How to curse people, Japan-style:
The practitioner — typically a scorned woman — while dressed in white and crowning herself with an iron ring set with three lit candles upright, hammers nails into a sacred tree of the Shinto shrine. In the modern-day common conception, the nails are driven through a straw effigy of the victim, impaled upon the tree behind it. The ritual must be repeated seven days running, after which the curse is believed to succeed, causing death to the target, but being witnessed in the act is thought to nullify the spell.
In Japanese law studies, attempts to commit murder through the ushi no mairi is often cited as the “textbook example of impossibility defense case crime”.