What Are Japanese Yokai? Spirits, Monsters and Haunted Objects

The term is written with characters meaning bewitching and apparition, and it is a large, loose category rather than a defined class. It includes animals that have acquired powers with age, spirits of places, monsters, ghosts, deities that have slipped down in status, and ordinary household objects that have come to life. The underlying idea is not that these are evil beings opposed to good ones, which is the framework Christianity supplies and Japanese folklore does not use, but that the world is densely populated by presences that are strange, mostly local, sometimes dangerous and often merely inconvenient. Many are mischievous rather than malevolent, several are helpful if treated properly, and a considerable number exist mainly to explain an odd noise, a missing object or the feeling of being watched on a mountain path.

A handful appear everywhere in art, theatre and modern animation:

• •Kappa, river creatures the size of a child with a beak, a shell and a water-filled depression on the head, which lose their power if it spills, and which are said to drown swimmers and to love cucumbers
• •Tengu, mountain spirits with long noses or bird beaks, originally dangerous and later recast as stern masters of martial arts who train worthy humans
• •Kitsune, foxes that gain a tail for every century of life, can take human form, and serve the rice deity Inari, appearing as both faithful guardians and deceivers
• •Tanuki, the raccoon dog, a shape-shifter of enormous appetite and comic indignity whose statues stand outside restaurants
• •Oni, large horned ogres with clubs, the closest thing to a straightforward monster, driven out of houses each February by throwing roasted soybeans
• •Tsukumogami, everyday objects that come alive on their hundredth birthday, including umbrellas, lanterns, sandals and tea kettles, a category that is quietly a lesson about not discarding things carelessly
• •Yurei, the ghosts of the dead, usually women in white with long loose hair and no feet, held here by a grievance, and the direct ancestors of modern Japanese horror cinema

They existed in oral tradition long before anyone wrote them down, and their modern form owes an enormous amount to the artist Toriyama Sekien, who published illustrated catalogues in the 1770s and 1780s. He drew hundreds of creatures in the manner of a natural history, gave each a name and a short description, and in doing so fixed their appearance for every later artist. He also, by his own account, invented some outright, which means the standard corpus is a mixture of genuine regional folklore and eighteenth-century artistic invention that has since become folklore by adoption. The Edo period turned them into popular entertainment generally, with picture books, card games, scroll paintings of night processions and a parlour game in which a hundred candles were lit and one extinguished after each ghost story told, the last leaving the room dark.

The practical functions are easy to see once looked for. Warnings are the commonest: the river creature that drowns children keeps children away from deep water, the mountain spirit that misleads travellers encodes the genuine danger of walking unfamiliar slopes at dusk, and the faceless woman punishes those out alone late at night. Others explain the inexplicable, so that a sound in an empty house, food disappearing or a traveller losing their way has a name attached to it. Some enforce social rules, since the creatures that punish waste, rudeness or greed do the work of a moral lesson without a sermon. And some are simply funny, because a great many are ridiculous, and the tradition has always been comfortable with terror and comedy occupying the same page. The scholar Yanagita Kunio, who founded Japanese folklore studies in the early twentieth century, argued that many were deities who had lost their worship and declined into local oddities, which is a neat account of how a religion's discarded material stays in circulation.

They never became antiquarian. Mizuki Shigeru, a manga artist who lost an arm in the Second World War, spent his career researching and drawing them, and his long-running series from 1960 onward reintroduced hundreds of obscure regional creatures to a national audience; his home town of Sakaiminato now has a street lined with bronze statues of them. From there the tradition runs directly into anime, video games and film, and it is the reason a great many creatures in Japanese popular culture look the way they do, including the forest spirits of Studio Ghibli, the more folkloric entries in the Pokemon roster, and the long-haired ghosts of the horror films of the late 1990s that were then remade in Hollywood. Regional tourism promotes local specimens, shrines still sell charms against them, and the eighteenth-century catalogues are in print. The result is an unusually continuous tradition, in which a creature drawn in 1776 from a story told centuries earlier turns up in a children's game without anybody finding that odd.

The supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore are a loose category covering animal shape-shifters, mountain and river spirits, ogres, ghosts and household objects that come alive at a hundred years old, and they are strange and local rather than evil in any organised sense. Their standard appearances were fixed by Toriyama Sekien's illustrated catalogues of the 1770s, which mixed genuine folklore with his own inventions. They warn about real dangers, explain odd events, enforce manners and entertain, and Mizuki Shigeru's manga carried them into anime, games and horror film.