2/18/2024 0 Comments Red steam trainIts continued popularity, he suggests, was due to a widespread ambivalence on the part of the Japanese populace towards the steam era, on the one hand it providing better transportation, and on the other it destroying or (with the construction of the railway lines) physically reshaping the natural environment and homogenizing society and erasing local differences. Īccording to Michael Dylan Foster, a professor of Japanese at University of California at Davis, there are many allegorical interpretations of the tale, from industry versus the environment to the foreign versus the native. The tale would conclude with a humorous observation such as that "of course the tanuki really enjoy imitating things". The essence of the folk tale is that steam train drivers would hear the noise of a steam train coming towards them along the track, and they would initially stop to avoid a collision but they would eventually carry on, when no train arrived, later to find a dead tanuki lying across the tracks. Īccording to Sasaki, the tales of ghost steam trains are rather humorous, unlike the Japanese folk tales of ghost ships which are more mystical in character. The earliest instance of the tale that he had been able to trace was from some time between 18, but it had spread as the railways, first arriving in Japan only a few years earlier, had themselves spread across the country. Such tales were widespread by 1910, and folklorist Kizen Sasaki commented in 1926 that "probably everybody has heard this story somewhere at least once". ![]() In Japan, the nisekisha ( 偽汽車) or yūrei-kikansha ( 幽霊機関車) is a folk tale of a phantom/counterfeit/ghost steam train involving the tanuki. Accounts of ghost trains have been reported in Canada, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and in many states of the United States. Ghost trains are reported in many different parts of the world where trains have at some point been prevalent forms of transportation. The ghost train differs from other traditional forms of haunting in that rather than being a static location where ghosts are claimed to be present, "the apparition is the entire train". In ghostlore, a ghost train is a phantom vehicle in the form of a locomotive or train. For other uses, see Ghost train (disambiguation).
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