Everything the tradition issues for the other side of the boundary, in one kit. Two primitives run it all — text (name the guardian) and geometry (draw the border) — plus food, manners, and nerve.
Paper & rope: the ofuda (issued, renewed yearly, burned at Dondoyaki; fails only through incomplete application — ask Hōichi's ears); the shimenawa (the drawn line, first hung behind the sun); the sutra sewn in the garment (the night parade's survivor).
Doorway hardware: the mekago basket (one-eye defense); holly and sardine heads (setsubun); the cedar sprig (amazake-babaa); the written door-slips — "this is Shōbō village" (wanyūdō) and "we don't like amazake" (the banbā variant); the carpenter's ink-line (yamawaro); repaired shōji (mokumokuren — housework as exorcism).
Field equipment: the bottomless ladle (funayūrei/umibōzu); spare rice balls, some always uneaten (hidarugami); tobacco for the looming monk; the crossed-fingers aperture blown through against fox-fire; a coin not reached for (tsurube-otoshi's bait); thrown beans, peaches from the founding myth (Yomi) to Momotarō's peach itself.
Postures. The kit includes things you do with your body. The sandal-crown: footwear lifted onto the head — which reroutes the rōjinbi's flame onto another path, and which, worn while lying flat, lets yagyō-san pass over you. You present yourself as already walked-on — the road's own furniture, not traffic. Same inversion-magic as the majimun's loincloth-headband. And *matanozoki, viewing the world upside-down between your own legs, which cuts both ways: elsewhere it reveals spirits; against the shidaidaka it deletes* one. The gesture was never about what you see — it is about breaking the ordinary orientation of looking.
Spoken tools: "after you"; "I saw through you"; "average"; "I don't need any paper"; "oil-pourer!"; "Batsu!"; "TEN!"; the nembutsu when all else fails. And the kit's gentlest item, from Sado: pursued by the ubu — the spider-shaped thing formed from stillborn infants, crying like a baby — you throw one sandal back over your shoulder and say "you are your mother." Not protocol, not payment, not posture: adoption. A stranger on a night road claims kinship with the unclaimed thing chasing him, and the claim is enough. The most merciful counter-spell in the tradition, attached to its cruellest diagnosis — what it wanted was a parent. And the meta-tool over all of them — the hundred-tales frame: the tradition's own machine for handling fear by telling it, one lamp at a time, stopping at 99 if you're wise.
Issued personnel: Jizō at every roadside; the komainu/shisa pairs breathing a-un at every gate; the hakutaku's image on the pillow; the baku on nightmare call (invoke sparingly — it can eat hopes); Fudō in the waterfall, the door out.
The kit's one instruction, printed on the lid: most of these work by acknowledgment, not force — the tradition disarms what it cannot defeat by being polite to it, feeding it, naming it, or housing it. The toolkit is a diplomacy set.