A collection of a hundred debunked wonders, published in the 1890s, prints among its cases something that is not a wonder at all. It is a police item, lifted from a Kobe newspaper of the previous June, under the heading “The Arrest of an Inari Medium.”
The subtitle the paper gave it is exact: obtaining money by fraud under cover of a god.
The man was from Iwami, and was what people call an inari-oroshi — one who brings Inari down. He worked with his wife. They had arrived in Kobe around the fourth month of that year.
This is the part of the report that matters, and it is one clause.
They asked around until they heard of a man in a village outside the city who was a believer in Inari, and then the two of them went to his house.
Not a rich man. Not a gullible man. A devout one. The selection criterion was his religion, and it is stated as flatly as a trade practice, because that is what it was.
One detail cuts across the usual picture of this trade.
The practitioners covered here who were spoken through have mostly been women — the note on this site about the itako deals with the blind mediums of the north-east, and the miko material is the same. Here the report names the husband as the inari-oroshi, and the wife as the person working alongside him. Whatever the division of labour was between them, the paper does not treat a male medium as worth a remark.
It also charges them jointly. She is not described as an accessory to his scheme; the two of them arrive together, call at the house together, pray there daily together, and are picked up together. Whatever else this was, it was a family business.
The wife or the husband — the report does not separate them — made the claim.
A particular Inari has come down into me, they said. While you keep to what I tell you, there is no wish whatever that will not be granted. And if you think that is a lie, then here: wrap money in this white paper and offer it to Inari, and pray singlemindedly for a month or two, and then open it. Five yen will have become ten. A hundred will certainly have become two hundred. Of this there can be no further doubt.
He was convinced. He wrapped forty yen in banknotes in the paper and set it before the god.
The couple came to the house every day and prayed hard.
At some point in all that praying, they took the forty yen out of the paper and put old newspaper in its place, and went on with straight faces.
That is the whole trick, and it is not a Japanese trick. It has been worked in every country that has both paper money and belief, and it is still worked now. What the report preserves is the local fittings: the white paper, the god’s shelf, the daily visits, the one- or two-month waiting period that gives the operators time to be somewhere else.
Nothing about the claim was investigated. Nobody examined the god.
What drew official attention was that the couple’s spending had lately become conspicuously lavish. On that, the authorities looked into them, and the day before the report they were picked up at a cheap lodging house on the harbour road, drinking, and questioned.
Under questioning the forty yen came out, and so did the rest. Fifteen yen from a man in one district. Twenty from another. Twenty-three yen eighty from a third — the paper prints the eighty sen, which tells you it was reading a charge sheet. And gathered up across several dozen places in various districts, what they had taken came to several thousand yen.
Several thousand yen, in the 1890s, extracted forty at a time from people who had been identified by their neighbours as devout.
Here is the thing worth carrying away, and it is easy to miss because the case looks at first like the state moving against folk religion.
It is not. Nobody is charged with being an inari-oroshi. Nobody is charged with claiming possession, or with taking money to pray, or with lying about a god. The offence is that they took forty yen out of a piece of paper and replaced it with newspaper.
Set that beside the other enforcement case in the same body of work. The note on kokkuri records that in Osaka the practice itself was prohibited by the police, because harm was held to follow from it. Same decade, same author, same country — and in one case the state bans the practice and in the other it prosecutes only the theft.
I do not think the difference is principled. Kokkuri was a fad with no priesthood and nobody’s livelihood behind it, and it could be swept off the table. Bringing Inari down was an occupation with customers, and an administration that started charging people for that would have had a great deal of work to do.
The collection prints the item and then adds a line that is more careful than most of the book.
Whether this is true or not, he writes, is not something within our knowing. But since wickedness of this kind is far from rare in the world, one cannot be too much on guard.
He is not vouching for it. He is passing on a newspaper report as a newspaper report — which is worth noting, because in a volume titled for a hundred false wonders it would have cost him nothing to present it as proven.
The report ends with the arrest, as such reports do. It does not say what happened to the believer in the village outside Kobe.
He is the only person in the case who behaved consistently. He kept to what he was told. He prayed singlemindedly for the stated period. He did not open the paper early. The entire method depended on his doing exactly that, and he did it, and the reason he could be relied on to do it was that the neighbours all knew he would.
This site’s notes on the itako and on possession deal with people who made a living from being spoken through. This one is about a household that was known, up and down its own village, as the sort of family you could name if a stranger came asking who in these parts had faith.
The reading in “The Charge Was Theft” and the closing section are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
Found an error? Write to kwaidanote@gmail.com — corrections are made on this page and dated.