The goryo logic described in the main entry, that a spirit who died with grievance must be actively placated rather than merely mourned, is not uniquely Japanese; comparable beliefs about dangerous, aggrieved dead appear across East Asia, showing both a shared intuition and distinctively Japanese institutional development.
Chinese folk religion has a long-standing category of yuan gui, wronged or resentful ghosts, spirits of people who died unjustly or without proper burial rites, believed capable of causing illness or misfortune until their grievance is addressed, whether through proper burial, correction of the injustice, or formal propitiation; the annual Hungry Ghost Festival during the seventh lunar month addresses a related category of restless spirits through offerings. Korean shamanic tradition similarly recognizes vengeful spirits, wonhon, requiring a gut ceremony performed by a shaman to resolve the spirit's grievance (han), a practice with obvious parallels to the Japanese goryo-e rites performed for figures like Sugawara no Michizane.
What distinguishes the Japanese pattern is the degree of institutionalization: appeasement of a sufficiently significant wronged spirit became state policy, involving formal deification, court-sponsored shrine construction, and the transformation of a specific grievance into a major, ongoing national cult, Tenjin worship, that persists today entirely detached from its punitive origin and is understood almost exclusively as a benevolent patron of scholarship, a trajectory from feared ghost to beloved patron deity that historians treat as a clear illustration of how ritual appeasement can transform a spirit's public character over centuries.