A Primer on Japanese Hell Imagery and Imagination - Occidental ...

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Monumenta Nipponica 63:1
Figure 8. Oni no shikogusa. Courtesy of the National Diet Library. Image reproduced
from Kabat 2000.
faith in Zenkôji and its icon conveyed everyone to paradise, hell suffers
a recession. With no sinners to stew, hell’s cauldron is covered in cobwebs.
Demons gamble as Enma tweezes his nose hairs to while away the time (see
figure 8). 126 An early Meiji work, Hima jigoku no zu , similarly depicts
hell’s functionaries with too much time on their hands due to the salvation
granted by the Buddha. A demon serves coffee to King Enma as he reads the
newspaper, bored demons take up new professions, and Enma becomes a tea
ceremony instructor. 127 Nichôsai’s (d. 1802?) illustrated scroll Bessekaikan
updates vocational appeals and warnings in hell imagery to correspond
to professions and predilections of the time. 128 Nichôsai nods to
traditionally brutal representations of hell, as in his soba noodle-makers’ hell,
where demons grate, knead, and roll out sinners like pasta dough, but one also
finds a tobacco hell, where demons smoke sinners like pipes (see figure 9), while
in candy-makers’ hell, sinners are twisted like taffy. Elsewhere an artistic demon
cuts and poses in a flower pot people who enjoyed flower arranging. While famil-
126 See Kabat 2000, pp. 196–97.
127 In the Clark Family Collection, on long term loan to the Ruth and Sherman Lee Institute of
Japanese Art, University of California, Merced.
128 See Nakatani 2003.