J-Horror, Meet Esoterror

Though founded in Britain and with long history in the West, the Ordo Veritatis has in recent years come to regard Japan as key strategic ground in the battle against the Outer Dark. These extra-dimensional demons and their human minions, the Esoterrorists, thrive by spreading panic, anxiety and cognitive dissonance. Japan’s propensity for urban legends of curses and malign ghosts gives its homegrown Esoterrorists an automatic head start in their efforts to tear a hole in reality. Not only do tales of eerie menaces such as the Kuchisake-onna (“Slit-Mouthed Woman”) and Aka Manto (“Red Cape”) readily circulate in Japan; they trigger genuine panics. An instance of a Slit-Mouthed Woman provoking a panic in South Korea chilled OV analysts on every continent.

Local operatives try to defuse these incidents by ensuring that they rapidly wind up in movies, TV shows and manga, thus rendering them absurd. Some within the organization fear that the group places too much confidence in these Veil-Out techniques. They worry that as people around the world increasingly steep themselves in outlandish pop culture, these gambits may wind up propagating urban legends useful to Esoterror.

Workers in the Anglo OV hierarchy refer to their Japanese colleagues as J-Branch, a term not used or needed in the country itself. For geopolitical reasons the Ordo could not establish itself in Japan until after WWII. Early attempts to impose the Anglo-European structure bore mixed results, leading headquarters to back off in favor of local control under more familiar consensus-based management principles. Certain maverick agents in Tokyo or Sendai now complain of a faith in bureaucratic procedure that eclipses even that of head office.

Western OV operatives rarely conduct operations in Japan, whose agents know the territory better than they ever could. More commonly a J-Branch agent will be dispatched outside the country as an adviser to a local team when a drowned ghost or yokai-inspired ODE shows up elsewhere in the world. If they can pop up in South Korea, further manifestations in San Francisco, Vancouver or south London may not be so far behind. Especially when they have human accomplices to spread the word.

hat tip to this installment of the A.V. Club’s Wiki Wormhole


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