A lot of yokai have recurring themes to them: prostitutes, priests, young boys… these are not coincidences. These different classes of yokai are all there for reasons. In some of the cases, they are commentaries on societal problems that Toriyama Sekien and other yokai-ologists saw in Edo period Japan.

Another commonly recurring theme is having one eye. A number of yokai have this trait, ao bozu, hitotsume nyudo, hitotsume kozo, yamajijii, dorotabo, ippondatara of course… the list goes on and on. So where does this trait come from. Why are there so many one-eyed gods?

The most common theory is pretty interesting, and it is related to yesterday’s topic: just what makes a yokai a yokai and not something else? Scholars believe that many one-eyed yokai may actually be former mountain gods who were forgotten over time and corrupted into yokai.

You may have heard that Japan is the land of 8 million kami. That’s not really an exaggeration either. There are kami everywhere. Every river, every tree, and yes, even every mountain has its own local kami. Of course beliefs change, populations move, and oral traditions evolve, so those kami may change over time, or be forgotten, or be replaced by other kami brought in by migrants. And what happens to the old kami that get demoted? Maybe they turn into yokai.

Ippondatara’s story is particularly interesting because not only is he attached to a very specific place (a mountain range located between Nara and Wakayama) but he is also attached to a very specific time (December 20th). Why this day? Well, it is very close to the winter solstice, when fall ends and winter begins. Perhaps that was a holy day related to some long-forgotten god of those mountains between Nara and Wakayama… In that area, children are warned to stay out of the mountains on that day, and it is considered unlucky. Why? Maybe the change from bountiful fall into cold, dead winter was associated with death or misfortune in some old local superstition? Changes in the season are also strongly associated with yokai and evil spirits. In some area, kappa are said to transform from water spirits into mountain spirits (maybe even gods?) during the change from fall to winter. Perhaps that day was associated with kappa migrations? Perhaps ippondatara picked up parts of that legend over time?

All of this is purely speculation. Nobody knows for sure, and that is part of the appeal of folklore. There is this hint, just a faint whiff of a truth buried in there somewhere. We can look at the oral traditions and remnants of ancient legends passed down, with all of the changes, additions, and subtractions applied over the centuries, and try to figure out what, if anything, it means. But looking at all of these points; the date, the one eye, and the similarities between other yokai, it seems impossible that there isn’t some connection doesn’t it? Ippondatara must fit in there somewhere. Of course, we probably will never know… but then, that’s the fun of it! If we knew for sure, he wouldn’t be a yokai would he?

Today’s yokai is really fun because not only is it imposing and awesome, but it is one of the rare creatures with a longer legend behind it, instead of simply a few sentences in one of Toriyama Sekien’s books. But first, an interesting question: what exactly is a yokai?

I ask this because invariably, when a famous creature like Yamata no Orochi, or kirin, or tatsu, etc. are brought up, someone is going to say, “I thought XX was a bakemono, not a yokai!” or “Wow, XX is a yokai? I had no idea!”

It’s a strange question, because how do we really classify made-up creatures? Where is the line between yokai and yurei, or yokai and kaiju, or even yokai and monster? And even though it seems strange to pick nits over imaginary creatures, it is something that we have been doing for a long time—at least as long as we have been classifying real creatures! Even back when Toriyama Sekien was writing his books, he was developing something like a Linnaean taxonomy for them.

Generally, if you ask any number of yokai-ologists (is that a thing??) to define a yokai, you will get as many definitions as you have people. Most of the time, the similarities are just too vague to truly iron out. One story might seem to draw a clear distinction between certain characteristics of a particular yokai, but then another story might blow those distinctions to pieces.

For example, some people might argue that a kirin is a kami, not a yokai… but then in some places, kappa and hyosube (to name a few) are worshiped as kami and even have their own shrines. Does that mean kappa are kami as well? Many ghosts are also worshiped as kami, such as the famous Tenjin-sama, who is the god-version of the yurei Sugawara no Michizane. So is he not a yurei? Some might say that yurei are the spirits of people, but then are onibi ghosts or yokai or something else? The vagaries are endless, and it becomes impossible to pin down a truly authoritative definition.

And then, of course there are the similar terms bakemono, mamono, mononoke, and so on… where does it end?

So what most foklorists do is use the term “yokai” as a very vague descriptor. Is a kirin a kami? Yes, and it is also a yokai. Same goes for yurei. Sugawara no Michizane is a yurei, a kami, a yokai, and a person. Some people, like Mizuki Shigeru for instance, will even go so far as to say that Dracula, the Wolf Man, even hobgoblins and bugbears are kinds of yokai!

Personally, I prefer to put a few limits on my use of the word. I don’t include Western monsters in my definition of yokai. I also tend to exclude Asian monsters that don’t have a strong Japanese character to them. For example, many many yokai were imported to Japan from China. Plenty were even just copied out of Chinese bestiaries. I would consider them to be yokai; however, I would not consider their native Chinese versions to be yokai. There is a similar term in Chinese—yaoguai (which is pretty much the exact same word)—which might decribe them perfectly well, but I try to keep a strictly-Japanese definition.

I also don’t include modern pop-culture creatures as yokai. Pikachu, Usapyon, Godzilla and other kaiju, and so on do not fit my definition of yokai. This is a much more arbitrary decision, as it is hard to draw a line. After all, I consider kuchisake onna, hanako-san, and teketeke to be yokai, even though those are very modern urban legends—younger than Godzilla, even. But they are missing something… a “folk” quality to them. Even though plenty of yokai were created by Edo period illustrators for commercial purposes, something feels different about those. There is a quality to them that is different from Pikachu and Godzilla. Perhaps one day, in a few decades, kaiju and pokemon will join the ranks of yokai… but not for a while in my book anyway.

I also tend to exclude a lot of kami. Animal kami I feel fit the description of yokai very easily. Plenty of people consider kitsune, for example, to be kami. But they are also yokai… However, gods like Amaterasu or Izanagi certainly don’t feel like yokai. There is a more official, ceremonial, or even mythical aura to them as opposed to a vengeful ghost-god like Sugawara no Michizane. Gods that were part of the early mythology of Japan don’t have the same essence as the later additions. This area is much harder to draw the line at… The gods that tend to be “yokai-like” are the gods that have a strong folk lore to them. For example, yokai that were enshrined in a local village, or folk heroes that were deified like Taira no Masakado.

So what does that leave us? My broadest definition of yokai would be “a creature or phenomenon from Japanese folklore.” Not very descriptive… But to clarify it a bit further, it can include gods, ghosts, unexplained occurrences, and monsters. It can also include foreign imports, as long as they pick up a uniquely Japanese identity. Gods/kami can be yokai, but usually are not. Legendary beasts straddle the line between kami and yokai, but I think they can be safely included in both.

Yamata no Orochi is a good character to bring up because he straddles many of these definitions. He is a mythological beast. Some even call him a god, and he interacts with gods in the creation myths of Japan. Yet he is also truly monstrous, and a lot of folk lore surrounds him. (He doesn’t really fall into the yurei sphere at all, so we’ll have that be.) I think that we can safely say that he is all of the above; legendary beast, monster, god… and definitely a yokai.

Of course, there is no “right” answer to this question. I take some comfort in the fact that most of the professors and yokai-ologists I have heard tend to agree with my own definition, more or less. But I have no real argument with those who disagree either. At most, it can become a fun dinner-table discussion. If you are having dinner with the right people, of course!

Click on the image below to read about Yamata no Orochi. Or, get my book The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits and keep Yamata no Orochi on your bookshelf!

Today let’s look at another child yokai, though this one isn’t nearly as creepy as last night’s. This yokai is quite interesting because it fits a few different themes: 1) it is a child, 2) it is a fireball, and 3) it is related to oil.

All three of those are very common recurring themes in Japanese folklore. Children, because why not? Children can be creepy, and if there is one thing Japanese horror knows how to do it is creepy children. They have a charm that most people quickly fall for, so how would you know if a child were evil? It would be very difficult, because most people would just refuse to see it out of natural love for children.

Fireballs are another very common theme. Hi no tama is one of the broadest genre of yokai, containing a huge number of varieties. Perhaps this is because there are a lot of natural phenomena that are create eerie lights; bio-luminescence from fish, decaying plant matter, fireflies that blink on and off. And of course we notice these lights at night, when the shadows play tricks on us and our imaginations go wild.

Oil is not as common as the other two, but it is a recurring theme in yokai. We see it in abura sumashi, cats which drink oil and become bakeneko, rokurokubi which like to lick oil… Oil was a very precious commodity in old Japan. It had to be collected from fish or whales, or else pressed from plant seeds. It was very hard work, and with such a small amount of oil to be collected, it was extremely valuable. Many of the oil-related yokai were turned into monsters because they stole oil, or drank it up. The wasting of precious resources has long been frowned upon in Japanese culture, and oil is no exception.

Click below to read about the story behind today’s yokai. He comes from The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, available on Amazon.com.

Abura akago

I mentioned at the start of the month that I like to start out with a few cute yokai and gradually move in to the scarier ones. We’ve seen a couple of cuter yokai now, so today I thought it was time for a scary one. And this one definitely ranks up there with the scarier yokai!

This painting is brand new, and has not been featured in any of my books yet. It is thanks to my Patreon backers that I am posting it tonight. In fact, it was a request which came through my Patreon project. So if you like it, please consider joining for $1 or more per month. Backers get various rewards, like doodled postcards from me, art prints, having a say in what yokai I paint next, and you get to see the process that goes into making these yokai. In essence, it’s like having A-Yokai-A-Day happen year-round! So if you like yokai, you should definitely become a backer!

I won’t give away the story behind this creepy yokai on this blog. Just click on the creepy picture to read its entry on yokai.com:

Like yesterday’s yokai, today’s yokai has been featured once before on this site, years ago. I re-imagined the illustration and made a new writeup on it for The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, mainly because it would be impossible to include Tamamo no Mae without including Sesshō seki, the stone which her spirit haunted for many years.

I also think it forms a really nice little capstone on the Tamamo no Mae story—and fortunately for me, this one is totally canon, so there is no question over whether it is “real” folklore or not (as much as I cringe when I describe folklore as real or not…)

Speaking of whether certain aspects of folklore are “real” or not, tomorrow is somewhat of a big day for yokai in the US. Tomorrow, the yokai-themed TV show that has taken taken Japan by storm, Yo-Kai Watch, hits American shores via the Disney channel. Yo-Kai Watch (I hate that they hyphened it, but oh well… I’m sure the hyphen will fade over time as people get used to the seeing word) has become so popular in Japan that it has totally devoured Pokemon. Jibanyan has overtaken Pikachu as the most popular character in Japan, so I’m wondering what the reception will be like over here. Since Pokemon itself is very yokai-like, and a lot of Pokemon even came directly from yokai, it seems like Yo-Kai Watch was invented just to eat into that particular market. And so far it has done a great job.

But you “real” is Yo-Kai watch, really? There are a lot of cute characters, that’s for sure. But while Jibanyan is a nekomata and a few other characters are also recognizable yokai, there is also a large element of artistic license. Usa-pyon, for example, is something completely made up for the show. Will Yo-kai Watch end up changing the definition of the word yokai by adding new characters to the already enormous list of yokai?

While part of me is glad that the word yokai is about to become a household word in America, part of me also grumbles that these are not “real” yokai. But then, I have to ask myself why I really say that… After all, so many of what we consider “real” yokai were just creations by Toriyama Sekien and other Edo period artists. In fact, so many of these were created solely for the purpose of selling books, so you can’t even make the argument that TV shows are purely commercial in nature rather than literary, because so are many of the old yokai! I suspect that after a character has existed for a generation or two, it takes on an air of authenticity. Maybe a few decades from now, characters like Pikachu and Jibanyan will be considered just as authentic yokai as Tofu kozo and Mikoshi nyudo. So I tell myself that I grumble for no reason at all. It is a great thing that a popular TV show will be introducing children over here to the world of yokai, and if it causes them to gain an interest in history and traditional folk tales, all the better. So here’s to Yo-Kai Watch and the soon-to-come yokai explosion in the US!

As always, click on the photo below to learn about today’s yokai. It can can also be found in my new book The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits. Order it now from Amazon.com.

Whenever I talk with yokai fans, I like to ask them what their favorite yokai is. And if I haven’t done an illustration of that yokai yet, I like to add it to my ever-growing to-do list. One yokai which keeps coming up as a fan favorite, no matter which country the person is from, is Tamamo no Mae. And for good reason too! She is beautiful, famous, powerful, dangerous, and well-known. So much so, in fact, that she is considered one of the three most evil yokai in Japan!

I have covered Tamamo no Mae on my blog before, many years ago, in the form of her ghost. However, when writing The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, I decided that if the title includes “evil spirits,” I have to at the very least include the evilest spirits of them all—which is why Shuten douji, Emperor Sutoku, and Tamamo no Mae all made it into that book.

Actually, this is a blog post that I have been intending to write for a very long time—over a year now, in fact. It touches upon one of the most important parts of my work when writing these books: the research.

I take great care when researching my books. However, I don’t consider myself an academic, and my books and my blog are not scholarly works. For scholarly yokai books, I would recommend checking out the fantastic yokai works by Michael Dylan Foster. While I do include a general list of sources in my books and on yokai.com, I don’t have many direct citations in my text of where the information on each yokai comes from. There are a few reasons for this:

Firstly, I am writing for entertainment rather than research purposes, and I want to avoid falling into an overly academic writing style. My goal is to make English-language translations of yokai stories which are informative and accessible, while still really fun to read. So I try to keep the tone more like a storybook and less like a textbook.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I reject the idea that there is a “correct” version of any particular yokai out there. So many myths and folk tales on the same subject differ from each other dramatically. Some even directly contradict one another. When this happens, how do you decide which one is “right?” It’s a difficult task, if not an impossible one, and it would feel dishonest if I were to just choose the one I like the best and label it as “authentic” while dismissing the others. My yokai stories are pulled from a number of sources, both academic and historical, but also “folk”—i.e. oral tradition and popular understanding. These “folk” sources include websites, bulletin boards and forums, Wikipedia, and other places where the source is either untrustworthy or completely lost due to repeated transmission without citation. How do you choose which one of this to favor? You can’t simply favor historical sources, because the nature of many yokai has changed over the centuries, and an oni from the 1100s is quite different from an oni in the 1800s. Which one is correct? Similarly, if you only go with proper academic sources over “folksy” sources, are you really getting the essence of “folklore?” I have heard professors on yokai and Japanese folklore give amazing lectures, going into the nuances and details of yokai, their symbolism, their connection with the changing culture of the time, and so on. I have also heard just-so-stories from people who have heard the legends passed down over time. And I have read blogs collecting these just-so-stories. Can you argue that only the papers written by academics who have spend decades studying yokai are more authentic than the blog by a guy who heard the story from a friend who heard the story from his grandmother who remembered it from her childhood? Well certainly the person who has studied for decades has earned a great deal of authority, but ignoring the free and wild aspects of a story would be to strip folklore of its “folk”-iness.

Therefore, when I write, I try to blend the historical with the contemporary understanding of yokai, and the academic accounts with the popular ones, to make the most interesting and accessible story for people to enjoy. When there are interesting contradictions, I try to include them. When there are different stories that come from different sources, I try to blend them to create a single narrative. Is this academic? No, not really. But I think it is the essence of what folklore is about. I think this is what people Lafcadio Hearn, Yanagita Kunio, et al were trying to do when they began collecting and adapting oral folk tales for audiences to read.

Okay, now that my little soapbox speech about writing folklore is done, I promise it has something important to do with today’s Tamamo no Mae entry! You see, Tamamo no Mae is not only the longest yokai entry I have in my book, she was by far the hardest entry to research and to write. The problem is her popularity. While many yokai are quite obscure, this actually can be a blessing: when there is only once source, there is only one thing I have to translate! When a yokai is super famous, then every author who has ever written about it has probably taken some liberties with the story—embellishing it here and there, adding bits and pieces to suit their political or religious motivations, and so on. When you have a yokai so famous as to be called one of “the top three evil yokai of Japan” you can bet you are going to find some difficult nuances!

When I began this blog post months ago, I was calling it “mapping the geneology of a yokai.” And that is basically what I was doing when researching and outlining my entry on Tamamo no Mae. I’m pretty sure that when her story originated, she was simply an evil kitsune who cursed the emperor. But later, as her story grew, and as it moved from oral tale to written one, bits and pieces began to get added. Now not only was she a nasty fox, she was actually a nine-tailed fox. And not just any nine-tailed fox, but a particular one; this one, which came from China!

I have no idea who the first person to connect Tamamo no Mae’s legend with Bao Si’s, but it was either a stroke of genius or a careless mistake. Connecting her with another well-known yokai makes her story a lot more appealing, but it adds a whole new canon to her geneology! Because now everything that is in Bao Si’s story is also part of Tamamo no Mae’s story, and wouldn’t you know—some storyteller, at some point in history, decided that Bao Si was actually the reincarnation (or reappearance) of Daji, a famous evil spirit (sometimes she’s a fox, sometimes she’s a dragon, sometimes somthing else…) from much-more-ancient China!

So my research of Tamamo no Mae then became research about Bao Si, and my research into Bao Si then became research into Daji. Each myth became more and more vague, and with each layer of myth I undercovered, the question of where do I stop haunted me even further. I mean, the legend of Tamamo no Mae really starts and ends with her Japanese incarnation, doesn’t it? All of the myth before must have just been tacked on, right?…

Well, I thought it was settled, I would just stick to her Japan-side history… until I came across an intersecting myth when I was researching my entries on Abe no Seimei and onmyoudou magic. You see, Abe no Seimei received his book of spells which became the basis for onmyoudou as a gift from an ambassador who went to Tang China from Japan, who in turn received it from a famous Chinese wizard. And this is the part where a young girl named Wakamo journeyed from China to Japan, and later became Tamamo no Mae. Seeing the names of these same characters come up while researching totally different yokai made me realize that perhaps I was too hasty in cutting Tamamo no Mae’s entries to just her Japanese debut. So I went back and delved further.

By now, nothing I was reading had anything to do with Japan. These were Japanese translations of Chinese chronicles, and didn’t contain many details about the connection between Daji and Bao Si. I didn’t want to include that in Tamamo no Mae’s story if it was too apocryphal or couldn’t find any connection at all… Even while there is no such thing as “true” when it comes to yokai, there has to be some kind of line to what we consider canon.

Finally, I found a Japanese legend that said after Daji was run out of Shang China, she fled to a land called Kosala where she married a demon king and together they feasted on babies and basically ran their country into the ground. Hmm….. okay, that was interesting, but what??? Surely there had to be some other mention of this character. The legend was far too wild to just end there. After weeks of searching in vain, I finally found a different legend that matched the story very closely: a fox spirit married the king of Magadha, convinced him to eat babies and kill priests, and was responsible for the downfall of the kingdom. The parallels were really strong, but where was the demon king, and was it Magadha or Kosala?

Eventually, I figured out that whoever wrote down these stories was probably as confused as I had become… Magadha and Kosala were both kingdoms in India, and their territories overlapped. The demon king had to be King Kalmashapada, who in Indian folklore is a rakshasa and who is known as Hanzoku in Japanese. Other Japanese legends referred to Hanzoku as having the legs of a tiger, and there was the connection! The confusion, I discovered, came from the fact that the Indian calendar measures time vastly different from the way the old Chinese calendar measures time, and when these stories were translated or interpreted by Japanese writers long, long ago, they either didn’t realize or didn’t adjust for these discrepancies! I felt like I had just solved the problem of time dilation on Star Trek or something.

So I figured out that Daji had ruined China and fled to India, ruined the country there, and then fled back to China to become Bao Si and ruin China again, after which she went to Japan and tried to ruin everything there, but she was ultimately killed. Even though none of these myths were connected to each other in their original forms, through the work of a handful of storytellers with a flair for the dramatic, each of these legendary people became part of the greater mosaic that is Tamamo no Mae. Whether they made these connections on purpose or out of carelessness, or to add an air of authenticity to their individual legends, this grand, era-spanning narrative was formed. It is a truly amazing example of folkloric gestalt.

The feeling after finishing weeks of research and making all of these connections was great. Thanks to Tamamo no Mae, I had studied more of Chinese and Indian ancient mythical history than I had ever imagine I would, even to the point of learning the strange ways that time was recorded in ancient Indian cultures. It was a really fun and educational experience. And after I had done all of that work, the question remained: how much of this do I put in the book?

My main goal was of course to chronicle her relation to Japanese folklore, so I didn’t want to over-focus on her bizarre and fairly apocryphal history, yet I had done all that work, and it was such a cool narrative that I didn’t want to leave it out. And the questions about folklore that I raised above come into play here as well. The “common” myths of Tamamo no Mae don’t have any awareness of these connections that were probably completely inadvertently made by past storytellers. I doubt there was any intention to ever say that Tamamo no Mae is the same character as the evil courtesan who convinced an Indian king to eat babies. And yet, the narrative works so well. Nobody I had ever spoken to was aware of much beyond Tamamo’s adventures in Japan. So which do you write? The obscure, probably accidental history that sounds awesome? Or the commonly believed history that more closely fits the definition of “folk” lore?

Ultimately I compromised and wrote up a version of her tale which includes her strange and fantastic history without going into much detail, and then focuses on her Japanese adventures. The Indian and Chinese parts of her tale don’t take anything away from her story, and if you don’t like them you can always ignore them as apocryphal and say that only the parts of her story that take place in Japan are “correct.” But like I said earlier, does “correct” have any real meaning when applied to folklore? My version is no more correct than anyone else’s. It’s just another variation of a story by someone who carries no more authority than anybody else who has a different variation. I think that is what makes something a folktale.

Tamamo no Mae – click the painting to view the story on yokai.com

Tamamo no Mae can can be found in my new book The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits. Order it now from Amazon.com.

Before we move on to the yokai for today, I just wanted to remind everyone that I will be at the Collingswood Book Festival tomorrow, all day long! Bring your book and I will sign it, or buy a signed book from me there! I sign my books with a brush pen I picked up at the Abe no Seimei Shrine in Kyoto—the only shrine dedicated to black magic and sorcery!

Now, on to today’s A-Yokai-A-Day!

Osakabe hime

Have you ever visited Japan? If you have, chances are you have visited Himeji Castle. It’s one of the most famous tourist spots in the country, after all! So if that describes you, I have news for you: you have been much closer to a yokai than you realize! If you climbed all the way up to the top floor of the keep (which you probably did, because the view is amazing!) then you were literally right next to the secret hiding place where this yokai lives!

What a view! (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s yokai, Osakabe hime, is rare because she is tied to a specific place and has a specific name. Generally, yokai tales are very vague. You can hear the same story from 100 different people and get 100 different accounts. Sometimes the names change, the places, little details like that, but there is enough similarity to recognize that it is the same story. It is only rarely that you have a clearly defined yokai inhabiting a clearly defined place. Even though there are still variable details about what exactly it is that Osakabe hime does, there is no doubt that she is a spirit which haunts the top floor of Himeji Castle.

So the next time you are touring Japan and you happen to visit Himeji Castle, make sure you look around for signs of her when you reach the keep. Maybe she will even introduce herself!

As always, click below to visit the entry on yokai.com!

Osakabe hime

Osakabe hime can can be found in my new book The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits. Order it now from Amazon.com.