My Two Yen Worth: Ghost Arms And Legs!

2010-10-25

Ghost Arms And Legs!

てあらい鬼 (Te-arai Oni) is an Oni who is so large it's said he straddles the gaps between mountains.

ほそ手 (Hoso-De=slender arms) are these long slender arms (duh) that hang around your home out of duty.

足まがり (Ashi-Magari=leg turner) is a soft thing, like a kitten or a wad of cotton, which is felt wrapping itself around a person's leg at night, impeding the ability to walk. While it is not generally visible, Ashi-Magari is often believed to be the trick of a tanuki.

Ghost Leg known in Japan as 阿弥陀籤 (Amidakuji) is a method of lottery designed to create random pairings between two sets of any number of things, as long as the number of elements in each set is the same. This is often used to distribute things among people, where the number of things distributed is the same as the number of people. For instance, chores or prizes could be assigned fairly and randomly this way.
Check out Amidakuji for an example or look at these ghostly examples that I picked up. They come with a piece of gum and I really wonder what each of the 18 different ones entails (but at a buck a pop, it wasn't worth finding out.)