RELOCATED

Blogspot hosting wasn't doing it for me, since formatting was a real pain in the ass. I might as well keep this up, but all future updates will be done via Tumblr.

Check out American Alchemy in its current version at http://americanalchemy.tumblr.com/

That was fast.

Yokai: Toire-no-Hanako-san

Matthew Meyer is a guy who lives in my very rural prefecture of Fukui. I stumbled across his blog a while ago while researching one of my minor obsessions, yokai (Japanese folkloric ghosts/demons/spirits). He had a project where he drew (awesome) pictures of a yokai and posted their accompanying stories each day of October. He called it the "A-Yokai-A-Day," and the results were awesome.
I reposted one of my favorites, "Toire-no-Hanako-san," a ghost that most elementary and junior high students -- and hence, my students -- are terrified of. Read up on her... it's freaky weird. When you're done with that, make sure to check out Matthew's other awesome yokai. I recommend the "Slit-Mouth Woman" if you never want to sleep again.

For the last 5 paintings I wanted to do a few of the named, more famous ghosts from Japan, like the one I did of Gagoze a few days back. Something about these individual monster legends is so compelling; that they, as single characters, have kept par with the legions of bizarre and fantastic yokai that have filled Japan’s folklore over the centuries. Like the Jersey Devil or Bigfoot, these spirits have a lot more character and can feel a lot more personal than your ordinary spook.

Hanako-san

Who among us hasn’t been scared of using a toilet at one point or another? When I was a kid, I was afraid that there was a lobster in our toilet that would sneak up and pinch my bottom when I couldn’t see. And of course the public restrooms on I-95… who wouldn’t be scared of those! What I remember most being scared of, though, was the ghost that lived in the bathroom mirror that we used to try to summon at sleepover parties. Sometimes it was the Candyman, sometimes it was Bloody Mary, but there was a morbid horror about that fact that you were actually inviting something to come into your home and destroy you… and that was probably what was so fun about it.

Hanako, or Toire no Hanako (“Hanako of the Toilet”) as she is known is Japan, is a somewhat modern ghost. She doesn’t have a distinct origin, but reports of her go back to the 1950′s, and can be found in every school in every prefecture across Japan. She is the “Bloody Mary” of Japanese elementary schools. The legend of Hanako tells of a ghost of a young girl who haunts a bathroom. Some legends say she was an abused child who was chased down and finally caught by her angry parent in the school’s bathroom. Some modern tales claim she is a student who committed suicide in the girl’s bathroom. Others say she was the victim of a school which was burnt down during one of the WW2 bombing raids — she was playing hide and seek and hid out in the bathroom when the bombs struck. In most stories, though, it is agreed that she died (and thus now resides) in the 3rd stall of the 3rd floor bathroom. And she waits there, ready to be summoned by daring or curious children.

It is said that she can be summoned by knocking on her stall three times and ask, “Hanako-san, are you there?” If she is there, she will reply, “Yes I am,” in a quiet, little girl’s voice. The stall door will open up a bit, and when the student looks in to investigate, the ghost of little Hanako, wearing a red skirt and with her hair done up in an old-style bun, will pull her into the toilet and down to Hell.

In the version my wife grew up with in elementary school, a girl who goes to the bathroom by herself will sometimes hear a voice asking her if she wants to be friends. If the poor kid is smart and tries to save her life by saying yes, Hanako’s ghost will come up beneath her and drag her down through the toilet to Hell. If the kid says no, Hanako will simply cut her to pieces. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Hanako is not the only school bathroom ghost in Japan, nor even the scariest. In fact, there are some stories where Hanako will actually protect children from other bathroom-based ghosts! And, unlike some other ghosts, Hanako can be easily avoided if you just stay away from her hiding place.

Of course, any kid who is like me will probably just seek her out anyway. And maybe they’ll grow up to be obsessed with ghosts and monsters too…

Hanako-san by Matthew Meyer

I'll admit, the thought of running into Hanako made me a little leery of toilets when I first got here.

Domo Genesis and Hodgy Beats - TANGGOLF

I've been a bit on the fence about the whole Odd Future surge lately. I must admit I'm a bit of a neophyte and am still scratching the surface of the OFWGKTA catalogue, only first discovering the OMGWTFBBQ-esque acronym while on a recent (and ongoing) Das Racist kick. While I think the collective is pretty brilliant from what I've heard so far, I have problems with them. Technically, most of them are damn gifted, and they have the viral thing down like nobody before. The problem is, even the best among them (Earl Sweatshirt) are capable of spitting truly heinous shit that I sometimes find hard to listen to, even as it flows incredibly over Tyler's handiwork. Call me old-fashioned, but rape lyrics will always make me cringe.
Nevertheless, I can't help but listen to a lot of this stuff, and I'm pretty excited for Goblin to drop later. In the meantime, the blogs have been abuzz about this track, and I am pretty sure you've seen it tossed around by the Pitchfork-loyal "we understand rap on a much deeper level than you" jive-turkey crowd. But I'm gonna agree with them here. Domo Genesis and Hodgy Beats combined with the beat from 4th Chamber is a thing of beauty. I'm a sucker for anything Wu.
"What the fuck is being humble about?" 

Download here.

a little about me and the blog to come

A word of warning: this blog isn't necessarily going to be about me. It'll just be a little of whatever thoughts are currently crawling through the muck of my brain wrinkles.
But in case you were interested -- and even in case you weren't...


My name is Dylan Holland. I'm from Kentucky (born and raised/FUCK INDIANA), but currently live in a podunk town in the middle of Nowhere, Japan. Supposedly, I teach English to Japanese middle schoolers, but in reality, I stand in the corner of a classroom parroting phrases from a woefully inadequate textbook and bemoan the state of English education in a country that only goes through the motions of feigning foreign language proficiency. Of course, I have little room to talk, as I have managed to learn less than a handful of dubiously useful Japanese words since coming here. I can find no reason why I should learn more. My term is coming to an end in early August, and while I can't wait to come home to Kentucky, I don't regret having the experience afforded to me by the JET program. Chief among them are the friends I have made here (fellow JETs all), and the varying amounts of hell I have raised on a regular basis with them. I will also, in my own way, miss the constant absurdity of this country, since looking to either side of you usually reveals somebody engaging in inexplicably weird behavior. In other words, it's ammunition out the asshole for writing essays and Twitter. You can't make this shit up.


In my free time I generally try to read and write, but I just usually end up dicking around on the internet, listening to music, playing games, and getting irrationally drunk. I figure that's generally what I'll end up writing about on this blog, and while I can't pretend I'm going to introduce you to the newest thing for hipsters to cream themselves over, or reveal any mind-shatteringly epic truths... I can promise to plumb the depths of the internet as far as I am personally willing to go in order to bring you meaningless shit you may not even want to bother reading.


I never said I wasn't a realist!



P.S. Here is a picture of a puppy. You're welcome.

could be a blog

I have decided that I could be doing a lot worse with my time than starting a blog, so here it is.

Since surviving the brutal Japanese winter for the first (and last) time, I could feel my creativity draining from me like so much oil from the ruptured underside of my piece of shit car (R.I.P.). I was no longer writing much of anything, despite the noble attempts our group of expat JET writers initially made. Truth is, after aborting my novel midway through November, I had barely written more than a page, and after being honest with myself, I felt I could no longer in good faith call myself even an amateur writer.
This blog is an attempt to fix that. Sure, I am plenty active on Twitter, but I can barely consider 147 character semi-witticisms to be a true test of creativity. A blog will offer something in a longer format, tempered by the internet's ability to render anything I say less meaningful. I figure it'll allow me to take what I'm saying less seriously, while diving back into extended writing.
Here goes nothing.