The vocabulary, plainly
The words you need to read the rest
A retelling, not a citation. What follows is the story as the most widely circulated popular accounts tell it — folklore encyclopedias, translations, and the versions that have travelled furthest. It is synthesized rather than keyed line by line to the dated primary texts, and popular versions drift from what those texts actually say. The cited, source-by-source record begins further down this page, and where the two disagree, the record wins.
Not every name in this collection is a creature. A block of them are concept words — the vocabulary the beings are shelved with.
They're worth ten minutes, because once you have them the rest reads differently.
Kami (神)
The divine power-class. Usually translated "god," which is misleading — kami covers everything from the sun goddess to the spirit of a notable rock.
The useful working definition is anything that commands awe and can be addressed.
And the thing to hold onto: kami is not a category of being. It's a relationship. Worship is the variable. A being worshipped is a kami; the same being unworshipped becomes something else, and this collection is largely a record of what happens next.
Mitama (御霊)
The spirit regarded as an object of reverence — and it comes in aspects.
Ara-mitama — the rough spirit. Violent, sudden, destructive.
Nigi-mitama — the gentle spirit. Harmonious, nurturing.
Same god. Both true.
This one clause explains an enormous amount. It's why a single deity can be the one who protects your kitchen and the one who burns your house down. It's why the storm god is both a monster-slayer and the vandal who got thrown out of heaven.
Japanese religion never required its gods to have a consistent personality. It required them to have modes.
Reikon (霊魂)
The soul, generally. The thing that leaves the body and gets processed by the thirty-three-year ancestral track.
Shiryō (死霊) and Ikiryō (生霊)
Shiryō — a dead person's spirit.
Ikiryō — a living person's spirit, detached and acting on its own. The jealous noblewoman whose resentment leaves her body while she sleeps and kills her rival, while her waking self only suspects.
The pairing is the point: you do not have to be dead to haunt someone.
Jibakurei (地縛霊)
"Earthbound spirit" — a ghost tied to a place.
Label this one carefully. It is Shōwa-era spiritualist vocabulary — séance language, twentieth-century, popularized through occult media. It is not classical folklore, and it gets used as though it were.
Hotoke (仏)
Literally "buddha" — and used, in ordinary Japanese, for the household dead.
Your deceased relatives are hotoke. The family altar is where the hotoke live.
It's the Buddhist paperwork stamped onto the ancestral system: everyone who dies properly is, administratively, a buddha.
Jigoku (地獄)
The Buddhist hells — plural, numerous, and specialized.
This tradition mostly meets them through staff: the ox-headed and horse-headed wardens, the judge with his ledger and his mirror, the old woman at the river who takes your clothes.
Hell, in Japanese folklore, is less a destination than an institution with employees, some of whom occasionally turn up on this side.
Akuma, Mazoku, Ten, Tenka
Buddhist-derived class-words: demon, demon-race, deva (heavenly being), sky-fire.
Mostly genre vocabulary rather than folklore — they do more work in modern fiction than they ever did in village belief.
Yōsei (妖精)
The modern word for "fairy" — and it's a translation artifact.
It was coined to render the Western concept in Japanese, in the Meiji dictionary era.
Its presence in a list of yokai is itself a small piece of history: it shows the category absorbing European imports the moment they arrived, filing Tinker Bell next to the ceiling-licker without noticing a difficulty.
Onmyōji (陰陽師)
Not a being — a profession. The court diviner, employed by an actual government bureau, with ranks and a salary.
Worth remembering whenever the supernatural in this collection starts feeling disorganized: for eleven hundred years, somebody was on staff for this.
Kotobuki (寿)
The auspicious composite creature — a chimera assembled entirely from longevity symbols, popular in Edo prints. Crane, tortoise, pine, and so on, stitched into one animal.
A monster made only of good wishes, which is a genuinely charming thing for a culture to produce.
Hitorigami (独神)
The "single kami" of the earliest generations — the primordial deities who came into being alone, without a partner, before the pairing of Izanagi and Izanami started producing the world.
The gods who existed before there was anything to be a god of.
Field guide
At a glance
- Behavior
- Not a being but the roster's vocabulary block: the concept-words — kami, mitama, reikon, shiryō, hotoke, jigoku, and kin — that a creature-list swept in because you cannot shelve the beings without the words for spirit, soul, and hell.
- Powers
- Load-bearing: mitama's rough and gentle aspects explain how one god can be two neighbors; hotoke explains why the household dead are called buddhas; jigoku supplies the hells the oni staff.
- Oddities
- Jibakurei, the "earthbound spirit," is Shōwa-era séance vocabulary, not classical folklore — the glossary carries its own modern stratum, labeled.
- Yōsei is the Meiji dictionary-era word for Western "fairy" — its presence in a yokai roster records the moment the category started absorbing European imports.
- Read charitably, a roster built by inclusion-error becomes a concordance; every term gets an address here.
Overview
This bestiary's roster (built from a Wikipedia list that swept in vocabulary alongside creatures) carries a block of concept-words — terms, not beings. They resolve here, each with its one-line filing and its pointer:
- Kami (神) — the divine power-class; see the keystone yokai doctrine (worship is the variable) and yorishiro (how kami take addresses).
- Mitama (御霊/みたま) — the spirit regarded as an object of reverence; its aspects (ara-mitama the rough, nigi-mitama the gentle) explain why one god can be two neighbors — the kōjin's whole personality in two words.
- Reikon (霊魂) — the soul-term generally; the sorei pipeline processes it.
- Shiryō (死霊) / Jibakurei (地縛霊) — dead-spirit and earthbound-spirit; the first is ikiryō's contrast-word, the second modern spiritualist vocabulary (Shōwa-era séance language, not classical folklore — label accordingly).
- Hotoke (仏) — the dead-as-buddha usage: the household dead called "buddhas" — the sorei track's Buddhist paperwork.
- Jigoku (地獄) — the Buddhist hells; the tradition meets them through staff (gozu-mezu, the oni wardens) and defectors.
- Akuma (悪魔) / Mazoku (魔族) / Ten (天) / Tenka (天火) — Buddhist-derived demon/deva class-words and the sky-fire term; genre vocabulary more than folklore.
- Yōsei (妖精) — the modern translation-word for Western "fairy"; its presence in a yokai roster is itself a note on how the category absorbed European imports in the Meiji dictionary era.
- Onmyōji (陰陽師) — the profession, not a being; the tradition's practitioners file under Abe no Seimei and the-writers/humans wing.
- Kotobuki (寿) — the auspicious-word/creature-composite (the chimera assembled from longevity-symbols in Edo prints); one delight-register line on the toolkit page.
- Hitorigami (独神) — the "single kami" of the primordial generations, per kamiumi's cluster.
The reading
A roster built by inclusion-error becomes, read charitably, a concordance: the list-makers swept in the words because the words are load-bearing — you cannot shelve the beings without the vocabulary of spirit, soul, hell, and profession. Filed here so every term has an address, and so the site's glossary (the-rules page) can inherit the block wholesale.
Two-track labeling
The image
Citations
The record
Where the evidence thins
Open questions
- Ara-mitama/nigi-mitama one-paragraph expansion (with a shrine example) when sourced.
- The Meiji "yōsei" translation history (one line, dated).