page_title: Yōkai
section_title: Meiji period
hierarchical_section_title: Yōkai / History / Modern history / Meiji period
context_page_description: Yōkai are a class of supernatural monsters and spirits in Japanese folklore. The word yōkai is made up of the kanji for "bewitching; attractive; calamity" and "spectre; apparition; mystery; suspicious." They can also be called ayakashi, mononoke or mamono. Yōkai range diversely from the malevolent to the mischievous, or occasionally bring good fortune to those who encounter them.
  Yōkai often possess animal features, yet others appear mostly human like kuchisake-onna. Some yōkai look like inanimate objects, while others have no discernible shape. Yōkai usually have spiritual or supernatural abilities, with shapeshifting being the most common. Yōkai that shapeshift are called bakemono or obake.
  Japanese folklorists and historians explain yōkai as personifications of "supernatural or unaccountable phenomena to their informants." In the Edo period, many artists, such as Toriyama Sekien, invented new yōkai by taking inspiration from folk tales or purely from their own imagination. Today, several such yōkai are mistaken to originate in more traditional folklore.
context_section_description: Meiji 24 (1891): Publication of the Seiyou Youkai Kidan by Shibue Tamotsu. It introduced folktales from Europe, such as the Grimm Tales.
  Meiji 29 (1896): Publication of the Yōkaigaku Kogi by Inoue Enryō
  Meiji 33 (1900): Performance of the kabuki Yami no Ume Hyakumonogatari at the Kabuki-za in January. It was a performance in which appeared numerous yōkai such as the kasa ippon ashi, skeletons, yuki-onna, osakabe-hime, among others. Onoe Kikugorō V played the role of many of these, such as the osakabe-hime.
  Taishō 3 (1914): Publication of the Shokubutsu Kaiko by Mitsutaro Shirai. Shirai expositioned on plant yōkai from the point of view of a plant pathologist and herbalist.
  With the Meiji Restoration, Western ideas and translated western publications began to make an impact, and western tales were particularly sought after. Things like binbogami, yakubyogami, and shinigami were talked about, and shinigami were even depicted in classical rakugo, and although the shinigami were misunderstood as a kind of Japanese yōkai or kami, they actually became well known among the populace through a rakugo called "Shinigami" in San'yūtei Enchō, which were adoptions of European tales such as the Grimm fairy tale "Godfather Death" and the Italian opera "Crispino" (1850). Also, in Meiji 41 (1908), Kyōka Izumi and Tobari Chikufuu jointedly translated Gerhart Hauptmann's play The Sunken Bell. Later works of Kyōka such as Yasha ga Ike were influenced by The Sunken Bell, and so it can be seen that folktales that come from the West became adapted into Japanese tales of yōkai.
caption: "The Heavy Basket" from the Shinkei Sanjurokkei Sen by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (Meiji 25)
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "1322", "Image ImageLength": "2000", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2020:10:06 03:51:19", "Image ExifOffset": "236", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "386", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6658", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1298", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1972"}