A Youkai History of Touhou Project

This is a rather extensive (some would argue excessive) look into the history of youkai, and how this deep and broad history manifests in Touhou project. This was an enormous effort to write, and I learned a lot.
A really fascinating aspect of youkai history is how often the people who become deeply involved with the subject are rather unusual and liminal too.
This isn't meant to sensationalize or other these people, but this pattern was so noticeable I couldn't help but to write about it.
This is part of the "big youkai text" which has now ballooned to 93 pages in lenght.
-Emi

14 000 BCE - 1603 CE: From Prehistory to Sengoku period - Youkai Before Youkai

While it’s likely that all kinds of supernatural creatures, strange events and numinous occurrences have been part of Japanese culture as long as people have lived on the archipelago, very little is known with absolute certainty about how the early Japanese thought about these things or conceptualized them. The broadly animistic Japanese worldview that survived introduction of Buddhism and Chinese ideas is thought to be of ancient origin. However, it is very difficult to say to what extent these ideas were shaped by later Chinese and Buddhist beliefs which shared similar animistic foundations. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, ancient Japanese would have attributed a kind of spiritual agency or cause to phenomena like storms, lightning, earthquakes and celestial events. Events like sudden unexpected deaths or plague epidemics were also seen to be the working of spirits. Before the invention of modern epidemiology, an epidemic would have been as mysterious as they would have been horrifying. The realm of “unexplained events” used to be much broader than it is today.

Early Japanese cultures lacked known writing systems, and it is only after the 7th century that a written record of Japanese history and beliefs begins to emerge. The very earliest known Japanese texts frequently feature spirits. These spirits included not only various deities, but also the kind of troublemakers that would become known as youkai. Oni appear in the earliest known Japanese texts, including Kojiki (711-712), while Nihon Shoki (720) contains mentions of tengu and tanuki-like creatures called mujina. Shoku Nihongi (797) contains the first instance of the word “youkai”. Early texts also present first instances of the “undead woman” or “demonic woman” archetype, including the yomotsu-shikome, or Hags of Yomi. While the intention of those who compiled these texts was not to write about youkai per say, they did document encounters the Yamato court had with the numinous.

Written text became an important tool in establishing imperial authority. In 713, an order was given to begin the compilation of provincial gazettes called fudoki. They contained reports of provincial geography, natural resources, estimations of land fertility, etymology as well as folktales and oral tradition. The fudoki provide insight into local beliefs and culture at the time, including those related to youkai. A type of “youkai” that was noted in the fudoki are the tsuchigumo, earth spiders. At first it was a kind of ethnic slur against insubordinate clans, but later on it became interpreted as a literal monstrous spider.

Tsuchigumo-as-an-ethnic-slur is an early example of a process that would continue for centuries onwards, where the rulers of Japan, be they emperors of shoguns, would associate the outer realms of their domain and dissident groups with monsters and demons. Thus the various religious and magical measures taken to control demons can also be seen as attempts at social control. In turn, dissidents would use carnivalesque inversions of this discourse, turning monsters into champions of common people. Occasionally the ruling classes themselves would be equated with monsters by commoners. At times, this kind of politicized discourse about monsters would take a surprisingly central place in Japanese culture.

Japanese perception of the spirit world started to become influenced by Buddhism after its introduction into the country. Early influence of Buddhism on Japanese ideas about the supernatural is reflected in written collections of spoken tales known as setsuwa. The Japanese started writing them down at the end of the 8th century. Important examples of setsuwa collections are Nihon Ryoiki from the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries and Konjaku Monogatari from the late Heian era (794-1185). They draw heavily from Buddhist beliefs and local folktales, and feature many miraculous events as well as terrifying encounters. These stories feature different types of numinous creatures. Many of setsuwa also serve as morality tales, and the various spirits are presented in a Buddhist framework.

The Heian era classic Tale of Genji from the 11th century offers a different kind of a view into Japanese ideas regarding spirits. Written by a courtwoman during a time when writing was seen as masculine pursuit, it offers literature coming inside the palace walls. At one point in the story, the intense emotions of a woman cause her “living soul”, or “ikiryo” to manifest as a terrifying mononoke. This is an early example of human spiritual power and agency manifesting spiritual phenomena or creating spirits. Both Tale of Genji and collections of setsuwa show that Japanese attributed all kinds of mysterious, including dangerous or threatening mysterious phenomena to spirits. The various spirits associated with misery, uncleanliness, danger, outsiders, fear and death were seen as a real enough threat to the well-being of communities that they started leaving a very notable cultural footprint. They were interpreted in different ways by various spiritual traditions which were starting to shape up in Japan.

While it’s not possible to perfectly reconstruct a picture of native Japanese beliefs before the introduction of elements from Chinese culture and Buddhism, the early texts do offer a view into native beliefs as they were presented in early texts. Malicious spirits were associated with uncleanliness. Acts for establishing boundaries, taboos and rituals for purification were born to manage these entities. Sometimes these spirits could be appeased, and with long enough appeasement, they might even turn into something that can help humans. Deities could become upset and show their rough side, causing misfortune and disasters. Spirits were seen to be capable of appearing almost anywhere, but were normally unseen. Humans were thought to possess spiritual power which could manifest to other people, including as apparitions. Spirits known as magakami or magatsubi, “crooked” spirits, could cause misfortune and drive people to act in wicked ways. These beliefs form elements of what is nowadays called Shinto.

Buddhists would view various spirits as being part of the Buddhist framework. Certain spirits that would be classed as youkai were integrated to the Buddhist worldview quite directly. For example, oni were seen to be the same as Buddhist hellish demons. Other entities, like the tengu proved more difficult to integrate in a straightforward manner, and eventually ideas such as a whole separate reincarnation track from a human into a tengu emerged. Buddhist ideas of humans transforming into other entities after death or during their lifetime would greatly shape cultural ideas about spirits. Buddhist imagery of hellish realms and of people transforming into grotesque creatures had a powerful impact on Japanese culture and imagination, and contributed to how youkai were imagined. On the other, a strangely large number of youkai are depicted as monstrous Buddhist clergymen, or at least creatures looking like such. This likely reflects how Buddhist monks were seen as part of the community, yet simultaneously outsiders. Monk-like youkai might have also been a way to critique corrupt elements of Buddhism.

The Taoism-influenced Onmyodo also shaped how Japanese conceptualized spirits and their working on the world. The onmyodo practitioners worked with a framework based on Chinese astrology and the ba gua system. Certain directions were seen to be inauspicious depending on astrological factors. Practitioners would create calendars, perform rituals and warn people of dangerous days and directions. One spiritually dangerous event which the Onmyodo practitioners would predict and announce were the oni night parades. In a way, to Onmyodo the appearance of dangerous spirits was almost like a seasonal force of nature, pouring in from the direction of the “demon gate”, or northeast direction. Onmyodo ritual technology was also used in purification, and their methods influence later ideas about protection against spirits. Legends of the famous onmyouji Abe no Seimei (921-1005) and his wizardly exploits are a part of youkai-related folklore, especially as he was regarded as being able to tame various spirits, including some very monstrous ones.

The co-existence, intermingling and clashing of these different traditions and perspectives led to the birth of a rich body of folklore about spirits. From the Kamakura period (1185-1333) to the Muromachi period (1333-1603) Japan experienced many civil wars, including the Sengoku Jidai (roughly 1454-1638) era of internal warfare and turmoil. The importance of court literature declined, and the wars and upheavals disrupted cultural life. However, the social disruption also ended up disseminating written tales to a broader audience. For example, setsuwa became popularized during these eras. A notable piece of long-form, epic literature from this era is the Tale of Heike (1371), which features supernatural elements in its telling of the story of conflict between the Taira and Minamoto clans.

The Muromachi period also saw the emergence of visual depictions of youkai, and picture scrolls of youkai started to slowly appear. It’s somewhat unclear why it took until this time period for visual art of youkai to appear. Folklorist Kazuhiko Komatsu has speculated that it might be related to earlier customs of not depicting kami in a visual way, and perhaps fear that depicting youkai might somehow invoke them to appear. Noh theater was another form of art that emerged during this time. Various supernatural narratives, quite often involving youkai-type creatures, are a notable feature of Noh. As such, it helped to popularize and shape narratives about certain supernatural entities. Terrors of the social upheavals and civil wars also shaped the Japanese imagination in general.

No dominant narrative regarding “spirits” or “monsters” emerged during these tumultuous years either. It’s very likely that this very chaos of the era in itself stopped the formation of any dominant grand narratives regarding the supernatural. It would take until the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868) and the long peace that followed it until the concept of youkai as we know truly started to slowly develop. It’s a story that is entangled with Neo-Confucian philosophy, the creation of the first Japanese encyclopedias, efforts at making a more self-sufficient country and the rise of popular culture in Japan.

1603-1868: Edo period - Encyclopedias, Bakemono Boom and Political Monsters

The Edo period saw the rise of several trends which would greatly contribute to the birth of youkai as a concept. These trends include the effort towards cataloguing information in the form of dictionaries and the emergence of popular culture fascinated by monsters, which increasingly came to be called bakemono regardless of them being shapeshifters or not. Youkai became entangled with politics, both as a way to express social satire and hidden desires, but also as subjects of political discourse related to the rise of kokugaku, Japanese nativist scholarship.There were also occasions where dissidents were equated with monsters, and even cases where the dissidents would take up these monstrous labels as their own.

The first of these converging trends, the emergence of Japanese encyclopedias, is linked to Neo-Confucianism, a revival and renewal of Confucian philosophy which greatly shaped Chinese and Japanese society. Neo-Confucianism emerged in China between the 12th and 15th centuries, and started spreading to Japan during the late Kamakura period. It would rise to prominence in the Edo era (1603-1868). The Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868) sponsored Neo-Confucian philosophy to establish a secular ruling ideology for the country, which could be used for consolidating leadership over Japan.

The Neo-Confucian philosophy can be broadly characterized as being a rationalistic one, believing that the universe could be understood through human reason. The process of studying the universe in a rational manner would also be a process of a moral cultivation, which would lead to a more harmonious society and individual relation with the world. An important Neo-Confucian concept is that principle, or ri, a rational law that shapes how qi, energy, becomes expressed in the world. Studying the ri was of great interest to Neo-Confucianism. Hence the various Neo-Confucian encyclopedic projects expressed a worldview that placed exceptional emphasis on studying things rationally, and trying to find the underlying laws shaping phenomena.

As Neo-Confucianism focused on practical, rational matters of everyday human life, it de-emphasized matters relating to the supernatural. Confucius himself had maintained a kind of vague attitude towards the existence of things like ghosts or deities, and had simply chastised people to focus on the matters of humanity instead. This ambiguity extended to Neo-Confucianism, and while the existence of spirits and deities became a matter of debate during the Edo period, these debates left enough space for youkai to dwell in even as Neo-Confucianism became the dominant ideology of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Early Japanese encyclopedias emerged from this culture, reflecting a growing interest towards natural history as part of broader Neo-Confucian intellectual trend. These encyclopedias did not yet treat youkai as a separate category, but rather as parts 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 to begin with, as they did not seem to distinguish between hearsay and more solid forms of knowledge. Through these encyclopedias, certain youkai were introduced to the Japanese, while others would often be ”legitimized” by comparing it with a similar creature from China. They would also serve as the basis for a classic genre of youkai literature, the youkai encyclopedia.

Neo-Confucianism was a comprehensive philosophy regarding how society should be organized, and ideas from Neo-Confucianism were used to enforce a stratified social order in Japan, modeled after older Confucian ideals. The samurai were seen as the Japanese equivalent of the Chinese scholarly bureaucratic class. They were on top of the hierarchy, followed by farmers, artisans and merchants. Many of the samurai took this ideal of becoming the Japanese scholar class very seriously, and studied and taught Neo-Confucianism, establishing many academies. The imposition of the stratification never truly succeeded though. There were samurai who were so poor that their social status meant very little, and over the long era of peace, some merchants became so rich that they could wield considerable influence. As this attempt at ordering society began to unravel, Japan entered a liminal time period. It’s thought that the social changes, contradictions and tensions of the era contributed to how certain youkai were depicted, and that the very uncertainty of the times might have contributed to popular interest towards the strange.

The rule of the Tokugawa shogunate during the Edo period was characterized by a long period of peace, which started to come undone towards the end as internal dissent started to mount. During this time Edo, present day Tokyo, grew into an enormous metropolitan area that by 1700 had a population larger than Paris or London. The long peace and urbanization allowed for the emergence of new forms of popular culture. These included things like kabuki theater and ningyou joururi, or bunraku puppet theater as it is now known. An important youkai-related popular culture was the development of kibyoushi, short picture books combining text and imagery which can be seen as a kind of early form of manga. Youkai were a popular subject in the later Edo period, and they were often used for purposes of humor and social satire. These picture books took youkai out of their previous folkloric contexts and started to present them as characters, which would shape later portrayals of youkai. Kibyoushi also contributed to bakemono becoming a more inclusive term that covered all kinds of monsters.

By the late Edo period, there was a veritable bakemono or youkai boom, and strange, humorous monsters appeared in board games, spectacle shows, picture scrolls and even in collectible cards. The misemono spectacle shows were a particularly striking and visible form of popular entertainment. They featured everything from archery ranges where people could shoot at pictures of monsters to haunted house type of experiences to exhibits which displayed strange carcasses or even real people with unusual physical qualities. These would include people with deformities, but also those with unusual physical feats such as exceptional strength, the ability to pop out one’s eyeballs or even controlled flatulence. There was a very real, very human side to certain things seen as bakemono during the Edo period.

An interesting form of popular entertainment that emerged during this period was the hyaku monogatari culture. These were essentially gatherings where people would come together after dark to share scary stories in candlelight. It was believed that after sharing a hundred stories and extinguishing a candle for each one, a real monster world appeared. These gatherings were a kind of attempt at converting a supernatural narrative into a supernatural experience. So while youkai were treated as subjects of humor, play and satire, an element of earnest belief and fear persisted, as did the various local beliefs beyond the confines of Edo and other large cities such as Osaka. Youkai and bakemono related popular culture used folktales as fuel for their narratives. As people increasingly started to move from rural communities to urban areas, these migrants would have brought their own folklore with them, ready to mingle with and to be disseminated by the increasingly diverse and rich, if at times scorned, popular culture.

One can however also find a rather surprising connection between the dissemination of folklore and youkai culture and attempts to catalogue medicinal plants in Japan. This research into native medicinal plants was another Neo-Confucian project. Japan 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. These Tokugawa era conventions helped to disseminate youkai lore and culture.

The long peace of the Tokugawa rule started to crumble from the 1830s onwards. The shogunate had resorted to policies which caused monetary inflation, making basic goods more expensive for common people. In 1830, a famine and revolts broke out, followed by another revolt in 1837. Between 1841 and 1843 the Shogunate instituted a series of highly unpopular reforms known as the Tenpo Reforms in order to restore order and to regulate the economy. These interventions were at best only half-successful, and caused heavy disruptions into merchant networks necessary for the distribution of goods. Among the measures were actions taken to prevent the consumption of “luxury goods” and to regulate popular entertainment.

The measures taken didn’t stop satire and hidden desires from slipping by in popular entertainment. An example of this is a triptych from 1843 which is a satirical inversion of the legend of Minamoto no Yorimitsu defeating the tsuchigumo. In this version, bedridden Yorimitsu who is a stand-in for the shogun is about to be devoured by the tsuchigumo, accompanied by a gaggle of youkai, while Yorimitsu’s companions drink sake and play go. Another example are the so-called catfish prints which emerged after a devastating earthquake in 1855. In these prints, the giant catfish which is thought to be the cause for earthquakes is depicted in the role of a world-remaking deity destroying Edo so it could be rebuilt.

The Shogunate also used monsters as a part of its politics, using the old strategy of labeling dissidents monsters. A most fascinating example of this were the so-called youkai revolts in Osaka. They broke out in the Tenmancho district, which covered the north-northeastern direction of the city. As the northeast was traditionally considered the demon gate where evil spirits would emerge from, the rioters were labeled as youkai. Another example was an insurrection in Mit domaino that was organized by a group that became called the tengu group, insinuating that the Mito reformists had become arrogant through study. Interestingly enough, later the reformist lord of Mito, Tokugawa Nariaki, used this term for the Mito reformists in a positive connotation, referring to supernatural power and courage. Youkai were occasionally used to refer to certain professions, especially from the merchant class who were despised by the samurai. The habit of using youkai for advertisement might have been as much sensational attention-seeking as it was a way to own the monstrous label.

There is a single person whose work is truly emblematic of all these developments that were going on towards the later half of the Edo period. He would go on to become a massive popularizer of youkai, establish the youkai encyclopedia genre of literature, and give shapes to numerous youkai. This person was Toriyama Sekien.

Toriyama Sekien: Youkai Popularizer and Imaginator

Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788) was a painter and a poet, who produced a series of compendiums of over 200 youkai. He was influenced by the encyclopedia culture of the era, as well as by popular fascination with all things weird and monstrous. His work on youkai was humorous, satirical, witty and talented. And as extensive as his work on youkai was, it formed only a part of his career as an artist. He innovated new printmaking techniques, trained numerous other artists and also wrote poetry. His double interest in visual art and poetry influenced his youkai-related art, which can be seen as a visual counterpart to parodic poetry of his day.

It should be noted that 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 a separate category of beings. His youkai encyclopedias have been interpreted as parodies of the encyclopedias that were popular at the time. His humor, playfulness and creativity with youkai would shape the tone with how people would approach youkai in popular culture from there on out. Sekien would also imagine 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 words and imagery.

Sekien’s explorations of the borderlands between visual art and poetry took place during a rather liminal time, which influenced his creations. The later half of the Tokugawa shogunate rule saw the breakdown of the social stratification which the shogunate had tried to impose. Many samurai had become impoverished, and wealthy merchants had acquired considerable influence despite being nominally of lower class than samurai, farmers or artisans. The city of Edo, present day Tokyo, had become a massive metropolis with a vibrant social life. Within Edo, the Yoshiwara red lights district had become a massive entertainment and culture complex. In there, people of every class mingled with each other, and the teahouses became a cultural hotspot. Sekien’s work would at times comment on this era of dissolving social boundaries.

The collections of youkai art that Sekien produced are known as the Gazu Hyakkiyagyou series. This collection would in the end contain over 200 youkai. They started off as rather straightforward encyclopedic works documenting youkai and legends involving them, 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 a 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. 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 are various forms of visual and textual punnery going on, as well as many references to older forms of culture, including both Chinese classics and Japanese poetry and theater. The scrolls are a heavily intertextual play of image and text, a kind of strange liminal thing in itself.

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 trends where youkai were becoming part of popular culture and play. The growth of popular culture and the hot and loose epistemic culture that didn’t distinguish between hearsay and fact would have fueled hunger for weird stories and images, no matter how truthful they were or not. Sekien would have likely been happy to provide, while also commenting on this unfolding “derangement of the weird”.

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

Hirata Atsutane: Kokugaku and Political Monsters

Towards the end of the Edo period, youkai, or at least tengu, became entangled in a project to re-define Japanese self-identity. This project was the kokugaku, or national studies movement, which advocated a return to forms of Japanese culture they perceived to be indigenous origin. Kokugaku was initially focused on the study of old Japanese texts and poetry. This was perhaps somewhat paradoxically inspired by the Neo-Confucian return to Chinese classics. Later on, kokugaku developed into a more broader project of trying to prove Japanese national supremacy. By taking the old narratives of Nihon Shoki and Kojiki seriously and literally, Japan would after all be the land of gods, led by an Emperor whose lineage was born from a sun kami.

An important figure in the kokugaku movement was Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843). He came from a relatively impoverished samurai background, and would over time become a Shinto radicalist. Atsutane was apparently broadly influenced by Chinese and Buddhist teachings, and there is proof to suggest he was also influenced by Christian writings which Tokugawa scholars were allowed to access. Atsutane himself however presented these teachings as something that was actually already present in Japan, or had been present in Japan but became lost or corrupted. After all, since Japan was the land of gods, all knowledge had to come originally from there. His radical proto-nationalist project eventually led him becoming entangled with discourse regarding youkai.

Atsutane became involved with a 14-year boy who represented himself as a tengu boy and a medium. This boy, Torakichi, was supposedly mentored by a mysterious master in the mountains, and he could access some kind of other world through the mountains. Torakichi had spent some time in a Buddhist temple as a student, but left for unknown reasons. While it’s possible he was involved with some kind of community of mountain hermits which people would have associated with tengu, it’s also possible that Torakichi could have been influenced by folktales and Buddhist legends he had heard while spending time in temples. Whatever his background truly was, the boy was found fascinating and impressive enough for there to be some interest towards him in the Edo era parlor culture.

For Atsutane however Torakichi wasn’t just a curiosity, but rather a missing piece in his theological and political project. Atsutane disagreed with the ideas of his major influence, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) regarding the afterlife. Where Norinaga saw the afterlife as being something bleak, Atsutane presented a more optimistic vision, perhaps influenced by Christianity. Atsutane started working with Torakichi, steering his narratives away from Buddhism and towards his Shinto framework. The other world Torakichi supposedly visited became a land of spiritually potent, technologically adept mystics called sanjin, mountain people who possessed knowledge and military power exceeding those of Europeans encroaching Japan.

Atsutane produced a book called Senkyo ibun or Strange Tales from the Land of Immortals (1822) which presented this vision of the other world as given by Torakichi and filtered by him. While greatly shaped by Atsutane's particular views, it offers insight into what people were thinking about when it came to the supernatural and youkai. Atsutane had a divided view on tengu, believing there were “false tengu” who were fallen Buddhists and “true tengu” which represented another type of entity. He might have later on converged towards viewing all of tengu as evil spirits, which is perhaps why he steered Torakichi away from tengu-centered narratives. These views were likely influenced by Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), a Neo-Confucian scholar who strongly opposed Buddhist ideas related to demons. It wasn’t that Razan didn’t believe demons existed. Rather, he thought that Buddhism itself had brought demons with it from India and China, and that people who practiced Buddhism eventually turned into demonic entities. When it came to the tengu boy himself, Torakichi said that “tengu” was just a term applied by common people to all kinds of mountain spirits.

The conversations and questions presented to the boy paint a picture of a world where tengu are at once a term for a wide range of spirits, transformed animals, a very particular entity associated with Buddhism, a term for people living in the mountains, and something associated with homosexuality. The uneasy undertones of mountain-men abducting teenage boys did not escape the Japanese of the day. Torakichi himself strongly denied any homosexual activity taking place among the “sanjin” or “tengu”. While not the intended focus of Senkyo ibun, it captures the liminal qualities of tengu at the time of its publication.

Atsutane’s radical Shinto literalism and nationalism greatly influenced later ethnocentric movements in Japan as well as various pseudohistorical and occult movements. He has also been seen as a kind of precursor to later minzokugaku, later Japanese folklore studies, as he turned focus away from study of literary classics to studies of wider elements of Japanese culture and society. Senkyo ibun has been called an “ethnography of the otherworld”, as Atsutane’s process can be seen as a kind of highly biased process of interviewing an informant. As outlandish as the claims made might be, and as much as Atsutane might have steered Torakichi, the history of anthropology is littered with just about equally crude manipulations and fabrications passed forth as legitimate studies. Senkyo ibun and the intellectual history behind it is also an example of the supernatural becoming entangled with politics, and the discourse surrounding the existence or non-existence of the supernatural.

personally find the partnership between Atsutane and Torakichi deeply fascinating because Atsutane apparently had such strongly negative preconceived ideas about the tengu. Surely he would have found the idea of a purported tengu boy quite dislikeable? While it’s quite hard to say what exactly Torakichi was - some kind of legitimate medium, a juvenile con artist or a young associate of some circle of mountain hermits, he made an impact in the intellectual circles of the era. If one were to seriously believe he was a tengu, then he would have been a creature associated with lies and misleading doctrine in the eyes of many people of the time. Using someone claiming to be such a creature as your medium is certainly an interesting choice.

1868-1912: Meiji period - Modernize the Country, Control the Supernatural

From 1853 onwards, the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate started to rapidly crumble. Japan was forced to open up to foreign trade under threat of violence, initiated by Matthew C. Perry’s expedition, followed by Russian and British expeditions. Japan was forced to sign deals that would open it up to foreign trade on unequal terms. This led to massive economic instability. Earthquakes, famines and the spread of cholera for the first time into Japan added to the instability. During the 1860s, the social unrest only intensified, including religious protests such as the ee ja nai ka phenomenon, which were carnivalesque religious celebrations spurred on rumours of “amulet rains”. The name of this phenomenon literally means “isn’t it good”, but is perhaps better understood as “who cares” or “why not”, reflecting the broad dissolution of social norms and expectations towards the end of the Tokugawa shogunate.

The powerlessness of the Tokugawa shogunate in front of foreign powers as well as the broad social collapse led to the sonno joi, or revere the emperor, expel the barbarians movement. The Emperor of Japan had been a figurehead for centuries, but now there was a movement in support for imperial restoration. Emperor Komei seized the opportunity, and broke centuries of tradition by directly issuing an edict known as the Order to Expel the Barbarians in 1863. The shogun was pressured to close the country off to foreigners, which resulted in a series of military interventions by various Western powers.

A series of rebellions erupted from 1864 onwards. While these did not manage to topple the Shogunate, they damaged Tokugawa rule severely. Emperor Komei reversed his total opposition to treaties with foreigners in 1865, leading to cessation of foreign military interventions. The Shogunate tried to relentlessly modernize, but it had lost too much support among both the broader population and the samurai to survive. In 1867, Emperor Komeiji passed away and Emperor Meiji became the new ruling monarch. The same year Tokugawa Yoshinobu became the last shogun. Yoshinobu tried for a political settlement, but an anti-Tokugawa, pro-Imperial faction of samurai opposed any kind of power sharing arrangement with him, desiring to create a kind of parliament of daimyo lords under the Emperor. The Boshin War against pro- and anti-Tokugawa forces would erupt in 1868 and last until 1869, resulting in the victory of the pro-Imperial forces.

Contrary to hopes and expectations of many, the Meiji reformation would end up resulting in centralizing the power to the Emperor, continued and deepening interaction with Western powers, as well as rapid and extensive modernization. This modernization was brought on by the fear of becoming colonized by Western powers. The extremely quick modernization process saw the old way of life shattered. Western learning 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.

When it comes to the topic of the supernatural, the Meiji era is ultimately best viewed as an attempt to control discourses about the supernatural, rather than wholesale rejection of ideas related to it. While certain elements were deemed wicked backwards superstitions, certain other mythological and supernatural elements were being actively reinforced. These included beliefs regarding what became the State Shinto religion, especially the status of the Emperor. The Meiji era is full of rather fascinating attempts at what can be called a kind of “spiritual engineering” in pursuit of creating a strong, centralized state, from attempts at consolidating shrines, to establishing a national shrine for the war dead.

These attempts at controlling discourse and beliefs relating to the supernatural were extensive and forceful. Whatever became perceived as being superstitions, be it mediumship, belief in the existence of youkai, spirit possession, shamanism or traditional forms of medicine became either outlawed, suppressed or targets of propaganda campaigns. Education reforms aimed at eradicating belief in things labeled as superstitions were instituted. Supernatural experiences were pathologized and conceptualized as being a form of neurosis or mental illness. In some cases this led to considerably worse treatment towards people who experienced unusual things. While cases of what was conceptualized as fox possession had been the realm of village shamans and often the person undergoing it was able to return to society after exorcism, after this condition became seen as a mental illness the sufferers would essentially face a lifetime incarceration in a mental institute.

The stated goals of the reforms and suppression and control of discourse related to the supernatural was the creation of a rational, modern state which would be free of delusions and false beliefs. When it came to youkai, the suppression of beliefs was also likely motivated by an awareness of the political dimensions it had acquired during the Edo period. As the new political system consolidated itself, youkai which had become associated with dissent and rebellion had to be swept away. This was especially so as there were acts of resistance versus the Meiji government that saw people conceptualizing representatives of the government or foreigners as monstrous entities. An example of this is 1873 “blood tax riots” which were spurred on by - intentionally spread - rumors that people who got conscripted by the government had their blood drained by a “person in white”. These seemed to build on earlier rumors about Westerners drinking blood and even using it as a coating of electrical wires. In turn, these rumors were likely based on the Western metaphor of drinking Jesus’ blood, which the Japanese found abhorrent.

Despite suspicion and resistance, Japan opened up to Western influences. This saw the further spread of Western science and philosophy, building on the earlier rangaku movement which was a controlled attempt to introduce Western learning during the Tokugawa rule. Alongside these ideas, Western ideas regarding the supernatural started to arrive in Japan. Some of these influences were of purely “spiritual” nature. Spiritism influenced among other things the divination game kokkuri-san, which boomed in popularity after serious attempts were made to ban professional divination and mediumship as superstition. It can be perhaps seen as an example of the supernatural finding a place to live in the space of play in a manner similar to how youkai became subjects of humor during the Edo period. Theosophy also arrived in Japan and had some influence on certain Shinto sects.

Other Western ideas relating to the supernatural were based on science of the day, and relied on back-then poorly understood forces such as magnetism or electricity to offer explanations for phenomena perceived as supernatural. These explanations tend to come off almost humorous to modern eyes. Sometimes models of explanation for supernatural phenomena emerged that seemed to draw on Western ideas and terminology, but were ultimately rooted in older ideas.

The opening up of Japan to the West also led to Westerners entering and documenting the country. Among these were people who became deeply interested in Japanese tradition, folklore and ideas regarding the spirit world. The interest shown by these people would help to document certain aspects of Japan that were being condemned into the past. The most notable of these figures was Lafcadio Hearn, who not only documented Japan, but also engaged creatively with Japanese folklore and offered retellings of older tales in English. Western folklore also reached Japan, and translated Western fairytales were conceptualized as stories about Western youkai.

Cultural interest towards the monstrous and the supernatural declined, partly because of changing perceptions, partly because of suppression. As the supernatural became more explained in psychological terms such as neurosis, supernatural narratives started to lose their power to fascinate people. On the other hand, the Meiji government also actively sought to suppress certain forms of entertainment. The misemono spectacle shows were among these. Rather than being outright banned at once, the government rather skillfully banned them through partial measures, first by banning "fraudulent displays” in 1870, then displaying of deformed people on humanitarian grounds in 1872, and finally the setting up of temporary screen booths in 1873.

The Meiji reformation and attempts at modernization were ultimately bound to be only a partial success, so total was the transformation of society which the reformers sought. Rather than fully replacing older ideas, the modernization created a new layer which had official state sanction, and older ideas continued to live in the margins of society, waiting to re-emerge in new forms as times would change. The Meiji reformation also had its dissidents, from the militant uprising of disaffected samurai in the Satsuma rebellion to subtler forms of resistance. These subtler forms also included discourse related to the spiritual and supernatural and their importance to local communities.

The struggle to rid Japan of belief in youkai, now seen as an “old evil” that was obstructing modernization, formed a surprisingly large part of the modernization efforts. However, somewhat paradoxically the amount of effort spent on debunking youkai reinforced youkai as an ontological category. It was during this time that “youkai” emerged as the choice of word for a wide variety of monsters, spirits and strange phenomena. Youkaigaku, or youkai studies also emerged during this time, as a way to catalog and explain away youkai. The central figure of this emerging youkai studies-as-debunking was Inoue Enryou, and his life and work is extremely reflective of the broader changes Meiji era Japan underwent.

Inoue Enryou - Philosopher, Debunker and Youkai Professor

Inoue Enryou (1858-1919) was a central figure in the Meiji era anti-superstition campaigns. He was a complex figure, and interpretations of him tend to highlight different aspects of his life. He greatly contributed to the introduction of Western philosophy to Japan, yet had his roots in Buddhism and Confucianism. He strived to debunk mysterious phenomena, yet believed in the existence of some kind of true mysteries. He was an elitist who used harsh rhetoric against uneducated people, but also disliked scientists who didn’t share his belief in true mysteries. He campaigned against belief in youkai, yet seemed quite fond of them. In fact, his efforts at debunking them solidified youkai as a category of their own. He was a fierce Meiji nationalist, yet became disgraced in an incident which was seen as giving support to the regicide of the Emperor. He was a rationalist, a sensationalist, a propagandist, and perhaps an unwitting entertainer through his humor and media-savviness. Much like Toriyama Sekien existed between high and low culture in a time of social transformation, Enryou too was about as liminal as his favorite subjects and objects of debunking were. This will become a pattern that repeats over and over again with people whose lives become entangled with youkai.

Inoue was the son of a high-ranking Buddhist priest, and he was versed in the classical 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. Inoue would go on to greatly contribute to the introduction of Western philosophy into Japan through his early works Epitome of Philosophy (1886) and Outline of Ethics (1887). Inoue also greatly contributed to the Buddhist modernist movement in Japan. Interestingly enough, Inoue saw Christianity as an obstacle to Western rationalism, and considered Buddhism a much more rational religion. Inoue’s work covered a broad range of subjects, from philosophy to psychology, pedagogy and religious studies, as well as his investigations into the supernatural.

Inoue’s intellectual and practical program can be characterized as a combination of Western and Eastern philosophy and rationalism mixed with an extremely pro-Meiji attitude. He celebrated Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and Kant as the four sages of world philosophy, and went as far as to establish a ceremony to commemorate them. Later on, they would also be enshrined in the Tetsugaku-do park he created. Inoue would spend considerable energy and effort to articulate a view of Buddhism as something compatible with scientific knowledge and the Japanese national project. Inoue became an enthusiastic supporter and disseminator of the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), which set guiding principles for education in Japan. It was distributed to all schools in Japan, and students were required to memorize it. In it, values such as social harmony, modesty, benevolence, learning, practice of arts and observance of laws were promoted.

The interest towards the supernatural that Inoue had was of the debunking variety, using the scientific knowledge of his day to explain away phenomena that were found to be mysterious, strange or supernatural. He saw ignorance and superstition as not only something that had to be fixed in order for Japan to compete with strong Western nations, but also as something that brought undue fear and anxiety to people. He also thought beliefs he found ignorant and superstitious obstructed proper medical care, made people more selfish, immoral and less capable at putting the proper effort into their work.

Inoue saw his program of rationalization, education and moral cultivation as a kind of spiritual equivalent to the industrialization the country was going through, a process of creating a spiritual infrastructure that would mirror the railways and electric lines spreading to Japan. While there is an element of wider social concern to his work, it is tinged by elitism. Inoue had an extremely low opinion of and patronizing attitude towards uneducated, lower class people, going as far as to claim that educated people did not experience strange phenomena. He was also concerned that the surge in population growth following Meiji reforms would only worsen the situation, comparing the situation to a plentiful harvest that however results in tasteless fruits. It’s very hard to say how much of his concerns were of humanitarian nature, and how much they were a fear of Japan becoming dominated by stronger countries with what he perceived to be more intelligent, fitter populations, as both elements are certainly present in his work.

While Inoue liked to represent himself as a kind of pioneer in Japanese rationalism and scepticism, but it should be noted that there were earlier scholars who held highly rational views of the world or were sceptical towards supernatural phenomena. What made Inoue’s program of youkai-studies-as-debunking unique was how it incorporated Western worldviews and how powerful institutional support it would receive from the Meiji political establishment.

While Inoue was a debunker, he wasn’t perhaps quite like his most ardently materialistic counterparts in the West. In fact, in Outline of Mystery Studies (1893/94), he explicitly says he is not a materialist. Rather, Inoue operates from a point of view where he saw both mind and matter as being interrelated. They are not the same, yet emerge from a “single great principle”.

To fully understand Inoue’s youkaigaku, it’s important to understand his ideas regarding “mystery” and “strange”. 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. 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.

Inoue had a very systematic approach to categorizing knowledge, and this applied also to how he categorized mysteries into multiple categories. The main dividing line is between kakai and shinkai, false or provisional mysteries and true mysteries. A false mystery is one which can be explained by a natural law, human psychology or trickery of perceptions. He also used a category of kyokai, empty mystery, which included gokai (mistaken mystery) and gikai (artificial mystery). Gokai are caused by coincidence, while gikai are fabricated by humans.

As for true mysteries, they are something that Inoue didn’t define too deeply, but it gives an impression of something very profound and fundamental, being apparently the “great principle” that produces both matter and mind. He resorts to rather poetic language to describe this true mystery, writing how it “produces heart and mind” when it “moves”, and how “ministers of mind and matter go down to the world and rule over the myriads of immeasurable phenomena”. Inoue’s ideas about true mystery and the great principle appear to be a mix of Confucian principle-based thinking, Buddhist ideas about how immediately perceivable reality is not the fundamental reality, and Kantian transcendental idealism. In fact, Inoue regarded the idealist explanation model as the best way to approach the true mystery.

Inoue’s views regarding the true mystery and great principle were also tied to his ideas regarding the true purpose of religion. He saw it as a way to come in contact with the “unlimited, absolute world” which would ideally result in “unlimited intellect, feeling and volition”. This he contrasted in popular, material results oriented ways of practicing religion, which he saw as diminishing human intellect, feeling and volition, and making humans more distant from the “unlimited, absolute world”.

When it came to the false or nominal mysteries, Inoue saw the empirical method as the best way to “do away” with them. The purpose of Inoue’s work was essentially to clear away what he saw as the chaff of superstition, fear, projection, rumors, trickery and fabrication so that the ”true mystery” would shine through more clearly. Inoue saw the false mysteries as essentially psychological phenomena, a misinterpretation of events.

What then causes people to misinterpret events according to Inoue? He blames lack of education and stupidity, going as far as to suggest that false mysteries are experienced only by lower class people, women and children. Interestingly enough he however primarily blames old stories and narratives. Inoue writes that not only do narratives prime people to perceive things in certain ways, humans have an inherent tendency to organize their thoughts into narratives, especially when they share them with other people. This narrativization leads into embellishment and elaboration and the tendency to create “perfect”, interesting and emotionally stirring narratives. Inoue also writes that people fixate on exceptional events and tend to label things with emotional charge or value judgement which distort truth value. Curiosity, not a bad thing in itself, can, according to Inoue, lead people to “assert their experience” in an attempt to “try to make it part of the world”. Inoue also implies that all narratives, not just those of supernatural type, have the power to color human preconceptions, and it’s simply the fact that Japanese culture was rife with stories of mystery and strange events which would cause people to “welcome mystery” and interpret events in numinous light. Inoue observed that there seemed to be very few new mysteries in his time. He expected that as narratives changed and people became more educated that over time what he saw as false mysteries would completely disappear.

Inoue’s approach started to turn youkai from strange events and creatures into psychological experiences that arise in humans under certain conditions, a label slapped onto phenomena tinted by fear or ignorance, shaped by narratives. A very representative example of this is a retelling of a case where a man mistook two stacked sacks of rice in a dark hallway for a monster. There was no monster, but there was a mistaken, illusionary experience of there perhaps being one. This example is rather similar to the Buddhist story of a man mistaking a rope for a snake, used to warn people of not confusing initial appearances with final truths. Inoue enjoyed using these kinds of narratives about “revealing the true form”, probably partly because of his Buddhist background, but also as they were resonant with earlier cultural tropes of monsters revealing their true form (such as a demonic snake turning out to be a jealous wife) upon being defeated.

False mysteries didn’t emerge just from stories though, and Inoue saw the misapplication of logic as the root cause. He splits these errors of logic into errors of deduction and errors of induction. Errors of deduction are to him a misrepresentation between the whole and part. Logically speaking, what is true for the whole is not necessarily true for the parts. Inoue sees errors of this category being things like expecting a change in the world because of a change in the sky, expecting natural disasters to repeat on same dates and, quite interestingly, the idea that other entities than humans would have a soul. Errors of induction are misattributions of cause and effect. Inoue writes that cause and effect are an exceedingly difficult topic even for educated people, because effects can become causes and there can be secondary causes, proximate causes, distant causes and so forth. However, Inoue sees things like attributing political unrest to the appearance of a comet or a murderer dying of illness to spirit vengeance as belonging to this category.

Much like certain later scholars, Inoue saw the study of mysteries as a way to study human affairs, in his case the development and intellect of humanity. Inoue, based on broader ideas of his time, drew a rather direct parallel between the development of individual humans and human cultures. He claims that prehistoric people were on the intellectual level of very young children, incapable of making distinctions between mind and matter, and thus nothing would be mysterious to them because they essentially would simply not be thinking. Only the emergence of division between mind and matter, internal and external, would lead to the birth of mysteries, or perhaps rather a sense of mystery.

In Outline of Mystery Studies, Inoue divides human history into the eras of senses, imagination and reasoning. In the era of senses, people would live in an immediate sensory world and perceive themselves as having a single body but dual selves. The “other self” would be perceived to literally go to places while dreaming, death would be perceived as a dream from which one would not wake up and literally go elsewhere, afterlife and deities were seen in very concrete terms. The era of imagination leads to the emergence of imagination and the idea of intangible spirits and afterlife. The era of reasoning is where humanity was currently, where they would be capable of figuring out the laws and principles of the universe through reasoning. Inoue implies certain types and groups of people are essentially stuck in earlier eras and that some “barbarian” groups might not be able to make it to reasoning because of “deficient brain structures”. Thus the persistence of false mysteries would also be a reflection of earlier forms of perception lingering in certain groups of people, and thus studying such people, including “vulgar people and babies”, could be used to create a kind of psychohistory of humanity.

Inoue’s elitism and love of categories leads to the emergence of a potentially quite troublesome and rather circular model of explanation. Since false mysteries are psychological phenomena experienced by uneducated people, women and children, almost definitionally every mysterious experience had by an uneducated person, woman or child would be a false mystery. One could even argue that rather than offering a genuine rationalist program of investigation, he offers ready-made quick categories that could be used to paper over worldviews considered embarrassing or disruptive. Youkai studies was after all only a part of his broad program of education and national empowerment. With him clearly perceiving the fate of Japan being threatened by powerful, modern outside powers, perhaps the genuine, thorough investigation of mysteries was of secondary or tertiary importance to forcefully and rapidly dragging Japan into modernity.

Weighing his rationalism and nationalism against each other is exceedingly difficult. There certainly are statements made by him which in modern Western context read as being almost absurdly nationalistic and religiously reverent towards Emperor Meiji and his lineage. Among these are him calling the “Imperial nation-body…the brilliant light of the Ideal” and that above this “Imperial nation-body” is the “the pure spirit of Imperial sacredness” and the “energy” of “loyal subjects mutually reflecting and glittering in the completely spiritual divine light of the national body”. In light of statements like these, the historian Gerald A. Figal has interpreted Inoue essentially as a Meiji propagandist of sorts. In light of Inoue’s religiously ultranationalistic statements, it is painfully ironic that Inoue became entangled in an incident which was seen as giving support to regicide. In this Philosophy Academy Incident, one student in his Academy received a full score from an ethics examination for answering that in certain circumstances regicide could be acceptable. This led to a scandal, the Academy almost closed and lost its permission to grant certificates for teaching in public schools.

Inoue’s methodology for approaching mysterious phenomena can be described as a mix of finding ready-made explanations of similar phenomena from international research and on-site investigations. Inoue boasted that he had collected 462 items of information concerning the supernatural and had read over five hundred texts from the past and present regarding the topic of supernatural. He participated in about ten on-site investigations on topics like hypnotism, sorcery and alleged kitsune activity. It’s been reported that Inoue visited 1579 sites throughout Japan to record observations and information. In a sense, Inoue was a kind of proto-folklorist too, and his notes have been used in later folkloristic research too.

As the enormously disparate ratio of about 462 collected items of information versus 1579 visited versus only roughly ten on-site investigations suggests, Inoue’s main methodology appears to have been seeking similar phenomena from foreign materials focusing on debunking supernatural phenomena and then applying the same explanation for the phenomena in Japan. I personally find the ratio between sites visited and “on-site investigations” quite the headscratcher, and there sadly doesn’t appear to be English-language materials that would go in-depth into his investigative methods and purpose of these visits. Lacking more precise information, I’ll refrain from commenting on the integrity of his investigations more broadly, but would like to highlight two cases where I personally found the given explanations questionable or lacking.

The first of these is his investigation into the kokkuri-san phenomenon. Kokkuri-san was a divination game where the participants put their hands on a plate that was propped up with bamboo sticks or other suitable means. The plate would tilt, and it would be interpreted in a lighthearted manner as a divination method that invoked tengu, kitsune or tanuki. This game was likely influenced by the Western Spiritist practice of table-turning, and Inoue basically copied wholesale the Western debunking explanations aimed at table-turning. The problem here is that Inoue describes the kokkuri-san plate as turning instead of tilting. The model of explanation, activity of human nervous system and “expectant attention” could arguably apply to both cases, but it is slightly eyebrow-raising that he dismisses something without clearly having looked into it at all.

The second is Inoue’s explanation or lack thereof regarding certain dimensions of the tengu phenomenon. Inoue offers believable explanations for reports of seeing tengu as entities. Stories and folklore about tengu prime people to expect encounters with them, so if someone sees an unusually large man at the mountains, perhaps a recluse or hermit, they might be primed to misinterpret it as a tengu. The mountain nature is unfamiliar, and the unfamiliarity might cause people to misinterpret things they see in a frightful state. When it comes to the phenomena known as tengu possession, I find his explanation lacking. Tengu possession refers to incidents where people become lost in the mountains and return after a while and they are somehow transformed when they return. Inoue chalks this up to the same kind of insanity that causes alleged cases of kitsune possession. However, where things become interesting is that apparently an aspect of tengu possessions was that sometimes people would spontaneously acquire new skills after the experience. One would expect Inoue to challenge this, yet he does. Inoue is simply content to state that such is due to the “workings of the mind” and not the tengu. While I am not saying that tengu are any form necessarily responsible for such a thing, I do find it curious how he brushes the issue aside. He does not spend time claiming such things do not happen, but neither does he dwell on just how “workings of the mind” produce spontaneous skill acquisition. I find this strangely incurious.

While these two examples hardly destroy his whole program, it does lead one to wonder if there were also other such cases where he missed details and was strangely incurious about unusual and truly unexplained aspects of some phenomena. Investigation of alleged supernatural phenomena wasn’t Inoue’s only field of activity, he was an extremely prolific author and lecturer operating on multiple fields. He toured around the world three times and worked on education. One has to ask how much time he really had for his investigations. Inoue was a truth-seeker, but he was also a political operator with a certain nation-building vision, and one can easily imagine that these two roles might at times start to contradict each other.

Some of Inoue’s work also used models of explanation that would these days be considered pseudoscientific or at least dated and speculative in a very particular way. In Outline of Mystery studies, he writes about using conjecture from empirical explanations to things that are not known for certain via “normal experience”. He then uses electricity and the back-then valid ether theory as being possible explanations for all kinds of supernatural phenomena. In particular, he refers to The Unseen Universe (1875) by Balfour Stewart (1828-1887) and Peter Guthrie Tait (1831-1901). In this book, foresight, prophecies, ghosts and demonic spirits are explained as phenomena arising from “ether” and “energy”. Inoue also mentions arguments that use the conservation of energy principle for the existence of an immortal soul. Inoue considered these ideas a possible model of explanation for certain mysterious phenomena, but lacking direct evidence, did not fully commit to believing them.

Inoue, Stewart and Tait were not the only ones floating various scientific explanations of supernatural and spiritual phenomena. For example, a competing explanation for the operation of the kokkuri-san divination game was that it was neither youkai nor human nerve impulses tilting the plate, but rather “human electricity”. This “human electricity” wasn’t the same as the electrical phenomena of human physiology as we know it today, but something that had little to do with conventional, modern understanding of electricity. Some qualities given to this “human electricity” strongly recall older yin-yang thinking. This model of explanation was likely inspired by broader Western attempts at using the back-then 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. Analogues to this recent times are attempts at using quantum theory or simulation theory to explain supernatural phenomena, through unintuitive properties of quantum physics or treating the supernatural as “glitches in the matrix”.

Inoue was of course a man of his times, and there is much to give credit for in his work. His philosophy is a fascinating synthesis of Western and Eastern thought, drawing from multiple fields. In a sense, youkaigaku sits between East and West, a liminal, hybrid quality very suitable for the topic. His insight into how what is mysterious is relative to the knowledge available and how narratives impact humans feel fresh to this day. There are genuinely very insightful aspects to his work. The point I am trying to make is that his project did not succeed completely. Not everyone was convinced by Inoue, and his work left a gap big enough for youkai to slip through into continued existence. Perhaps this gap was unintentionally even widened by him seriously considering models of explanation we would now consider pseudoscientific. He did greatly shape the future of youkai studies and culture, and his psychologizing approach would later be adapted by scholars and creatives working with the topic of youkai.

It also has to be acknowledged that Inoue took on a monumental task of “altering the landscape of perception” as Foster puts it, essentially trying to replace an entire old worldview with a new, alien one with new and complex concepts. It was an interdisciplinary project, trying to use the most up to date knowledge from diverse fields. It is very hard to imagine how difficult such a venture must have been, and how a single person could levy such a broad base of knowledge in this project.

Even though Inoue displayed a clearly elitist attitude, he was more than willing to reach out to people outside of the social elite in order to educate them. He had serialized publications in the newspaper Yomiuri shinbun, which were later compiled into standalone collections known as Youkai hyaku-dan (One Hundred Youkai Tales) and Zoku youkai hyaku-dan (One Hundred Youkai Tales Continued). The naming conventions are an obvious play on the earlier hyaku monogatari culture. Rather than providing tales of the supernatural, they provided mundane explanations for the supernatural. While obviously intended to be a way to disenchant youkai, there’s however a certain entertaining quality to these works. They came with illustrations, and it’s likely that people of the time were enjoying these stories also as a form of sensationalist entertainment. Inoue’s later works and lectures on youkai had a certain levity to them, making him a popular author and lecturer. The folklorist Kazuhiko Komatsu has later gone so far as to argue that Inoue had a certain fondness of youkai, a kind of prototypical youkai otaku who was always on the hunt for new youkai.

Whether Inoue was a secret precursor to youkai otaku or not, his work ended up paradoxically preserving youkai. By taking them as a serious object of cataloguing, study and debunking, he ended up creating a kind of catalogue of youkai. This process also started to turn youkai into “tradition”, which gave them a kind of layer of ”patina” and certain cultural stability. Despite his attempts, neither Inoue nor the broader Meiji reforms fully squashed out earnest belief in youkai. In the coming decades, the Japanese would keep on engaging with this tradition.

However, as the country started to open up, it would no longer be just the Japanese who would engage with this tradition. A number of Western people would arrive in the country, and begin documenting the Japanese way of life. Some of these travellers would also touch on Japanese beliefs regarding the supernatural. For one of these travellers the journey would turn into a residence that lasted until the end of his life, and he would end up making notable contributions to both youkai culture within Japan, as well as introducing it abroad. This person was Lafcadio Hearn.

Lafcadio Hearn - Introducing Unseen Japan to the West

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) played a notable role in preserving and translating Japanese culture related to the supernatural. He wrote several books that documented life in Japan in the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and also wrote retellings of Japanese stories of the supernatural in English. While he is best known for his writings in Japan, he had a colorful career in newspapers before his arrival in Japan. Lafcadio lived on the edge of mainstream, and in some ways he was a quite youkai-like figure himself.

Hearn was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkada. He was originally named Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, and the middle name by which he later chose to go with came from the name of the island he was born on. His mother was Greek while his father was a British Army medical officer of Irish and British descent. At the time Lefkada was part of a British protectorate in the Ionian Islands of Greece, and Hearn’s father was deployed on the islands.

In 1852 Hearn was forced to move with his mother into Dublin, as his father was reassigned and left his family behind. Hearn’s father arranged for his wife and child to live with his parents. They treated Hearn and his mother in a rather cold fashion. Hearn’s father would continue to be absent from family life. By 1856, Hearn’s mother had left back for Greece, and his father had become severely injured and traumatized in the Crimean War. The marriage was eventually annulled, and the custodianship of Hearn was given to his father, who then left Hearn in the care of his family in Dublin.

Hearn was baptized Greek Orthodox, but given a Catholic education. Hearn showed interest towards mythology and literature, and adopted the name “Paddy” to better fit in. In 1866, Hearn injured his left eye. He lost sight in the eye and the color of the iris became permanently changed. Hearn would avoid showing his discolored eye to others, and he would turn his left side away for photos taken of him. Economic hardship faced the family in 1867, and Hearn was taken out of school. He would spend time at workhouses and wandering aimlessly. He would frequently visit libraries and the British Museum.

By 1869 the financial situation of Hearn’s foster family had become more stable. As Hearn was at this point 19 years old, the family decided to cut their obligation to Hearn. They bought him a one-way ticket to the United States and told him to go to Cincinnati, where family friends would help him start his new life. In reality, the family friends wanted little to do with Hearn and threw him out.

Hearn had to survive on doing odd jobs for a while, but by 1872 his skills as a writer had become recognized, and he started working for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer newspaper. He developed a reputation for being an audacious reporter who did not shy away from scandalous topics. Hearn was especially known for lurid accounts of local murders. He would also write about the disadvantaged people of the city. In 1874, Hearn married Alethea Foley, an African-American woman who was formerly enslaved. This was against local laws at the time, and in 1875 his illegal marriage was used as a pretext for firing him from the newspaper he worked for. While Hearn found employment in a rival newspaper quickly, his marriage turned out to be an unstable one. By 1877 Hearn was divorced and fed up with Cincinnati.

Hearn left for New Orleans, and by 1878 had found employment in a local newspaper. He ended up in editorial roles, and his touch greatly changed the newspapers he became employed by. Hearn would also begin writing publications for national newspapers, presenting the distinct culture of the city to a national audience. He was enthusiastic about the city, but also wrote of its decay and corruption. In 1887, Hearn was sent by Harper’s magazine to the island of Martinique to act as a correspondent, and his writings would end up becoming two books.

In 1890, Hearn would end up going to Japan, where he would spend the rest of his life. He initially went there as a newspaper correspondent, but this commission was quickly terminated. He ended up getting a teaching position in Matsue, a town in western Japan. While in Matsue, he married Koizumi Setsuko, and would end up having four children with her. In 1896, he became a Japanese citizen and took up the name Koizumi Yakumo.

Hearn would end up writing many essays and books while in Japan based on his experiences while living there. He fell in love with what he perceived to be traditional Japanese culture. In his first Japan-related book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Hearn documents Japanese society, culture and landscape, and discusses several topics such as Japanese religion and folklore. In the book Hearn argues against both modernization and Christianization of Japan, both of which he sees as something which would destroy Japanese culture. Part of the traditional aspects of Japanese culture that Hearn loved were the supernatural and the mysterious, and these would feature in many of his works, including Japanese Fairy Tales (1898) and In Ghostly Japan (1899).

The book that Hearn is these days perhaps best remembered for is Kwaidan (1904) a collection of “stories of strange things”. It’s a collection of retellings of older Japanese stories that deal with the supernatural and youkai. Hearn did not likely translate these tales completely by himself, using help of either his wife or translator. What Hearn did was to provide a skillfully written retelling of these tales in English. He injected a lot of his own literary style, skillful prose and personality into the texts while retaining the broad strokes of older stories. They are not intended to be literal translations, but rather creative works. Kwaidan was translated back into Japanese fairly soon after its publication, and it remains a beloved work of Japanese literature up to this day.

Hearn’s efforts at preserving and exhibiting premodern aspects of Japanese culture appears to have had a genuine impact. As Hearn was a Westerner, his views were given much weight. Him seeing value in pre-modern aspects of Japanese culture was thus particularly impactful. He didn’t see beliefs in the supernatural or youkai as being impediments to progress, but rather a part of the Japanese experience that should be treasured. His works came out during a time in which Japan was seeking its identity. The most radical phase of Meiji modernization when native culture and tradition was maligned was winding down by the time Hearn spent in Japan. While the modernization continued - much to Hearn’s dislike - and attitudes and policies which were against certain supernatural beliefs continued and even intensified after his work, he did help to preserve aspects of Japanese culture that were at risk of disappearing.

Later on, Hearn became somewhat disillusioned with Japan, and his 1904 Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation is more grounded than his earlier romantic works. It’s thought that Hearn might have started to crave a change of scenery, as he had grown accustomed to changing countries fairly regularly during his life. Hearn would never get this chance, as he died in 1906, being only 54 years of age. He left behind a considerable legacy of literature that was impactful both in Japan and outside of it, shaping how Westerners viewed Japan and its modernization.

Hearn’s views on youkai as meaningful parts of Japanese culture had an impact on later youkai culture and study of youkai. Being quite the liminal figure himself, of mixed origin, one-eyed, moving from one country to another several times, working among the marginalized and the unknown, it’s no wonder he would end up contributing to youkai culture himself. These contributions echo also in Touhou, and Hearn is likely the source for Maribel Hearn’s and Yakumo Yukari’s names.

Minakata Kumagusu - For the Interconnectedness of Life

The modernization of Japan also raised resistance among native Japanese, and Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941) was a notable figure among such dissidents. He has been flatly described as “a Japanese author, biologist, naturalist and ethnologist”, but as an extensive picture this might paint, it hardly captures the extent of his interests and his colorful life. He traveled and studied widely, but never acquired a formal degree from a university. He treasured Western learning, but also Eastern classics, and defended the value of folk traditions. He was passionate about biology, especially slime molds, a form of life that sits in a liminal space between plants, fungi and animals. He organized resistance against shrine consolidation and destruction of forests, yet was the first Japanese commoner to be granted an audience with the Emperor of Japan. He corresponded widely and got into fistfights.

Kumagusu never acquired a formal degree, and rather than working with a particular theory or set or theories, he had an approach that can be seen as either seeking patterns, be they in biology or folklore. He did very little of what could be characterized as formal work, and largely depended on his merchant father’s estate. While he was a noted person during his lifetime, he became forgotten until revived interest towards his works in the 1980s led to a re-evaluation of his legacy. These days his contributions, especially towards ecological protection, are recognized. He tried to pursue a very total form of knowledge, which would have included phenomena in the realms of the spiritual and supernatural.

Kumagusu was born in Wakayama, on the Kii peninsula. He was a sickly child, and when he was taken to the Fujishiro shrine to be named, the head priest decided to name him Kumagusu in an effort to invoke a bit of the mountain deities’ power to sustain the child. Kuma came from the word for bear, also featured in the name of the Kumano faith of which the shrine belonged. Gusu came from the word for camphor tree, kusu, in reference to the sacred camphor growing on the shrine grounds. Perhaps this effort worked, as Kumagusu would go on to live a fairly long life, and perhaps it is because of this act that he went on to develop a deep tie to nature and a spiritual view of the world. Kumagusu himself apparently deeply read into the significance of his given name as a child.

Maybe it was his sickliness, or perhaps some numinous touch invoked by the priest that explains the unusual physical qualities, rough and withdrawn temperament and strange habits that he would come to display alongside some unusual intellectual talents. He suffered from epilepsy, with the seizures warning of themselves through experiences of deja vu. Along these, he experienced out of body experiences and hallucinations. He sweated profusely and preferred to be naked or only in his undergarments during summers. Perhaps his most unusually physical feature was the ability to vomit on command. Kumagusu had an astonishing memory, being able to read through a book and then transcribe it in its entirety from memory. He could also function exceptionally long without food or rest, sometimes writing almost nonstop for two or three days, losing himself in the process to the point where he had to ask his family members if he had eaten or not during the day. He drank heavily and enjoyed smoking. Taking these qualities together, it is perhaps not surprising that once a frightened group of young women thought Kumagusu was a tengyan, tengu in Wakayama dialect, when they saw him running down from a mountain only in his undergarments.

While Kumagusu displayed his gifts for memorization and keen observation early on, he however was ill fit for formal education, a theme that would continue throughout his life. After finishing middle school in 1883, he went to Tokyo in order to study at a preparatory school for the University of Tokyo. He however wasn’t particularly interested in studying, and would spend his days largely exploring libraries, gardens and zoos and collecting plants, animals, minerals and artifacts. His lifelong interest in slime molds blossomed during this time. After failing the end of year examination in 1886, he decided to travel to the United States.

Kumagusu landed in San Francisco, where he studied business for a year, apparently just to experience how life in America was. He ended up moving to Michigan in 1887, got expelled from the Michigan State School of Agriculture in 1888, moved to Ann Arbor where he nominally attended another university but spent most of his time exploring the mountains, collecting specimens and reading books. Kumagusu would eventually hear that there were many undiscovered plant species in Florida, and left for Jacksonville in 1891. He spent three months gathering specimens there, then moved to Key West and then Havana, Cuba. While in Havana, he encountered a Japanese member of a traveling circus, and would end up traveling with the circus, visiting Port-au-Prince, Caracas, Valencia and Jamaica. In 1892 he returned to Jacksonville, worked with the specimens he had collected, and then decided to leave for the United Kingdom.

In London, Kumagusu would end up working in a herbaria and spent time visiting museums and galleries. He would write an article to Nature about constellations in Eastern cultures as a reply to inquiry posted in the magazine. His article was published, and it became one of his many which would be published in Nature and Notes and Queries. He would often write articles related to folklore, especially how folklore has migrated and transformed, as well as folklore of plants and insects. His topics were wide ranging, from such as “Some Oriental Beliefs about Bees and Wasps” or “Chinese Beliefs about the North” to “Legless Spirits in Lithuanian Folklore” and “Extraordinary Fountains in Ireland and Brittany”.

He eventually met the Japanese antique dealer Kataoka Prince, who noticed Kumagusu’s unusual intellectual prowess and introduced him to Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks of the British Museum. Kumagusu would start visiting the British Museum daily, reading and copying books from the West and the East. The intellectual circles of London were starting to take note of Kumagusu, and Franks offered him a job at the British Museum. Kumagusu would end up declining this offer, as he craved freedom. He however helped the museum with cataloguing and conducted historical research on Buddhist statues in possession of the museum. Kumagusu would however face occasional discrimination, and he left the British Museum in 1898 after a violent incident.

Kumagusu would end up returning to Japan in 1900. He received a cold reception, as at that time it was expected that he would have gotten a degree abroad. Minakata would return to his favored activities of collecting biological specimens, translating and writing. He would also explore the relationship between the spiritual and the natural world. In 1904, Kumagusu settled for a few months into a lodge near Kumano Nachi Taisha, one of the three great Kumano shrines. There he would spend time both collecting specimens, as well as studying the extensive Kegon Buddhism treatise Huayan wujiao zhang. This was a powerful experience for him, and he achieved a new level of clarity and intellectual fertility. Later in the same year he settled in Tanabe, a town in Wakayama, and started a carefree phase of his life characterized by partying, drinking, renting geishas and performing strange performances. In 1906, he met and married his wife Matsue, who was the daughter of a shrine priest.

In 1906, Kumagusu became involved in protests against the movement to consolidate shrines. The Meiji government wanted to reduce the amount of shrines and to centralize them in order to better politically control Shinto. There was also a desire to free up shrine forests for clearing. Kumagusu actively campaigned against this process, arguing that not only would this destroy precious buildings and antiquities, but also damage local ecology, and cause moral and spiritual harm to people. His resistance would eventually gain momentum, and the move to consolidate shrines ground to a halt and was eventually cancelled in 1920. Today, some consider him a pioneer in ecological preservation for his efforts.

In 1916, Kumagusu obtained a property and turned it into an open-air laboratory for the observation of wildlife, plants and fungi. He would discover a new species of slime mold on a persimmon tree. Around this time he started fundraising efforts for establishing a botanical garden, which lasted until 1925, when he became severely ill. He struggled to deal with the financial strain of sickness, and ended up writing three books compiling his earlier work to cover the costs.

Kumagusu would end up making Japanese history in 1929, when he became the first commoner to be granted an audience with the Emperor of Japan. The reigning Emperor Hirohito was a biologist by training, and had developed an interest in slime molds. Kumagusu was secretly approached and asked to give a presentation to the emperor during his upcoming royal visit to Wakayama. As there was no precedent for a commoner presenting to an emperor, Kumagusu became the subject of public attention and speculation. Kumagasu would present the emperor the woods at Kashima island, and give a 25 minute presentation on slime molds and marine life aboard the royal ship Nagato. He would also present the emperor with a gift of 110 slime mold specimens.

Towards the end of his life, Kumagusu would keep on writing and studying, but his health started declining. The start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 saw the impoverishment of many people’s lives, and Kumagusu was not an exception. He developed mobility issues and could not attend the 2600th anniversary of the establishment of Japan in 1940, to which he was invited as a recipient for an award. Kumagusu eventually passed away in 1941, his last words having been said to have been “I can see purple flowers blossoming on the ceiling”.

Kumagusu mostly operated on the fringes of academia and made only a few publications that would be considered strictly academic literature. He didn’t really develop any large theories which could have formed the basis of a research project, and it’s difficult to pin him as a conventional scientist. Assessments of the quality of his work have varied. For example, Carmen Blacker, a later British japanologist called him a “neglected genius” and praised his comparative folklore studies which would use a staggering span of sources of trace parallels and evolution of mythologies around the world. While he was a known person during his lifetime, he soon became forgotten, even scorned in his native Japan after death, being regarded as a troublesome dilettante. The style and quality of his output also varied from language and time to another. His writings in English could be very eloquent and well-structured, while some of his texts in Japanese are apparently messy, scattered, strangely “mandala-like” with occasional obscenities popping in, reflecting his broad base of knowledge, nonlinear views on information as well as his sheer vitality.

While Kumagusu wrote very little on the topic of youkai in itself, he did contribute to the field of youkai studies in two ways. First are his extensive studies into folklore, and second is his work on developing ways to conceptualize intertwined forms of subtle knowledge related to topics considered supernatural, spiritual and mysterious.

Kumagusu’s folkloristic work began while he was in the United Kingdom, and it was truly groundbreaking at the time, as very little was known of the East in the West at that time. Kumagusu relentlessly sought to demonstrate that the East had folklore and cultural depth that was just as deep as in the West, and that certain elements of folklore which were thought to be unique to Indo-Europeans could also be found in the Far East. Kumagusu would for example find parallels between the legends of the European mandrake and the chinese plant shang-lu, the legends of the Wandering Jew and the Buddhist legend of Pindola as well as stories of miraculous healing wells in Japan and Ireland. He would also trace the evolution of folklore, for example demonstrating how stories of wealth-bringing rats from India transformed to stories of wealth-bringing cats in the Arab world, from where they then spread into Europe. Another constant theme in his work on folklore were topics related to animals and plants, such as myths related to birds producing and gifting magical rocks in certain conditions.

The work on folklore that Kumagusu did would intersect somewhat with the birth of Japanese minzokugaku, folklore studies driven by interest in understanding the origins of Japanese people and culture. Kumagusu himself however wasn’t concerned with such as much as he was concerned with observing and collecting patterns. This was reflected down to the way he preferred to work, attaching little notes and tiny patches of writing into larger papers, these pieces of knowledge forming patterns in themselves. Perhaps these patterned presentations could be conceptualized as a kind of mandalas - Kumagusu was after all an apparently learned and devout Buddhist. It has been thought that Kumagusu struggled to arrive at issaichi, a term referring to knowledge of the whole world, a central truth that radiates into all of nature and is the key to the fundamental workings of the universe.

When it comes to topics of mysterious phenomena, as one could perhaps expect, it is not a separate domain from Kumagusu’s other work. Rather, it is related to ontological ideas which were central to his work on more mundane topics too. Much of our understanding of his core ontological views come from his extensive correspondence with the high-ranking Shingon Buddhist priest Toki Houryuu (1854-1922). Toki was a quite interesting and international figure himself, and Kumagusu met him in London, when Houryuu was making his way back to Japan from the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893. Minakata sought to convince Toki that modern science could be compatible with Buddhism as it offered ways to study the various causal relations which were inherent to the Buddhist idea of interdependent origination.

Minakata Kumagusu and Inoue Enryou would share some similarities in how they approached studying and conceptualizing mysteries, thanks to their shared Buddhist background. These include using kokoro and mono as part of their conceptual toolkit, as well as how they both categorized mysteries and sought to pursue a kind of “ultimate mystery”. In many other ways these two would diverge quite radically, both in their conceptualizations as well as the practical programs (if Kumagusu ever had anything even remotely like a practical program) that would flow out of the ways these two perceived the world.

One of the central conceptual tools that emerges from Kumagusu’s correspondence with Toki is the kokoro - koto - mono triad. Kokoro can be translated as “heart”, but it doesn’t really capture its meaning in Japanese. Rather, it represents a kind of “heart-mind”, the intertwining of emotions and reasoning, a nuanced totality of human consciousness. In the sense that Kumagusu used this word, mono refers to material things, living and nonliving, that are outside of the human consciousness.

Koto is where things become very interesting and also exceedingly difficult to translate. Kumagusu visualized koto as a kind of Venn diagram type of figure, where it represents an intersection of kokoro and mono. In other words, it is something that arises between the human consciousness and the world outside of human consciousness. Koto could be translated as “thing”, but completely fails to describe what Kumagusu was trying to express with it. To him, everything from “from the taking of a tissue in hand and blowing one’s nose to the founding of religions to benefit people” was in this domain of koto.

The historian Gerald A. Figal suggested “cultural thing” as a translation for Kumagusu’s koto, but I think even that doesn’t really capture it. I do find his description of it being “the operation and product of mind interacting with the matter” very intriguing, as it demonstrates how it is neither something that is done, nor a static product, but a process. If I were to attempt to give my explanation, koto is a concept for describing how an enormous wealth of activities necessary and relevant to human existence, perhaps all of it, emerges from interactions between what we perceive to be a separate human consciousness and the outside world.

As we will later on see, some later youkai studies scholars have made use of conceptual frameworks very similar to kokoro - koto - mono, and there is a case to be made that this might be the origin point for cultural trends that resulted in how the role of human belief is depicted in Touhou Project. It should be noted that Kumagusu did not invent these ideas wholesale, and they appear to be an interpretation or clarification of earlier, broader Japanese and Buddhist ideas.

When it comes to classification of various mysteries, Kumagusu didn’t have quite as elaborate a schema as Inoue did. He classified the various mysteries of the world into monofushigi (mysteries of matter), kokorofushigi (mysteries of mind), kotofushigi (mysteries which emerge from interactions of matter and mind) and most interestingly, rifushigi (mysteries of reason). The idea that there might be mysteries to reason, the very abstract operations of logic that underpin rational efforts to investigate the world is a radical divergence from Inoue, who did not even consider such a possibility. Both Kumagusu and Inoue however were ultimately interested in the “great mystery”, something transcendental and outside of human knowledge. While Inoue used the Buddhist idea of true reality, Kumagusu chose to use a more sectarian idea of “the immortal soul of Dainichi Nyorai”, the Cosmic Sun Buddha of Shingon Buddhism who is a personification of the universe itself.

Inoue and Kumagusu also had differing views on the power of science when it came to explaining the various mysteries. Kumagusu thought that the various physical sciences were mostly able to organize and label mysteries of the matter, while struggling to explain the reasons behind them. When it came to kokorofushigi, Kumagusu noted that psychology could not disentangle itself from the physicality of the human brain and nervous system, and thus not pure science of the human consciousness existed. Mathematics and reasons were ways to approach kotofushigi, yet they were not complete models of explanations for these phenomena either. Kumagusu struggled to even name something that would be approaching mysteries of reason itself.

As Kumagusu thought that there were gaps in the explanatory power of science, he seems to have become motivated in his own intellectual projects to explore and conceptualise things that could fill these gaps. He thought that physical sciences had certain efficacy in ordering the world, and that certain natural laws were good descriptions of causal relations among matter. Kumagusu saw that these laws are comparable to laws of karmic transmigration in Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. However, he was uncertain if the world of kokoro and mono, of human thoughts, desires, feelings and what kind of things emerge when they interact with matter, would follow such discernible laws. Thus any science that is aimed at investigating human action and desires must grapple with the fact that there might be no simple causal laws explaining such things.

Kumagusu produced an intriguing, albeit messy, mandala-like graph in a letter to Toki that has become known as the Minakata mandala. It presents a kind of network of causality in an attempt to explore the interactions of mind, matter and things that emerge between these two. Humans are placed on the center of the mandala, as a suiten, or gathering point. The various lines that crisscross and intermingle across the mandala represent various causal relationships between the mysteries of matter, mind and their interactions. The further out from the center the various elements of the mandala are, the further away they are from human awareness and ability to comprehend causal relations.

On the edge of the mandala are two outer lines. The lower line represents things on the fringes of human understanding, from which humans are barely glean information from. The outermost line is the cut-off point for human ability to understand causal relations, outside of the reaches of reasoning and interference. At best humans can “feel” that something exists there. Kumagusu associated this cut-off point with the mysteries of reason, and he was very sceptical of the ability of reason to investigate its own mysteries.

Humans might be at the center of the mandala, but the various casualties depicted also influence each other. This appears to have been Kumagusu’s major interest, as well as something he critiqued Western science for failing to account form. Western models were good at isolating elements of the larger network, and causality within these isolated elements. What Kumagusu thought Western science lacked however was en, or karmic relations. He used this term taken out of its moral charge, to describe relations among forces influenced by human action.

Kumagusu also viewed that a different approach than Western scientific predictability and repeatability would be needed to approach the big picture of things emerging between mind and matter. Because humans come with their own unique perceptions, feelings and desires which change moment to moment, “objective” repeatability is not possible. What is needed in the process of investigating human creativity and discovery is what Kumagusu calls “tact”, interestingly enough choosing to use the English term. He considered jukuren, trained skill, as an alternative term but felt that it did not quite capture what he was trying to express. This “tact” seems to have been a mix of experience, sensitivity and openness, a kind of intuition. The openness allows for “chance hits”, yariate to happen, which can yield unexpected and novel results. He uses the example of flammable hydrogen and oxygen producing water and poisonous tapioca seeds growing into healthy food as examples of these kinds of “chance hits” where measuring the constituent parts will not lead to discovery of these results.

These ideas of “tact” and “chance hits” were used by Kumagusu to explain certain things that appear “supernatural”. He uses examples of him having what appear to be precognitive dreams. He had a dream of finding a particular type of duckweed in a certain place, and while he initially didn’t seem to find any in that place, he took a sample nevertheless. Upon observing the sample, the duckweed was there. Another example is of him dreaming of a particular slime mold appearing in a certain location. He did not find it there initially, but forced to take a detour and rest, he then found the particular species in plenty. It is quite difficult to understand how such experiences emerge from “tact”, and Kumagusu doesn’t attempt to dissect them further.

When it came to topics like divination and shamanism, Kumagusu was of the opinion that they were “nothing special” and “full of chance hits”, but that there could be some sort of efficacy, purpose and a strange, dreamlike logic to occult practices. The efficacy and power of an occult act would rise from declaring a “chance hit” to be a miracle, perhaps in line with later discussions regarding the power of belief and subjective experience in relation to occult practices. Some of the measures which Kumagusu saw as ways to apply “tact” however did include “curses, spells” as well as “a variety of other presently nameless mental operations”. There could also be perhaps a kind of alternative, dream-like logic to occult acts that would be difficult to examine. Finally, various “supernatural” or occult practices could at the very least serve a meaningful social function.

Kumagusu’s correspondence with Toki and ideas regarding kokoro - koto - mono, the mysteries, tact and chance hits must be understood in the context of the rapid, aggressive, state-sanctioned program of cultural change of the Meiji era. While these days it might not be particularly revolutionary to say that “folk practices” might have interpersonal and social value, the ethos of the day was extremely hostile to everything declared “superstition”. To say that things like shamanism might have difficult to grasp value to communities was an act of defiance. To Kumagusu, tactful acts seemed to have included any beneficial techniques that stimulate thought, discovery and cultural production. This includes a wide range of “irrational” practices.

When it comes to the topic of youkai as entities, Kumagusu himself did not, as far as I know, systematically apply these views to them. Rather, they were material for his folklore studies. There are however later youkai scholars who would start to conceptualize youkai as something that emerges between matter and mind, something that may owe its origins to Kumagusu’s ideas. His ideas highlight strange, liminal borderlands and networks of influence within the human cognition of the world itself, and leave open the space for seemingly wondrous events to emerge in ways that rational models struggle to explain.

It could be reasonably argued that Kumagusu’s deep fascination with slime molds was a kind of microcosm of his view and interest towards the world. Many species of slime molds have highly unusual life cycles, where they move from living as individuated amoebas to merging together into single entities which not only become visible to humans, but sometimes grow into considerable size. These plasmoids are a single cell with multiple nuclei. They produce fruiting bodies which disperse spores, which grow into amoeba again, which can undergo reproductive fusion when they encounter counterparts of the correct mating type. These creatures display qualities of animals, plants and fungi while not belonging to any of these categories, and defy human notions of life and death, male and female. They have no nervous system yet are able to display intelligent behaviour. These creatures are quite the bakemono, a changing thing. Perhaps Kumagusu saw all of reality like they are, a liminal network from which occasionally fruitful insights appear from, only to return to the invisible world beyond human perception.

1912-1945: Taisho and Early Showa – Twilight Times, Folkloristics and Youkai as Nostalgia

By the time Emperor Meiji passed away on 29th of July 1912, Japan had modernized and industrialized at a staggering pace. It had gone from a country that struggled to resist Western incursions into one that had defeated the Chinese Empire in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Japan had become an empire among empires in the ruthless competition for sphere of power that characterized the era, and had conquered Korea and Taiwan. These military successes shocked the West and fueled Japanese self-understanding as an exceptional nation. After all, no other Asian country had managed to resist the West to the extent they had, and Japan had not only resisted, they had built an empire of their own. This would lead into a cycle of ever increasing militarization and imperialism.

Meiji was succeeded by Crown Prince Yoshihito, who chose to reign as Emperor Taisho. He suffered from neurological issues and died at a relatively young age of 47 in 1926. The short Taisho era saw Japan participating in the First World War of 1914-1918 and gaining former German territories in China and Pacific as a result. Japan became seen as one of the “Big Five” nations of the era, and was awarded a seat of the League of Nations, which was an international organization that tried to maintain world peace, with poor results. Japan would also manage to assert further control over China. These international successes were counterbalanced by economic challenges brought on militarization, as well as political instability. The Taisho era saw Japan become more democratic, but after the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the government declared martial law to deal with the chaotic aftermath. This allowed the military to intervene in politics, paving way for authoritarian developments that would characterize the build-up towards the Second World War.

If Emperor Taisho had a short reign, his successor Emperor Showa would have a reign that far outlasted the most remarkable events of his reign, that being Japan’s participation and defeat in the Second World War. The pre-war Showa era was characterized by increasingly authoritarian, nationalistic and imperialistic politics. Japanese nationalist sentiment was bolstered by a mix of resentment over racial discrimination by Western powers, particularly the United States, as well as earlier military successes. The government aggressively suppressed leftist movements and started to formulate an ideology that would justify a war against Western powers. Japan felt politically isolated and lacked international allies in the 1920s. A major economic crisis hit the country in 1927. These factors coalesced together to allow for the centralization of political power for the attempt to build a pan-Asian empire led by Japan. In 1937, the Second Sino-Japan War erupted, and this marked the start of nonstop warfare for Japan that lasted until the defeat in the Second World War in 1945. While Japan espoused rhetoric of liberation of Asia, in practice they ruled as colonial overlords in the territories Japan managed to occupy, unwilling to extend racial equality they demanded from the West towards other Asians.

The post-Meiji, pre-war Japanese culture saw youkai increasingly becoming relegated as a thing of the past. The Meiji program against things labeled superstition might not have been a total success, but it did have a massive impact on Japanese society. New models of explanation for strange phenomena replaced old ones, and cultural tastes shifted. There is a folktale from this time that captures the spirit of the times well. It goes like this: A train is stopped when the people operating it 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 was getting run over by modernity. Youkai didn’t completely vanish from Japanese culture, but they became diminished.

This process of youkai becoming things of the past made them subjects to nostalgia and therefore more safe, especially compared to certain cultural trends that would emerge during the early 20th century. In particular, 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. This shocking and very human horror made youkai feel rather quaint in comparison.

Another cultural trend was the bifurcation of mysterious and youkai, where new strange phenomena were no longer conceptualized in terms of youkai. These included things such as hypnosis. Strange things never stopped happening in Japan, but they were for the most part no longer thought to be the work of youkai. Humans evolved and youkai devolved, but this evolution wasn’t always seen to be so one-directional. The physicist and writer Terada Torahiko (1878-1935) stated that the desire to understand youkai drives science because understanding mystery would require what would these days be called interdisciplinary studies. Youkai evolve with humanity, because solving old mysteries simply brings forth new ones.

As youkai became nostalgic things of the past that were safe, they were perhaps somewhat paradoxically allowed more space to exist, both in the emerging field of Japanese folklore and customs studies, as well certain literature trends of the time. Long gone were the restless late Edo days of monsters as emblems of political unrest. While the consolidation of the Imperial power that started with Meiji did not reverse until the end of the Second World War, it acquired perhaps a bit more nuance in certain fields. The mysterious and supernatural too could serve in the reinforcement of Japan’s ambitions and self-identity. The perceived need to emulate Western nations was replaced with a sense of Japanese uniqueness and even superiority, and this would include aspects of Japanese culture that would have been condemned only a few decades prior. Rhetoric contrasting Western materiality and Eastern spirituality would emerge. So while earnest belief, lived traditions and present cultural relevance of youkai declined, they found a new type of symbolic and historical role in Japan.

When it comes to the minzokugaku, a form of Japanese folklore studies, studying youkai became a way to understand, define and reinforce Japanese history and identity. Scholars of folklore started to treat them not as delusions to be gotten rid of, but as parts of the historical record from which one could learn about the origins of Japanese culture. Suspending the judgement between declaring youkai to be real or imaginary, scholars started categorizing youkai and studying the circumstances of their alleged appearances, highlighting the liminality of the phenomena. This suspension of judgement further amplified the liminality of youkai, allowing them to exist between the real and the imaginary, making the question of their existence less important than what stories of youkai could tell about history and society.

The period from late Meiji to early Showa saw a great flourishing of Japanese literature that captured the transitional, liminal qualities of Japanese modernization and how people’s beliefs shifted. These include the works of Natsumi Soseki, Mori Ogai, Akutagawa Ryonosuke and Kyoka Izumi. Out of these figures Kyoka Izumi went most against the prevailing trends and was critical both of literary realism as well as modernization. Yanagita Kunio, who would later go on to become the founder of Japanese folklore studies, also initially had literary ambitions and his approach to folklore was likely influenced by debates between those who favored naturalistic, realistic literature versus those who favored more romantic, emotionally appealing literature.

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) and Mori Ogai (1862-1922) were important figures in late 19th and early 20th century Japanese literature. Soseki’s writings would often depict collisions between tradition, superstition and modern rationality. An example of this is The Empty Sounds of the Koto (1905). It features the protagonist regressing into a kind of premodern superstitious 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” (superstition) cannot be replaced with ”silk” (understanding), then people would rather cling to the ”rags”. Nevertheless, his writings portray a world where disillusionment has started stripping the potency from older forms of culture related to the supernatural, which have then irreversibly become things of the 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 in the West horror became viewed through Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) creation of the concept of ”uncanny”. In Freud’s thinking, 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. Western culture would start viewing thoughts and feelings themselves as potentially terrifying and pathological phantasmagorias. This same trend appears to have emerged in Japan, likely started by Inoue Enryou starting to treat youkai as delusional, imaginary phenomena. Both Souseki and Mori worked with a more psychological and pathological view on mysterious phenomena, but it was another author who took the idea of youkai as internal phantasmagorias to its extreme. This author was Akutagawa Ryonosuke.

Akutagawa Ryonosuke - Kappa and Youkai as Insanity

Akutagawa Ryonosuke (1892-1927) was a prolific writer of short stories, and he has been called “the father of the Japanese short story”. Over the course of his 35 years of life he would write 150 short stories. Many of his stories were set in historical times, particularly the Heian period, Edo period or early Meiji era. Many of his stories were retellings of older stories or historical events given an interpretation more in line with modern sensibilities. He would also create stories which combined multiple sources. Akutagawa did not limit his source of inspiration to Japanese works, but would also use influences from other cultures. This reflected his belief in the universal quality of literature, which he hoped would bring together Japanese and Western cultures.

The two most influential stories that Akutagawa wrote are Rashomon and In a Grove. Rashomon would give the name and In a Grove the basic set-up for Akira Kurosawa’s (1910-1998) famous film Rashomon (1950). Through this, the set-up of In a Grove, multiple conflicting accounts of an event with none of them being the definitive one, has become a general trope in fiction.

The latter years of Akutagawa’s life were difficult, marked by decline in both physical and mental health. In 1921 he spent four months as a reporter in China, and this stressful period caused him to have health problems he never recovered fully from. Akutagawa’s mother suffered from severe mental health issues, forcing him to live with foster parents from an early age on. This led Akutagawa to live in fear of inheriting his mother’s condition, and towards the end of his life he started experiencing hallucinations. His work became more autobiographical and contemporary.

Among these works is Kappa (1927), which has been variously viewed as social satire, a tale of Akutagawa’s personal suffering, or a mix of both. The story features a patient in a mental hospital telling a story of how he ended up in the land of kappa. Akutagawa’s kappa however aren’t some rustic water spirits, but a parallel industrial civilization that displays baffling and terrifying qualities that are extreme manifestations of social and cultural trends of the time. The kappa are constantly churning out new inventions, they have a hedonistic religion called “lifeism” which encourages its members to “live avidly” and there is no unemployment because the kappa made redundant by machines are killed and eaten by other kappa. There are elements of clearly Western origin in their society, such as the concept of “übermensch” being known to kappa. Their names and language too have a vaguely Western quality to them.

The strangeness of the kappa is not limited just to elements which seem to be obvious satire of 1920s Japan. They are described as possessing chameleon-like qualities, being able to change the color of their skin. Considerable time is spent describing kappa sexual and reproductive habits. The kappa have a custom of asking their children if they wish to be born while they are gestating, and the story has a child that refuses to be born because he is afraid of inheriting the father’s insanity. As a possible inversion of old tales of kappa men assaulting human women, the women of kappa society are described as ruthlessly pursuing kappa men when it comes time to mate.

Some elements of the short story are quite likely inspired by Akutagawa’s own social circles, as the kappa that the protagonist of the story interacts with includes a poet and a philosopher. One of them is the ghost of a suicidal poet concerned with his posthumous fame who adored writers and philosophers who had killed themselves. This is grimly resonant considering that quite soon after the publication of the short story Akutagawa ended up taking his own life. Some see this poet as Akutagawa inserting himself into his fiction.

Eventually the protagonist becomes depressed with life in the kappa land and escapes with the help of a kappa who was born an elderly man and has ever since been aging backwards. The protagonist however has difficulties readjusting back to life among humans, becoming disturbed by their facial features and body odor. After a business failure, he becomes institutionalized. The short story ends with the kappa being revealed to be unambiguous hallucinations, “visiting” him in the mental hospital, giving a nonexistent bouquet of flowers as a gift. The short story ends with the protagonist reading “kappa poetry” from an old phonebook and expressing a desire to visit one of his hallucinatory kappa friends who too has become hospitalized in a mental institution.

Akutagawa’s short story is an extreme example of the psychologization of youkai that began with Inoue Enryo’s work. The kappa are presented as an internal phantasmagoria upon which the protagonist projects his own condition, as well as the condition of his own society. It also reflects the very real shift of how certain conditions went from being considered matters of the spirit world to matters of psychiatry. This same process would turn the perception of these phenomena from something caused by external agents into something caused by a private illness - or even personal failure.

Kappa was among Akutagawa’s very last works, and he committed suicide by overdosing on sedatives the same year as the story was published. Among other issues, he was severely anxious over the possibility of inheriting his mother’s condition. One has to wonder if in his case the psychological framing became a lethal self-fulfilling curse, the anxiety over becoming insane becoming insanity in itself.

Kyoka Izumi - A Taste for the Twilight

Kyoka Izumi (1873-1937) was a Japanese writer, novelist, poet and kabuki playwright who went against the social and literature trends of his time. While many of the Japanese authors of the day were influenced by more naturalistic, realistic styles, Kyoka was influenced by Edo period literature. He sought to write and advocated for literature that would “make the reader feel…feelings not felt by ordinary people”, in contrast to the naturalists who favored descriptive works. Kyoka was interested in the supernatural, both as an element of literature, as well as a lived experience. He was critical of many aspects of the culture of his day, from forceful modernization to the drive to produce simplified narratives to things he perceived to be mistreatment of spirits. Many of his works would be fantastical stories that had subtle or not so critique of society. Kyoka became a respected author in his own right, known for this rich prose. He also influenced later Japanese fantasy literature and helped to preserve and pass forward influence from Edo era culture.

The life of Kyoka Izumi was marked by recurring bouts of poor health. He would suffer from digestive issues and beriberi, a disease caused by lack of B1 vitamin. He was known to be extremely germophobic, and went to great lengths to avoid certain foods and to sterilize objects he would handle. He was also a very heavy smoker. Many people who have become involved with the topic of youkai have had some kind of liminal qualities, and for Kyoka - besides being born in Meiji era but raised on Edo culture - it seems to have been occasionally entering the borderlands between life and death. He was regarded as eccentric and superstitious. He was extremely fond of rabbits, because according to the Chinese zodiac, they were his lucky animal.

In 1873, Kyoka was born into an impoverished family in Kanazawa, Ishikawa. His father was an inlayer of metallic ornaments and his mother was the player of a tsuzumi hand drum. He was able to attend tuition-free Japanese-English school which was run by Christian missionaries. His mother introduced him to literature in the form of kusazoshi, Edo era picture-books at an early age, which would greatly influence his literature output later on. In 1883, when Kyoka was nine years old, he lost his mother, who was only 29 years old at the time. This had a deep impact on him.

Kyoka was extremely fond of the author Ozaki Koyo, and moved to Tokyo in 1890 to follow in his footsteps. He would end up living as a live-in apprentice for Ozaki from 1891 to 1894. Kyoka would correct Ozaki’s manuscripts and help with household tasks, and in turn Ozaki helped Kyoka develop his style and to get his literature career started. Kyoka would suffer from various health problems throughout his life, and in 1893 he returned to Kanazawa briefly to get treated for beriberi. He would return to Kanazawa again briefly in 1894 after his father’s death, but after encouragement from his grandmother he returned to Tokyo.

The first real critical breakthrough for Kyoka would come in 1895 with the success of his story The Night Watchman (Yakoujunsa). Kyoka would receive mostly mixed reviews during his time. His perhaps most representative work The Holy Man of Mount Koya (Koya hijiri) would come out in 1900. In 1903 he met his future wife and lost his mentor Oyo, who died at only 35 years of age. In 1906, his grandmother passed away. These events impacted him, and his health issues worsened. He would mostly eat thin rice gruel and sweet potatoes, and would occasionally slip into dreamlike states due to illness and malnutrition. Despite this, he managed to write several stories during this time.

Kyoka had been recovering in Kanazawa, but returned to Tokyo in 1908. In 1909 he became part of Kaidankai, Ghost Story Association, a literary group dedicated to researching and writing about supernatural tales among the Japanese.He started to gain more reputation, and this would allow him to enter the world of theater and he would end up writing several plays. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s he would keep on writing stories. He met Ryonosuke Akutagawa in 1920, and was severely shocked by his suicide in 1927. In 1928, he contracted pneumonia, which was a dark omen of things to come. While he was an active writer almost to the very end, he would not publish any works in 1938 due to compounding health issues. He would pass away due to lung cancer in 1939, his habit of heavy smoking perhaps taking its final toll.

When it comes to his literature, Kyoka would often use narratives featuring the supernatural, but rather than these elements being purely fantastical or escapistic, he used them in a way that communicated something about the times he was living through. An example of this is his story The Holy Man of Mount Koya, where a Buddhist priest comes in contact with a mysterious woman who represents various archetypes associated with mountain spirits. She is a wicked temptress who turns men into animals, but she is also capable of acts of miraculous healing. Over the course of the story it becomes clear that this woman is the daughter of a corrupt and incompetent doctor using modern medicine, who is implied to have swindled villagers by presenting a common type of eye infection as a severe disease. Ultimately a flood wipes away the village and the doctor, and only the daughter of the doctor with miraculous healing powers and a boy she could not fully heal and who became intellectually disabled as a result are left. The narrative is complex and layered but an element of it is a critique of the Meiji and post-Meiji medical system.

The story Kecho can be easily read as a critique of the Meiji school system. The protagonist is a boy whose mother is a bridge-keeper in the mid-Meiji era. The mother’s status recalls the hashihime spirits of older legends, and the bridge from which the mother and son eke out a meager living from acts almost like a liminal point between the past and the present. There is a clash between the boy’s upbringing and what he is taught at school during ethics lessons, the very same lessons which in the Meiji system were used to debunk the supernatural. The boy denies the claim that humans are “the most superior thing”. A debate follows, where the teacher tries to convince the boy that humans are superior to animals, but the boy in turn relatives and shows that animals are capable of communication and reasoning. The exchange ends with the teacher positing that at least humans are superior to plants, but the boy replies simply “but teacher, flowers are more beautiful than you”, embarrassing the teacher. Back at home, his mother says that things like these should not be said out loud, but does not deny what the boy said. Instead, she finds it valid, and a result of witnessing the rich “in-between” life on the bridge. Throughout the story, the boy attributes animal-like qualities to people around him, including perceiving an obese and unpleasant Meiji-era official with a long list of titles as “Mr. Frogfish”.

While Kyoka’s writings did go against prevailing cultural trends and ideals, he is ultimately part of a broader moment in Japanese history, when authors were capturing a kind of in-between time that stood between old and new in their works. What makes Kyoka notable in this respect is that he was particularly aware and articulate about it. In his essay The Taste of Twilight (Tasogare no aji) he writes out his appreciation for the “twilight” and desire to explore the twilight qualities of the world in his works. He finds twilight to be a particularly beautiful and fascinating time, bringing out colors and qualities that are not otherwise apparent in the world. Twilight is not just between light and dark, day and night, but also a thing of its own. But for him, twilight is not just a time between day and night, it is also a broader metaphor. Kyoka finds that similar enjoyable and fascinating twilight qualities emerge between other extremes, between good and evil, and pleasure and displeasure. In other words, Kyoka was identifying and enjoying liminal qualities of things. Twilight was traditionally a time associated with the appearance of youkai, something which Kyoka would have no doubt been aware of. This particular essay influenced later youkai scholars, particularly Yanagita Kunio who was at the fringes of the literature circles that Kyoka was part of.

Kyoka was also involved with the Kaidankai literature group which gathered and researched ghost stories from all around Japan. The group started working together in 1908, and while Kyoka was not the leader of the group, he would write the foreword for their first collected work, simply also titled Kaidankai (1909). The foreword has a rather interesting bit where Kyoka chastises people who would use spirits as tools for “ethical education and admonitions” and “moral allegories”, at an apparent swipe at Inoue Enryou’s youkai-studies-as-debunking and the more realistic literature trends of his time. He appears to grant spirits their own agency, asking rhetorically how humans could know the likes and dislikes of the spirits. This group essentially engaged in a kind of proto-folklore studies, and it was connected to an often overshadowed figure that helped to serve as a link between literature and folklore research. This person was Kizen Sasaki.

Kizen Sasaki - The “Grimm of Japan”

The life and work of Kizen Sasaki (1886-1933) was deeply intertwined to the work of Kunio Yanagita, who often considered the father of Japanese folklore studies, to the point that his own role as an author and a folklore researcher tends to get overshadowed by Yanagita’s work. His career as an author never really took off, but he greatly influenced not only Yanagita, but also the author Mizuno Yoshu, who in fact introduced Kizen to Yanagita. Mizuno was the central figure of the Kaidankai group which also included Kyoka Izumi. Besides introducing folklore from his native Iwate to literary circles of Tokyo, he also did folklore studies of his own. He would collected 400 tales, and researched in particular the Oshira-sama household deities and the zashiki-warashi youkai which were said to bring fortune to households which treated them well.

As with many people involved with the topic of youkai, Kizen had some rather liminal qualities. He was born in the countryside, yet made his largest impact while living in Tokyo. He was an earnest believer in the supernatural, and especially as a child was so sensitive he would sometimes be thoroughly terrified by ghost stories and be unable to sleep. Later on, he would sometimes refuse to go to work if he had bad dreams. He converted to Christianity in 1903, yet acquired the qualifications of a Shinto priest in 1927.

Kizen Sasaki was born in Tsuchibuchi, a village in present-day Tono City in Iwate. His family was wealthy, and his grandfather was a locally renowned storyteller. Kizen would absorb these tales from a young age onwards. His family wished him to become a doctor, and he entered the Iwate Medical School in 1900. He would however drop out only two years later. Despite resistance from his family, he would move to Tokyo in 1905 and enroll into Inoue Enryou’s Tetsugakukan, drawn in by the possibility of studying ghosts. He would however apparently find Inoue’s approach disagreeable, and as he had aspirations towards being an author, he would end up transferring to the Department of Literature in Waseda University.

While studying at Waseda university he made friends with Mizuno Yoshu, a fellow student at the time. Mizuno was fascinated by Kizen’s stories of the supernatural, and his novella The Person from the North Country (Kitaguni no hito) featured a fictionalized version of Kizen and some of his tales from his native Tono. Around 1905, encouraged by Mizuno, Kizen started writing his own novels. While he never had a big breakthrough as a writer, some of his works did receive good reviews.

In 1908, Mizuno would introduce Kizen to Yanagita Kunio. This would result in the birth of Tono Monogatari, which is widely considered the starting point of Japanese folklore studies. Yanagita Kunio and Tono Monogatari will be written in depth later on. The partnership of the two has been often written only from Yanagita’s perspective, and there are elements to which could be seen as exploitative. Yanagita was very critical of Kizen’s abilities as a storyteller, and when working on a follow-up to Tono Monogatari, Yanagita chastised Kizen for adding too much of his own flair to the stories he was collecting. This led to Kizen abandoning his aspirations as a creative writer. Later on, Kizen would end up distancing himself from Yanagita.

In 1910, Kizen became so ill he had to drop out of his studies. He was diagnosed with a lung and kidney disease, and suffered from hallucinations and neurological symptoms. He moved back to Iwate in 1911 to recover. Historian Geral Figal offers a cynical reading of Kizen’s time in Tokyo: he fell victim to excessive city life and exploitative academic and literary colleagues who were drawn in by his unusual appearance and eccentricity. He fell ill the same year Tono Monogatari was published, and Figal doesn’t see this as a coincidence. It must have been incredibly hurtful for Kizen to see his storytelling abilities belittled by Yanagita, and Figal seems to almost suggest that Kizen’s collapse was of psycho-spiritual variety, his “deep spirit of heart-felt beliefs” extracted and Kizen himself discarded. It certainly almost reads like a youkai story in itself: a young man aspiring to be a writer arrives in Tokyo, and has his spirit drained by exploitative urban strangers..!

After his recovery, Kizen would stay in his native Iwate and collect and research folklore. He served as the mayor of Tsuchibuchi between 1925 and 1929, but found the work too stressful and demanding. He had also become burdened by debt, and ended up moving to Sendai in Miyagi prefecture. The last few years of his life were impoverished, and due to his longtime health issues he would die in 1933 at the age of only 48, reportedly passing away in front of the household shrine. The linguist Kyosuke Kendaichi, pioneer in research of Ainu language, would posthumously call Kizen the “Grimm of Japan” in reference to the Grimm brothers who collected folklore in Germany.

Kizen’s own story has often been neglected, and while it is difficult for me to assess whether he was exploited or not, Yanagita’s attitude towards his collaborator was astonishingly rude and tactless if nothing else. Were it not for Kizen so freely sharing his stories, the trajectory of Yanagita’s life might have looked quite different. Kizen deserves to be remembered for his contribution to the birth of Japanese folklore studies and revitalization of interest towards supernatural stories, acting as a bridge between the city and the countryside, past and present.

Yanagita Kunio - Tono Monogatari and the Birth of Japanese Folklore Studies

Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) is a very important person in the history of youkai studies, and he is considered the founder of minzokugaku. It’s commonly simply translated as folklore studies, a translation which I have also opted to use, but some have liked to use a different term to highlight particular qualities of Yanagita’s research program. It has been for example translated as “nativist folklore studies”, and I think it is a fair characterization. Yanagita did believe that the Japanese had some qualities which set them apart from other people’s, like being exceptionally imaginative, spiritually sensitive, as well as having a sense of an invisible authority looking at how they behaved. He however didn’t seem to believe that Japanese were superior over other peoples (or at least the Western people) like Hirata and some nativists did. Rather, Yanagita was interested in what were the particular qualities of Japanese people, and why did these qualities emerge. He tried to probe into the Japanese “collective psyche” and what defines Japanese culture by taking folkloric stories as serious research material, as he believed they would reflect very deep, archaic layers of history.

There has been some debate around how much of Yanagita’s work is “science”, even more so than the usual and rather inane “social sciences are not science” type of debates. This is because the birth of Minzokugaku is so strongly tied to Yanagita’s connections to the late Meiji, early Taisho literature scene and his aspirations to be part of it. While Yanagita did not fabricate anything per say, his breakthrough work is essentially retold folklore, written as a work of literature. This was however backed up by methodologically sound gathering of material. His later investigations into yamabito, mountain people, and jomin, “ordinary people” or “abiding folk” as it also has been translated, relied on theories which later researchers have tended to find speculative and ahistorical. Yanagita had certain poetic sensibilities, had his perception of the world shaped by an unusual experience in his childhood, and expressed a nostalgic ache for “an other world” in his pre-folklore studies creative output. Some have seen his minzokugaku more as a kind of romantic construction of a new national identity, and less as a social science. There’s also been other kinds of later reassessments, which highlight Yanagita’s apparently earnest desire to preserve and present the history of “ordinary people”.

While later scholars have critiqued his work and for good reasons, it needs to be understood in the context of the time. His landmark work Tono Monogatari came out during the late Meiji period. The wildest boom of throwing out everything native was still a living memory to many, and the shift of attitudes that had come with Meiji restoration and Inoue Enryou had essentially rendered supernatural a ridiculed topic. People who took it seriously risked the charge of being insane, which would have then resulted essentially in a life incarceration on medical basis. While Yanagita was not the only one who took folklore and tales of the supernatural seriously (he was influenced by the Kaidankai group, and could be contrasted with Minakata Kumagusu and his program of comparative folklore studies), he did much to push forward the idea that the supernatural, or at least culture relating to the supernatural, could be a valuable and meaningful part of Japanese history and identity.

Yanagita Kunio was born in 1875 in Fukusaki, Hyogo prefecture as Matsuoka Kunio, but was adopted into the Yanagita family. It was once a common practice for families without sons to adopt boys or even adult men of other families to ensure continuity and to extend family influence and estate, and Kunio was one of such adopted men. Yanagita graduated from Tokyo Imperial University with a degree in law. He worked as a civil servant for the Ministry of Agriculture and commerce for twenty years. His work for the ministry took him to the countryside, and he became interested in the affairs of rural villages. Over time he became increasingly critical of policies favored by the Ministry of Agriculture, which were diminishing local autonomy. He argued in favor of agricultural policy centered around cooperatives of farmers. His ideas were not well-received, and it has been argued that the resistance he faced contributed to him shifting his focus to folklore studies and eventually leaving the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce.

From a young age Yanagita had displayed great memory and interest in literature, both Japanese and Western. This continued even as he worked as a civil servant. He was active in literature movements, wrote poetry and even established a literary society dedicated to the study of the works of playwright Henrik Ibsen. Yanagita was a romanticist and he wrote polemics against the naturalists. This naturally made him gravitate towards the same literature circles as Kyoka Izumi, including the Kaidankai group. Yanagita’s tastes in literature and his interest in matters related to youkai was likely shaped by him enjoying Chinese tales of the supernatural in his youth. He was also influenced by tales of “Western youkai”, and a piece of Western literature that would be particularly impactful on his later pursuits were the tales of Brothers Grimm, a collection of fairytales. As Yanagita started developing interest in Japanese folklore, he also began studying Western folklore studies and anthropology.

Yanagita also had a mysterious experience of his own which shaped his interests and outlook in life. In Genkaku no Jikken (1936) (Experiments with Illusion), he tells of how he saw daytime stars as a child. Daytime stars are a type of unusual experience featured in Japanese culture, referring to the appearance of stars in the sky during the day. When Yanagita told of his experience later in life, he was mocked for it. This experience seems to have made him question objective reality and made him more respectful towards the subjective experiences of others. I find it quite remarkable he apparently took until 1936 to share this experience, and it likely tells us something of the attitudes towards strange experiences during the late Meiji and Taisho era.

By 1910 these influences came together in what is Yanagita’s best-known work, the Tono monogatari. It is a collection of 119 short stories set in and around Tono, a village in Iwate prefecture in northern Honshu. Yanagita became aware of tales from Tono through Kizen Sasaki, whom he met through the literature circles he was active in. Yanagita became deeply fascinated by Kizen’s tales of the area, and decided to travel to Tono in 1909. Yanagita had wanted to write a novel, and Tono monogatari was initially intended to be a literary work. Yanagita and Kizen ended up in a sense doing in Japan what the Grimm brothers had done in Germany, collecting local stories and writing them out in a more literary form. Behind this was however solid folklore research. Yanagita would carefully listen and write down the stories, go to the locations to see them himself and then verify whatever facts were presented with local experts. This diligent research allowed Tono monogatari to become what is widely considered the starting point of Japanese folklore studies. In 1935, Yanagita published a further collection of 299 stories gathered with the assistance of Kizen. These however lack the literary qualities of the 1910 collection, and have a more flat, encyclopedic style.

Tono monogatari wasn’t an instant hit, and initial reception was mostly limited to Yanagita’s friends in literary circles. Some of them were highly critical of the work, not as research but as literature, with Katai Tayama writing that the book was “infused with extravagance of affected rusticity”. The book has however since become a classic of Japanese literature and is also considered the starting point of Japanese folklore studies. Later on, some have criticized Tono monogatari as a kind of "voyeurism" and othering of rural Japan. It has also been called a “salvage ethnography”, part of a broader trend of ethnologists and archeologists arriving the moment a culture has lost its means of defining itself. While there is perhaps some merit to some of these claims, it has to be kept in mind that Kizen Sasaki, as imperfect as Yanagita’s working relationship with him was, very much voluntarily shared the stories of Tono. One could even make the case that Tono Monogatari was a more or less successful case of a culture about to lose its means to define itself managing to reassert itself…

The stories in the two collections that make up the totality of Tono Monogatari cover a rather wide range of topics, many of them what we would call supernatural. There are stories of kami, youkai and various strange events, such as near-death experiences. Some of the stories are of considerably more mundane nature, and these are found especially in the 1935 collection. These include stories related to crime, counterfeiting and even things like how certain people got their nicknames. Yanagita did not shy away from dark and sensitive topics such as murder, but neither did he scandalize these topics.

Life in Tono was not easy, and the area had been hit by several devastating famines in the past. Many of the stories deal with human fortune or misfortune. Zashiki-warashi selecting a household as their dwelling or someone finding treasure in a mayoiga, magical houses that appear to people who get lost, were given as reasons why certain households prospered. But these fortunes could be lost too. Many of the stories deal with choja, wealthy farmer families. This is perhaps because Kizen, Yanagita’s informant, came from a wealthy background and they would have been part of his social world, but it’s also likely that tales of fortune waxing and waning would have been of great interest to locals. Later folklore research has indicated that Japanese often used the supernatural as means to explain differences in wealth.

The wide variety of stories portrays Tono as a kind of ecosystem with humans, animals, plants and spirits taking part in the local life. As with broader youkai lore, sometimes the line between a human or an animal and a youkai was a blurry one. Children born with certain features such as webbed hands and feet were thought to be a result of a kappa impregnating a woman and were killed. There are stories of ambiguously human or non-human mountain dwellers, variously conceptualized as mountain men, tengu or ijin, strangers. The category of ijin is particularly liminal, as it was used to refer to ghosts and human-like youkai, but also people who were not locals. Mountains and forests are portrayed as especially numinous and dangerous places, and even the revered mountain deities were said to have fearsome, and even deadly qualities, especially if provoked. Mountain deities, outsiders, mountain people, tengu, even kappa seem to share qualities with each other. Not only are they all attributed with mysterious powers and volatile temperaments, but sometimes they even have physical similarities. A tengu, a deity, a mountain man and a kappa could all for instance be said to have a red face. The tales of Tono wonderfully highlight the liminal qualities of these entities from folklore.

Yanagita does not impose any kind of assessment on the truth value of the experiences reported. The stories of strange deaths, youkai sightings and heretical rituals are taken as-is. When making the 1910 collection, Yanagita likely wasn’t interested in whether these stories were true or not, but rather if they captured the local qualities and if he could present them in a way that would appeal to literary circles. Later on, as Yanagita abandoned his literary ambitions, he simply treated these matters as part of the historical record that might have not happened as told, but that would tell something about Japanese culture and history and the “collective psyche”.

Answering the question of “what is Japanese” and using folklore as means to reach back into history became important parts of Yanagita’s minzokugaku. Yanagita wished to highlight the history of “ordinary people”, and thought that focusing only on official written records produced a distorted picture of history. As uneventful everyday life was considered unremarkable, the peasant history of Japan would appear to be nothing but a “chain of rebellions and disasters”, exceptions noted in the records.Yanagita also argued that folklore research was especially well suited for Japan. In Europe, thousand years of Christianity, the great migrations and industrialization had thoroughly disrupted the folkloric memory layer. In contrast in Japan Buddhism had syncretized and not replaced the native faiths, there had only been the Yamato migration and Japan was only undergoing industrialization. Thus he argued that folklore could be used to grasp a more intact picture of history in Japan than in Europe.

While Yanagita would later lose interest in studying youkai mythology, he developed two separate hypotheses regarding origins of youkai stories that capture his idea of folklore research well. Based on his work in Tono and the liminal qualities given to mountain men, tengu and ijin, Yanagita developed a hypothesis that stories of these types of youkai were of marginalized groups of people. In particular, he had the idea that as the Yamato expanded their domain, they would have driven insubordinate groups out into the mountains. Thus by studying these types of youkai, it could be possible to find traces of pre-Yamato culture.

Yanagita would end up losing interest in this hypothesis, and instead started regarding youkai as deities from older forms of religion that had become discarded but went on to live as monsters on the fringes of Japanese culture. This hypothesis became extremely influential in Japan. An example of this in practice is his 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 the spirit world with one leg and one eye would have remained part of the culture and eventually transformed into a youkai.

However, this hypothesis is nowadays regarded as excessively simplifying complex historical processes. While it’s possible some youkai had their origins as old deities, many likely do not. Hitotsume-kozo is one of those youkai where there is no evidence of connection to human sacrifice, even though there are records of human sacrifice in the history of Japan. In fact, Tono monogatari too contains stories of human sacrifice, mass graves and ancient burial mounds.

Perhaps this hypothesis of youkai as abandoned kami 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 divinity is an interesting and valid topic of research, as certain youkai were regarded also as deities in other places or times. Youkai and kami seem to have a kind of dual nature, being fascinating and awesome, yet also terrifying and repulsive.

The kami-youkai hypothesis is of course tied to its time, and in Yanagita’s time, youkai could be seen as having a powerful nostalgic connection to a more divine world of the past. His folkloric project was tied to questions of identity, and I would argue that it appears to have a kind of religious or spiritual dimension. Some Yanagita’s writings appear to portray the past as something outside of history itself, an idea resonant with ideas of mythological time and eternal return. This hypothesis is also rather fascinating in how it has parallels with Western ideas about various demons being demonized pre-Christian deities. It’s also quite interesting that Yanagita was working out this hypothesis when new ”gods” of modernity and industrialization were supplanting older Japanese gods.

The folklorist Michael Dylan Foster writes that Yanagita’s project can be conceptualized as a way to reintroduce the poetic back to science. A certain poetic sensibility allows one to empathise with the experiences of others, and work with the subjective topic of supernatural experiences. Yanagita seems to have ultimately regarded human beings and their experiences as the most mysterious thing. By taking strange stories seriously, but perhaps not literally, he allowed them to become subjects of serious research. By not separating between “real” and “imaginary”, he amplified the liminal qualities of youkai and made them in a sense possible again.

Yanagita also engaged in more taxonomic types of youkai research. He 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 third, liminal category of people were perhaps ready to slip into belief given the right circumstances, something at times explored in literature of the time.

Another example of Yanagita’s classification work is his three-stage ”tanuki demonology” 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 possess people, in the second stage derange them, and in the third they are only able to surprise people. Over time tales of youkai being subjugated started to appear, in a sense offering an explanation why they were no longer seen.

An example of Kyoka Izumi’s influence on Yanagita that would surface later was his analysis of the Japanese words for twilight, tasogare and kawatare and how they are related to youkai. He demonstrated that the words used to refer to twilight in certain areas in Japan were also used as a greeting when encountering someone that couldn’t be immediately recognized at twilight. He also found other examples of words related to twilight used when encountering unfamiliar passerbys, strangers or potential monsters. Later on, he would further this analysis, and conclude that the exchange of words between strangers at twilight was not just common courtesy, but a way to prove that one was not a youkai. Twilight time was conducive to the appearance of youkai, yet verbalizing this twilight was a way to dispel potential monsters.

Between 1926 and 1927, Yanagita would take stock and reassess his previous research, and start to more strongly articulate the object and goals of his minzokugaku. This same time period also saw him shifting from yamabito, mountain people, as his primary topic of interest to jomin, “ordinary” or “abiding” people. While it is hard to say if this was a conscious decision in line with the spirit of times, or if Yanagita was following along some more insubstantial trends, it is in quite fascinating resonance with the broader developments in Japanese culture at the time. The yamabito were strange, marginal and complex, and the jomin were agriculturalists living in a set location, practicing ancestor worship. This move from the messy and liminal to something more rigid and defined by ancestry reflects broader nationalistic trends built around the idea of particular ancestry. I think it’s entirely possible that Yanagita, being close to the political establishment, sensed the winds shifting and consciously thought that perhaps he should stop probing into strange liminal borderlands.

While Yanagita’s most important work came in the pre-war era, he did formalize his research project by establishing the Folklore Research Institute in 1947. The same year he - fascinatingly enough - voiced public support for the Communist candidate Shigehary Nakano during elections. In 1951 he was invited to act as a professor in the Kokugakuin university, an institution for classical studies and Shinto priest training, and he would teach courses related to Shinto there. Yanagita would end up living rather long, passing away in 1962 at the age of 88 due to heart failure. He left a long and complicated legacy, and it took until the late 1970s that Japanese folklore studies and youkai studies would start to drift away from paradigms he had established.

Tsutomu Ema - Changelings and Taxonomies

Another scholar from this era who contributed to youkaigaku was Tsutomu Ema (1884-1979). He worked from a more textual basis, more reliant on written records 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. This included work on historical clothing, and he pioneered producing restorations of clothing as a method of historical research.

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 its 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. Tsutomu 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”, liminality, was a defining characteristic of a youkai for him.

Tsutomu 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 encounters 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. Tsutomu himself didn’t speculate why this was so, but it certainly does raise questions. Did the increase in reports of female youkai 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 Tsutomu 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. He treated youkai as a serious object of study, and at times he wrote of youkai as if they were phenomena outside of human imagination. According to him, the advance of science in Japan since the Meiji restoration had done much to unveil the mysteries of the world. This led to youkai becoming afraid of humans, an inversion of the old situation where humans feared youkai. The youkai haven’t however completely vanished, and there remains a sublime world or aspect of reality that transcends science.

I find Tsutomu’s work to be somewhat reminiscent 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. Whether he truly believed that youkai existed as some kind of spiritual entities, or whether these ideas were his own way of putting a bit of poetry back into science is very difficult for me to say. Whichever the case, Tsutomu’s work helped to highlight the liminal qualities of youkai, and this ambiguity regarding his own beliefs is more than fitting.

1945 - 1989: Late Showa – Youkai Reborn

The impact of the Second World War on Japan was devastating. The country lost about 2.1 million soldiers and 800 000 to one million civilians during the war. Most of the soldiers who lost their lives died of malnutrition and disease. The inability and unwillingness to provide proper supplies not only led to mass casualties, but also drove the soldiers to loot occupied territories to survive, amplifying the cruel military culture instilled by the armed forces. The American bombing campaigns, including the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, caused extreme damage to the country’s economy. The idea of Japan as a divinely chosen nation was shattered.

The occupation of Japan that lasted until 1947 caused dramatic changes to the country. Emperor Showa retained his position, but was reduced to a figurehead and had to renounce his divinity, or more specifically as him being a “presently manifest kami”. A new, democratic constitution was drafted and women were allowed to write. There were massive changes to everything from education to religion, with the aim of liberalizing and demilitarizing the society. In 1952, Japan regained its sovereignty as the Treaty of San Francisco was signed and the occupation ended. With the new constitution prohibiting warfare and a military alliance with the United States offering protection against possible hostilities from the Soviet Union, Japan went all in on economic recovery and growth.

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 until 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 in 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. Youkai Daisensou represents a milestone in the process of youkai becoming safe and nostalgic, as they had become good enough to be levied in the defence of the nation.

The post-war period from the 1950s to 1980s was a time of explosive economic growth and urbanization, a radical transformation of Japanese society. However, 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 environmentalist 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 large-scale protests and anti-authoritarian movements.

Part of this reaction against modernization and post-war political developments was the emergence of a kind of nostalgia and renewed interest in folklore. This interest wasn’t purely nostalgic though. It was also a kind of (re)discovery of history expressed from a non-hegemonic perspective, and this included a reassessment of Yanagita’s work as something that managed to preserve people’s history in increasingly authoritarian times. The renewed interest towards folklore also included the “weird” parts of it, including youkai. This interest in stranger and more numinous sides of Japanese history would feed into and intermingle with the “occult boom” that blossomed in the 1980s, which was a broad surge of interest towards all kinds of paranormal and mystical topics, be they Japanese or foreign.

The Japanese relationship to the supernatural and strange would become more layered and nuanced. The idea of Japan as a mysterious or spiritual land and culture became part of the self-identity and representation of the nation, even though earnest belief in spirits and deities might have declined. Sometimes quite fantastic-sounding discourse about this would crop up in very surprising places, such as Daikichi Irokawa’s very grounded The Culture of the Meiji Period, which uses terms like “fairy-tale aspect” and “strange wonder” to describe Japan. The legacy of the nativist movement continued in so-called nihonjinron, or “theories of Japanese people”. Early post-war nihonjinron tended to portray a kind of negative exceptionalism in order to explain why Japan failed to modernize and lost the war. However, as Japan recovered and became economically ascendant, the tone changed to more positive exceptionalism.

While nihonjinron (especially its most extreme forms) are a fascinating topic, the relevance here is that youkai too have been treated as an especially Japanese phenomenon, and various supernatural topics have occasionally been part of nihonjinron even in modern times. Another fascinating aspect of the discourses surrounding Japanese uniqueness is that sometimes Japan’s uniqueness was posited as arising from a liminal position of being between East and West. In a shift that would have been difficult to imagine in earlier eras, liminality and strangeness started to become parts of the accepted national identity.

While there was a wave of renewed interest towards folklore, the folklore took interest in the new urban settings. Urban legends, including tales of creatures with undeniably youkai-like characteristics started to emerge during this time. Researchers have viewed this as symptoms of cultural anxieties and growing discomfort with urban life. Folklore researchers took interest in cities as sites of research, and in an intriguing sequence of events, the first tentative attempts at formulating a program for urban folkloristics arrived slightly before the arrival of urban legends of new youkai-like creatures. Japanese researchers interested in folklore and youkai started to slowly move away from the paradigms established by Yanagita during the late 1970s and the 1980s, as it became apparent that the theory of youkai as “degraded” kami was not as universal as Yanagita had presented.

The ever more media-rich environment of the 1970s and 1980s fueled the spread of urban legends. It was indeed during the post-war era up to the 1980s that the seeds of Japanese popular culture as we know it today sprouted. While manga and anime and their precursors had existed before, they became popularized during this time. Much like how the rich popular culture of the Edo period offered a way for youkai to popularize themselves, these emergent forms of popular culture would now offer a way for youkai to be reborn and re-popularized. The central figure in this rebirth of the youkai would be the mangaka, writer and researcher Shigeru Mizuki. His colorful life serves as a wonderful microcosm of the horrifying human price of the Second World War, as well as the rapid evolution of post-war Japanese popular culture.

Shigeru Mizuki - Youkai for the Mass Culture Age

Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015) was a manga artist, illustrator, writer and folklorist who contributed greatly to the revived interest towards youkai, as well as youkai becoming part of popular culture. His works with youkai have included original creations and research, as well as creating re-interpretations of older youkai culture. While he is perhaps best known for his works related to youkai, during his career he worked on a wide range of themes and topics, including some squarely rooted in history. Besides youkai, anti-war and anti-imperialistic themes were another constant in his work, inspired by his horrifying experiences in Rabaul during the Second World War. Mizuki lived a very unconventional, at times chaotic life and saw success and financial stability only during the latter half of his life. While many people who have been drawn to the topic of youkai have had kind of youkai-like qualities, Mizuki is perhaps the clearest example of this. He went against the grain, both in how he found it impossible to fit into mainstream institutions, as well as with his beliefs. To Mizuki, youkai were a real, spiritual phenomenon that had an existence separate from humans, yet tangled with the human imaginative capacity.

Mizuki was born in Osaka, but lived out his childhood in Sakaiminato, a rural fishing village in Tottori prefecture. He was a rowdy, restless child who didn’t fit into the school system. He was something of a bully and was very strong and became involved in child gangs who would frequently fight each other with sticks and stones. On the first day of school, he sought the strongest looking student and beat him up to assert dominance. There was also an incident when he was 5 years old where he tried to push his younger brother into the sea after becoming obsessed with the concept of death. An adult in the community found him, stopped him and scolded him for this. He was treated with moxibustion after this incident, the community apparently perceiving this incident as the result of a some kind of psycho-spiritual-physiological issue that needed an intervention.

Trouble wasn’t the only thing Mizuki had an appetite for, and he had an abnormally effective digestion which allowed him to eat things that would be indigestible to most humans. These included eating a gold-painted ball of wood. This extraordinary quality to digest things helped him survive during the Second World War. Shigeru apparently had a strong appetite until the end of his life, and much of his Twitter feed consisted of photos of hamburgers and french fries. Mizuki also displayed great artistic talent and sensitivity from very early age on. While no works of his from his childhood have survived, they were apparently of extraordinary quality. His school went as far as to organize an exhibition of his art - despite Mizuki being a notoriously disruptive student. Mizuki received no formal education in art as a child, but was supported by his father who bought him things like art supplies and magazines. Mizuki’s family was relatively wealthy, and while his parents considered him something of a lost cause from early on, they nevertheless supported his more constructive pursuits.

A major influence on Mizuki’s early life was a woman called Kageyama Fusa, who Mizuki would later immortalize in (semi-)autobiographical fiction as NonNonBa. Kageyama has sometimes been mistakenly called his grandmother, but he was not related to him at all. Instead, she was a long-term servant of his family. Accounts on what sort of a person Kageyama was are somewhat conflicting. Mizuki himself portrayed her as an almost shaman-like wise woman who taught him all kinds of folklore and tradition. Mizuki’s older brother however has said that Kageyama was a “completely ordinary rural old woman”, contradicting Mizuki. In an interview, Mizuki’s daughter told that Kageyama was married to a local non-non-san, or a shaman-type figure, and she would often take Mizuki to a local Buddhist temple. In this temple, there was a vivid depiction of hell painted in the main hall which greatly stirred young Mizuki. It’s however unclear if she was basing this on what his father had told her. Mizuki most likely did put in some creative embellishments onto his time with Kageyama, but it’s also plausible that she could have introduced him to the idea of a spirit world and some local folklore.

In his late teens, Mizuki would end up back in Osaka, where he fell into a cycle of drifting in and out of odd jobs and various schools. His father allowed him to study painting, but Mizuki was disappointed by the quality of teaching and would spend his time wandering the forests and mountains near the neighbourhood he lived in. When he was 18 years old, he reportedly had an encounter with a strange entity resembling the otoroshi youkai from Toriyama Sekien’s picture scrolls while visiting a shrine in the mountains of Sasayama.

The cycle of odd jobs and drifting ended in 1942, when Mizuki was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. He was certain that he would die in the war, and he voraciously studied philosophy, Buddhist literature and even the Bible. Unsurprisingly, he was completely unsuited to military life. He ended up being assigned as a trumpeter, but he hated being one and couldn’t play the instrument well. After that, his superiors simply assigned him to run around the barracks day after day. Unsurprisingly, Mizuki eventually requested a change of assignment. He was asked if he liked the north or the south. Thinking he would get a domestic assignment, he replied he wanted to go somewhere warm.

This “somewhere warm” did not turn out to be a domestic assignment, and he was shipped into Rabaul, New Britain, an island in Papua New Guinea. The conditions there were horrific and deeply impacted Mizuki. The culture of the Imperial Japanese Army was cruel, and Japan had neither the industrial base, logistics or overall willingness to adequately supply their troops. This turned the military campaigns quickly into desperate looting, harvesting and hunting for food. Soldiers died not only from enemy bullets and bombs, but because of diseases and malnutrition.

Mizuki was constantly abused by his fellow soldiers and commanders, with few exceptions. As the war situation deteriorated, the unit Mizuki was part of was assigned to a suicidal attack. The company commander opted to not play along, and the unit fought guerilla warfare instead. Mizuki ended up being the only survivor of his unit, and when he regrouped with the remnants of the army forces, he was scolded for this and questioned why he did not die with the rest of his unit.

The worst was yet to come, as Mizuki contracted a severe case of malaria and was written off as dead. The field hospital he was in was bombed, and Mizuki suffered a devastating injury to his left arm. It started to turn necrotic, and he had to undergo a field amputation. Mizuki was sent to the backline along with other injured soldiers. There were rumors that the army was abandoning injured soldiers to die, but this did not turn out to be the case. Towards the end of the war, Mizuki ended up befriending local Tolai natives, a breach of military discipline. The locals took a liking to Mizuki who treated them well and traded with them cigarettes for food. When he fell ill with malaria for a second time, the locals would bring him food while he was recovering. The friendship between Mizuki and Tolai went so far that Mizuki was offered land, a home and membership of the Tolai community via a marriage to a Tolai woman after the war ended. Mizuki however returned to Japan after an army medic convinced him that his hastily amputated arm would require further surgery.

These experiences with the locals would nevertheless have a deep impact on Mizuki. In later accounts, he paints an almost utopian, otherworldly, “fairyland”-like quality to the time he spent with the locals. In later accounts he also drew parallels between the Tolai society and Jomon era Japan. There are certain elements to these descriptions which seem fictionalized, but it's entirely plausible Mizuki genuinely found respite from the horrors of war among the Tolai. He would return to them two more times later in his life, and these encounters seemed to have sparked an interest in him towards various native cultures of the world.

Back in Japan, Mizuki once again returned to the cycle of odd jobs and studies, working as a fishmonger, running a bicycle taxi and trading in the black market. He even became a landlord at one point in the early 1950s. None of these ventures were particularly lucrative though, and he ended up working in the kamishibai, or paper theater business when looking for a side job during his brief stint as a landlord. Kamishibai was a kind of pre-television form of entertainment that involved illustrations, and Mizuki would illustrate stories written by kamishibai story authors.

Kamishibai offered Mizuki his first real stable opportunity at using his artistic talents at work. However, as televisions became more common, kamishibai lost popularity rapidly. Mizuki ended up moving to the emerging form of entertainment known as rental manga, publishing his first manga Rocketman in 1957. Mizuki’s early manga work was extremely derivative, and he frequently used elements from kamishibai stories and American comic books. Mizuki was especially fond of American horror comics, and reproduced these stories, giving them a Japanese flair.

The derivative quality of Mizuki’s early work probably had less to do with his own preferences and more with the extremely demanding, cutthroat nature of the business itself. He worked on multiple genres under multiple pseudonyms. The war had left him with a dark attitude that was reflected in his works. He was considered part of or adjacent to the emerging gekiga manga genre, which were more adult-oriented works dealing with more dramatic and darker themes. Both gekiga as a whole and Mizuki’s works occasionally received backlash, and this further soured Mizuki’s mood. He found some success with the war manga known these days as Shigeru Mizuki’s Operation Series, but the sales of this manga declined as soon as he started depicting losing battles.

In 1960, a marriage was arranged between Mizuki and his wife Mura Nunoe. Thinking this was his last chance to get married, Mizuki pretended to be a sophisticated urbanite earning twice the salary of an average office worker. In reality, Mizuki was poor and worked in an extremely competitive and unsteady field. Nunoe was however impressed by his diligence and dedication to his craft, and decided to stick with him. The same year he started to work on Hakaba no Kitaro, or Kitaro of the Graveyard, a story based on the kamishibai story of the same name by Masami Ito. The manga was soon cancelled, but enthusiastic feedback from some readers led to it being resumed as a last ditch effort by the near-bankrupt publisher Togetsu Shobo. This work became popular, and Mizuki later remarked that “Kitaro was the one who always appeared and saved me when I was in trouble”.

In 1961 Mizuki would write Kappa no Sanpei, another work based on a kamishibai play, and in 1962 he would write Akuma-kun, an original work where the titular Akuma-kun tries to create a world where everyone is happy by - interestingly enough - harnessing the power of demons. The first iteration of Akuma-kun contained social satire of a “world where you remain poor even if you work” and it was not popular as expected and was cancelled mid-publication. Another work of his from this time is Terebi-kun, which commented on economic inequality and the emerging media of television. In the story, the titular Terebi-kun would enter televisions and fetch goods displayed in advertisements and distribute them to the poor. These early manga works show his interest in older forms of storytelling, the idea of spirits perceived as dark or evil being agents of good, as well as social commentary and reflection on the changing media environment. During the 1960s Mizuki established his own team that worked relentlessly to meet the expectations of publishers. At its peak it had eight members, who would work from 1pm to 1am, and once a week they would pull an all-nighter. This team of assistants allowed Mizuki to develop his signature style, which incorporated highly detailed backgrounds against which relatively simply drawn characters were contrasted with.

Mizuki’s real breakthrough would come in 1967 with the publication of Gegege no Kitaro. While this manga is based on the older Hakaba Kitaro, it had by now metamorphosed into something decidedly of Mizuki’s own imagination. In the manga, Kitaro, the last survivor of Ghost Tribe, strives to unite the worlds of humanity and youkai. He faces off with both wicked youkai that want to disturb the balance between humans and youkai, as well as monsters of foreign origin. Kitaro is accompanied by Medama-Oji, “Eyeball Dad”, which is his father’s spirit reincarnated into the form of an eyeball. Kitaro’s other companions include Nezumi-Otoko, “Rat Man” and Neko-Musume, “Cat Girl”. Some of the storylines make very direct references to Japanese folklore, such as the tale of Momotaro.

Kitaro has been viewed at times as a kind of extension or self-insert of Mizuki himself. Mizuki had lost his arm, while Kitaro had lost his other eye. The “Gegege” in Gegege no Kitaro is similar to Japanese sound symbolism for a cackling sound, but it is also a reference to “Gege”, a nickname that Mizuki had as a child. In the 1985 anime adaptation, he is described as being half-human, half-youkai. He is depicted with an assortment of powers, and these include extreme physical resilience, perhaps a reference to Mizuki’s own hardiness which allowed him to survive jungle warfare, malaria, amputation, poverty and the merciless manga business.

Many of the characters appearing in Gegege no Kitaro are based on earlier folklore and youkai illustrations. Some of these were given a visible form for the first time by Mizuki, including the Sunakake Babaa, “Sand-Throwing Granny”, which in folklore from Nara is an invisible, sand-throwing spirit. Another example is the Nurikabe, the appearance of a wall in the middle of a road which Mizuki depicted as a block-like creature with feet, arms and eyes. In this, Mizuki carried on Sekien’s methodology of giving strange happenings and visual form. His habit of inserting his own creations amid earlier folklore is also very Sekien-like. While Mizuki had been interested in Japanese folktales before, it was Fujisawa Masahiko’s book “The Study of Folk Belief” that deepened his interest around the year 1966.

The 1970s saw Mizuki author the autobiographical one-shot manga Towards Our Noble Deaths that detailed the final few weeks he experienced during the Second World War. He also wrote Hitler, a manga about the life of Adolf Hitler. Besides these manga related to the Second World War, he also experimented with a few strange topics. These include The Witch Marilyn, which depicts a supernatural version of Marilyn Monroe, and Kitaro Continues, where a grown-up Kitaro and his hijinx in college are the subject of a sex comedy.

The relentless pace of work started to take a severe toll on Mizuki by the 1970s, and he started developing psychosomatic symptoms like dizziness and tinnitus. He was also troubled by the costs of operating his own production company. He took time to visit Rabaul with one of his former commanding officers who had tried to help and protect him during the Second World War. This visit helped him to recuperate somewhat. However, by the 1980s the initial youkai boom started by Gegege no Kitaro had started winding down. Work was less forthcoming, the financial situation had once again become very difficult, and Mizuki suffered a severe spiritual and creative crisis. At some point he apparently stopped believing in the existence of youkai, and became unable to create anything. This crisis was resolved when one of his daughters told that she had seen the mokumokuren youkai during a school trip. An interesting detail here is that mokumokuren is widely considered to have been imagined by Sekien, giving the vague anxiety of being in an abandoned house a shape. A second boom followed the 1985 Gegege no Kitaro anime which led to a reversal of fortunes.

The success of the Gegege no Kitaro anime would lead to a phase where Mizuki pretty much worked on whatever he fancied. Some notable later works include Showa: A History of Japan (1988-1989), NonNonBa (1992) and Shigeru Mizuki’s Tono Monogatari (2008-2009). He became involved with the revitalization of Sakaiminato, and these days the town has a road lined with over hundred statues of characters from his work. There is also a museum dedicated to Mizuki there. 2003 saw him returning to Rabaul once again, where he discovered that the locals had named a street after him. In 2005, he would appear in the film Youkai Daisensou as “Great Elder Youkai” who reaffirmed that youkai are playful and peaceful creatures. The 2010s saw his work translated into several European languages, allowing his work to spread outside the borders of Japan.

Mizuki died in 2015 after falling down at his home and injuring his head. While he survived the injury, his health rapidly declined while in the hospital, leading into multiple organ failure. He left behind an immense legacy that went beyond his revitalization of youkai. His influence can be seen in works as diverse as Pokemon, Spirited Away, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Bleach and of course Touhou Project. He received many awards during his lifetime, and he became considered a truly unique artist, a kind of genre of his own. The manga critic Kure Tomohide wrote that “Shigeru Mizuki’s best work may be Shigeru Mizuki”, perhaps referencing both his ability to make a successful life that very much looked like himself, but also his tendency to insert himself into fiction and fiction into his life.

It’s this tendency to insert fiction into his life that makes any definitive assessment of Shigeru Mizuki a challenge. For example, NonNonBa, while ostensibly autobiographical, contains elements that are very likely fictionalized. These include Nonnonba telling Mizuki about youkai that are clearly of not local folkloric origin, but from the imagination of Toriyama Sekien. Mizuki appears to have projected later youkai knowledge he learned after he became deeply interested in the topic after the mid-1960s further into his past, creating at least a somewhat fictionalized account of his past that was more mysterious and youkai-rich than it was. This fictionalization of course clouds some other aspects of his history, such as the youkai encounter he had when he was 18, and his accounts of what happened during the Second World War. His (admittedly very Sekien-like) habit of occasionally inserting his own creations and reinterpretations of youkai into ostensibly encyclopedic works he made also at times caused controversy.

Ultimately, this kind of toying with narratives is not only extremely traditional within the context of youkai culture, but it is also perhaps a quite youkai-like quality in itself. There’s something of a darkly mischievous and vital undercurrent to his life, starting from his early years as a school bully. While he was later in his life considered a good-spirited intellectual who praised laziness (while in reality constantly working) and benefits of getting good sleep (which he apparently really did get), he never shied away from dark, gross or sexual topics. Many of his characters, no matter how fantastic, were driven by rather human desires, and he wasn’t ashamed to draw characters pissing, farting or pooping. Mizuki was deeply spiritual, but he was also a hedonist with incredible stamina to fuel the pursuit for fulfilment of desires. There’s an anecdote regarding him from 1993, after he and his team returned from an expedition to the Hopi tribe in Arizona. After a night of eating and drinking, Mizuki’s younger colleagues were exhausted, but he wanted to go to a porn store to check out the magazines for sale there. There was most certainly something youkai-like about him, and this doesn’t seem to be just my private opinion. When the Sakaiminato City Tourism Board organized the first Youkai Popularity Poll, Mizuki himself came in third place.

Shigeru Mizuki might have made his career by making fiction about youkai, but he was also a very serious folklore researcher, and by all accounts a true believer in the existence of youkai as something else than cultural phenomenon. To him, youkai and kami have some kind of ontological reality and agency of their own, which is however tied to the human creative agency. According to Mizuki, youkai try to “knock on the brains” of sensitive and receptive people so that they may “take shape”. This process requires belief, and according to Mizuki, as soon as one starts to believe that youkai and kami are man-made, they “stop knocking”.

By allowing one to believe in and thus perceive the youkai, one is able to give them shape and bring them out for the 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, shaped on the human side by our emotions and the culture and environment we live in.

Besides belief, interacting with youkai in this kind of manner requires a “youkai sense”, which is a kind of sensitivity towards elusive presences that escape ordinary perception. To Mizuki, youkai were not just entertainment or nostalgia, but expressions of human sensitivity to the invisible and inexplicable. He used the Japanese term kehai to refer to this invisible and inexplicable, a kind of vague presence. There is an affective, emotional component to this, and when it came to ghosts, he stated that “without fear no ghost will make its presence known”. When it comes to fear, Mizuki has also stated that the reason why there were so many youkai in the past was that people used to live in a much scarier world. Thus people would create a lot of youkai from these emotions of fear, or perhaps color their idea of the unseen with the fear they were feeling.

For Mizuki, youkai were something that transcended the borders of Japan, and arguably he used the term as a substitute for “spirit”. His fictional youkai included characters from all over the world, and many of them were depicted without clear ethnicity or nationality. When it came to his research, he advocated for the “Youkai Thousand Body Theory”. He believed that the spirits people reported encounters with across the world were mostly the same and could be put into (perhaps figurative) thousand different types. Mizuki even established the World Youkai Association, which however in reality only had activity in Japan.

Mizuki traveled a lot, and explored cultures where animism is still strongly present, from Papua New Guinea and Malaysia to Africa and the native populations of the Americas. He observed how animistic beliefs led to people giving very vivid forms to the unseen, and he argued that kehai flourishes where animism still thrives. For these cultures, giving form to the formless wasn’t just an exercise in sensitivity either, and spirits were seen as being involved in all kinds of aspects of everyday life, from healing to hunting.

While origins as Mizuki’s thinking regarding youkai have not to my knowledge been not explored in depth, and these views are perhaps mostly treated as creative flourishes of a curious artist spinning an interesting story about himself, I would argue they are very much in line with very deep throughlines in both youkai culture and studies as well as broader Japanese culture. Both Inoue Enryou (of whom Mizuki would have been no doubt very familiar with) and Minakata Kumagusu thought about the relationship between mysterious phenomena and human cognition, and both of these thinkers drew from much older Buddhist ideas. These same Buddhist ideas diffused into broader Japanese culture. Spirits appearing in visionary states or dreams, existing somehow in a manner tangled with the human mind, was and is certainly a very well established part of Japanese culture. Mizuki might have simply articulated an older set of beliefs without referencing older, traditional or Buddhist concepts. His background as an artist likely influenced his perception that youkai want to take shape through the imagination of sensitive people, but it also does seem to have captured something about more universal tendencies he himself also observed firsthand.

Mizuki's experiences and beliefs related to the link between kehai and the natural world made him very critical of postwar modernization and industrialization which he felt damaged the environment and disrupted social relationships. He was critical of the long working hours in Japan, which he saw as dampening people’s sensitivity to the unseen world, which then further alienated people from the environment. He advocated for a worldview where humans were to be seen as part of the natural world and respectful of it.

There is a fascinating convergence between certain strands of Western esoteric thought and Mizuki’s ideas. These include the idea that spirits lack a definite form and instead take shape within the human imaginative faculties, as well as the idea that belief plays a role in interacting with the spirit world. His way of interpreting spirits conventionally thought to be evil or troublesome as something positive has also slightly parallels with certain Western esoteric movements that sought to reinterpret evil spiritual figures like Satan or demons in positive light. Mizuki clearly understood the power of narratives, and recognizing this same power is part of the Western esoteric thought too. It’s very difficult to say how these convergences formed.

There are also certain shamanic qualities to Mizuki, even though he did not at least explicitly work with altered states of consciousness. His description of meeting, befriending and healing via the Tolai has a narrative arc similar to accounts of shamanic initiations. Mizuki suffers a disfigurement and undergoes a near-fatal sickness. As he recovers, he makes contact with what he describes as “otherworldly” people, who take a particular liking to him. Spending time with them leads to him not only physically recovering, but also to a kind of total rebirth. He goes so far as to say that his arm stump started to “smell like a newborn” as he spent time with the Tolai. The encounter with these “otherworldly” people leaves him with a permanently altered view of the world.

While it is very likely that Mizuki at least narrativized his experiences, and might have even intentionally written it in a somewhat shamanic story arc, his experiences in Rabaul were life-altering and left him profoundly changed. This included his missing arm, which left him somewhat othered. His daughter recalled in an interview that people who didn’t know Mizuki would often be slightly uncomfortable with his disability. Using the terminology of Manvir Singh, Mizuki was xenized, human yet somehow standing apart from humans. Mizuki also fully leaned into the xenizing process by inserting himself into fiction and inserting fiction into his life, and over time a kind of cult of personality of sorts grew around him.

Mizuki’s role as a link between the seen and unseen world of course makes him a kind of shamanic figure, but he also fulfilled another important shamanic role, which is carrying the history and traditions of a community. This is not limited to just the youkai, as he also carried the heavy memory of the early Showa militarism and Second World War. In a sense, he carried forth a kind of “everyman history”, and even his struggles post-WWII before hitting his stride as an artist would have resonated with many fellow Japanese.

There are also certain magical or mediumistic qualities to how Mizuki worked with mass media. The adventures of Terebi-kun are especially interesting in this light. Mizuki seems to have understood “the media landscape” of television as a kind of magical otherworld. Even the idea of Terebi-kun bringing “treasure” to poor children through this new mediumistic device repeats older themes of supernatural agency granting wealth to the needy. There are certain qualities to how he worked that are uncannily similar to later Western memetics and even “meme magic”. In modern youkaigaku, youkai have been analyzed as cultural representations and affective experiences, but I think they can also be seen as kind of memetic agents, compelling re-interpretation and dissemination. Mizuki of course was a most excellent re-interpreter and disseminator of youkai, who took them to new forms of media twice, first into manga, and then onto movies and television. When it comes to movies and television, he did something that some would read as a magical operation. Before there were movies and TV adaptations of Gegege no Kitaro, Mizuki wrote a plotline where Kitaro gets “dragged into” TV and movies. While it might have “only” been Mizuki commenting on these new forms of media, it is a bit curious how this ended up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

Overall, Mizuki’s life and work was most youkai-like, walking the line between fiction and reality, fantasy and history. His fiction touched on reality, and when he wrote of reality it was colored by fiction. At times he rationalized the irrational and fantastic, such as when 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. Other times he spliced fantasy into reality, as he seems to have done with some of his autobiographical works. He offered new, intriguing narratives and ways to think about youkai and skillfully used the new forms of mass media to disseminate these ideas. It’s in these liminal borderlands and subtle realms between fact and fiction, new and old, fear and fun, suffering and joy that youkai thrive, and Mizuki thrived with them.

Kuchi-sake-onna and Urban Legends as New Youkai

The powerful cultural presence that Mizuki had led him to becoming entangled 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 if 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 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 calm things down.

The folklorist Michael Dylan Foster has written about the kuchi-sake-onna phenomenon in his book Pandemonium and Parade (2009). Foster analyzes the broad cultural and societal trends of Japan in the late 1970s, and finds several trends which contributed to and shaped the kuchi-sake-onna phenomena. First of these trends is the re-popularization of youkai by Shigeru Mizuki. While Foster doesn’t think Mizuki’s works are the only cause, Mizuki did end up legitimizing the kuchi-sake-onna. Mizuki would illustrate the kuchi-sake-onna and considered her to be very much a youkai, down to the fact that there apparently was a ”spell” she could be repelled with.

Even if one were to ignore Mizuki’s opinion on the matter, kuchi-sake-onna appears to be a rather clear continuation of earlier youkai lore. She can be seen as a modern version of the ghost and demon-women populating Japanese mythology. Kuchi-sake-onna’s 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 youkai stories. These include variations where kuchi-sake-onna asks for candy, much like ghosts in certain earlier stories would. Kuchi-sake-onna can also be seen as a kind of transmigratory entity. Many of her origin stories feature her being a woman who becomes disfigured from cosmetic surgery, or going insane from grief. This transformation doesn’t leave her just spiteful, but also endows her with supernatural qualities like inhuman speed and endurance.

Besides analyzing Mizuki’s role in the phenomena, 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 also 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 the sight of people wearing masks during flu seasons and as protection against pollution. Environmental 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 and 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 also been interpreted as containing sexual themes, at times by Japanese who lived 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 of course quite the microcosm of attitudes at the time, but there are more primordial elements to this sexual side.

According to Foster the kuchi-sake-onna can be seen as a part of a continuum of cannibalistic female figures in mythology and folklore, ”pre-Oedipal figures” who threaten to symbolically or concretely to devour children. These figures have also been 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 is perhaps resonant on the idea of 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.

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 places, 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.Her appearance also seems to have had an almost darkly prophetic quality, and in a sense she acted as a harbinger for torima jiken, random acts of violence conducted against innocent bystanders that began to emerge in the 1980s. I find these strangely timely and even premonitory qualities of the kuch-sake-onna phenomenon deeply fascinating. The appearance of strange beings was sometimes considered both in Japan and the West as having prophetic qualities.

Kuchi-sake-onna wasn’t the only new youkai to manifest. Other new youkai continued to appear sporadically from the 1980s onwards, 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. These kinds of urban legends and urban youkai would provide ample research material after Japanese folklore studies started regarding cities as legitimate sites of research.

Noboru Miyata - Urban Youkai, Borders and Towards a new Youkaigaku

The key figure in Japanese folklore studies turning its attention towards cities was Noboru Miyata (1936-2000). He was a Japanese folklorist who researched and wrote about multiple topics, of which youkai formed only a small part. His other interests included among others the Miroku (Maitreya) faith, the concept of living gods and their relation to imperial authority, sexuality and folklore, the role of old people in society, urban folklore and comparative folklore. He wrote many books aimed at a general audience and was generally considered as the leading figure of Japanese folklore studies from the 1970s until his sudden death in 2000.

Miyata was born in Yokohama, and his interest in religion and folklore was stirred from an early age on. He attended Christian kindergarten, and he recalled seeing a film that was the biography of Jesus. He was particularly struck by the scene of the crucifixion, which featured storms and earthquakes. During the Second World War he was moved to the countryside, which was perceived to be safer. He spent time in Kamigo, a village that is now part of Nagano City. There, he was exposed to local beliefs, folklore and sites regarded as having particular spiritual qualities. These included a nearby Dosojin shrine, a mountain associated with the kitsune as well as folklore regarding mountain men. He was an avid reader who was interested in the mysterious, the soul and the otherworld, and he was driven to seek answers related to these questions.

These childhood experiences would blossom into an interest towards Japanese history, religion and culture. Miyata ended up enrolling into the Tokyo University of Education (now University of Tsukuba) into the department of Japanese History. His initial interest was religion, and his graduation thesis dealt with the Mt. Ontake faith. His interest in mountain faith continued in graduate school, where he researched Mt. Fuji faith. His research into the Mt. Fuji faith led him to a case from 1733 where a practitioner of Mt. Fuji faith entered a cave in the mountain and meditated until death with the intent of reaching instant enlightenment. The man had called himself with the name of Miroku (Maitreya), the future direct successor of Gautama Buddha in Buddhism. This discovery led to Miyata becoming interested in the wider Miroku faith, and it would lead to his first book A Miroku Belief (1970).

From there on out, Miayata would write a great number of books covering a wide variety of topics. He earned the nickname “Weekly Miyata” for this productivity. Over the course of his academic career Miyata would develop a methodology that would be characterized by the phases of “transmission”, “development” and “deepening”. Transmission consisted of passing forwards the work of his predecessors, development of building on pre-existing work and deepening of refining his arguments. He had a habit of seeking out “big topics from small materials”, an example of this being him becoming interested in the Miroku faith through a single mention to a man calling himself the future Buddha.

Miyata was also regarded as having an unusually sharp foresight, ability to “read the weather”, when it came to what kind of topics of research should be pursued. An almost uncanny example of this is related to him developing interest in urban folklore. Miyata had developed interest in the idea already in 1975, but in 1978 he published the first concrete proposal for it. This was the very same year that kuchi-sake-onna would make her first appearance and became an object of folkloristic interest. Miyata would end up becoming interested in her, and youkai more broadly.

This interest culminated in the book Folklore of Youkai: Japan’s Invisible Space (1985). Miyata saw the kuchi-sake-onna as a continuation of earlier types of youkai, in particular the witch-like mountain entity known as yamanba or yamauba. These witch-like beings were not only similar in appearance to kuchi-sake-onna, but also appeared to share emotional, geographic and social factors similar to yamanba. He also sought to connect the phenomenon of random urban crimes going on in Tokyo at the time with legends of the hair-cutting kami-kiri youkai from the Edo period.

Miyata uses the concept of border, kyokai, to conceptualize the “topology of youkai” as he calls it. While earlier authors such as Yanagita and Tsutomu had noted that youkai tend to appear in borderlands, Miyata took this further. He studied reports of strange occurrences on bridges, in crossroads and urban no-man’s lands. Miyata noted that cities are full of such no-man’s lands which seem to belong to nobody and rouse a sense of danger. Miyata ended up not only conceptualizing the “topology of youkai”, but also highlighting liminality as a core feature of the youkai phenomenon. He first used liminality as a conceptual tool while researching aging and the role of elderly, drawing on Victor Turner’s idea of liminality and center, which was in turn based on the work of Arnold van Gennep. Miyata didn’t see his urban folklore studies as something separate from rural folklore studies, but rather saw these two forming a continuum in both time and space. To Miyata, studying folklore of the “present” was studying a span of roughly two hundred years, as it would be roughly the same as the span from great-grandparents, to grandparents, to parents and finally to their children.

In researching youkai in urban contexts, Miyata pioneered the re-introduction of youkai as a subject of academic research. He would end up both building on earlier work, but also making a break from them by focusing on youkai as phenomena that was unfolding in present times and not just as subjects of rural folklore research focused on the past. Rather than seeking traces of lost peoples or gods forgotten to history, he found the “big topic” of liminality in the “small matter” of where youkai were being reported, both historically and in modern times. His work would clear the way for future youkai studies, and Miyata contributed to revitalizing youkai in academia, perhaps somewhat like Shigeru Mizuki had revitalized them in popular culture. I find it quite fascinating that Folklore of Youkai ended up coming out the same year as an anime adaptation of Gegege no Kitaro. Whether this is pure coincidence or another example of Miyata’s ability to “read the weather” is impossible for us to say.

1989 - 2026: Heisei to Reiwa - From Youkai Boom to Youkai Culture

The long Showa era ended in 1989 with Emperor Showa passing away. His reign had seen Japan undergo massive changes. His successor, Emperor Akihito would inherit a country undergoing a massive economic and cultural boom. In the 1980s, many seriously thought Japan might rise to an economic status where they might be able to compete with the United States. The good times would soon however come to an end, and the Japanese economic bubble burst in 1991, leading into the so-called Lost Decade, which despite the name was more than ten years of economic stagnation.

While the Japanese economy stagnated, its culture continued to boom and international interest towards Japanese popular culture truly took off during the 1990s. The “anime boom” of the 1990s (one might observe a pattern of the Japanese really liking the term “boom”) saw anime become more popular, both in Japan but also abroad. Convention and doujin culture, which had already started to develop earlier on, expanded and solidified. It is most likely thanks to this era of Japanese popular culture going international that I am writing this text and you are reading it.

The occult boom arguably came to an end with the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack in 1995. While society at large had mostly treated unusual religious and occult movements as a source of entertainment, this incident led to considerable souring of attitudes towards such things. Occult and magical themes would still of course continue to influence Japanese popular culture. Youkai avoided any blame this time around, after all, they are hardly associated with religions.

If anything, the “youkai boom” started by kuchi-sake-onna and the Gegege no Kitaro anime resulted in youkai and youkai-influenced media becoming mainstays, if not always mainstream, of Japanese culture. Kyogoku Natsuhiko’s runaway success with his stories where youkai are treated as psychological sublimations is one example of youkai becoming a topic of interest in mass culture. The full list of every instance of youkai or youkai-like entities appearing in Japanese pop culture from the late 1980s onwards would likely be borderline impossible to catalogue. Rather than even attempting such, it is perhaps enough to say that a vibrant community of youkai enthusiasts evolved during this timeframe. This “youkai folk” is a mix of researchers, artists and people who have a hobbyist interest in youkai. A lot of features of this “youkai culture network” as the folklorist Michael Dylan Foster calls it appear to share features with broader otaku, convention and doujin culture. An important part of this youkai culture network is the magazine Kai, which has featured a broad range of content, from manga and photos to roundtable discussions related to youkai.

The 2005 remake of the Youkai Daisensou film is emblematic of several developments in youkai culture up to the early 2000s. It is an example of how interconnected the youkai culture network is, but also how youkai have become perfectly acceptable aspects of Japanese culture. The remake features numerous cameos from various people involved in youkai culture, including Shigeru Mizuki as a “great elder youkai”. The youkai fight against not foreign invaders, but rather mechanical monsters that feed on human waste. They defend an idyllic, nostalgic version of Japan.

The folklorist Michael Dylan Foster has analyzed how towards the 2000s, youkai have become less of signifiers of a spiritual other world, but rather a kind of nostalgic “other Japan”. The youkai-related author Natsuhiko Kyokogu has also commented on how the term youkai seems to invoke old-fashioned imagery in the Japanese. This “nostalgization” of youkai is also connected to efforts at revitalizing rural areas, and sometimes these campaigns have involved youkai as mascots or symbols. Shigeru Mizuki’s support for the revival efforts of his native Sakaiminato are an excellent example of this. Youkai have also found themselves entangled with advertisement and commercial activity, and at times they have been used as national symbols.

Youkai culture and the encyclopedic mode associated with youkai culture also quite possibly influenced some forms of Japanese culture that are 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 its popularity. The folklorist Michael Dylan Foster argues that this makes the world of Pokemon a kind of self-contained otherworld that is separate from the world, but to its fans, always relevant to it, a modern development of ideas related to “the other world” in Japanese culture. I’m sure that Foster had a lot of thoughts on the later phenomenon of Pokemon GO which blurred the line between these realities...

Japan’s history of the uncanny and mysterious becoming a fully acceptable topic of popular culture has led to depictions of youkai-like entities which however are not called youkai nor do they directly reference older forms of youkai. One popular example are the various strange spirit entities from Studio Ghibli films, which draw from culture related to both kami and youkai, yet are called neither. This has perhaps allowed these films to be as internationally popular as they are, carrying forth the idea while not being stuck in very culture-bound specifics. A less popular but intriguing example are the mushi from Mushishi, which are spirit-like creatures that cause mysterious incidents, but look mostly like amoebas, plankton, insects or highly abstract forms.

Another medium for youkai-like entities and phenomena are Japanese horror films, which saw a boom in both national and international popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s. 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 the 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 an urban legend. The liminal bleeds back out back into material reality using the “medium” of a 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.

When it comes to youkai being thought as real entities, there has been at least one incident where youkai have become entangled with modern day cryptozoological discourses. In May of 2000, a strange snake-like skeleton was found in the town of Yoshii in Okayama prefecture. As these were presented as being possibly the bones of tsuchinoko, a legendary snakelike youkai, it made national news. The remains were taken to a university, where a professor of biology examined them. The conclusion was that it was a malformed grass snake. This did little to dampen tsuchinoko enthusiasm which had erupted in Yoshii. A giant statue of a tsuchinoko was erected, local manufacturers began producing tsuchinoko-themed products and a reward was offered to anyone who could find an actual tsuchinoko.

Perhaps the most notable youkai-related incident in recent history was the Amabie boom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amabie is a rather unusual looking youkai with several variations recorded in history, the most popular form being a three-legged, scaly, bird-beaked creature with long hair. According to legend, it appeared in 1846 in the present-day Kumamoto prefecture and prophesied that good harvests would continue for six years. In addition, amabie said that should a disease epidemic break out, pictures of it should be created and shown to the ill. Due to this disease-repelling quality, during the pandemic, amabie went viral on Twitter, with Orochi Do, a shop specializing in hanging scrolls depicting youkai, being possibly the originator, presenting a “new coronavirus countermeasure”. The trend was viral enough to get noted by researchers.

As youkai have stayed culturally relevant, the academic study of youkai has also continued, arguably even flourished. The most important figure in this has been Kazuhiko Komatsu, who formulated a new program for modern youkaigaku that would study youkai as cultural phenomena. Kazuhiko was the director of the cultural studies institute Nichibunken for several years, and while there he organized numerous cross-disciplinary events which greatly fostered the popularization of youkai studies as culture studies. These modern youkai studies have approached both historical as well as more modern manifestations of youkai, ranging the full spectrum from ancient history to urban legends as well as modern Japanese fascination with the otherworldly.

Youkai have also gone international, especially from the later half of the first decade of the 2000s onwards. Mizuki Shigeru finally received translations into European language, and some more contemporary forms of youkai culture also received official translations. As the Western otaku have developed as a cultural force, their fan translation efforts have disseminated youkai culture through more liminal, gray zone means. Toriyama Sekien’s classic youkai scrolls have been translated into English, and there are now also original youkai encyclopedias published in English. Youkai studies too have gone international. The historian Gerald Figal’s Civilization and Monsters from 1999 was an omen of things to come, and Michael Dylan Foster’s 2009 Pandemonium and Parade and 2015 Book of Yokai are examples of English youkaigaku following Kazuhiko’s paradigm of youkai studies as culture studies.

It is during this timeframe that the Touhou Project comes into existence. Perhaps one way to view Touhou in the context of youkai history and culture is that it mostly sheds traditional visual representations, while building on various cultural ideas on what youkai are and how they work. The strange “ontology of belief” on which the world of Touhou operates on can be seen as having historical precedents in ideas related to youkai, but Touhou takes these ideas a step further. There is also much to be said about Gensokyo as an “other world”, both as a classical other world, and as a “nostalgic other Japan”, and how ZUN’s creative modus operandi is a supreme example of collecting-as-play which Foster has written about. It is also an intriguing example of youkai finding new forms, new mediums and new representations.

Before we finally move on to Touhou Project as a part of the continuum of youkai culture, we shall take a look at the origins of modern youkai studies, the arguably most popular modern youkai-related author who is known to be a favorite of ZUN, as well as how youkai culture and studies spread from Japan to the wider world.

Kazuhiko Komatsu - The New Youkaigaku

Kazuhiko Komatsu (born 1947) is a Japanese cultural anthropologist and folklorist who has had a massive impact on youkai studies. He is credited with developing a new form of youkaigaku, which studies youkai as a way to understand Japanese, and more broadly human culture. To him, youkai are not simply imaginary creatures, but rather something that reflects very real human fears and anxieties, natural catastrophes, moral lessons and changing cultural conditions. Kazuhiko’s program of youkai studies as studies humans broke youkaigaku out of its niche in folklore studies, and his approach to studying youkai has also influenced how youkai are depicted in popular culture. Kazuhiko is a prolific author and has published over 60 books, some of them written for a more general audience, including some works aimed at high school age students.

As a child, Kazuhiko was interested in stories and movies of Japanese youkai and Western monsters. He enjoyed stories depicting strange other lands and worlds such as Gulliver’s Travels. While he was an university student, he visited a mountain village in Chichibu, Saitama while doing folklore research practice, and learned of kitsune-centered beliefs which were still part of the village’s life. During graduate school, he would explore setsuwa tales and picture scrolls which would reference things like mononoke, possession and the practices of onmyodo and shugendo, further stirring his interest.

Kazuhiko would end up studying a community in the mountains of Shikoku that practiced a faith called Izanagi-ryu that incorporated rituals from onmyodo and shugendo. He felt a sense of strangeness during his initial fieldwork, as if he was simultaneously in the present and the far past of the Heian era. Many people who become deeply interested in the topic of youkai seem to have some kind of a liminal experience or lead very liminal lives, and this strange experience of being both in the past and present seems to have been such an experience for Kazuhiko. These interests and experiences started coming together, and Kazuhiko started to feel like there was a particularly Japanese tendency to perceive something that was between the visible and invisible. This “mystical thinking” as he would call it did not easily fit into any existing academic categories, and it seemed to span the entire length of the Japanese lived experience, from art, literature, history and religion to people’s everyday lives.

Kazuhiko graduated from Tokyo Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Social Sciences in 1972, and finished his doctoral studies in 1976. Kazuhiko’s early publications dealt with religion, possession and mediumship. His 1985 book Ijin-ron or Theories on Strangers became his first groundbreaking work. Kazuhiko analysed so-called ijin-goroshi or “stranger-killing” legends. In these, outsiders to the community like wandering monks or merchants end up murdered by locals. Kazuhiko would argue that sometimes through a process of “communal illusions” (kyoudou gensou) the murders would become mythologized as events involving youkai or ghosts. Towards the end of the book, Kazuhiko explores links between outsiders, otherness and youkai, suggesting that some youkai can be interpreted as folklorized versions of outsiders and outcasts.

While Kazuhiko’s early works were not yet about youkai in itself, Kazuhiko was moving towards his project of a new youkaigaku. He would write about oni, curses and the idea of other worlds. Kazuhiko believed that Japanese youkai studies were a kind of gem in the rough, that if “dug up and polished” could be a very rich interdisciplinary field that Japan could be proud of. At first many didn’t agree with him. He even got mocked and laughed at sometimes. Many considered the topic of youkai as too childish and vulgar to be worthy of serious research and that nothing of importance regarding human culture could be learned from studying them.

Kazuhiko’s second breakthrough came in 1994 with the publication of New Thoughts on Youkai Studies (Youkaigaku shinko). The study of youkai had become a rather small subsection of folklore studies, and much of it had revolved around frameworks and ideas set up by Yanagita Kunio. In particular, his ideas about youkai representing earlier layers of Japanese religion had been very influential. It was becoming increasingly clear that this thesis was nowhere nearly as universally applicable as Yanagita had thought. Kazuhiko himself diverged from this thinking by conceptualizing the difference between kami and youkai as a continuum, where whether a supernatural entity was seen as a kami or youkai depended on whether humans worshipped them or not, and whether they were seen as being controllable or not.

There had been earlier attempts at breaking out of the “deadlock” of Yanagita’s program and attempts at modernizing folkloristics at large and studies on youkai in particular. Noboru Miyata had brought folklore studies to urban environments and highlighted liminality as a quality of youkai. Baba Akiko’s Oni Research (Oni no kenkyu) explored the idea of suppressed emotions turning into oni and Satake Akihiro’s Other Tales of Shuten Doji (Shuten Doji ibun) challenged Yanagita’s ideas of oni as degraded deities. Ishizuka Takatoshi’s Tsukimono of Japan (Nihon no tsukimono) explored beliefs regarding possession by animal spirits. Tanigawa Ken’ichi’s Lineage of Evil (Ma no keifu) explored connections between Japanese history and onryou, vengeful spirits. This history of “losers and underdogs” coming back to haunt the “winners” of history from a “bizarre alternate history ruled by the magic of the dead” did not fit into any of Yanagita’s frameworks. Kazuhiko’s earlier work on youkai-related topics was also part of this trend of trying to seek out new directions for youkai research.

None of these works however proposed a coherent new vision for youkai studies as a whole, as Kazuhiko would end up doing with New Thoughts on Youkai Studies. Kazuhiko proposes that the new youkaigaku should be a discipline that researches youkai as cultural phenomena that is shaped by human imagination. Kazuhiko states that the form and attributes which youkai are given are always in a relationship with humans and their culture, but that this relational interaction with humanity and human interaction is not unique to youkai. Minerals, plants and animals too are given meanings by humanity. This new youkaigaku would be the study of youkai culture, and a “human-ology”, ningengaku, which tries to understand humans by understanding how humans give meaning to youkai.

Kazuhiko’s new youkaigaku has since then become quite influential, and Kazuhiko has continued to research youkai and refine his views on youkai. What exactly youkai are beyond something that humanity interacts with and interprets using the human imaginative powers is something that Kazuhiko intentionally leaves quite open, in order not to limit the complexity of youkai and how they are treated in culture. Kazuhiko however does divide the youkai phenomena into three “domains”, which can be seen as a kind of process. The first domain is youkai as unexplained phenomena which are named. This name allows the phenomena to be given a kind of identity, and further “domains” of youkai spring forth from this. The second domain is youkai as supernatural entities, which are anthropomorphised. This is in Kazuhiko’s view born out of Japanese animist traditions, which see various things having a soul or spiritual presence that can have emotions and interact with humans. Strange or unexplainable events gain a perceived agency and internal life of their own. The third domain emerges with the birth of visual culture depicting youkai. Early Japanese culture rarely if ever produced visual depictions of deities, demons or ghosts (with the debated exception of some ancient sculptures). Kazuhiko speculates that the early Japanese might have been afraid to depict supernatural entities visually. Starting from the Japanese middle ages onwards, there was an explosion in the culture of creating imagery of youkai. This changes human relationship with these entities, and they become culturally transferable to a previously unseen degree. This process of youkai acquiring a visual form eventually allows them to become subjects of entertainment too.

The connection between Japanese animism and youkai is something that Kazuhiko has highlighted especially in the light of the tsukumogami. He sees the idea of tools acquiring a spirit and coming alive as a fairly straightforward extension of earlier animist ideas. As the Japanese material culture developed, humans would become increasingly surrounded by artificial objects. As this “second natural world” started to form, people would have transposed earlier ideas of natural phenomena and objects having feelings and agency onto human creations. Such led to tales of tsukumogami and practices like funerals for old items.

Another lens that Kazuhiko has used in studying youkai are the concept of various forms of knowledge, and the idea of etic and emic. Humans can be viewed as having various forms of knowledge, such as scientific knowledge based on science, or practical instrumental knowledge on how to do things that can be entirely based on hands-on experience. Youkai can be seen as a kind of faith based or transcendental knowledge that is applied to unusual, unclear, strange or confusing aspects of reality. Closer investigation might of course reveal that a transcendental explanation is not needed, and that what one thought was a ghost was indeed just dried grass swaying in the wind.

Etic and emic are terms used in social sciences. Etic refers to investigative methods centered around external observation and measurement of a subject of investigation, while emic refers to explaining and assigning significance and meaning to things from the perspective of the subject. Youkai are a type of Japanese emic that is culturally shaped. Understanding this divide allows one to analyze the similarities and differences between youkai-like phenomena in various cultures. Kazuhiko uses a quite clever example of a Micronesian folktale, where he switches local terms for the entities for Japanese terms, creating a surface-level “Japanese” tale which however completely loses the original cultural context.

Kazuhiko has also approached the youkai phenomenon through the idea of borders and boundaries, building on earlier work that has noted the liminal qualities of youkai. He has written about how youkai seem to appear during “border times”, be they the twilight hours, transitional periods of timekeeping such as setsubun or periods of social change. There are of course also spatial elements to borders, as humans divide the world into things that are part of “their world” and the “other world”. Kazuhiko views this process of creating various “borders” as a quite fundamental part of the human experience. Humans automatically start drawing a line between “here” and “there”, and tend to populate the “there” with unknown things, perhaps even strange and monstrous things. When the borders between “here” and “there”, known and unknown begin to blur, vague anxieties rise, and these anxieties then acquire imagined forms.

According to Kazuhiko, humans have used this idea of boundaries as an attempt at controlling and explaining negative events. By devising rituals for driving out demons, people attempted to push things which cause misfortune out of their community. In turn, things that are now conceptualized as mental illnesses were seen as a kind of collapse or inversion of the boundaries, the outside where strangers and demons dwelt suddenly rushing in. Humans also used the intrusion of youkai into the community as a way to explain things like social disharmony or why some people were more fortunate or unfortunate than others.

The concept of ijin, strangers, and how it relates to the concept of youkai has been of special interest to Kazuhiko, even beyond his breakthrough work Theories on Outsiders. Broadly defined, an ijin is a “person” from “another world”, and in the context of legends, these should be understood in a maximally broad sense. Sometimes ijin as they are told of are clearly human, monks, merchants or criminals, and sometimes they are deities or youkai. Sometimes this “other world” is simply the world outside of a particular community, sometimes it is understood in a more spiritual sense. Kazuhiko splits the ijin into four groups: outsiders who visit but leave, outsiders who visit but don’t leave, outsiders born from internal shunning by the community, and outsiders who dwell far away and can only be imagined.

There are many types of legends featuring ijin, with some of them featuring ijin who bring good fortune and are welcomed, and others where they are shunned and killed. There are even stories where an ijin intervenes in a local cruel practice, or manages to stop an attempt on their life. These are subsets of stories which feature ijin becoming sacrifices. Legends about human sacrifice are surprisingly common in Japan, but there is debate as to how much they reflect actual ancient practices.

Kazuhiko’s particular interests regarding the ijin are stories of strangers getting killed, and how certain youkai appear to be born out of stories regarding marginalized groups. He views that the stranger killing legends emerged during a period of transition from premodern times to early modernity. This would have seen the emergence of the cash economy, which started to change the fortunes of people. Legends of killing strangers were used to explain why some families were wealthier than others, and why some were poorer. Wealthy families were suspected of having acquired wealth by killing a stranger and stealing their wealth, and poor families were thought to suffer from the curse of a slain stranger.

When it comes to the relationship between youkai and boundaries, Kazuhiko has also built on ideas presented by Nakazawa Shin’inchi’s essay Youkai Art and Natural History (Yokaiga to hakubutsugaku). Nakazawa highlighted connections between youkai and the Edo-period boom in interest towards natural history, conceptualizing youkai as something that appears on the boundary between the natural world and consciousness. Kazuhiko extrapolates this to cover the “second natural world” of tools, and wonders if it could also cover what he calls the “third natural world” of computers.These ideas of youkai emerging between human consciousness and the material world recall Minakata Kumagusu’s kokoro - koto - mono triad, and were perhaps influenced by it.

For those interested in Kazuhiko’s youkaigaku, his book An Introduction to Youkai Culture: Monsters, Ghosts and Outsiders in Japanese History (2006) was translated into English in 2017. It serves as a good, very approachable general introduction to not only Kazuhiko’s own research, but also as an introduction to youkaigaku in general. A feature of the book I found notable was how thoroughly he credits his predecessors and colleagues' works. Sometimes Kazuhiko gets portrayed as a figure who almost singlehandedly turned the direction of youkai studies, but reading his own writings on the matter, a different picture emerges. Kazuhiko did groundbreaking research, but perhaps more importantly he systematized earlier research, offered a coherent research program and worked to popularize youkai studies.

Kazuhiko was extremely committed to his mission in making youkaigaku that interdisciplinary jewel of Japan which he envisioned, and this is exemplified by his work in the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, or Nichibunken. In 1997, he became a professor there, the deputy director in 2010, before finally becoming the director in 2012. He worked as the director until his retirement in 2020. Nichibunken has become known for interdisciplinary studies, as well as hosting many international researchers. As part of his work in Nichibunken, between 1997 to 2013 he organized sixty-two interdisciplinary workshops. These workshops included scholars from the fields of literature, folklore, history, art, anthropology, sociology and religion, as well as museum curators, photographers and novelists. As a result of these workshops, dozens of books and articles were written, and three public databases of youkai research materials and images were created.

From a young researcher passionate about a niche topic that many laughed at, to the director of a major research institute and to a professor emeritus awarded with the prestigious Order of Culture award, Kazuhiko’s life trajectory mirrors how youkai have become both a mainstay of Japanese culture, as well as a topic of serious inquiry. His impact on the field of youkai studies will likely be felt for a very very long time.

Kyougoku Natsuhiko - Youkai as Sublimation

While Kazuhiko Komatsu is the most well-known modern youkai scholar, Kyogoku Natsuhiko (b. 1963) is arguably the most famous modern author working with the topic of youkai. He has written many books featuring youkai, and he is also a researcher, graphic designer and art director. Kyogoku is extremely productive, and since the publication of his first book, The Summer of the Ubume (1994), he has written dozens of books, hundreds of short stories and essays. He also writes research articles, edits academic texts, holds lectures and takes part in forums and panel discussions. Among other youkai researchers, he has published an informal roundtable called Youkai Baka. He has also been a key figure in the Kai journal, apparently the only journal dedicated to youkai. He is a celebrity with an unique style to both his writing and his appearance, always donning a kimono and fingerless black gloves for his public appearances.

Born in Otaru, Hokkaido, Kyogoku attended the Kurasawa Design School but dropped out. He worked in an advertisement company, and eventually became promoted to be the deputy head of the production department. However, due to poor health, he ended up resigning and setting up his own company. Due to the burst of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s, Kyogoku struggled to find clients and was left with much spare time. He ended up using this time writing his debut novel. Kyogoku dropped off his massive manuscript at Kodansha publishing. The editor who received it was allegedly so engrossed by it that he finished reading it in a day, and initially thought it was a famous author playing a prank on them in order to see how well-read the editorial department really was. Kodansha decided to publish the book, and it turned out to be a runaway success.

The Summer of Ubume is part of his long-running series known as the Kyodogoku or Hundred Demons Night series in Japan, with Kyogoku himself apparently strongly preferring the latter. These books are generally set in 1950s postwar Japan, and feature a reappearing cast of characters centered around the character of Chuzenji Akihiko. He is commonly called Kyougokudou, the name of a bookstore he owns. He is a kind of “atheist onmyoji”. He is learned in various religious traditions and is respectful of them, but lacks faith himself. He is capable of debunking false mysteries, and moves skillfully between various modes of perception and narratives as the situation calls for. The Hundred Demons Night series are ultimately stories about crimes, and Kyogokudou’s role is to solve mysterious crimes. He uses logical deduction as well as his immense knowledge in topics related to religion, esoteric and youkai to do so.

The most remarkable technique that Kyogokudou uses in solving these crimes is related to how Kyogoku Natsuhiko views youkai as a form of psychological sublimation. In the case of the Hundred Demons Night books, the criminals, victims and witnesses to strange crimes project the events as being caused by youkai. Reaching the true core of the mystery therefore requires banishing the “youkai”, which Kyogokudou does by using an exorcism technique called Tsukimono-Otoshi. This is a real term from onmyodo, and it refers to exorcism of ghosts and demons. For Kyogokudou it is essentially a psychological-conceptual operation, where he reconstructs what happens and reframes the events, using language and concepts most fit to those involved in the case.

This interpretation of the Tsukimono-Otoshi can be seen as a fictionalized, dramatized and more personal version of how Inoue Enryou attempted to “alter the landscape of perception” on a national level, which however builds from a broader base of knowledge that would be considered irrational in the scientific context. It is also highly resonant with the process of psychologization of youkai that started with Enryou, as well as modern, psychological interpretations of occult and religious practices.

Kyogoku has also written other fiction involving youkai, and in these stories the youkai are revealed to be either man-made trickery, or then phenomena fitting within rational explanations, but framed as youkai. These include the Hundred Stories of Folklore series, as well as the Edo Ghost Story series. Besides works involving youkai, he has also written science fiction, parodies, as well as books that were intended to be simply “disgusting”. His books are often rather long, with some of them being over 800 pages long, and they have been called “brick books” and even compared to harmonicas.

The extraordinary length of the Kyogoku’s books isn’t the only notable thing about them. He has rather strict rules he has set regarding the layout of his books. He never has a sentence cross a page break, and this rule is strictly followed even when new editions are published. This is because Kyogoku wants people to be able to stop reading at any given page. Kyogoku uses a lot of rare kanji found mostly in older texts to give his book an old-timey air, but he always includes furigana to accompany these kanji, allowing Japanese readers who cannot read these rare kanji to read his books. He also uses null spaces to highlight important sentences. So while his books might be lengthy, he has made a lot of considerations when it comes to their readability. The books also feature high production values and stylish covers, which in the case of the Hundred Demons Night series feature a historical image of the youkai referenced in the story.

Kyogoku is a best-selling author and has received many prizes, and is broadly considered to be the brightest star in contemporary youkai entertainment. While their beliefs regarding youkai might be different, Kyogoku’s dual role as a creative writer and a researcher is very reminiscent of Shigeru Mizuki. In fact, Kyogoku is known to deeply admire Mizuki, and worked with Mizuki while he was still alive. Kyogoku has also contributed to the popularization of youkaigaku, as his works reference very real research and researchers related to the topic. The Summer of Ubume contains references to Sekien, Enryou and Yanagita, and it explores topics related to psychology, perception and belief.

When it comes to the topic of youkai, Kyogoku has remarked that the popular understanding of youkai is understood to strongly imply “premodern things” and “things from folklore or the oral tradition”. This is of course different from how the word is used in academia, but according to Kazuhiko, this view does seem to reflect popular opinions and cannot be discounted.

ZUN is known to enjoy Kyougoku’s novels and they have very likely had a 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. This has obvious parallels with the character of Chuzenji and his Kyogokudou shop. While Rinnosuke doesn’t solve criminal mysteries, he acts as a kind of lorekeeper who appears to have been around since the creation of the Great Hakurei Barrier.

Youkai Culture in English

Youkai have not only become a mainstay of Japanese culture, they have gone international. Japanese youkai culture has been translated into English and other non-Japanese languages, and international researchers have become involved with youkai studies. While there are some earlier examples, the internalization of youkai appears to have really taken off in the late 00s and early 2010s. While popular takes on youkai often emphasize their “weird” and “wacky” qualities and play on stereotypes of Japan being “strange”, there have also been more context-sensitive attempts at introducing the youkai to the world outside of Japan. I will be focusing on the materials available in English, as it is a relatively commonly understood international language.

The earliest introduction of youkai to the Anglophone world were the works of Lafcadio Hearn, which we went over already earlier on. For a refresher, Hearn both documented Japanese beliefs regarding the spirit world, as well as offered creative retellings of Japanese tales using genres of literature from the Anglophone world of his time. Another early example of Japanese folklore being translated into English is F. Hadland Davis’ Myths & Legends of Japan from 1912.

Between Hearn’s and Davis’ time and now, there have been many translations of Japanese stories featuring things that fit under the umbrella of youkai. One can find for example English translations of Genji Monogatari and Konjaku Hyakku Monogatari. Usually these translations do not contextualize these works as culture related to youkai, and this section is not intended as a comprehensive list of every piece of Japanese folklore and literature featuring youkai that has been translated into English. Rather, I will highlight a few important ones.

Ryonosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa has been translated into English several times. First in 1947, with a curious subtitle of “Gulliver in a Kimono”, which was an attempt to contextualize the story in a framing related to Anglosphere literature. Some of the reviews from the time are frankly dehumanizing towards the Japanese, implying that it is extraordinary that they would be capable of satire, and tell probably more of immediate post-WWII attitudes towards Japan than anything else. Since then, Kappa has received a surprisingly large number of English translations in 1967, 1970 and the latest one in 2023. Akutagawa’s novella tends to get put in the context of Taisho era culture and Akutagawa’s personal struggles.

Kunio Yanagita’s Tono Monogatari was translated into English in 1975, and the 2010 edition offers a fairly comprehensive look at Yanagita’s life, contextualizing the work. The translation highlights that Yanagita intended it to be a work of literature rooted on folklore, and only later became the starting point for Japanese folklore studies. The 1935 collection of 299 further tales, written in more condensed, flat style was also translated in 2015. These translations were done by Ronald A. Morse. Morse studied Chinese history at University of California, Berkeley. He has served the U.S Defense, State and Energy departments and worked at several universities in both the United States and Japan.

Shigeru Mizuki might have been a superstar of Japanese manga and anime, but his works received English translations surprisingly late. The Gegege no Kitaro manga received its first English translation in 2002 as a bilingual (English-Japanese) compilation of three volumes, interestingly enough compiled by Natsuhiko Kyogoku. Since 2013, the manga has been published as a compilation of selected works in English by Drawn & Quarterly. Several of his other manga have also been translated by Drawn & Quarterly. These include his autobiographical and historical works, and thus the perception of Mizuki’s work in the West tends to be slightly different compared to Japan, where he appears to be overwhelmingly remembered for his youkai-related works.

Natsuhiko Kyougoku’s The Summer of the Ubume was translated into English in 2009, and several of his short stories from The Wicked and the Damned series were translated between 2015 and 2016. Loups-Garous, a scifi story, got translated in 2010, and the standalone crime story Why Don’t You Just Die was translated in 2011. While it’s a bit of a shame that no further translations have been made, the stylistic and cultural peculiarities of this titan of youkai culture are perhaps a bit too difficult to translate for what in the West would ultimately be a niche audience.

When it comes to films, the Studio Ghibli film Heisei tanuki gassen Pompoko (1993) got released by Walt Disney simply as Pom Poko in North America by Walt Disney Studios in 2005. For many in the West, this would have likely been the first time they would see a depiction of a youkai parade, which the tanuki in the film conjure forth using illusion magic. Many Ghibli films feature youkai-like or kami-like spirit entities which are rarely however named such. The 2005 Youkai Daisensou film was translated as The Great Youkai War in English and received international distributions. It appears to have received favorable reviews, but the film’s intense intertextual references to Japanese youkai culture and research were probably lost to all but a tiny handful outside of Japan.

The Yo-kai Watch role playing games and their associated media empire of related toys, anime and films which started in 2013 is worth mentioning here, especially as it deals with youkai explicitly as youkai and calls them such. The setup of the player characters befriending friendly youkai and fighting evil youkai is rather reminiscent of Gegege no Kitaro, and the two franchises have in fact produced crossover content. While its popularity has declined, no new content has been produced in a while, and it never really took off in North America, it remains a cult favorite. Apparently towards the end it was more popular in Europe than in its native Japan, which I find quite fascinating.

When it comes to anime and manga, it’s difficult to pick representative examples firstly due to the large volume of works featuring supernatural themes and youkai or youkai-like entities, and secondly because so much of especially early manga and anime fandom in the West was driven by unsanctioned fan translations. So while Western audiences interested in anime and manga have been exposed to countless examples of youkai, they tend to get translated with more specific names and tend to go uncontextualized. If I had to highlight something, I would highlight Inuyasha. While the translation used mostly “demons” for youkai, there was a 2005 collectible card game that used the term “yokai”, making it a fairly early pop culture example of the term going untranslated.

The First Steps Towards English Youkai Studies

Youkai culture is of course only the other half of the youkai coin. While youkai are a Japanese phenomenon, the field of youkai studies has drawn in people outside of the country too. The full history of international youkaigaku is hidden in fragments of paywalled articles, academic compilations, theses and seminars, and this is not intended as a comprehensive history.

It is also admittedly difficult to draw the line between English academic literature about Japanese folklore and folklore studies and what are youkai studies in English, and as such the starting point of English-language youkaigaku is extremely hard to place. One can argue that things like Hearn’s non-fictional works on Japan or Percival Lowell’s Occult Japan constitute the first exposure the English-speaking world had to the supernatural side of Japan. Ever since then, there’s been a steady stream of translations and analyses of Japanese folklore in English.

If I had to name a starting point for English-language youkai studies, I would perhaps choose 1975, when the translation of Tono Monogatari came out. This seems to have created a kind of mini-lineage of English research of Japanese folklore studies, popular imagination, fantasy, youkai and what they could tell of Japanese society. In 1985, a group of scholars from Cornell University produced a collection of essays and critiques on Kunio Yanagita. Around the same time, graduate students in University of Chicago began to research Japanese minzokugaku under the guidance of Harry Haroutunian and Tatsuo Najita. Harotuunian himself ended up writing about Yanagita’s relation to earlier Japanese nativism in 1990. In 1995 Marilyn Ivy analyzed Yanagita’s work as the “uncanny other” and “return of the repressed” of Japanese modernity, and Susan J. Napier explored in 1996 how Japanese fantasy literature has critiqued, subverted and escaped the modernist paradigm.

1999 saw the publication of Gerald Figal’s Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan. Figal himself was a student of Harootunian, and his work is also related to the processes that were used to define and reinforce Japanese national identity. However, Figal’s focus is on how attempts at defining and controlling the supernatural defined the Japanese modernization process from Edo to Meiji period. Figal analyzes how culture and entertainment flourished during the mid to late Edo period, potentially as a way to make sense and cope with the ongoing social changes. The Meiji era saw the struggle to eliminate “superstitions”, yet as noted earlier in this text, Inoue Enryou ended up paradoxically preserving the supernatural through his efforts. Japanese modernity also had its dissidents, like Kyoka Izumi and Minakata Kumagusu. Figal highlights the role Kunio Yanagita had in helping to construct Japanese identity through his folklore studies, but also draws attention to how Yanagita was fascinated by all sorts of liminal figures. The project of folklore didn’t just help to create a kind of shared history, it also at times complicated this shared history. Figal concludes that rather than ever eliminating the irrational and fantastic, societies simply constantly redefine and reorganize them.

Coincidentally or not, 1999 is also the earliest year I have found a reference to a non-Japanese person contributing to Japanese youkaigaku. The person in question is Adam Kabat, who studied kibyoshi, illustrated books of the middle to late Edo period. He has written three studies on the matter in Japanese: Edo bakemono-zoshi (1999), O-Edo bakemono saiken (2000) and Edo kokkei bakemono-zukushi (2003). Kabat made the case that during the mid- to late Edo period, the term bakemono started to expand and include creatures without shapeshifting abilities. This term started to eventually even include ghosts, and can be seen as a precursor to various supernatural “strange” entities becoming rolled under the term of youkai. Kazuhiko Komatsu’s An Introduction to Youkai Culture highlighted Kabat’s work and its relation to how youkai became the catch-all umbrella term for “weird” supernatural phenomena and entities in Japan.

Michael Dylan Foster - Pandemoniums, Parades and Modes

Roughly ten years after Figal’s Civilization and Monsters and Kabat’s first work on the bakemono, Michael Dylan Foster would publish a landmark work of youkai studies in English, the 2009 book Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai. In this book, Foster offers a broad overview of how ideas about youkai have changed over time, and traces the development of the concept from the Edo period to 2000s. Foster’s approach is built upon Japanese youkai studies, and his focus on how youkai have been treated in popular culture is especially reminiscent of Kazuhiko’s youkai studies as human studies. However, while Foster indeed does study humanity - or at least Japanese culture - through the lens of youkai, there is almost an inversion of this paradigm to be found in the book. That is, by studying how Japanese culture has changed, he studies how (the idea of) youkai have changed.

Foster pinpoints a certain kind of instability and liminality as a core quality of youkai that extends to many levels. Many youkai are hybrid creatures or shapeshifters and prefer to appear in liminal times, at liminal places. However, this instability and liminality extends onto a deeper level, as youkai have been subject to an array of changing conceptualizations over the centuries and decades. The way discourse about youkai has evolved has generally not been characterized by neat and clean transitions from one era to another, but rather it seems that the various discourses about youkai continue to live side by side and overlap with each other, further contributing to their elusive, unstable nature.

The concepts of the encyclopedic and ludic mode are used by Foster to analyze how ideas about youkai have changed, and how they have been both subjects to serious research and earnest belief, but also at this very playful pop cultural representation. The encyclopedic mode refers to a fact-gathering approach, and it has been represented by figures such as the Edo era encyclopedists, Inoue Enryou, Kunio Yanagita, as well as later youkai studies scholars. The ludic mode refers to a playful approach, and it is most manifest in the various popular culture expressions of youkai. These two modes can and often become entangled, and often very defining moments in youkai history appear to be characterized by these two modes intertwining. Toriyama Sekien’s playful youkai encyclopedias, Shigeru Mizuki’s dual role as a researcher and artist and Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s mix of literature and research are all examples of this process.

The name of the book, Pandemonium and Parade forms a kind of central metaphor of the book related to the encyclopedic and ludic modes. Foster writes how youkai appear to have their origin in vague fears, which are then given an imagined shape in an attempt to name and control this anxiety. This kind of naming and shaping allows for what he somewhat humorously calls the “disciplining” of youkai, that is conceptualizing and categorizing youkai according to prevailing “disciplines” of the time. This allows for the uncontrollable and chaotic pandemonium of “things that must not be seen” to be turned into an orderly parade, which can be even enjoyed for entertainment. Yet reading between the lines (perhaps a liminal space where youkai like to dwell?), the youkai Foster writes about almost come off as having a tricksterish agency of their own, escaping and subverting definitions, and persisting from one age to another, changing along with humans, and pushing us to think more deeply and broadly about the mysterious things in the world.

Foster traces the evolution of discourse regarding youkai through four “moments” in Japanese history, the Edo period, the Meiji reformation, early modernity and the post-war era up until what he calls an ongoing “youkai boom”. Credit where credit is due, Pandemonium and Parade has been one of my major sources, and the structure of this work owes much to Foster. But as a quick recap, the Edo period saw both the emergence of encyclopedias which inspired Toriyama Sekien’s work, as well as the emergence of bakemono and youkai themed popular entertainment. The Meiji era saw debunking attempts spearheaded by Inoue Enryou, which however paradoxically solidified youkai as a category. Early modernity saw the emergence of Japanese folklore studies, which sought to preserve youkai, but framed them as tradition at the risk of disappearance. The post-war era saw the resurgence of youkai culture, new forms of youkai discourse and the rise of new youkai studies, which has led to a “youkai boom”.

Foster closes his book with an analysis on modern otaku-adjacent collector culture and its youkai-flavored manifestations as expressions of the old intermingling of ludic and encyclopedic modes. Foster has analyzes how the encyclopedic mode associated with youkai, collecting and desire for an “otherworld”, be it a nostalgic version of Japan or something else come together in the circles of youkai enthusiasts. According to Foster, the process of cataloguing, naming and placing things can generate a kind of ”doppleganger” universe. Collection becomes a form of play and art, and the point of it becomes the creation of a new context. The messy “pandemonium” of youkai and the historical context from which they emerge from are turned into a neat “parade”, turning them into parts of a single, unified context. Yet at the end of the collecting, cataloguing and studying there seems to persistently remain something mysterious to grapple with. Pandemonium and Parade is not the only book that Foster has written on the topic of youkai, and he has also written the Book of Youkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore (2015). I would describe this book in two ways. Firstly and foremostly, it is a most excellent introduction to the topic of youkai for a more general audience, and secondly it is Foster’s own entry into the encyclopedic mode of discourse about youkai.

Foster’s stated goal is to offer a book that would introduce Japanese research into youkai in a manner that would be also accessible to a general public. The book begins by defining youkai - as much as they can be defined - and by offering an overview of how youkai have been researched. Foster articulates that youkai are essentially vague anxieties given imagined forms, and offers an introduction to methods of humanities & folklore research methods. An important section of the book is one where Foster offers an explanation of the idea of folklore, and how it has changed over time. Folklore used to refer to what was exclusively seen as things of the past or tradition, but Foster offers a different definition. He works with an argument initially presented by folklorist Alan Dundes, and presents folklore as forms of cultural expression that are open to change that are practiced and expressed by a “folk”, defined by their shared interests. These interests can include traditionally perceived kinship interests too, but also apply to more modern expressions of shared interests.

From the introduction of concepts and research methods, the book moves to a history of youkai. Compared to Pandemonium and Parade, this youkai history is simultaneously more broader and condensed. It isn’t divided into “moments” like in Pandemonium and Parade, and goes over a bit larger cast of people who shaped how youkai have been thought about. After this history section, Foster writes about youkai practice. This might seem like a curious term to use, but refers to how certain people creatively engage with youkai instead of treating them as a given part of cultural heritage. Foster describes a “Youkai Culture Network”, a rhizome-like group of people who are deeply interested in youkai. Various clubs, organizations and events act as central nodes of this network. Foster identifies different elements or “dimensions” of this network, which are local, academic, commercial and vernacular. The “vernacular” element describes essentially a broad youkai fandom, engaged in activities which Touhou fans would easily identify as elements of doujin/fandom culture, including conventions, creation and distribution of art, writings and presentations, cosplay and afterparties.

The second half is Foster’s own youkai encyclopedia. He highlights a number of youkai, some very popular, some quite unknown, in an attempt to offer an “incomplete” but representative selection of youkai. Foster contextualizes each “species” or “type” of youkai he has selected, and a number of them even come with commissioned artwork, adding to the tradition of illustrated youkai encyclopedias. Foster notes that to put a youkai onto a page is to preserve it, possibly very long after its living relevance has vanished. Certain entries in his “youkai codex” are things he himself stumbled upon while doing fieldwork research, so by creating his codex, he has contributed to preservation of youkai. Foster discusses the challenges of naming and categorizing things, especially as liminal and slippery as youkai. He draws from his own experience as working as a fisherman, he compares fish and youkai. Fish have official names, but they also have local names. There can also be subtle, but meaningful differences between fish depending on time and place, such as certain fish tasting better during certain seasons. While the differences between how youkai taste depending on the season are as far as I know an unexplored territory, there are other subtle differences, as well as different names for similar entities, depending on time and place. When it comes to categorizing youkai, Foster points out that there is no single agreed taxonomy, and systems or lack thereof run the gamut. Foster himself ends up using a system where youkai are placed into kind of “ecological niches” including wilds, water, countryside, village and city and home.

Both of Foster’s books are highly recommended and quite accessible. It’s also good to remember that he isn’t only translating youkaigaku, he has contributed to it through his own research and fieldwork, as well as by applying perspectives from Western cultural studies onto the field. He is also very talented at offering personal anecdotes that contextualize and offer a lived, human touch to a topic that could otherwise be a rather dry academic exercise. Western people interested in the topic of youkai are very fortunate to have someone like Foster working with youkai.

English-language Youkai Encyclopedias

Foster’s Book of Youkai was quite likely written as a response to growing popularity, awareness and interest towards youkai in the West. This includes the emergence of the youkai encyclopedia genre in the English language. Three people in particular have been involved in this trend: Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt, who work as a pair, and Matthew Meyer.

Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt are translators and cultural commentators, who are the founders of AltJapan Co. This company produces English language versions of various forms of Japanese culture, from books to games. While youkai feature only in a part of their translation output, they have made rather notable contributions to English-language youkai culture. These include translating Kazuhiko Komatsu’s An Introduction to Youkai Culture, as well as producing a translated compilation and commentary of Toriyama Sekien’s youkai encyclopedias, published as Japandemonium illustrated in 2016.

Before doing translation work on academic youkai studies and Sekien’s classics, Hiroko and Alt made an English-language youkai encyclopedia of their own. The first edition of Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide came out in 2008, and an expanded, revised edition came out in 2012. The book offers a brief but perfectly fine introduction to the history of youkai, and a selected catalogue of youkai, illustrated by Tatsuya Morino. The book has a rather fascinating framing, being indeed a “survival guide” that highlights the ways youkai would in mythology attack people, and how people could survive these attacks. Another intriguing aspect of this encyclopedia is the rather colorful taxonomy used, which consists of Ferocious Fiends, Gruesome Gourmets, Annoying Neighbours, The Sexy and The Slimy and The Wimps. The book does have its own colorful spin on the topic, highlights how in the past certain youkai were seen as a genuine threat to humans, offers condensed information in a highly digestible manner and is generally speaking a fun and easy read.

Matthew Meyer is an illustrator and folklorist living in Japan. His work is related to Japanese folklore, and especially youkai. Meyer has been astonishingly productive on the topic of youkai, and he has produced several illustrated youkai encyclopedias. These include The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (2012), The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits (2015) and The Book of Hakutaku (2018). Compared to Youkai Attack!, Meyer prefers to use more ecological niche types of taxonomies, albeit these can include some unusual “niches” such as the Underworld and Sorcerer's Parlor from The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits. Meyer provides relatively compact pieces of information on each youkai and folkloric figure, including things like habitat, behavior, interaction and mythological origins. It’s notable that all of these books are illustrated, and considering that they push into hundreds of pages in length, they have been a substantial effort to illustrate. Meyer’s greatest contribution to English-language youkai culture is however his site yokai.com, which is a free to use illustrated database of youkai. The database has a search function, and one can also explore youkai through an interactive map of Japan. For many interested in youkai, this site has likely been the first stop, and for a good reason.

Overall, while youkai remain a niche interest in the West, the English language culture sphere now enjoys both high quality academic youkai studies, translations and commentaries of foundational works of youkai culture as well as accessible, illustrated youkai encyclopedias.

With this rather extensive look into broader youkai culture and history now over, it’s time to finally look at how the Touhou Project fits into this broader picture.

Touhou Project as Folklore and New Youkai Mythology

So where does the Touhou Project fit into the history of the youkai? I would argue that Touhou draws very broadly from youkai history and culture, including scholarship regarding youkai. There are also more specific references to particular people or works related to youkai history. The clear influences to highlight are Lafcadio Hearn, Yanagita Kunio, Shigeru Mizuki and Kyogoku Natsuhiko. While it’s not possible to fully reconstruct some kind of “youkai history of Touhou”, as I am unsure if ZUN himself could disentangle all of his influences, it is possible to highlight these specific influences, as well as see how broader cultural throughlines have influenced Touhou. Youkai culture and research are all tangled with each other across time and space.

Touhou Project stands in a curious place when it comes to how it represents youkai. It mostly discards traditional appearances, and largely removes youkai from their historical context and instead puts them into the other world of Gensokyo. By choosing to portray the youkai as human-like, more specifically as mostly young women, Touhou on the surface level has more to do with the bishoujo and character moe trends than youkai history. Especially the pc98 era of Touhou games drew more from these trends and contemporary popular fantasy than anything else.

However, as time has passed and Touhou has become more about youkai and kami, this human-like portrayal which extends to how the youkai act and communicate has ended up doing something perhaps unexpected. Whether intended or not, this re-humanizes youkai, as certain historical youkai were based on ostracized, maligned or othered groups of people. As the arguably most well-known and popular modern youkai scholar Kazuhiko Komatsu has highlighted this human element of youkai, it is possible that to some extent this humanization of youkai has become a conscious choice. Another possible influence of Kazuhiko is that at times youkai in Touhou appear to have a kind of social role, such as Suika gleefully participating in Setsubun as a kind of playful opponent, and how Hieda no Akyuu defines human society in Gensokyo through their opposition to youkai.

Even though Touhou does away with traditional depictions of youkai for the most part, ZUN’s methodology for creating his new visual representations has qualities that are reminiscent of very old layers of youkai culture. The way ZUN uses visual symbolism to give new shapes to old entities is at times similar to how Toriyama Sekien and even older visual artists working with youkai used visual symbolism to give shapes to strange or intangible phenomena. The intertextuality of Touhou is also very reminiscent of Sekien’s work, even though the two are drawing from vastly different cultures of literature and creative works.

By mostly discarding the traditional portrayals Touhou diminishes historical ways to conceptualize and perceive youkai, and instead offers its own narrative where youkai are entities defined and shaped by belief. The most likely source of influence for this is Mizuki Shigeru’s ideas about how youkai and deities try to “knock on the brains” of sensitive humans in order to gain an (imagined) shape. Mizuki stated that this process required sincere belief in youkai. It was highly likely that ZUN would have been influenced by Mizuki here, and considering he was born in 1977, he would have been about just the right age when the 1985 Gegege no Kitaro anime aired. Touhou however appears to take Mizuki’s ideas further, as basically everything seems to be shaped by belief in Touhou. An important part in the ontology of Touhou Project is that naming things gives them a shape, and this is an extrapolation of how in youkai studies and culture it is thought that naming a youkai is crucial for the appearance of a new youkai. After all, a youkai without a name is just a scary story…

The influence of Mizuki also probably extends beyond the idea of youkai requiring belief to exist. As Mizuki saw youkai as something that is free to change in depiction over time, this could have served as a conscious motivator for choosing to depict youkai in a human-like way. Touhou’s ambiguous relationship with factual reality, power of narratives and how the Outside World appears to be portrayed as our present-day reality likely owe much to Mizuki. While ZUN doesn’t - as far as we know - tinker with the fictionalization of his personal history as much as Mizuki did, it might have influenced his choice to call himself the “Grand Priest of Hakurei Shrine”, representing himself (or acting in!) a kind of mediumistic role between an otherworld which has a strangely slippery and liminal relationship with reality as we know it. Both ZUN and Mizuki also seemed to have a handle on the strange, otherworldly qualities of the mediascape of their respective time periods, and this is also likely an influence from Mizuki. Overall, Mizuki appears to have influenced many broad narrative (mediumistic?) choices and worldbuilding in Touhou.

ZUN has a habit of interpreting more modern weird phenomena as youkai-related and shaped by belief. Partly this appears to be him following the footsteps of Mizuki again, as Mizuki was more than ready to consider certain entities from urban legends proper youkai. As we previously learned, urban legends and the youkai-like entities associated with them became targets of serious folkloric research thanks to efforts started by Noboru Miyata. In a sense ZUN is making fiction from a point of view that is more inclusive to modern phenomena as youkai than the view articulated by Kyogoku Natsuhiko where the popular understanding of youkai refers to exclusive old and folkloric entities and phenomena. What is especially fascinating about Touhou is how far ZUN is willing to take this idea, and he also treats the UFO phenomenon as something caused by youkai, or at least manifesting from similar mechanisms as youkai do. There have been both Western and Japanese scholars who have noted similarities between UFO lore and older folklore, so while this idea is perhaps not novel to ZUN, I don’t know if others have explicitly conceptualized UFOs as a type of youkai. If there have been such people, they have likely been fairly fringe and haven’t left a trace to mainstream youkai studies.

Liminality is a big part of Touhou, starting from the Great Hakurei Barrier that divides the magical world of Gensokyo from the Outside World that is ruled by “common sense” that makes youkai and deities impossible (though apparently some youkai do survive in the outside world). The arch-youkai Yakumo Yukari has the power over “boundaries”, which was an object of interest to Noboru Miyata as something central to the youkai phenomenon. Touhou has multiple references to Japanese beliefs regarding twilight times as a time for meeting youkai. Recognizing and analyzing the liminal qualities of youkai has been perhaps the single largest throughline that cuts across youkai studies.

The idea of an “other world”, be it a more traditional spirit world or a “nostalgic another Japan” as the folklorist Michael Dylan Foster puts it has been an important part in culture related to youkai. This of course has influenced the idea of Gensokyo, a separate spirit world that is separate yet somehow intertwined with our world. These other worlds and in particular their relation to mountains are another big throughline in youkai studies, but before this I would like to highlight a perhaps unexpected, perhaps unlikely influence on the depiction of Gensokyo that might be influenced by youkai studies. If we think about it, what would be the logical counterpart to “Outside World”? An “Inside World”, of course. This links back to debates about the role of human cognition and imagination when it comes to youkai, from Inoue Enryo writing about the mysteries of mind and matter, to Minakata Kumagusu’s kokoro - koto - mono triad, to Mizuki’s ideas about the role of human imagination and Nakazawa Shin’ichi’s idea of youkai appearing between consciousness and the natural world. And in turn, these ideas are connected to a much more archaic layer of Japanese traditional beliefs and Buddhist thought. Touhou has enormously old roots under its surface.

Gensokyo can of course also be very much interpreted as a “nostalgic another Japan”, something which is of course tangled with human imagination. There is an argument to be made that this trend of thinking about the spirit world as a “nostalgic another Japan” started with Yanagita Kunio. I would argue that Yanagita’s work has been a major influence on Touhou. There are several rather direct references to Tono Monogatari in Touhou Project, from the Mayohiga to zashiki-warashi and Passing on Through the Dendera Field at Night from the Ghostly Field Club CD. The influence of Yanagita and Tono Monogatari aren’t limited to just a bunch of references though, but also appear in core elements of the worldbuilding of Touhou. These elements include the Youkai Mountain, and how prominent tengu, kappa and yamanba are in there. Many of the numinous tales of Tono were set in the mountains, tengu and kappa feature in many of the stories, as well as more ambiguous “mountain people” of which the yamanba could be seen as a subtype of. Yanagita himself was of course early on interested in yamabito, mountain people. The role of tengu as snooping journalists might also be a roundabout influence from Yanagita, who thought they acted as a kind of unseen moral authority and enforcers in early rural communities. When it comes to the influence of Tono Monogatari on Touhou, ZUN has at some point stated that he personally imagines Gensokyo to be in “Shikoku or Tohoku”, and Tohoku is where Tono is located.

Besides Tono Monogatari, the works and the person of Lafcadio Hearn are also directly referenced in Touhou. He has in some capacity served as inspiration for the characters of Maribel Hearn and Yakumo Yukari. A more diffuse influence is the various Hourai terminology in Touhou. While this Japanese name for the Penglai, island of immortals, is part of broader Japanese folklore, Hearn wrote of Hourai in Kwaidan, equating it with Japan itself. Considering how well-beloved Hearn is in Japan, it is extremely likely ZUN has been influenced by him beyond simple references.

Lafcadio Hearn isn’t the only thing of Western origin that has influenced Touhou though, and while there is a lot to unpack here, I would like to focus on Western fairytales being historically conceptualized as tales about “Western youkai” in Japan. One of the most common entities in Gensokyo are fairies, their depiction being of Western origin. There are also multiple characters who are of either Western origin or appearance. The most intriguing of these are the Scarlet sisters. It is a very strange parallel that Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was the start of a new era for Touhou and featured an incident started by blood-drinking foreigners, and how Meiji era was the start of a new era for Japan, and featured incidents caused by rumors of blood-drinking foreigners. At times “foreigners” in Japan have been conceptualized as youkai, and this element is also reflected in Touhou.

Kyogoku Natsuhiko is the fourth person related to youkai history and culture whose works are very directly referenced in Touhou. As mentioned before, the character of Morichika Rinnosuke seems to be a reference to the character of Akihiko Chuuzenji from Kyogoku’s popular book series. The two characters are of course very different from each other, but both run a store for used goods and act as repositories of knowledge - Rinnosuke is just a much humbler and goofier character than Chuuzenji is. While Touhou doesn’t really treat youkai as sublimations, there are moments in the print works when investigations into mysteries reveal them to be driven mainly by human beliefs - although in Gensokyo they tend to manifest in very concrete forms. As such, a certain kind of “belief engineering” is sometimes needed to bring the situation under control. The desire to explain youkai as “mysteries of the mind” and as scams and swindles of course goes all the way back to Inoue Enryou, and even something as fantastical as Touhou has not escaped the long shadow of his debunking program. The process of “changing the landscape of perception”, arguably started by Inoue, fictionalized and psychologized by Kyogoku, finds a strange and magical manifestation in Gensokyo, where true miracles spring forth even from fakery if it is believed earnestly enough.

Touhou Project is fascinating because it spends so much time and effort elaborating on what exactly youkai are and how they function, instead of presenting them simply as a given but mysterious part of the setting. This isn’t unique to Touhou, but what makes this even more fascinating is the ambiguous status of Outside World in Touhou. There are fourth wall breaks in the series, and certain characters and events are treated as if the Outside World where they came from into Gensokyo was just our world. Thus while Touhou is ostensibly a work of fiction and ZUN’s intention might have not been to comment on mysterious phenomena outside of fiction, the ever more blurry boundaries between Gensokyo and Outside World seem to be making commentary on the role of narratives and belief in our world too. This increasingly ambiguous status between Gensokyo and Outside World has also been used for political commentary, which at times has been very divisive within the fanbase. As this text has hopefully shown, using youkai for social commentary is of course extremely traditional.

There’s an element to youkai as social commentary which can be seen as an attempt at charting out alternative histories, not necessarily in the sense of speculating about what might have happened, but as means of probing alternative ideas about history. These include histories written from a non-hegemonic position, history of the “losers and underdogs”, something which folklore studies have perhaps partially captured. Touhou represents a fantastic (and arguably “bizarre”) alternative history of “losers and underdogs”, but one which is not “ruled by the magic of the dead”, but rather involves fantastic narratives of the power of belief, of old deities abandoning Earth yet constantly meddling in its affairs, of stories that humanize monsters and put women onto the center stage. And much like alternative views on history will not go away, the supposedly phantasmal entities of Gensokyo have persistence and power to assert their own existence.

Another rather traditional element of youkai culture which Touhou also has are the youkai encyclopedias. While the games themselves tend to relegate encyclopedic elements to accompanying text files, the print work Perfect Memento in Strict Sense is essentially a Touhou in-universe equivalent of a youkai encyclopedia. What makes it interesting is that its in-universe author Hieda no Akyuu is an unreliable narrator, despite having perfect memory that stretches over 1200 years into the past through several reincarnations who remember all their previous lifetimes. The arch-youkai Yakumo Yukari served as the in-universe editor of the text, and beyond her tampering there are erroneous and dubious statements, as well as cases where youkai are described as being much more powerful than they actually are. So in other words, perhaps more than being traditional youkai encyclopedia or a simple who’s who catalogue for fans, it’s a commentary on how even “perfect recall” can become muddled by lack of information, misunderstandings, power interests and favors to subjects of Akyuu’s encyclopedic work.

Ultimately Touhou Project uses youkai to tell many different types of narratives which are sometimes highly contradictory and vary greatly in tone from one work to another. While this has sometimes been seen as a sign of ZUN being a bad writer from a Western POV, I argue that this is intentionally meant to be in line with forms of Japanese storytelling that go back to at least Ryonosuke Akutagawa’s In A Grove, and to reflect the complex and contradictory narratives regarding youkai in Japanese culture. There’s a case to be made that rather than being fiction about youkai in themselves, Touhou is fiction about youkai history and culture, fiction about youkai narratives and how this power of belief and narratives extends beyond the topic of youkai.

If I have understood correctly, there is a bit of a disconnect between Touhou fans and fans of more traditional youkai, and Touhou is not necessarily considered to be part of “youkai culture” because it does away with historical representations and context. On the other hand, there are Touhou fans who are also interested in more traditional youkai, and fans of traditional youkai who also like Touhou. It’s just that the diagram representing the overlap of these two interests is not a single circle. I’m of course biased, but I do consider Touhou part of youkai culture, and a deeply fascinating one at that for how it tries to establish a kind of ostensibly fictional theory of everything for weird phenomena that would neatly connect phenomena from prehistory to present day under the framework of the power of belief and narratives. Touhou is also strangely insistent on smuggling this narrative out of its fictional confines by constantly blurring the line between fiction and reality.

It’s of course possible to analyze the Touhou Project from a perspective of broader otaku studies and folklore studies. Micheal Dylan Foster’s analysis of contemporary youkai culture as a form of collecting-and-play that removes youkai from historical contexts certainly describes elements of ZUN’s creative process. Especially the pc98 era strikes me more as a gleeful collage of whatever fantasy pop culture was striking ZUN’s fancy at the time with mostly rather tenuous connections to broader folklore and mythology. Over time Touhou has however grown into something much more mythological and folklorical. It has to be remembered that from the very beginning it was not just a single person’s dream, rising from and being part of the extremely liminal grey zone of doujin culture. It was through doujin culture that Touhou exploded into popularity, and it is this doujin spirit which has inspired innumerable artworks and countless secondary creations. Over time Touhou has become kind of like a new folklore, both how collective and free to change it is, and how it has laid roots that connect it to older expressions of folklore, acting almost like a portal to older forms of Japanese culture, a “nostalgic other Japan” that is still somehow relevant in the modern times.

The “folk” of Touhou enthusiasts is these days of course international, and the international status of Touhou is thanks to a passionate group of people who put great personal effort into translating the games. Their fateful decision to leave the word “youkai” untranslated has had great consequences, one of which is this document. Interestingly enough, the international fandom exists as a kind of liminal zone of its own, because there are no official translations of any of the games. So in some way, the globalization of Touhou has somehow managed to amplify certain liminal qualities of Touhou.

So in summary:
Touhou Project is deeply intertwined with youkai history and culture, being perhaps best seen as fiction about youkai culture and youkai studies rather than historical youkai in themselves. The way Touhou Project removes youkai from historical context while maintaining the connections allows them to once again change and assume new narratives and new relevance. Gensokyo can be read as a “nostalgic other Japan”, yet its fluid relationship with the Outer World implies that this otherworld has some relevance to the Outside World. Touhou follows several strong throughlines of youkai culture and history, including liminality, the role of human cognition and belief, the complexity of narratives and youkai as tools for social commentary. Lafcadio Hearn, Yanagita Kunio, Shigeru Mizuki and Kyogoku Natsuhiko are the clearest direct influences on ZUN, but Touhou reflects youkai culture in a way that transcends the influence of these three people. Whether this is ZUN diligently studying youkai culture and history or picking up influences more organically is hard to say. Touhou Project partially intersects with contemporary culture of youkai enthusiasts, as not everybody appreciates how ZUN has done away with traditional representations and contexts of youkai. Touhou however contains connections to history, and ZUN’s intertextuality and habit of making symbolically charged visual representations harkens back to Toriyama Sekien and even older layers of youkai culture. The way Touhou is a doujin work gives it a rather folklore-like character, which is further amplified by its connections to older forms of folklore and beliefs.

There’s been a big throughline in this text that you have probably noticed, and that is of course the liminal qualities of people who get involved with youkai. So, is ZUN a liminal person? I would say that at least to an extent, yes. He was born and raised in a rural setting, yet moved to Tokyo to study. While it’s hard for me to give an assessment of the “collective psyche” of Hakuba during his childhood, based on Carmen Blacker’s The Catalpa Bow, elements of a much more “magical” culture remained surprisingly strong at least up to the 1960s in more rural parts of Japan. ZUN has stated he likes to draw inspiration from his childhood experiences, and it’s entirely possible he might have been exposed to stories about spirits, deities, mountain mystics and exorcisms in his childhood. Yet ZUN was also fond of very modern forms of entertainment (video games) and self-expression (electronic keyboard) in his childhood and youth. While much of his life is unknown, things like these do offer some hints that he might have qualities of a person between places and times, the kind of qualities displayed by many others who have become deeply involved with the topic of youkai.

I am of course hopelessly biased in my assessment, but I do find Touhou to be extremely intriguing and charming in how it manages to capture such huge swathes of youkai culture and history in such a fun and effortless way that still manages to say something about topics relevant to lived reality here and now. It would have been immensely easy for ZUN to treat Gensokyo as an escapist wonderland, and of course many of the fans of the series treat it as such. Yet in-universe people who wander there, especially those who have ended up there through self-destructive means, are politely returned to the Outside World. Whatever relevance Gensokyo has, it is something that can be experienced here and now. Perhaps this relevance is the fantastically diverse, creative and productive global community that has sprung up around Touhou, a folk engaging with a new folklore that transcends time and space.

And if one reads between the lines (a liminal space, favorite habitat of youkai) and is willing to indulge in a flight of fancy which gives youkai their own agency, has Touhou Project not been an unfathomably successful charm offensive which has allowed in a sense youkai to write their own history and reassert their own existence, not as relics of past, but something which has relevance to this day and can teach us about the power of our beliefs and narratives? Has it not allowed some “losers and underdogs” to escape their confines and to be seen again? Has it not humanized entities which were once dehumanized? Has it not called us out to the liminal and mysterious borderlands where our preconceived notions about the world can dissolve and be reconstructed from a new perspective? If youkai emerge between human consciousness and the natural world, if tools are the “second natural world”, wouldn’t youkai emerging between human consciousness and the “third natural world” of computers, of vast communication networks, of immense repositories of history, of new creative methods and mediums, would not this emergence perhaps look something like Touhou Project..?

Even if you are not willing to engage in such a flight of fancy, I hope this text has been helpful in contextualizing Touhou as part of a much deeper and broader historical continuum than many would realize at first glance. I believe it is these deep and broad roots and its shared nature which have helped to sustain interest in Touhou and draw in new people year after year, while many other franchises have simply fizzled out. I hope that this attempt at articulating these connections will serve to inspire people in their own creative and research efforts, and further contribute to this deeply fascinating, ever expanding new folklore.

Further reading:

Michael Dylan Foster - Pandemonium and Parade (2009)
Michael Dylan Foster - Book of Youkai (2015)
Kazuhiko Komatsu - An Introduction to Youkai Culture (2017)
Gerald Figal - Civilization and Monsters (1999)
Hiroko Yoda & Matt Alt - Japandemonium Illustrated (2016)
Ken Wilbur - When Tengu Talk (2009)