Curse and Tatari: Haunted Ground in the Modern World
Why one small plot in Tokyo's financial district never became a tower
Are a “curse” and a “tatari” the same thing?
The English word “curse” is sometimes translated into Japanese as noroi, and sometimes as tatari, the harm brought by an angry spirit. Both describe an unseen force that brings misfortune to people. The feared dead, ground you must not touch, a chain of consequence best avoided: even the uneasy texture the words carry is nearly identical.
What differs, almost to the point of opposition, is how people behave in the face of that fear.
In Western stories, a curse has been something to strike down, to drive out, to expose. A saint spears a dragon. A priest casts out a demon. An explorer sets out to test whether the curse of the pharaohs is real. The object of fear is an enemy to be pushed back.
In Japan, the dead who were feared were sometimes enshrined with great care and turned into allies. The one who curses is received as a god, a shrine is built for him, and festivals console him. The object of fear is refashioned into a guardian.
What this essay follows is two recurring story patterns, not two internally uniform civilizations.
Both traditions start from the same place, a fear of the dead and of certain ground. Why did the answers diverge into striking down and enshrining?
One clue sits in an unlikely spot: a small piece of land still standing at the center of Japanese finance.
The plot that never became a tower
Otemachi, Tokyo. The head offices of major banks and trading houses stand shoulder to shoulder here, on some of the most valuable land in Japan.
In one corner of it is a small plot that never became a high-rise and never became a road, and that has been left in place for a very long time. Office towers surround it. A subway entrance faces it. That patch alone stays low and green.
It is not vacant land. It is a historic site designated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, managed by a preservation society, and people still come to press their hands together there.
Why, at the heart of Japan’s financial district, did this one place never become a building? Follow the reason back and you arrive at a single warlord who lost a war more than a thousand years ago. And the history of the ground around him traces the fork between striking a curse down and enshrining it.
Clue 1: The mound that keeps coming back to the same spot
The site is the Kubizuka, the head mound, of Taira no Masakado.
Masakado was a warrior of tenth century eastern Japan who raised troops against the imperial court. He was defeated in 940, and his head was carried to Kyoto and put on display.
From here on, the preservation society presents the story as legend. The head displayed in Kyoto gave off a white light at midnight and flew east, coming down at Shibasaki in Toshima district of Musashi province, near present-day Otemachi. The ground rang for three days and three nights. People, afraid, washed the head, raised a mound, and buried it.
There is no way to confirm a flying head as historical fact. What the records do show is that a mound was built on this spot, and that repairs and memorial rites continued there in later centuries.
The mound lasted, but not because nobody touched it. It fell into ruin more than once, faced removal, and was in fact destroyed on one occasion. Each time it was repaired on the same spot and enshrined again.
In the late Kamakura period, while the mound lay neglected, an epidemic spread through the surrounding area. Shinkyo, a priest of the Ji school of Pure Land Buddhism, gave Masakado the Buddhist name Ren’a Amida Butsu, repaired the mound, and held memorial rites. The records of the temple Nichirinji and of the preservation society state that the epidemic subsided afterward.
These records do not establish that the epidemic was caused by Masakado’s tatari. What they do show is that the people of the time connected the neglect of the mound with the outbreak, and tried to settle their unease by repairing the mound and performing rites.
Then the story moves into the modern era.
In 1924, the year after the Great Kanto Earthquake, the Ministry of Finance put up temporary offices on the burned out block. In the process, the mound and the pond where Masakado’s head was said to have been washed were levelled.
Deaths and illnesses followed among the construction workers and ministry staff, and Finance Minister Hayami Seiji died in office in 1926. People at the time talked of Masakado’s tatari. Voices objecting to the loss of the mound grew, a memorial stone was raised, and the movement toward preservation began.
Here too, there is no evidence tying those deaths and illnesses to the removal of the mound. What is documented is the outcome: a mound that had been cleared away was returned to the same spot because people pushed for it.
The sharpest turn in the whole story comes just after the Second World War.
The occupying US forces set out to grade this burned over block into a parking lot. According to the preservation society’s records, a bulldozer overturned during the levelling work and the driver was killed. When the site was examined, the half buried markers of the mound came to light.
Those involved went to a house still standing nearby and called for Endo Masazo, the head of the neighbourhood association, who knew the local history. Endo explained to the work crew that this was the head mound of Taira no Masakado, a place said to bring tatari, and that it would be better not to touch it.
His petitioning began the next day. He went to General MacArthur’s headquarters with someone who spoke English, and kept pressing for the removal to be called off.
Years later Endo looked back on it as feeling “like risking my life, and it was frightening,” and said that once he explained through an interpreter that this was “the grave of a great chieftain of old,” he was understood at once.
After repeated petitions, the mound stayed. Had the accident not happened, and had Endo, who knew what the ground was, not been called in, the mound could well have disappeared.
After the war a private preservation society took over management, and in 1971 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government designated the site a metropolitan historic site. Between 2020 and 2021 the mound underwent its sixth refurbishment, timed with the redevelopment around it. It is still maintained today, and the society’s published list of corporate participants includes Mitsubishi Estate, Mitsui Fudosan, Mitsui & Co. and Takenaka Corporation, firms with holdings and projects in the surrounding blocks.
