Since I live in the countryside, I always took the side road through the rice paddies on my way to school.
That day, I was walking along the side road through the rice paddies, listening to the croaking of frogs, as I always do on my way home.
Then I noticed a person standing in the rice paddies, dressed in what looked like a pink kappo-gai (a Japanese cooking stove).
I thought, “Oh, he must be planting rice or something.”
I took a closer look and noticed something odd about the way he was moving.
He was on one leg, wiggling his hips.
He was twirling a white plastic string around his body as if he was doing rhythmic gymnastics.
It was like he was playing hula hoop.
And it was coming closer and closer to me little by little, with one foot on the ground.
In the rice paddies at sunset, with the croaking of frogs echoing in the air, I watched it, unable to move for some reason.
I could not see its face as it came toward me with its hips wriggling.
It was shaking face violently, as if it was blurred in a photograph. It was like that.
It body looked normal, but only it face was blurred.
I wondered if my eyes were blurry. I tried rubbing my eyes again and again, but I still couldn’t see her face.
And it was already right in front of me.
“Oh, my life is over.”
As soon as I thought that, tears flowed down my face at a tremendous rate. My eyes hurt so much that I couldn’t open them.
I must have passed out from the pain and fear, because the next time I opened my eyes, I was in my futon at home.
My father, grandfather, grandmother, and a neighborhood monk were surrounding me.
They were chanting something like a Buddhist prayer in unison.
I thought the situation was hilarious, and I laughed.
My grandmother held me down and said in a low voice, “Stay still!”
This went on for about an hour after I woke up.
After that, my grandmother told me that the thing I met was a “scarecrow god” or something like that.
I don’t know if the scarecrow was lonely or what, but it tried to take me in as one of its own.
She told me that if scarecrow took me away, I would have to live in the mud for the rest of my life.
Thanks to this, I still get scared when I see a scarecrow standing alone in the rice paddies.
It was a neighbor who found me passed out.
I saw a person (me) lying on the side of a rice field, and when he approached me, he said, “No way…” I was lying on the side of the field with tears streaming down my face.
He saw a scarecrow standing in front of me, looking down at me.
He thought, “I knew it,” and informed my grandfather and the priest.
It seems that there have been several similar incidents in the past.
Most of the people survived.
Some of them kept staring at the scarecrow in front of them and kept laughing, refusing to leave the scarecrow’s side.
I also heard a more unpleasant story.
It is said that in times of food shortages in the olden days, people would kill the useless people in their village in order not to waste food.
However, they thought that just killing them would not be enough, so they started to use them to keep away the animals that were destroying the rice paddies.
To prevent them from escaping, they would cut off one of their legs, dress them in white clothes, and tie them to a cross-shaped tree set up in the rice paddies.
The man, who could hardly move because one leg and both hands were tied, wiggled his body to try to escape from the tree.
The villagers watching from afar are said to say, “That person can hold out for two or three more days.”
The people who are tied up usually die of starvation or sunstroke? Some are eaten by bears or wild dogs.
Well, if you do such atrocious things, there will be a lot of things happening in that village, such as hauntings and so on.
(Neither his father nor his grandfather knew the details of what kind of haunting had occurred.)
A man who was made into a scarecrow while still alive was feted as a “the deity of scarecrow.”
Well, both my father and my grandfather loved to drink, so I don’t know how much of this is true and how much is a lie.
