Binbōgami

Poverty, in Japanese folk belief, is a lodger.

He's a shabby, emaciated old man, pale, dressed badly, and he carries a straw fan. He moves into your storage closet — not the main room; the closet, the neglected part of the house — and once he's in, he stays, and your household gets poorer. Not through any dramatic disaster. Just continuously, quietly, from then on.

He picks his houses by temperament rather than by wealth. He gravitates toward lazy people, regardless of how much they currently have.

And he has exactly one appetite: miso. That's what the fan is for. He wafts the smell of it toward himself.

How to get him out

This is where the binbōgami stops being a story and becomes a set of practices, which is why he's one of the most interesting figures in the whole tradition.

In Niigata, on New Year's Eve, you build the fire in the hearth up hot. The heat drives him out of the house — and once he's gone, the god of fortune is said to arrive. One tenant out, the better one in.

In Osaka, at the end of the month, shopkeepers roasted miso and carried it around the neighbourhood. The smell lures the god into the folded miso, and the miso then goes into the river. He is trapped by his own appetite and floated away. That is pest control conducted as theology, and it's brilliant.

And the formal eviction: steamed rice and roast miso set on a wooden tray, carried out through the rear exit of the house, and floated downstream. Poverty is not shown out the front door. It goes out the servants' entrance.

Look at what the rituals actually are

Now step back and read the practice list again, and notice something.

Build the fire up at the turn of the year. Do an accounting at the end of every month. Handle the disposal properly and get it off the premises.

Every single anti-binbōgami ritual is indistinguishable from good housekeeping. Heat the house properly. Reckon up monthly. Don't let things accumulate in the closet.

The god of poverty is driven out by exactly the habits whose absence let him in, and the ritual is the habit, wearing a costume that makes it memorable and communal instead of a nagging chore. This is folklore doing economics, and doing it better than most advice does now.

And then the reversal

There's one more layer, recorded in a merchant-class book of 1688, and it's the best thing on this page.

Some households did the opposite. They honoured him. They made offerings. They kept a maintained shrine to the god of poverty in the house.

And in those households, the story says, he transformed into a bringer of fortune.

That's the keystone of the whole tradition, stated as clearly as it ever gets: the being is constant, and worship is the variable. The same tenant is poverty or prosperity depending entirely on how he's treated. It's the identical mechanic that governs the foot through the ceiling that becomes a household god when washed with respect, and the disease-crone who protects the children of families who make her offerings.

Put him beside the zashiki-warashi — the child in the parlour whose presence makes the house prosper — and you have the two resident spirits of the Japanese household ledger. The child you have to keep happy, and the old man you have to keep moving.