Imaginary Worlds - How Folklore Spirited Anime Away

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

Anime and manga are a global phenomenon, and their popularity continues to grow. Many of these stories are populated by supernatural beings called yōkai. Even though yōkai can be portrayed as ghosts, demons, or monsters, they're rarely purely good or evil. We trace the history of yōkai from ancient folklore to Studio Ghibli films and shows like Dan Da Dan. I talk with scholars Kaitlyn Ugoretz, Deborah Shamoon, and Michael Dylan Foster about why these supernatural beings have captured people's imaginations, how they became central to modern pop culture, and the role they play in Japan even in times of national emergency. Deborah’s book, “Text and Image: Making Meaning in Manga and Comics” is available in the Fall. Kaitlyn’s YouTube channel is Eat Pray Anime. Michael Dylan Foster wrote several books on yōkai To support the show, you can donate on Patreon where you get access to the ad-free version and our companion show Between Imaginary Worlds.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Wayfair, every style, every home. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molinsky. I've been a fan of anime for most of my life, but I'm also a casual fan. I'm like the equivalent of somebody who says they're into a band or a musician, but they mostly know the greatest hits and not a lot of the deep guts. Recently, someone recommended to me a show called Dan to Dan, and when I started watching it,

I felt like it was aimed at a younger audience, which is another issue for me. A lot of anime is aimed at a younger demographic, which I've aged way beyond. But I got hooked on Dan to Dan immediately. In fact, it actually kind of reminded me of all the conflicted feelings I used to have as a teenager. The show starts with an argument between a nerdy boy named Okaroon and a quick-tempered girl named Momo. He tells her, aliens are real. The U.S. military admitted UAPs exist and reform their space force. And now Japan has a aerospace defense force. Don't you see everyone's gearing up for war? She thinks that he's crazy. But then she admits,

I don't believe aliens are real, but I believe ghosts are. There's no such thing as ghosts. It turns out they're both right. From that point on, the characters are relentlessly pursued by ghosts and aliens. The show is completely bonkers and extremely bingeable. And as you can tell, I'll be playing the English dubbed versions of anime in this episode. Now, the ghosts in the show are not like the kind of ghosts that I'm used to seeing. They're more like powerful spirits or supernatural entities.

And the characters keep referring to them as yokey. How can you not know she's a yukai? You're a yoki. She was a modern day yokey, but sightings were rare. What a strange little yokai have you become this human slave? You was a scum sucker! I thought that sounds familiar. I feel like I've heard Yo-Kai before.

So I looked it up and fell deep into a rabbit hole. Yo-kai are in a ton of anime and manga, and their history goes back for centuries. In fact, I think you could take any yokai from a manga or an anime and write a master's thesis that traces the character's roots back to specific spiritual traditions or regions in Japan. And they're not always called ghosts.

I've seen them referred to as demons, monsters, and cryptids. Caitlin Eugarets is the host of a YouTube channel called Eat Prey Anime. She's also a postdoctoral fellow of East Asian Cinema in Media Studies at the University of Idaho. I asked her, how would she classify Yokai? If we had to put them in one bucket for the purpose of talking about them, I would put them in the folklore bucket. And this is a bucket that everybody can draw things out of. So Buddhism can reach into the bucket. Shinto can reach into the bucket.

And they might pull out the same Yolai, but they might not treat it in the same way. There was never a nationwide understanding of these creatures that we now call yokai. There were just local traditions. And then some of them became composited into the creatures that we understand now today. That is Deborah Shammun. She is a professor of Japanese film and pop culture at the National University of Singapore. And like all the scholars that I talked with, she said, don't worry about trying to classify yokai. Because these things are so popular in science fiction and fantasy storytelling,

when people talk about them online today, they tend to approach it as if it's a video game or like a role-playing game. And so they expect it has certain stats. can do certain things. And if it doesn't fit that category, then it's not that thing or it has to have different stats. But that's not how these, it's not how yoki or folklore was understood in the pre-modern period. So, you know, like it's not like it's absolutely has to fit this category or it's not that thing. But I did notice three things that a lot of yokei have in common, whether it's in folklore or pop culture. First, they often have a connection to the natural world. So a yokey might appear as a fox, cat, snake, spider, or some other animal. Or a yoki might be tied to a

specific location, like a mountain or a forest. Secondly, they're often shape-shifters. They might look like an animal at first, but then they shape-shift into looking like a human. The third thing they have in common is that you typically cannot divide them into clear categories of good and evil. Michael Dillon Foster is a professor at UC Davis who wrote several books about Yoki. In a way, I think they are a lot like nature. You know, they're sort of indifferent to human kindness or morality. So if we treat them correctly, they may reward us. And if we treat them badly, they may punish us.

But it's not all that clear cut. For instance, there's a Yoki called the Kappa. It's often depicted as a humanoid turtle. with a tiny pool of water on its head. Caitlin says in pre-modern Japan, the Kappa could be useful for parents if they wanted to warn their kids. Hey, don't go near the rivers,

especially when the water is high. Kappa were famous for pulling small children and also livestock like horses and cows, which were very expensive and important in sort of rural, pastoral life, right? Don't go near the rivers. Don't go near the water in an unsafe way. And so the kappa is kind of a manifestation of that danger.

But some people saw the kappa as a powerful being that they wanted to please. And so people would pray to the kappa and give them gifts of cucumbers and other things that they like so that they would help to control the water and make the rice and all the other crops grow well. A lot of cultures around the world have stories like this, where folklore is used to explain natural phenomena or to teach lessons to children. So why does anime and manga keep dipping into this well over and over again? And how did we get here from ancient spiritual beliefs to characters that kids are watching on their iPads or buying as trading cards in games like Yu-Gi-O?

Caitlin says, A good place to begin is when people started to categorize. in pre-modern Japan. They would try to write down every little thing, give it a name, try to understand it, basically create an encyclopedia. And so from very early times in Japan, we see these books and encyclopedias and lists of yoki. What do they have in common?

What makes some yoki different from others? She says some people were doing this because they thought yoki were real and were creating problems in their lives. If they could figure out which Yoki they were dealing with, they could understand how to appease it or get rid of it. They were also starting to depict Yoki visually. And then there was a huge shift during the Edo period, which is from the early 1600s to the mid-1800s.

You might actually know this time period because it's when a lot of samurai movies and TV shows take place. Michael Dillon Foster says it was also a time of urbanization and technological development. Print culture exploded, especially within the cities, woodblock prints, originally just black and white prints. And in those, there was a form of literature called Kusazoshi, which were really just kind of cheap paperback books, essentially. And those very early on started depicting folk tales and legends, and were in, incredibly popular. And those were in some ways really the precursor to modern manga. They were word and image on the page. Neither of them sort of took precedent. They were very well integrated.

And many of those also depicted yokey. For example, he says that during this period, there is a popular paper scroll, which was a parody of a wedding manual, something that would show the procedures for a marriage ceremony. But this was an illustrated wedding manual for yokai. They were grotesque and even sexualized monsters. People reading it would enjoy and laugh about. But all of a sudden, these yokai had been extracted in a sense from their natural environment as they were in rural communities and in oral tradition and put on the page.

And it also, most importantly, I think it made yoki into popular culture figures. I don't think it's a coincidence that Yo-Kai were becoming figures of popular culture at a time when people were moving from the countryside to cities. Some people may have seen Yoki as old-fashioned superstitions they were leaving behind, or they might see Yoki as nostalgic, as if they represented a simpler time. And Caitlin says there was an artist in the 1700s named Toriyama Sekine. who made a series of illustrated encyclopedias of yokai that were bestsellers. So he took stories from lots of different places and put them in one book, which was exciting. If you only lived in one small place,

you could read this book and learn about the yokey of another place where you had never been, and you could even see them. But he also invented a lot of his own yokey that are pretty popular today, all came from his brain. I'll get back to him later because amazingly enough, his encyclopedias of Yokai still have an influence today. But Gaitland says there's one more art form we need to talk about. When I teach my anime course and the history of where anime come from, we talk about this one art form called paper theater or kamishibai as a precursor to anime.

So you can imagine that a guy would have like a wooden or a cardboard frame or a little stage. And you could load large slides that were illustrated into it one by one, almost like a PowerPoint presentation. And this is where we get sort of the next yawkeye boom thanks to a guy called Mizuki Shigeru. And that guy is our missing link. Mizuki Shigerro is the artist in the 20th century who bridged the gap, from woodblock prints to manga, from paper theater to anime. And he was obsessed with.

with Yoki. Michael Dylan Foster says Mizuki Shigero was practically raised on Yoki folklore in the 1920s and 30s. If we go back into his own personal history, he tells the story about as a child growing up in pre-war, Totori Prefecture, a kind of a very rural community. There was an old lady in his village who would come speak with him and take care of him when his parents were away and she would tell him stories about Yokai. and local legends and folklore that really affected him. Again, Deborah Shammoon. He was drafted during World War II and sent to Papua New Guinea,

where he lost an arm and then was sick with malaria, and so he spent quite a long time there recovering. He was really struck by the culture there in a bit of a colonialist way, but he thought that the culture there was much closer to nature and that they had much more direct access to the gods and to supernatural than which he felt was more like Japan was in the pre-modern period. And then he also claimed to have had supernatural experiences while he was there, that he had encountered Yol Kai.

That's an important point. For some people, Yoki don't feel any less real just because they're also appearing in pop culture. After World War II ended, Mizuki Shigero got into the art of paper theater. And then a number of those artists then transitioned to become manga artists. So the manga industry was really booming in the late 1940s, early 1950s. And he was right there at the very beginning of the manga boom.

He created a tremendous amount of different types of manga, but what he's best remembered for today is the manga that he created for boys. His most famous title is Gege Gae Gno Kittaro, which is about a boy who is himself a yokai, and it includes both yokey that Mizuki made up and ones from folklore. In the 1960s, that manga was turned into an anime. The show was so popular, it's been remade many times over. He was also a fan of Toriyama Sekian. the artists from the 18th century who drew encyclopedias of yokai.

And he clearly had read that and then also reproduced it in manga version and he made up his own entries. And he really took this kind of cataloging approach to yokai. And then these would get printed in children's magazines. Because of all of this, he really brought the understanding of yokai into the contemporary or into the modern period. Michael Dillon Foster sees a parallel between these two artists who are drawing encyclopedias of Yochai in the 1770s and the 1970s, in the Edo period and in post-war Japan. Japan was rapidly industrializing. People were moving to the big cities like Tokyo and Osaka.

There was a kind of abandonment of the countryside, and modernity had sort of destroyed the connections, people had with these older legends and with the creatures inhabiting the rural environment. I think one of the factors in Mizuki's work that made his Yo-Kai so popular is that there's a sort of nostalgic longing for these creatures. So he got the ball rolling, but I think there are practical reasons why so many other artists have embraced Yo-Kai. Animation can capture the shape-shifting aspects of yokai in a way that's different for from the static art of illustration.

And production schedules for anime and manga can be relentless. If they're in crunch time, and they need to keep creating new characters with magical powers. There's something they can draw on that already exists. It's like a book of characters as it were.

But I think one of the key things of that that's really important is that because it's not created out of whole cloth, I think the very, the viewer, the reader also feels some sense of connection with it already. And that sense of connection gives it a weight and maybe a staying power that it wouldn't otherwise have. So there are shows like Yoki Watch, which is aimed at young children. I am a Yonai.

That thing you humans call a ghost spirit or an extra-dimensional being. There are also shows like Demon Slayer Kimetsu No Yaiba. It's dark, action-packed. and it's based on a manga series that draws directly from those classic encyclopedias of yokai. It's the sound I heard the moment before everyone started to kill each other. It's the only way for certain to stop the rest of us from being killed. And then there's my Oni girl. In folklore and Oni is a demonic yoki that eats people.

But this Oni is a sweet teenage girl. And the reason I've come here, is to eat you Hi-doggy. Just kidding. I would never eat a person. I really am an oni, though. Are you spooked? Now, there are three examples that I want to go into much deeper,

because they're using Yo-Kai in ways that I think speak to larger issues. As usual, I will be giving away a few spoilers, but some of these works came out a long time ago. For instance, Pompocco, came out in 1994. It's a studio jibli film directed by Isay Takahata. Deborah says, That's the film that really is based on yokey from folklore.

He doesn't make anything up. The main characters are Tanuki, which are also called Japanese raccoon dogs. And there's a history in folklore of Tanuki as shape-shifting yokai. It's about the development of the Tamah Hills area that's now part of municipal Tokyo, and the Tanuki who live there are trying to fight back against the development by scaring the construction workers by taking on the forms of various yokai from legends. In one scene, the Tanuki watch a news program to see if their tactics are working.

You must admit the similarities between these events and the old folks Tales are uncanny. How would you explain these similarities? That's easy. Whoever's making up these stories isn't even clever enough to come up with something new. We did not make anything up. We saw it with our own eyes. Fine, you win. But the ending of the film also is a bit sad because we know that the Tama Hills actually was built up. Now it's a suburb. And they are forced to live in the modern world. And so the very end of the film, you see all of the Tanuki who have taken on human form.

are like commuting to work on the train as salary men. And then you see that it's really difficult for them to maintain that shape-chipped appearance. And when they get tired, they start shifting back into their Tanuki form. I now have a desk job while my wife Keo works at a snack bar. But most could barely handle the stress of living in the human world. And they wanted nothing more than to return to the hills. I'm constantly impressed by the humans. it takes a lot of stamina to live the way they do.

Caitlin thinks the ending of the film is very poignant. We kind of have this full circle where probably wildlife, you know, making weird noises in the forest, spooked people into creating Yol Kai. And then we have Yol Kai coming back around to try to remind us that we live in a world where it's not just humans, living for the sake of humans, but that we have to live in connection with all of these other things around us as well. Takahata, the director of Pompoko, co-founded Studio Ghibli with Hayayo Miyazaki.

The two men had a very complicated relationship, but there was one thing they had in common, an interest in folklore. Although Miyazaki doesn't do as many direct adaptations, he tends to use folklore as a building block to create something new. And the film that I want to focus on is spirited away from 2001. It is one of my favorite animated films of all time. It is so incredibly rich with imagery and emotion. The story is about a girl named Chihiru, who accidentally crosses over into a spiritual plane. She ends up working on a bathhouse for spirits and other supernatural beings. A lot of them are Kami, which are different from Yoki.

Kami are often described as gods or nature spirit. spirits. But as we heard earlier, the boundaries between these categories are blurry. The bathhouse is run by an old woman named Yubaba. She's often compared to a yokey called Yamauba, which is similar to a wicked witch. And if you could give me a job. I don't want to hear such a stupid request. You're just a stinking, useless weakling. And this is certainly no place for humans. One of my favorite characters in the film is called No Face. He's fully covered in a black material, and he's also transparent.

The only other thing he wears is a white face mask with very simple features. Some people have likened No Face to No Perrabo, which is a Yolkai that is said to be faceless. But a lot of the creation of that Yolkai comes from Miyazaki's societal messages that he wants to tell children. Many critics have interpreted No Face as a commentary on greed and capitalism. So one of the plot points is that No Face offers people gold in exchange for food. And the more you take his gold or you want it, the more greedy you become. And it becomes this like terrible cycle of just like mindless consumption. And so what sets Chihiro apart as she grows up in the film is that she politely decommelior.

clients to take anything from No Face. I don't want any, but thanks. I'm sorry, but I'm in a really big hurry. And this confuses No Face to no end. And so he ends up becoming her friend, and they continue on the adventure together. In explaining why he made the movie, Miyazaki said, quote, surrounded by high technology and its flimsy devices,

children are more and more losing their roots. We must inform them of the richness of our traditions. The three anime filmmakers that have talked about so far are all using folklore as a form of nostalgia. They share a concern about what happens when Japanese society loses touch with its older values. And all three of them saw the destruction of World War II firsthand. two of them were traumatized as children.

But the next anime that I want to look at has a very different take on Yoki and their relationship to the modern world. Let's move on to Dan to Dan, or back to Dan to Dan. That's the show that I was talking about at the beginning, the one where teenage kids are dealing with aliens, Yoki, and their own raging hormones.

The anime launched in 2024. It's based on a manga series, by Yuki Nobu Tatsu, who is much younger than Miyazaki. In fact, Caitlin thinks, It's kind of the anti-spirited away. So if Miyazaki uses Yolkai to kind of inspire a feeling of like whimsy and nostalgia, Dand-Dan uses Yolkai to kind of freak you out and shake you out of your complacency in your position in society. But they mostly use Yolkai that aren't the true.

pride and true ones that we see in a lot of anime and literature. They draw mostly on urban legends, so newer yokei, but one of the most prominent yokei in Dandaran is Turbo Granny or Tabo Baba, who is an urban legend that if you're driving in your car, that people reported sightings of seeing like this old lady running on 100 kilometers per hour or something to keep up with the car and that that was spooky. When we first meet Turbo Granny, she is very creepy. Who do you think you're mouthing off to over here? I never lost a race. You hear me, never. I'll take you on if that's what you want. It don't matter if I eat you now or later.

But the character turns out to be multifaceted. The show has this image that we have seen in Yochai scholarship, where Yolkai are the manifestations of either the emotional pain or trauma of people or that they are created out of these moments. And so even with Turbo Granny, we also find this other side of her that she cares about young women who have been sort of like murdered in this tunnel in the city that went missing. And so with a lot of Yoakai, we also see that they come out of this commentary on society.

They hold up sort of a mirror to the anxieties and the wishes of people who created them. I think the fact that a lot of yokai and Dandadan come from urban legends on the internet is an indicator that people haven't changed as much as we might think in hundreds of years. Deborah says there's another yokai in the show called acrobatic silky, which originated in online forums. In Japanese acrobatic sarasara or aksara, and she's seen as a woman with empty eye sockets and long hair, and she appears on the tops of buildings

and then makes acrobatic moves from height. In the show, Acrobatic Silky has a tragic backstory. She mistakenly thinks one of the girls in the high school is the daughter that was taken away from her when she was alive. Finally, Ira, I have you back. I've been waiting and waiting for so long until you could see me again. Not all of the yokai and Dandadan are from contemporary urban legends.

There's a character called Evil Eye, who is similar to a yokai from classic folklore. So he's very typical of an or a vengeful ghost. So a person who dies a horrible tragic death and then holds a grudge. Just like in the horror films, the grudge and the ring. And Dandadan, Evil-I possesses a teenage boy in their group of friends. At last, I have control of this body. With it, I shall kill all humans. Like TurboGranny and like Acrobatic Silky,

Evil Eye seems to be evil at first, but his sense of morality is fluid. Debra says this is typical of a lot of Yokai in folklore. They're often very playful, just in a dangerous way. And he keeps saying that he wants to play. And by playing, he means killing people. But he is essentially a child. And I think they really capture the playfulness and the playful aspect, as well as the frightening aspect in Yol Kai in that character.

A while ago, you said you were going to kill all humans, remember? When I said I would only fight you, I'm not. I meant that. Great, but I'll only be able to fight once in a while because of school. No, I want to fight you every second of every day. In Japanese culture today, you can find references to yokai beyond anime and manga. They're used in advertising. There's even a haircut named after a yokai.

Caitlin says they can even be useful in emergencies. One of my favorite yokey is the Namazu, which is a catfish, a monster that's thought to create. earthquakes. And one of the ways that we see this pop up in popular culture today, not only is there a Pokemon called Whiskash or Namazoon in Japanese that knows the power earthquake. Whiskash has strong territorial instincts and goes berserk when any enemy approaches, creating earthquakes. But we also see cute pictures of these catfish on earthquake warning, posters, billboards. And so because there's this cultural connection between the catfish and the the earthquake, they use this cute catfish as a mascot for earthquake prevention and

awareness. A similar thing happened when COVID hit Japan in 2020. An artist posted a picture on social media of Amabiyah. It's a yokeai from the 19th century that could protect people from disease. It looks like a combination of a duck and a mermaid. The post went viral, and other artists uploaded their own versions of Amma B.A. The yokei was even used by the government in public safety announcements during the pandemic. There's a very popular yokey museum in Japan now where every year they have a competition

to create new yokey and people try to, you know, imagine the creatures that would come out of the things that we're dealing with today. So one that I saw very recently was the like-like yokai where, you know, it's obsessed with getting, interaction on social media. And so even that is like this new yokei that we've created based on, you know, the technology that we're dealing with today, our addiction to social media and that type of thing. At one point, the popularity of yoki was coming from artists who

were nostalgic for the past and feeling ambivalent about change. But one way to react to change is to embrace adaptation. I asked Michael Dillon Foster, could we see yokey almost like a real species that keeps evolving with the environment around them so they can survive and even thrive. Absolutely. I think you're absolutely right. I've actually written a kind of creative article about that called the Kappa Manifesto about the way in which, you know, if we trace the history of the Kappa, this water creature, it starts out as a very problematic,

demonic little thing that did horribly disgusting things like reaching up. people's anuses and yanking out their intestines. And now it's a cute little motif that, you know, it's a little character that everybody loves and we eat cop a roll in the sushi place. And there's really nothing people think of as disgusting or repugnant about them. And that keeps them alive in this very competitive media world. So I think you're absolutely right. It's about evolution and survival of the fittest in the sense or survival of the cutest sometimes. And now, yokai are spreading around the world because anime and manga are reaching new levels of global popularity.

Luckily, we don't have to worry about them trying to eat us or disembowel us. They just want to entertain us and make for really cool merchandise. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Michael Dylan Foster, Caitlin Ugueretz, and Deborah Shammoon. In the show notes, I have links to Michael's book. books on Yo-Kai, Deborah's forthcoming book on comics, and Caitlin's YouTube channel. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like this episode, I've done a lot of episodes about anime, including an episode in

2023 about the environmental messages in Miyazaki's films. We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show. It's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with science fiction. writer Alan Stroud. He collaborated with the UK Ministry of Defense to create an anthology of sci-fi stories set over the next 100 years. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an

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