Japanese Superstitions and Mt. Fear

Although the Japanese are a very level-headed people who generally have their feet firmly planted on the ground, they can also be quite superstitious. I’ll regularly encounter odd (to me) Japanese beliefs in my daily life, like the other day when my daughter found a spider in her room and my wife warned us not to kill it because it was night, and it’s bad luck to kill a spider at night. Or when someone sticks their chopsticks into their rice accidentally. When I planned my trip to Aomori Prefecture, I was going to take my son to both the eastern Tsugaru Peninsula, so famous in enka songs, and the facing Shimokita Peninsula, location of Mt. Osore-zan, a terrifying volcanic place with a name that literally means Mt. Fear. This unearthly spot has been revered for more than 1000 years, a place where blind shamen tell people’s fortunes and women leave offerings at a very solemn shrine to babies miscarried before they could be born. When my mother-in-law heard I was planning to go, she got really animated and made me promise not to, so fearful was she that I would bring home some evil spirit or something. I’d been to the place before and I wanted to see Hirosaki with my son too, so we opted to go there and not bother with Mt. Fear.

Osore-zan is the gateway to hell in Japan, or something like that.