Empire of Monsters

The rural fantasies that made Japan a global superstar

The philosopher Roland Barthes famously described Japan as an “empire of signs,” in a critically acclaimed 1970 book by the same title. He was bewitched by Japan’s art and culture, modern and traditional, but found himself powerless to penetrate its core, to unravel what it might all mean. He saw his frustration reflected in three dimensions, in the structure of the nation’s capital. Tokyo pulsed with light and energy, fueled by the “vast organism” of a sprawling transit network. But the city’s heart remained shrouded in perpetual darkness: the grounds of the Imperial Palace, deliberately left in their natural forested state. The city of Tokyo, and by extension Japanese culture as a whole, “offers this precious paradox,” declared Barthes. “It does possess a center, but this center is empty.”

Barthes, who died in 1980, was a titan of academia, the founding father of semiology: the study of symbols and the ways that they communicate meanings. Far be it from me, a lowly newsletter-writer, to critique him. But I do believe he missed the heart of Japan altogether. He was correct that there is a void at Japan’s center. Where he was wrong is that it is not empty. It is filled with things that can’t be seen by human eyes.

Some of these things are holy – like the kami, deities of Shinto lore. For more about them, see Hiroko’s latest newsletter, which is a companion to this essay. Here I’m going to focus on a certain subset of these invisible things, too strange for the human mind to even imagine. Those oddballs have been known by many names over the millennia: oni, bakemono, mononoke, yokai. They are the things that go bump in the night, lurking just beyond the periphery of human perception, here before civilization and with us still. Japan isn’t as much an empire of signs as it is an empire of monsters. And the capital of this empire isn’t Tokyo: it’s the far-flung, little-visited rural region of San’in. It is home to two creatives who tamed those monsters, transforming them from fearsome folklore into characters that won hearts and minds across Japan — and then the world.

I started thinking about all of this on a recent trip Hiroko and I took to the San’in region, the collective name for the prefectures of Shimane and Tottori. Written with characters – or should I say signs! – meaning “mountain” and “shadow,” it refers to the area’s location alongside the northern face of the mountains separating it from Okayama, Hiroshima, and Yamaguchi. The weather is mercurial; the mountains soaring. San’in is a place of myth and legend, and it played home to two artists who made their names from monsters: Lafcadio Hearn, who lived in Matsue for a little over a year in 1890-1, and Shigeru Mizuki, who grew up in rural Sakaiminato in the 1920s. Hearn’s home in Matsue has been converted into a museum, while an entire street in Sakaiminato has been transformed into the “Mizuki Shigeru Road.”

Hearn’s home at the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum in Matsue.

Hearn noticed that void at the heart of Japan almost a century before Barthes did. In “My First Day in the Orient,” which he wrote for Harper’s Magazine in the spring of 1890, Hearn recounts taking a rickshaw to an old Shinto shrine on the outskirts of Yokohama. Fascinated by its display of Japanese spirituality, he asks for a closer look at the altar. But he is shocked at what he finds – or rather, doesn’t find. There is no painting, no statue of a deity. Instead he sees “only a mirror, a round pale disk of polished metal, and my own face therein, and behind this mockery of me a phantom of the far sea. Only a mirror! Symbolizing what? Illusion? ...Perhaps one day I will be able to find out all these things.”

Hearn spent the next fifteen years doing just that. He soon moved to the city of Matsue, as “it was the oldest province, where many shadows of great historic events would remain,” as his wife Setsu wrote for The Atlantic Monthly many years later. When they first met, soon after Hearn’s move, she barely spoke any English, and he only the most rudimentary Japanese. But they were bound by a love of folktales, superstitions, ghosts, and monsters. Setsu became Hearn’s muse, conveying Japan’s spookiest stories through a mixture of pantomime and pidgin she called “Hearn-speak.” (This also happens to be the subject of the upcoming NHK morning drama “Baké-baké,” which is all about Setsu’s relationship with Hearn.)

He was so deft at capturing her meaning that the texts he produced of these oral legends, originally intended for foreign audiences, were soon re-translated into Japanese. By that point, Hearn had naturalized as a Japanese citizen and taken a Japanese name, Yakumo Koizumi. As a result, successive generations of Japanese grew up on stories of the faceless nopperabo, the fearsome yuki-onna, and many other yokai tales without realizing they were being recounted by a foreigner (or more precisely, an international husband-wife team from San’in.)

Hearn gave the yokai a new life in print. But still they remained invisible to the eye. It would fall to another San’in local to give them form. Japan knows him today as Shigeru Mizuki. While he was born more than a decade after Hearn’s death, Mizuki came of age in Sakaiminato, just to the east of Matsue, and grew up on a steady diet of the same regional folklore. “When I learned of Koizumi Yakumo,” recalled Mizuki in an interview late in life, “I was surprised to learn that there were foreigners who, like me, fell in love with Shimane's strange customs and atmosphere.”

After returning to Japan from World War II, Mizuki found work as manga artist. Much of it featured yokai and other monsters. In 1967, at the age of forty-five, he finally landed the megahit that would make his name: Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro, an animated adaptation of his manga series Hakaba Kitaro (Graveyard Kitaro). Deftly mixing Japanese yokai with foreign creatures and characters of Mizuki’s own invention, Kitaro channeled traditional folklore directly into the hearts and minds of Japanese children through a then-new medium of broadcast television. The eponymous Kitaro was a half-yokai, half-human child with the power to battle, and befriend, monsters. His animated adventures proved incredibly popular, triggering a “yokai boom” that lasted through the late Sixties.

A menagerie of Mizuki monsters at play.

Barthes visited Tokyo in the midst of this fad for the invisible-turned-visible, but totally missed it. This was long before Japanese cartoons began winning hearts and minds around the globe, and the fifty-something semiotician was undoubtedly too busy hobnobbing with the cultural elite to pay much attention to what seemed like kids’ stuff. Which is a shame, because the yokai boom, a product of both Hearn’s and Mizuki’s work, offered insight into the questions that so bedeviled Barthes.

And in fact, the boom never really ended. Even today, most Japanese get their first taste of yokai lore from later incarnations of Kitaro, making the name a household word, a synonym for things spooky. The show’s format, featuring half-yokai, half-human child who could tame monsters, provided a roadmap for countless imitators and homages, not least among them Pokémon. Kitaro’s influence is such that if you fly into San’in, you enter the mountain-shadow realm through an airport that was, in 2010, re-christened “Kitaro-Yonago Airport.”

When you think about it, monsters are Japan’s literal face to the world, whether in the form of commercial characters like giant kaiju and pocket-sized Pokémon, or folkloric ones like yokai. Godzilla, the stereotypical giant monster, stomped home with an Oscar earlier this year. Pikachu adorns everything from children’s wear to jumbo jets. The Demons of Demon Slayer, the Devils of Chainsaw Man, the Curses of Jujutsu Kaisen and more all owe their existence to Mizuki’s pop-yokai creations. And the government even turned to the yokai for help during the pandemic, turning a yokai called Amabié into the mascot of its COVID-19 countermeasures campaign. It wasn’t so very long ago that yokai were regarded as quaint rural superstition; now they’re the foundation of Japan’s entire fantasy-industrial complex.

And Japan has Hearn and Mizuki, the twin stars of San’in, to thank in large part for that. They were early explorers of that “empty center” at the heart of Japan, pioneers who first shone light on its invisible denizens for mass audiences. You can still sense the things that inspired them today, as Hiroko writes about so eloqently in her companion to this piece. Check it out here!