The Contemporary Yamanba

The story of Hansel and Gretel can supposedly be explained by famine.  The witch was an old woman, abandoned in the forest by her family once they were no longer able to feed her.  To survive she ate anything she could.  She relied on her appearance as a sweet old granny to lure in other humans as prey.  Tales of the elderly being abandoned during such famines are widespread.  They're also apparently the back story to Japan's Yamanba, a cannibalistic hag living in the mountains.

When I lived in the Japanese countryside, I once saw a real live Yamanba.  Leaving my house, I noticed a woman, emaciated, covered in dirt, with leaves in her knee-long hair, stark naked.  She was digging through the trash.  She looked right at me and made eye contact.  I was terrified.  Probably the only thing scarier than being surprised by a wild animal is being surprised by a wild human!

I jumped in my car and headed to work, watching her in the rear view.  I told my supervisor what I saw.  He blew me off but I insisted.  This woman probably needed help.  Who knows what had happened to her.  They called the police.  I learned the next day that it was all sorted out.

I told some friends about it.  One told me that it was a regular occurrence and the neighborhood boys called her, "The Stripper."  Another friend's husband who worked at the local mental institution explained that she's a patient there and periodically escapes.  She wasn't a Yamanba abandoned in the mountains, just a person who did in fact need a little help.

While no longer at the mercy of famines, modern man still lives at the mercy of a similar, less severe cycle.  One over which he has no influence and indeed risks losing his livelihood, that of the modern economy.  To predict the occurrence, we consult economists rather than the Farmer's Almanac.

If the workplace is the modern equivalent of the village of old, each batch of lay-offs are its Yamambas.  As profits decline, a group of people are selected to be cast out for the good of the others.  Jack Welch went as far as to institutionalize this as a yearly practice to eliminate the "bottom 10%."  This would be like instituting artificial food scarcity to starve out a portion of the population, not unlike the satirical clip of Euthanasia Day from Death Race 2000.