99% Invisible - 403- Return of the Yokai

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

In the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events, or for traumatizing generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese, but in Japan it’s different. There are mascots for towns, aquariums, dentists' offices, even prisons. There are mascots in cities that tell people not to litter, or remind them to be quiet on the train. Everything has a mascot and anything can be a mascot. The reason why mascots and character culture flourish in Japan is connected with the nation’s fascinating history with mythical monsters known as Yokai. Return of the Yokai

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. One of the cool parts about moving to a new city or a new state or a new country is that you notice all these fascinating things about a place that are just normal for people who have been there a long time. When Chris Carlier moved from England to Japan in 2002, there was one thing that really stood out to him. I think a lot of Japanese people go about that day and they don't really pay any attention to the mascots that are everywhere. The mascots.

Real-world, life-size character costumes with sweaty actors inside. Most people ignore them, but I always found them really fascinating. Here in the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events or traumatized generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese. But in Japan, it's different. There are mascots for towns, aquariums, prisons. Sometimes I just go to the dentist

and the dentist has their own mascot. There are mascots that tell people not to litter or remind them to stay quiet on the train. Everything has a mascot and anything can be a mascot. There are mascots that tell people not to litter, or remind them to stay quiet on the train. Everything has a mascot and anything can be a mascot. There's an anthropomorphized bare mascot. There's an anthropomorphized melon mascot. There's an anthropomorphized bear whose head is made out of a melon.

His name is Melon Kuma, and he's the mascot of a region known for both its bears and its melons. And so, as Carlier adjusted to his new life in Tokyo, he started snapping photos of all these mascots. He was coming across. Yeah, I just realized one day I had hundreds of pictures of mascots, so I started putting them online. Carlier's hobby has since morphed into a wildly popular Twitter account called Mondo mascots, and if you were to build a Twitter account in a lab, you could not concoct a more Vivian-lay set of content than this Twitter account. Yeah, it's one of my favorite things on the internet. That's producer Vivian-lay.

Twitter has been a rollercoaster ride of emotions for the past few months, so it's a real treat to see a picture of a manatee with a pompadour made out of cabbage. Usually these costume mascots are out interacting with the world, waving at tourists and opening supermarkets, but like the rest of us, they recently had to spend a lot of time indoors in order to flatten the curve of the coronavirus. One mascot was making quarantine workout videos for people's stig at home. Another posted photo after photo of himself just staring blankly into space. But around mid-march, I saw something kind of odd and very meta happening on the Mondo mascots twitter.

Some of the more well-known mascots were adding these similar new flourishes on top of the regular mascot costumes. They were all wearing long flowing blue wigs and colorful fish scales. The mascots were dressing up as the same creature. I posted some mascots dressed as a kind of mermaid type creature with long hair and three legs It was a mythical character called Amabye, a 174-year-old monster that has recently become the unexpected hero of the COVID era in Japan. What's going on in this tweet here is that local mascots are now dressing up as Amabye as a form of cosplay, a form of meta-cost play.

That's Matt Alt, a writer and translator based in Tokyo. Because there's obviously somebody in these costumes who's dressed up as the regional mascot who is now dressing up as a mobier. Does that make sense? No, not really. There's so many layers. It's like an onion.

Just peel the layers back. Matt wrote about a Mabye for the New Yorker and is also the co-author of a book called Yo-Kai Attack, the Japanese Monster Survival Guide. I spoke with both him and his co-author, Heroku Yoda, in order to peel back all of the oniony history layers of this Twitter moment. Matt and Heroku explained to me that a Mabye

is a creature from Japanese folklore, what's called a yokai. Yokai are monsters from Japanese folklore, and they've been part of the oral storytelling tradition here in Japan since before Japan has been Japan, and they are basically superstitions with personalities. Yeah, the yokai are characterization of natural phenomena or unexplained phenomena. other stitions with personalities. Yokai is a pretty broad term that includes everything from shape-shifting demons to cuddly animal-like creatures to spirited inanimate objects.

And it also ghosts. It's kind of like trying to lump fairies, vampires, leprechauns, and angry toaster into the same category. Yokai are supernatural manifestations of the unknown. If you don't know what made that noise that went bump in the night, you blame it on Yokai. Occasionally, they take the form of benevolent guardian angels, while some Yokai are completely innocuous. One of my favorites is the azuki arai, which is a spirit that washes azuki beans, and that's it. But more often than not, they're malevolent beans associated with a specific place,

kind of like regional ghosts or the troll that lives under a particular bridge. If you go to this part of the river, you might be pulled underwater by a kappa, a river goblin. If you go to this part of the mountains, you might be spirited away by a tangu, which is like a big, a raven-like creature. The first yokai stories were told in the 8th century, but you can see the traces of yokai that stem thousands of years back to Japan's native religion called shintoism. The shintoism teaches you basically appreciate things surrounding you. And the things surrounding you

shouldn't just be appreciated, but respected. For shinto, we believe in the nature like a forest, mountain, it has a spirit. So we respect the nature of spirits. This is Izumi Hasegawa head priest at Shinto Shrine of Shusei and Rai in America. Hasegawa says that Shinto was a religion that's so tightly woven into the fabric of Japanese society that it's difficult to separate where the religion ends and Japanese culture begins. More than they Japanese people didn't realize Shinto is our college's basis.

So I say it's not revision, it's more like a way of living in the college tradition custom. Hasegawa says that Shintoism is a belief system that venerates millions of deities that live all around us and impact daily life. After the rain stopped and sun shined and the plants grow so well, maybe like a sun has some kind of spirits. Rain, water has some kind of spirit. The growing, the productivity has some kind of the spirits. We should respect them.

These chinto spirits are called kami and they reside within everything, from the trees to the wind, even your iPhone. Shintoism fosters the mindset that everything in the world is animated and has a spirit. Anything can become a character. Everything is alive. You have this belief system in which nearly anything can be receptacle for a deity or a soul, and many of those coming are actually personifications, that worldview, that belief system of polytheism and animism, is the soil from which Yokai emerged? In the beginning tales of spirit monsters varied drastically from region to region, and were

passed on as verbal stories with no real visual form attached. A copper water goblin from the south might be described totally differently from a copper from the north. That is, until the Edo period. The Edo period, which took place between 1603 and 1868, was a time of political stability and economic growth for Japan. And during this time, the publishing industry

really started taking off. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in Japan, one of the most popular forms of book was the Encyclopedia. And Encyclopædias are, what, full of data and information. Well, around 1776, a artist named Toriyama Sekian came around and he published a parody encyclopedia that wasn't full of facts at all. It was an encyclopedia of Yokai. Second created a catalog that gave each Yokai a name, a description, and an illustrated image associated with it.

And this was the moment that the modern concept of Yokai emerged. Second's books were some of the first mass-produced reference images of Yokai. The entire nation was literally on the same page about who these monsters were and what they looked like. Before the Toyama Sikian's book came out, the Yokai were only drawn on Japanese scrolls,

but the people in general cannot really see them. It essentially cemented the image of a lot of Yokai in place, and those are the images that we know today. By creating an illustrated index of them, Sekian took all these local legends and consolidated them in place, and those are the images that we know today. and as a way of explaining the many unknowns of the world, including explaining highly infectious diseases caused by invisible microorganisms. You know, today we have science to explain. Like plague, for example, but back in time, there's not much information about medical, and so it's very unknown.

And that's when the yoga comes to play. about medical, and so it's very unknown. And that's when the yoga comes to play. And the plague was actually where the Yokai known as a Mabyei specifically came into play. Throughout the 19th century, cholera epidemics were sweeping the world, and Japan was hit especially hard. Wave after wave of outbreaks devastated the country

over the course of several decades. And at the same time, very little was known about the disease and how to fight it. According to an actual newspaper story at the time, a Mobi egg was spotted off the coast of southwestern Japan in 1846. For several nights in a row, villagers could see a mysterious light radiating off the coast towards the sea. One night, an officer was sent to investigate the source. He followed the light towards the water until he was greeted by a strange-looking creature who appeared out of the sea.

It had the beak of a bird, long locks of human-like hair, a body covered in scales, and three legs with web feet, kind of like cross between mermaid and a duck. And it declared that its name was Amabie. It said that there would be a abundant harvest. And then it said, If plague should ever ravage these lands again, show an image of me to the people, and then it was gone. It appeared in a Japanese newspaper of the era as a little article, and it was accompanied by a very charmingly crude drawing that looks almost like a child

might have done it. Because of that story, Amabye became a talisman against plague in Japan. People would draw a picture of it and display it for others to see so that Amabye would protect the world from harm. Mythical creatures like a Mabye played an important societal role within Japan in the 1800s. But by the turn of the 20th century, Japan's relationship with its Yokai began to shift.

Largely because of one man in particular, a philosopher named Inoue Enrio. So Inoue Engo is known as Dr. Yokai. If you see that word, Dr. Yokai, it sounds like he is reading into Yokai. But it was the exact opposite. He made it his mission to displace Yokai from the Japanese psyche for good. Inoue was born right at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration,

which was a moment when Japan began opening up to the rest of the world after hundreds of years of isolation. But as the country began opening up, leaders wanted to be able to compete with Western countries in terms of science, technology, and military power. So in his eyes and in the sound politicians to Japan, it's very behind from the West, and military power.

He no way saw Yokai as a crutch holding back the nation. If Japan was going to become a world power, it needed to actively embrace modern science and technology. He felt that so long as people clung to Yokai in superstition to explain the way they are known, Japan would never reach its full potential. He went around the country finding examples of superstitions or places where people said a spirit was responsible for things or urban legends and basically debunked them. Inoa became sort of a ghost buster. He created his own area of research called Yokai Gaku, or Yokai studies,

and would basically go from town to town being that one guy at magic shows, pointing out all the trap doors and mirrors in the illusions. He used scientific experimentation to explain away the natural phenomenon that Yokai were previously attributed to. But it didn't just stop at Yokai. A lot of local customs and traditions were quashed during this time. I think that movement went too far. Our local beliefs are totally killed by the modernization. The local deities, the Buddhist deities, and small temples are shut down.

You know what, it wasn't necessarily some crotchety old hater of all things wondrous. If anything, he was fascinated by the great mysteries of life, what he called the true mysteries. They were the universal conundrums that we may never find any answer to. Like, what happens to us when we die or what's the meaning of life? But he was a Buddhist in the scholar and he just didn't think that monsters fell into that category. He didn't deny all possibility of mystery.

This is Michael Dylan Foster, Professor of Japanese and Japanese folklore at UC Davis. He was basically saying that most of the mysteries that we see, most of the yokei can be explained away, but there are those that can't be explained away and those are what we have to find. He tried to come up with solutions or some kind of answers for unexplainable things like, you know, like a molder, ex-filed, like, tooth is out there, you know what I mean? He's trying to find it.

But because of Yenoan's work, people became less and less interested in stories of Yokai. They were no longer needed to understand the world. But they didn't completely disappear, because they provided something that modern science couldn't. Yokai filled a different, more psychological need for comfort. There's an expression in Japanese, which is translated as half belief, half doubt. And I think that's how in our sort of daily interactions with so many things in the world, we actually approach them.

People think of a yokai, a monster, creature, supernatural explanation of something as being irrational in some ways. But I think we have to sort of turn that around and realize that it really is a very rational way to think about things. Sometimes a ghost story can make the unknown feel less chaotic. Imagining that it's a monster,

a met putting a form and a face and sometimes a name, and very attributes to something, gives you a sense of control over it. And even though you know I earned the reputation as a yokai killer, it's actually thanks to him that we know as much as we do about yokai. Inoei was an incredibly thorough researcher and kept meticulous notes. His work has been really helpful for people who study folklore. Even though he's famous for a debunker, I guess, for the paranormal activities, but because

he left so much data to look for the absolute truth. His data is very useful for a folklorist today. For years, Yoko existed in this nebulous space. Their stories weren't entirely forgotten, but they were suppressed in the name of rationality and progress. It wasn't until after WWII that Yokoy crept out of the shadows and back into the public imagination. In the post-war era, when Japan is finally recovering from the horrors of war, a consumer

economy starts up again, a publishing industry starts up again, and there's a huge hunger for entertainment, manga, comic books, cheap comic books, become one of the main forms of entertainment. And just as it took basically one man to exercise yoga from Japan's collective consciousness, it only took one man to revive them, an artist, actually. The manga artist, Muki Shigeru brought it back. He's very known by the animation called Gage-Gage No Kitaro. In the 1950s, an artist and animator named

Mizuki Shigeru released a manga that was adapted into a popular animation series called Gage-Gage No Kitaro. It's charming in a deeply unsettling way that will haunt your dreams. The story centers on a one-eyed ghost boy named Kitaro, who keeps the peace between the world of Yokai and the world of mortals. Mizuki was also a folklorist, and he used this series as a platform to propel Y Yokai back into the Japanese mainstream. When I was a kid, I saw the animation, and I grew up with it. It was huge and popular, so a lot of characters are creating by him, but also the many of Yokai are based on the old Yokai.

He brought them back. Since Mizuki's reintroduction, Yokai have been a constant presence in Japanese pop culture. There's been reboot after reboot of Kitaro over the decades, as well as incredibly popular games like Yokai Watch, which is introducing newer generations to Yokai. And these monsters are all over the cultural exports that we, Americans, like flip out over. You can see the dark, whimsical undercurrents of Yokai in the work of Haruki Marakami, or the animation of Haiya Miyazaki. Not to mention one of the biggest franchises in the world.

Pokemon. There's a certain Pokemon that's inspired by a Yokai called Sogenby, which is depicted as a ghoulish floating head engulfed in a fireball. Let's see if you can guess! Who is that Pokémon? Not a clue. Come on, Roman. It's Gessli!

Gessli! Mizuki Shige-du, the man who revived Yokai in the 20th century, was concerned about whether Yokai could survive in modern society. Their products of an older era, one that relied on faith and superstition rather than science and technology. In an interview before his death, Mizuki says that in the bright lights of modern Japan, Yokai can't flourish like they once did. Not today, the modern era is lighter everywhere, so bright. You can see everything.

He's saying that modernization makes Yokai quite difficult to live. But despite the bright lights and modernization, Yokai are still thriving. I don't think Yokai ever go away. Foster says that Yokai have been a part of popular imagination and will remain a part of popular imagination in one form or another. The need for explaining mystery never disappears. Once we scientifically explain it, it just moves on to something further along,

something deeper, and there's still that mystery needing to be explained. So, in other words, Yokai themselves will never go away. They may not take the same form or adjust the same fears as they did hundreds of years ago, but Yokai will always adapt to inhabit the world around them. And you can see this in the character culture of Japan. A lot of times foreigners come here and they see this and they're just blown away by the sheer amount of super cute characters running around

on the streets of Japan and the forms of illustrations and signs and things like that. And they mistake it for it being kind of infantile or childish, but in reality, the roots of that character and mascot culture can be found in the Yokai, who were sort of mascots for a bygone era. Which brings us back to that plague-fighting Edo period mascot Amabye. Until recently, Amabye was actually not a well-known Yokai in Japan.

But then suddenly, in late February, just as COVID-19 was starting to sweep the world in earnest, a Japanese artist on Twitter kind of resurrected him, and he posted an image of the original newspaper article, and then he posted an illustration that he had made of him, I'm obvious saying, I'm obvious, I'm following what you said, I'm sharing your image, I hope this helps. Thousands of people'm following what you said. I'm sharing your image. I hope this helps. Thousands of people on Twitter from all over the world started posting

their own renditions of a Mabi-A, with the hashtag, a Mabi-A Challenge. I've seen hand drawn sketches of a Mabi-A, watercolors of a Mabi-A, wildly inappropriate, humanoid female forms of a Mabi-A, all with the same luxurious, flowing locks, scales, and three legs.

One thing that we can do is latch on to this idea of the mabye as a kind of counter-attack to the virus. Here's Foster again. Most people would say they don't really believe in them, but the idea that there is the possibility that something could exist, that potential for there being something beyond our current way of explaining the world, I think is a very attractive thing to a lot of people.

If you're facing something unknown or something that you don't understand or something uncontrollable, it's chaos. Obviously, you know, growing up, I'm not gonna give you hardcore solutions or vaccine or anything like that, but yoga is, it gives you a way, one of the ways to control things,

to give you a piece of mind. So if you're feeling anxious about the pandemic these days, go ahead and draw a picture of a Mabye and put it on your window for everyone to see. It is not going to stop the virus. I cannot stress this enough. It is not going to stop the virus. But why not have a Yokai around the house? You might just feel a little bit better. What also might make you feel better and would make the whole world better is if you wore a mask. I also can't stress this enough. Wear a mask. Draw a mabye on it if you want to, but wear a mask. Thanks. Speaking of Japanese character culture, did you know that Hello Kitty isn't a cat?

I certainly didn't. Vivian comes back to explain that after this. So I'm talking with Vivian Lay again. How you doing? I'm good. Roman, how are you? Excellent. In your closet doing good. Yeah, I'm in my quarantine studio, surrounded by like, I didn't realize how many pairs of overalls I have, and like, rompers, so this is kind of embarrassing. No, you should not be embarrassed. Rompers, one piece clothing is extremely acceptable in the new era.

It's very efficient, so I'm really appreciating it right now. So, Roman, how familiar are you with Hello Kitty? I'm guessing you didn't grow collecting a lot of like stationary and coin purses, but I don't want to assume. No, I don't think I became familiar until my 20s actually. I didn't quite catch on to it at the time. So I'm more more, I'm somewhat familiar, but that's about it. Like, Hello Kitty is one of those characters that like, it's like a huge cultural export from Japan. So even if you're not a fan, you would still, you know,

recognize the character. Absolutely. And she, she kind of came up in conversation during my interview with Matt Alt and Heroko Yoda, and Matt told me about this big new story from a few years back that I had completely forgotten about. I don't know if you remember like a couple of years ago, there was a big bruja when it was announced

that Hello Kitty wasn't a cat. What, she's clearly a cat. She was like cat ears, like her name is Kitty. Like could she, that's a cat. Exactly. Exactly cat ears, like her name is Kitty. Like, is she, that's a cat. That's a cat. Exactly. It's incredibly misleading. But back in 2014, there was a retrospective exhibit

on Hello Kitty at the Japanese American National Museum. And the curator was an anthropologist named Christine Yano. And she had written a book about Hello Kitty. So she was doing an interview with the LA Times, which was covering the exhibition. And Yano said that she was writing up some text, and she would refer to Hello Kitty as a quote unquote cat. And she said she was firmly corrected by Sanrio and was told that Hello Kitty is not

a cat. She was a girl. Like, she's supposed to be like a human girl, like not a cat girl, but a human girl. See, that is actually unclear if she's like a human girl or like a young female blank. But Yano says that what Sanrio told her was, she's a cartoon character, she's a little girl, she is a friend, but she is not a cat.

She has never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. And then, if you go to the Sanrio website, they have even more details about her background. And apparently, her name is Hello Kitty White. She is the daughter of George and Mary White. She has a boyfriend named Daniel Star, who wants to be a cameraman when he grows up.

And she also has a pet cat named Charmi Kitty. Oh, so is Charmi Kitty a cat?. So is Charmi Kitty a cat? Like is Charmi Kitty her cat? From what I could tell, she's a cat. She looks exactly like Hello Kitty, but she walks on all fours. So I guess technically she's a cat. Wow. So okay, so I'm trying to think of other cartoon characters.

So like if you're thinking of Donald Duck, okay, so I'm trying to think of other cartoon characters. So, like, if you're thinking of Donald Duck, okay. You know, I'm aware that Donald Duck is not like a real duck that he was close and smokes cigars. I mean, not a real duck, but I wouldn't say he's not a duck. You know what I mean? Like, that's a weird choice. It's a very clear distinction. Right.

So, it's kind of funny because Yano like casually slipped this Hello Kitty is not a cat thing into an interview with like the LA Times and people just like didn't take it very well. She may look like a friendly feline but this week fans of Hello Kitty were told the shocking truth. I think she's a cat. I in my heart she will be a cat forever. I'm a cat lover. She's like the ambassador of cats. All right, you're into Hello Kitty, right? Yes, yes.

You were pulled to hear this? What was your reaction? I actually was a pulled. Um, I think he's leaving the witness, your honor. But like, even the Washington Post headline was Hello Kitty is not a cat. Everything is a lie. And then, and even Josh Groben had an opinion on the matter and tweeted, Hello Kitty is

a cat. She has whiskers and a cat nose. Girls don't look like that. Stop this nonsense. It seemed that people just can't file a universe where Hello Kitty is not a cat. So, like, you know, actually after this news broke out, a bunch of reporters ended up reaching out directly to Sanrio, and the company actually, you know, revised their statement, and they said, maybe it was too far to say she was not a cat.

But they clarified that Hello Kitty is a personification done in the motif of a cat, which I think may have still been confusing to a lot of people. Yeah, but if you read really carefully, what Sanrio is saying is she's a personification of a cat. She's actually a little girl. And this is something that Westerners couldn't wrap their heads around at all. And that's not to say that like all Japanese people immediately understood that hello kitty is not a cat

There's still a lot of confused Japanese people, but the word that Sanrio used to describe her is that she's a Gijinka which translates to anthropomorphization and You see this in those costume mask-ots on the streets of Japan, but like also everywhere in the country like on the streets of Japan, but also everywhere in the country. There's an anthropomorphized strawberry on the pack of fruit or a cartoon phone in the manual of your phone. And it's just something that's incredibly present in Japan in a way that it isn't here in the West. I started using Gizenga to explain the culture difference.

Especially to me, is like America versus Japan. So it's kind of the natural, it's just there like air to me. So I think that when Sanrio was trying to explain why Hello Kitty is not necessarily a cat, they were working off this understanding of anthropomorphism that you could look at a cartoon cat

and not necessarily think of it as a cat per se. Anthropomorphism really runs through Japanese culture. And that, I think, is the thread that connects things most of all. Yeah, it just, you don't see it. You just see it outside Japan. It's actually, it's a unique thing of Japan. So it's so natural to us. So I guess the answer is that Hello Kitty is not a cat, but is also you know like not not a cat.

Yeah she lives somewhere on the spectrum of cat. But your fan of the mountain goats, right? Yeah, sure. So if you're like confused, you could just take a cue from them because they tweeted, Hello Kitty is not a cat. Hello Kitty is a god. You exist only at Hello Kitty's pleasure. Crawl, like drugged roaches before her splendor.

That's a very John Tarnial take. Oh, that's so good. Well, I feel like I understand this a whole lot more in some way. But also like a lot less. Exactly. You could say that I both understand it and don't understand it. Thanks a lot lot Vivian. Thank you.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivian Le. Mixing tech production by Bryson Barnes and Sri Fusef. Music by Sean Raeow. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Baroubaix, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Meeho Gounder. Matt Alt has a new book out right now, and I mean literally as I'm recording this and

we're releasing this episode, it comes out today. It's called Pure Invention, how Japanese pop culture conquered the world. If you're interested and read more about Hello Kitty and Pokemon, you know, if you're a regular Vivian Lay, you should check it out. This episode is supported by the Bogry Foundation, based in London, UK, and led by three generations of the Bogry family. The team and trustees share a spirit of curiosity. Through a diverse arts and culture program, the Foundation celebrates extraordinary talent from across Asia, encouraging artistic dialogue between both traditional and contemporary disciplines. Learn more at boggreyfoundation.org.

We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row, which is now distributed in multiple locations across North America, but in our hearts will always be in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We're a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars on the show at 99pi, or go on Instagram and read it to. But our true home on the open internet is 99pi.org.

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