![]() In a Christian context, for example, it might call to mind the Christian Eucharist, when Jesus instructs his disciples, “Take this bread and eat it, for it is my body.” (Pagan Romans used false accusations against Christians to justify persecution, making Christians into an Other, as I’ll discuss in a minute.) In the West, cannibalism as communion isn’t completely unknown either. Kenney also claims that, even though Shinto priests aren’t “sympathetic to this practice,” multiple Japanese have reported eating bone or drinking a tea made with ashes: “We drank Grandmother’s ashes in order to keep her with us, to be joined with her.” ![]() On the other hand, Elizabeth Kenney sees cannibalistic symbolism in the Shinto funeral-for example “all the eating that goes on during the funeral rites,” including simultaneously with the cremation of the corpse, and the custom of picking through the ashes with chopsticks for bone fragments. Cannibalism is perhaps the ultimate taboo, the taboo Sigmund Freud describes, fairly accurately, as the only taboo “to be universally proscribed” and “completely surmounted.” In each of these cases, the Japanese response to cannibalism is more or less the same as the American response. (It didn’t, of course.) According to the fake news, you could now eat part of another person for as little as $120. His colorful resume includes soft-core porn star and sushi critic.Īnd don’t forget the internet rumor that Japan passed legislation in 2014 to allow for the consumption of human flesh. After a stint in prison of only two years, he’s made a career of his notoriety. He has both horrified and fascinated the public for the last thirty years and developed a kind of cult following not unlike the unsettling hero worship of Ted Bundy in the United States. There’s also the notorious case of Issei Sagawa, the Japanese man who killed and cannibalized a Dutch woman. Tanaka reported that he hadn’t been able to publish his work in Japan because it was deemed “too sensitive.” As recently as 2014, many in Japan were outraged by the depiction of Japanese cannibalism in the WWII biopic Unbroken-“there was absolutely no cannibalism,” one Shinto priest claimed, “That is not our custom.” In the early 90s, historian Toshiyuki Tanaka publicized documents that he claims “clearly show that this cannibalism was done by a whole group of Japanese soldiers, and in some cases they were not even starving.” He claimed the motive was most often “to consolidate the group feeling of the troops”-what better way to unite troops than to break a strong taboo together? Today, cannibalism is a quietly contentious political issue in Japan. The connotations of cannibalism in Japanese folklore are always negative. ![]() For more than a thousand years, demonic female yamauba have roamed Japan’s mountains, assisting some travelers, eating others. Like many other countries, Japan has its own body of folklore with cannibalistic monsters. Futakuchi-Onna from Ehon Hyaku Monogatari (絵本百物語, “Picture Book of a Hundred Stories”)
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