Amazake-babaa

Also Known As: 甘酒婆, “sweet-sake hag”; also read amazake-baba and amasake-baba, and appearing in Yamanashi as Amazake-banbā
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She goes from door to door on winter nights asking whether the house has any sweet sake, and sickness falls on whoever answers.
Role in Mythos: She carries epidemic disease through a village or a city one household at a time, and several accounts identify her with the god of smallpox.
Relation to Humans: She deals with ordinary families at their own front doors, and the transaction is entirely verbal, since it is the reply and not the drink that infects. People kept her off with a sprig of cedar at the threshold and, when the rumour reached the cities, with red berries, dried chilli and a written lie about the stock inside.

Winter in the villages of old Aomori did the sensible thing and went quiet after dark. Snow packed the street flat, the fire went down to a red seam under the ash, and the only working sound left was the wind testing the eaves. Then somebody began at the far end of the road and knocked at every house in turn. It was never a violent knock. It came with a question attached, put politely, in the voice of an old woman: is there no sweet sake in this house?

Whatever you said, you fell ill.

That is very nearly the whole of her. The earliest written record comes from a folklorist’s notebook published in the journal Tabi to Densetsu in June 1940, collected in Aomori City, and a second account printed in the folklore volume of the Miyagi prefectural history in 1956 sets the same story in parts of Aomori and adds that she works on winter nights, knocking her way along under the eaves. The two accounts were gathered by different people for different purposes sixteen years apart and they agree on three points and no others. She asks about amazake. Answering brings sickness. A cedar sprig hung at the door keeps her away. There is no fourth point. Nobody who reported her had seen her.

That silence is worth sitting with, because it is unusual. Japanese tradition is generous with faces, and its catalogues of yōkai are crowded with beings drawn down to the last claw and eyelid. She got none of it. The word attached to her is babā, an old woman, worn and unglamorous, and beyond that she is a knock and a sentence. The one piece of colour in the Aomori note is not even hers: the same page describes the smallpox god as appearing in the shape of a child in a red hood and a red robe. Red runs right through Japanese smallpox practice, in the red paper dolls set around a sick bed, the red banners, the red wands, the red rice offered when the fever broke. Her neighbour in the notebook got the costume. She got the doorway.

The thing she asks for is the least frightening thing imaginable. Amazake is thick, cloudy and barely alcoholic, made by letting rice mould work on cooked rice until it turns sweet, and it is served warm with the grains still suspended in it. It tastes faintly of milk and steamed rice. It is what you give a child on a cold day. An old woman standing outside in the snow asking whether anyone has any is not a monster in the doorway, it is a neighbour, and the whole mechanism of the story runs on that.

The counter-charm was cedar. A cut sprig of sugi, tied above the door and left there, and she would pass the house without stopping. Households facing a bad season fixed the greenery in place before dusk, banked the fire early and lay listening to the latches being tried down the row. Nobody fought her. That was not the shape of the relationship.

She did not stay in the northeast. Between 1817 and 1820, as smallpox moved through the country, the same rumour surfaced in Edo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya at once, and people in all four cities hung cedar leaves, branches of nandina heavy with red winter berries, and strings of dried chilli at their gates. A recent monograph working through early-modern documents tracks her further still, into Owari and Dewa and Nagaoka, back around to Hiroshima and Osaka for a second pass, and out to Matsuyama, and it notes that in Owari and Edo she travelled with a popular song. A song is a very efficient way to move a rumour. So is an epidemic.

The cleverest defence was pure commerce. Rather than bar her, a household could paste a slip of paper on the gate declaring that fine sake was already stocked here, which turned the encounter into a failed sales call. The same instinct shows up in a smallpox charm recorded elsewhere in Japan, where you write on the gatepost that the master of the house is away and the disease deity, being polite, goes elsewhere. These are not spells. They are excuses.

What she carried has been argued over. The rumour that swept the cities was originally about catching smallpox specifically, and it slackened into a general fear of epidemic sickness as it was passed along, which is the ordinary fate of a story in transit. That drift is the reason some scholars read her as the hōsōgami, the smallpox deity, working under a domestic disguise, and it makes the knock at the door less a haunting than a house call from the disease itself.

The tradition also splits. In Yamanashi she is the amazake-banbā, and she is not begging but selling, coming round nightly to push her sake and her amazake on the village. The counter-charm adapts to the sales pitch: a note at the door announcing that this household dislikes sake and amazake, and she stopped coming. Stranger again is what stands in Bunkyō in Tokyo, in the grounds of a Sōtō Zen temple called Nichirinji, where an Amazake Jizō has been listed among the stones since before the war. The story there is not hers at all, though it borrowed her name. An old woman who sold amazake near the temple was worn down by a terrible cough, and died saying she wanted to help people with the same affliction, so the priest had her likeness cut in stone. People with bad chests still leave amazake at her feet. In Edo the two ideas ran side by side, and when the sickness was going round, mothers with young children would hurry to the cough-curing old-woman statues and pray.

Her power is the power of contagion, which needs no strength at all. She cannot break a door or work a charm or lay a curse; she can only ask, and be answered, and let the answer do the rest. That makes her limitless in one direction, since she can be at every house on a street in one night and in four cities in one season, and pitifully limited in the other. Green cedar stops her. So do red berries, dried peppers and a fib on a scrap of paper. So, most of all, does silence, because the transaction requires a reply and she has no way to compel one. For a spirit once thought to be smallpox itself, she can be beaten by a household that simply lies still and says nothing at all, not even no.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Amazake-babaa?

The Amazake-babaa is an old-woman yōkai from northeastern Japan, recorded chiefly in Aomori and Miyagi, whose name means “sweet-sake hag”. She walks a village at night knocking at doors and asking whether the house has any amazake, a warm, thick, barely alcoholic rice drink. Anyone who answers her falls ill.

What happens if you answer the Amazake-babaa?

Sickness follows, and the content of the answer makes no difference: saying the house has amazake and saying it has none both bring illness. The infection travels through the reply itself rather than through any drink or contact. Staying silent is the only recorded way through the encounter.

How do you keep the Amazake-babaa away?

The oldest accounts from Aomori and Miyagi say a sprig of cedar hung at the doorway will turn the Amazake-babaa aside. When the rumour spread to Edo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya between 1817 and 1820, households added nandina branches and dried chilli at the gate, or pasted up a paper claiming that fine sake was already in stock. In the Yamanashi version, where she peddles her sake as the Amazake-banbā, a note saying the household dislikes sake and amazake sends her on.

Is the Amazake-babaa the same as the smallpox god?

Some accounts identify her with the hōsōgami, the deity of smallpox, and the identification has a documentary basis. The urban rumour of 1817 to 1820 originally warned that answering her brought smallpox, and only softened into a general fear of epidemic disease as it was retold. The earliest Aomori notebook entry that records her also describes the smallpox god as a child in a red hood and red robe.

Why is there an Amazake Jizō statue in Tokyo?

Nichirinji, a Sōtō Zen temple in Bunkyō, Tokyo, holds a stone Amazake Jizō that belongs to a separate and gentler tradition sharing the name. It commemorates an old woman who sold amazake near the temple, suffered badly from a cough, and asked before dying to be able to help others with the same complaint. People troubled by coughs leave amazake there, which is the reverse of everything the Amazake-babaa does.