The Japanese Oni and the Korean Dokkaebi

They meet at the water.

The Korea Strait is narrow enough that supernatural beings, whose movements are not governed by the same constraints as fishing boats, can cross it without difficulty. The oni comes from the mountain above the Japanese village. The dokkaebi comes from the bamboo grove at the edge of the Korean settlement. They arrive at approximately the same kind of place — the edge of cultivated land, the beginning of wild territory — and find each other there.

The oni has horns and an iron club. He is large. His face is the compressed face of everything a person fears in the dark: the random violence of the storm, the unpredictable fury of fire, the brute force of weather with malevolent intent. His color is red, the color of rage and fever. He smells like the inside of old mountains.

The dokkaebi has a gnarled club that once was a broom. He grew from an old broom that had been discarded — or from an old item that had been used so long it had accumulated enough life-force to become something. He is smaller than the oni and shaggier, his hair uncombed, his manner less military and more mischievous. He plays tricks. He wrestles humans for sport and can be beaten by a clever one. He steals food but will give it back if you are funny.

They look at each other across the water.

---

The oni says: What are you?

The dokkaebi says: What are you?

Both answers to both questions are versions of the same thing: the product of accumulated human fear and agricultural necessity, given a body and a purpose. The rice-farming civilization that developed across East Asia over three thousand years produced, in every location it took root, some version of this being — the dangerous supernatural resident of the space between the cultivated and the wild, the figure who embodies what happens when the farming stops, when the maintenance of the paddies lapses, when the careful management of water and light and time that rice requires is not performed.

The oni is what you get when that failure is dramatic and violent.

The dokkaebi is what you get when it is comic and recoverable.

---

They are cousins from the same cultural substrate, shaped differently by the specific character of their respective societies. Japan’s oni tradition emphasizes military threat, the samurai-era overlay making the demons hieratic and dangerous. Korea’s dokkaebi tradition emphasizes the mischievous and the recoverable, perhaps because the Korean folk tradition had more room for the supernatural to be dealt with through cleverness than through force.

Both can be driven away by specific materials: the oni by holly and sardine heads; the dokkaebi by red beans or by the roosters crowing at dawn.

Both are attracted to abandoned buildings and old objects.

Both have a relationship with alcohol: the oni drinks sake with the heroes who defeat him; the dokkaebi steals makgeolli and is generally benign when drunk.

At the crossroads between the two countries, the two demons stand and look at each other and recognize, dimly, across the language barrier and the cultural specificity, something they share.

The rice paddies are on both sides of the water.

The edge of the fields is where they live.

The farmers are afraid of both of them.

This is enough to make a kinship.