Greetings yokai fans!
As I am fighting off a cold and some food poisoning, I am wondering how many of these little guys I have inside of me right now! But painting has been helping me to forget the discomfort. Hopefully you can enjoy these without having to feel their effects!
This post was made possible by the generous support from my Patreon backers. If you like yokai and want to learn more, please consider pledging $1 per month to support my work.
Greetings yokai fans!
I’m still battling jet lag after landing in Japan earlier this week. Most of this week has been spent house-hunting, registering with the city, getting my phone & accounts in order, and that kind of boring official stuff, but I have managed to squeeze in some painting time to work on these two guys.
The text these are from, the Harikikigaki, is an old book kept in the Kyushu National Museum. It details the human body, the five elements, and how they related to sickness. It’s based mostly on Chinese medicine and philosophy. I’m now working with a couple books based on the Harikikigaki that I didn’t have access to in the US, and since online sources only cover a handful of these “bugs,” I’m excited to get to do a little deeper work with more of them. Hopefully some of the upcoming ones will be new to the eyes of even the most dedicated yokai fans!
As you’ve seen with the previous parasitic yokai posts, I’m grouping them into pairs and trios based on shared traits. In this case, Koseu and Oozakenomushi are on the same page because they are both alcoholic bugs! Both of these guys live inside you and love sake, and of course cause you to drink too much. I really love the Koseu though, because not only can this bearded worm-bug speak, but it has a funny little umbrella protuberance on its head which blocks medicine, making him very hard to get rid of!
There will be another bug painting towards the end of this month, and sketches for that coming soon! I don’t yet have a proper studio space set up, so I’m squeezing in work whenever and wherever I have the chance.
More soon!
This post was made possible by the generous support from my Patreon backers. If you like yokai and want to learn more, please consider pledging $1 per month to support my work.
Today’s yokai continues the theme of the week: aquatic yokai.
I painted this yokai earlier this year at the request of one of my Patreon backers. He had found it in the book Yokai Museum, and asked me to explain more about it. Yokai Museum is a cool book showcasing some of the collection of yokai scrolls and paintings belonging to Yumoto Koichi—yokai researcher, professor, and former curatorial director of the Kawasaki City Museum. This particular yokai exists solely in his collection; it appears only on the Bakemono tsukushi emaki, a yokai scroll painted in 1820. What’s interesting about this scroll is that it contains a lot of yokai which don’t appear anywhere else in folklore. Most likely they were entirely made up by the artist. However, since he didn’t give any explanation text along with his illustrations, we can only speculate about these yokai. I wish we knew more, because the illustrations in that scroll are fantastic!
A lot of yokai work is like that—guesswork. Usually it’s not too hard to get a general idea of the yokai’s concept, because so many of them are puns or plays on previously created yokai. Of course, it helps to have a bit of knowledge of other yokai, the author’s personality, and the context in which it was written. That’s not so hard with Toriyama Sekien’s yokai, because he had a very distinct sense of humor. But with this particular scroll, we don’t have much of that, so we have to rely on the names.
Shihofuki pretty much literally means “salt sprayer,” and judging by its appearance, we can picture it leaping out of the water and spitting salt at passing boats. Maybe it is the creature that sprays you with water when you sit too close to the edge of a boat.
I really love this yokai, partially because it is so adorable, but also in part because of its mysterious nature. People often ask me to elaborate on a yokai’s “powers” or “abilities” as if they were creatures in a video game with specific abilities. But yokai can not be so well-defined. They are by their very nature and definition mysterious. They exist in the spaces that we don’t know and don’t understand. Their whole appeal is their mystery. When you define them too much, they start to lose their mystique, and the very essence of “yokai-ness.” Shihofuki, and the others for which we have literally no information at all, will always remain ill-defined, and so will always be excellent examples of true yokai.
Click below to read about shihofuki on yokai.com:
Shihofuki
The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons show opened up last Friday, and it’s been a great success so far. Everyone’s reactions have been very interesting — from kids insisting that they aren’t scared while gritting their teeth and refusing to look anywhere but at the floor, to adults doing pretty much the same thing. I’m really enjoying meeting fans and hearing what they have to say about the book. One family brought in their tattered copy for me to sign. Their kids love it so much they take it everywhere they go, and it looked like it could have been 20 years old instead of only a couple of months.
Here are a couple of articles about the show. The first one is from Urala, Fukui prefecture’s monthly magazine. They got my website address wrong (.com instead of .net), but oh well. The article looks nice anyway, and it’s an honor to be in Urala:
Urala, August 2012
On the first day of the show, a reporter who really loves yokai came from the Fukui Shinbun to take some photos and write an article. He was squirming and making faces while reading each yokai description, and letting out yelps and shouts. But he stayed for an hour and came back again later in the day. He said really enjoyed the show, and he wrote a great article to go with it:
Fukui Shinbun, July 28, 2012
If you haven’t come to the show yet, please do! I’ll be there every weekend and sporadically throughout the week until August 16th! | 福井の情報誌URALAさんでも紹介されました！
Urala, August 2012
福井新聞で「百鬼夜行展」の紹介をしてもらえました！
Fukui Shinbun, July 28, 2012
In Japan, summer is the season for scary things (unlike in the US, when horror revolves around late fall and Halloween). Summer is when the new scary movies come out, when ghost stories are told, and when creatures from beyond are said to return to our world. The idea is that being scared chills your body and helps you beat the summer heat, but this also has more ancient roots going back thousands of years — the same roots that lead to the superstitions of the dead returning to our world and the boundaries of the spirit world being weaker during the Obon holiday.
As such, summer is the perfect time to talk about yokai! And in the spirit of keeping everyone cool, I’m having a gallery show featuring illustrations from The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons next month in Fukui City.
The show will feature a broad range of yokai, from the funny and cute, to the weird and creepy, to the downright terrifying. If you can make it to Fukui city this summer, definitely come check it out!
Hyakki Yagyou, 7/26-8/16 @ Space Oichi
The full dates of the show are July 27 until August 16, 11 am to 7:30 pm. The location is Space Oichi, Apple Building 2F, right behind Seibu and above Seatle’s Best Coffee and Theatre Cinque. Hope to see you there! | 日本では、夏といえば何か怖いホラーの季節のイメージがあります。（アメリカではハロウィーンの時期ということで遅めの秋がホラーシーズンですからちょっと違いますね）夏にには毎年新作のホラー映画がでてきて、怪談話もあちこちで聞かれるようになります。死者が蘇る時期でもありますね。夏の暑さ対策にはもってこいです！
と、言うことで・・・夏です！妖怪の季節がやってきました！涼しくなりたい皆さんに朗報です。私の本「The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons」の妖怪たちの展示がスペースおいちさんで開催されます。
Hyakki Yagyou, 7/26-8/16 @ Space Oichi
展示は7月27日から8月16日まで、時間はAM11時～PM7時30分までです。フェニックス祭りをはさんで展示が行われますので、お祭りに来られた際には是非立ち寄って見てください！
場所は福井市中央1-17-1アップルビル2Ｆです。妖怪たちがあなたを待っていますよ！
I love history. When my mind wanders, one of the things I constantly go back to is imagining different worlds if history had been different. You know, like if you could go back in time and give Julius Caesar a modern chemistry textbook, or warn the American Indians about the crap the Europeans are trying to pull. Japan has an amazing and rich history, and riding my bike through town usually ends up with me daydreaming about different time periods here (a little dangerous perhaps). Particularly here in Fukui prefecture, where the modern world has just barely taken a foothold, there are so many places where the land is untouched by foreign influence or the modern global culture. It’s easy to get lost in one’s imagination.
Historically, Fukui was a very important military and cultural center of Japan for many centuries. After the feudal period its power waned considerably, but in its heyday it was one of the top population centers in Japan. Sadly, though, that history is mostly buried here. All of the castles have been leveled and paved over, the aqueducts filled in and turned into streets and real estate, and most of it has been forgotten even by the residents.
Fukui castle is one of the sites that almost brings tears to my eyes when I think how much history has been squandered. Currently the prefectural capital and largest city in the prefecture, Fukui used to be a rural swampland called Kitanosho. In the late 1500’s a castle was built here, and soon afterwards war came. The first castle was burnt down after 8 short years, and in 1606 a new castle was built at a nearby site. The whole city was designed and developed into a paragon of a castle town. Moats and canals were dug all over town separating it into many districts, walls and gates were erected all over for defense, and walled samurai towns sprung up. Looking at the old maps of Fukui city, it looks like it must have been completely impregnable.
Although the town was never taken after that, a fire destroyed the main keep in 1669 and it was never rebuilt. The innermost walls remained, as did the noble’s houses on the castle grounds, though, and it continued to be an important castle town until the Meiji Restoration. Sadly, the remaining walls and palaces were burned down when Fukui was firebombed in World War 2. A few years after the city was burnt to the ground by bombers, a huge earthquake struck and re-leveled the city once again. The stone walls of the castle still bear the marks of that earthquake. During the second reconstruction, the cityscape was changed and it lost its identity as a castle town. The aqueducts and moats were paved over with cement and a lot of important cultural heritage was lost. While other cities on Japan reconstructed their castles and turned them into parks and tourism centers, Fukui erased its past, even going so far as to build a hideous government building on top of the remains of the castle palace.
Today the city is expanding, and as it grows and new construction takes place, workers are constantly finding old walls and remnants of the castle town. Thankfully, some work has been done to restore these artifacts when they have been found, and there are plaques scattered about the city wherever a historical remnant has been uncovered. Whenever I run into one of these I stop for a while and try to picture what the city could have looked like if the people in charge of reconstructing the city had had a little more foresight (and hindsight) about preserving their history.
A few years ago, a minor reconstruction at the castle grounds took place. One of the rotting wooden footbridges was reconstructed into its original, beautiful form. On the day it opened, I went to visit it, and it was just superb. Even though it was only a bridge, the smell of the new timber and the authentic reconstruction of the ancient building stirred my imagination. I decided I wanted to paint a view of what the town might look like if the castle had never burned down, and if it had been preserved properly.
I started this painting two years ago and got about halfway done when I hit a big roadblock: I couldn’t find any reference of what the castle looked like! I thought about making up a new facade for the castle based on the other castles I have visited, but that just didn’t seem right. Each castle is unique, and that wouldn’t be fair to Fukui castle or the castle I would have copied. I had to put the painting on hold until I could accurately reconstruct it.
For the past two years I have visited libraries, history museums, and done countless image searches trying to build up a database of images I could use to reconstruct the castle. Every now and then I would find a goldmine. One store was selling postcards with pre-WW2 photographs of the town. I could finally reconstruct the outer walls! At another store I found a few old woodblock prints with images of the castle, printed back when the castle was still around! But sadly the perspective was way off and it was hard to get an accurate measuring from them. I did a lot of research and discovered a whole lot about Fukui’s history as well — not just the castle. It was like unfolding a mystery that was hidden all around me; in the street names, the rivers, under the streets, and the property lines remnants of the old castle town were still evident. From one of the paintings, I learned that one of my friend’s apartments was actually built right on top of one of the old gateways into the city!
A scale model of Fukui Castle I stumbled upon while climbing Mt. Asuwa. Who hides such a beautiful piece of artwork in a field behind a parking lot on top of a mountain??
A pre-war photo showing the walls of Fukui castle
Photos showing various shots of old Fukui
A very old painting showing the castle before it burned down
A diagram of the main keep located on a plaque outside of the castle ruins
3D digital recreation of Fukui Castle
Finally, I discovered a website that created some 3D images of old castles, and lo and behold, they recreated a shot of Fukui castle! It was the final bit of reference I needed to be able to reconstruct what the castle might have looked like. I spent the better part of this week putting together my references and sitting down to finish this two-year-old painting, and here is the result. The only part I was unable to faithfully recreate is the gatehouse beyond the bridge, as none of the references I found were able to give me a good image of it. So I did my best to recreate what it may have looked like, based on other castles’ gatehouses.
Fukui castle, seen from the south, during cherry blossom season (click for a larger version)
In one week, I will be moving back to Echizen city after spending a year here in Fukui. Even though Echizen is only 30 minutes away from Fukui, I’m especially happy that I was able to finish this painting now, rather than later. I feel like I can present it now, saying thank you to the city that has struck my imagination so strongly. (After all, after I return to Echizen I’m going to resume obsessing over that city’s own rich, forgotten history.)
The Gangster
It’s been a busy month, what with studying for the JLPT, organizing things for the move, such as shutting off the utilities and turning them on at the new apartment, and packing things up. I really haven’t had that much time to paint (hopefully I can make up for that with ample painting time starting next month). I did manage to get one done this month though: a new chicken, The Gangster!
I recently ran a Call of Cthulhu game set in 1920’s Boston and NYC, and the final game had a pretty fun car chase/shoot out with a bunch of cultists/bootleggers/gangsters. I had such vivid images in my head after that I really wanted to paint a gangster, so I sketched out this chicken one day and spent this week painting it. I didn’t use any lemon yellow this time so it didn’t have any trouble drying. On the other hand, though, as it’s a pretty dark painting, it was really hard to get the colors and values right in the scan. They’re pretty close to the real image, though the bricks on the wall are just a bit bluer than in the real painting.