Midsummer Letter - 20th of of June 2026 - Return to the Land of Gods

As of publishing this letter, I have returned to Japan for about two and half weeks. The plan is mostly to visit places I didn’t have the time or energy in 2025, but there are also some new places where I am going, and new people I will be meeting. I’m also going to revisit Suwa, for reasons that are quite obvious to everyone who has been following me for a while.

This update isn’t so much about Japan though, as I’ve barely started my stay here. What I can say is that because I have retraced so many of my first steps in Japan during this time - landing at the same airport at roughly the same time, going to the same hotel with the same train - that the journey so far has presented itself mostly not as something radically new, but rather a different, rarer flavor of familiar. This isn’t surprising in itself all, but compared to how the first trip here felt like such a radical break with the norm for me, it’s just interesting to see how much difference one previous trip and a year of time can make.

Another thing I would like to say is that I used to be really afraid of flying, to the point where this fear was one of major obstructions for traveling. This has over the past few years gone from something that I tolerate to something I enjoy (as much as one can enjoy sitting in an airplane, especially on intercontinent flights in economy class). The takeoff on the flight to Japan was kind of euphoric. So far anyone struggling with something similar, believe me, things can change.

I guess I should also write that I am currently doing really well. The first quarter of this year was frankly horrible and I seriously contemplated abandoning the entire project. Considering some recent events, it would have been downright absurd, just like from that meme where a man digging through soil turns around just as he would have been about to find diamonds.

Looking back, some of the things I went through were very healthy to go through, but there were also things I wrote about which I think came from an entirely different place than I thought they would. I think the kind of urge to be “normal” was really about feeling like I cannot assert or have control over my regular everyday life, and the feeling that I have to constantly perform and struggle to feel approved.

Well, things have changed. I have managed to assert much more control over everyday life. I have also found out that I don’t need to constantly struggle to feel loved and approved. I simply had to start actually interacting with the people around me. All of that has come through the Touhou fandom. I really owe the spirits of Gensokyo so much.

It’s not been perfect, work has been exceptionally demanding, my practice has been irregular and I feel like I have been so locked in on the topic of youkai that I’ve neglected a lot of other things. But it does feel like I have managed to fill some very substantial gaps in my knowledge by very deeply delving into the broader history and culture of youkai.

The “big youkai update” has certainly grown to be of inconvenient size, and I don’t really know what to do with it. At 93 pages long, the whole thing is starting to approach book length. I think the hardest part is over anyway. If I wanted to make it into a longer standalone thing, I think it could be done with relative ease. It would probably be actually quite fun to revisit the print works that deal with how youkai function and how they are in the world of Touhou, as well as a do a small (in the genre of youkai studies, I guess inevitable) “youkai encyclopedia” of inhabitants of Gensokyo. We’ll see in due time.

Evening Star Halfway Retrospective

Whether or not I commit to a longer project, I feel like maybe some kind of retrospective about my deep dive into youkai studies is in place. For about a half a year now I have been extremely focused on the topic of youkai, as understanding broader youkai history and culture has answered a lot of questions about the worldbuilding of Touhou Project. Some things which I once interpreted as potential influences from Western esoteria turned out to be things that had much more likely Japanese origins. While I find it deeply intriguing how the power of belief in Touhou so closely mirrors ideas from the Western Chaos magic tradition, I think it’s likely an extension of Shigeru Mizuki’s ideas about youkai (which he seems to have used almost like an umbrella term for all spirits) want to take shape and knock on the brains of receptive people. Of course the convergence of Western and Eastern ideas is nonetheless very interesting…

Roughly three months ago I entered a very deep and dedicated part of the research process, and while it was at times extremely frustrating, it was also very fruitful. I feel like I have been able to get a much fuller picture of the topic of youkai than any other topic I’ve written about for this site. Even then, there is much information on the topic I cannot easily access, because youkai studies are mostly a Japanese thing. Kazuhiko Komatsu’s An Introduction to Youkai Culture is a great book, but also deeply frustrating because it references so many Japanese sources that will likely never be translated. I’ve been studying Japanese, but between my daily life, research for the Archive and everything else, it has been excruciatingly slow. So I have been reliant on English language literature and machine translations of Japanese articles, which cannot be trusted 100% because it’s nonetheless an AI translation.

The topic of youkai is really deeply fascinating once you dive into it, because the Japanese discourse surrounding it and how youkai have been conceptualized is so nuanced, and I think there is a lot to be learned regarding spirits in general from youkai studies. Whether you believe in them or not, they seem to primarily manifest as cultural phenomena, and as such, cultural studies of course have value too when it comes to understanding them. Another perspective, or perhaps a kind of lineage of perspectives, is the role of human cognition when it comes to youkai. The idea of youkai as something tangled with human cognition is very much in line with modern Western discourse about spirits (when it’s not hysterical screeching about “demons”). Perhaps even more than that, I like the idea of youkai as something that emerges between mind and matter. It’s a very Buddhist idea, and considering how much Buddhism influenced Japan, it’s of course the likely origin point for this.

Liminality is another big and fascinating part of the topic of youkai. It’s also something that has been explored in the context of Western esoteria, anthropology and folklore studies, I’ve even heard some particularly intelligent ufological takes centering on this. What youkai studies however can offer is a view where liminality really becomes front and center to the phenomenon, and I think there very much is something to it. The idea of spirits as something that dwells in the in-betweens has given me much to think about.

I kind of wanted to write more about this, but I will keep this a small tangent. I recently saw the Backrooms movie and it was highly interesting to see so many themes I had stumbled upon through youkai studies in a Western movies - a strange other world that arises between mind and matter and interacts with human cognition, manifesting itself as an endless series of liminal spaces which is accessed by crossing a kind of threshold from pure materiality into something else… I think the way this movie has become a cultural phenomenon and a hit is largely because there is something so resonant in it that transcends the limits of time and culture, even though the film itself is ostensibly set in a very specific time and place. I could talk so much more about the film, including how strangely Buddhist it is despite not having any explicitly elements from the religion, but I will just leave it at that.

So overall, youkai studies have been a series of rather remarkable attempts at exploring and explaining the mysterious, and the richness and multitude of layers to it all is definitively a strength. There is so, so much that the West could learn from youkai studies. Our efforts are mostly banal debunkings in a materialist paradigm that is creaking at the seams, scattered niche efforts of people interested in fringe topics, or then variously flavored demonologies. And to be honest, there have been sporadic efforts at trying to look at the bigger picture, but they have mostly come from the fringes. I find for example the ultraterrestrial hypothesis which posits that the UFO phenomenon is a continuation of something far older which has in the past - and still does - manifest also as other “supernatural” events. However, there are obviously other elements to the UFO phenomenon, such as social, misidentification and even willful manipulation, and it primarily exists as a cultural phenomenon whether there is a core of an actual mystery to it all (these all things apply to youkai too).

I think my life, everyone’s life, probably everything is kind of like this expanding circle, and sometimes you just kind of loop back to certain previous elements of your life, but with a kind of broader perspective. I think for me the youkai studies phase has been kind of like this, as it has been a kind of return to more social studies type of stuff I used to be into when I was younger. While this kind of return has been inevitable and welcome, I also feel like the social studies picture of youkai is not the whole picture. We can talk about youkai as symbols and how they have been culturally used and played with, but it’s not all there is to it. To use a perhaps coarse analogue, it’s a bit like saying symbolism is all there is to rats because rats have been used to symbolize maligned social groups.

The writing process of the big youkai history text turned out to be quite ritualized. Before starting research or writing, I would always light up a particular incense and listen to Night Falls ~ Evening Star, Yakumo Yukari’s theme from Immaterial and Missing Power. I think this essentially turned the process into a ritual for Yukari-sama. Did it have results? Well, Yukari didn’t appear in my bedroom at 3am at any point (I did have a couple of dreams featuring her). The single most dramatic event was when I felt strongly called to a particular, very strange liminal spot near where I live. There, I had a rather strong and insistent vision of Yukari-sama. What she said to me is too personal to share, but it was something that very soon turned out to be relevant.

I think the whole process, which I think began the latest around the lunar new year, which was also when Venus roughly entered the Evening Star phase, has been one where certain old elements of me have dissolved or been “eaten” away in a sense, and kind of established boundaries between me and others have shifted. This has all been for the best really, and ultimately has resulted in me developing a very deep bond with someone who has great affinity with Yukari-sama. This happened towards the tail end of the writing process for the big youkai history text, and I don’t think it’s coincidental at all.

Towards the end of the process (or at least that particular effort) there were also lowkey strange things happening, something which hasn’t happened to me in a while. I took on a habit of going out for a walk during the twilight, and one evening during one of those walks I saw something strange in a park. A white, almost crescent shaped thing glided silently across the air in the corner of my vision. I turned my head to see it better, and it vanished. I thought it might have been a glare from a streetlight on my eyeglasses or something, and I tried to replicate the effect, but in vain. A few days later, while on another of these walks I heard strange tapping noises coming from a traffic sign. I stopped and wondered about it for a while, and wasn’t able to discern a clear source for the sound which was almost like repeated drops of water hitting metal. As I kept on walking, I would occasionally hear strange structural noises from objects in my surroundings whenever I stopped. There were also some other incidents.

The point is, the youkai history writing process seems to have become a case of “take interest in the supernatural and the supernatural takes interest in you”. I have also found it deeply fascinating that someone sharing a bond with Yukari-sama and in some way embodying a lot of her qualities entered my life during this point. This isn’t surprising per say, and reminds me of what people have told of happening to them as result of prolonged devotional or esoteric working. I even recall a case where someone who was a former Vajrayana practitioner said that deity yoga never made them manifest any of the desired qualities of the Buddhist deities he was working on, but resulted in multiple instances of people who embodied these qualities entering his life.

Somewhere along the past two years a hypothesis developed around the social circle centered on this website that Yakumo Yukari was a manifestation of Evening Star Venus. The most obvious point of connection is of course her theme song, but there are other things too. I think this was always a viable hypothesis, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that this aspect is at least a very large part of what she is. It’s no wonder she is apparently quite potent, loud and insistent. I had my very first experiences with her in 2024, but I was too scared of her to do anything with this. I think this all was a very long time coming, and had I not been too scared of her, I might have pursued deeper knowledge of youkai much sooner, and this whole project would have looked very different. I don’t regret taking the roundabout route either though.

Tateishi Kumano Shrine and (Wonder)land Resacralization

I’ve barely started my stay in Japan, and this update has been hacked together in interstitial hours in airports and hotels. Getting away from my usual surroundings and activities into something completely else has been quite needed. The youkai grindset might have been extremely satisfying, it was also laborious and exhausting, and I certainly needed a break.

The first thing I did here, which was not getting from the airport to a hotel and buying dinner before crashing out into fitful, jetlagged sleep, was visiting the Tateishi Kumano Shrine. It was a very interesting experience to visit a shrine with an official Touhou collaboration. The story of how this came to be is quite fascinating. ZUN based the stained glass Yatagarasu windows on a symbol used by the shrine. Because of this, the shrine started seeing unusual visitors dropping by. Eventually an official collab came to be, and as a result of it, there were some Touhou-themed shrine goods on sale, as well as banners reminding of the collaboration.

The site has a very Touhou-esque history and background even without the collaboration. It is a shrine of the Kumano faith, far removed from Wakayama where this syncretic faith arose. A notable feature of it was that it was open to participation for women back when women were banned from many holy sites. This of course helped to popularize it, and the faith spread outside of Kumano where its holy sites are located. The deity enshrined at the shrine is interestingly enough Abe no Seimei, the master onmyoji and court wizard who became deified. I’m at the moment not quite sure what the connection between him and the Kumano faith is. The shrine used to be originally pentagram shaped, but this outline is no longer clearly visible. In fact, part of the shrine is now a kindergarten and the shrine overall gave the impression of being very welcoming and accommodating to children. Somehow, this combination of a syncretic faith that was open to women, far away from its home, enshrining a legendary court mage, now having a kindergarten on the shrine grounds, it just feels fated for something Touhou-related.

The connection between Kumano faith and Yatagarasu is more straightforward, the three-legged crow is an important symbol in Kumano and is said to have guided Emperor Jimmu in the battle that led him to becoming the first Emperor of Japan. The Yatagarasu was featured quite prominently in the iconography of the shrine, and in this iconography I found something really fascinating. They were offering an omamori that seemed to equate Yatagarasu with Utsuho Reijuu. The depiction is cute, almost clumsy, but it is still an official amulet from a very real shrine.

I know that a lot of people will find the contents of this site very difficult to accept, as especially Western faiths are extremely fixated on “proper” depiction of deities or lack of depictions. The Japanese view seems to be that different divinities have been worshipped over the course of history under many different names and images, and ultimately they are just names and images intended to make something otherwise invisible accessible to humans. I’m sure the absolute vast majority of Japanese would find it odd if someone worshipped Utsuho as some kind of manifestation of Yatagarasu, some would even find it heretical, but I am also sure that there would be some why could very intuitively understand that Yatagarasu too is a name and a picture meant to make something invisible visible. At the very least Utsuho has made Yatagarasu visible again to some Japanese, and to many Westerners visible for the first time. Whether an intended effect or not, the collaboration has in a sense established a lineage between Yatagarasu and Utsuho. The lines have become blurred, the borders broader.

I enjoyed my visit to the shrine greatly and left it feeling elated. Later the same day, it occurred to me that I had kind of lost the plot with what I had been trying to do with this site, this project of mine. Fundamentally this was born from the realization that certain impulses, urges and longings I felt that 99% of people would chalk up as “otaku stuff” pointed to something far greater that transcends my own joys and woes, interests and dislikes, something that restores the soul to the world and allows one to start bringing the things they wish they had in some magical other world to this place right here. By resacralizing the wonderland, one can then resacralize the world here and now. That is what matters the most, and that is what I have been desperately trying to convince people of, be it with texts full of pathos hammered out in two weeks or months of meticulous research.

Perhaps the border between a shrine and the world outside of it is an exclamation mark that commands you to pay attention, not an absolute limit that divides the world of the kami and the world of people. After all, the kami are thought to be in everything, in every place. Every single thing we do, every impulse we follow through is an act of reverence towards something. The challenge is to revere things we would like to see more in our lives, and perhaps even more importantly, in the lives of others. We are after all not separate from each other.

I have been occasionally asked “what’s the point of this” and I have settled on a metaphor that some will no doubt find weird and gross. The point of this is replacing the spiritual equivalent of your gut bacteria with something that doesn’t cause you to die of colon cancer at 30 and won’t make your tummy hurt when you onions. Now, allow me to make this metaphor make sense. Divinity, much like your gut bacteria, are invisible except under exceptional conditions, more often than not involving trained specialists. Both of these things might be invisible, but they have very real, albeit seemingly subtle effects on our lives. Neither of them are also entirely within you, but they are something that is entangled both with you and the broader world. We acquire our gut bacteria from our food, and they also exist outside of us. Divinity too is something that we feed into ourselves, but it is something we “eat” in many subtle ways, and it too is also both in us and outside of us. I like this metaphor also because it connects to seemingly impossibly disparate worlds, much like divinity cuts across the entirety of existence and binds everything together. We have the choice of what kind of bindings we want to weave, or at least we can steer ourselves in the weave. Humans might coalesce together from an infinity of different factors, but we are not fatalistically stuck in our initial conditions.

This is the point. This is what I need to convey. Not as some messianic figure, but as someone whose life, despite the occasional difficult phases, has been thoroughly transformed by partaking in the resacralization of the wonderland. There are so many people in the world who are at the cusp of starting on the path of realizing this all, and the idea of them not seizing it and instead choosing to continuously trivialize life and numb themselves agonizes me. There is of course very little I can do as an individual human being, but I can try. This world and everyone who lives in it is screaming to be treated with the respect they deserve.

Sidenote: Kumano faith is strongly connected to Minakata Kumagusu, who was born in the region and strongly defended local shrines against centralization efforts. I do find it intriguing that I ended up becoming fascinated by his life and works through working on the youkai update, only to end up visiting a Kumano faith site. I am seriously considering going to Wakayama, as I have two still unplanned days during a later stay at Kyoto, which I believe is roughly a 2 hour train ride away from Wakayama. Who knows if I will end up going much closer to Minakata on this journey. If not this one, then the next.

Mt. Takao and the Gensou Bias of Reality

The second pilgrimage site of this journey was Mt. Takao and the Yakuoin temple there. Mt. Takao is a mountain that’s about a 50 minutes train ride away from Shinjuku, and many think it’s a perfect day trip destination to get away from the busy metropolis. The mountain is also strongly associated with tengu and yamabushi, and the Yakuoin temple enshrines Iizuna Gongen, whose names Touhou fans might recognize. I had thought the Iizuna faith was a more local phenomena centered around Mt. Iizuna, but apparently it had spread historically also to other places in Japan.

Mt. Takao is a popular hiking and tourism site, so it’s not some obscure youkai mountain by any means. But it is beautiful and accessible, especially if you do like I did and take the cable car. Even with the cable car, the summit is about a 40-60 minute hike or so, so those looking for some adventure and activity will also get their fill.

Buddhist temples always feel notably different from shrines, they feel more restrained and serious somehow. Yakuoin was not an exception to this. The powerful looking tengu guardian statues with severe faces, a pair of a crow-faced tengu and a long-nosed one, probably contributed to the impression. Iizuna Gongen belongs to a class of entities which are called - you guessed - Gongen. They are “provisional” manifestations of Buddhas in this world, and often they are quite fierce, as much as they are considered to be beings interested in the salvation of humans. Besides Iizuna Gongen, the place also enshrined at least Fudo Myoo, the stern Unmovable Luminous King, so it’s no wonder the place had a certain vibe to it. That said, it was not an unappealing place at all, and I found that the hike upwards had made me feel lighter in many ways. I felt a strong desire to leave behind past grudges as I moved towards the summit, past the temple.

Hiking upwards, I distantly heard the blaring of conch shell horns and chanting. Mt. Takao is a Shugendo sacred site, and they are still active on the mountain to this day. Shugendo is a deeply fascinating phenomenon, and having now hiked three mountains in some capacity (the two other being Minakamiyama and Mt. Inari), I understand why people find these kinds of places very powerful and are drawn to them. There is something about mountains that does change you, even if just a little bit.

On very clear days, Mt. Fuji is visible from the summit, but this was not such a clear day. The view from there was nevertheless amazing, and it’s always interesting to experience such a concrete change of perspective. Even though one cannot see all of Tokyo from the mountain, getting the high altitude view really puts the urban sprawl into context. The invisible - the later size of Tokyo, blocked by its numerous buildings - becomes visible. Perhaps these kinds of changes of perspective contributed to mountains becoming sacred sites. We really don’t have “the big picture” in our everyday life, everything is so contextualized into our perspective.

Another perspective to Mt. Takao is offered by the Takao 599 museum near the base of the mountain. It is a museum that displays preserved specimens - animals, plants, fungi - from the nature of the mountains. There is no access fee, so unless you hate nature or have a strong negative reaction to the idea of seeing taxidermied animals and preserved insects, there is no reason not to visit. Doing this kind of “still life” presentation of natural life that avoid the daytime trails frequented by humans (I did see a butterfly called asagimadara and one of those giant hornets myself though) so humans can see it - and at least ostensibly learn more about it and therefore respect it - was really fascinating.

I guess I have become quite Fosterpilled because I thought I was witnessing a “pandemonium” of animal and vegetable life that was being “disciplined” into exhibits. It’s not that I disliked the exhibition, I quite enjoyed it, found it very informative and was very impressed by how big Japanese insects can get, and the mountain’s perhaps most striking inhabitant, the giant flying squirrel, was both remarkable and cute. It’s just that an exhibition is not the “big picture” either, rather it is a categorical, microscopic view, which can further illuminate the world, and Takao 599 didn’t try to present itself as a replica of the natural world either. Rather, it called to observe the little details in the surroundings. I think this is perhaps best visited before the ascent to the mountain. Who knows if you would know how to spot traces of giant beetles and flying squirrels.

There’s a third site related to human perception that is located near the mountain. This one is not directly related to Mt. Takao or its nature, and the first impression is that it doesn’t fit at all into the surroundings. It’s the Takao Trick Art museum. There’s an old large torii gate that lines up with the fascinatingly Egypt-themed complex in a way that is quite absurd, and I can’t help but associate the sight with Fossilized Wonders and its Egyptian cosplaying dosojin. Japan appears to have some kind of lowkey fascination with ancient Egypt. One could ask who doesn’t, but while I was studying the belief that Minakamiyama is an ancient pyramid, I stumbled upon an old 20th century idea that Japanese were descendants of ancient Egyptians, as well as the belief that many mountains in Japan are actually man-made structures. Whether Mt. Takao is considered one of these, I don’t remember, and if it is, that would explain why this strange place was here.

I found the place really amusing, the strong Egyptian theming continued within the museum itself, and there were also things like famous optical illusions turned into painting, and more European-themed works too. I would have gone nuts over this place as a child, and even as an adult I found it quite amusing. It seems to have been made for the social media age, and there were many exhibits that were intended to work best with two people, one being the subject of photography, another taking the photo. There was still plenty to see for a single person though.

I left it amused and thankful for the complimentary grape soda visitors could redeem from a vending machine at the end of the exhibition. I thought of it as a fun diversion until much later, after dinner and a shower when it hit me: it’s actually quite incredible Buddhist praxis to put something that teaches one about illusions and subjectivity of perceptions in a fun and lighthearted way next to a Buddhist holy site. Of course the place ostensibly has nothing to do with Buddhism, and I doubt it’s intended as a secret dharma teaching praxis either. At best it might have been some kind of subconscious influence at best, or some kind of pranksterish divine intervention. But it was fascinating and beautiful.

Of course it might be completely deranged to attribute spiritual importance to a site that could cynicaly be read as a way to sate grumpy children who have been dragged along mom’s and dad’s weekend hike, or something capitalizing on smartphones being everywhere, but I guess that’s the difference between the cynical reading and the non-cynical reading, one eviscerates all life from the subject and dry freezes it and categorizes it as “crap”, while the other perspective is able to see it is a part of something deeply interconnected, living, nuanced that might just have roots that are not visible to the naked eye.

And I mean, for some reason the first exhibit, before the museum really even began, was a strange cave-like, shrine-like indentation on the wall with water gushing like a waterfall, housing the statue of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. Next to it was a plaque, reading something about how it has been long believed that praying the Sekhmet will make your wishes come through the magic of the goddess in all of us. Was the whole complex some kind of secret shrine to Sekhmet? Well, I don’t know about that. But it was a curious, unusual place and experience.

It is also of course unbelievably Gensokyo-pilled that there is a Tengu mountain, and right next to it is some strange Egyptian themed thing. Did ZUN get partly inspired for Fossilized Wonders through this? Is it just a strange convergence? Do the gods have a sense of humor? I don’t know.

This pattern that I have been sketching here, Mt. Takao as a perspective changing site of teaching might of course be, like the exhibitions at the Trick Art Museum, illusionary. But it is a pattern that emerged and which I found intriguing, helpful and something that shifted my awareness. Without my interests and previous experiences, I would have never discerned it, be it “real” or not.

Buddhism holds that the ultimate reality is undivided and without categories, so all patterns are illusionary in the end. But patterns can be useful. Recognizing them can keep us alive, make us prosper, help us connect more deeply with the world even. Every unenlightened thing, including the perception of patterns, has the potential to lead to enlightenment.

The obvious question that many will have if what I have been spending much time writing about is also just an illusion, and I admit it, it is of course a possibility. But there is a higher level case to be made here. Reality as we perceive it, including extremely tangible things, is an illusion that emerges when the human cognitive apparatus encounters the baseline reality, which even according to modern physics is mostly empty space with islands of energy resonating at different frequencies. Therefore, even if the spirits of Gensokyo were an illusion that emerges when ancient spirits encounter the “third natural world of computers”, is it any less “real”? Is an illusion that emerges between the contact of a painted floor, a mirror and the human cognitive apparatus somehow “not real”? It is simply a peculiar configuration of phenomena which can invite one to question how accurate and unbiased their perception of things really is. It invites one to look higher, to learn more.

I think that is very important. The other half of the calling for me has been gathering of data, not as some kind of object of collection, but as an attempt to perceive the larger patterns, to understand why do the spirits of Gensokyo emerge between human cognition, ancient spirits and the third natural world of computers. I don’t have the answers yet, but I have found that trying to look past the representations - while allowing them to appear as they wish - solves a lot of neuroses, problems and contradictions which might arise, from the classic hysteria of being “deceived by demons” (humans primarily deceive themselves, secondarily others) to some more specific ones which emerge from the fact that we are dealing with entities choosing to appear (at times) as things many would simply call “video game characters”.

All patterns might be illusionary or provisional, but they do tell us things. Pattern recognition has created the human world as we know it, the good things and the bad things. There are many different patterns to be detected in a place like Mt. Takao. One can try to for example detect the monetary value of human activity there, or one can perceive the patterns of religious activity over the centuries, or the migration patterns of the animals there. The challenge comes in trying to perceive beyond these small patterns, in trying to see the bigger picture, closer to baseline reality. I believe seeing the bigger picture has long since ceased to be a luxury hobby for the intellectuals and mystics and is becoming increasingly necessary for the well-being and even bare existence of life in this world.

If every action is an act of dedication, every act of cognition is one of world-making, and much like we have responsibility for what we revere and make manifest in the world, we are also responsible for how we perceive the world and how we perceive what we can even manifest in the world. I cannot claim that I have the big picture or answers, maybe nobody does. But I can make the claim that it is possible to perceive the world in a radically different way that is enrichening, enlivening and allows one to act with more sensitivity, tact and therefore also freedom, to better navigate the complexities of life.

I cannot say that all of this began with the spirits of Gensokyo, because I was interested in many diverse topics before them, but they lead me to things that turned out to be the missing pieces for me. And if something that emerges between ancient spirits, human cognition and the third natural world of computers has a real impact, does it not therefore have reality through the sheer virtue of its meaningful impact, even if we were to discount everything else? Reality, after all, might very well have a gensou bias. If everything is illusionary or provisional, then illusionary and provisional things are capable of having real impact.

Shadow Pictures, Youkai Scrolls and Other Imaginal Machines

The last thing I am going to write about for this update which has been more than long enough is the Youkai Immersive Experience Exhibition which is being held for (as of writing) one more week at Tennozu Isle in Japan. I had been recommended the exhibition by a friend who had gone there, and he had a lot of positive things to say about it. So going there was everything considered a very easy choice that paid off very well.

The exhibition was very substantial, and consisted of projected video works, sculptures, installations, as well as recreations of old woodblock prints and picture scrolls, with a few original old ones in too. There was even someone in a kappa suit wandering around. When I got to the exhibition the kappa appeared near the entrance and managed to slightly startle me with its sudden appearance, which was an excellent start for the exhibition.

Still images, video clips and text cannot do the exhibition any justice. It was excellent, and I found the way it was arranged to be very well thought out. It spaced video, installations, images and text very well. There was even an interactive kid’s games corner for the little folk to blow off their steam around the halfway point of the exhibition. I liked the installations featuring sculptures, lights and video most. They were really well done and it was really cool to see creatures I had only read about or maybe seen 2D images of before brought to the third dimension like that. I also really liked seeing older picture scroll and woodblock art, and there were some very famous pieces or their reproductions on exhibitions, including Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s giant skeleton. Considering that the originals too were intended to be reproducible, woodblock prints really are the perfect ones for this kind of replica display. And the question of “the original” becomes rather liminal and therefore very youkai-like with them anyway. What is the original? The very first print? The woodblocks used to print the first print? The image in the artist’s mind’s eye?

There was a rather large focus on the works of several artists who were crucial at establishing the visual language of youkai. These were Toriyama Sekien, Katsushika Hokusai, Kawanabe Kyosai, Tsukiyoka Hoshitoshi and Utagawa Kuniyoshi. There were also some pieces predating these artists on display. I actually learned a fair bit, as I was not deeply familiar with the art history of youkai beyond Toriyama Sekien. It was interesting to learn that visual culture related to youkai developed in tandem with visual culture in general, and that Sekien’s big deal was using the woodblock medium to make youkai art for the mass market, whereas earlier bakemono scrolls had been affordable only to the elite.

The exhibition wasn’t just a visual spectacle, it was also informative. While there wasn’t anything radically new for me, there were few tidbits, and it was most interestingly an example of Japanese discourse on youkai in the present day caught live. So what did the exhibition have to say about youkai? There wasn’t perhaps one thing that could be compressed into a single phrase, but rather themes, such as the power of imagination, how the Japanese in the past conceptualized and deal with anxiety-inducing mystery, the use of youkai for satire and humor, youkai as something nostalgic, imaginary that still somehow waits to wake up in human hearts and quiet corners of the world.

The exhibition could be perhaps described as an (judging by audience reactions, successful) attempt at re-enlivening the past. As cultures and tastes change, expressions need to follow in order to speak to new audiences. The audiovisual spectacle that blended the real world and new immersive entertainment technologies could perhaps be seen as a way to re-introduce the kind of impact Edo era misemono shows and youkai art could have had on the audience. However, as we live in the present, and youkai are seen (mostly) as things of the past, there was also an element of rousing nostalgia and teaching about the past and origins of this element of Japanese culture.

The way the exhibition used technology to blur the barriers between old art and present day material reality, imagination and the external world was not only very youkai-like, but also reminded me of one of my favorite lectures, Erik Davis’ A Brief History of Imaginal Machines (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHb05I6kwFQ). In this lecture, Davis makes the case that throughout history, there have been various forms of technologies used ostensibly for entertainment, but also for bringing out subconscious, imaginary realms that have very real spiritual potency and meaning. While Davis works from a Western perspective, I am sure he would have found the exhibition quite intriguing. I found it quite fascinating how the exhibition contained within it hints and traces of even earlier forms of art and imagination interacting with technology of its day, like the “shadow pictures” which were woodblock prints depicting shadowplays, creating strangely layered and curious effect, a picture of a play that involves deceiving the senses.

Much has been written in contemporary youkai studies about youkai as a way to give an imagined shape to invisible, unusual and unexplainable phenomena and vague anxieties and fears, the unusual and unexplainable of course changing with the ages. If imagination is indeed bound up with technology as Davis makes the case for, then it only makes sense that as technology of imagination develops, youkai will follow. I was left with the impression that in certain ways youkai seemed to have pushed the envelopes of the imaginal technologies of their time, from haunted houses of spectacle shows to artists experimenting with new styles and techniques. Maybe a bit too much has been written about youkai following human trends, and not enough has been written about youkai pushing human creativity and technologies which facilitate it forwards…

If one wants to entertain the idea that youkai “want to take shape”, then this exhibition was a most grand example of them taking shape for sure. Here they were, with plenty of room, talented craftsmen and media artists, archivists and people well-positioned to build the bridge between past and future helping them to come to life again. The audience seemed to love it and people were visibly excited and impressed. I even witnessed a case of a little child experiencing apparently earnest and quite extreme fear at one of the exhibits.

While the primary exhibition itself presented youkai as a thing of the past that still lingers on “in quiet corners of the world, waiting to awake within your heart” (I might be misquoting things here), there was a short section after the end which exhibited modern youkai art and promoted the Yokai Art Museum in Shodoshima. Some of the pieces from there that were exhibited were of decidedly modern nature, such as a little blue impish figure that helps people to get a lot of likes on social media, but makes them obsessed with it, hollowing out their lives. So certainly some people still are imagining youkai as something relevant, at least in symbolic form.

This very last point loops to something that I have been fascinated with for years, which is the current ongoing wave of some kind of re-enchament and neo-anismism in the West. A “demon that makes you obsessed with social media” is straight out this mental landscape, and it’s not surprising at all that a Japanese person would come up with a slightly more nuanced take on the matter. So it’s definitively not just the more quiet corners of the world where “youkai” are waiting to wake up, and maybe it’s not just within the hearts of people either.

I feel like much more could be written about this all, but perhaps I have said most already in other youkai-related texts. It was simply amazing, educational, fun and also just kind of outright spiritual to see the exhibition, and I thought it was wonderful how youkai-like the whole thing was on some many different levels. The people behind it really knew what they were doing, and found ways to inject the surprising and otherworldly qualities of youkai into our time. It is kind of funny how insistent they are on “taking shape” and staying somehow culturally relevant throughout the ages. I will end this for now, as I am quite tired and this update is rather insistent on being delivered on time, in one form or another.