Enma Daiō

Somebody has to run hell, and in Japan it's Enma.

He's the magistrate of the dead — King Yama, arriving through Buddhism from India by way of China, and installed in Japan as the judge who sits at the head of the underworld's court. Every soul comes before his desk. He hears the case, he reads the record, and he assigns you where you're going.

The image of him is fixed and it is very good: an enormous red-faced figure in Chinese court dress, glaring, holding a tablet of office, flanked by his staff. He looks less like a devil than like the most terrifying civil servant you will ever meet, which is exactly right.

The tongue

If a Japanese child knows one thing about Enma, it's this:

Tell a lie and Enma will pull out your tongue.

He has great pincers for it. It's in every hell scroll, it's in the statuary, and it has been in the mouth of every grandmother in Japan for centuries. As child-facing doctrine goes it is close to perfect — specific, physical, memorable, and aimed at the exact body part that committed the offence.

Nothing else in the Japanese afterlife has anything like its market penetration.

He has a department

What I find genuinely delightful about the Japanese hell is that it is not a pit. It's an institution, and you can more or less draw its org chart.

Before you ever reach Enma you pass through intake: an old woman on the bank of the river of the dead who takes your clothes, and her colleague who hangs them on a tree to weigh how far you sank on the crossing. That's your case file, and it's assembled before you arrive.

Enforcement is Gozu and Mezu — Ox-Head and Horse-Face — who bring you in. The warders are oni, the horned demons, who carry out whatever the court decides. There's a cart that comes to collect certain corpses. There are whole graded realms for particular failings — the hungry ghosts, with their needle throats and swollen bellies, for the greedy.

And above Enma there's a fuller bench: a system of Ten Kings, each judging at a different interval after death, which is why Japanese memorial services fall on the days they do. The seventh day, the forty-ninth day, the anniversaries — those are court dates.

Japan imagined the afterlife as paperwork with demons, and it committed to the bit thoroughly.

Even hell gets a holiday

The best detail on the whole page.

Enma has festival days — the sixteenth of the first month and the sixteenth of the seventh. And on those days, the tradition holds, hell rests. The cauldrons come off the boil. The demons stop work.

In the Edo period those same dates were the days shop apprentices and servants were given off to go home and see their families — some of the very few days in the year when the working household stopped.

So the two holidays line up: hell closes, and so does the shop. Somewhere in that arrangement is the most humane thing this tradition ever did with its own underworld — the people with the hardest lives in Japan sharing their annual day off with the damned.