Yokai

The word covers an enormous range — the term is closer to "the uncanny" than to "monster." Yokai are mostly not evil. They are mostly inconvenient: they block your path, they mislead you, they make a noise in an empty house, they steal small things.

Three kinds worth knowing

Things that were once objects. A tsukumogami is a tool that reaches a hundred years old and acquires a spirit. There is a yokai that is a paper lantern with one eye and a tongue, and one that is an abandoned umbrella hopping on a single leg. This category is a moral instruction about not discarding things carelessly, delivered as a joke.

Things that explain a sensation. The nurikabe is an invisible wall that appears in front of a night traveller so that they cannot go forward or around. Anyone who has been lost in the dark knows the feeling precisely, and the yokai is the name for it.

Things at the water's edge. The kappa — a river child with a dish of water on its head, which it must not spill — is the most famous. It drowns people. It is also, unmistakably, a way of telling children that the river is dangerous.

A yokai is usually a piece of local knowledge with a face attached. That is why they are regional, and why they were disappearing until someone wrote them down.

Why they nearly vanished

Yokai lived in oral tradition, told by grandparents in villages, and tied to specific places — this bridge, this pond, this stretch of road. Twentieth-century urbanisation, electric light and television broke that chain almost completely.

What saved them was, ironically, mass media. The folklorist Yanagita Kunio collected them academically from the 1910s; Mizuki Shigeru then drew them, and by drawing them fixed what they looked like. A yokai that had been a description in one village became an image the whole country recognised.

They are still working

Yokai are visibly alive in modern Japanese culture — in games, animation, films and advertising — and children still learn them. The difference is that they are now national rather than local, and they look like Mizuki drew them.

Sakaiminato is where you can see that transition physically: an ordinary fishing town whose main street is lined with the bronze results of one man's cataloguing.