Qualities of Youkai: Folklore vs Touhou Project
This will be part of larger entry about youkai and how Touhou Project presents them and draws inspiration from studies into youkai, youkaigaku. This particular section draws heavily from two books by Michael Dylan Foster: Pandemonium & Parade, which I wrote a review of, and Book of Youkai, which I find to be a bit more accessible, and which I recommend highly. However, this is not simply a shortened presentation of ideas represented by Foster. Rather, I felt like a certain set of qualities related to youkai emerged from the texts, some which were only very implicit as written by Foster. The most interesting quality of youkai, their "continuumness" is an example of something that is only written about in the context of folklore about youkai, but not youkai themselves. Another quality that remains rather implicit in Fosters writing is the way many youkai are associated with uncleanliness, misplacement or other taboo topics.
I decided to publish this is a separate thing first for couple of reasons. First is that I think this does also work as a self-contained introduction, and is easier to digest than the tens of pages long affairs my writings tend to turn into. Secondly, I am trying a more "modular" approach to writing, which I hope takes off some pressure to me. Thirdly, this segment was extremely insistent on being born, and fighting back felt useless. I hope you find this interesting and that it helps you put Touhou Project more into a context. Youkaigaku seems like a very worthwhile field of study, because the same kind of processes - or perhaps entities - which created historical oddities and monsters seem to keep on generating present day manifestations of them.
- Emi
Youkai - More than Monsters
The term ”youkai” itself dates back to at least the 800s. In Shoku Nihongi, it’s mentioned that a ”youkai” appeared at the imperial court and a purification ritual had to be performed afterwards. It’s quite unclear what exactly this youkai was, but as it was something that warranted a purification afterwards, it was obviously something unwelcome. It however took until the Edo period (1603-1868) that youkai became the word of choice to describe all sorts of unexplained and strange occurrences and creatures.
The word itself is written with two kanji, 妖怪. The second kanji simply means ”mysterious”, but the first one has multiple meanings. It can mean bewitching, calamity, but also attractive. So a youkai is a ”mysterious calamity”, or ”bewitching mystery” or ”attractive mystery”. Perhaps these multiple potential meanings bake in a kind of unstable nature to the youkai on the level of language. These unstable, liminal qualities that are subject to interpretation are arguably a defining feature of youkai.
In the West, youkai have been variously translated as things such as spirits, phantoms, goblins, fantastic beings, and numinous occurrences. The most common translation however seems to be simply “monster”. While the Western idea of monster, particularly the historical context for it, does overlap with the concept of youkai, it isn’t quite an exact match. In contemporary Western understanding, monsters are seen as abnormal, physical creatures that are grotesque, dangerous or at least frightening. While there are certainly grotesque, dangerous and scary youkai, not all of them are defined by such qualities. When it comes to corporeality, youkai were historically seen as being spirit entities, though in later times the idea has in some cases become entangled with Western-style cryptozoology or study of ”Unidentified Mysterious Animals”.
There is however a quite interesting overlap between the old historical concept of monster and youkai. The word monster comes from the same root as ”to demonstrate”, and in Roman times appearance of monsters was regarded as an omen. This belief persisted quite long into Christian times. Certain youkai were regarded as omens, or then delivered omens themselves.
In fact, it’s an incomplete picture to view youkai exclusively as entities. Historically, youkai was a term that was applied to all kinds of mysterious happenings that were not attributed as being miracles of divine origin. These included all kinds of strange, mischievous and malicious occurrences. Historical examples could be things such as mysterious sounds heard in your home, waking up to find your pillow moved or getting an unexplainable wound without apparent cause.
Michael Dylan Foster, who has written several articles and two books about youkai, shared a modern example of a ”youkai event” that happened to him. While he was doing fieldwork, he attended a local festival. The next morning he woke up to find that the television in the house was staying in had turned itself on without an explanation. Foster does not attribute any explanation to this event, monstrous or not, but rather uses it as an example of a strange occurrence that could be conceptualized as a ”youkai”.
Foster presents the case, based on Japanese studies into youkai, that youkai are essentially strange events, unexplainable occurrences and vague anxieties that are given an imagined form. Often the work of single artists or storytellers has shaped public imagination over what certain youkai should look like, as well as given a form to what would otherwise be an intangible occurrence. This process of naming and shaping is seen as important parts of a process of ”becoming a youkai”. An artist Foster worked with for illustrations on his Book of Youkai commented that ”without a name a youkai is just a scary story”.
This process of naming and shaping is not only a historical one, but one that continues to this day. The emergence of monstrous figures from urban legends can be seen to be part of this, and some of such figures have explicitly become called youkai. It’s also possible to coax out what are the modern strange occurrences and vague events by asking the Japanese to intentionally imagine new youkai. When done to university students, such experiments tend to yield youkai related to university life and public spaces. A very common, interesting example was students imagining a seat in a train that nobody wants to take as being occupied by some kind of dark presence.
Youkai as an Umbrella Category
Youkai are best understood as an umbrella category that contains many types of beings under a single name. One can make an easy biological analogy here: the category of “insect” includes a tremendous amount of different species which humans regard differently in different circumstances. Before youkai became the dominant catch-all term for strange creatures and events, the Japanese used a wide range of terms to describe such things. Some of these became supplanted by the term youkai, while others became specific types of youkai.
An early term first documented in the Heian period (794-1185) is mononoke, or mono no ke. It appeared to be a general category for mysterious and frightening experiences. These could be spirit entities, including ones conjured forth by great human emotions, but also a more abstract, suspicious, unstable quality of things that made them frightening and weird. It has been speculated that ”mono”, which simply means ”thing” in modern Japanese, used to refer to abstract things in the past. The ”ke” in this word is the same kanji as the ”kai” in youkai, and together it would mean something ”strangeness of things”. Philosopher Thomas P. Kasulis writes that in modern Shinto context, mono refers to a ”changeling quality” that ”moves among the forms of ghosts, monsters, humans and animals” that is especially apparent in cases of spirit possession. So perhaps a way to understand mononoke is a strange manifestation of this quality.
Oni is another old term for unexplained and strange, especially malevolent creatures and phenomena. The meaning of oni is something like a demon or an ogre. These days the term is strongly associated with a very particular type of creature, but before their image solidified, oni appeared to be much more nebulous, and it was thought that not all people could even see them. They were blamed for all kinds of misfortune, including plague epidemics. It was also thought that humans could transform into oni through becoming consumed by powerful negative emotions, such as lust or jealousy. We will go into further detail of oni later on, but the important thing here is that they were not always perceived as they are these days, and the term used to be more general and encompassing.
An example of how oni used to be a more encompassing term is the hyakkiyagyou, a night parade of monsters. This word includes the kanji for ”oni” in it, so in essence it was perceived as an oni parade. The oni of these parades came in all kinds of sizes and shapes. When Kyoto was the imperial capital, the inhabitants seemed to take this procession of monsters which was said to take place at certain dates quite seriously. It was said that even looking at this parade could invite death. It is therefore with certain irony that over time this became a popular subject of picture scrolls. The parade was connected with the night to the point where certain depictions explicitly show the oni scattering when sun rises. There’s also a kind of class element to certain stories of these parades, such as one where only a nobleman is able to see the oni and needs to take precautions against it. Perhaps the lower classes were perceived to be so oni-like themselves that they did not need protection from them. Overall, the night parade seems to have been perceived as a kind of breaching of boundaries and an inversion of the normal, the wilds where oni where thought to live pouring into urban areas.
Another example of proto-youkai invading what should have been solidly part of the human world are tsukumogami. They are essentially household items that have come into life. This ties into the belief that items that are old enough develop a soul of their own. Often the amount of hundred years is given, but this is generally understood to be shorthand for ”a long time”. Starting from the Kamakura period (1185-1333) onwards, they became a quite prevalent form of strange creature in Japanese culture. On some level there is something comical about these creatures, but on the other hand they seem to bring the monstrous right into the home. Material objects coming alive and terrorizing humans seems very much like an inversion of the usual state of affairs.
As these older terms show, changeling qualities were often associated with monsters in Japan. The terms bakemono and obake which became popular during the Edo period, roughly in parallel with youkai, especially highlight these shapeshifting qualities. Written with the kanji for ”change” and ”thing”, bakemono emphasises the shape-shifting power traditionally attributed to creatures like foxes and tanuki. Not all bakemono were shapeshifters though, and it was a general term for all kinds of strange, anomalous and supernatural creatures. In certain cases it could be perhaps conceptualized as a creature that doesn’t shapeshift but rather has been shape-shifted.
Yurei, commonly translated as a ghost, are these days considered a particular type of a youkai. Their most noteworthy quality is of course them being associated with a deceased human being. Ghosts in Japan are commonly associated with either lingering attachments to life, or an unexpected and traumatic death. Essentially for some reason or another, the human spirit lingers in the material world when it shouldn’t. It has been noted that there is certain degree of divergence between folkloric (ie. Presented as factually happened encounters) and dramatic (fictional) depictions of ghosts. The folkloric ghosts are frequently almost indistinguishable from living humans. Often accounts of encounters with ghosts feature shock and surprise over the realization that one has been dealing with a ghost all along. The dramatic ghosts are clearly distinguishable from humans, such as wearing funeral clothes, being extremely pale or having no feet. Often, rather than lingering in the world, they are beings that have come to the other side but returned for some reason.
The concept of kami overlaps with certain types of youkai, and in fact the ”gami” in tsukumogami is phonetically shifted reading of kami. A common example are kappa, who were variously feared as troublesome youkai, but also worshipped as water deities. Another example is the kodama, a kami residing in an old tree making itself known being found in youkai catalogues. Kitsune are associated with the deity Inari Ookami, and historically there appears to have been at least alleged kitsune cults. Often the perception between a kami and youkai came down to location and time. A family might worship a water spirit as a kami in a place where the river helps with irrigation, and curse it as a youkai in a place with drought.
As kami were traditionally thought to have two different sides, a co-operative and a rough side, the rough side can in many cases come very close to youkai. In fact, sometimes these rough aspects were directly called oni. In Buddhism too, there are deities that are both helpful and fearsome. For those not in the know it would be easy to mistake for example the fierce Fudo Myoo for a malevolent entity. Youkai and kami are also related in another way, as there are also theories among youkai scholars in Japan that certain youkai are essentially ”degraded” or unworshipped kami, memories of earlier deities or religious practices that were abandoned or demonized by newer forms of culture.
So how did youkai become the catch-all term for strange creatures and mysterious phenomena? It’s a process involving serious encyclopedic work, early Japanese popular culture as well as efforts at debunking, explaining, rationalizing and integrating them that arrived with modernity. It wasn’t really until the Meiji period (1868-1912) and the rapid modernization associated with it that youkai became the dominant term. During this time, the need to define what was superstition and what was rational, what belonged to the past and what could be brought into the future led to scholars adopting youkai as an umbrella term for strange creatures and phenomena. Essentially, youkai came to mean “the unexplained” that should either be explained away or suppressed as superstition. Japanese attitudes towards the youkai have since changed, but it remains an umbrella term that encompasses unknown, strange, monstrous, frightening and surprising things.
The Qualities of Youkai
We now have the broad outlines of youkai as a concept: it is a broad umbrella category that contains many types of strange, unusual or frightening creatures and occurrences. In the present day sense of the term, a crucial part for something to become a “youkai” is giving it a name and an (imagined) shape.
It’s time to take a closer look at the qualities of what make youkai what they are. The qualities presented here are what I would call high-level qualities, and they are based on writings of Michael Dylan Foster, who has written about youkai and youkai studies in English. There are likely other ways to conceptualize youkai, ways that would highlight other aspects and diminish others. There have been for example various attempts to treat youkai as if they were biological entities, and look at them through things like “habitats” and “behavior”. Some of the qualities presented here are more explicit in Foster’s presentation of youkaigaku, and others more implicit. Not all youkai share these qualities, and some have stronger manifestations of particular qualities than others.
Among the most notable qualities of youkai are that they are liminal creatures. They appear to be fond of appearing at twilight hours and dwelling in liminal places. Such places include the edges of towns, mountains between villages, rivers between rice fields, tunnels and crossroads. Certain animals associated with or thought to be youkai, such as foxes and tanuki, perhaps gained this reputation from them sporadically appearing near human settlements, but not being part of the human world.
As we have seen earlier, liminality plays an important part in Japanese culture. Where Shinto divides territories into sacred and profane, youkai lurk on the thresholds, as uncanny presences between different realms. Japan’s mountainous geography also creates a strong sense of divide between nature and the human world, of “here” and “there”. This has likely allowed in part liminality to remain important in Japanese culture. There is also a temporal quality to the liminality of youkai. They seem to become (at least culturally) more prominent in transitional periods of time, and some of them seem to prefer appearing to children undergoing puberty.
Another liminal quality that youkai have is that they dwell between fact and fiction. It is unclear to what extent people believed in youkai from the Edo period onwards where they started becoming subjects of popular culture. A common attitude towards youkai has been described as half-belief, half-doubt. Foster calls this cognitive resonance, where two unresolved contradictory beliefs co-exist in a life-enriching way. Reports of alleged youkai encounters have persisted to this day, and where youkai pass into fantasy, new strange creatures and phenomena emerge, though they may be viewed through cryptozoological or ufological lenses. Strange occurrences and reports of them challenge the everyday perception of reality, and thus beyond being liminal creatures, youkai have the power to take humans to a more liminal state of being where the truth is more unclear and malleable.
As youkai are liminal, they are also strange, abnormal and even othered or foreign entities. A youkai encounter is an event that does not belong in the everyday order of the world. In older times, when more of various phenomena was attributed to youkai or spirits, this was perhaps more in the sense that youkai did not belong to the everyday social order. Thus encounters with certain animals or even with certain people could become conceptualized in terms of youkai. Certain youkai are thought to have been based on othered or liminal groups of people.
An example of this process is the tsuchigumo, which went from a Yamato ethnic slur against natives to literal “earth spider” youkai. Legends of yamanba, mountain witches, were quite possibly influenced by instances of very real women living outside of established communities. Another example is the one-eyed hitotsume-kouzo. Historical methods of metalworking in Japan often led to smiths losing one of their eyes, as they would peek into hot kilns through a peephole, exposing the eye to damaging heat and infrared radiation. Smiths were regarded with a mix of awe and suspicion, and occasionally attributed magical powers due to their metalworking ability. This could have led to legends about one-eyed youkai. Another group of people who seems to have inspired youkai are Buddhist monks. Their status apart from the rest of society as well as ability to move between communities in times where most people lived in a single community would have made them kind of liminal people.
Themes of disfigurement and a dehumanizing transformation into a monster through tragedies is a feature of also modern youkai lore. When it comes to the abnormality youkai today, the abnormality has become of a more supernatural type, as division between natural and supernatural has also emerged in Japanese culture. To encounter a youkai these days would be all the more terrifying today, as it constitutes a breach of everyday perception of material reality and what belongs in the realm of fiction and what belongs in the realm of reality.
Youkai are broadly speaking “foreign” in the sense that they do not fit in the everyday realm of experience, be it social or material, but some are in a more conventional sense. A number of youkai were essentially imported from China, while some were based on exotic animals. An extreme example of a foreign youkai traveling from far abroad is the ninmenju, a human faced tree quite possibly based on the wak-wak tree that Alexander the Great allegedly spoke to, traveling from the Middle East to China and finally Japan. Western culture has contributed to, if not how youkai are perceived, then at least to modern Japanese popular imagination regarding the supernatural and fantastical.
As has already been implied, youkai are often shape-shifters, elusive and associated with illusions. Some youkai have been attributed with very direct abilities of shape-shifting and illusory bewitchment. Classic examples are kitsune and tanuki, but also badgers (mujina) and river otters (kawauso) were attributed with such abilities. Others have subtler deceptive and transformative qualities. Examples of these are the nopperabo who are revealed to be faceless upon closer inspection, the rokurobi whose heads detach when they sleep, and the later-day kuchi-sake-onna who reveals her mouth to be a terrible wide slit when she removes her mask. Some youkai cause illusions of less threatening but still weird nature, such as the “bean washer” who causes the sound of beans being washed to sound out near rivers.
An element related to the shape-shifting and shape-shifted qualities is that certain youkai are very clearly unusual events which have been turned into unusual creatures. The term youkai is nowadays strongly associated with creatures that have a visual depiction, but it used to be also associated with strange events with no apparent creature as a cause. The role of various artists in turning youkai from strange events into strange creatures has been instrumental. Examples of these include Toriyama Sekien turning yanari, strange sounds heard at home into little goblins hammering a house, and Mizuki Shigeru turning nurikabe, the sudden appearance of a wall on a road into a block-like entity with limbs and eyes.
However, it appears that broadly speaking humans tend to attribute agency and intelligence to the world at large. This tendency seems to emerge all the more strongly when something unexpected and strange happens. Letting imagination to illustrate the perceived perpetrator is simply the next step - that is, unless youkai have an ability to somehow compel people to generate such depictions. It wouldn’t exactly be uncharacteristic of creatures associated with illusions.
While not all youkai share these qualities, some are associated with filth, out of place things, death and even perversion, that is to say, taboo things. They can be seen as creatures often associated with things that people are averse towards or which are perceived as disruptions from normal order of things. Filth and out of place things can be seen as being interrelated, and the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that what humans perceive to be dirty or unclean is ultimately misplaced matter. Soil in the garden is not dirt, and it being brought inside the house is what makes it dirty. While there are very real hygienic arguments to be made about many types of dirt, this view is one to think about in relation to youkai. An example of a youkai associated with filth is the akaname or scum-licker, who Sekien depicted as licking an old bathtub. There are also youkai associated with toilets who fit into this category of dirty youkai.
An example of a youkai associated with out of place things is the “pillow shifter”, who moves around pillows while people are sleeping on them. There is a case to be made that all youkai are in some sense “out of place”: suddenly something that should not be there, is there. This breach of normalcy is of course related to their quality of strangeness. It’s also something that is highly subjective of a particular time and place. An alleged kappa encounter in the Edo period would be less “out of place” than one coming from today.
The association between youkai and death comes in multiple ways. Some youkai are depicted as killing humans, even preying on them, and there are even examples of youkai tricking humans into eating other humans. Others don’t ever seem to actually kill humans, but certainly carry such a threat with them. There are also youkai who are essentially born out of death. Ghosts are an obvious example of this. There are also a number of named ghostly youkai, such as the ubume, “birthing woman”, who asks a passer-by to hold her baby. The baby becomes heavier and heavier, in some legends turning into stone. Furthermore, certain entities like tengu and oni were at times seen to be results of humans being reborn as these creatures. Death, after all, was seen as opening a path to a rebirth.
Certain youkai are associated with what could be argued to be excessive or perverse sexual qualities. An example of this is a story from Konjaku Monogatari Shu where a monk goes insane from lust, turns into an oni and assaults the empress. There are also stories of women turning into oni or similarly malevolent creatures due to jealousness or unreturned love or lust. Perhaps these uncontrollably envious demon women can be seen as the grandmother of the yandere character trope. A youkai that is depicted with excessive sexual qualities but not so much behaviors is the tanuki, who are often depicted with enormous scrotums which they sometimes shape-shift into other things. Other youkai are more of implied perverts. A hand reaching out from the toilet can be seen as intrusive in more ways than one. The kuchi-sake-onna has been analyzed as a kind of exhibitionist that despoils children. The tengu abducting young boys and virgin men and the kappa interest in the human anus can also be seen as having implied perverse qualities.
Some youkai were also associated with more straightforward sexual qualities. The kitsune are an obvious example of this, and there are many myths of men and women having kitsune as spouses. Often in these legends the marriage ends unhappily, as the kitsune becomes revealed for what they truly are. Some other youkai are depicted as having both male and female forms. These include, of course, ones based on animals, but also things like the kappa. There is at least one folktale of a male kappa showing interest towards a human woman, so attempted “inter-species” relationships were not exclusively the realm of kitsune.
Strangeness, shapeshifting, trickery, surprises, association with taboos and even sexuality - these are all things that rouse emotions, powerful and sudden ones. Foster writes that youkai can be viewed as a kind of “affective phenomena”, a process of reacting emotionally to the unknown or attributing emotional qualities to various phenomena. Emotions are certainly a feature of youkai-related mythology. While there are stories of youkai harming, even killing people, there are also stories of youkai acting in ways that seem to be aimed solely at getting a reaction out of people. These include things like surprising or scaring humans with no apparent intention to commit any substantial harm.
Youkai are associated with strong emotions in another way. Sometimes strong emotions are attributed to be a mechanism which turns humans into youkai. Resentment and attachments turn people into ghosts, lust and jealousy turn people into oni, and there were even theories of how excessive pride would cause Buddhist monks to reincarnate as tengu. These ideas are likely of Buddhist origin, where it was seen that present mental states could change humans into other entities, if not in this life, then in the next one.
Emotions also shape how youkai are perceived. The artist Mizuki Shigeru has stated that youkai in the past were depicted in a scarier way because humans lived more scary lives. Thus the human imagination was more tinted with fear. As youkai have become less feared, they have started to be imagined in different ways. Humorous, even cute qualities have become more presented. Touhou is perhaps an extreme example of “youkai moe”. Yet the more frightening depictions too persist, and even Touhou characters seem to retain potential to manifest in more frightening ways.
Foster makes the case that youkai are cultural creatures. They have always interacted with folklore, literature, art and later on popular culture. They disseminate themselves through stories, which can turn local legends into national phenomena. Human cultural creativity can also create new youkai, as artists turn strange events into strange creatures, or give shape to new strange anxieties. As Japanese culture has gone global, so have youkai. This is analogous to how biological species can spread through global trade across the world. Foster writes that youkai “reside in stories and narratives” and human beliefs. Thus as long as human culture - or at least Japanese culture - persists, youkai will also exist.
One can of course thus view youkai as an entirely cultural phenomena, but other interpretations are possible. These include a kind of form of life that uses culture as its substrate, perhaps living as information and not as a biological process. Another is that of creatures that depend on human culture to be given a particular shape. Being given a name and a shape would then allow them to act on human culture in particular ways that mere vague anxieties and strange phenomena could not. Such views are of course outside of the scientific consensus.
A Japanese take on the matter that seems to give the youkai weight and substance beyond mere human cultural whims and tendencies is the artist Mizuki Shigeru’s idea that youkai “want to take shape” by “knocking on the brains” of people who are receptive to them. This process requires belief and a kind of ”youkai sense”. By allowing one to perceive the youkai, one is able to give them shape and bring them out for the world to see. For Mizuki, for something to be a youkai was not a static, but rather something that could and should adapt to the times. This process of youkai-creation or perhaps youkai-becoming is then a co-creative one between humans and something else.
Regardless of whether youkai are a purely cultural creation or have their own existence and agency, human depictions of them are tied to the culture and symbolism of the times. For example, the depiction of oni as beings with horns who wear tiger skins is related to the direction of the so-called demon gate, the northeast direct, also known as the ushi-tora or ox-tiger direction. It was believed misfortune and demonic forces came from this direction. Some youkai seem to reflect a deeper layer of symbolism, perhaps reflecting more universal, pre-cultural anxieties. A fairly new youkai, Hanako of the Toilet wears a red skirt which is thought by some to reflect anxieties over menstruation experienced by teenagers.
Youkai have been made to interact with human culture and symbols in a variety of ways. They have been repelled with prayers, beans and baskets with holes. They have been used to warn children of the dangers of deep waters. They have been used for entertainment, advertisement and propaganda. Youkai are not unique in this respect, as humans are capable of levying basically anything in the world to be part of their culture, and in turn imbue meaning upon the world. Minerals, plants and animals can be given additional layers of meaning by humans. This is the possible origin point for certain youkai associated with animals. There is fox, the animal, and kitsune, the youkai. Certain youkai were also associated with trees or rocks which were perceived to have animal or human-like qualities. Whether there is an other side to this process that has its own say in the meaning-making process is a question that is much harder to answer.
When it comes to the cultural characteristics of youkai, they are folkloric, perhaps even kind of “doujin” creatures. Folklore in itself is a term that is both notoriously difficult to define and an extremely broad subject, perfectly fitting the equally nebulous youkai. A conventional definition would perhaps go something like this: folklore refers to the traditional beliefs, stories, customs, and practices passed down through generations within a culture. Folklore tends to be defined as forms of culture that belong to “country folk” contrasted with urban culture, and it is seen to have a relationship mostly with the past.
Foster however defines it as having a relationship to past, present and future. Folklore is a living, changing thing, and tradition can be seen as a creative continuity that extends from the past through the present moment into an imagined future. Foster sees the “folk” as a group of people who perceive themselves to be a “folk”, be it defined by more conventional ethnic or cultural perceptions, or then an interest in youkai. One way to see it is that folklore helps to create this sense of being part of a “folk”. Folklore also isn’t anymore just spoken or written tales, but also includes visual culture, modern media, urban legends and social media.
Folklore is at least in principle unofficial, noninstitutional and noncommercial. It tends to slip out of official histories. It is owned by no-one and not subject to copyright, depending on collective effort and creativity. Folklore however overlaps with official power, institutions and commercialism to various degrees. A fairly common example of such an entanglement would be “folkloric” forms of culture being harnessed for tourism by the local government. As folkloristics became a subject of its own, folklore doesn’t anymore so easily escape official histories. In the case of youkai, they have become part of countryside revival programs, as well as media franchises with substantial revenue - and copyrights.
In a sense, all youkai are entangled with human society. However, certain youkai are described as having societies of their own, and are thus social creatures. Types of youkai which have been described as having some kind of social formations are at least tengu, kappa, tanuki, kitsune, bakeneko and oni. The size and type of these societies varies a lot. Oni might be described as having small bands, while at some point tengu started to be depicted as having hierarchical societies. There’s a range of behavior to be gleaned from descriptions of these social types of youkai. Most common seems to be forms of play and leisure, such as drinking, singing or dancing. Youkai caught doing things humans would understand as work seems to be a much rarer theme. Reports from people allegedly taken by tengu describe harder to understand, possibly ritualistic behaviors. There are hints of types of kinship some youkai are engaged in, as there is a belief that during times when it is both sunny and rainy, kitsune are getting married.
Youkai are of course not only social among themselves, and certain types are described as engaging with humans in a human-like manner, albeit one often tinged with trickery or threats. There are however other types of interactions too. The romantically charged encounters that were mentioned previously are one type, but there are also instances of youkai warning or helping humans. There are even some stories where youkai simply seem to seek friendship with individual humans. Certain youkai who could be otherwise dangerous or troublesome could be persuaded, subjugated or fooled into being useful to humans. It appears that youkai occupied a much larger social niche than simply being scary creatures.
Youkai societies have of course been also used to intentionally tell stories about human society. It’s thought that the shift towards tengu being perceived as having hierarchical societies had much to do with social changes in the human society of Japan. Ryonosuke Akutagawa’s novel Kappa used a wildly nontraditional depiction of an industrial and cruel kappa society to satirize the early 20th century Japanese society. The tanuki from the Ghibli film Ponpoko are probably at least as much about human societies getting bulldozed under urban expansion as they are about youkai becoming choked out by modernity.
This entanglement of natural entities and objects and human cultural meaning-making is an example of youkai as chimeric, hybrid creatures. They are creatures that are tangled with culture, nature, the past, present and future, the real and the unreal, the unknown and frightening and the attempts at explaining and controlling these. Youkai are also often hybrid creatures in depiction, presented as collections of traits from various different animals and humans. Kappa have attributes from turtles, frogs and humans, while Tengu have bird-like and human-like features. An extreme and iconic example of this chimerism is nue, an entity with the body of a tanuki, legs of a tiger, head of a monkey, snake as a tail and the cry of a bird for voice.
Youkai also have a tendency to hybridize among themselves. The Kappa have become conflated or associated with a wide variety of different water spirits, including the once very real, now extinct kawauso, river otter. Kuchi-sake-onna rapidly acquired characteristics familiar from other folkloric entities, such as asking for sweets, a quality associated with the ame-bekko ghost. The tengu are a hybrid of the Chinese tian gou, likely referring to shooting stars, and Japanese native mountain spirits. During the era of Neo-Confucian influence, Japanese created encyclopedias which sought to connect local spirits with Chinese ones.
The forms of culture that sprung up around youkai are also of hybrid nature. Throughout history they have mixed earnest belief and conscious fakery, fear and humor, mystery and explanation, fact and fiction. The enduring but ever-changing cultural legacy of youkai also has hybridizing potency of its own, as it connects together people and expressions of culture from different eras. As Japanese culture has become a worldwide phenomenon, youkai have also become entangled with global culture, and people overseas too have become entangled in the web of youkai.
Ultimately, youkai are creatures that are part of a continuum. They have proven capable of rejuvenation, recontextualization and rebirth. A Japanese person from the Edo period and a Japanese person today might assign different perceptions and meanings to youkai, but they would likely find some common ground. I would argue that while few people these days would ever expect to run into a kappa in the wild - and I don’t know if there are people who claim they have - stumbling upon one would be all the more shocking these days. Youkai are tantalizing because they have in them potential to drag people into an “earlier” mode of experience and perception, into a world where there are once again unknowable things. Certain Japanese authors from the early modern era explored these ideas in their works.
This idea is related to the Western idea of uncanny, coming from the work of Sigmund Freud. Tied to linear historical narratives of the day, the uncanny was defined with the potential to cause people to regress into a more “primitive”, “magical” state of thinking. But perhaps this state need not be a more “primitive” one, but simply a humbler one, where one can accept that first and final answers to things are much harder to come by than people generally think. Perhaps the certainty-dissolving, narrative-bending quality of youkai can crack open a space of possibility which need not lead into panic and fear, but wonder and awe. In various times, Japanese scholars and artists have seen questions regarding youkai as paving a way towards a future. Whether this future has been one where rational inquiry shifts true mystery from folklore, or a world where people once again become more sensitive to the intangible in the world, or one where “poetry moves Earth and Heavens” has depended on the person. If nothing else, studying and appreciating youkai makes us understand how the Japanese have conceptualized the world in different times.
As older forms of youkai become regarded as things belonging to the museums or realms of fantasy, new ones seem to emerge from the fringes, demanding representation and conceptualization. There are present day phenomena which do not get contextualized as youkai, but perhaps they could and should. Strange balls of light, odd creatures and strange apparitions have after all been conceptualized as youkai in the past, and perhaps seeing them as such would be more insightful than relegating them to realms of ufology, cryptozoology and creepy posts on the internet.
At the same time, older forms of youkai also seem to be resisting the process of being forgotten and are asking for constant re-assessment and remain part of both folklore and more modern manifestations. When it comes to this side, Touhou is fascinating in many ways in this regard, but especially in how it humanizes creatures that were at least partly based on othering, dehumanization of humans. I have come to find this quite beautiful myself, and I hope more people will be able to perceive this quality in Touhou going forward. As cultures change, it becomes possible to think of old things in different, hopefully more nuanced ways.
Youkai are part of a continuum in an even broader sense. All of reality is ultimately a single, unified thing, and it is only the human perception that cleaves it into separate categories. Even things we humans tend to assign to be phenomena of our private realms, like perceptions, thoughts, emotions ultimately arise from interactions between what we perceive to be ourselves and the world outside. We think thoughts shaped by the languages we know and the culture we live, which are in turn shaped by innumerable environmental, social and historical factors. Our emotional states are affected not only by obvious things such as how others treat us and what happens to us, but also physiological factors like our blood sugar levels or how well-rested we are. Our perceptions are in constant interplay with what we perceive to be the outside world, and the kind of categories and meanings we impose on things are shaped by our experiences and the culture we grow in. Thus if one begins to closely scrutinize this whole, one would suddenly find it much more difficult to name the difference between “emotion” and “environment” and “thought” and “culture”.
While literally everything is part of this continuum, the liminal, elusive, shape-shifting quality of youkai, entangled with both the cultural and the material, serves to highlight the continuum-like aspect of reality. Foster writes that youkai being where language ends, with strange, unusual, amorphous experiences. Perhaps all spirits begin where language ends, dwelling in uncomfortable liminal border worlds, praised as deities if the experience is elating, and loathed as youkai if it’s terrifying. Perhaps part of the fear associated with youkai comes not from malevolent threats, but a perceived assault on human cognitive integrity and the stability of our world models. Perhaps this is the reason why so many cultures attribute fearsome qualities to the divine too, perhaps all spirits are harbingers of a world that is radically different from our everyday perceptions and upon coming in contact with this possibility we retreat into the most primal of our emotions.
Ultimately youkai are creatures that are subject to research. This study of youkai has historically taken on many different shapes, which will be looked at more in depth later on. What is of importance here is that youkai studies, youkaigaku, are a subject of their own in Japan. Youkaigaku remains an active field, perhaps the most active field of studying “monsters” in the world. It has also escaped the confines of academia, as there are hobbyists doing personal historical, folkloric and cultural investigations into the matter (arguably this text is part of this genre), as well as some cryptozoologically-flavored inquiries into certain youkai as potential materially existing biological entities. Mainstream academic youkaigaku however tends to be of cultural, folkloric, ethnographic nature. Its research methods include ethnography, archive study and secondary study, that is reading and understanding other studies on youkai.
So, to sum things up, youkai generally speaking possess the following high-level qualities:
- liminal
- strange, othered or foreign
- shapeshifting and elusive
- associated with misplacement, filth, death, taboos
- affective, often shocking or threatening
- cultural
- social
- folkloric, free to change
- chimeric, hybrid
- part of continuum
- subject to research
Touhou Project and the Qualities of Youkai
On the surface level, the way youkai are treated in Touhou appears quite divergent from how they are traditionally portrayed. Arguably, Touhou has been more influenced by later youkai studies and youkai-related fiction than older folkloric and legendary treatments of youkai. As such, certain of the qualities described become much more highlighted, and others subdued. Another factor at play in Touhou is that it depicts the world through a lens which de-centers humanity and what is normal in human context to some extent and offers us an inside view from a youkai society.
The youkai in Touhou are also depicted in likely intentionally complex, even contradictory ways, with the series tone being different quite a bit from one game or print work to another. If I had to offer an extremely coarse description of how youkai are treated in the Touhou project, it would be something like “a complex narrative tool for telling stories in a kind of neo-mythological mode”. What makes Touhou particularly fascinating is that this “complexity” and “narrative” are incorporated into how youkai are depicted in it.
The theme of liminality is present in Touhou. This manifests in overall qualities of youkai, on the level of certain entities having explicitly liminal qualities, and most importantly on a broader narrative level. In Touhou, youkai are described as being corporeal entities that are extremely physically resilient, but vulnerable to “spiritual attacks”. Their corporeal qualities are however quite fluid. How a youkai manifests is defined by myth, legend and public perception. Some of them are capable of shape-shifting, and some of them are hinted to be more akin to a mask that hides are more archaic, perhaps “truer” manifestation of the entity. They also appear to inhibit less corporeal realms, and can manifest in dreams and in alcohol-fueled hallucinations. They inhabit a liminal existence, at once solidly manifest in Gensokyo, yet shaped by perceptions and beliefs within Gensokyo and outside of it, at once material yet immaterial.
Beyond these general qualities, there are a number of characters who seem to occupy a liminal half-and-half existence of more specific type. Interestingly enough, most of these entities are not youkai or at least full-blown ones. These include the half-human, half-deity shrine maiden Kochiya Sanae, half-human half-phantom Konpaku Youmu and the ambiguously human yet supernaturally gifted maid Izayoi Sakuya. Other characters seem to be moving towards becoming a youkai, but have not yet arrived there. Kirisame Marisa’s status as a human magician and not a full blown youkai magician gets occasionally teased at as a plot point, which is unlikely to ever resolve, leaving Marisa a liminal character. Maribel Hearn of the Hifuu Club and the arch-youkai Yakumo Yukari seem to share a connection, and there are a lot of fan theories about Maribel somehow turning to Yukari.
Yakumo Yukari is an extremely interesting character in the context of liminality, because her power of altering the “boundary” between things seems explicitly to be based on the idea of liminality. She is also involved in the creation and maintenance of the thing that sets Gensokyo apart from the Outside World, that is the Great Hakurei Barrier and the “barrier of common sense”. Yukari is able to move between Gensokyo and Outside World with ease, and is implied to bring humans into Gensokyo at times. There are also other characters who are described as being able to move through this barrier. These include the tanuki Futatsuiwa Mamizou, and psychic Outside Worlder Usami Sumireko, as well as the aforementioned Maribel Hearn.
The Barrier and Gensokyo itself are also liminal. People, entities, items and ideas from the Outside World seem to quite frequently end up in the supposedly off-limits Gensokyo. Popular fads, fears and manias are able to manifest new things into Gensokyo. Methods for people ending up in Gensokyo are wide, ranging between dreams, botched suicides and Yukari’s whims. Gensokyo is at the same time closed and far away, yet apparently in constant interaction with the outside world.
When it comes to strangeness, otherness and foreignness of youkai, Touhou sits at an interesting place because in Gensokyo, youkai are perfectly normal and often manifest in very human-like forms. They nevertheless retain strangeness, as there doesn’t seem to be a limit to the imaginative ways that they can cause weird incidents, big or small, to manifest. From a human-centered point of view, they are also at least supposed to be outsiders of the human community of Gensokyo, yet the reality is that youkai constantly cross this line and appear among humans.
From the point of view of the humans in Gensokyo, youkai are a fearsome other, even as they frequently appear in ways that are at least surface-level human. From a broader outside-in narrative view, the youkai of Touhou come off as being quite un-othered. Touhou doesn’t quite directly comment on the historical processes that led to certain othered groups of humans inspiring certain historical youkai. What it does however is that by humanizing the youkai, it in a sense undoes this process of othering. Youkai in Touhou aren’t some incomprehensible other, but rather an intelligent form of life that might be broadly antagonistic to humans, but is intelligent and capable of compromises. Their everyday concerns and love for leisure turn out to be surprisingly similar to humans. ZUN himself has said in a Q&A session that “youkai simply means the other”, so the approach of humanizing youkai might very well be quite intentional.
As for the foreignness of youkai, this too is reflected in Touhou, with Gensokyo having some inhabitants that are of Western appearance, or Chinese origin. Much of the pc98 era cast and the inhabitants of Scarlet Devil Mansion are of foreign style. Perhaps there is some kind of commentary in literal demons and vampires appearing in Western outfits. Kirisame Marisa has assumed Western style of dress and first name. Hong Meiling and Kaku Seiga are of Chinese origin. Seiga’s servant Miyako Yoshika is a jiang shi, a creature from Chinese folklore. Yacchie Kichou, Yuuma Toutetsu and Son Biten are all based on creatures or characters from Chinese folklore and mythology.
The shapeshifting and elusive qualities of youkai are also quite present in Touhou too. While the relatively straightforward games rarely play with the shapeshifting qualities of the youkai, they do occasionally appear. A humorous one is Kaenbyou Rin first appearing as a red and black cat several times before finally revealing her humanoid form, prompting “the cat turned into a cat!” from the protagonist in one of the game routes. Another example is Houjuu Nue appearing first as an orb of light to the player.
The print works explore the shapeshifting and elusive qualities of youkai more frequently, often featuring amorphous, hard to perceive and shape-shifting entities. Print works also more often explore elusive qualities, being often small, self-contained mysteries where it’s sometimes highly unclear what exactly is causing trouble in Gensokyo. The games are more straightforward, but often in them too it is highly unclear what is causing the incident to be resolved. These reflect later youkai studies and youkai fiction, where youkai represent a kind of problem to be solved. In the case of Touhou it is less about explaining and more trouble solving.
The process of naming and shaping youkai is something that Touhou also comments on. Much like the artist that Foster interviewed, likely echoing a broader youkaigaku attitude, ZUN holds that a proper youkai that can sustain itself needs at least a name. In Symposium of Post-Mysticism a youkai that displaces TV remotes is mentioned as a type of youkai that has failed to be born. In the belief-driven ontology of Touhou, name turns strange occurrences and vague anxieties into something that can start developing an identity of its own. An older, broader cultural influence on this idea is that of kotodama, the word soul, the power of language in shaping things.
When it comes to association with taboo or out of place things, Touhou mostly steers away from directly addressing these topics. The threat of violence and death does hang around even the humanized description of youkai, even though it is implied that it really is the fear that youkai want. Subterranean Animism directly states that youkai are said to be drawn to human death, and some of the locations depicted in the games in the print works are unsanitary or strongly associated with death. The games and printworks also occasionally joke about the kappa habit of stealing shirikodama, which in Touhou is implied to be an inefficient way to acquire certain nutrients.
As for out of place things, one can certainly find such in Touhou. One can find modern artifacts, occasionally humoristically misunderstood, in Gensokyo. An example of this is the Apollo V rocket manual found in Kourindou, and children using a game console as football mentioned in Curiosites of Lotus Asia. Some of Gensokyo’s non-Japanese residents are arguably out of place, as are the occasional people from Outside World who somehow stray into Gensokyo. Sometimes this appears to be because of youkai activity, sometimes because of the same ontological mechanisms which allow youkai to exist.
When it comes to sexual topics, official Touhou works are sexless, with romance being shown very rarely in print works, and rarely otherwise alluded to. I found the very sexless depiction of kitsune in Touhou quite interesting in the light of the erotic folklore built around them. It’s entirely possible however to make psychosexual readings of certain aspects of the worldbuilding as well as the characters. Whether these were directly intended, or unintentionally surfaced, is impossible for me to say. There’s of course a great amount of erotic Touhou fanworks. Official Gensokyo might be sexless, but many fans certainly don’t imagine it to be.
There is however a very interesting taboo of its own in Gensokyo, which is understanding the true nature of youkai and Gensokyo. If the humans in there fully understood that youkai are after their fear and dependent on it, it would shatter the social balance where youkai terrify humans of Gensokyo but don’t seriously hunt them. In this sense, the true nature of youkai themselves is a kind of taboo in Touhou. There are some humans who know the truth, and in Forbidden Scrollery learning this truth is shown to be a kind of distressing initiatory experience with risk of derangement. Another taboo is people trying to “game the system” by intentionally becoming youkai, and this is infamously one of the few incidents which have resulted in someone getting killed in Touhou.
The affective qualities of youkai are at the very center of Touhou. In Touhou youkai depend on human belief and fear for their existence. They are creatures who want and need to be feared and believed in. This is possibly an extension of Mizuki Shigeru’s idea that youkai have a desire to “take a form” by “knocking on the brains” of receptive people. Whatever the origin of this idea is, I find it quite interesting because it is also resonant with certain modern Western occult ideas about spirit entities desiring human attention or emotion. It’s entirely possible but hard to prove that these ideas might have been to some extent disseminated into Japan during the “occult boom” and interest in Western esoteria. If this idea has been influenced by Western esoteric thought, then in some sense ZUN has acted as a kind of bridge between the West and East in this case.
Regardless of the origins of this idea, the affective qualities of youkai have been noted by people interested in and involved in youkai studies, with Foster going as far as calling youkai an “affective phenomena”. In a sense this affect-first conceptualization reverses the relationship between outcome of youkai encounter and their behaviors. The strange and creepy, yet often essentially harmless, behaviors become explained as fear or attention-seeking. Someone living to tell the tale of a faceless man or scythe-wielding woman with a wicked smile is not the result of a failed supernatural predation, but rather the entire point of the whole ordeal. Such encounters would provide affective energy for the entity to sustain itself. If the target of the feeding process tells the story, it could be the start of a legend, helping the entity not only acquire more affective energy, but also to solidify and spread its existence further. In a way, Touhou offers a rather compelling explanation for the bizarre, fear-seeking behavior folkloric youkai seem to quite often be involved in.
In Touhou, youkai are physically manifest in Gensokyo, but they are also cultural creatures. They are shaped by belief and perception, and work to cultivate a social order within Gensokyo that would sustain them indefinitely. Since certain youkai are depicted as being capable of traveling beyond the borders of Gensokyo, an unexplored possibility of youkai being involved in social engineering for their advantage in the Outside World exists. In Touhou, youkai are cultural creatures also in the sense that they have their own cultures, with their own timekeeping system, written languages and passed-on understanding on how one should behave in Gensokyo.
The youkai of Touhou are social both among themselves, as well as with humans. Certain youkai are more of lone wolves, while some have societies of their own. The kappa, yamawaro and tengu are examples of youkai who have established societies in Gensokyo. The industrial kappa are likely influenced by Akutagawa’s satirical novel, but they are not depicted as being cruel to each other. Rather, their activities are described as an attempt at mimicking human society. The yamawaro, cousins of kappa, in turn mimic human warfare, dressing in camouflage and engaging in play warfare among themselves. The tengu are obsessed with newspapers, and their society seems to revolve around the production - and manipulation - of information. It’s unclear where this depiction has come from. It might be an extrapolation from Akutagawa’s Kappa, a presentation of mass media as a new form of “religion” or a modernization of the tengu being historically associated with trickery.
Interactions between humans and youkai are supposed to be regulated by the unwritten inter-entity norms that allow youkai to gather fear from humans without harming them, while keeping the arrangement secret from humans, with the Human Village being supposed to be a youkai-free zone. In reality, this arrangement doesn’t quite hold up. While it’s uncommon for humans to interact with youkai outside of them being spooked by youkai, there’s examples of other types of relationships. The protagonists of the games are arguably friends with youkai, and the “extermination” or “exorcism” they are involved in seem to be more about forcing troublesome youkai - or deities - to integrate into the social order of Gensokyo. Usually this seems to involve banquets and drinking. Beyond the protagonists, the bartender Okunoda Miyoi is a zashiki-warashi, and it appears that the owner of the establishment is oblivious to the fact. Youkai in disguise interact with villagers occasionally, and the tengu peddle their newspapers to humans. Morichika Rinnosuke, keeper of the Kourindou antique store, is implied to be half-youkai, likely half-tengu, which implies there has been at least one case of forbidden love between humans and youkai in Gensokyo.
Looking from the outside in, Touhou project is of course an example of humans using youkai for entertainment and storytelling. Touhou seems to draw from multiple different styles and types of stories about youkai that have been told. There are parts of it which read as self-contained fantasy, but there is also social satire, mystery and occasional moments of logic-driven debunking. Touhou isn’t very scary per say, but it has a few darker moments to be found in it too. One thing which youkai have been used for is as a kind of visual and linguistic puns, and ZUN too has designed many characters as such. Certain characters also carry symbolism constructed in a way reminiscent of how oni became the tiger-skin clad horned ogres. While oni visualize malignant forces from the “ox-tiger” direction, certain Touhou characters visualize their cultural origins in a symbolic manner.
The way youkai are shaped by perception in Touhou is related to the folkloric, free to change qualities of youkai in Japanese culture. What makes Touhou stand out from folkloric processes (as most people perceive them) is that the youkai in Touhou take part in the process. They posture and disseminate narratives, trying to appear as relevant and fearsome as possible. So while in the conventional sense folklore is not owned by a single particular human, in Touhou humans are not the sole owners of their own folklore.
Folkloristic processes are very relevant to Touhou on another level too. The doujin culture that Touhou is part of seems like an extremely natural continuation of “traditional” folklore. While a lot of doujin culture is tangled with commercial properties but tolerated as a kind of grey zone, Touhou is explicitly a doujin franchise, free to use as long as certain guidelines are followed. While ZUN is the originator of the original creative works that form the core of Touhou, a vast co-creative sphere has risen around Touhou. Arguably this co-creative element has done a lot to popularize Touhou, giving it reach that far exceeds what would have been expected of an independently developed shooter series. The variety of secondary works is staggering, ranging from games to manga, music and even animations. The variety of different genres, tones and interpretations is also extremely diverse.
Much like “traditional” forms of folklore are entangled separate from yet entangled with institutions and commercialism, touhou too is to some extent entangled with official power, institutions and commercialism. There have been local promotion campaigns involving characters from the franchise, at least one shrine has incorporated Touhou-themed merchandise to their shrine goods, and as a videogame and manga franchise, it is of course involved with commercial activities. These have also included things like spinoff gacha games as well as collaborations with McDonalds. The creative output of ZUN tends to focus on things that are on the margins of history, but Touhou has become entangled with official history too, as its thick web of references also contains some rather substantial institutions, such as the Suwa shrine network.
In Book of Youkai, Foster described some kind of modern youkai enthusiast gathering, and it certainly seems to have a lot of commonalities with Touhou doujin events, including people sharing their creations, independently created merchandise, navigation around copyright, cosplay, music as well as partying and drinking that followed the event. Perhaps in some sense all of otaku culture operates in a kind of folkloric manner. Thus rather than the emergence of “database animals” as it has sometimes been presented, there has been a return to an earlier mode that eschews singular grand narratives for small mythologies and communal activities. To me, at least the Touhou scene seems to be like this.
Touhou also seems very much shaped by the kind of conflict between opposing forces that Foster describes, of past, present and future clashing, as well as collective and individual interests. Foster sees that this pull has defined youkai over the ages, leading to their creative re-interpretations. It is very easy to see Touhou as an example of this process, a single individual starting to make his own creative re-interpretations that then found resonance with a broader audience. But these processes also play out within the Touhou fandom, with occasional single creatives or teams making their own notable re-interpretations of Gensokyo and its inhabitants.
When it comes to the chimeric, hybrid characteristics of youkai, Touhou has some characters that display human-animal hybrid features. These tend to be of much cuter nature than the traditional hybrids. They draw from the kawaii culture and nekomimi character tropes associated with the broader otaku culture. Beyond these surface-level hybrid qualities, the corporeal yet noncorporeal, material yet culturally shaped qualities of youkai in Touhou make them into hybrid creatures.
When it comes to the tendency of folkloric youkai to “hybridize” among themselves, assuming names and qualities of each other, Touhou actually plays with this tendency. Several characters combine the qualities of multiple youkai into one. Tatara Kogasa is a karakase-obake, an umbrella that has come to life, but she also has qualities of hitotsume-kouzo, another type of one-eyed youkai, including her being a smith. Rin Kaenbyou’s appearance is based on nekomata, but she is described as a kasha, the hybridization coming from both entities being associated with corpses.
The depiction of youkai in Touhou, while divergent from folkloric forms, is still quite clearly part of the cultural continuum of how youkai are depicted and studied in Japan. Touhou might ultimately be more about youkai as subjects of youkaigaku than youkai as actors in folklore. There is a kind of implied thesis about the ontological status and how youkai act in Touhou, that their existence or non-existence is shaped by belief or lack thereof, and that they intentionally seek belief, shape and emotional charge from humans to perpetuate their existence. Had ZUN chosen a career in academic youkaigaku, perhaps he would have ended up making this thesis explicit, and bridged Japanese youkaigaku with Western ideas regarding our folklore, spirits and monsters, which Touhou seems to do in a fictional context. Blending entertainment, folklore and youkaigaku within fictional work is not unique to Touhou, and for example Mizuki Shigeru has also acted in a mode that blends fiction and folkloric studies. Touhou has nevertheless contributed to this continuum between fiction and research.
In a way Touhou represents a kind of Grand Unified Theory of Weird with its belief driven-ontology. It’s not only youkai that demand human attention, belief and affective energies. Gods too are dependent on belief, losing their ability to act in the world, “dying” if this belief is not forthcoming. The difference between a god and a youkai, explicitly stated in Touhou, is that youkai seek fear. Gods cannot simply intimidate people into believing, as it would turn them into youkai. Naming and shaping of things is implied to give shape not only to youkai or gods, but to everything. Junko’s power of “purification” has been described as the ability to essentially un-name, un-shape things. It’s quite interesting that she is the only character who has been described as breaching the rules of spellcard combat, attempting to use this power of “purification” in a lethal way.
If taken to its logical conclusion, the belief-driven ontology of Touhou is a quite radical view of reality where perhaps everything is shaped by the conscious act of naming, shaping, believing and giving it attention and energy. Touhou puts human cognition into a privileged position, yet it’s also a world where humans can become ghosts, demons, saints, celestials and youkai. In such a world, what even is a human, a ghost, a demon, a saint, a celestial, or a youkai? Just a particular named and shaped manifestation of a broader spectrum of existence?
Finally, just like folkloric youkai are subjects to research, so too are their Touhou counterparts. This has mostly been in the form of fans digging into the historical, folkloric and mythological inspirations of various Touhou characters. There has also been research into the overall worldbuilding of Touhou. This text is very much part of these efforts, though perhaps coming from somewhat different angle than ones done for the sheer love of historico-mythologico-folklorical influences.
When it comes to academic research, as far as I am aware, there has not been much research done on the Touhou project, at least not in English. It is somewhat marginal compared to very big Japanese intellectual properties. While there are some rather interesting intersections between Touhou and folklore, as well as Touhou and religious institutions, it hasn’t yet earned the kind of attention that for example otaku tourism driven by Lucky Star has in the English academic world. The single example of a Touhou-related academic content that I am currently aware of is “Yōkai in Tōhō Project: Monsters, Modernization, and the Death of Japanese Spirituality” (https://scholar.valpo.edu/cus/967/), a presentation in the spring 2021 Symposium on Research and Creative Expression. Sadly the contents of this presentation are not publicly accessible.
The current lack of research however makes the Touhou project an unexplored territory for the academia, and as the contents of this site have hopefully shown, there is much to be studied about Touhou and the social and cultural phenomena surrounding it.
