Japan Navigator

Japan is still suffering from the “yokai” monster boom that was caused by Miike Takashi’s enjoyable and totally extravagant The Great Yokai War (2005). These folktale goblins were first popularized by the 1966 humoristic manga Ge ge ge no Kitaro by Mizuki Shigeru (who rightly has a cameo in Miike’s film; on top of that, the film is set in and near Mizuki’s hometown Sakai-Minato) and a late sixties yokai film. Miike improves on the older film by flashy CGI effects and comes up with quite realistic one-eyed hopping umbrellas, ladies with necks that stretch for meters on end, river sprites, long-nosed tengu and other pleasant aberrations.

In the good old Edo-period there were no special effects and computer animations. If you want to know how people fulfilled their monster fantasies in such a seemingly dark age, run to the National Science Museum in Ueno, Tokyo, for the last days of an exhibition that has rather grandly been named Cultural Records about Spectres. You will find scrolls and prints that clearly are the ancestors of today’s yokai manga, with heroic fights against giant insects and catfish-headed dragons, full of energy and inspiration.

[National Science Museum, Tokyo - Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

But the real thing here are the mummies of yokai. These have often been preserved in temples, where in the past they must have been taken out of their boxes and shown to the gullible country folk whenever the priest wanted to scare them into belief in higher powers. They have been almost scientifically manufactured, by stitching together the bones and skulls of various small animals such as monkeys and birds and adding feathers or skin. Other have parts made of sculpted wood or paper, as was discovered in an X-ray survey of the monsters.

These yokai mummies look real, much more so than the monsters in Miike’s film. The fact that they are dead, with wide-open mouthed skulls, adds to the horror. I never shudder at horror films, but these things really are creepy!