Kokkuri-san

The modern form is handed down through Japanese schoolyards: a sheet of paper with a torii gate drawn at the top, 'yes' and 'no,' and the fifty kana with numerals below; each player rests one finger on a ten-yen coin and all chant, 'Kokkuri-san, Kokkuri-san, please come.' The coin begins to slide, spelling out answers, exam questions, a crush's name, the date of one's death. The rules bristle with taboos: never lift your finger midway, always send the spirit off with 'please return home,' tear up the paper, spend the coin that day. Violators are possessed by the fox spirit. The game swept elementary and middle schools in the 1970s, trailing episodes of mass hysteria that led many schools to ban it, and the bans became part of the allure.

Its pedigree is imported. In 1884 sailors from a Western ship introduced table-turning, then the rage of European and American spiritualism, at the Izu peninsula; the Japanese version balanced a rice-tub lid on three bamboo stalks and read the tilting as speech. The craze crossed the country under the name kokkuri, 'the nodding,' soon dressed in the characters for fox, dog, and tanuki. The philosopher Inoue Enryo dissected it in his Yokai Gendan (1887), diagnosing unconscious muscular movement, a founding case of Meiji 'monsterology' and its campaign of disenchantment.

From the Meiji rice-tub lid to the Showa ten-yen coin, Kokkuri-san was domesticated from parlor seance into playground rite, a sibling of the Western Ouija board by parallel descent. In horror manga and film it remains the standard first scene of a door that should have stayed shut.