Inugami Legend

The Inugami tradition is a possession-lineage (tsukimono-suji) folk belief centered on Kochi and extending through Shikoku and the Chugoku region, in which a dog spirit is said to be attached to certain households. According to one account, a live dog is buried with only the head left above ground, food placed before its mouth, and the head cut off at the point of starvation to make the Inugami; according to another, the spirit is inherited and enshrined within the lineage. Those resented by an Inugami household are said to suffer abdominal pain, derangement, or death, and from the early modern period onward marriage and association taboos around Inugami households were widely practiced in Shikoku and Chugoku mountain villages. Possession-lineage discrimination became a major theme of modern Japanese folklore: Hayami Yasutaka's Tsukimono-mochi Meishin (Showa 28, 1953), Yanagita Kunio's Hitotsume-kozo Sonota and Yokai Dangi, Ishizuka Takatoshi's Nihon no Tsukimono (Showa 34, 1959), the Kochi Prefectural Board of Education's Kochi Kenshi Minzoku-hen, and Shikoku ethnography are the basic references. The tradition does not appear in the Kiki and is read as an early-modern folk lineage.