My complicated relationship with Japan, Part 2

I always thought of Japan as generally creepy.

- I read too many Japanese ghost stories. I’m sure this is a familiar thing to a lot of people: You read or watch some horror-genre movie/book/etc. out of morbid curiosity and feeling strangely drawn to it, only to regret it later when you’re lying awake at night. And my grandma’s house was creepy. Fairly large house (by Japanese standards), giant yard with gnarled pine trees and Japanese maple trees, tatami mats and shoji doors in the rooms, creaky wooden floors with dim lights in the hallways, and worst of all — traditional Japanese dolls. I have a terrible, irrational fear of dolls in general. And these dolls in one of the rooms we were staying in, in their glass cases, in nice traditional Japanese garb, with thin eyes but missing their pupils…really freaked me out. And the kids’ Japanese horror stories I’d read seemed to most often follow a formula of “If you do (this totally innocuous thing anyone can end up doing by accident), then (this terrible thing that involves scary visions, death, or being stuck in an alternate dimension) will happen to you.” So I’d lie in bed trying to stay perfectly still and attempt to not be in any positions that might lead me to certain doom, all the while trying to convince myself that no, the dolls are not looking at me, no, they’re not actually moving closer and I’m not going to find them right in front of me next time I open my eyes, and if I get up to go to the bathroom right now, I’m not going to run into any white figures in the hallway, and blood is not going to spurt out of the faucet….

Overactive imagination? Possibly.

I still refuse to watch the original Japanese version of リング(The Ring).

Why does Wikipedia have to have this creepy image under the “Shōji” page?