Japanese Folklore

Japanese folklore is a layered country of the mind, with a great deal packed into a small compass. In its older form it is the world of the eight million kami (yaoyorozu no kami), of the fox messengers of Inari, of the kappa lurking in the irrigation ditch, and of the lonely moon-viewing parties of the Heian court. In its more recent form it is the world of the yōkai bestiary, the printed ghost stories of Lafcadio Hearn, the seasonal matsuri of neighbourhood shrines, and the manga and anime re-imaginings of the same ancient figures. Few folk traditions have been so thoroughly recorded, and few have been so lovingly remade in the popular culture of the present day.

The World of the Kami

At the heart of Japanese folk belief sits Shinto, the ancient and not quite systematised native religion of the islands. The word kami is sometimes translated as “god” and sometimes as “spirit,” but the original sense is closer to “that which is worthy of reverence.” A kami can be the spirit of a mountain, of a waterfall, of a long-dead emperor, of a fox, of a sword, of a great cooking-pot, or of a family ancestor. There are said to be eight million of them in Japan — a number meant to suggest an uncountable multitude rather than a specific census — and they are treated with a politeness that is more like the careful courtesy one extends to a powerful neighbour than the awe one feels before a distant creator deity.

The great shrine network of the islands is essentially a map of the local kami. Every village has its ujigami, its tutelary deity; every mountain has its yama no kami, its mountain spirit; every rice paddy has its ta no kami, its field spirit. The shrine’s role is to provide a place where the kami can be properly received, fed, and entertained. Offerings of rice, sake, salt, and the strange forked paper streamers known as shide are laid out, and the priests perform the formal rituals (norito) that are believed to keep the world in its right order.

The kami are not, on the whole, moralists. They are fussy, sometimes dangerous, occasionally comical, and very particular about etiquette. The most famous of them is the sun goddess Amaterasu, who withdrew into a cave and plunged the world into darkness until the other kami lured her out with laughter. The story of the cave, retold in the eighth-century chronicle Kojiki, is one of the founding myths of Japan, and it sets the tone for an entire folkloric tradition in which the gods are persuaded more often than they are obeyed. For a comparable tradition of nature-spirits and sacred landscape in the European north, the Norse Folklore pages and the discussion of Yggdrasil the World Tree provide useful parallels.

The Yōkai Bestiary

If the kami are the upper house of the Japanese spirit world, the yōkai are the great unwashed downstairs. The word yōkai is sometimes translated “monster” and sometimes “strange apparition,” and the category covers a vast, informal, often comic bestiary of beings that are mischievous, dangerous, or merely odd. The medieval picture-scrolls known as the Hyakki Yagyō, or “Night Parade of One Hundred Demons,” and the Edo-period compendia of Toriyama Sekien established a cast of characters that has been continuously re-imagined ever since.

Among the best-known yōkai are the kappa, the river-children said to lurk in irrigation ditches; the oni, the horned ogres of the mountain passes; the tengu, the long-nosed bird-men of the deep forests; the bakeneko, the house-cat grown huge and uncanny; the tsukumogami, the household objects that have grown old enough to take on a spirit of their own. The yōkai are not simply monsters: they are the village’s way of giving a face to a strange noise in the night, a strange mood in a person, or the particular unease of a lonely forest path.

The modern yōkai revival, fed by artists like Mizuki Shigeru and the long-running franchise of GeGeGe no Kitarō, has carried these figures into the global imagination. Anime and manga of the last fifty years have given the yōkai a depth that the older folk traditions only hinted at, but the basic vocabulary is the same. The trickster Kitsune and his heavier cousin the Tanuki belong to this yōkai world, and so do the yūrei, the ghosts of the rainy evening, of whom more below.

Kitsune, Tanuki, and the Art of Henge

Of all the yōkai, the two trickster figures of the fox and the raccoon dog are the most beloved. The kitsune is a creature of long memory and considerable wit, capable of taking human form, of breathing small fireballs, of possessing the unwary, and of accumulating a ninth tail as the centuries pass. The tanuki, by contrast, is a creature of appetite and good humour, a master of comic transformation who uses a magical leaf on his forehead to change shape and a vast pair of golden testicles, in the medieval suzuri ink-paintings, to stand in for any large round object from a drum to a mountain.

The broader category that both belong to is that of henge, the Japanese art of transformation. The fox, the raccoon dog, the badger, the cat, the snake, the weasel, the crow, and the tanuki are all, in the folk tradition, capable of taking human form if they live long enough or practise hard enough. The Buddhist and Taoist background is important here. China had a long tradition of fox-spirit lore — the huli jing — and the Japanese tradition is in many ways an extension of it, with local kami and Buddhist saints added to the cast. The trickster of the yōkai bestiary has obvious cousins in other continents: the fox of the Reynard cycle, the spider Anansi of West Africa, and the Norse Loki.

Shrines, Inari, and the Fox

The great shrine of Fushimi Inari, on the southern edge of Kyoto, is the head temple of the Inari cult and one of the most-visited shrines in Japan. Its thousands of vermilion torii gates wind up the wooded slopes of Mount Inari, and along the way stand dozens of smaller subsidiary shrines, each tended by a pair of fox statues. The Inari foxes are not, properly speaking, yōkai; they are the messengers (tsukai) of the kami Inari, who is the kami of rice, of prosperity, of business, of the household, and of the fox.

The Inari cult is unusual for the way it has spread. Every neighbourhood in Japan has at least one Inari shrine, often no larger than a kitchen alcove, with a single red torii, a pair of fox statues, and a faded silk bib. The cult has travelled with the Japanese diaspora to Hawai’i, Brazil, and the Pacific coast of the United States. The iconography is specific: the fox holds a jewel in its mouth, a key to the rice granary, a sheaf of rice, or a ball of flame, and the statue’s colour indicates its rank — white for the heavenly messenger, black for the protective, red for the somewhat alarming.

The stories of kitsune possession are closely tied to the Inari cult. In the Heian and Edo periods, possession by a fox was a recognised medical condition, and the afflicted person was taken to an Inari shrine for treatment. The most famous of the possession stories, the tale of the Abe no Seimei’s daughter Kuzunoha, is one of the foundational love stories of the Japanese imagination.

The Seasonal Matsuri

If the shrines are the static map of Japanese folk belief, the matsuri are its moving festival. There are said to be over 100,000 matsuri every year in Japan, and almost every one of them has a kami, a story, and a characteristic food. The most famous are the three great festivals of Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo — the Gion Matsuri in July, the Tenjin Matsuri in Osaka, and the Kanda Matsuri in Tokyo — but the small village festival, in which the local kami is paraded through the rice paddies on a portable shrine, is the more ancient and, in many ways, the more authentic form.

The cycle of the agricultural year dictates the timing of the festivals. In spring, the ta no kami, the field spirit, is welcomed with the rice-planting rituals; in summer, the Gion Matsuri of Kyoto and the Tenjin Matsuri of Osaka are great public processions with elaborate floats; in autumn, the harvest is celebrated with the moon-viewing festivals and the kagura dances; in winter, the year is closed with the bonenkai, the year-end forgetting party. A parallel cycle of seasonal festivals is to be found in many other folk traditions, including the Midsummer traditions of Europe and the Samhain roots of Halloween. The underlying pattern — the seasonal negotiation between the human community and the spirit world — is essentially the same.

The Ghost at the Izakaya: Yūrei Stories

Japan has a particular genius for the ghost story, and the modern form known as kaidan — the spooky tale told by lamplight — has a long and respectable ancestry. The earliest collection of such tales is the ninth-century Nihon Ryōiki, but the most influential single text is the seventeenth-century collection Tōnoigusa by Asai Ryōi, in which the ghost, the ruined temple, the rainy evening, and the wandering priest are first assembled into a single atmospheric package.

The yūrei of the Edo period are usually depicted as pale women in white kimono, with long dishevelled hair and a single dangling foot, but the older yūrei were considerably more various. The famous kaidan of Oiwa, of Okiku, and of the mansion with the bleeding room are the great set pieces of the kabuki and bunraku theatres, and the lantern-lit world of the yūrei was a favourite subject of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Katsushika Hokusai. Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-Irish-American writer who took the name Koizumi Yakumo and became a Japanese citizen in 1896, did more than any other foreigner to introduce the yūrei tradition to the West; his collection Kwaidan (1904) is still in print.

The yūrei tradition has migrated into modern Japanese cinema with extraordinary effect. The J-horror wave of the late 1990s and 2000s — the films of Nakata Hideo, Shimizu Takashi, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi — drew directly on the older kaidan conventions, and the figure of the long-haired ghost in the white dress has become a global cinematic shorthand. The ghost-and-restaurant is a particular sub-genre: the izakaya, or Japanese pub, has a folkloric association with the appearance of the yūrei that goes back at least to the Edo-period “haunted restaurant” stories, and the modern horror manga and anime have continued the tradition.

Buddhism and the Japanese Folk World

It is impossible to understand Japanese folklore without Buddhism, and equally impossible to understand Japanese Buddhism without the folk world. From the seventh century onward, the two traditions have been so deeply intertwined that almost every major shrine has a Buddhist hall on the grounds, and almost every major Buddhist temple has a small Inari shrine tucked away behind the main building. The Buddhist contribution to the folk world has been enormous: it brought the hungry ghost (gaki) of the medieval Japanese imagination, the bodhisattva Jizō who protects the souls of children, and the Goddess of Mercy, Kannon, who in Japan has been associated with the syncretic figure of Senju Kannon and with a long tradition of miracle tales.

The Buddhist festival of Obon, in mid-August, is the time when the ancestors are believed to return to the household altar. The Bon Odori, the circling dance performed in the neighbourhood park, is one of the most distinctive sights of the Japanese summer. The festival is a piece of Japanese folk life that has, like so much else in the islands, been carried into the diaspora. The Hindu-Buddhist pantheon of guardians, nagas, and dragon kings is also visible in Japan, where the Buddhist dragon kings of the four seas are honoured in temple paintings, and the naga has been absorbed into the Japanese myth of the great snake that becomes a dragon and ascends to the sky. The story has parallels in Indian yakshas and nature spirits, in the Chinese dragon king of the four seas, and in the Buddhist traditions of Southeast Asia.

Lafcadio Hearn and the Western Discovery of Japanese Folklore

If the modern international reputation of Japanese folklore rests on a single figure, it is on Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who introduced the yūrei, the yōkai, and the older folk tales to a Western audience. Born on the Greek island of Lefkada in 1850, raised in Ireland, and educated partly in England, Hearn arrived in Japan in 1890 and became a passionate observer of the older Japanese world. His books — Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Out of the East, Kwaidan, and others — remain the classic introductions to the subject for the English-language reader.

Hearn’s importance is partly as a translator, partly as a selector, and partly as a mythologiser. He chose the yūrei and the yōkai stories, not the more scholarly Buddhist or Shinto texts, and he made the older Japanese folkloric world visible to a global audience for the first time. The modern anime and manga industry, the international cult of the yōkai, and the global popularity of the J-horror film are all, in their way, extensions of Hearn’s work.

Modern Re-imaginings: Manga, Anime, and the Yōkai Boom

The yōkai, the kitsune, the tanuki, and the yūrei have never been more popular in Japan than they are at present. The yōkai boom of the 1990s and 2000s — kicked off in part by Mizuki Shigeru’s manga GeGeGe no Kitarō and by the films of Miyazaki Hayao — turned a corner of the older folkloric world into a major industry. Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbor Totoro are global hits that draw directly on the older traditions; the kappa, the kodama tree-spirits, the masked animals, and the soot-sprites are all recognisable to anyone who has read the older picture-scrolls.

The fox has been particularly important in the modern reimagining. The Inari shrine of Fushimi is now a global tourist destination, and the visual language of the kitsune — the multiple tails, the possession motif, the “kitsune mask” of the festival dancer — has become a Japanese pop-cultural export. The kitsune-tsuki, or fox possession, has been the subject of several modern horror films; the tanuki has been the cute mascot of izakaya, of garden statuary, and of at least one well-known Japanese video-game franchise.