Japanese folklore

Japanese folklore encompasses the informally learned folk traditions of Japan and the Japanese people as expressed in its oral traditions, customs, and material culture. In Japanese, the term minkan denshō is used to describe folklore. The academic study of folklore is known as minzokugaku. Folklorists also employ the term minzoku shiryō or "folklore material" to refer to the objects and arts they study. Shinto Men dressed as namahage, wearing ogre-like masks and traditional straw capes (mino) make rounds of homes, in an annual ritual of the Oga Peninsula area of the Northeast region. These ogre-men masquerade as kami looking to instill fear in the children who are lazily idling around the fire. This is a particularly colorful example of folk practice still kept alive. A parallel custom is the secretive ja ritual of the Yaeyama Islands, Okinawa which does not allow itself to be photographed. Many, though increasingly fewer households maintain a kamidana or a small Shinto altar shelf. The Shinto version of the kitchen god is the Kamado kami, and the syncretic Buddhist version is the Kōjin, a deity of the hearth enshrined in the kitchen. Japanese popular cults or kō are sometimes devoted to particular deities and buddhas, e.g. the angry Fudō Myōō or the healer Yakushi Nyorai. But many cults centered around paying respects to sacred sites such as the Ise Shrine (Ise-kō or ja) or Mount Fuji (ja, by which many local mock-Fuji shrines have been erected). Pilgrimage to these meccas declined after the Edo period. But recently, the of the eighty-eight temple sites (commonly known as ohenro-san) has become fashionable. Popular media and cottage industries now extoll a number of shrines and sacred natural sites as ja. There is a long list of practices performed to ward evil (yakuyoke) or expel evil (yakubarai, oharai), e.g. sounding the drums. In some areas it is common to place a small mound of salt outside the house (ja). Salt-scattering is generally considered purifying (it is employed in sumo tournaments, to give a well-known example).