usually everything what i know is that , oriental ghost stories came from Japanese ,
The western world developed a pantheon of Gods to explain the inexplicable nature of the world. Zeus, Odin, The Titans, the Tuatha DeDanan 鈥 all of these elementally superior beings forged the fates of Earth and man, destroyers and shapers of destiny.
The East developed a mythology that was both more arrogant and more humble at the same time 鈥 from the greatest calamity to the greatest fortune, the invisible rulers of this world were the spirits of the dead.
To paint with the broadest possible brush, the spirit released from the body instantly became something akin to a Jedi Master, only moreso. It could summon rains to the fields鈥 or drought, or typhoons or meteor showers, all depending on how well-disposed they felt at any given time. No less than 8 million spirit/gods loitered around the flowers and the rivers and the marketplaces and the homes of Japan. Some of them became specialists, merging with rivers or forests or beasts 鈥 what have you 鈥 and used these natural forces to mete out favor or punishment. Many others ran freelance, causing disease or ill-fortune or luck or prosperity on a completely prejudiced basis.
What logically followed was that everybody tried to stay on the good side of every dead person they knew. If you owed Uncle Lee a fiver from an old gambling debt, it better be in his pocket when they burned the body, or else he鈥檒l be there to screw with your dice for every craps game you played for the rest of your life. If you gypped cousin Fong out of a cow at some point you鈥檇 better settle with the widow quick before he came back and brought a plague down on your entire herd.
Things were in no way limited to family, either. If you jerked around Mei, her great-grandfather鈥檚 spirit, being rather protective of her, could come over and burn your house down. Unless of course your dear, departed Cousin Wei is out there patrolling the grounds to deflect him. One of the scariest threats a person could make is to declare that it had become their intention to haunt you. While Westerners had to deal with the simple math of one god/one devil, the folks out East were living day-to-day in the middle of a supernatural turf war.
As millennium crept by, the good folks of the far east sharpened their philosophies on the care and feeding of ghosts. First off, they decided that every ghost was essentially pissed off 鈥 nobody likes being dead. So every soul that popped out of a corpse was treated to a seven-year regimen of prayer and offering designed to mollify them and send them off packing to The Happy Place. Without the seven-year ghost psychotherapy course, all the pissiness bubbles up and turns rancid, and your basic perturbed spirit is in danger of becoming a full-fledged demon.
Naturally, this puts a few categories of spirits in the S.O.L bin 鈥 victims murdered and hidden, for example, or solitary suicides. Unsent and unmourned, these souls are practically destined to become hardcore vengeance machines.
Back here in the west, ghosts are pretty much miserable souls 鈥 dead and wandering, a little moan here, a little sigh there. In Japan, that鈥檚 part of daily breakfast. The ghosts they worry about would slit your gizzard, yank your heart out and play your arteries like the bass fiddle. They鈥檝e been doing it since before the American Revolution in folklore and is a primary staple of Kabuki, Japan鈥檚 national theater, to the morbid delight of several generations of Japanese.
It took dainty American sensibilities a while to catch up. Floating candles and chattering skulls were sufficient to send Lou Costello and The Three Stooges into catatonia, and a woman in flowing robes and white greasepaint was sufficient to score first base for American daters right up through the sixties. A cheesed off Asian ghost that would tear people鈥檚 souls out just because they鈥檙e having a miserable afterlife might have spoiled the mood some.
Squaring off against an oriental ghost was also slightly different than it is back here in the states. If Japanese Gods were human spirits, so were Japanese demons; although priests were the best first-line defense, they were by no means guaranteed protection. A Japanese version of "The Exorcist" would have the demon pop out of Reagan just long enough to drop a wall on Father Merrick and then get back to cavorting in peace. It's a mano-a-mano fight, and the guys without the bodies have the advantage.
So, how long will we basking in Asian ghost stories? Frankly, probably not too long. As nasty as they are, Oriental ghosts are pretty much one-trick ponies as far as motivation goes. You see one spazzed out black-haired critter, you've seen 'em all; as you may have noticed, the American release of "Ring 2" slammed into the ground harder than a Greek airliner, while the series has gone five movies and a television series in native Japan. I think we demand more fiber in our carnage; Japanese ghosts literally contain more style than substance.
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