Japan's yōkai were only given that name by a scholar trying to abolish them
Kappa, tengu and haunted household objects all count as yōkai, a sprawling class of Japanese spirits that can be kind, mischievous or dangerous. Yet before the Meiji era people rarely used the word at all. It became standard thanks to Inoue Enryō, who founded a whole academic field hoping to stamp out superstition.
The category is enormous. Some yōkai look like animals: the kappa resembles a turtle, while the tengu is usually drawn with wings. Others take human shape, such as the kuchisake-onna, and the tsukumogami are ordinary objects that have come alive. A few have no fixed form. The trait most often attached to them is shapeshifting, and the ones that change form are called bakemono or obake. Alternative names include ayakashi, mononoke and mamono.
Their roots lie in an animist outlook in which spirits dwelt in everything, from weather to tools. Calm spirits, the nigi-mitama, brought luck; violent ones, the ara-mitama, brought sickness and disaster. Neither counted as yōkai. A ritual called chinkon, meaning roughly the calming of the spirits, tried to turn the violent kind into the gentle kind. When it failed, or when a spirit lost the worship that kept it divine, the result was a yōkai. Some Shinto practitioners and academics go further and treat yōkai and kami as fundamentally one family of nature spirits.
The written word itself pairs two characters that each mean suspicious or doubtful, borrowed from the Chinese yāoguài. As fewer events were blamed on the supernatural, paintings and picture scrolls settled on standard looks, and the creatures drifted from terrifying to cartoonish. Folklore about them was entering popular entertainment as early as Japan's Middle Ages.
The Edo period, 1603 to 1868, added a twist. Artists such as Toriyama Sekien, who lived from 1712 to 1788, dreamed up brand-new yōkai from folktales or pure imagination. Several of these inventions, the amikiri among them, are now wrongly assumed to be ancient. Folklorist Michael Foster sees the whole tradition as a way of naming danger in a risky landscape, turning vague threats into something specific enough to face.
Source: Yōkai
