Pandemonium and Parade & Touhou as Youkai Culture

Pandemonium and Parade – Japanese Monsters and the Cultre of Youkai (2009) is a book written by Michael Dylan Foster that explores the history of youkai as a concept, and how it has intermingled with broader trends in Japanese culture over the centuries. Foster is a professor of folklore whose work has focused on Japanese folklore and culture. Besides academic work, he has also written several short stories and novels. Youkai appear to be a dear subject to Foster, as not only he has written two books about them, but also hosted an English-language NHK series about them.

I’ll start right away by saying that this book is excelent and I highly recommend it for all Touhou fans to read. The things found within this book’s pages greatly contextualize not only youkai, but also Touhou. While Foster does not write of Touhou – it would have not been quite the cultural force it is today in 2009 – he does write about modern youkai pop culture. There’s many ideas coming from Japanese culture about youkai presented in this book, such as the idea that youkai seek to ”take shape” via human imagination and the power of naming things that likely influenced the worldbuilding of Touhou. After reading this, I much more clearly understand Touhou as part of the cultural continuum of Japan.

In all honesty I should have read this book ages ago, I don’t really know why for as much they are the main focus of Touhou, I wasn’t particularly interested in youkai. Maybe I thought there isn’t that much to them in the end beyond them being ”monsters”.Foster’s book has however completely dispelled this notion for me, and it turns out youkai have been conceptualized and studied in deeply interesting ways that are intertwined with important developments in Japanese culture.

The name of the book is reference to the classic night parade scroll genre of art, but also to a process Foster describes in the book. The youkai, as we shall see, by their nature diverse, liminal, chaotic and polymorphic. They are very much a pandemonium, ”all the demons”, and by their nature seem to resist attempts at categorizing them. Yet the project of ”disciplining youkai” as Foster calls it has been a defining part of culture around youkai. They have been categorised into different taxonomies, been targets of debunking, turned into subjects of folklore, then national icons of pop culture. Ever since the Tokugawa era there has been a constant attempt at reforming this pandemonium into a ”parade”, a more neat, cohesive representation.

Foster’s research is less about youkai as individual entities or even as taxonomic categories, and more about this process of ”disciplining” them and how the ways youkai have been conceptualized have evolved over time. I’ve used the term ”youkai culture” throughout this review, and you could say Foster writes a kind of cultural history of youkai or Japanese ideas about ”the weird”. A fascinating part of this history is how many creatives involved with the process have been aware and playful with of the narrative construction process. Youkai have always liked to blur the lines between reality and fiction, and Touhou is a continuation of this trend.

Foster’s analysis consists of looking at the concept of youkai itself, and then presenting how ideas surrounding youkai have developed over the times. This review will stick closely to this format, and will serve also as a synopsis of the book with some commentary. At the end I will look at Touhou project and ZUN as a creator in light of the ideas presented in this book. Foster’s book is very comprehensive, but it too is also a narrative that by necessity highlights some things and diminishes others. For example, the relationship between religion and youkai is mostly glossed over, and while it’s mentioned we never really learn how the kokugaku scholar and Shinto advocate Hirata Atsutane tried to ”discipline” youkai. Making choices like these of course necessary when writing a book like this, but someone else might have ended up creating a somewhat different narrative. As this book is rooted in a time and a place, it of course has has nothing to say post-2009 developments, which of course includes the boom in popularity of Touhou project. Considering some things Foster writes towards the end of the book, I think he would have something to say about it.

Let’s start following Foster’s trail by looking at youkai as a concept.

Youkai – what’s in a word?

The word ”youkai” has been various translated as things like monster, goblin, spirit, fantastic being, lower-order deity, unexplainable experience or numinous event. The multiple translations and meanings are very much part of what makes youkai a youkai. While Foster doesn’t make a linguistic breakdown of the two kanji constituting the word, it’s written as 妖怪 . The second kanji simply means ”mysterious”, but the first one has multiple meanings. It can mean bewitching, calamity, but also attractive. So a youkai is a ”mysterious calamity”, or ”bewitching mystery” or ”attractive mystery”. Perhaps these multiple potential meanings bake in a kind of unstable nature to the youkai on the level of language. These unstable, liminal qualities that are subject to interpretation are arguably a defining feature of youkai.

The term youkai itself appears to be relatively new, and Foster states it appears in Japan during the mid-Edo period or the late 1700s. Before that, people used different terms to refer to monstrous creatures or strange events. The types of entities focused on also changed over time. In earlier times, terms like mononoke and bakemono were. In the Heian period (794-1185) the term mononoke was used as general category for mysterious and frightening experiences. These could be spirit entities, including ones conjured forth by great human emotions, but also a more abstract, suspicious, unstable quality of things that made them frightening and weird. Bakemono, ”changing thing”, was the word of choice for earlier half Tokugawa period (1601-1868) before youkai became popularized as a term. While the name has strong connotations with shapeshifters, it also refered to all kinds of monstrous creatures.

The term youkai is rather inclusive. Youkai could be creatures like kappa, tengu or kitsune, but also ghostly entities and strange phenomena such as unexplainable noises, a wall appearing in the middle of a road or stars visible during daytime. So the concept of youkai was a rather inclusive one, and it’s defining quality appears to have been weirdness, something that broke the everyday experience of reality. Beyond this, the category had qualities of liminality, blurriness, metamorphosis, hybridity and quite importantly – scariness. Youkai have been later on conceptualized as vague anxieties about the dark, unknown and strange given name and shape. The scariness and abnormality of youkai assumed at times almost transcendental qualities. It wasn’t just that some youkai were thought to hunt humans. Some thought that to witness a youkai night parade invited death upon the viewer through the mere act of seeing the youkai.

Youkai weren’t all hostile, and sometimes in one place something could be worshipped as a deity, and be feared as a youkai elsewhere. Kappa are a classic example of this. While Foster does not write of kitsune, they too were associated with religion, yet also seen as troublesome tricksters. Later thinkers came to at times conceptualize youkai as scorned, forgotten or unworshipped kami. Youkai were not just connected with divinity, but also nature in their own strange and liminal ways. Many youkai would display a kind of excess of natural features, things like deformity, chimeric combinations of traits from humans and animals or unusual metamorphoses. Foster writes how witnessing things like lifecycles of frogs and insects could have inspired humans to apply these concepts to other creatures in suprising ways. A mundane fox becomes in a sense a ”pupa” for the divine fox it becomes when it reaches hundred years of age. Buddhist ideas of the transmigration of the mindstream after death also likely influenced these ideas.

So youkai is a rather inclusive and blurry category. In some sense the blurriness of the youkai blurs reality itself, as encounters and stories with them would force people to reasses their relationship with reality. The blurriness and liminality of youkai seems to have extended to people’s belief in them. It’s unclear how much people historicaly believed in them, and a certain culture of half-belief, half-disbelief seems to have lingered around youkai from at least since they started becoming part of the wider culture from Tokugawa era onwards. Foster writes of ”cognitive resonance” in which people hold contradictory beliefs in way that does not cause dissonance, but rather enrichens their lives. This kind of ”cognitive resonance” seems to be a big part of youkai culture, from early times onwards. As we will see, the youkai have had a quite interesting and rather playful relationship with popular culture, which helped to disseminate them and shape how people perceived them. But youkai have also been subjects of very serious scholarship, and it’s from such where the quest to name and categorize them was born.

As times have changed, the definition – or understand – of youkai has also changed, eventually settling into the category of ”strange Japanese monsters” as it is perhaps popularly now understood. Nevertheless, they retain strange, liminal, reality-bending qualities that play with human perceptions and beliefs. To understand this process of how youkai have evolved and how they have been scrutinized, denied and revived, Foster takes us through time, starting from the Tokugawa era and leading us all the way to the 2000s. Each era has seen people have a different kind of relationship with youkai, and the type of interest and attidutes towards youkai have reflected larger developments in Japanese culture. By studying youkai, one can come to understand Japanese culture at large.

The Tokugawa era (1603-1868) saw the ruling shogunate using Neo-Confucian ideology from China to support it’s rule. The Neo-Confucians encouraged rational inquiry into things as part of a process of moral cultivation which would lead to a more harmonius society. Fruits of this ideology being put into practice included the creation of various encyclopedias modeled after Chinese examples. Later on, the Shogunate (check this) desired to make Japan less dependent on certain imports, and levied the power of inquire and knowledge-making to serve this end. Both of these developments, perhaps surprisingly, influenced the development of culture surrounding youkai. The period of long peace following Tokugawa shogunate becoming the supreme authority of Japan and ending the violent Sengoku era fostered the development of popular culture and entertainment, which soon started making use of youkai for entertainment. This would lead into what were once local legends becoming more widespread phenomenon. An example of entertainment entangled with the supernatural that emerged during this time was hyaku monogatari culture, where people would share scary stories. It was believed that after sharing a hundred stories and extinguishing a candle for each one, a real monster world appear. These gatherings were a kind of attempt a converting a supernatural narrative into a supernatural experience.

Early Japanese encyclopedias reflected a growing interest in what can be termed as ”natural history” and they became rather popular, with some examples remaining such untill early 20th century. They treated youkai not as an ontologicaly separate category, but rather as part of the natural world. The more youkai-like characteristics of kitsune or tanuki could be listed right next to their physical qualities as animals. Some of the categorizations would seem unusual by today’s standards, as the category of ”humans” also included what these days would be called humanoid monsters. Perhaps this reflected a culture where the ”strange” and ”monstrous” were not seen as being separate from everyday reality. The relationship these encyclopedias have with facts as we understand them today was different anyway, as they did not seem to distinguish between hearsay and more solid forms of knowledge. An interesting feature of these encyclopedias was that often a youkai would be ”legitimized” by comparing it with a similar creature from Chinese traditions.

A surprising connection with youkai emerges from attempts to catalogue medicinal plants in Japan. The country was heavily reliant on imported medicines from China and Korea, and the shogunate desired to find domestic ways to produce medicine. This led into an information gathering drive where people began to collect information regarding medicinal plants and their uses. People would distribute their findings and share products made from medicinal plants in kind of ”product conventions”. Soon enough these conventions started to feature things that went beyond their initial scope. People would display curious findings and share stories from their travels. This would attract curious onlookers who were drawn to tales of the weird and things like unusual minerals or alleged kappa remains. Eventually people started to produce things just for these conventions, and for example the bonsai hobby was popularized through these conventions. One can easily draw parallels to later Japanese convention and hobby culture, down to people displaying their creations and distributing various findings (for example, Touhou folklore doujins). These Tokugawa era conventions helped to disseminate youkai lore and culture.

The Edo period saw the emergence of an artist who would make momentous contributions to youkai culture. This artist in question was Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788), who produced compendiums of over 200 youkai, influenced by the encyclopedia culture of the era. Sekien was not the first to produce collected art of youkai, as bakemono scrolls and night parade scrolls depicting youkai processions had existed before. Sekien however made very important contributions to youkai culture that went beyond simply illustrating youkai. He worked with the encyclopedic format, making the first encyclopedias that presented youkai as separate category of beings. They were visual works, but also provided information – and humor. This humor, playfullness and creativity with youkai would shape the tone with how people would approach youkai in popular culture. Sekien would invent new youkai not found in earlier folklore using a process of turning affective phenomena and weird events into more corporeal entities. He would even turn language itself into youkai through using complex play of written language and imagery.

Sekien’s Gazu Hyakkiyagyou series of scrolls would in the end contain over 200 youkai. They started off as rather straightforward encyclopedic works documenting youkai, but became increasingly playful over time. He took the youkai from their earlier context of simply being part of the natural world and presented them as their own thing, bound together by their ”weirdness”. What else connects a tanuki and a ghost other than them being creatures of the night involved in strange happenings?

The later turn towards more humorous works and youkai of his own invention are a part of process that related to his belief that art was a kind of ”wordless poetry”. Sekien’s choice of visual poetry was the kyoka genre of parodic poetry. His parodic approach might have also been influenced by other parodic encyclopedias floating around. While the later works were humorous, there is something quite genius to Sekien’s methods. He had a particular habit of turning the kind of youkai that were more strange events into strange things. The uncomfortable feeling of being in an abandoned house becomes a wall with eyes. Strange sounds heard at the house become little impish goblins hammering at the foundation of the house. There were also forms of visual-textual punnery, like a man who wasted time while living transformed into a youkai that licks oil from lamps, like cockroaches do. One could also read it as ”man wasting the time of a courtesan”. Sekien even went as far as to suggest that a youkai of his invention preceded and influenced a youkai from folklore.

Sekien’s work seems to be partly a kind of commentary on how naming things on paper creates youkai. This can be seen as an extension in the belief of kotodama, the soul of words that gives them particular power. His belief in the power of language and written word is evidenced in a parodical poem he wrote to accompany one of his youkai encyclopedias that tells how poetry moves Heaven and Earth, fabricates deities and demons and paints ”derangement of the weird” year after year. Over time Sekien went from an apparently earnest documentarian of this ”weird” to someone who was engaging it in a very playful way, reflecting broader trend where youkai were becoming part of popular culture and play. While Foster doesn’t write it outright, one can perhaps imagine that the growth of popular culture and the hot and loose epistemic culture that didn’t distinguish hearsay and fact would have fueled hunger for weird stories and images, no matter how truthfull they were or not. A man like Sekien would have been happy to provide, while also commenting on this.

The birth of popular culture that treated youkai in a more playful way didn’t however dispell people’s belief in youkai, nor make people less afraid of them. The half-belief, half-disbelief still had it’s earnest believers. In a slightly paradoxical manner this playfulness led to great dissemination of youkai lore and in some sense solidifed their reality. Youkai also start to become part of a shared Japanese culture as a distinct category, and Sekien’s encyclopedic format would form the basis of for many works on youkai, fictional and academic, later on.

Meiji era – Modernization, Rationalism and Debunking

The rule of the Tokugawa shogunate ended with the Meiji restoration, which led to rapid modernization of Japan. This modernization was brought on by the fear of becoming colonized by Western powers. The extremely rapid modernization process saw the old way of life shattered. Western learned would displace Chinese learning, ”superstition” was banned, radical interventions to religion were made, and even the very concept of time was altered. The move from lunisolar to solar calendar disconnected time from traditional rhythms and cycles and the holidays for celebrating these events. It was a time of great upheaval and arguably created a kind of national trauma, a severing of roots.

Such great upheaval of course had an impact on how youkai were conceptualized. They were relegated to realm of superstition and became targets of debunking, yet somewhat paradoxicaly the amount of effort spent on debunking them perhaps reinforced youkai as an ontological category. In fact, ”youkai studies”, youkaigaku, emerged as a field of study during this time.

The central figure of these studies was Inoue Enryou (1858-1919). He was the son of a Buddhist priest, and was versed in the Chinese studies. He however also became learned in Western sciences, and graduated from University of Tokyo in 1881, where he had studied a wide range of subjects. Beyond his contribution to youkai studies and mission to dispell ”supersition”, he also contributed to Buddhist modernist movement in Japan. Interestingly enough, Inou saw Christianity as an obstacle to Western rationalism, and considered Buddhism a much more rational religion. He had a rather patronizing attidute towards ”uneducated” poople and conceptualized his project of spreading rationalism as a kind of creation of spiritual infrastructure that would mirror the railways and electric lines spreading to Japan.

Enryo's ideas regarding ”mystery” and ”strange” are important for understanding his approach to youkai studies. In fact, his terminology for youkai studies drifted over time. At first he called the subject of his studies ”fushigi”, or mysterious, then of youkai-fushigi, and finally only youkai. Fushigi, or mysterious, according to Inoue are phenomena that are unknown. This he contrasted with ijo, ”strange” or ”out of place” phenomena or ijo. Youkai for him were both fushigi and ijo, mysterious and out of place. He saw fushigi and ijo as being relative concepts that would change as the limits of human knowledge would change. Inou also categorized mysteries into kakai and shinkai, false or provisional mysteries and true mysteries. A false mystery is one which can be explained by natural law, but true mysteries are something Inoue didn’t too deeply define. This is perhaps due to his Buddhist background. He also use a category of kyokai, empty mystery, which included gokai (mistaken mystery) and gikai (artificial mystery).

The purpose of Enryo's work was essentially to clear away the chaff of superstition, fear, projection, rumors, trickery and fabrication so that the ”true mystery”, whatever it was, would shine through more clearly. In some sense he collected youkai cases in order to debunk them, using science and psychology to explain them. A very representative case is one where a man mistook two stacked sacks of rice in a dark hallway for a monster. Youkai start to become psychological experiences that arise in humans under certain conditions, a label slapped into phenomena tinted by fear or ignorance. Inoue had a model of social-religious development, where people start from a state of seeing everything having it’s own spirits, then move to more distinct deities and finally arrive at models for explaining how the world works. Youkai were in a sense holdovers of an earlier mode of perceiving the world. Yet the youkai seem to retain something close to medieval European ideas about wonders, a category between mundane and miraculous. Every false case had at it’s hear the potential for true mystery, and only fearless rational inquiry into weird apparitions would bring humans closer to understanding this mystery.

For all it’s (imposed) rationalism, the Meiji era gave birth to it’s own youkai phenomena, and Inoue of course got involved with it. The phenomena in question is the kokkuri boom, the explosive spread of a divination game that was influenced by the Western spiritualist movement that started in 1848. It’s popularity peaked around 1886 , and was likely spurred on the Meiji ban on spirit mediumship. As there was no human medium and the kokkuri device – a lid or plate on three bamboo legs – itself served as the spirit medium, it would for the most part escape police attention. People also seemed to take it more lightly than older forms of mediumship, and it was clearly more of a game and a form of entertainment. This playful quality makes it unclear to what extent people believed in the device’s ability to channel spirits. It’s foreign origins however gave it a kind of aura of novelty and ”authority” as Japan looked up to Western nations during it’s modernization process. So as Japan imported foreign science, it also imported Western ”irrational”, ”mysterious” and ”weird” too. While Foster does not write of it, later parallels can be found with Japan’s vivid UFOlogy scene of later times which has tangled itself with historical numinous locations and ideas of mountain spirits.

There were some surprisingly detailed origin stories given for kokkuri, including stranded sailors bringing the game, but it’s origins are unclear. What is known that it’s remarkably similar to the table turning mediumship of the spiritualists, and that it was invariably credited to be a foreign creation. Despite – or perhaps because – of this foreigness, it ended up ”hybridizing” with local youkai. While the name kokkuri is likely an onomapoetic one related to nodding, as the plate or lid would ”nod” from alleged influence of spirits, it acquired a youkai-associated set of kanji for writing it. These were the kanji for fox, dog and tanuki. The dog here likely being a reference not to inugami spirits, but rather the Tengu, which are written with the kanji for heaven and dog. Many strongly associated the device with these youkai, and there were even categorizations which of these spirits were present based on how the device behaved. If the plate or lid dipped strongly, it was said to be proof of the presence of a Tengu.

Foster writes that Enryo attempted to ”alter the landscape of perception” by explaining Kokkuri as something else than youkai. This was not an easy task as he had to introduce foreign concepts to tackle this foreign ”youkai”. These concepts were derived from physiology and psychology, and were rather complex, requiring one to understand things like nerves, muscles and ”expectant attention”. These were exactly the same kind of arguments that were used to explain away spiritualist table turning, and Enryo seems to have directly taken these from English literature on the subject.

While Foster doesn’t explore out the full potential implications of it, he points out that Enryo’s debunking of kokkuri leans so much on Western debunking of table turning that he describes the kokkuri plate as spinning, which was not how the divination game played. Such apparent unfamiliarity with the phenomena being debunked does at least raise my eyebrows, and is emblematic of many later debunkings of ”paranormal phenomena” also tending to be rather dismissive and quite surface-level. Do I think youkai were tilting the kokkuri? Well, the various psycho-physiological explanations are in my mind reasonable and likely, but one must consider that spirits were traditionally thought to operate through people anyway in Japan. Those believing in mediumship could easily argue that it was youkai causing the muscle twitching and tampering with expectant attention... At least for me the displayed unfamiliarity with the actual practice leaves open a tiny sliver of possibility and makes me wonder about his level of attention paid in other cases. Surely some among the Japanese of his time felt the same, which is probably why attempts at debunking youkai didn’t entirely dispell them.

Enryo wasn’t the only one tackling the kokkuri phenomenon with Western concepts though. Others were levying the new phenomenon of electricity as a model of explanation. It was claimed that it was not youkai but rather ”human electricity” that made the kokkuri tilt. This ”human electricity” wasn’t the same as the electrical phenomena of human physiology (the debunking argument would indeed operate by ”human electricity” via electric impulses in nerves), but something which seemed to have little to do with electricity as physical phenomena. Some of the qualities given to this ”human electricity” recall more of older yin-yang thinking and were perhaps directly inspired by Western attempts at levying the at time poorly understood electricity to explain all kinds of mysterious phenomena. So both in Japan and the West a never, ”scientific” and ”technological” explanation interfaced with older and more numinous views of the world.

According to Foter, the struggle to explain youkai away formed a surprisingly central part of the Japanese modernization program. I can see that in some sense they would be the perfect target. They became codified and popularized during the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, and their rule was was blamed for Japan’s weakness in front of Western powers. Youkai were associated with the ”supernatural”, and the Japanese became embarrassed of being seen as ”superstitious” in front of Westerners. Furthermore, youkai were troublingly liminal. As Japan sought to manufacture singular truths to form a coherent nation state capable of resisting Western influence, there was very little time for monsters on the fringes, weird rumors, panics or parodic fiddling with ideas about reality. Paradoxicaly, the introduction of new paradigms of course displayed the power of language and definition in constructing understandings of reality.

Youkai of course didn’t vanish as an object of cultural interest – and not fully as targets of earnest belief – after the Meiji era. And in some ways Inoue’s project ended up turning youkai into ”tradition”, which gave them a kind of layer of ”patina” and certain cultural stability. In the coming decades, Japanese would keep on engaging with this tradition.

Early 20th Century – Liminality, Nostalgia and Ethnology

The time between the end Meiji era and the start of the Second World War saw youkai increasingly becoming relegated as a thing of the past. Foster presents a tale from this time he finds particularly emblematic. A train is stopped when the people operating hear another train unexpectedly coming towards them. The mysterious train never appears and there is no collision. The railway men get off to investigate, and discover a dead tanuki lying on the railway tracks. Youkai were increasingly becoming this ”dead tanuki on the tracks,” something that were getting ran over by modernity. It’s not like they completely disappeared from the spaces of fiction and play, but they become diminished, understood more as representing a lost world. At the same the various new ”weird” phenomena that emerge like hypnosis are divorced from old youkai ideas.

Youkai did feature in certain fiction written during this time, and Foster writes about how Natsumi Soseki and Mori Ogai treated youkai and similar themes in their works. Interestingly enough, Foster mostly glosses over Ryonosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa, perhaps because his parody of kappa as a heartless modern society perhaps did not fit the larger trends. Youkai also became objects of folklore studies during this time, and Foster writes that in a sense youkai were ”taxidermied” for a museum, becoming relics, not to be even debunked, but rather standing as reminders of a bygone era.

Natsumi Soseki and Mori Ogai were important figures in 20th century Japanese literature. Neither wrote much directly about youkai, but the mythological past is a theme in their works. Soseki’s writings could perhaps be characterised as capturing this collision between tradition, supersition and modern rationality. As an example Foster presents a story of his which features the protagonist regressing into a kind of premodern supersitious mindset over concern for his ill wife. Suddenly his home city becomes uncanny and spooky, filled with ominous sights and sounds. Ultimately his concern turns out to be baseless and his wife recovers, and the protagonist is left feeling confused over his lapse of rationality.

Mori Ogai’s approach was somewhat different, and was informed by his background in the medical sciences. He was kind of a liminal figure, growing up in the countryside but moving to an urban setting, educated both in classical Chinese learning and modern sciences. Some of his works were rather Enryo-like tales of mysterious phenomena becoming debunked, but others explored the dangers and limits of modern science, such as the abuse potential of hypnotism. He seems to have been of the opinion that if the ”rags” (supersition) cannot be replaced with ”silk” (understanding), then people would rather cling to the ”rags”. A particular story of his that Foster presents deals with how certain staples of older culture related to the supernatural, in this case the tellings of hundred ghost stories have lost all their potential after the modern disillusionment and have become irreversibly things of past.

Both of these authors wrote stories that were ultimately about people stuck in liminal times, neither quite in the past nor in the present. Their protagonists are awkwardly in between, ready to slip into past modes of thinking and viewing the world when conditions for such arise. This is interestingly very much in line with how horror became viewed through Freud’s creation of the concept of ”uncanny”. For Freud, uncanniness, ”unheimlich”, ”un-home-ness”, was a reversal into an earlier mode of thinking. For the 20th century Europeans, reverting into ”barbarism” would of course be the pinnacle of horror. While Foster writes of this concept of uncanniness in the introduction, he does not make the connection to Natsumi’s and Mori’s wirtings. Foster also writes in the references section that Western culture at one point started viewing thoughts and feelings themselves as potentially terrifying phantasmagorias, but does not connect this kind of psychological shift in Japanese ideas about the youkai and supernatural. The omission of Akutagawa’s Kappa is bit of a shame in this light, as the witness to the cruel kappa society is in the novel considered insane – an example of youkai becoming deemed terrifying internal phantasmagoria by society at large. There is much to explore in this kind of psychologization and pathologization of abnormal experiences, the internalization of monsters.

Youkai were also the subjects of academic studies, though from a different perspective compared to previous eras. The most important figure in this new wave of youkai studies was Yanagita Kunio, the founder off minzokugaku or folklore studies. His research is characterized by Foster as driven by nostalgia and desire to incorporate elements of the past into the present. He is most known for Tono Monogatari from 1910, a collection of 119 short stories set in Tono, a village. In these stories, various strange events are described as factually happening in a flat, encyclopedic style. The witnesses are not treated as some ignorant country bumpkins, but their word are taken as-is. These events include rituals, strange deaths and youkai sightings like kappa footprints on the riverbank. For Yanagita, youkai were a part of the historical empirical record and he does not attempt to separate real and imaginary. This feed into liminality and makes the youkai once again possible in a sense.

Yanagita’s work has however sometimes been criticized as a kind of ”voyeurism” and othering of rural Japan. Foster ties him to a broader trend of ”ethnologists and archeologists arriving the moment a culture has losts it’s mean of self-defence”. Kunio’s work is a kind of salva ethnography, an aesthetization of the youkai that ”puts them into a museum”. Foster finds him to be self-awarely writing the literal landscape of his texts into existence. Yet for all the possible critiques, his work seems to have been born from personal experiences that made him more respectful toward the subjective experiences of others. In Genkaku no Jikken (1936), Experiments with Illusion, he tells of how he saw daytime stars as a child. Later in life he would be mocked for telling the story, but the experience nevertheless made him question objective reality. Yanagaita’s project can be conceptualized as a way to reintroduce the poetic to science. A certain poetic sensibility allows one to emphatize with the experience’s of others, and work with the subjective topic of supernatural experiences. Ultimately Yanagita regarded human beings and their experiences as the most mysterious thing.

One influential hypothesis that Yanagita had regarding youkai was that they were deities from older forms of religion that had become discarded but went on to live as monsters on the fringes of the culture. An example of this is attempt at explaining the origins of a youkai known as hitotsume-kozo, which had one eye, one leg and a long tongue. Kunio believed that ancient Japanese practiced human sacrifice. The chosen victim would have one eye poked out and one leg broken to prevent them from escaping, but at the same time they were respected and considered to be close to the divine. As other forms of religion pushed away these practices, the idea of a creature close to spirit world with one leg and one eye would have remained part of the culture and eventually transformed into a youkai. This idea is rather fascinating as it has parallels with Western ideas about various demons being demonized pre-Christian deities. It’s also quite interesting that Kunion was working out this hypothesis when new ”gods” of modernity and industrialization were supplanting older Japanese gods…

Of course, there is ultimately little evidence for this particular case, even though there are traces of Japanese practicing other forms of human sacrifice. Perhaps this is best taken as an extrapolation of the ambiguity between a kami and youkai, and Yangaita’s belief in root causes lying in customs and narratives. The proximity between youkai and divnity is an interesting question, as historicaly – and in the present – they do hold a kind of dual nature, being fascinating yet repulsive. In Yanagita’s time, they could be seen as having a powerful nostalgic connection to a more divine world of the past. His folkloric project was of course tied to questions of identity, and I would argue that it appears to have a kind of religious dimension. In some sense for Kunio past was outside of history itself, an idea resonant with ideas of mythological time and eternal return.

Another scholar from around this time was Ema Tsutomu. He worked from a more textual basis, more reliant on written record and locating youkai in different historical contexts. He was the founder of fuzokushigaku, the study of customs. In Tsutomu’s original sense it could perhaps be better conceptualized as a study of historical fads and fashions. In his Nihon Youkai-henge Shi, he treats youkai as if they were real, at least in the sense of being real cultural phenomena. They might be illusionary, but they have a real impact on people, and this illusion appears to form a kind of taxonomy. He makes a distinction between a youkai and a ”henge”. A youkai is a kind of ungraspable mystery to him, and henge is a kind of changeling that has externally changed it’s identity He divides the henge into gensu-teki or this-worldly and rinne-teki or transmigratory. This-worldly henge are essentially shapeshifters, and transmigratory henge are entities like ghosts. Ema created a kind of taxonomy of youkai that relied on the thing they most closely resembled, such as a person, an animal, a plant, an object or ”natural thing”. The ”not-quiteness” was a defining characteristic of a youkai for him.

Ema didn’t just catalogue the weird but he studied where and when youkai and henge made their appearances and which types were most common. He found that evening was the most common time to report encounter with youkai. When it came to locations, they were rather varied, from mountains to rivers, but the most urban areas seemed to be mostly absent. A very interesting trend in youkai reports he noted was that over time female youkai were reported more and more. Emadidn’t postulate any kind of cause for this. Foster notes that there would be ripe material for analysis, but sadly doesn’t commit to it himself. I would love to read an analysis on this trend, as he later does offer some psychosexual dimensions of moder modern youkai phenomena. Some historical female youkai, such as a woman falling so madly in love with a monk that she turns into a giant snake and kills him, have rather obvious sexual elements. Others can be seen in the light of things like infant morality and dangers of giving birth. But further social analysis would be of great interest – did the increase in youkai sightings correlate with some historical decline or increase in women’s status in society, or changes regarding women’s role in society?

The project of studying youkai was to Ema something less tied to questions of identity per say, and more related to his idea that there was a lot to learn from the history of youkai-henge. Tsutomu thought that the encounters and stories of them contributed to moral lessons and self-cultivation of people from older times. His view of treating the youkai as a serious and perhaps in some sense actually existing phenomena is reflected on his views on later cultural developments in Japan. According to Ema, since Meiji restoration advances in science have caused mysteries to unfold, and this has made youkai fear the humans instead. The youkai haven’t however completely vanished, and despite all the advances of the science, there remains a sublime world or aspect of reality that transcends science. I find Ema’s work to be somewhat reminescent of the Western forteana of Charles Fort who collected reports of strange events and presented them as a challenge to science of his day. While Ema didn’t have such an agenda, there are still some parallels to be made.

Ema’s work and certain more taxonomic aspects of Yanagita’s work offered a kind of backdoor for youkai to come back into reality. For example, Yanagita explored the difference between yurei and bakemono. Bakemono are location-bound, indiscriminate of time and target all people. Yurei on the other hand target specific individuals, chase them and appear at the hour of the Ox. Later scholars have however criticized his taxonomical choices. Yanagita also explored categories of belief in relation to youkai, dividing them to believers, non-believers and people who feel eerie when told about youkai, this liminal category being perhaps ready to slip into belief given the right circumstances.

Youkai were however inevitably on their way into history and fantasy, and some people from countryside were becoming upset from the implications that they still believed in youkai. Yanagita offered a kind of ”tanuki demonology” in three stages which described the decline in the potency of youkai, be they real monsters or cultural phenomena. In the first stages the tanuki are able to posses people, on the second stage derange them, and on the third they are only able to surprise people. Tales of youkai being subjugated started to appear, in a sense offering an explanation why they were no longer seen. Humans evolve and youkai devolve. But this evolution wasn’t always seen to be so unidirectional. The physicist and writer Terada Torahiko(1878-1935) stated that the desire to understand youkai drives science because understand mystery would require what would these days be called interdisciplinary studies. Bakemono evolve with humanity, because solving old mysteries simply brings forth new ones.

Two telling examples of how youkai were becoming ”fossilized” and in some sense safe and nostalgic were two cultural trends from this time. The first is the rise of the eroguro nansensu cultural movement, which dealt with erotic and grotesque themes. The subject matters of these works included physical deformity, criminal psychology and deviant sexuality. The very human horror made youkai feel much safer. Another cultural trend was the bifurcation of mysterious and youkai, where new strange phenomena were no longer conceptualized in terms of youkai. Strange things never stopped happening in Japan, but they were no longer thought to be the work of youkai. The cultural relevance of youkai diminished too, and it took untill the 1960s for broader interest to rise again.

1950s to 1980s – Popular Culture and Birth of New Youkai

Foster has very little to say about youkai culture during the Second World War. Most likely the very real horrors of the war left little apetite for stories of supernatural horror. The youkai would not make a cultural comeback for a while after the war either. The post-war cultural landscape of monsters was mainly populated by newcomers which came to be called kaiju, giant monsters. The 1954 film Gojira, better known in the West as Godzilla, started this trend. Godzilla is a rather straightforward analogy for the destruction faced during the war and dangers of nuclear weapons and nuclear testing. Kaiju are not broadly speaking considered youkai, despite being monstrous. They are perhaps too large, too evident and not liminal enough to be such. It took untill 1968 for youkai to be featured in the context of a kaiju movie, and interestingly enough they were depicted as defending Japan. In the Youkai Daisensou (1968) film the antagonist is a monster from ”Babylonia”, stirred into life by archeology. When it arrives into Japan, it attacks symbols of Shinto and Buddhism. The symbolism of native monsters defending against an foreign invader attacking national symbols is rather obvious. I find the choice of the monster coming from ”Babylonia” to be a fascinating choice, as ”Babylon” has been at times used to pejoratively describe the West. Whether this is influence or convergence, Foster does not tell and I don’t know. Beyond these qualities, this move is an example of youkai becoming safe and nostalgic, good enough to be levied for the defense of the nation.

The post-war period from 1950s to 1980s was a time of explosive economic growth and urbanization, a radical transformation of the Japanese society. By the 1970s this rapid modernization was starting to face difficulties and criticism. The energy crisis of the 1970s, triggered by the oil crisis of 1973, demonstrated potential limits to economic growth. The enviromentalist movement emerged, and in Japan it was spurred by several incidents of pollutants leading to mass poisonings. Dissatisfaction with social conditions and security treaties with the United States led to mass protests and anti-authoritarian movements. Part of this reaction against modernization and post-war political developments was the emergence of kind of nostalgia and renewed interest in folklore. This included also a renewed interest in the weird, youkai included.

A modern champion of the youkai would emerge in the form of the mangaka, writer and researcher Mizuki Shigeru. He has written both more academic texts on youkai, as well as fiction. His youkai catalogues are rather reminescent of earlier work by Toriyama Sekien. His fiction has featured historical youkai, but also some inventions of his own. When it comes to his own creations, the creative methodology appears to be inspired or at least very similar to Toriyama’s methods. For example, he took the nurikabe phenomenon, an unexpected wall appearing on a road, and turned it into a creature for fiction. He has also recontextualized some older youkai. An example of this is a ceiling-licking youkai which according to Sekien made houses cold. Mizuki however credits this creature with leaving stains on ceilings.

Mizuki’s most famous work is the manga Gegege no Kitaro, who details the adventures of a youkai boy called Kitaro. This youkai boy is a very human-like character, with a missing eye being his most divergent physical feature. As far as Foster lets us know, this is the first incident of youkai being presented as relatable human-like beings. Humanoid youkai were of course part of the folklore, but their separation from humanity was an important quality in making them youkai. Touhou is of course part of this continuum that was apparently started by Shigeru. Foster states that there are certain parallels between the character of Kitaro and Mizuki himself. Where Kitaro is missing an eye, Mizuki lost one of his arms during Second World War. Mizuki’s childhood which took place between urban and rural settings and his experiences during the war seem to have made him a kind of a liminal character, much like the human-like monster boy Kitaro is. Kitaro fights for the survival of good youkai and good humans, and Mizuki himself in a sense fought for the survival of youkai by re-popularizing them.

These parallels between a fictional character and Mizuki himself seem to be part of a broader trend of him fictionalizing aspects of his life. An example of this is how he credited his grandmother, which he called Nonnonba, with transmiting him knowledge of youkai and mysterious events. However, it seems in reality that his grandmother wasn’t particularly interested in youkai and was a rather ordinary countryside woman. Many of the youkai Nonnonba supposedly told Mizuki about were not creatures of local folklore, but entities which Sekien conjured. In a way Sekien created a kind of fictional past that was more youkai-rich than any real past was. While Foster does not state that Sekien would have fabricated his experiences during the war, his fictionalization of his childhood does raise questions, and Mizuki’s views regarding the natives at Rabaul were greatly divergent from views expressed by many other veterans who served there. While deployed in Rabaul, Mizuki was repeatedly sick with malaria and lost his arm. While recovering from losing his arm, he stumbled upon a local tribe which felt ”otherwordly” and ”like the Jomon” era to him. The contact with the natives seems to have been somehow profoundly healing to him, instilling kind of primitivist utopianism in him. Other Japanese accounts from the same time seem to dismiss the locals as backwards brutes and barbarians. I think it’s entirely possible that Mizuki might have truly perceived the locals differently, even if the details would have some poetic license to them.

But what exactly are youkai, Mizuki’s favorite topic, to him? His views regarding them are actually rather interesting and form an interesting continuum from Sekien. Mizuki seems to believe them to be things that have some kind of ontological reality or at least own agency, and that youkai (and kami) want to ”take shape” by ”knocking on people’s brains”. This process requires belief and a kind of ”youkai sense”. By allowing one to perceive the youkai, one is able to give them shape and bring them out for world to see. For Mizuki, being a youkai was not a static process, but rather something that could and should adapt to the times. This process of youkai-creation or perhaps youkai-becoming was a co-creative one. Mizuki states that the reason why there were so many youkai in the past was that people used to live in a much more scarier world. Thus people would create a lot of youkai from these emotions of fear. Foster writes that this would make youkai kind of ”affective phenomena”, like particular feelings, but personaly I think this idea would make youkai a memetic phenomena.

Mizuki’s relationship with what would later be perhaps called memetics and perhaps even ”meme magic” is extremely fascinating. For example, Mizuki stated that perhaps there should be an ”organization for preserving youkai”, while in fact serving as something like that organization. He created a neat, fictional or fictionalized, chronology of youkai which stopped at 1865, just at the cusp of Meiji restoration, turning cultural developments into a historical narrative. Before there were movie and TV adaptations of Gegege no Kitara, Mizuki wrote a plotline where Kitaro gets ”dragged into” TV and movies. He also had an earlier manga called Terebi-Kun which commented on the rising, commercialized TV culture. Foster writes that Mizuki took on a kind of a medium role that was working very deftly with new forms media. Mizuki was instrumental in re-interpreting and reviving youkai culture, provided interesting new narratives and conceptualizations regarding youkai and turned them into a truly national phenomena through new forms of mass media.

The powerful cultural presence that Mizuki had led him to becoming intertwined with the birth of a new, modern youkai that happened in the late 1970s. In 1978, strange things were reported from Gifu Prefecture. Stories of a masked woman harassing and threatening schoolchildren emerged. She would approach children while wearing a mask, asking them is she was pretty. If the children replied yes, she would remove her mask, revealing a terribly mutilated and wide slit mouth and ask if she was pretty ”even like this”. She was dubbed the kuchi-sake-onna, or slit-mouth-woman. While at first represented as a living flesh and blood person, these encounters soon took mythological, supernatural characteristics. These included the detail that repeating the word ”pomade” three times could repel her. By 1979, there were reports of this kuchi-sake-onna as she was being called from every single prefecture of Japan. The terror caused by kuchi-sake-onna among children was apparently very real, and in certain areas police patrols were deployed to keep things calm.

Mizuki would illustrate the kuchi-sake-onna and considered her to be very much one, down to the fact that there apparently was a ”spell” she could be repelled with. It’s possible that Mizuki re-popularizing youkai contributed to the kuchi-sake-onna phenomenon, but other types of emergent horror media also likely contributed to it. What exactly caused this event to happen is a good question, and Foster has a lot to write about it. While kuchi-sake-onna has been variously termed things like urban legend or contemporary mythology, on some she was very clear continuation of earlier youkai lore, a modern version of the ghost and demon-women populating Japanese mythology. One can argue that the myth of Izanami no Mikoto dying and going to Yomi is the origin of these stories, and thus it’s part of very primordial cultural layer. Her modus operandi of entrapping people by asking questions was in line with historical youkai, and there were local variations of the story which seemed retellings of older stories. These include a ghost asking for candy being replaced by kuchi-sake-onna asking for candy. While Foster does not make this connection, kuchi-sake-onna could be conceptualized as a kind of transmigratory henge. Many of her origin stories feature her being a woman who becomes defaced from cosmetic surgery, or going insane from grief, but this transformation seems to have endowed her with not only spite, but also supernatural qualities like inhuman speed and endurance.

Foster presents some possible social causes for the emergence and popularization of the kuchi-sake-onna. The stories of her hit a very vibrant media environment which contained outlets willing to run sensational stories like this. The late 1970s were an era of increasing demands of academic performance placed on children. Some have presented that kuchi-sake-onna was something like a demonic shadow to the ”education mama”, mothers who would do their best to encourage – and pressure – children to perform well at school. Kuchi-sake-onna was generally described as being the age of a young mother. She also appeared in an environment where beauty standards for women were becoming stricter, and things like advertisements for cosmetic surgery were commonplace. Her behavior and origin story are certainly tied to these factors. Her mask might have not only been hiding a deformity, but been inspired by sight of people wearing masks during flu seasons and as protection against pollution. Enviromental pollution became a major topic in the 1970s, so kuchi-sake-onna might have had an element of perceived disease or pollution associated with her. Furthermore, masks were used to cover the faces of protesters. The protests in the 1970s included the women’s right movement. The sight of a masked woman could have been associated with these protests and ”women who can’t close their mouths”. One can also read a fear of ”unmasking” as a woman, truly representing yourself, from her character. Some have seen her as a kind of hybrid character carrying multiple of these qualities, a kind of emblem of the shadow side of Japan in the 1970s, almost asking if the country itself is ”pretty” after all the sacrifices made.

Foster also puts forward some explanations that deal with rather primordial psychological sexual themes. Kuchi-sake-onna might not have been just the shadow of an ”education mama”, but also mothers in general. Some see certain types of monstrous female figures as being manifestations of the latent fear that children feel towards their mothers. Elements of the kuchi-sake-onna phenomenon have been interpreted as containing sexual themes, at times by Japanese living through the events. For example, one university student compared her slit mouth to a vagina, and there were anecdotes of adults encountering her and initially thinking she was a prostitute. Such stories are quite the microcosm of attidutes at the time, but there are more primordial elements to this sexual side.

Kuchi-sake-onna is part of a continuum of cannibalistic female figures, ”pre-Oedipal figures” who threaten to symbolicaly or concretely to devour children. These figures have als obeen called the ”oral-sadistic female”, and have been interpreted as a kind of inversion of breastfeeding. Where babies feed from women, the oral-sadistic demoness eats children. The toothy wide mouth that somehow evoked comparisons to a vagina seems to mirror the vagina dentata myth and play on castration anxiety. There is also something very exhibitionist in how she unveils a hidden part of herself to little children. On some level kuchi-sake-onna can be seen as a pervert who targets children that invades their spaces and taints their innocence, implicitly threatens boys with castration and shows girls aspects of womanhood that were considered ugly or dirty. I found this interpretation very interesting, and I wish Foster would have done some comparison with older manifestations of youkai here. There could be (and perhaps elsewhere has been) much to write about these dimensions of the youkai phenomena. It’s interesting to note that the sexual dimensions of the youkai phenomena view in the light that one of the readings for the ”you” kanji is ”attractive”. Perhaps it was an inevitability that this meaning would begin to spill over in the realm of experience.

While youkai had been condemned to be things of a rural past, kuchi-sake-onna was an urban phenomenon. This likely reflected cities itself becoming alienating and frightening and fear of strangers in an urban setting becoming a deeper part of Japanese culture. Interestingly enough her time of appearance also coincided with the time that urban settings were becoming accepted targets of ethnographic and folkloric research. It was almost as if she appeared to provide researchers material to work with… Her appearance also troublingly seems to have acted as harbringer for torima jiken, random acts of violence conducted against innocent bystanders that began to emerge in the 1980s.

Her timely and premonitory qualities are deeply fascinating, and while Foster does not go in depth about these, I would like to draw some parallels here. In ufology, it has been noted that the apparent appearance of the unidentified ”craft” often seem to be slightly ahead of the present technologicaly trajectory. In some sense the anomalous sightings have predictive power. Some have also pointed that the anomalous craft also seem to in a sense make a show of themselves, they want to be seen, just as kuchi-sake-onna appeared when there started to be folklorists interested in urban folklore. I would also argue that the post-2000s popularization of ”shadow people” as category of monsters people report has been predictive of a kind of process of the world becoming a more shadowy, nebulous place where the ”shadow” qualities of humanity have been unveiled through the internet. Another interesting phenomenon with potentially predictive qualities is the re-emergence of demons as explanatory models of strange, unpleasant phenomena. This might of course predict a return to older modes of explaining the world. Can urban legends have such predictive qualities. Maybe. Can monsters? Well, they have been considered as portents and omens, so perhaps kuchi-sake-onna was a real monster after all. Mizuki certainly considered her to be a very fine example of the youkai.

From Youkai Boom to Youkai Culture

Mizuki and the kuchi-sake-onna phenomenon can be seen as initiators of a ”youkai boom” which Foster saw as continuing during the time he was writing it. Youkai were dragged out of the past and countryside straight into the present. The 1980s saw renewed interest in kokkuri, and while Foster doesn’t write about it, it was likely part of the 1980s occult boom. New youkai continued to appear sporadicaly, such as the jinmenken, the human faced dog that emerged in 1989, and the Toire-no-Hanako who haunts school toilets. Schools becoming grounds for scary stories has been a particular trend in Japanese culture, and one can of course read much into it representing academic and social pressure felt in these environments.

The popularization of Japanese horror movies led to emergence of new youkai-like entities and phenomena depicted on film. The J-Horror genre would often feature the liminal qualities of various communication devices which were becoming an increasingly important part of the nation’s culture and technological infrastructure. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Ringu, which was localized in United States as Ring. It features a cursed videotape that kills all who see it in seven days. The original film is interestingly self-aware of the folkloric process and begins essentially as an investigation of rumos. It’s also almost like an inverse Terebi-Kun, where the liminal bleeds out back into material reality from television. The idea of a lethal videotape also harkens back to old ideas about seeing the youkai night parade being deadly through the mere act of seeing.

Historical youkai have seen themselves becoming local, rural, revivalist and national icons. Cute kappa mascots are good enough to server as local mascots, and kitsune and tanuki feature in advertisements. On some level Foster finds that the world of the youkai hasn’t become an otherworld but a kind of nostalgic ”other Japan”. Youkai have become entangled with the commerical process and while foster doesn’t use the term, a kind of group of ”youkai otaku” have emerged. An example is the Kai magazine, which gathered manga, photos, articles and discussions about youkai from various enthusiasts. This magazine has become entangled with broader youkai-interested culture, and an example of it is how it makes a cameo in the 2005 remake of the Youkai Daisensou film. Rather than defending against foreign invaders, the youkai fight mechanical monsters that feed on human refuse. This not only recalls earlier ideas about tsukumogami, but also the idea as technological activity as enemy of youkai – and humans. This remake saw an international release, but Foster states that much of the cultural context will be lost to foreign viewers. He wonders to what extent youkai can ”go international” and how much they must be removed from their culture-bound past to be enjoyed by broader audience. Foster compares the relative lack of international success of Studio Ghibli’s (in my opinion genius) Pompoko, deeply bound to Japanese tanuki lore, as evidence for the lack of international appeal of youkai. In contrast, Ghibli movies in general seem to have done very well because while they draw from Japanese culture, they are not stuck particular mythologies or forms of presenting these ideas.

There’s also been developments in the study of youkai. A certain kind of self-awareness and study of the historical process has become a prominent feature of the new youkaigaku. Foster puts forth Komatsu Kazuhiko as an example of a scholar working with this discipline. He views the study of youkai ultimately as being the study of humans through the lens of youkai, conceptualizing youkai as ”creatures that humans imagine”, a kind of ”youkai culture studies”.

Youkai also continue to be the subject of written fiction. An example of this is Kyougoku Natsuhiko, whose works pay a lot of homage to Sekien. His most famous series of novels feature a protagonist who shares the author’s surname, continuing the trend of creators within the youkai space inserting themselves into fiction. This protagonist solves youkai-related mysterious through Enryo-like rationality and a multidisciplinary approach. ZUN is known to enjoy Kyougoku’s novels and they have very likely had very broad influence on him. A particular example is the character of Rinnosuke Morichika, which is considered by many to be a kind of self-insert by ZUN. He runs a secondhand item shop called Kourindou, and the name of the bookstore and Kyogoku’s protagonist runs in Kyogokudou. While Rinnosuke doesn’t really solve mysteries, he acts as a kind of lorekeeper who appears to have been around since the creation of the Great Hakurei Barrier.

Youkai culture and the encyclopedic mode associated with youkai also influenced some prominent forms of Japanese culture that are however not directly related to youkai. An example of this is Pokemon. While some Pokemon are based on youkai, it’s the encyclopedic mode that the franchise heavily leans on. The idea of collecting creatures that are then divided among different types and biomes where they are found has parallels with historical encyclopedias. The use of real-world cataloguing techniques gives Pokemon a kind of air of added reality which likely contributed to it’s popularity. Foster finds that this seems to make the world of Pokemon a kind of self-contained otherworld that is separate from the world, but to it’s fans, always relevant to it. I’m sure that Foster had a lot of thoughts on the later phenomenon of Pokemon GO which blurred the line between these realities...

Foster ends his book with an analysis of this encyclopedic mode, collecting and desire for an ”otherworld”. Accordeing to Foster, the process cataloguing, naming and placing things can generate a kind of ”doppleganger” universe. He quotes Komatsu, who writes that ”the otherworld is the world that is on the other side of our lived world”. This lived world can be understood in the sense of time, or as a space. Youkai then emerge as kind of interruptions to the lived world that alert people to their presence. This collection and naming forms a kind of collection as a form of play and art. Rather than simply collecting being the point, the point becomes the production of a new context. Entities and phenomena from different contexts are represented next to each other, and they become part of a single, unified context. The messy pandemonium of youkai and the contexts where they appeared in become a neat parade. Yet at the end of the collecting, cataloguing and studying there seems to persistently remain something mysterious to grapple with.

Touhou and Youkai Culture

As the book sheds light on one of the central concepts of Touhou, that is of course youkai, it has great relevance when it comes to putting the worldbuilding of Touhou into context. Beyond that, it shows that ZUN is a part of continuum of creative people working with youkai. ZUN appears to be rather well-read when it comes to the matter of youkai. Many themes of Touhou’s worldbuilding are very resonant with themes presented in this book. The idea that youkai need human belief and fear to sustain themselves and that they lack a single defined form and are mutable seem to be inspired by Mizuki Shigeru’s ideas. Mizuki in turn was perhaps influenced by Sekien’s ideas about the power of writing, which was perhaps in turn influenced by belief in the kotodama, word-soul, the power of language. So Touhou is very much part of a very long cultural trend.

An important part of youkai culture has been the encyclopedic mode, and there are traces of it to be found in Touhou, even though I would argue it’s not the main mode ZUN presents information. Sure there are there omake texts which offer backgrounds to characters, and some of the printworks follow the encyclopedic format to some extent. Touhou however is very character-driven, and even when a certain character acts like a representative of a species, they are still very much their own person. So in this regard Touhou is a break from that tradition.

What exactly are youkai in Touhou? Trying to answer this is a bit tricker than one would assume. They are creatures that have a solid, tangible existence in the pocket universe of Gensokyo, and they have individual personalities. It’s to some extent implied that they have some kind of reality in the Outside World, our world too. Some of them have complex societies, although ones which are at times mocked as attempts at imitating the outside world. They are not mindless monsters hell-bent on preying on humans, but at least the more inteligent among them are very self-aware of their own nature as creatures needing belief and fear to sustain themselves. They are described as being vulnerable to only spiritual forces, being near impervious to physical damage, so their corporeal qualities are of rather unnatural type. And even this corporeality is at times blurry. In the print works, there are youkai that manifest as dark clouds or which seem to entirely occupy dreams or alcohol-fueled hallucinations. They have forms defined by beliefs, but the most capable among them seem to be able to steer this belief-making process. They form a kind of upper class of the anarchistic un-society of Gensokyo, fighting over who gets to control the narratives that define them. At the same time they are entirely dependent on the humans present in Gensokyo, and in turn seem to protect from serious existential threats. This forms an uneasy balance. Sometimes their more monstrous sides come to front, and sometimes they seem almost indistinguishable from humans. In short, in Touhou, youkai are a multifaceted way for telling stories. They are inconsistent and subject to interpretation.

When ZUN was asked what kind of youkai Hong Meiling is, he replied something to the effect that youkai is simply ”the other”, youkai is the ”everything else”. A Chinese woman with magical powers guardian a Western mansion in ”other Japan” is on many levels mysterious and out of place. I’m unsure if this ”the other” can be read in the academic reading, which would imply that youkai are othered beings. This of course opens up an interesting dimension of interpretation. The extremely skewed gender ratios of characters would be rather interesting in this light. Is Gensokyo and inhabitants some manifestation of ”othering” of women, especially when they display such headstrong and discordant traits as the youkai of Gensokyo do? It’s one possible interpretation. Another possible interpretation of this ”otherness” is a more categorical and cultural-historical one. Youkai of course are things of the past, ”othered” from having a reality of their own. They were also historicaly ”othered” from everyday experience of reality and to some extent the kind of religious frameworks the Japanese used. Something like a kappa or a kitsune does not quite neatly fit into the Ten Realms of Buddhism either. This ”otherness” can be the othering of traditional Japanese culture as the modern project became dominant. Kappa and Tengu emulating the Outside World can be read as a parallel to how the Japanese emulated Western industrial societies and modernization. As you can see from this long list of possibilities, which might not be exhaustive, the ”otherness” of youkai is otherness on many levels and possible interpretations. This richness of possible interpretations might be entirely intended.

A defining feature of youkai in Touhou is their dependence on human belief and narratives. ZUN’s penchant for toying with reality, the fact that Gensokyo’s Outside World seems to be just ours can be seen as a continuation of creatives involved with youkai culture toying with reality, be it Sekien’s poetry moving Heaven and Earth or Mizuki fictionalizing the past. Even his self-insert as Rinnosuke and calling himself the High Priest of Hakurei Shrine can be seen to be part of this tradition of an author inserting himself into his creative endeavors. Touhou is obsessed with liminality and mutability, and if youkai are anything, they are liminal and mutable. His chronology of Gensokyo seems to pick off almost where Mizuki ends his, as the given creation year of Great Hakurei Barrier is 1885, mere 20 years later than Mizuki’s 1865. ZUN seems to have caught a very real turning point in culture. Youkai losing their power, very much becoming afraid of humanity, is of course a key point Touhou’s worldbuilding.

Youkai are wholly a thing of the past in Touhou. As much as Gensokyo is an ”otherworld as a self-contained system” and perhaps arguably ”another Japan”, it’s not a mere museum. The Barrier bleeds. There are constant incidents. New things come in, challenge the status quo, and then become absorbed to be part of a new status quo. Youkai might be in ZUN’s words created from the shadows of moonlight which should have been banished by the electric light, yet people from the Outside World constantly come up with strange things which add to Gensokyo. Kuchi-sake-onna has not made an appearance in Gensokyo, but the man-faced dog has. Conspiracy theories, UFOs and urban legends and occult flotsam and jetsam are modern ”youkai” – or perhaps just youkai – which should they acquire enough identity to sustain themselves make themselves known in Gensokyo. ”Passing into fantasy” has in Touhou lore been described as a process of forgetting and things moving into fiction and disbelief. The appearance of things very much in some sense still believed in, like UFOs, seems to however hint that the real mechanism is the creation of a fantastic narrative around a subject. The Apollo Rocket manual ends in Gensokyo not because everybody forgot about it, but because a conspiratorial fantasy mythology built around the faking of the Moon landings. Modern urban legends end in Gensokyo because they acquire a stable enough identity as modern youkai-like things.

While not everything weird in Gensokyo is called a youkai, ZUN in a sense mends the split into youkai and fushigi, and presents a kind of Grand Unified Theory of Weird, where human belief and narrative crafting fuel the strangeness. Yet the children born out of this strangeness acquire enough agency and power to hatch plots in order to further their survival, how to craft their own narratives. This is especially evident in the Tengu, who take great pride in how they steer the narratives and reality-construction in Gensokyo via their journalism. Youkai are deeply relational creatures in Touhou, as they arguably are in real life. If a youkai lacks it’s own legend, a name and a face, it cannot sustain itself. This is quite delightful play on Sekien’s habit of turning weird events into weird creatures. ZUN refuses to turn the youkai that misplaces your remote controller into a creature, and instead writes how such little weird creatures don’t seem to earn their own shape and legend these days.

ZUN is of course a very accomplished ”collector” in the sense that Foster presents collecting. In Gensokyo, all kinds of youkai, kami, foreign entities and strange and archaic things are gathered and presented in a new context. Some of these radicaly reinterpret existing folklore and religion. The worldbuilding of Touhou has been most excelent at creation that otherworld as a self-contained system, and arguably ”another Japan”, for which many seem to feel genuine nostalgia and homesickness for. The most curious aspect of this homesickness though is that some outside of Japan seem to feel it too, and at this point we are perhaps forced to look at factors such as the ones presented in the book Shinto - The Way Home. Perhaps that nostalgic, homesickness-inducing quality that seems to transcend borders and cultures is a genuine mystery that has been invited by involving onself in the play of youkai and the divine. Call yourself a High Priest long enough and the spirits will perhaps come.

At the very least, Touhou’s unique take seems to increasingly constitute a kind of neo-mythology that is perhaps becoming more resonant with the times than ZUN ever intended. The power of belief and capacity for humanity to conjure forth or interact with discarnate inteligences might have simply been a cool idea for offering a modern take on youkai. It can be seen as a kind of long trend of ”justifying” youkai by refering to external concepts, be they creatures of Chinese mythology, ”human electricity” or cultural forces. The power of perception and belief is of course extremely strong and recognized by both native Buddhism and Western psychology. Yet the current wave of neo-occultism and people pushing at the limits of science have created a substantial number of Western people who believe that consciousness – human or something more cosmic – (co-)creates reality in rather tangible sense. As it tends to be Western trends arrive Japan with some delay, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this wave of re-enchantment would soon hit Japan, if it already hasn’t. When it does, Touhou might have given surprisingly accurate language to talk about these things, just as the various youkai scholars produced surprisingly fresh and interesting takes on the impact of language, culture and belief on humans decades and centuries ago. Once again, monsters might be strange portents of things to come.

Something should be said about how Touhou is obsessed with liminality and plays with it, and how youkai have historicaly thrived on this liminality. They are creatures appearing at twilight times, forcing those who experience them to question their reality. Encounters with them can push one to be a kind of outsider among one’s culture, as happened with Yanagita. They are also creatures that have thrived on mix of fear and playfulness, of earnest experiences and fabrications, of repulsion and attraction. They are strange hybrids and former humans who inspired dread and nostalgia. They have inspired people to push against the boundaries of what is and what is not possible and common sense. They have thrived on art and play and media attention, and seem to repeatedly somehow bleed out from the fiction they repeatedly get banished into. And they inspire people to become more youkai-like, more liminal, granting them poetry that creates more youkai and imagination to rewrite the past. For something that ”does not exist” they have incredible potency and ability to driveculture, to receive and reshape narratives pushed on them. Even Enryo’s all-out debunking assault could only petrify them, and as seems to be partially happening with some other ”weird” topics in the West, perhaps there will be a time in Japan too when debunkers will get debunked.

Touhou features countless examples of liminality, the ur-example being of course the arch-youkai Yakumo Yukari. Once can argue that she is the archaic oral-sadistic demon woman par excelence. She has many possible mythological connections, but one I would like to highlight here is a possible connection to Izanami no Mikoto, the grandmother of not only all kami, but at least in archetypal sense all the ghost ladies and jealous demonesses. A crucial part of this mythology is that of establishing a boundary between the underworld of Yomi no Kuni and the rest of reality. You could compare this to Yukari’s creation of the Great Hakurei Barrier. Her ability is to manipulate boundaries is incredibly liminal, and considering how Touhou constantly teases about our reality being Gensokyo’s Outside World, this has of course led to all kinds of jokes and hopes about ”getting gapped” into Gensokyo. It’s like people are half-begging for that disruption which gives sign of the other world being real. This play of liminality, of reality and unreality, so defining of Touhou, is a wonderful play on the liminality of youkai itself. It’s quite genius, extremely beautiful actually, and reading this book made me appreciate something I have loved even more. Yukari isn’t of course the only liminal character, and there could be much to unpack about all the humans turning into youkai by being too invested in magic, or the half-ghosts, or historical deities and humans changing genders, but a complete analysis of liminality in Touhou would perhaps be it’s own 20-page document.

This liminality perhaps extends to some extent to ZUN himself, as like many people mentioned in the book, he had a rural childhood but moved to a more urban setting. One could speculate about other potential qualities, but I won’t spend time there. Touhou does seem to attract all kinds of liminal people in general though. This kind of liminality has been noted to be part of kind of spiritual, occult or shamanic qualities. ZUN keeps on talking as if he’s not in the driver’s seat of the creative process, that characters ”move on their own” and ”decide when they want to appear” and that his modus operandi for drawing and composing is to go into a trance at night. This could be a process of constructing a fantastical version of personality, but it could also be very earnest and he could be in essence be acting as a youkai medium acting in a hypersaturated media environment, with obvious parallels to Mizuki. I cannot make a definite judgement, but as everyone even little bit familiar with this site knows, I do believe in spirits as something else than human construction. What exactly they are is a tremendously complex question, which might recursively loop into being something like ”an extremely liminal thing”. So I think its entirely possible ZUN could have something that ”wants to take shape” knocking on his brain during those nightly drawing and composing sessions.

Liminality is of course not an exactly easy trait to have in a world that constantly desires to cleave black and white into two clean pieces, and this of course generates escapism in many. Touhou has undoubtedly an escapist component to it too, that is intertwined with other forms of escapism in broader otaku culture. For some, perhaps to me, it’s escapist in the same sense as any form of entertainment with enough bones to chew on is. For some Gensokyo is a dangerously obsessive daydream destination, be this obsession fueled by aching for ”another Japan” or the company of appealing ladies that populate this land. Gensokyo’s unusual feature though is that chewing on the bones long enough will cause the marrow of the very real culture, history – and if you believe in them, spirits – leak out. The non-euclidean fairyland loops back to reality. As for becoming obsessed with the fine ladies, the cast of oral-sadists, swindlers, drunks and brawlers reveal their complex and potentialy souled natures for those who become obsessed enough. It’s not that people don’t manage to treat them as pure masturbation targets or dolls in shipping games, but I feel like raw human sexuality is so powerful it can attach itself to almost any flat surface and whip up almost any fantasy out of the lightest potential stimulus. Maybe that too is a youkai-like quality. The most dangerous form of escapism related to Gensokyo is then potentially an aching for ”another Japan”, but not being Japanese myself I cannot really comment on this. Perhaps even this has a kind of escape hatch built into it, as people interested in this aspect might find themselves going to pilgrimages (otaku or just a plain old fashioned one) or engaging with folklore and tradition in constructive ways. That isn’t to say that people don’t become unhealthily obsessed with Touhou, but there is a remarkable difference between Gensokyo and the kind of gacha constructs intended to entrap people. I have over time noted that Gensokyo has some quality to it that seems to chew up and spit out people who want to escape there.

Koi no Youkai

Now that sexuality has been conjured forth, it’s time to take a look at some psychosexual elements of Touhou in light of what Foster writes about sexuality and youkai. As a caveat, none of the following things should be taken as implying anything about ZUN’s preferences or experiences, but rather as talking about broader cultural trends which also include the erotic dimension of how the fanbase has engaged with Touhou. When it comes to this topic, the elephant in the room is how many Touhou characters are women. Male characters appear only in the pc98 era games and the print works. Not all Touhou characters of course are youkai, and some of the men from the printworks are humble men like regulars of the Geidontei bar. When it comes to youkai, a kind of sexual dimorphism seems to exist in Gensokyo. Many of the outwardly male youkai present themselves as much more monstrous and non-human entities. Some youkai are of indeterminate gender, being things like a cup with legs or sentient smoke. In the print works, some female youkai also hint at their more monstrous natures lurking beneath surface, a more monstrous form appearing as a literal shadow, as if the woman is just a mask ready to come off. Nevertheless, the absolute vast majority of youkai are represented as being human – or humanoid – women. While Touhou is on surface level rather sexless and absent of romance except implied one, scratching the surface reveals certain psychosexual elements which are also connected to older youkai lore.

The obvious thing here is that uncanny, scary, liminal creatures are presented as women. You could see this as an implication that there is something uncanny, scary and liminal about women. An enormously long text could be written about this topic alone, but to put it very shortly, there are people who can perceive such qualities in either all women or particular women, in particular situations. Considering youkai as ”the other”, you can argue that Gensokyo is a place where these qualities in women have been banished to. Uncanny, scary, liminal are of course subjective qualities, interpersonal ones. I think there are two, not mutually exclusive, readings for this. One is patriarchical desire to suppress and sweep away troublesome qualities in women. Another possible one is a topic that remains kind of taboo to this day, that is fears, concerns and trauma about women. Anyone who has a mother has an adult woman as one of their earliest authority figures. Mother’s can of course abuse this authority in unfathomably cruel ways. People of any sexual orientation of gender can have hurtful formative social or sexual encounters with women. Women too have the potential for violence, be it physical, psychological or social. So women can take on youkai-like, monstrous qualities. All people can. It’s just that I feel like these qualities in women tend to get culturally supressed. I don’t quite know how Japanese culture has treated these themes though, so anything more that I write about it all would be purely speculative at this point. But I think it’s entirely possible that to some extent the all-female youkai cast could be a representation of these qualities, which has become hushed, projected historicaly into narratives about demon and ghost women, and then ”passing into fantasy”.

Touhou has characters that fit into certain archetypes about mythological monstrous women, which we’ll look at later. Before that, there is another angle to be considered, that of the youkai being female not because of youkai-like characteristics being perceived in women, but rather through a kind of ”youkai fetish”. As Foster wrote, youkai have become an object of collecting and non-sexual desire. This desire can however apparently spill over and hybridize into sexual realms. Japan, and later creatives from the international otaku culture, have had a penchant for hybridizing women and objects of interest and desire from other realms. These include things like ship-girls, operating system-girls, kaiju-girls, gun-girls and of course youkai-girls. It’s entirely possible to read Touhou’s overwhelmingly female cast simply through this light, a hybridization of special interests and sexual interests.

Another way to approach a kind of ”youkai fetishism” is seeking a counterpart for some perceived inner monstrosity. Feelings of alienation, discrimination or not living up to expectations can crystallize into a self-image that sees oneself not as fully human or at least not fitting among humans. And if one does not see itself as human, then it would be quite normal to desire someone sharing similar internal monstrous nature. Touhou is remarkable for how human it’s cast looks, and the ”monstrous” traits are decidedly internal, personal. A third angle is of course one of purely sexual interest towards uncommon or fantastic traits. Some men desire the oral sadist woman, the oni who could wrestle them down, the mind reader knowing their every indecent thought or the chtonian earth mommy who could unmake them if she so desired. Youkai sexuality does rouse the imagination. And some will find the unknowability and mutability in itself attractive. Fear of the unknown might be the oldest fear, but lust for the unknown might as well be the oldest lust.

Some characters, like the kitsune Yakumo Ran and Kudamaki Tsukasa are even type of youkai who were sexualized already in folktales. It’s not like youkai were thought to be entirely sexless to begin with, as many of them were connected to the natural world. Kitsune and tanuki as animals certainly reproduced, and tengu and kappa too were thought to have males and females among their ranks. And the kanji ”you” always has had ”attractive” among it’s readings. Perhaps Touhou is the endpoint of this conceptual drift, the last stage of ”mysterious calamity” becoming ”attractive mystery”.

One could of course write about these things from a queer perspective. Touhou fandom is obsessed with ”yuri shipping” and there are some hints to non-heterosexual relationships and attraction even in canon material. But I am not in a position to write of these things beyond saying that queerness is in itself something that many societies would consider abnormal and therefore uncanny, liminal and monstrous in itself. I don’t know enough about attidutes in Japan, contemporary and historical, towards queer people to write anything about it. I know that it has been more complicated than Christian West’s rather straightforward condemnation and suppression which has changed only within past few decades. Youkai are of course complicated creatures. Maybe there is something queer in being attracted to youkai to begin with, even if it would be seemingly heterosexual, as depending on context or interpretation, we are talking about fictional characters or spirit entities.

None of the things described are of course exclusive, and humans are complicated beings. I don’t want to overblow the potential sexual elements either. The fact however is that Touhou’s leniency towards fanworks of erotic nature likely contributed to it’s early popularity. At least certain long-term fans I have talked about this were of this opinion. This shouldn’t be overblown either as Touhou gets remarkable amounts of non-sexual fanworks and fan art, but it’s completely useless to pretend this dimension is not part of the fandom. And of course as such it does raise questions regarding how youkai are represented in Touhou and their sexual aspects. The fact that the canon works are so sexless and the characters present themselves very modestly makes the amount of erotic sentiments they raise rather fascinating.

To round this off, let’s take a look at the arch-youkai Yakumo Yukari from the perspective of female archetypes attached to youkai. As stated before, she can be seen coming from the lineage of ghost and demon women arguably starting with Izanami no Mikoto. Her powers are signified by ”gaps” that can also be used to connect Gensokyo to the Outside World. The shape of these gaps is rather yonic, and some erotic fanwork has explored this aspect, as well as the eldritch sexual potential of creating portal-like holes into reality itself. These gaps are filled with a strange dark void that has numerous eyes looking out from there. This might be a nod to Sekien’s eye-wall youkai, perhaps signifying a kind of ultimate uncanny presence. It can also be a visual metaphor for being extremely seen. This can be terrifying, humiliating and of course erotic. The fact that these eyes are peering from the ”gap” of a woman creates a potential sexual connotation, that feeling of being naked and seen in front of someone. Yukari is described as being at least 1200 years old, and while it’s very difficult to determine her apparent physical age from canon art, fan art seems to have converged into presenting her to be on the more mature side. She is not a young maiden, and her role in Gensokyo’s creation and maintenance of it’s ecosystem through ”gapping” in humans for youkai to feed on gives her kind of motherly qualities. Gensokyo is a fantasy land one can reach through the ”gap” of an older woman who acts as a kind of twisted cannibalistic mother to monsters. If Yukari does not feast on the one gapped herself, then the person risks being eaten by youkai if they lack the spiritual potency to deal with such dangers. As you can see from this, Yukari and by some extension all of Gensokyo has acquired the chtonian mother and oral-sadistic qualities. One can even make a reading of a more metaphorical ”eaten by youkai” in that if one lacks certain spiritual potency they might dissolve into the phantasmagoria of the wonderland, be it into the teeth of the oral-sadist or pain of nostalgia...

Reality Eaters – Youkai in the Time of the Weird

This has been a lot of text written about something that for many people is just a bunch of funny memes, a load of porn and maybe some games they have tried. Touhou fandom is notoriously surface level and averse to engaging with the source material. This isn’t some elitistic complaint, though I of course encourage everyone to play the games and read the print works. Rather, I am making a point. The point is that for many youkai would just be silly monsters. Yet Michael Dylan Foster has been able to unearth vast amounts of information about Japanese cultural development and ideas that cut deep into questions about the very nature of reality and humanity’s relationship with it’s surroundings by studying those who took youkai seriously. As Touhou is part of this continuum, and in some sense transcends it by incorporating many elements not traditionally associated with youkai, there is much to be learned by taking Touhou seriously.

Youkai have for centuries existed at the intersection of play and seriousness, and they have been remarkably adaptive. But are they real? They are real enough to exert cultural influence. They are real enough that kuchi-sake-onna made herself known just as folklorists turned their eyes towards cities, real enough that Sadako crawled out of a TV just before new forms of media began to change the cultural landscape in dramatic ways, real enough that the internet ghosts from the movie Pulse seemed to predict a world where everyone just kind of vanishes into the net. They are real enough to have kind of predictive power, and real enough to refuse to die. They are real enough to force people to seriously grapple with their existence, and real enough to find new ways to manifest after having been debunked once. Real enough to constitute a mystery that requires explanation, that pushes human understanding forwards, and real enough to start manifesting as lights in the skies and restless rumors when old forms didn’t cut it out. They are real enough to deftly use the most up to date forms of mass media to propagate themselves, including outside of Japan’s borders. And maybe they are just real enough to cause things to go bump in the night.

I’d like to share an anecdote that you might find funny, interesting or embarrassing, but which I think will illustrate the potential of youkai. In early 2024, before I really believed in the reality of Gensokyo and it’s spirits on some spiritual level, I posted in one of those Gensokyo conspiracy threads. I posted some rude things about Yukari, and went to sleep without thinking too much about it. I was woken up by a loud bang that seemed to come from my apartement. My neighbours are very quiet, and while it’s possible the sound did come from elsewhere, it very much felt like it came from inside the apartement. I was a bit surprised by this, and while I was contemplating if I should investigate it I heard another similar bang. Once is a poorly placed book falling to the floor, twice is weird. I would lie if I said I wasn’t a bit scared. I actually hesitated for a good couple minutes before I investigated. Of course I found nothing at all, which just made it weirder. Now do I believe Yukari decided to troll me for being rude towards her? I don’t know. But you could argue that I experienced a ”youkai”, a mysterious phenomenon that annoyingly sat on the fence between mundane and miraculous and which seemed to respond to a provocation in a mischevious way.

While reading Foster’s book, I was struck by how similar conclusions the Japanese arrived to things associated with relatively modern Western occult lore. These include the power of belief and narrative steering in Chaos Magic, or the culture-mimicing changeling qualities given to the ultraterrestrials which some believe are responsible both for modern UFO-sightings as well as historical monster encounters. There is also something remarkably close to certain modern ideas about demons as ”dissolving” entities in how youkai seem to eat narratives and preconceptions. Getting eaten is of course just an ultimate form of ”dissolving”. Modern demonology bleeds straight into memetics, and the Japanese seemed to have had a kind of grasp of spirits as self-perpetuating entities manifesting in media space before it became part of Western discourse. Terebi-Kun crawled into the TV and Sadako crawled out of it decades before internet brainrot and general psycho-spiritual-ideological miasma infecting us became put into funny memes about cunning demons breaking the King’s Pact. Japanese culture has been ahead of the curve in matters related to the spirit world compared to the West. There is much to learn form studying youkai lore and comparing it to Western legends and tales of the weird.

Ever since Sekien made his youkai compendiums, one of the defining metacharacteristics of a youkai has been it’s ability to distort reality. This ability to distort reality opens a space of possibility into ossified narratives and perceptions of the world we take for granted. Our existence is in substantial part just that, narratives and perceptions. And when this space of possibility opens, something mysterious can pass out of fantasy. And that mysterious might not be some unreached possibility of science, philosophy or Buddhist philosophy. It might be something that moves with inscrutable inteligence and purpose, something that loans our imaginative faculties and linguistic capabilities and perpetuates itself, something that weaves itself time after time to be part of our culture and reality. For what purposes I don’t know, and our share history gives little clues beyond cultivating fear and wonder. Maybe it really is a process of co-evolution, the bakemono evolve with humanity.

Perhaps the next chapter of this story is understand this co-creation better. I don’t think human consciousness is so priviledged that it can by itself conjure things into existence. I think it takes more than that. Even in a very flat sense, the power of belief requires the believed and the believer. While it might be naive to think that Touhou could offer insight to the phenomena the Japanese have called youkai, the fact that it’s a co-creative franchise might be a kind of clue, the message following contours of the medium. The High Priest of course channels the spirits, but recently ever increasingly the message seems to have been a kind of deeper and deeper intermingling of Gensokyo and the Outside World, perhaps in preparation of handing over the process to the fans. There might be one, two or ten more games and canon print works, but ZUN too is a mortal man. He has experienced desire that Touhou would become something like the Lovecraft mythos. While this no doubt refers to the collaborative, distributed, mythological aspects of it, there is another dimension to these mythos that he may or may not be aware. That is of course that there are occultists who claim contact with entities from Lovecraft’s mythos, and that they have gotten results from working with them. I wonder if things like the Whispered Oracle of Hakurei Shrine are expressions of a desire to bring forth this occult quality to Touhou too..?

There was a really fascinating small art trend on Twitter recently. People portrayed Touhou characters as people or entities wanting to burst forth under masks representing them as they are portrayed in the games or fanworks. Perhaps the dream no longer needs a single dreamer, the old shells have grown small and stuffy and the youkai and kami want to break free of the representations accreted around them. Perhaps we should try to give them a chance to be seen for what they truly are. We are on the cusp of a some kind of age of re-enchantment, or at least on the verge of some kind of global chaos as old systems dissolve. Global political structures established after the Second World War are coming apart, the modern project is stalling and narratives constructed ever since the start of modernity are evaporating. The weirdness, the youkai that modernity tried to push to the margins are creeping back towards the center. The world is becoming more and more liminal and stranger. Things we thought we banished from our midst might return from fantasy. There is no way to know how weird things will get.

We are given the opportunity to face the unknown with either dignity or despair. Our relationship with fear and the unknown and unknowable might very well come to define our relationship with reality itself. We can either fall into despair or rise up to the challenge.

Let’s welcome the youkai back into our midst with dignity, bravery, curiosity and readiness to play.