"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
Kappa Yokai photo from Wiki Commons
What is a Yokai?
If you ask ten folklorists what a Japanese “Yokai” is, you’ll probably get eleven different answers. It is usually translated into English as “ghost” or “monster”, and is, in the strictest sense, a spirit that is haunting the non-magical world. In modern usage, however, the word has become a catch-all basket for Japan’s rich mythology of supernatural oddities. What else can one make of a half-man half-crow demon with an absurdly long nose, or a humanoid with a huge eye in its butt, or a mermaid that can prevent diseases with her picture, or a pair of straw sandals that have become possessed by a mischievous spirit. If it’s strange or unexplainable, chances are that someone has attributed it to a Yokai. They can be animal, human, object, spirit ... or something in between.
Some Yokai stories were moral lessons, while others just made a good scary story. Many tales also served a practical purpose. Parents, for instance, didn’t have to give long safety lectures to their children when they could just say, “Don’t wander by the river after dark, or the Kappa will get you.” It made the point. These stories kept people safe, taught manners, and reinforced traditional rules and customs.
It wasn’t until the Edo period under the Tokugawa Shoguns (1603–1868) that Japan became more urbanized, educated, and literate. The printing press replaced the old method of woodblock printing and hand-drawn scrolls, making books and lithographs far less expensive. Very quickly, the ancient folklore started moving from word of mouth onto the printed page as storytellers began collecting and printing the old legends. These works became known as Kaidan, or “ghost stories”.
The most famous of these was Toriyama Sekien, a painter and printmaker who, in 1776, published Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (“The Illustrated Night Parade of a Hundred Demons”). He is a central and important figure in the story of Yokai in Japan. His book gathered together Yokai from regional folklore—some ancient and traditional, some that he made up himself—and displayed their images on paper. Many of these old stories only exist today because they were saved by this collector, and nearly our entire modern conception of Yokai comes directly from his work. Toriyama published additional volumes in 1779 and 1780.
Others followed his lead. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, best known for his block prints of Samurai warriors, now did several works with illustrations of monsters and ghosts, the most famous of which was “Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre”, featuring a Gashadokuro giant skeleton Yokai.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, one of the last traditional woodblock printers, brought a sharper touch to his depictions. He became famous for his depictions of bloody death scenes, but he also published a series of prints titled “New Forms Of Thirty-Six Ghosts”, based on traditional Yokai tales.
Stories featuring the supernatural also became popular staples of Kabuki and Noh theater. In addition to the time-honored old legends, artists could invent entirely new creations on a whim, and if readers and viewers liked them, these new Yokai entered the realm of mythology.
One of the first works to introduce the Yokai to an English-speaking audience came from Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek who was living in Japan. His 1904 book of Yokai was titled Kwaidan.
Roku-rokubi Yokai photo from Wiki Commons
This process still continues, and over the last few decades, Yokai, both traditional and modern, have become a major part of Japan’s Manga and Anime pop culture. One of the earliest examples is GeGeGe no Kitaro, a series by Mizuki Shigeru that started in the 1960s. Mizuki, another important figure in Yokai history, took an interest in traditional Yokai and brought them back into the modern world. In his series, the protagonist Kitaro is a Yokai boy who likes humans and wants to protect them from other Yokai.
Later works, like Natsume’s Book of Friends, written and illustrated by Manga artist Midorikawa Yuki in 2003, continued this trend, and kid-friendly Anime franchises like Yo-kai Watch have introduced the traditional legends to a new generation.
Yokai stories are no longer just Japanese, though. Thanks to video games and the Internet, they’ve traveled across the globe, and fans worldwide now recognize spirit-beings like Kappa, Kitsune, Tengu and Oni. They’ve become part of a shared world culture.
Amabie Yokai photo from Wiki Commons
During the spring of 2020, as the Covid pandemic spread across Japan and the world, one traditional Yokai made a remarkable comeback. After a few people in Japan began sharing online pictures of Amabie, a mermaid-like Yokai who, the legends said, could ward off disease, local businesses, schools, and public health officials posted cartoon images of her everywhere in a campaign to encourage careful hygiene, social distancing, and shared community, even in lockdown. In the 21st-century digital age, Yokai folklore showed that it could still offer comfort when the world felt uncertain.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)
