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Feb. 8, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:34
Edition 430 - Phillip Jackson

Phillip Jackson - a British man living in Japan - has strange tales of the ghosts and spirits of the ancient city of Kyoto...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
I see every single one as it comes in and of course if your email requires a response, then I will do my best to get one right back to you.
If you haven't heard from me, please let me know and I will reply, as they say by return.
Thank you for all of your guest suggestions.
And if you've made a donation to the show recently through the website theunexplained.tv, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing that.
Very, very kind of you and vital to allow this to continue.
Lots of comments about recent shows.
Thank you for those.
I think Anthony Peake, a guest who most of you seem to like a lot.
One word that one listener used was wow.
So thank you very much for that.
Not everybody, though, you know, because this is a world of free will.
But most of the emails were very positive towards Anthony.
And one in particular, Simon, thank you very much for your email.
Fascinating, because Anthony was talking about the way that life is a continuum and that we come back and we maybe correct each time certain mistakes that we've made.
And Simon, if I've got this right, Simon, you posed the very interesting question that, you know, I hadn't thought of myself.
Those are the best questions.
What happens if we keep coming back and we get to the point where we've put right everything that has gone wrong and then we're done?
Then it's very boring after that.
What happens next?
That's a very good question, Simon.
And one that I need to ask next time we speak to Anthony Peake.
You know, if you get to a point, assuming that this life, as many of my friends believe, is just a one-shot, so you better make the most of it because you hear the once and then it's oblivion.
But if it isn't, if you keep coming back and you keep trying to rectify the misdone, unless of course you've lived a perfect and blameless life, which I'm afraid I can't say I have, not at all.
But if you haven't lived a perfect and blameless life, that's most of us, then you have to come back and bit by bit you correct it.
And then at the end of it all, presumably it's job done, as we say here in the UK.
But then what happens?
You know, you just, you know, sit and twiddle your thumbs, very bored.
I'm now perfect.
I don't know.
Or you become one of those awful people who think they are perfect because you've corrected all the wrongs in your life and all the mistakes that you made.
You see, that's going to have me thinking all day now, Simon, though.
Thank you very much for that.
If you want to send me an email, please go to the website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
And thank you very much for all of your response through the website.
Still, conversations aren't going about audio quality for guests.
And like I mentioned on a recent show, you know, and the conversation we're about to have, I think, is going to be an illustration of that.
You know, some people are not sound engineers.
They're just ordinary people and they're using smartphone devices and other things.
And I kind of come from the, and maybe I'm wrong, and you've got to tell me if I am, I kind of come from the generation where I started getting interested in the world by listening to shortwave radio.
Now, if you're of a certain age, you will remember what the sound quality of shortwave radio was.
But we adapted to it.
And as long as the information came through, we got it.
Now, standards are higher now, which is great.
And of course, we have all of these digital connection and communication methods.
And all of these things have improved what we do.
And, you know, I love it.
I'm learning all the time, but I am not perfect.
But some of the shows are going to feature near CD quality guests because they understand how to make a connection.
Maybe they're using the Blue Yeti professional microphone or a microphone like that.
There are many of them.
That will give them a fantastic connection with a good broadband speed.
We'll give them wonderful fidelity.
And others, of course, may be using an iPhone device that will give you very good fidelity these days, but it won't be studio quality.
But, you know, as long as the message gets across, then I tend to think it's okay.
So you tell me.
The guest on this edition, Philip Jackson.
Now, he's not a man that you're going to be able to go and Google right now for his many works because he hasn't got that many.
He's a British guy who's been listening to this show, and I'm very grateful for his participation in it for years.
He made his life about 20 years ago in Kyoto, Japan, and is very, very interested in the, obviously, the wonderful and varied, diverse Japanese culture that they have there, all of the things that are so different from here.
I've always wanted to visit Japan after studying it when I was a kid.
So he's very much immersed in that.
But he's also made a study of some of Japan's ghost and folklore stories, all of which he sent me a list of some of them, and this is by no means all of them.
But some of these Kyoto stories are astonishing, and I have never read or heard about them before.
So I thought we'd connect with Philip Jackson in Kyoto, Japan on this edition of the show.
He's never done anything like this before.
So please be nice to him.
And I will be too.
Okay, thank you very much for being part of my show.
When you get in touch, please tell me always who you are, where you are, and how you use my show.
And thank you very much for being a part of it.
I'm always trying to do better here.
Right, let's get to Kyoto, Japan, where I think they're about nine hours ahead of London.
So it's morning time here, evening time there.
And say hello to Philip Jackson.
Hello, Philip.
Thank you for having me on, Howard.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
Now, I've just got to say to my listener, I know some of you are concerned about sound quality.
This is a connection to Japan, and this is the best that we can do at the minute.
I can certainly hear what Philip is saying, and I think you're going to like the stories that you hear.
So I'm going to make some adjustments here as we go along, and let's see how we go.
First of all, Philip, there are not many English people.
I actually had a good friend I worked with who became a teacher of English as a foreign language in Japan.
But it's not something that many people do.
What took you there?
It's a very simple answer, actually.
My wife is Japanese.
So I'm originally from Northeast Lincolnshire.
Spent a good few years of my adult life in London, but first came over to Japan in 1998.
And over the next few years after that, we would come over every couple of years to visit family.
And then we lived here from 2003 to 2007, then a few years back in the UK, and then returned back to Japan in 2012.
And I've been here in Kyoto since then, really.
I love the way that you say Kyoto rather than here.
I'm saying Kyoto.
The Brits put their own spin on everything, don't they?
It usually does come out as Kyoto.
But yeah, it's Kyoto, the pronunciation.
Well, I think, you know, and if my listener will forgive me just for talking to you a little bit about what living in Japan is like, because it is a totally, a very beautiful, but totally different culture from the one that you left.
It is.
It is.
And I think everybody who comes here experiences that.
You know, I've heard people say it's like going to a different planet.
And it can be.
It can be very different.
You know, in many ways, it's the same.
You know, it's a first world country, the same as the UK.
I can get all the same things as far as from shops, you know, food and things like that that I can get in the UK here in Japan.
But the culture, many of the ways of doing things is very different.
It's very different.
I mean, my only experience really of anything Japanese, and you will laugh when I tell you this because it's a very trivial example, but years ago for the BBC, I had to present, or rather receive a Help a London Child charity appeal check from Panasonic.
No, Technics, which is the same company, basically, but Technics, who produce electronic, as you will know, as a musician too, they produce a lot of electronic instruments.
So I had to receive a charity check from them, from one of their UK head honchos.
The guy was Japanese.
And, you know, they said to me, don't forget, of course, the protocol that you bow.
But nobody told me that, you know, if I bow, he bows, and then I bow again, he's got to bow back.
So we spent about a minute bowing to each other.
There's a lot of ceremony involved, which can be difficult at times until you get used to it.
But after time, it just becomes second nature and you get used to it.
And it's no problem.
It does take a while.
Yeah, it can be a bit interesting.
But for you, as I followed your story, as you've been emailing me and your life's ups and downs in Japan, it sounds like it's been a great and very different life.
Do you think that you could ever adjust if you had to come back here after 20 years of doing things the Japanese way?
Do you think you would ever be able to adjust back to the ways of things in the UK?
I'm not sure, really.
I haven't been back in the UK for about eight years.
So I expect that the next time I return to the UK, you know, just for a flying visit for a couple of weeks, it might be a little bit of an eye-opener.
Well, just basic day-to-day things, like, you know, for example, if I travel into work on a Sunday night, which I have to to do the radio show, I get a train.
And the trains, certainly lately, they've been very hit and miss.
Now, from what I read, in Japan, if your train is a second late, they will tell you about that.
Maybe a minute.
Usually the trains are working quite reliably.
You know, you do get days where it's nothing's perfect, but yeah, I think they're a little bit more reliable over here.
Well, I think it's an incredible experience that you're having, and you're clearly very happy there.
What about the Japanese view?
And I came into contact with this to a small extent when I did a radio show from Maui, Hawaii, which has a huge, as you know, a big Japanese and Pacific influence.
And there were many tales and much folklore there, but very, very different from the UK or indeed the United States.
What is the Japanese view of the paranormal?
How do they see those things?
It's, I mean, the outside image of Japan is, you know, nature and tranquility, tea ceremonies, temples and kimonos and all that side of it that you see in the media.
But there is a lot of folklore in Japan.
There's a lot of stories about ghosts and people enjoy telling these stories.
And there's quite a lot of festivals that revolve around folk tales or traditions.
For example, next week we have the Setsubun Festival, which is basically the start of the...
And what happens at the Setzubun festival is that you have somebody dressed as a demon and all the children chase the demon and throw dried beans at the demon, shouting demons out, happiness in.
And it's supposed to get rid of all the evil spirits from the previous year and welcome in happiness and good luck for the following year.
So these kind of things are quite, I think, ingrained in the culture of Japan as much as anywhere else, really.
Well, that festival sounds a lot like a mix of Halloween and some of the things that some people in parts of the United Kingdom do, as you know, you know, we're both from well north of London originally.
You know, in parts of the north of England and in Scotland, they have traditions that are exactly like that.
It's all about trying to seed the future for good luck.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, there's another one in August time, which is probably closer to Halloween, and it's called the Obon Festival.
And that's a time when you welcome back the spirits of your past family and they come back for a short period during August.
And there's a festival to welcome them here and then send them back to the spirit world afterwards.
And it's really nice in Kyoto, actually, because the city is surrounded by mountains on three sides.
And on those three sides, they light fires in the mountains.
And the positioning of the fires show either some Japanese writing to signify something or An image such as a boat which is carrying the spirits back to the spirit world, and one of them is lined up to look like a gate, so the boat goes through the gate to take them back.
So, yeah, there's quite a lot of these kind of festivals like that.
So, it sounds to me as if, and you tell me if I'm wrong, but ghosts and spirits then there are things, and this is a broad brush generalization and may well be wrong, but ghosts and spirits there are more to be revered than they're to be feared.
I think we've got both sides.
I think the traditional, the folktales and that side of it is, you know, you've got those festivals, as I mentioned, where there is more of a kind of positive feel to it.
But on the other hand, there are some quite, you know, negative stories that have been passed down through the ages as well.
And, you know, the horror genre of movies in Japan is very strong.
And I think a lot of the horror movies have been remade in Hollywood.
I think a good example of that was The Ring.
So there's a lot of scary ghost stories as well over here.
Yep, well, I can imagine from what you said.
But also, there's a strong cartoon tradition there that I don't think we quite have in the same way in the United Kingdom and United States.
Is paranormality reflected in the cartoons and the magazines of cartoons that people look at and buy?
Yes, definitely.
You know, you've got many series of animation and manga comics where some of the characters are ghosts or creatures, monsters.
And in a lot of cases, it's, you know, they're quite comical.
They're not scary.
And a lot of them are made for children as well.
So it's something that people are brought up with.
It's part of the culture, part of people's traditions, in a different way, perhaps from the United Kingdom and the US, ingrained within the society in a different way, perhaps more friendly.
You could say that, yeah, in many cases, yeah.
Okay, we're going to talk about some specific stories, and I think these are all to do with the city that you're in, Kyoto.
Talk to me about Kyoto.
I love the way that you say it, by the way.
Talk to me about Kyoto.
Now, I studied Japan for A-level when I was doing geography, so I know a little bit about Japan.
I'm sure things have changed massively.
But, you know, we studied Tokyo and Kyoto as economic powerhouses.
But I think what a lot of people fail to appreciate is, if I've got this right, that we now see Tokyo as the big place, as the capital.
But Kyoto is the traditional capital, isn't it?
Yes.
So Kyoto was the old imperial city for a long time, which is now Tokyo.
There's two big areas in the main island.
In East Japan, you have the Kanto area where Tokyo is.
And Tokyo used to be called Edo.
And in the west part of the main island of Japan, you've got Kansai, which takes in Kyoto and Osaka and those main areas around there.
So Osaka is very close.
It's just about 30 minutes on the train to the west of here, southwest.
So because Kyoto has a tradition, has perhaps a deeper tradition than Tokyo, because the emperor was there and it has a past to it, does that mean that paranormal stories are more ingrained in Kyoto?
There's probably more stories.
It's a much older city.
And one of the particular stories which I was going to mention today, at the time when it happened, Tokyo Edo didn't really exist at that time.
Definitely not in the size that it is now.
But yeah, Kyoto is over a thousand years old.
Which, if you think about it, you know, I have listeners in American cities that have histories of a couple of hundred years.
You know, to think of somewhere that is a thousand years old is astonishing.
I mean, even for us here in the UK, to go back a thousand years.
That's remarkable.
The connection with the emperor.
Now, you know, one thing that people, I don't think, understand as well as they might here in the UK, and mostly they get their knowledge from old war films, but the emperor was deified, wasn't he?
The emperor was a deity.
Did that have any impact on the connection between the emperor and ghosts and spirits and paranormality, do you think?
There could be a connection in that Kyoto was chosen as the imperial capital because it was seen as a spiritual place.
When they was looking for the next location for the capital, this area was seen as it had some significance spiritually.
And that's why they chose here.
Because before this, it was in a location just not too far from Kyoto.
But the ground wasn't good.
There were sicknesses.
And then they had to look for another location.
And Kyoto was deemed a spiritually good fit for the emperor.
Well, it's a fascinating.
I'd love to see the city.
Fascinating place.
Let's get to some of the stories then.
And there are many of them.
The first one that you want to talk about is the curse of Taira no Masakado.
Taira no Masakado was a samurai in the early part of the 10th century.
And this story actually starts, it involves Kyoto and what's now Tokyo.
He was based in the Kanto area.
And what started as nothing more than really a family feud with his father-in-law, he got married.
And the tradition was that you would then move in with the father-in-law, but he decided he didn't want to do that.
So there was a family feud with the father-in-law, which turned into conflict and eventually turned into a full-blown rebellion to the point where Masakado named himself the Shino, which is new emperor.
And he started a rebellion against the central government in Kyoto, Which all sounds quite ridiculous, bearing in mind that it was just based on not wanting to move in with his father-in-law.
Even at that point, there's a sense of a little bit of folktale paranormality in that when he started his rebellion against the government of the emperor, it's said that there was a great swarm of butterflies and rainbows appeared in Kyoto as a sign of the actions that he was starting.
Now, eventually, he was defeated in the year 940, by which time his father-in-law had already passed away.
And he was defeated at the Battle of Kojima, and he was beheaded.
And his head was taken to Kyoto, and it was put on display as a warning to anybody else who might have any rebellious intent about them.
And instead of decomposing the decapitated head, at night it said that it was screaming out, where is my body?
Where is my murdered body?
Oh, my lord.
And did people report seeing this?
Do they still report seeing this?
My lord.
I mean, it's say it's it's it's um this is going back to the year 940.
So you this is as the story goes, but obviously you have to take some of these things with you know time has passed and how much of the story is myth and how much is recorded.
So this story is less about the screaming head and perhaps more about the curse that is said to be connected with it.
Yes, because the curse then comes up into the 20th century.
So his head was screaming, where is my body?
And the story continues that eventually his head disappeared and did resurface at another temple and then resurfaced again in a fishing village in an area which is now part of Tokyo.
And the head was found by fishermen.
They cleaned it up.
They gave it a burial.
And that seemed to be the end of it.
But then a few years later, the story is that his ghost was seen wandering around the neighborhood.
And then in the 14th century, there was a plague in Tokyo, which was then called Edo.
And people put this down to the curse of Masakado and his anger, still anger about being defeated in the battle he had in 940.
So to appease his spirit, they enshrined his spirit into a larger shrine, thinking that that would pacify him.
And a few stories came over the years after that, but taking it to sort of like a modern day, in 1923, there was the great Kanto earthquake and a lot of the area where his head was buried in Tokyo was devastated.
And the Ministry of Finance had to build a new building.
And the location where they built their building was on the place where Masakado's head was buried.
So you can probably guess where this is kind of going.
Well, I can.
And I'm surprised that in a country with such traditions and so much folklore, that they went ahead and did that perhaps without thinking.
Yeah.
And what happened was that not long after, the finance minister became sick and died.
And this was then followed by around 12 to 15 other ministry workers died from either sickness or accidents.
So this was put down to the curse of Tairo no Masakado, and they decided to move the Ministry of Finance again.
Did they?
And that seemed to appease things.
It then jumps forward to just after the Second World War, the American forces have occupied Tokyo.
Obviously, the city was devastated from the bombings in the Second World War.
And obviously, they were now going through the process of rebuilding the city.
And the American authorities decided that they wanted to build a car park, a car lot on Masakado's grave site.
So the bulldozers went in.
One of the bulldozers tipped over and the driver was killed.
So again, the Japanese authorities then explained to the American authorities, it really would not be a good idea to build anything here.
And they managed to convince them.
So they didn't build anything there.
And that area now is what you would call the wall street of Tokyo.
It's the finance area.
There are banks, financial institutions, lots of big office blocks around there.
And in terms of buildings, is there anything actually on top of that site or has that site been left empty?
That site has been left.
There's now a small square which has a monument, a small monument to Masakado.
They've given him his head's grave site.
The buildings have built around it.
I have read that one of the banks actually, to keep him happy, they opened a bank account in his name for him.
Excellent.
Well, I mean, he's obviously somebody that you should not mess with.
Does Japanese media that I don't know much about, I mean, we see clips of their crazy game shows here, but that's all we see.
And I occasionally see the English news from NHK, which is the Japanese equivalent of the BBC.
Do Japanese media do shows like the most haunted kinds of shows that we do here in the UK and, of course, in America?
Do they do that kind of thing?
Or are they more respectful of cases like, for example, the one you've just talked about?
They do do it, but it's done in a different way and maybe not so often.
I mean, I watched one recently where they had the TV presenter who went into this building.
I believe it was a hotel, but it was an old style Japanese house, a Japanese building, wooden building, that had been turned into a hotel.
And it was reported that there was a ghost of a child there.
And they set up a camera in the room.
And this particular presenter was quite interested in that topic and didn't seem afraid at all.
So he went to sleep.
He was putting little toys around the room and Trying to welcome the ghost of this child if it was there.
And they left the camera rolling, and his arm was laid out.
And at one point, you saw his arm raise up into the air while he was asleep and then slowly go down again.
So they occasionally have, yeah.
But he, that it's not so much where they have a show focused on that.
It might be a segment of another show where they do something like that.
So the genre hasn't quite hit the way it's hit here.
All right, loads of stories to get through then.
The next one is a very famous one in Kyoto, the Ghost Candy Store.
And this one goes back not a thousand years, but 400 years.
400 years, yeah.
So the ghost candy store, as well as having a ghost story going back 400 years, the shop claims to have been in business for about 450 years, and they claim to be the oldest candy store in Japan.
I don't know if anybody else would refute that, but I haven't seen anything to go against that.
And the story is that 400 years ago, late one night, there was a knock at the owner's door, and he went down, opened the door, and there was this young woman standing at the door and she wanted to buy some candy.
So even though it was late at night, he obliged.
He sold her the candy and the woman went off on a way and he closed up.
And the same thing happened the next night.
Open the door, knock at the door, open the door.
There's the same woman asking to buy candy.
Same thing happened.
And the next night and the next night.
And after about seven nights, the shop owner was curious.
So he decided to follow her.
So he followed her around a few streets until she came to a graveyard.
And he followed her into the graveyard.
She went over a small hill and disappeared standing by another graveyard.
And apparently she turned to look at him before she disappeared.
The story does have a couple of differences at this point, two versions.
One version is that the shop owner went over to the grave where he saw the young woman disappear.
And there in the grave, the grave was open.
And there was the body, dead, of this woman that had been buying the candy.
And in her arms was a baby alive, sucking on the candy that he'd been selling to her every day.
Oh, goodness.
And the variation on the story is that when he saw the woman disappear next to the grave, he was so terrified, he turned and ran away.
And the next day went to the local temple and asked one of the priests to return with him to the grave the next day.
They went to the graveyard, they prayed, and then they heard a baby crying.
And they started digging where they heard the baby crying.
They opened up a grave and there was that woman's dead body, but there was a living baby and the ghost candy.
So it's got a slight variation.
Probably more likely that he did run away and go back the next day with somebody else.
But the story has kept going because if you go to the shop now, the shop is still there.
I visited not so long ago.
And one of the ways they make their business now is that they do sell this candy, which they call the ghost candy.
So people go to this shop to buy the candy and say that they've been to the shop where the ghost took the candy from 400 years ago.
Are there any, as far as you know, any reports of paranormality today around that store?
I did read from one source that somebody asked the current shop owner, have they seen the ghost recently?
And the response was, we haven't seen her recently.
Recently?
So I wonder how long ago the last site was.
Well, that may just be a cryptic Japanese answer, I think, but a good one.
Now, the world is replete, and we've talked about them on The Unexplained before, both on the radio show and here online.
We've talked about many cases of phantom passengers, perhaps hitchhiking or perhaps getting into taxis, phantom motorbike riders.
What I didn't know is that there's, I've heard stories from South Africa, the United States, Australia, the UK of these things.
What I didn't know is that there is an amazing one from 1969 in Kyoto.
Yes.
Now, this happened on a street called Kawabata Street.
And Kawabata Street runs alongside the Kamagawa River, which is the main river that runs through the city.
And yes, it was an October night in 1969.
And this story was actually reported and written up in one of the local newspapers when it happened in 1969.
And it was reported as a taxi driver pulled up to pick up a passenger on Cawabata Street.
And this young woman got into the back of the taxi and she said that she wanted to go to a place called Midorogaike Pond.
And there are a few stories around Midorogaike Pond as well.
It's claimed that some people have seen spirits above the water there.
And there have been stories of suicides there as well.
But it was late at night.
The taxi driver didn't think too much about taking her where she wanted to go.
So drove down the road.
It's just a straight road down, wasn't too far away, maybe only about a 20-minute drive.
But when they got there, turned around to take his fare, but there was nobody in the back of the taxi.
She was gone.
And the only trace left, the back seat, there was a wet patch, a soaking wet patch on the back seat.
Now, looking into the story a little bit more, not far from The location where the taxi driver picked up the young woman is the Kyoto University Hospital.
And apparently, the story that goes with this is that there was a young woman who died in Kyoto University Hospital on the same day as this passenger was picked up.
And apparently, she lived close to Midoro Gaike Pond.
So the thinking is that maybe this was the ghost of the young woman that died.
And she simply was caught between this life and the next life and was thinking that she could leave hospital because her suffering had ended, not realizing that she'd actually died.
I mean, it's not the first time in history we've had that.
Did the description of the woman that the taxi driver reported match that?
I presume it did, but who knows, match that of the woman in the hospital?
I'm not sure about that.
I've seen some reports where they've given the description as dressed in white and long black hair, which is typical Japanese ghost image.
The pale face, the white clothes, and the long black hair in front of the face.
But that could just be an embellishment on the story.
So I'm not sure about that side of it.
Well, 1980, it's a long time ago now.
It's what, 50 years ago, just over 50 years ago.
I'm guessing that taxi driver's not around anymore.
Pity.
I wonder if they tried to interview him in the day.
Presumably, if they did it for the newspaper, they must have.
But I have read that that is a route that taxi drivers refuse to take late at night now if anybody wants that route.
Yeah.
Are we saying in saying that that that's just 51-year-old superstition or have there been repeat occurrences in that area?
I haven't found any witness reports on it, but I have found where it has been said from second-hand sources that it has happened again.
But I haven't been able to find any first-hand sources to sort of bear witness to that.
Philip, do you not feel tempted to book yourself a taxi one night and see if you'll get the one taxi driver in Kyoto who will take you there?
I don't think I'd give that a go.
I know the area.
I've been to the area in the daytime, but it's a bit of a way out at nighttime.
I hear what you say.
That could be a challenge.
You may have sent me a challenge there, Howard.
All right, the next story goes even further back into history, and this is we always like some ghostly screaming.
This is ghostly screaming in the forests, a samurai apparently near Kyoto.
Yes, and this is actually what you could say is just down the road from where I live.
And I actually went there last week to get another look at the place.
So this goes back to the 16th century in the late 1500s.
And at that time, the leader, the person who was basically what you would call a de facto shogun at the time, there was a shogun in place, the Ashikaga shogun, but he was more of a puppet.
And the person running the show was Oda Nobunaga, who's probably, I would say, in Japan, probably the most known historical figure in Japan.
He's known as the great unifier of the country.
And in 1582, there was one of his retainers, one of his generals called Akechi Mitsuhede.
And there is a backstory to it, but he was a disgruntled retainer of Nobunaga.
Odo Nobunago at the time was staying at a temple in Kyoto called Honoji.
He wasn't expecting any combat at the time, so he had no soldiers with him.
He just had servants with him.
And his disgruntled retainer, Akechi, took his soldiers, surrounded the temple, and set fire to it.
And Nobunaga killed himself, knowing that he was going to be killed anyway.
His son escaped, but Akechi and his soldiers caught up with Nobunaga's son and killed him as well.
And Akechi Mitsuhide then became, for all intents and purposes, the shogun.
He went off to a place called Yamazaki, which is in between Kyoto and Osaka.
And there was another samurai at the time called Toitomi Hideyoshi, who was a loyal retainer of Oda Novanaga.
But he was involved in a siege with another group called the Mori clan at a different location.
So he couldn't help.
Akechi tried to get a message to the Mori clan to explain what had happened and get them to join forces.
But the message was intercepted by Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
And so he formed a treaty with the Mori clan and he headed over towards Yamazaki to take on Akechi and get revenge for his liege lord being killed.
So about two weeks later, they met in battle.
Akechi Mitsuhi Iide was defeated, but he survived and with some of his soldiers he escaped.
And as he was heading through Kyoto, through this area, say not far from where I'm living, I'm in a place called Kohata.
And he was heading through an area called Ogorisu.
And he was ambushed by a group of bandits.
There is some thinking that these bandits were loyal to Nobunaga and that they had word that Akechi was coming through there.
And the story is that Akechi was impaled on a bamboo spear by the bandit leader called Nakamura Chobe as they were going through the bamboo forest.
And this is where it starts to get a little bit the ghost story, the paranormality side of things.
As he was impaled by the bamboo spear, his blood and his guts fell out onto the ground.
And it's said to that exact location where his blood and guts hit the ground, that the bamboo has never grown there since then.
And I went to the location last weekend.
There is a small, there's a stone monument that says that this is the area where it happened.
And then you follow another path around through the bamboo, and there's a wooden post just stuck in the ground, which has a sign on it.
And I have to say that the ground where that post is, and there is no bamboo growing, but I can't say whether that's never whether it's been cleared for that.
It may be coincidence, but who knows?
But in history, there are many stories of things like that happening where birds don't sing or vegetation doesn't grow or, you know, it won't rain or whatever in particular areas where particular things have happened.
So who knows?
But what a great story.
Also, don't they report the ghostly screams of samurai being heard to echo through the forest?
The reports are that if you go there, some say it can be in the daytime, but most reports say that if you go there on a rainy night, you will hear the screams coming from the bamboo forest of Akechi and his samurai warriors, their screams coming from the forest, almost reliving that event as they were cut down by the bandits.
Great story.
And you see, he's totally unknown by people because we don't hear that much from Japan.
That is a great story.
Is there more to it?
I think you were about to say there's more to it.
Yeah, I mean, like I say, I was there last week and it was a cloudy afternoon and it was a little bit creepy.
And he's known in Japan as the 13-day shogun because he defeated the de facto shogun.
He, for all intents and purposes, became the shogun, but 13 days later, he was dead.
But there is a little bit more to it in that some of his soldiers who did escape, they took his head and took it to bury it somewhere, because usually enemies would take the head of their captors as a trophy for want of a better word.
So they took his head and you can, there is a place in the center of Kyoto where his head is supposedly buried and there's a monument there.
So there's a location near Tahia where he was cut down and reports of his ghost.
And there is another location in the center of Kyoto where he's got a burial site for his head.
But I haven't found any reports of ghostly curses or happenings from where his head is buried.
Well, I'm in danger of sounding like local radio in the UK, but if you're listening in Japan and you've heard those reports, let me know.
Now, there is a great story that you have, and we have to tell this one.
It is about a bridge that is said to bridge this life and the next life, but it also involves a ghost or ghostly familiar.
This story seems to have it all.
Yes, yeah.
This is called the Modori Bridge, Ichijo, Modori Bridge.
Ichijo means first street.
There are lots of main streets in Kyoto, Nibjo, Sanjo, Shijo, Gorjo, and it's basically one, two, three, four, five.
So Ichijo is the first street.
Modori Bridge means to return, to come back.
And there's been a bridge here since the 8th century.
The bridge that's there at the moment is much recent.
I think it was built, I believe, in about 1996.
But there has been a bridge there of some form since the 8th century.
And it got its name of the returning bridge from an incident that happened in the 10th century.
There was a funeral procession going over the bridge.
It was a well-known scholar from Kyoto.
And his son arrived late for the funeral.
And he was quite distraught that he hadn't had the opportunity to speak to his father before he died and say his last goodbyes.
And he was even late for the funeral.
So he got down and he prayed to the gods for the opportunity to speak to his father again.
And apparently the sky turned black and the light came down from the skies and down onto his father.
And his father came back to life, was resurrected.
Not permanently resurrected, but some reports say he was alive for two days, which gave him and his son enough time to say their last goodbyes and before he went on to the spirit world from there.
And so the bridge was called the Returning Bridge, jumping way ahead from there, but going to the Second World War, a lot of soldiers, Japanese soldiers, if they were drafted, before they went off to fight, quite a lot of them would go to the Modori Bridge and pray for the power of the bridge to bring them back if they were killed in battle in the war.
So even centuries later, it still had that reputation of being able to have some power to bring the dead back to life.
And has there been any, I say evidence, but are there any stories in the record, let's put it that way, of those sorts of things being reported?
There are a lot of stories happening, but not stories of people returning.
But the bridge is said to have power, isn't it?
Yes, yes.
And the power that it's said to have is there was what you would call a local mystic, a geomancer.
His name was Abe Noseme.
And in the 10th century, there was a story about a demon called Ibaraki Doji.
And it was claimed that the demon Ibaraki Doji was attacking people, disguising itself as a young woman and attacking people coming through the main gate of Kyoto and eating them.
And there was a samurai by the name of Watanabe no Tsuna who was given the task.
You did say eating them.
Eating them, yes.
This was a demon who was apparently eating people that it was catching coming through the main gate of Kyoto.
And a samurai by the name of Watanabe no Tsuna was given the task of killing the demon.
And so he ended up in battle with this demon.
He managed to chop off the demon's arm and the demon ran away, escaped.
And Watanabe took the arm to this mystic, this local mystic called Abe Noseme, and asked for advice.
What shall I do with this arm?
And the advice was put it into a sealed box for seven days.
And after the seventh day, the evil will disappear.
So he did that.
On the sixth day, Watanabe had a visit from someone that he believed was his aunt.
And his aunt convinced him to show her the arm in the box, the demon's arm.
So he opened the box.
And it turned out that it wasn't his aunt.
It was the demon in disguise to trick him.
And the demon took the arm and raced away.
Some stories say that the evil of the demon is still under the bridge.
But connecting to the mystic Abe noseme, it's said that he put his shakigami, his familiar or his magical spirit ghost, under the bridge.
He hid it under the bridge.
And stories go that Abe no semi's familiar mystical power is still underneath the bridge, protecting people using the bridge.
But the bridge has other, I suppose, what you would call grotesque stories attached to it as well.
From 1467 to 1477, there was a civil war in Japan called the Omanin War.
And that area was used as a place for executions.
And heads were, decapitated heads were put on display around the bridge.
There was a famous tea master called Sen Norikyu.
He was quite close to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who I mentioned earlier, who defeated Akechi, the screaming ghost samurai.
Toy Tomi Hideyoshi had a reputation in his later life for losing his temper and having a bad temper.
And apparently he Senorikyu fell foul of his temper and was ordered by Hideyoshi to kill himself, which he did.
And Senoriku's head was put on display on the Modori Bridge.
But also in the 16th century as well, there was a lot of religious intolerance to Christianity.
There was a fear at that time that Christianity taking off in Japan would lead to colonization from the Spanish or the Portuguese.
So it was outlawed.
Christians were put into prison.
These were Japanese Christians or foreign Christians.
Many of them were executed.
And in 1597, 26 Catholic Christians were at the order of Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
They were tortured on Modori Bridge and had their ears cut off before they were then paraded on carts around the city and then eventually taken to Nagasaki where they were put upon crosses and executed with spears.
And there's one more very grotesque story.
This goes back to the 16th century as well, in 1544.
A retainer of one of the samurai lords, Miyoshi Nagayoshi, a samurai by the name of Wada Shingoro.
He was executed on the bridge by Horosakawa Haramoto, but he wasn't executed in the usual way of head decapitation or indeed ear removal, which sounds absolutely horrendous.
Well, Wada Shingoro was even worse than that.
He was cut into pieces.
He was sawn into pieces, as the translation is from the Japanese.
I'm not sure how many pieces, but it sounds very grotesque.
I mean, there is an awful lot.
It seems to me that in Japanese paranormality, there is an awful lot of blood and gore.
Well, there is.
I mean, I think I said in the introduction that, you know, when people think of Japan and especially Kyoto, they think of the area of Gion and Kimonos and tea ceremonies and nature and honorable samurai.
And if you're looking for that in Kyoto and Japan, you'll definitely find lots of it.
But when you look into the history, you can quite quickly find yourself knee-deep in the blood of civil wars and conflicts and executions.
It's a warrior tradition, isn't it?
It's a tradition of honor.
Yeah, yeah.
And a lot of these civil wars started from nothing but an honor fallout, really.
And as a story that you told previously indicated that it could be the smallest thing, but if it was a matter of saving face, then you had to go into conflict.
You had to go into battle.
Definitely, yes, yes.
Okay.
Well, I mean, look, none of these stories I'd had any inkling of.
I knew nothing about the way paranormality was viewed.
What about wells?
Now, we have stories around wells in this country, I know.
But wells, that is water wells, are very big in Japan.
Yeah, I mean, it's probably similar to the folktales.
It's kind of ingrained in a lot of folktales and a lot of spiritual history, and even in modern times, wells sometimes come up.
The horror movie The Ring, there's a famous scene where the main character, Sadako, I believe she was thrown down a well, and then later in the movie, she comes crawling out of it.
It's quite a horrific scene.
And there's a famous Japanese writer who's known globally, Haruki Murakami.
And one of his most famous works is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.
And there's a reoccurrence in that story.
The main character is called Toru.
And he keeps referring to this well in a backyard close to where he lives.
And he goes into this well to do his thinking.
So wells come up quite a lot in ancient history in Japan, modern literature.
There's three particularly well-known ones, the Kanawa well, and this is quite a difficult one to find actually.
It's in the center of Kyoto.
It's a dried-up well.
But as you're walking down the street, there's a sliding door between two houses.
And as you're walking past, you would just think that it's the entrance to somebody else's house.
But you open the sliding door and you find that there's a narrow alley between these two houses.
And about 20 meters down, there's a very small shrine.
And just in the shrine, there is this well, an ornate well with a great over the top.
And this well is so well known that a story about it was even made into a No play.
No spell, N-O-H, kind of Japanese play.
But the actual story to it is that, and this is still thought of as true folklore today, that if you want to break up a relationship, if you drink from a bottle, take a drink of water from a bottle, and then pour the remains of some of the water from that bottle into the well, then the relationship will break up.
Thankfully, I recently went to visit that well and there was no bottles left around, but I have heard from somebody who went that they did go once and there was a half-empty bottle by it.
Really?
So in other words, if you want to force a breakup, if you're getting tired of your partner or you want to kind of get a split from them, you buy a bottle of water, you drink a bit of it and pour the rest down the well and then they're gone.
Yeah.
But the story that went into the Noor play was that a woman had been cast aside by her husband a long, long time ago, hundreds of years ago, and she wanted to get revenge on her husband and his new wife.
So she went to another shrine and prayed to the particular gods to wreak revenge on her husband who had cast her aside.
And apparently one night they paid her back by turning her into a demon.
And she was then able to do it to attack the husband.
And some of these attacks were through, I suppose what you'd call telepathic causing him headaches and severe trauma.
To be under, I sometimes get emails from people telling me that they're under psychic attack.
Yeah, that's what it sounds like, to be honest.
And in the story, it comes back to this mystic, Abe Noseme.
Apparently, the husband went to visit this mystic and he made what we would think as Zoodoo dolls, dolls, to divert the attack to these dolls.
And apparently the cast-aside woman who was making the attacks in the play, she dived into Kanoa well and disappeared into the spirit world.
Boy.
But obviously there must be some truth behind that story.
And you know, sometimes things get a power if you give them a power.
Rather like the story of the water bottle, if you want to split up.
Then if people believe it, then perhaps it can be self-fulfilling in some way.
You wonder which came first, the truth or the folklore, which came first.
Okay.
Now we're rapidly running out of time here.
We've saved the best till last year.
We had a story about a bridge that involved a ghostly familiar, people perhaps returning from the next life by crossing the bridge and then coming back again, all of that fascinating material.
This is about a tunnel and a deeply haunted one.
I think anybody who has lived in Kyoto for any length of time, who's not Japanese, will know about this one or have heard of it.
Anybody who's Japanese from Kyoto knows about the Kyotaki tunnel.
And strangely enough, there are quite a lot of tunnels in Japan that seem to have ghost stories.
So it's maybe similar to the wells.
The tunnels seem to have some connection.
But this particular one, it was built between 1927 and 1928.
And it's very close to a very famous area of Kyoto called Arashiama.
Lots of tourists.
It's a beautiful area.
You can take boat trips down the river.
You can climb up the mountain and feed monkeys.
It's got lots of heritage temples, bamboo forests.
It's one of the most visited areas in Arashiama.
But further down the road is this tunnel that maybe not so many people go to.
And it was originally a railway line until 1944.
But it was built in 1927 to 28 and it was built by what you could call slaves, but Legally unpaid workers.
Working conditions were apparently very bad, and quite a lot of people died during the construction of the tunnel.
And it is said that some of the ghosts of those workers do roam the tunnel.
But there's lots more things happen there.
The tunnel apparently officially you would find that it's said that it's nearly 500 meters long, but the report is that it's 444 meters long.
Now the number four, Japan has three different alphabets, hirakana, katakana, kanji.
And the kanji for four can be pronounced in the same way as the kanji for death.
So the number four is unlucky, and it's claimed that the tunnel is 444 meters long, which gives it that.
So this is the tunnel of death, but multiplied a number of times?
Yes, definitely.
Around the tunnel is woodland.
It's said to be a known suicide spot.
And people have reported a woman's scream coming from the woods around the tunnel, which could be the ghost of somebody who's committed suicide in the woods.
And there is one very, very disturbing story, isn't there, about a woman who throws herself onto cars?
Yes.
Yes.
And basically, it's a one-way tunnel.
So there are traffic lights at each end.
And it is said that there is a woman in white who stands by the edge of the tunnel.
And I did hear one report where a cyclist was coming up to the tunnel entrance and he saw a car had crashed.
And it turned out that it was one of his neighbors.
And so he got talking to him.
And his neighbor explained that he saw the white woman by the edge of the tunnel.
And he tried to avoid her and crashed into the side of the tunnel.
But it's been reported that the traffic lights can change suddenly whilst cars are in the tunnel to cause accidents.
Some people report that they feel the car being buffeted by winds and when they get out of the tunnel, they see handprints on the bonnet of the car.
It's reported that if you look in your mirror and you see your dead self in the mirror, that you're going to die in horrible circumstances a few days later.
What do you mean if you look into your interior mirror in the car?
Yes, yes, yes.
Do people avoid this tunnel or do they have to use it?
There is actually a bus route that goes through it as well.
I mean, it's even said that if you arrive at a tunnel and the traffic lights are green, apparently the warning is that you shouldn't go in because it's the spirits welcoming you into the tunnel.
What you should do is wait for it to turn to red and then turn to green again.
I don't think that's very good for traffic discipline, though, is it?
Probably not, no.
You'd have three or six points on your license here for doing that.
There is also a story that it's reported that people say that if you go through it and then go back, people report that it feels longer going one way than the other.
And I've spoken directly to somebody who did go through on a bicycle and one of the first things he said was, yeah, it seemed longer when I was coming back.
I wonder if that's just psychological or if that is some kind of, I don't know, time compression effect.
The only thing I can think of, it is slightly on a hill.
So it could well be.
I got you.
So one way is more difficult than the other.
It could be that, yeah.
And people have reported feeling sick and nauseous, but it's a very narrow tunnel.
So it could be car fumes making people feel sick.
But who knows?
The Kiyotaki Tunnel.
Boy, great stories, Philip, and stories that we wouldn't have heard otherwise.
So listen, thank you very much indeed.
So day to day, now we're recording this at 10 o'clock in the morning in the UK.
What time is it for you right now?
We're a nine-hour difference at the moment.
So it's 7pm.
Well, coming up on 8pm.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
So when you get up tomorrow, what is your working day like?
What do you do?
I have this vision of Japan being such a focused society and everybody depending on public transport that everybody is up at like half past six in the morning and they're out by seven and it's a great big rush.
Pretty much like that.
I'll be up at six o'clock tomorrow morning.
I'll be on the train at just after seven o'clock over on my way to Osaka.
So quite often on a Monday morning, I'm listening to your Sunday evening show as it's going out live.
What a great thought that is.
How does that doesn't, you know, look, you know, this is the online show where it all started and you started, thankfully, by listening to that years ago now, I think.
What is it like to have the experience of hearing my show that I do on the radio live online?
And it's another day and it's another country.
It's yeah, it's interesting because, you know, you're talking to people and you're saying, you know, I really appreciate you staying up to do this.
And I'm thinking it's 7.30 in the morning here.
But it's, yeah, I like the show because you've got, I think the great thing for the live show is that you can get people from different countries coming on.
You know, that's the thing I love about it, that the unexplained base, certainly from the online show has always been like this.
But the radio show's like that too.
We have a great, and I love that.
You know, I like to think of myself as, like you do, I'm sure, a bit of a citizen of the world.
And I'm lucky enough to have been to a lot of countries and come to appreciate different cultures and different people.
So the thought that people are hearing what I do in different places and maybe being influenced or interested by it is a fantastic thought.
But I remember getting the very first email from you, a Brit in Japan.
And I just thought that was amazing.
And, you know, I love the stories of your life.
And if I'm lucky to be spared long enough, I hope that I'm going to be able to afford to come to Japan and see it because I've always wanted to ride the Shinkansen, the bullet train.
It's quite an experience.
Quite an experience.
And of course, if you do ever get to Japan, then I'll quite happily take you around Dr. Tunnel.
Okay.
Now, it's only fair that is there anything you would like to publicize, your books, the walks that you host?
Anything you want to give some publicity to?
I put out some books.
The books are titled Hidden Paths, Walking Historical Kyoto.
Three of those books out at the moment.
Some of the places that we've talked about today are in those.
Along with some really...
Yes, yes.
So I go to all of these locations.
I take all the photographs, do all the research before going.
Occasionally when I'm out doing the walks, I'll come across something else that I didn't find.
So I take some photographs of that location and do some research on that.
There's a website which is just very simply hiddenpathskyoto.com.
And that's got links to the books, which are available online in e-books or paperback.
And each book has about three or four different walks.
And some of them are in the city.
Some of them take you up a mountain, outskirts of the city, and some well-known places.
But I try to highlight places that the tourists tend not to go to.
Well, no, I would love to do all of that.
One thing that's put me off in the past, though, going to Japan, despite my fascination with the place and the fact that I studied it when I was at school, I've always been concerned that all the signposts may be in Japanese and I wouldn't be able to ride the subway because I wouldn't know where I was going.
Is it that difficult for foreigners?
I would say no, as a tourist, a lot of the signs are now in English.
Obviously, we've got the Olympics here this year.
So even a lot of the convenience stores are now printing the names of the food and the wrappers in English.
And if you go to a restaurant, you can usually get an English menu or photographs in the menu.
You can point at what you want.
And I think a lot of people are trying to understand that use more English as well.
I mean, I'm not saying that the world should speak English.
That's not what I'm saying.
It's just that it always struck me as being very difficult for people going there.
But what a cultural feast if you do.
Hey, listen, Philip, I know it's evening time for you.
You've got to get to bed and get to work tomorrow.
So I've got the rest of my day looking, you know, staring.
You have traveled in time.
You've time traveled in front of me.
Whatever.
Philip Jackson, listen, thank you so much in Kyoto.
Please stay listening to my show, and thank you for doing this.
It's been a pleasure, Howard.
Thank you very much.
Philip Jackson, please give me your thoughts about him.
Some amazing stories I thought from Japan from the city of Kyoto that was the original city in Japan before Tokyo.
Astonishing material and I've never heard any of that before.
Hope you enjoyed that.
All the way.
Is it 10,000 miles from London?
Is it 12,000 miles?
I'm not sure.
But it's still a long way.
And that time difference of what, nine hours between there and here?
That is astonishing.
That is real.
Legitimate time travel, I guess.
More great guests in the pipeline as we go through February and into March here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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