Mizuki Shigeru

Every yokai a modern person recognizes was carried to them by one man.

Mizuki Shigeru, 1922–2015.

The childhood

He grew up in Sakaiminato, a small port town on the Sea of Japan, and the tales came to him from a neighbourhood woman he called "NonNonBa" — an old local who told children about the things in the hills and the house and the dark.

That's the source. Not a library. A specific old woman, in a specific town, in the 1920s.

Then the war

He was drafted and sent to Rabaul, in New Guinea — one of the worst postings in the Pacific.

His unit was largely wiped out. He caught malaria.

And an air raid took his left arm.

He drew with the other one for the rest of his life.

He came back a committed pacifist, worked in kamishibai — the paper-theatre storytelling done from the back of a bicycle — then moved into manga.

And in 1965 he changed everything

*GeGeGe no Kitarō.*

A boy yokai with one eye, his father who is an eyeball with a tiny body, and a supporting cast drawn from every corner of Japanese folklore.

It is credited with reviving public interest in traditional Japanese folklore — and it did that at the precise moment when the yokai were considered dead: a rural superstition, embarrassing, finished, belonging to the grandparents of a country busy becoming modern.

He made them charming, and it worked.

Pokémon sits downstream of him. Spirited Away sits downstream of him. So does every visitor to a page like this one.

And the same gift caused the problem

This is the part that has to be said plainly, because it comes up constantly.

He compiled the twelve-volume *Mujara* encyclopedias, and he was a member of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology. He took the scholarship seriously.

But those encyclopedias blended documented folklore with personal inventions — and the inventions were given apparent authenticity through inclusion in the catalogues.

Roughly thirty creatures, unlabelled.

The tree that drinks the blood of anyone who touches it, presented as folklore from Tōhoku's battlefields — invented. The crying-baby old man given the form everyone now pictures. The gourd-headed old man promoted to supreme commander of all yokai on the strength of a 1929 guess that Mizuki then made permanent.

And here is the thing that stops it being a scandal.

This is exactly what Sekien did in 1784.

Two great cataloguers, two centuries apart, both of them salvation and noise in the same package. Both gathered material that would otherwise have vanished. Both added their own and didn't flag it. Both are the reason we have any of this and the reason it's hard to sort.

You don't get one without the other. Nobody in the history of this tradition has ever managed it.

He was also the era's fiercest war memoirist

The man drawing cute monsters wrote *Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths* — a nearly documentary account of a suicide unit ordered to die pointlessly, drawn from what he watched happen.

It is brutal, and it is furious, and it earned him the description "the voice of Japan's conscience."

I think the two halves are connected, and I don't think it's a stretch to say so.

He came home from a war that killed almost everyone he served with, missing an arm, into a country erasing its own past as fast as it could — and he spent fifty years rebuilding a world in which the hills are full of strange, mostly harmless things, and an old woman tells children about them.

His yokai were partly a repaired world.

And his town rebuilt itself around him

Mizuki Shigeru Road opened in Sakaiminato in 1996: a street with a hundred bronze yokai statues along it, and a museum.

A declining port town, revived by a cartoonist's monsters.

It works, and other places have copied it — there's a village in Tokushima running the same model on the strength of one crying-baby yokai.

The relay

There's a line of people who kept this alive, and it's the same job done five times over a thousand years.

Seimei, the diviner, who made the supernatural a profession.

Sekien, the cataloguer, who drew them and printed them.

Hearn and his wife Setsu, who translated them out.

Yanagita and Sasaki, who went and asked people.

And Mizuki, the reviver.

The wing's closing line writes itself:

The yokai survive because in every century somebody wrote them down — and every one of those writers added some of their own.