Those of you who have been following my Facebook page since the winter probably have seen a number of these photos before, as I have been sharing them as I have been painting them. However, this is the first time you’ve seen them with the accompanying text of course!

Today’s yokai was a request from a fan. It sticks out in my mind because last winter when I visited Japan to do some yokai research I saw a lot of tsubaki trees. I was visiting Matsue, the small town in Shimane where the immortal Koizumi Yakumo (aka Lafcadio Hearn) made his home. I was tracing one of his favorite routes, down a street to a small, secluded Inari shrine which he used to visit and which supposedly inspired one or two of his stories, when I noticed the beautiful flowers all along the road. Their name stuck out at me: tsubaki. Then I realized, isn’t there a tsubaki yokai??? Yes of course! Furutsubaki no rei, or the ghost of the old tsubaki tree!

I went home and researched that yokai, but the blossoms of those trees, which bloom in the winter and are thus called the winter rose, still stand out in my memory. I guess it’s fate that I should be inspired about yokai stories on the same road that Lafcadio Hearn walked down to receive inspiration about yokai stories some 100 years ago!

Anyway, here is today’s yokai:

Today’s yokai is sort of an epilogue to the chimimōryō we looked at these past two days. Jami is actually a subset of chimi, being another generic term for monsters. The mi in jami is the same mi as in chimi, but the ja denotes wickedness. So these are also chimi, but these are the extra bad chimi.

Head on over to yokai.com to read the full entry on jami!

Today’s yokai is a bit of a continuation of yesterday’s. When you combine the two yokai, you get a common word: chimimōryō (魑魅魍魎).

Chimimōryō, combining the words chimi and mōryō, is a common term which refers to all of the evil spirits of the rivers and mountains. It’s one of many catch all terms for Japanese monsters, along with mononoke, bakemono, obake, minori, yōkai, and so on. Today yokai is most commonly used to refer to the vast menagerie of spirits in Japanese folklore, but in the past, each of these other words have enjoyed varying levels of popularity.

Chances are if you speak to a Japanese person, they may not have heard of chimi or mōryō, but they have heard of chimimōryō. That’s because today this word is much more familiar as a catch-all phrase for evil spirits than as two specific yokai. Of course, it isn’t nearly as common as obake or yokai, which are the go-to words for supernatural creatures in Japan.

One more note that could be source of confusion about transliteration. You may notice that in some places on the web, yokai is spelled yōkai or even youkai. In fact, you may notice that a lot of yokai names are written with macrons like ō, hyphens, or other combinations. This can probably cause a lot of confusion, because in English we are used to every word having a single “correct” spelling. We even get into arguments over words like color/colour.

The nature of Japanese transliteration is responsible for a lot of confusion, particularly with yokai names. Technically, yōkai is the best way to write the word in English, but very few people know how to type those macrons on a keyboard, so they just write yokai. Technically, though, that ō is shorthand for ou, which would make youkai equally correct. Ou in Japanese is pronounced as a long o sound lasting two syllables. However, in English we tend to read ou as in the word “shout,” which changes the pronunciation considerably. Older transliteration systems have tried addressing this problem by writing a double o for such words (i.e. yookai) but you can see that really doesn’t fix the problem at all. These days, macrons are pretty when writing double vowels in Japanese, because it marks the fact that there is a double-letter there, while still remaining generally legible for English-readers. The pronunciation of yōkai is certainly easier to guess than youkai or yookai!

Also, there is an argument to be made that once a word has sufficiently entered English, it becomes part of the language rather than just a loan-word, and we don’t normally use macrons in English. (Some examples of such Japanese loan-words would be sushi, samurai, geisha, ninja, and shogun—which, like yōkai, should actually be written with a macron: shōgun!) Once foreign words have become sufficiently familiar to us, we tend to drop the marks (jalapeno, uber, el nino). The case could be made that yokai is becoming one of these words.

So in short, when you see mōryō, onryō, yōkai, hitotsume kozō, remember that all those ō‘s might also be written as ou, or even just o, but should be pronounced as a long o lasting for two syllables!

Now, on to today’s yōkai!

Well, I spent most of the day recovering from a hard disk failure, but thanks to same-day-delivery I am now running a much faster solid state drive and re-installing everything. With the amount of frustration computers can bring us, it’s fun to imagine what kind of yokai would have been attributed to them if they had existed 250 years ago… With all of the crazy tsukumogami out there, I’m sure there would have been at least a few computer gremlin stories.

Today’s yokai is a very old one. It’s name is one of the oldest terms for supernatural creatures, in fact. Long, long ago, before words like yokai, onryou, and yuurei had been thought up, there were chimi (and their counterpart mouryou).

The word was originally a generic term for spirits—specifically mountain spirits—but eventually during the Edo period, during the mass cataloging of yokai into encyclopedias, it took on a more specific form and definition. It is still used occasionally as a catch-all term for yokai (particularly when coupled with its parter-word, mouryou).

Today’s yokai is a little late… I came home to a failed hard disk and have spent the evening recovering things. Ahhh computers. So I just got into bed, stressed out, and remembered I have a yokai to post!

Fortunately for me, today’s yokai is a short one, so this blog post won”t take too long. Today’s is another tsukumogami: a skeletal umbrella.

It doesn’t really have much of a claim to fame. There are no stories about it and there aren’t a lot of images either. The only real claim to fame that it has is that it was featured in one of Toriyama Sekien’s encyclopedias. However, that alone is pretty important!

Sekien’s writeup on this yokai leaves a little to be desired, though. Actually, he spends most of the description talking about another yokai, the shachi. The shachi is essentially a yokai killer whale or dolphin. You can actually see them on top of most Japanese castles as roof ornaments. The shachi was believed to have the power to summon rain, and when it rains you need an umbrella! <– That is pretty much how this yokai is described by Sekien. So, it’s quite an enigmatic one! Anyway, enjoy the honekarakasa!

Honekarakasa / 骨傘 / ほねからかさ

Today’s yokai isn’t really an animal, but it’s similar to one, as you can see. We’re actually going to look at a few tsukumogami, or artifact spirits, which are one of the most populous and popular types of yokai out there. It seems everyone loves them, and it’s not hard to see why: they are cute and silly and very weird!

In fact, tsukumogami were some of the earliest yokai ever invented. The tradition of drawing yokai scrolls began in the Muromachi period (14th-16th centuries), and quickly became quite popular. Prior to then, most stories of the strange and supernatural dealt with onryou and oni rather than yokai.

These yokai scrolls depicted almost entirely tsukumogami, with just a few other grotesque and bizarre creatures, though back then the creatures were not named. Most of them were recognizable, and they give us a good deal of insight into the types of household objects used by people in everyday life 500+ years ago, so they are quite valuable works of art. Rather than depicting aristocratic life or rich pastoral and nature scenes like the paintings of earlier periods, these yokai scrolls focused on ordinary people and ordinary things.

Before I get too far off on an art history rant, I’ll go back to the picture at hand. This yokai, like most, was not labled in its first scroll appearances, but it appears in some of the earliest yokai scrolls. Its name appears on much later scrolls, but it was not hard to guess what the original artist probably intended it to be. The cylindrical bells that hang above shrines are often called waniguchi, or “alligator mouths” because of their shape—they look like the head of some lizard-like creature. Looking at these bells, it’s almost as if they are just asking for an artist to add a scaly body and turn it into a monster!

Click on the image or here to visit yokai.com and learn more about this yokai and many others!

Today’s yokai is not cute, but it should make you laugh. In fact, its name is the sound of laughter (“heehee!”).

A lot of these animal yokai originated in China and were re-invented by Japanese encyclopedia writers during the Edo period. This is one such yokai. The boom in printing production during the late 18th century caused a huge rise in literacy as well as cheap, illustrated books for the masses. Because it was difficult for Japanese to travel, they often collected books full of pictures of distant lands, and full of stories and tales from those places. The authors of this period translated and reinterpreted older Chinese texts, often giving the creatures a distinctive Japanese identity through their reinterpretations. Other authors did their best to remain faithful to the source material, but nonetheless made mistakes (as we will see later this month, one author mistook a Chinese general for the Chinese god of the toilets, and a strange new yokai was born—but I digress).

Like some other other beast-yokai (baku, kirin, wani, and a few others), this creature eventually ended up lending its name to a real-world animal. Today, the word hihi means “baboon” in Japanese. It’s not so difficult to see the resemblance!

Hihi / 狒々 / ひひ

Click here or on the image to view the full entry on yokai.com!