#but only in the 7th month and into hungry ghosts--more like the game's jiangshi

[littlest-salomon]

Just a correction, Sakimori is actually a clan name and most Japanese families, AKA clan, tend to pass down their work through generations and Touji is human who's ancestor from waaaaaaay beyond when the Walls got up, was a normal human who had a pure oni as their spouse. Their oni blood has been watered down by human blood since before The Game, Gates are rare so they couldn't like refresh their oni blood. And Touji himself in his main chapter said that his blood is so watered down that his own children won't have any Oni features and be a pure human, making him the last Sakimori who will have oni blood.

Oh, I can infodump about Toji some more!

The narrative voice said that Toji can't have oni children in the main quest, and the same narrative voice says in Toji's character quest that "Sakimori" isn't a typical bloodline family, but essentially a title for oni and hybrids who follow the same pact to be bound to the land for sustenance and protect both it and its people; the writers wouldn't need to mention that Sakimori can be adopted in the limited time they had unless it was relevant to Toji. It seems the Sakimori occupied a social position similar to, if not the same, as that of the burakumin and their predecessors in the real world--a caste of "untouchable" people who largely shared the same bloody, but necessary careers.

Intermarriage also isn't a one and done thing: the Sakimori are based on tons of oni/human, oni/hybrid, and human/hybrid couples (lovers and otherwise) from over 1,000 years of real Japanese folklore, and in Housamo, Yoritomo definitely would've exiled far more than just one pair, one time. Plus, Toji seems to have some pretty gay oni/human memories in his date quest that couldn't've led to any offspring, so there had to have been at least two such couples in the Sakimori alone.

Toji never refers to the Sakimori who raised him as his parents, and he can remember a time before he knew them--even before his oni side first emerged--which isn't unusual in folklore. His oni subtype seems to be based on very old myths, in which oni were said to be invisible, blood-drinking, undead beings who could fly and transform into anything, but only existed in darkness and, in the Heian period, were said to represent humans' own dark sides: an apt description of Toji's oni as depicted in Halloween Police Corps. Originally ancestor spirits, oni regularly continued to begin life in later myths as "normal" humans, who are later transformed into oni after (or before, if the emotion is strong enough) death if they experience overpowering negative/violent emotions and/or a strong desire to become one; this is why it's so unusual that a small child became an oni.

Toji's character quest says that humans can turn into oni just by listening to the voices of ghosts and demons, which is the precise inborn psychic power that Toji demonstrates both in that quest and in his first appearance. This does not appear to be true in real Japanese myth, from what I've read; the legitimate options are really dark, though, so I think they decided to find a nicer way to describe whatever happened to him that was so bad that he reacted by transforming into a cannibal demon and then developing a dissociated alter to cope with the trauma. After reconciling with that alter in Halloween Police Corps, Toji apparently now identifies as an oni full-time rather than claiming to be a human with oni blood.