The Day of the Many-Eyed Basket — Hitotsume-kozo and Koto-yoka

Twice a year, there were days when people raised bamboo baskets high above their eaves. Not just any baskets, but the open-weave kind, full of little holes. A yokai with only one eye, so the thinking went, would take one look at something with far more eyes than itself and run away in fear. Hitotsume-kozo, the one-eyed little monk, is one of the yokai told of as just such a one-eyed visitor.

The eighth days of the second and twelfth months: Koto-yoka

In the old calendar, the eighth day of the second month and the eighth day of the twelfth month were known together as Koto-yoka, "the eighths of things." Here "things" means festivals and seasonal events. These two days marked the beginning and the end of the year's round of rituals and farm work, and which one counted as the beginning and which as the end is said to vary from place to place.

They weren't simply days for celebrating, though. They were said to be days when strange things went from house to house, so people took a break from work, shut their doors early, and stayed quietly indoors. Some places also held hari-kuyo on the same day, a memorial for broken sewing needles, which were laid to rest in soft tofu or konnyaku jelly. Stepping back from everyday life at the turn of the season to set things right: that seems to be what Koto-yoka was for.

Many eyes are scary

In the Kanto region around Tokyo and elsewhere, it was told that the visitor on Koto-yoka was a one-eyed yokai. Some places called it Hitotsume-kozo; others told of a one-eyed monster by a different name.

So, it's said, people hung a bamboo basket called a mekago on the end of a long pole and stood it up in the yard, higher than the roof. Every gap in the weave looks a bit like an eye. A yokai with just one eye would see all those eyes, decide it was hopelessly outmatched, and turn back.

Woven patterns like this were also thought to ward off evil in other ways. Something with many eyes is something that keeps a careful watch. Showing the unseen world that "we're watching you" may have been one of the ways people in the past protected themselves.

A one-eyed boy with a notebook, and the fire for Dosojin

In parts of the Kanto region, a slightly stranger story is told. On the Koto-yoka in the twelfth month, Hitotsume-kozo goes around from house to house, writing down in a notebook how each family has been behaving. He then leaves the notebook with the Dosojin, the guardian god who stands at the edge of the village to keep bad things out, and comes back to collect it on the next Koto-yoka.

Once the notebook was handed over, illness and misfortune would come to those houses. So, the story goes, people burned the area around the Dosojin at the fire festival of Koshogatsu, the "little New Year" in mid-January, and the notebook went up in smoke along with it. By the time Hitotsume-kozo came to collect it, there was nothing left. It should be a scary tale, but there's a sly bit of village wisdom in it, too.

Fellow one-eyed yokai

Hitotsume-kozo has plenty of one-eyed company. The karakasa umbrella ghost, a closed umbrella with one big eye, is one of them, and so is the ippon-datara, said to appear on a mountain pass. You can read about the ippon-datara's "one day a year" in this story.

For Hitotsume-kozo's shaved head and lolling tongue, and Kunio Yanagita's idea that one-eyed yokai may be fallen gods, see Hitotsume-kozo's Yokaipedia page. And if you spot a bamboo basket on a winter night, spare a thought for that small, one-eyed visitor.