Bake-kujira Legend

The bake-kujira legend tells of a skeletal ghost-whale said to appear in the Sea of Japan off the coast of Shimane. In Edo-period accounts, fishermen drawn out to sea one night by a strange light saw the skeleton of a whale floating on the surface, surrounded by strange shoals of fish and birds. The bake-kujira is understood as the collective vengeful presence of whales killed in whaling, and although it does not attack directly, those who see it are said to suffer serious illness, lean catches and household decline. As an early-modern maritime yokai, the figure forms at the meeting point of whaling village guilt and Buddhist memorial practice, and parallels are found in the whale-tomb and whale-memorial traditions of other whaling regions. The structure has three parts: the strange light at sea in the night; sighting of the skeletal whale and its retinue; and the spread of misfortune to those who see it. The cycle joins a maritime culture (whaling guilds) to a Buddhist mortuary frame (whale graves and memorial tablets), with comparable tales in the whaling districts of Yamaguchi, Wakayama and Chiba. The setting includes the Iwami coast of the Sea of Japan in Shimane (Hamada and Masuda) and the seas around the Oki islands; similar whale-ghost and whale-tomb traditions are recorded for Nagato (Yamaguchi) and Taiji (Wakayama). Sources include Toriyama Sekien's Konjaku Hyakki Shui (1781), the Edo 'Ehon Hyaku Monogatari' (1841), which has a 'bake-kujira' entry, the folklore volume of the Shimane prefectural history, and modern studies of the history of whaling.