#uwan

The philippines is cooked. just a heads up to my moots here that I might not be active for a while cause we have to evacuate from this fucking super typhoon bro

Our place is in one of the most geographically secure and protected parts of Baguio, in a building that will probably outlast the sun, with eight or ten inch thick concrete walls, hefty reinforcing pillars, metal doors, and reinforced windows, surrounded by friends, and with some of the best drainage in the entire city, so our little family--including me, @thesurestthing , our daughter El, and @geniussheepworld and a couple of her sisters who are staying with us--should be fine; our biggest immediate worry is losing power and maybe data connectivity for a few days. But I worry for those less protected, and although it would be crowded, I wish Jhane's mom and the rest of her sisters would come wait this out with us.

Anyway, wish us luck! And I'll try to keep posting occasionally, but don't worry too much if all you see is my queue for the next few days.

As the typhoon approaches, please secure your homes, keep your essentials ready, and check on your loved ones. Remember, things can be replaced, but lives can’t. Let’s all look out for each other and ride this storm out safely. ✨

Uwan: The Voice Without a Body

Uwan is one of the purest examples of a catalog yōkai: a being preserved not through stories or regional folklore but through a single, striking depiction in Edo‑period picture scrolls. It appears in Toriyama Sekien’s Gazu Hyakki Yagyō as a grotesque, wide‑mouthed creature bursting from the darkness, its face stretched into a scream. Yet the scream itself — the word “Uwan!” — is the only part of the yōkai that seems to matter. The image is almost secondary to the sound. This inversion makes Uwan feel less like a monster and more like a phenomenon, a moment of fear given form.

In the scrolls, Uwan’s body is ambiguous. It has a vaguely humanoid shape, but its features are exaggerated into something theatrical: bulging eyes, a cavernous mouth, and a posture that suggests sudden intrusion. It is not shown attacking or pursuing anyone. Instead, it is caught in the act of startling, as if its entire existence is compressed into the instant of a shout. This makes Uwan one of the rare yōkai defined not by what it does, but by what it is: a sound that becomes a presence.

The name “Uwan” is written in kana, leaving its meaning open. Some scholars interpret it as an onomatopoeic cry — a sudden, guttural exclamation meant to startle travelers in abandoned houses or dark hallways. Others see it as a fragment of a forgotten regional term, a linguistic fossil preserved only because Sekien found it evocative enough to illustrate. The lack of kanji is significant: it suggests that even in the Edo period, Uwan was already a creature of rumor rather than established folklore, a whisper rather than a tale.

Later writers attempted to give Uwan a narrative, claiming that it haunts empty buildings and shouts at intruders, but these additions are modern inventions. The historical Uwan has no ecology, no moral function, no backstory. It is a yōkai of pure interruption — a sudden noise in a silent place. This makes it deeply atmospheric, a reminder of how much Edo-period yōkai art was concerned with capturing fleeting sensations: a chill, a sound, a moment of unease. Uwan is the embodiment of that aesthetic, a creature that exists only in the instant it is perceived.

Momento em que uma forte ressaca atingiu o hotel devido ao tufão Uwan em Dipaculao, Aurora, Filipinas 09/11/2025

Typhoon Uwan (Fung-wong) continues to rapidly intensify as it moves closer to Catanduanes, according to PAGASA’s 5 a.m. update on Sunday, Nov. 9.