Hitodama

Also Known As: 人魂; “human soul”; also written hi-no-tama in some regional accounts
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A hitodama is a human soul that has come loose from its body and become visible as a slow, low-flying ball of light.
Role in Mythos: It marks a death, travelling from the body toward a temple or toward the house of someone the dead person loved.
Relation to Humans: It is not hostile and does not attack, but seeing one is understood as news, usually the worst kind. In some districts a soul that leaves a living body is read instead as a sign that the person is about to die, and in parts of Okinawa the same light announces a birth.

The rain had been coming down since dusk, and the light crossed the flooded paddy at walking pace, low enough that the water underneath it went pale. It was blue, near white at the middle, and it dragged a thin tail behind it the way a tadpole drags its tail. It did not hurry. It cleared the bank, passed the shrine gate without turning in, and went on toward the village. Anyone still awake to watch it knew what it was and knew, roughly, whose house it was going to.

The name says exactly what people believed it to be. Hito is a person. Tama is a soul. Put them together and you have a soul with a person’s death already behind it, out in the open air where souls are not supposed to be. This is the crucial distinction, and it is the one that gets lost most often: a hitodama is not a demon’s lantern and not a fox playing tricks with fire on a hillside. It is somebody. It was somebody an hour ago, or two days ago, and now it is a light over wet ground.

The belief is old enough to be in the oldest book of poems the country has. Among the verses of the sixteenth book of the Man’yōshū, compiled in the eighth century, someone writes of meeting the blue of a hitodama alone on a rainy night and of the sorrow that goes with it. Twelve hundred years later the colour has not changed. Blue, or blue tending to white, is still what people report, though red and orange turn up in the accounts too, and the weather has not changed either. Rain, damp air, the season when the ground gives back what it has absorbed. The soul fire of Japan is a foul-weather phenomenon.

Descriptions of the thing itself are consistent on shape and vague on scale. It is a ball with a tail. It floats rather than flies, staying near the ground, and it moves slowly enough that a person can walk beside it. Sources differ on how big it is, and honest ones say so. What they agree on is the behaviour, which is not the behaviour of a flame. It does not spread. It does not consume anything. It sits at head height over a rice field or a graveyard wall in air cold enough to sting, and it keeps its shape.

Where it comes from is the part of the story that people took seriously enough to argue about. The common account is that the soul separates from the corpse two or three days after death and sets out on a journey with a destination in mind, either a temple or the home of a person the dead one was close to. Other traditions have the soul leaving earlier, at the moment of death or a little before it, which raises the possibility that the light you are watching belongs to somebody who is not dead yet. The folklorists who went around the country writing down what villages actually said found a different name for it in every region and a slightly different theory behind each name. In the Nishitsugaru district of Aomori the soul of a person on the edge of death was called amabito. In the Senboku district of Akita the equivalent was tobi-damashi, the flying soul. Around Tōno in Iwate, Yanagita Kunio recorded omaku, the thought of a living person or a dead one gathering itself into a walking shape and showing itself to an eye that was not expecting it. In Okinawa they are tamagai, and in some places on the islands the sight of one means a child is coming rather than a coffin.

The image everyone now carries in their head, the round blue head with the wavering comet’s tail, owes a great deal to a printmaker. Toriyama Sekien put the hitodama into his illustrated demon catalogue around 1779, and the Edo woodblock artists between them fixed a shape that had been described in words for a thousand years. Every ghost light in Japanese comics and animation since is a descendant of that page.

Nobody has ever caught one. That has not stopped anyone trying to account for it. A nineteenth-century English folklorist, Sabine Baring-Gould, thought corpses might generate phosphine as they broke down and that the gas could produce a faint light drifting over graves, and a version of the same idea took hold in Japan, where funerals were burials rather than cremations for most of the country’s history and rain on a graveyard was held to draw the phosphorus out of the ground. In the 1980s the Waseda physicist Yoshi-Hiko Ohtsuki, who spent much of his career on ball lightning, argued that hitodama were plasma formed in the air. People still photograph them. The photographs still do not settle anything.

What it can do is simple enough, and it follows directly from what it is. It can leave the body, which is the one thing the body cannot do. It can cross open country, choose a house among many, and arrive. It carries information, and the information is a death, delivered before any messenger on foot could bring it. Its limits are equally plain, and they are the limits of a thing that has already lost its life. It does not speak. It does not act, or grant, or curse, or take. It cannot be held, and the man who runs out into the rain after it comes back with wet feet and nothing else. It is regularly mistaken for the onibi that burns on a hillside or the fox fire that leads travellers off a road, which is a peculiar indignity for what is, after all, the last visible fact about a human being. And it does not last. It goes where it is going, and then it is gone, flying low and slow and badly, like something that has not yet learned how.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hitodama?

A hitodama is a ball of light in Japanese folklore that is understood to be a human soul which has separated from its body. The name combines hito, meaning person, and tama, meaning soul. They are described as pale blue-white, red or orange orbs that drift slowly and close to the ground, usually trailing a thin tail behind them.

What does it mean if you see a hitodama?

Seeing a hitodama traditionally means someone has died, or is about to. The soul is said to leave the body around the time of death, often two or three days afterward, and to travel toward a temple or toward the house of a person the dead one was close to. In parts of Okinawa, where the same lights are called tamagai, some communities read them instead as a sign that a birth is near.

Are hitodama dangerous?

No. Hitodama are not aggressive and do not attack, curse or lead people astray. They are frightening because of what they announce rather than what they do, and traditional accounts describe them as passive lights that simply travel to a destination and vanish.

What is the difference between hitodama, onibi and kitsunebi?

All three are ghostly fires, but a hitodama is specifically the soul of a human being that has left its body. Onibi, the demon fire, and kitsunebi, the fox fire, are separate phenomena with different causes and different intentions, and both are far more likely to mean harm to whoever follows them.

How old is the hitodama belief?

It goes back at least to the eighth century. A poem in Book 16 of the Man’yōshū, Japan’s oldest surviving poetry anthology, describes the blue of a hitodama seen alone on a rainy night. The visual form most people recognise today, a round head with a wavering tail, was fixed much later by Edo-period printmakers, notably Toriyama Sekien around 1779.