SHAMANISM & THE DRUM · LESSON 12 OF 12 · 13 MIN
The Mudang and the Itako
Korea's mudang — over 200,000 of them, mostly women — their possession rites, their persecution under Confucians, Christians and colonisers and their return as a symbol of the nation; and Japan's blind itako, who speak for the dead on Mount Osore.
East Asia has specialists that Western writers have called shamans for a century, and that anthropologists still argue about — because they are possessed by gods rather than travelling to them, and because they are overwhelmingly women. Korea and Japan show the two faces of the question: a tradition that survived everything and now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and one that has nearly gone.