Season of Ghosts
Learned Vol. 7, Issue 9
Is it still spooky season if it’s after Halloween?
Halloween in Japan is an odd beast. Every mall and shopping center has decorations up and photo spots for the kiddies to get their picture taken with one mascot or another in one of the standard costumes. At the same time, Halloween has become such a pain that areas like Shibuya have more-or-less done what they can to outlaw it.
School kids don’t dress up in costumes during school hours but their teachers might put on a silly headband or something. My own students, university first and second year, refused to dress up or to tell me anything about their plans beyond “doing something fun with my friends.”
And, of course, every single place that sells any kind of candy has eighteen different ways to buy sugar in varying combinations. Oh, and it goes without saying that trick-or-treating is just not a thing.
So, Halloween in Japan is a study in contrasts: it’s part of the zeitgeist but it’s also just not that culturally relevant. But I do enjoy the questions I get from students. Older students want to know what my experiences with Halloween were like as a kid, younger students want to know what they would be doing if they were in the States now.
Recently, I’ve been getting occasional question about the ever-increasing vocabulary related to Halloween. This week, a couple of students asked me about spooky season and down the rabbit hole we went.
Spooky season has murky origins. We know that it's an older phrase that only became popular in the past few years. We know that the adjective spooky came after the noun spook, as per usual. And we know that spook, as per usual, is older than we think and has a long history of acquiring new meanings, some of them more appropriate than others.
Here's the breakdown:
Spook enters English in the early 1800s from the Dutch word of the same spelling. It traces its roots back through the Germanic lines back to an unknown origin.
The Germanic version of the word means something more akin to goblin and only acquires its ghostly version over time.
By the middle of the century, spook has begun to acquire related forms: spooky, spookily, spookiness, and, my favorite, spookish, meaning "like a ghost."
Around the same time, several other words with related meanings get pulled into English from other Germanic languages. Over time, these words combine with spook.
Throughout the next several decades, spook and spooky continue to evolve and give rise to new words and meanings, including neologisms like spooktacular1.
In the 1930s, spook becomes…let's say, divisive in meaning. Originally a term used by Black people to refer to other Black people, it began to be termed a slur when used outside of that context, i.e. by non-Black people.
By the 1940s, spook is doing double-duty as the slur mentioned above but also a less-than-polite term for government agents and spies.
Spook and spooky retain these disparate meanings while also being a common reference for all things ghost-related. Donald Duck, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Scooby Doo all make use of the words throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
Fast forward to the middle 20-teens and we begin to see the emergence of spooky season to describe the autumn weeks leading up to Halloween.
So, now that we're all caught up, we turn to my students' next question: So how do I say that in Japanese? The answer this time around, is, you don’t. Not really.
On a surface level, we can translate spooky as ayashii (怪しい), which is more often used to mean mysterious or suspicious. It doesn’t really have the being-scared-because-its-fun aspect that spooky often has. However, as we read down through the list of dictionary entries, we get to obake no hanashi（お化けの話), which can be translated as “ghost story” or “spooky story.”
My students and I decided to take this and run with it. They turned spooky season into obake no shizun （お化けのシーズン)2, or season of ghosts. And I think this is…good.
In fact, not only does season of ghosts have a nice ring to it, it neatly solves the growing backlash3 against the word spooky. There’s an argument to be made that, because of its racist associations, we maybe ought not to be using the words spook or spooky. The trouble with this is that it’s very hard to get people to stop using a given word unless you can show that it is doing absolute harm (as is the case with many slurs that have no non-derogatory meanings) or you can offer a substitute. In this particular case, I’m happy to help with the latter.
As a last comment, I’ll leave you with this: Among Wikipedia’s many treasures is a simple list of books and stories about Halloween. Ray Bradbury appears no less than four times4. Between the ages of 8 and 14, I read all of them. And I am still haunted by them. So when people casually refer to October as spooky season with twee delight and titilation, I recoil. Halloween is not for casuals. There are no dignified jaunts through the October country. No, All Hallow’s Eve is the last recourse of the dead to haunt the world of the flesh and to make known their voracious appetites for all that the world of the living has to offer.
Next time the world begins to darken, when the streetlights begin to come on early, to cast forth their wan defense against the night, next time the leaves on the trees begin to turn and to fall, to remind us that death is the only constant and the only truly commonality, remember this is no spooky season. This is the season of ghosts and they are coming for us, eager to claim us as their own.
Inktober is a better portmanteau than something as clumsy as spooktacular; when I’m lying on my deathbed, I’ll be fondly remembering all the time I’ve spent drawing and coloring with my daughter during this season even as I curse the wily motherfuckers who managed to force me to my deathbed.
I asked why season instead of kisetsu （季節) and was told that it was more fitting but for reasons they couldn’t really explain. In other words, it just felt right.
I’m honestly not sure how much of a real backlash there is and how much is just the algorithms playing games with me, but the more I searched for spooky, the more I found on why people should stop using it.
Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Halloween Tree, The October Country, From Dust Returned