Yōkai: Japan's Spirits and Monsters, With Their Names in Japanese (妖怪)

Yōkai: 妖怪, Japan's spirits and monsters

A yōkai (said "yoh-kai", and also spelled yokai), written 妖怪 (ようかい, yōkai), is a strange or supernatural being from Japanese folklore: a monster, goblin, spirit or shape-shifter. The word also covers eerie happenings that nobody can explain, not only creatures.

Among the best known are the kappa, the tengu, the oni and the kitsune (the fox spirit). The list below gives twenty of them with their names in Japanese, first in a table you can scan, then a short note on each. After it come what the word means, and where the pictures people know come from. Much of that goes back to two men: the Edo-period artist Toriyama Sekien and the manga artist Mizuki Shigeru.

Japanese yōkai list: famous yōkai with their names in Japanese

This is not a ranking. It is twenty well-known yōkai, with a line each, and below it a short note on each one.

Water, wind and mountains

Kappa (河童). The kappa is a water creature of rivers and ponds. It is usually shown as small and green, with webbed hands, a turtle-like shell and a dish on its head that holds water. It loves sumo and cucumbers. In older tales it drowned people and pulled horses and cattle into the water. Wikipedia says it has at least eighty other names across Japan, including 河太郎 (かわたろう, kawatarō) in the west.

The folk remedy is to bow deeply. The kappa bows back, spills the water in its dish and loses its strength. Its cucumber link fits the cucumber sushi roll named after it, the 河童巻き (かっぱまき, kappamaki).

Umibōzu (海坊主). The umibōzu is a giant black figure with a bald head, shown rising out of a calm sea that suddenly turns rough. Sailors' tales say it asks for a ladle and then tries to sink the ship with it, and that giving it a bottomless ladle saves the crew. Wikipedia lists records from the Edo period, such as the Kii Zōdan Shū of 1687.

Kamaitachi (鎌鼬). The kamaitachi is a weasel that rides a whirlwind and cuts people's skin with sickle-like claws. The wounds are sharp and painless. In Hida the tale has three evil beings working together: one knocks you down, one cuts you and one puts on the medicine, which is why there is no blood. Wikipedia says the legends probably explain cuts from wind-borne accidents.

Tengu (天狗). The tengu is a red-faced goblin with a long nose that lives deep in the mountains. The name comes from a Chinese word for a "celestial dog". An early record in the Nihon Shoki uses it for a meteor. The long nose dates from about the 14th century. By the 13th century tengu were tied to the 山伏 (やまぶし, yamabushi), the mountain ascetics of Shugendō, and are shown in their dress. The most famous is Sōjōbō of Mount Kurama, said to have taught swordsmanship to the warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune.

The word has an everyday meaning too. In the dictionary, 天狗 also means a braggart, and the idiom "to become a tengu" is used of someone conceited.

Yamauba (山姥). The yamauba is an old woman of the mountains. Wikipedia describes her with long white hair, tattered clothes and a second mouth hidden under her hair. In some tales she eats travellers. In others she is kind: she is the foster mother of the boy hero Kintarō. She is also a figure in Noh drama.

Demons

Oni (鬼). The oni is an ogre or demon. In pictures it has horns, big teeth and tiger-skin trousers, and carries an iron club, the kanabō. Skin colours include red, blue and black. One idea is that the word comes from a verb meaning "to hide". Another is that the horns and tiger skin refer to the "ox-tiger" direction, the north-east, which onmyōdō calls the demon gate. See 鬼 for the character.

On 節分 (せつぶん, setsubun), the last day of winter, people throw roasted soybeans out of the door to drive the oni away and invite luck in. That custom is the 豆まき (まめまき, mamemaki). Today oni also appear in anime, games and as friendly mascots.

Shuten-dōji (酒呑童子). Shuten-dōji is an oni chief. In the story, the warrior Minamoto no Raikō and his band disguise themselves as yamabushi, get the oni drunk on enchanted sake and cut off his head. The oldest surviving account is the 14th-century Ōeyama Ekotoba, the story of Mount Ōe.

Foxes, raccoon dogs, cats and the nue

Kitsune (狐). The fox is the most famous shape-shifter. It can turn into a person, bewitch people and cause possession. Foxes are also messengers of the god Inari, and Inari's foxes are usually white and seen as a good omen. There is more on the kinds of fox in the fox section further down.

Tanuki (狸). The tanuki is a real animal, the raccoon dog, and not a raccoon. In folklore the bake-danuki, 化け狸 (ばけだぬき, bakedanuki), changes shape and fools people. The Nihon Shoki already mentions one turning into a person and singing. The ceramic tanuki figures of Shigaraki ware carry eight lucky traits, including a hat, big eyes, a sake bottle and a big belly. That set of eight is modern: Wikipedia says a Buddhist monk devised it in 1952. The tale of Bunbuku Chagama is about a tanuki disguised as a teakettle.

Bakeneko and nekomata (化け猫, 猫又). The bakeneko is a cat with magical powers. The 猫又 (ねこまた, nekomata) is a related cat yōkai. Wikipedia says the clearest difference is the tail: the nekomata has two, the bakeneko one. Both were popular in Edo-period plays and stories. The best-known tale is the Nabeshima bakeneko story.

Nue (鵺). The nue is a chimera with a monkey's head, a tanuki's body, a tiger's limbs and a snake for a tail, as the Tale of the Heike describes it. In the best-known story, the nue made Emperor Konoe ill, and the warrior Minamoto no Yorimasa shot it with a sacred arrow. Its cry is like that of a bird, which is why the same word also names a real thrush.

People who are not what they seem

Rokurokubi (ろくろ首). The rokurokubi is a woman whose neck stretches or whose head leaves her body. Wikipedia says there are two versions: the stretching neck, often described while the person sleeps, and the flying head, the nukekubi. Tales of the flying head appear in the book Sorori Monogatari (1663). The name probably comes from rokuro, a potter's wheel or pulley. A rokurokubi also appeared in an Edo-period freak show.

Noppera-bō (のっぺらぼう). The noppera-bō has a human body and no face. It is usually harmless, and it frightens more than it hurts. Many tales say a fox, tanuki or badger is behind the blank face. The best-known version is Lafcadio Hearn's story "Mujina" in Kwaidan (1904): a man meets a faceless woman on Akasaka road, runs to a noodle seller, and the seller turns round with no face either.

Yuki-onna (雪女). The yuki-onna is a woman of snow. She is pale, in white, and can freeze travellers with her breath. Wikipedia says tales of her go back to the Muromachi period, when the poet Sōgi recorded a story from Echigo, today's Niigata, and that depictions before the 18th century stress her danger. Hearn's 1904 version in Kwaidan, in which she spares one young woodcutter and later marries him, is the best known today.

Zashiki-warashi (座敷童). The zashiki-warashi is a child spirit of the north-east, especially Iwate, and the dictionary calls it a protective household deity. It has a red face and a bobbed haircut. It plays small pranks, such as footprints in ash and noises in a back room. The house where it lives is said to prosper, and the house it leaves is said to fall on hard times. Yanagita Kunio recorded these stories. Some inns in Iwate, such as Ryokufūsō at Kindaichi Onsen, are said to have one.

Nurarihyon (滑瓢). The nurarihyon is an old man with an elongated head, drawn by Sekien. The idea that he is the "supreme commander of yōkai" who walks into houses and drinks the tea is modern. Wikipedia, citing scholars, traces it to a later reading of Sekien's picture that spread through Mizuki's yōkai books and the 1985 anime.

Hitotsume-kozō (一つ目小僧). The hitotsume-kozō is a bald child with one eye in the middle of its forehead. Wikipedia calls it a comparatively harmless yōkai that suddenly appears and surprises people.

Things that come alive

Tsukumogami (付喪神). A tsukumogami is an old object that has gained a spirit. The idea is that after about a hundred years, a tool or container wakes up. The name can also be written 九十九神, "ninety-nine kami", for a hundred years less one. The medieval Tsukumogami Emaki scroll shows discarded household objects turning on their owners. People used to do a year-end house-cleaning, susu-harai, partly to get rid of old things before they could turn.

The umbrella spirit, the 唐傘小僧 (からかさこぞう, karakasakozō), belongs to this family. Its earliest known picture is in a Muromachi-period night-parade scroll, and the one-eyed, one-legged form took shape in the Edo period. The dictionary also has the 提灯お化け (ちょうちんおばけ, chōchinobake).

Nurikabe (塗壁). The nurikabe is a wall that appears in front of a walker at night and will not let them pass. Wikipedia says the tale was recorded by Yanagita from the coast of Onga County, in today's Fukuoka. No old picture was known until a 17th-century scroll was identified in 2007. The wall character in the manga is Mizuki's own design, based on those folklore accounts.

Ittan-momen (一反木綿). The ittan-momen is a flying strip of cloth. Wikipedia places its origin in Kimotsuki, Kagoshima, where it is recorded in a local collection by Nomura Denshi and Yanagita. The cloth measured one tan, about 10.6 metres by 30 centimetres, and wrapped itself around people's faces and necks. In the manga Mizuki gave it two eyes, two arms and a Kyushu accent, which the older records don't mention.

Modern yōkai

Kuchisake-onna (口裂け女). The kuchisake-onna is a woman in a mask who asks "Am I pretty?" and then shows a mouth slit from ear to ear. Wikipedia dates the modern legend to Gifu around 1978 and says it exploded in the summer of 1979, when children were walked home from school in groups. Some scholars trace roots to the Edo period, and others think it is purely 1970s.

The three most feared

The folklorist Komatsu Kazuhiko names three medieval figures as the most feared yōkai of Kyoto: Shuten-dōji, Tamamo-no-Mae and Ōtakemaru.

• Tamamo-no-Mae (玉藻前) is a nine-tailed fox who took the form of a court lady and charmed Emperor Konoe until an astrologer saw through her. The tale appears in Muromachi-period stories. After she was chased and killed, her spirit was said to enter a stone at Nasu, the Sesshō-seki ("killing stone"). It split in two in March 2022.
• Ōtakemaru (大嶽丸) is a demon in the same group.

All three are best treated as legends. The stories grew over centuries, and the historical facts behind them are thin.

What is a yōkai? What the word 妖怪 means

The word is made of two characters, 妖 and 怪. Wikipedia says both mean "suspicious, doubtful", and that the word comes from the Chinese yāoguài. Think "uncanny" or "strange". If kanji are new to you, see What is Kanji?.

Japanese dictionaries define it broadly. The Digital Daijisen, quoted on Kotobank, calls it a mysterious phenomenon or eerie thing beyond human understanding, and lists the tengu, the one-eyed boy and the kappa as examples. Britannica says yōkai appear at fixed places and times. The Heibonsha World Encyclopedia adds that these are boundaries: crossroads, bridges and mountain passes, at twilight.

The Nichibunken yōkai database in Kyoto works from folklorist Komatsu Kazuhiko's definition. He divides yōkai into three kinds: the happening, the being, and the picture. So a yōkai can be a strange event (a light in a field, a voice with no speaker), a creature that explains it, or the image an artist draws of it.

The word has been in Japanese for a long time. Japanese Wikipedia traces it to the Shoku Nihongi, an official history, in an entry for the year 772. Then it meant an omen or a disturbance, not a monster you could draw. The same page says the modern sense spread partly through the philosopher Inoue Enryō (1858 to 1919), who studied yōkai widely. Before him, scholars said 鬼神, and ordinary people said お化け or 化け物.

Yōkai, yūrei and kami

Yōkai sit next to several other ideas. The lines between them are blurry, and speakers don't all draw them in the same place.

• Yūrei. A 幽霊 (ゆうれい, yūrei) is the spirit of a dead person who could not let go. Japanese Wikipedia describes the classic yūrei as dressed in white funeral clothes, with loose hair and no feet, appearing in graveyards or under riverside willows, around two in the morning or at twilight. A yōkai is wider: it need not be a dead person, and it is usually tied to a place. This is a rule of thumb, not a hard line.
• Kami. A 神 (かみ, kami) is a god or sacred spirit that is worshipped. Some scholars, Yanagita Kunio among them, say a yōkai is a kami that nobody worships any more. The serpent Yamata no Orochi is a standard example: a local god in one telling, a monster in another. The kappa and the dog spirit inugami are treated as gods in some places and yōkai in others.

These are the everyday words you will meet, with the sense each one carries:

Notice that 化 (to change) turns up again and again. A great many yōkai are defined by changing shape, or by being something that is not what it seems.

Where yōkai come from: Sekien, the night parade and Mizuki

Most of what people picture today was fixed late. It is worth knowing the order.

Stories first, pictures later

Early yōkai were written about, not drawn. Medieval tales such as the Konjaku Monogatarishū and the Uji Shūi Monogatari describe the 百鬼夜行 (ひゃっきやぎょう, hyakkiyagyō) (hyakki yagyō): a night parade of oni and yōkai in the streets. Meeting one was dangerous. A handbook, the Shūgaishō, advises staying indoors on certain nights or reciting a protective spell. Later, the parade was painted as a long scroll. The best-known handscroll, from the 16th century, is kept at Daitoku-ji in Kyoto.

Another medieval scroll, the Tsukumogami Emaki, shows old tools coming to life. It is covered under the tsukumogami above.

Toriyama Sekien, 1712 to 1788

In the Edo period, yōkai turned from omens into entertainment. Many new ones were invented then, often from puns, in picture books and prints. The tofu boy, 豆腐小僧, is one: it is first recorded in a 1779 picture book by Koikawa Harumachi, and nobody knows who made it up.

The key figure is Toriyama Sekien, a painter, who published four illustrated yōkai catalogues: Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776), Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779), Konjaku Hyakki Shūi (1780) and Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (1784). Japanese Wikipedia says his pictures were more odd and comic than cruel. English Wikipedia calls the books a literary parody of encyclopedias, and says the last of them is mostly his own imagination. In the dictionary, 泥田坊 (a vengeful spirit from a rice paddy) is marked as Sekien's work.

His designs became the standard look for many yōkai. Later artists copied him, and so did Mizuki.

Folklorists and a manga artist

In the 20th century the folklorist Yanagita Kunio made yōkai a subject for scholars. His Tōno Monogatari collects legends from Tōno in Iwate, among them the kappa and the zashiki-warashi, and his glossary of yōkai names, the Yōkai Meii, was serialised in 1938.

Mizuki Shigeru (1922 to 2015) did the most to put yōkai in front of the public. His manga GeGeGe no Kitarō ran in Weekly Shōnen Magazine from 1965 (as Hakaba no Kitarō) and under its present name from 1967. The first TV anime followed in 1968, and there have been six television series, the sixth starting in 2018 Facts on this page last checked on 2026-10-02.. Kitarō is a boy from the ghost tribe who helps keep the peace between humans and yōkai.

Mizuki took local folk creatures and gave them faces, voices and personalities. Wikipedia says he also created about 30 new yōkai of his own, such as Kitarō's father, Medama-oyaji. The nurikabe and the ittan-momen above are folklore yōkai that he made famous.

Kitsune: the fox spirits and their kinds

Foxes have their own vocabulary. Wikipedia describes them by kind (good or wild) and by origin (heavenly, sky or white). The fox's age matters too: Wikipedia says one, five, seven and nine tails are the commonest, and some tales say a fox grows an extra tail only after a hundred years. The nine-tailed fox came from Chinese myth.

Many of these are overlapping labels from different traditions, not a single official chart. Don't expect any two sources to agree on exactly where one fox ends and another begins.

The fox has even given its name to a bowl of noodles: 狐うどん (きつねうどん, kitsuneudon).

Yōkai in Japan today

Mizuki's Kitarō has been on television since 1968, and the creatures he popularised are better known than the old records they came from. Sakaiminato, his birthplace, held a popularity poll of local yōkai that Wikipedia says the ittan-momen won.

The word has gone modern too. Yo-kai Watch, made by the studio Level-5, began as a Nintendo 3DS game in 2013. Its anime, from 2014, became a hit in Japan. Its creatures are based on traditional yōkai. Urban legends such as the kuchisake-onna show that new yōkai are still being born.

Quizzes on Japan can help these names stick.

Questions about yōkai

What is a yōkai?

A yōkai (妖怪, also spelled yokai) is a supernatural creature, spirit or strange happening from Japanese folklore. The word covers monsters, goblins, shape-shifters and unexplained events. A yūrei, the spirit of a dead person, is a different thing, though the lines blur.

What are the top 10 Japanese yōkai?

There is no official top ten, but ten of the best known are the kappa, tengu, oni, kitsune, tanuki, bakeneko, rokurokubi, yuki-onna, zashiki-warashi and the tsukumogami. All of them are in the list above, in 河童, 天狗, 鬼, 狐, 狸, 化け猫, ろくろ首, 雪女, 座敷童 and 付喪神. Others would swap in the nurikabe, the noppera-bō or the umibōzu.

Who is the most famous yōkai?

No source ranks yōkai, but English Wikipedia calls the kappa one of the best-known yōkai in Japan. The tengu, the oni and the kitsune are just as familiar. Among characters, Mizuki's Kitarō and his friends, including the nurikabe and the ittan-momen, have been on television since 1968.

Who are the three terrible yōkai?

The folklorist Komatsu Kazuhiko names Shuten-dōji, Tamamo-no-Mae and Ōtakemaru as the three most feared yōkai of medieval Kyoto. They are legends, not records. Don't mix them up with the 三大怨霊, the three great vengeful spirits: Sugawara no Michizane, Taira no Masakado and Emperor Sutoku. Those were real people, later worshipped as kami, so they belong with the yūrei side of the line.

What is the creepiest yōkai?

The creepiest yōkai is a matter of taste, but the faceless noppera-bō and the rokurokubi are two that many people find unsettling. The noppera-bō scares by what is missing, and the story that made it famous is a double scare. The rokurokubi frightens because a normal-looking person turns out not to be.

Who is the prettiest yōkai?

The prettiest yōkai is also a matter of taste, but the yuki-onna and Tamamo-no-Mae are two that tales describe as beautiful: a woman of snow in white, and a fox who took the form of a court lady. Both are dangerous.

What are the 13 types of kitsune?

The reference works don't give a standard list of thirteen types of kitsune. Wikipedia describes overlapping groups: zenko (good), yako (wild) and ninko (man-foxes), and by origin the heavenly tenko, the sky kūko and the white byakko. Lists of thirteen circulate online, but none is a single agreed classification. The words above (善狐, 野狐, 天狐, 空狐, 白狐) are the main ones the dictionary records.

How many Japanese yōkai are there?

Nobody knows, because the number depends on what you count. Kyoto's Nichibunken database holds 35,307 records of yōkai and mysterious phenomena as of April 2025, but these are entries drawn from folklore studies, and they cover events as well as beings, so they are not a count of separate creatures. Many yōkai also have several regional names, and some are new inventions.

Sources

• Readings and meanings: JMdict (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0), including its notes on 泥田坊, 河童, 天狗 and 座敷童.
• What the word means, kami and yōkai, and the night parade: Wikipedia, Yōkai and Hyakki Yagyō; Japanese Wikipedia, 妖怪, 幽霊 and 怨霊.
• Definitions in Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias: Kotobank, 妖怪.
• Komatsu's definition and the database counts: Nichibunken, Database of Folktales of Mysterious Phenomena and Yōkai and its catalogue entry Facts on this page last checked on 2026-10-01..
• Sekien, Mizuki, Yanagita and the manga: Wikipedia, Toriyama Sekien, Shigeru Mizuki, GeGeGe no Kitarō and Kunio Yanagita; Japanese Wikipedia, 鳥山石燕 and 豆腐小僧.
• The individual yōkai: Wikipedia, Kappa, Umibōzu, Kamaitachi, Tengu, Yamauba, Oni, Shuten-dōji, Kitsune, Bake-danuki, Bakeneko, Nue, Rokurokubi, Noppera-bō, Yuki-onna, Zashiki-warashi, Nurarihyon, Hitotsume-kozō, Tsukumogami, Nurikabe, Ittan-momen, Kuchisake-onna, Tamamo-no-Mae and Yo-kai Watch; Japanese Wikipedia, からかさ小僧.
• Reviewed independently; the points about the legends, the fox kinds, the yūrei and yōkai distinction and the yōkai not in the dictionary are waiting for a native speaker's check.