette”.¹⁴ He does not use the word kokkuri, but Inoue says kokkuri and table-turning are one thing.⁹

Inoue’s first piece on kokkuri, according to Miura Setsuo’s catalogue of his writings on yōkai, is 「こッくり様ノ話」, printed in the Tetsugaku-kai zasshi on 5 February 1887.¹⁵ We have only the phrases Miura quotes from it.

Stories Inoue turned down

Inoue began by asking interested people in the provinces how kokkuri had spread, because he wanted to know where it began and who devised it.¹² He then lists four rumours about an older origin: that Oda Nobunaga first tried it, which old records are supposed to show; that it was done under the Tokugawa, on the word of old men; that it began in Satsuma; that it came from abroad.¹⁶ He calls all four street talk with nothing firm to rely on.¹⁶

It still seems to him beyond doubt that the method came from abroad. He sets aside two stories of how: that it arrived mixed up with the Christian religion centuries ago, and that Japanese who had been in America brought it home at the Restoration.¹⁷ His objection is the same for both. A method that had been in the country for years would not have stayed unknown among the people and then broken out in the last two years; and even if one or two people knew it before the Restoration, he says, the present craze undoubtedly has another source.¹⁷

The ship at Shimoda

His own first guess was Izu. From the way it had spread he supposed kokkuri began in the Tōkai provinces, and he thought it would have started in Izu.⁴ In the summer of 1886 he went there himself, looked into the craze, and learned for the first time, as he puts it, that his supposition was true.⁴

The Shimoda story comes next in the book. Over the damaged ship, he says, an American stayed in the place a long time and taught the method to the people.² In the lectures he adds that he heard in Izu that it began at Shimoda Port and was passed on by Americans.³

The two years are a year apart, and the text does not say which is closer. Both are worded as hearsay.²³

From the story he draws a chain of inferences that the text itself marks as his own. The American, he says, must have known table-turning at home, and with no table to hand at Shimoda they used bamboo and a lid on the spot; his word is “is imagined” (想像せらる).⁹ The boatmen at Shimoda who saw it must have carried it into the ports east and west, which is why, he says, it began in Tokyo at the seaside, in Fukagawa and Kyōbashi.¹⁸ He writes that it is clear the spread began at Shimoda, and that the kokkuri now in fashion began there, in his words “almost beyond doubt”.¹⁸

Inoue’s Shimoda origin is a hearsay story joined to his own reasoning about ports. The ship and the American are the report; the boatmen and the improvised table are his reasoning.²¹⁸⁹

A name that fitted afterwards

Inoue gives the name in three steps, each worded as hearsay (と云ふ). The American used an English name; the people could not say it and called it kokkuri, after the word for the lid tilting; and the characters 狐狗狸 were attached to the name afterwards.¹⁰

One thing in his own writing fits only a short interval. In the preface of May 1887 he already calls the affair 狐狗狸の一怪事, and in the piece of 5 February 1887, as Miura quotes it, he describes kokkuri as 狐狗狸, “a kind of yōkai like a fox or tanuki”.⁵¹⁹ If the characters were fitted to the name only after the ship, as he says, the fitting happened between the ship, about 1884 by our count, and early 1887.²¹⁰¹⁹

Why the lid moved

The book goes on from origins to cause.²⁰ In the lectures his answer is that the sitters moved the lid themselves without knowing it.²¹

In the lectures he lists the explanations he rejects: foxes and tanuki, spirits, electricity, deliberate moving by the sitters, and an illusion of movement.²¹ He tested them himself. With four or five students of the Imperial University nothing happened, and with a young student of little learning added, very little. With the young student and a woman of about forty, it worked.²² Ten days later the three of them got results every time with different bamboo and different lids, and with three pipes, a teapot or a flat board in place of the bamboo and lid. From this he concluded that it needs no fixed apparatus.²²

The 1887 book sets out three causes: the device itself; the contact of hands with it; and the mind, which he calls the most important.²⁰ In the lectures the mind’s part has two names. Unconscious muscle movement (不覚筋動), he says, arises from expectation (予期意向): sitters who expect the lid to tilt move their hands without knowing it, and when one person’s slight push starts it the others’ force joins in.²¹

He also borrows from Carpenter’s psychology a table that, asked how many years the reigning queen had been on the throne and how old her son was, answered sixteen years and eleven, figures that neither of the two sitters knew; Inoue reports that the answers matched a chronological table.²³

At Shimoda itself, Inoue says in the lectures, several police officers got no movement until a believer joined them, and afterwards they got it on their own, which he puts down to belief having arisen in them.¹¹

Which edition we read

We read Yōkai gendan in its second edition of 1900, from the National Diet Library’s scan. The printed preface is dated early May 1887, and Takahashi Naomi gives 2 May 1887 for the book.¹ The library’s own record for the 1900 edition, however, carries a note that the first edition came out in May 1892.²⁴ The two dates do not fit, and we have not seen the first edition. The text we read is the print of 1900, and whether the first edition said “the year before the year before last” is a question we could not settle.²²⁴