What Is Datsueba — The Hag Who Strips Robes at the River of the Dead

"Who is Datsueba?" She is the fearsome old hag of tradition who waits for the dead at the bank of the Sanzu, the river of the dead. This article traces who she is, from the origin of her name to her Edo-era cult, from both a Buddhist and a folkloric view.

Who Datsueba is

Datsueba is the old hag demon said to stand at the bank of the river of the dead and strip the robes of the dead who cross it. At the boundary from this world to the next, the dead are said to first be stripped of what they wear. The stripped robe is hung on the branch of a great tree by the river called the "robe-hanging tree" (eryoju), and the weight of one's sins in life is measured by how far the branch bends.

For all her fearsome telling, at her core lies the idea that "at the very gateway to the next world, one's deeds in life already begin to be questioned." Datsueba is depicted as the keeper of the first barrier of judgment.

Her other names, and the source text

Datsueba goes by many names — Datsue-ba, Sozukaba, Shozuka-no-baba, Ubagami, Ubason — called differently by region and by faith.

Her name appears clearly in the "Ten Kings Sutra" (Jizo Juo-kyo), said to have taken shape in Japan late in the twelfth century. Yet an earlier prototype is said to appear as a "hag demon" in the eleventh-century tale collection Hokke Genki. Tellingly, the Chinese source texts behind the Ten Kings cult are said to hold no image of Datsueba and Keneo as a pair. The concrete device of weighing robes on the robe-hanging tree is thought to be a distinctly Japanese vision of the afterlife. For the ten judges centered on King Enma, see also What the Ten Kings Are.

Why she strips the robes — the tree and Keneo

Datsueba does not strip robes out of mere plunder. It is said to be for measuring the gravity of sin — the robe is hung on the tree, and how far the branch sags reveals how heavy the karma is. The graver the sin, the heavier the robe and the more the branch bends. The karma measured this way is said to inform Lord Enma's later judgment.

She has a partner in this work: an old man demon called Keneo, said to hang the robes Datsueba strips onto the branch of the robe-hanging tree. Datsueba strips, Keneo weighs — the pair have long been told to keep the barrier at the river together.

The river's three crossings

The Sanzu where Datsueba waits is said to offer three ways across, according to one's deeds in life. Those who did good cross a bridge; those with light sins wade a shallow ford; those with heavy sins are made to cross a swift, deep current. The custom of sending the dead off with six coins as a toll also belongs to this river. Datsueba, it is said, strips the robe of one who carries no toll in its place. For the river itself, see The Meaning of the Sanzu River.

Her Edo-era cult — the hag who cures coughs

Even as she was told of as a dread demon, by the late Edo period Datsueba also became an object of everyday devotion. She was best known for a power over coughs: believed to ward off children's whooping cough and epidemic disease, and small halls were raised to her across the land. At Shojuin in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where cotton was offered when a cough was cured, she was fondly called the "cotton grandmother." The folklorist Kunio Yanagita saw this cult as an old native belief in hag-deities (ubagami) fused and transformed by Buddhism. A dread gatekeeper and a guardian who wards off illness — Datsueba has been handed down as a figure holding both faces at once.

Yurusen's world and Datsueba

This hag lives on in the world of the app "Yurusen." The act of stripping a robe also symbolizes peeling away the surface to reveal a person's "type." However smoothly the other person talks their way out, in the memory of the one who was wronged that deed still bends the branch with its full weight.

The one who was wronged is under no obligation to let everything go. Yurusen is a place, yours alone, to quietly discern the type of the one who hurt you and bind it into the ledger. Robesnatch, who strips the robes at the river, and the other wraiths can be seen on the Wraith Codex page.