Onmyōdō

Japan's monsters had a civil service.

Not a metaphorical one. An actual bureau, in the actual government, with a founding statute, a budget, an examination system, career grades, and a seventeen-hundred-year employment history.

Onmyōdō — the "way of yin and yang" — was institutionalized by the Taihō Code in 701 as the Onmyōryō, the Bureau of Onmyō.

What the bureau actually did

Its duties were a strange mixture by modern lights, and completely coherent by its own.

Calendars. Someone has to determine when the year starts and which days are which. That was them.

Astronomical observation. Recording what the sky did, and reporting anything anomalous, because anomalies in the sky were state business.

Timekeeping for the court.

And: protective magic against disasters and disease.

All four of those were the same job. If you believe the cosmos is a system whose state can be read and whose adverse conditions can be mitigated, then the astronomer and the exorcist are the same official with the same training.

They were who you called

Everything in this collection that happened to the court has this bureau's fingerprints on it.

A black cloud with a voice in it settles over the palace and the emperor sickens — the diviners identify it, and an archer is dispatched.

The emperor's favourite consort is beautiful, brilliant, and somehow killing him — an onmyōji named Yasuchika runs the divination and names her as a fox.

Plagues, droughts, comets, fires, and the string of imperial deaths that got blamed on an exiled scholar's ghost.

Those aren't folk tales that happened to involve the government. They are the bureau's paperwork, retold.

The compliance regime

This is the part that's hard to believe until you look at the diaries.

Katatagae — "direction-changing."

The system held that on certain days, travel in certain directions was inauspicious. And the Heian aristocracy complied, seriously, with real logistical cost.

If you needed to go somewhere in a forbidden direction, you didn't go. You went somewhere else first, slept there overnight, and set out again the next day — because you were now departing from a different point, so the bearing was different, so the taboo was satisfied.

People did this constantly. Court diaries are full of it. Appointments got moved. Visits were rerouted. Nights were spent in other people's houses purely to reset a compass bearing.

The Heian elite lived inside a regulatory regime administered by ghost- bureaucrats, and they experienced the supernatural much less as terror than as paperwork.

It got built into the cities

The northeast is the kimon — the demon gate, the unlucky quarter.

And this is katatagae frozen into urban planning.

Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei guards Kyoto's northeast. Kan'ei-ji was built to guard Edo Castle's. The wall of the Kyoto Imperial Palace is notched at that corner — the corner is simply removed, so there's no northeast angle for anything to come in through.

You can go and look at that notch. It is a piece of defensive architecture aimed at a direction.

And it became Japanese

Onmyōdō arrived as Chinese cosmology. From about the ninth century it began interacting with Shinto, and with the goryō cult — the practice of pacifying wrathful spirits by enshrining them — and became a system that exists nowhere else.

Which means the great ghost-settlements were partly bureau productions. When a dead courtier's spirit was answered with restored titles, a struck record, and a national shrine, there were officials advising on that, with training and a rank.

The employment history

Here's the thing I find most remarkable.

701 — founded, by statute.

Then centuries of operation, with the Abe family — Seimei's line — dominant, and their descendants the Tsuchimikado holding a hereditary monopoly on the practice for generations.

1870 — abolished. The Meiji government, modernizing and rationalizing, prohibited onmyōdō outright.

1954 — refounded, as Tensha Tsuchimikado Shintō, once postwar religious freedom made it possible again.

Founded 701. Abolished 1870. Back in 1954.

An eleven-hundred-and-seventy-year run, one formal abolition, and a return.

Whatever else the yokai were, they had professional opposite numbers with a pension scheme — and those opposite numbers outlasted the imperial court, the shogunate, and the government that fired them.