Colossal Yokai

Daidarabotchi is the foremost name in Japanese giant traditions, identifying a widespread body of lore that explains hollows, ponds, marshes, wells, mounds, and mountains as physical traces left by a colossus. Centered primarily in the Kantō and Chūbu regions, the giant is known by appellations that shift across localities—taking forms such as Daidarabō, Daidabotchi, Dairabotchi, and Deedarabotchi—and has historically been transcribed with kanji compounds such as 大太法師 (*Daitabōshi*) and 大多羅法師 (*Daitarahōshi*). Rather than signifying a single mythic individual possessing an identical appearance and life story nationwide, the name functions as an umbrella under which communities grouped analogous regional narratives that interpret local topography through titanic deeds. At the core of these traditions lies not the giant’s facial features or garments, but the physical impression stamped upon the earth in his wake. A single stride caves the ground into a pond or marsh; the point where his foot braces heaves the soil upward; and earth carried or knocked from footwear accumulates into knolls and barrows. Feats such as shouldering mountains, excavating and shifting enormous deposits of earth, planting a walking staff, or excreting connect far-flung peaks, bays, depressions, and natural springs to one colossal frame. These deeds and implements are not attributed uniformly across every district, however, nor does any nationwide consensus define the giant’s moral character, intellect, or attitude toward humans. Classical provincial gazetteers such as the *Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki* and *Harima no Kuni Fudoki* similarly document ancient legends that attribute local landforms to the bodies, footprints, and bodily waste of immense beings referred to as “people of high antiquity” (*jōko no hito*) or “great men” (*ōbito*). While these early accounts share a clear structural framework with later Daidarabotchi traditions, the classical texts never invoke his name. Consequently, they cannot be taken as proof that the same folkloric creature persisted unchanged from classical times; instead, they are comparative evidence for the age of the idea of explaining regional geography through the anatomy of a giant.

Gashadokuro is a modern yōkai known as a gigantic skeleton that walks across night fields. Its name does not appear in old village oral traditions or Edo-period yōkai picture books. The earliest presently verified starting point is “A Guide to Japanese Yōkai Around You,” an unsigned article written by Saitō Morihiro in the September 1966 issue of Bessatsu Shōjo Friend. Ryūhei Hirota’s research identifies Saitō as the creator of the yōkai, finds no earlier historical record, and shows that Shigeru Mizuki included it in a yōkai collection two years later as though it belonged among established beings. It is a representative creation of postwar publishing culture, one that challenges the assumption that only inherited, ancient beings can be yōkai. The securely documented core of its early image is a giant skeleton walking across open country. Because the full first article is not publicly available, details visible in scholars’ transcriptions—rattling bones, skulls of people who died by the roadside gathering together, and attacks on people—must be distinguished from settings added by later media. Resentment of war dead or famine victims, blood-drinking, dawn, talismans, and memorial rites likewise cannot all be projected back onto old tradition without establishing which medium said what and when. The hiragana name *gashadokuro* suggests the sound of bones striking one another, but the formal bibliographic record of the first article gives the spelling がしゃどくろ; 餓者髑髏 is a later ateji spelling and must be kept distinct. The image now most readily associated with Gashadokuro is Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s triptych *Sōma no Furu-dairi*. Yet the print predates the yōkai’s creation by about 120 years. Around 1845–46, Kuniyoshi adapted Santō Kyōden’s *Uto Yasukata Chūgiden* and depicted a skeleton summoned by Princess Takiyasha’s sorcery confronting Ōya Tarō Mitsukuni, replacing the several skeletons of the source with a single gigantic one. The skeleton in the print is not named Gashadokuro. Kuniyoshi did not portray that yōkai; postwar yōkai publishing joined a famous image of a giant skeleton to a new yōkai image. The process of giving an earlier image a new name, then having encyclopedias, manga, television, and games share that combination, clearly shows how yōkai continue to be made in the modern era. Gashadokuro’s significance does not lie in false antiquity. A name born in a single Shōwa-era article met a late-Edo image, older ideas about the dead, and the postwar horror boom, becoming a widely known Japanese yōkai in little more than half a century. That process of formation is the giant skeleton’s most firmly documented story.

Umibōzu is a maritime apparition known along coasts throughout Japan and long feared especially by fishers. A calm sea is said to heave without warning, becoming an immense black shadow or the bald form of a Buddhist monk that blocks a vessel's path. Accounts rarely show a whole body; most describe only a head and shoulders rising above the water. It appears at night or in heavy seas, overturning boats and dragging people into the depths. Edo-period sources including the Wakan Sansai Zue (1712) and the Butsurui Shōko (1775) also record the name of a giant apparition standing at sea.

A colossal catfish believed to lurk underground, twisting its body to cause earthquakes. Earlier notions held that dragons or serpents beneath the earth triggered quakes, but by the Edo period the agent shifted in popular belief to a catfish. Faith spread that the keystones (kaname-ishi) of Kashima and Katori shrines pinned the creature in place. After the 1855 Ansei earthquake, woodblock “catfish prints” (namazu-e) proliferated, turning the catfish into an emblem of quake protection and social upheaval.

Yamata no Orochi is the enormous serpent deity of Izumo mythology, recorded in the Kojiki, upper volume, completed in 712 and the Nihon Shoki, book one, section eight, completed in 720. It is said to have lived in the upper reaches of the Hii River, anciently called the Hi River, and to have been slain by Susanoo. Yet Orochi is not simply a monster to be defeated. It can be read as the spirit of Izumo's mountains and rivers, the memory of a flooding river, a mythic image of sand iron and tatara ironmaking, and a sign of local Izumo cults being drawn into the mythology of Yamato rule. The Kojiki describes eyes red like winter cherries, one body with eight heads and eight tails, moss, cypress, and cedar growing on its back, a body stretching across eight valleys and eight ridges, and a belly always bloody and raw. Susanoo prepares eight vats of strong yashiori sake and an eightfold fence, lets the eight heads drink themselves senseless, cuts the serpent down with his totsuka sword, and finds the great sword Tsumugari in the middle tail: the later Kusanagi, or Ame-no-Murakumo. This sword becomes the martial treasure among the Three Sacred Treasures. After the victory, Susanoo marries Kushinada-hime, builds a palace at Suga in Izumo, and composes the celebrated "Yakumo tatsu" poem, often treated as Japan's earliest waka. Today Unnan records roughly fifty sites tied to the Orochi legend, while the Iwami Kagura drama Orochi keeps the serpent on stage in the present.

Kuzuryū, also written with the character for 'dragon' in an older form, is a nine-headed dragon worshipped as a water and rain deity and as a guardian of particular landscapes. Many traditions turn on the same transformation: a poisonous or violent dragon that once harmed people is subdued by an ascetic or eminent monk, abandons its demonic nature, and becomes a benevolent god. At Togakushi in Nagano, a nine-headed, dragon-tailed demon is said to have been sealed in a rock chamber through the merit of the Lotus Sutra by the ascetic Gakumon, also known as Gakumon Gyōja. It then settled as the local tutelary deity Kuzuryū Ōgami. At Hakone in Kanagawa, the monk Mangan is said to have subdued the poisonous dragon of Lake Ashi in the Nara period and enshrined it as the lake's guardian. In Echizen, Fukui, a Hakusan Gongen origin story tells of a nine-headed dragon swimming with a sacred image on its head, an episode said to explain the name of the Kuzuryū River. Rainmaking and flood control remain central, but regional worship also seeks relief from toothache, good relationships, and peace for the realm.

Hachirotaro is a dragon god (ryūjin) whose primary domain is Lake Hachirōgata in Akita Prefecture. Legend says he was originally a matagi (traditional winter hunter) from the Kazuno region. After breaking a taboo by roasting and eating three char (iwana) that he was supposed to share with his companions, he was struck by an insatiable thirst. As he continued to drink from the mountain stream, he transformed into a giant serpent, and eventually a dragon. The transformed Hachirotaro dammed Lake Towada to make it his home. However, he later fought the monk Nansobō from Kumano for lordship of the lake and was defeated. Fleeing to the northwest, he carved out the Hachirōgata lagoon and became its master. He stands at the center of the "Legend of the Three Lakes" (Sanko Densetsu), an epic tale of dragon gods spanning three major lakes in Akita (Lake Towada, Hachirōgata, and Lake Tazawa). Including his later romance with Princess Tatsuko of Lake Tazawa, Hachirotaro is the central protagonist in the narrative that systematizes the lake and marsh worship of the northern Tōhoku region.

The Giant Centipede is a monstrous centipede yokai whose carapace is so hard it deflects blades and arrows. Its body is long enough to coil around mountains, its many legs glow a fiery red, and its venomous fangs were said to bite through armor. It is portrayed as an adversary of great serpents and dragons—water deities—with whom it battles in lakes, marshes, and the wilds. Centipedes symbolized fearless resolve and were seen as auspicious by warriors and merchants, though details of this creature vary widely by region.

Ushi-oni appears chiefly on the coasts, in deep pools, and in the mountains of western Japan. It is among the fiercest and most numinous beings in the yokai tradition. Its body has no single form: some artists give it a bull's head on an oni's body, while others set the same head on the body of a spider. The Heian-period Pillow Book already names Ushi-oni among the things that inspire terror. Its most striking quality is a radical dual nature. In one guise, Ushi-oni is a cruel man-eater and bringer of disease that spreads poisonous breath without discrimination. In another, it leads a mikoshi procession and uses its tremendous force to drive away other evil spirits. Over time, a frightening presence in literature became part of regional worship and festival performance. Few yokai show so clearly how a destructive power could also be received as a guardian.

Bake-kujira appears on rainy nights as the immense white shadow of a whale. Up close, it has neither skin nor flesh—only a complete skeleton. In the story of the skeletal whale seen off Oki on a rainy night, fishers take the shape for living prey and launch their boats. Their harpoons meet no resistance, and only then do they realize that the whale is made of bone. Unfamiliar fish crowd the water, strange birds wheel overhead, and the sea seems to waver into another country. Bake-kujira is not a predatory fish that eats people. It is a whale that should already have been caught and consumed, returning before a coastal society as something still alive in its bones. This yokai owes its familiar outline less to a long tradition of early modern paintings than to modern yokai encyclopedias and the visual memory created by Mizuki Shigeru. Mizuki Shigeru's Zusetsu Nihon Yōkai Taizen and Mizuki Shigeru no Sekai Genjū Jiten placed the immense skeletal sea animal before a wide readership. A whale was both a gift from the ocean and a vast living creature put to death. Bake-kujira therefore gathers whaling, drifted whales, memorial rites, and the abundance of fish into a single image. Harpoons cannot touch the skeleton because it is no longer prey; it has become a sea spirit that looks back at the people who once hunted it. Bake-kujira differs from Funayūrei and Umibōzu even though all three belong to the sea. Funayūrei are human dead who approach ships, while Umibōzu rises as an enormous shadow. Bake-kujira is the spirit of an animal that once lived and was once taken as quarry. Its bones signify death, but also the fact that the dead do not disappear from a community's memory. Floating between Oki and Izumo, the skeletal whale reminds those who accept the sea's bounty that gratitude must be joined by awe.

Isonade is a sea monster of western Japan. Its body resembles a shark, but its tail fin is said to bristle with countless fine spines. It appears when the north wind blows hard, approaching as lightly as a hand passing over the water. Without showing itself, it hooks people from the deck with its barbed tail, drags them into the sea, and swallows them. Edo-period collections of strange tales, including Ehon Hyaku Monogatari, and works of natural history both record the creature. Its name is said to come either from the way it 'strokes' the surface or from the deceptively slight movement with which it takes a victim. For sailors, Isonade embodied a maritime disaster almost impossible to prevent.

Akaei is a colossal ray recorded as Akaei no Uo, the 'red ray fish,' in the late Edo-period collection Ehon Hyaku Monogatari (1841). Sand accumulates on its back as it floats at the surface, making the creature large enough to be mistaken for an island. Sailors who approach or step ashore find it suddenly sinking beneath them, raising heavy seas that break ships and swallow people. The tale overlaps with mirages and castaway stories, and treats such uncanny encounters as anything but rare on the open ocean.

A towering monk-like apparition that appears on night roads, at the end of slopes, crossroads, stone bridges, or atop trees. The more you look up at it, the larger it grows, terrifying those who give in to fear. Common countermeasures include saying “I’ve seen through you” or calmly looking down at it. Its true nature varies by region and may be a shapeshifted tanuki, fox, weasel, or badger. It is a well-known type found in Edo-period ghost tales and essays.

A human-shaped apparition that appears on the road and grows taller the more you look up at it, looming to impossible heights. If you lower your gaze, it shrinks; look down far enough and it vanishes. Told across the Chūgoku region—especially in Shimane—it’s considered akin to mikoshi-nyūdō and other “the more you look up, the bigger it gets” yokai. Standard countermeasures are to never look up or to peer at it from between your legs.

A female yokai depicted by Toriyama Sekien in Gazu Hyakki Yagyo. She is known for stretching her lower body up to the height of a building’s second floor to peer through windows. Sekien’s original print includes no notes, so her nature and identity remain uncertain. Later writers imagined her startling patrons on the upper floors of brothels, but historical sources mostly present her as a visual motif without fixed tales or a settled etymology—an emblem of a strange figure that peers from high places.

The Seven-Fathom Wife is a giant female yokai from eastern Shimane (Izumo), the Oki Islands, and Hōki in Tottori. The term “fathom” (hiro) is a unit of length, and her height—or in some tales her neck—reaches seven hiro. She appears on mountain paths or along the shore, smiling at travelers, throwing stones, or miming laundry to bewilder people. Her look and behavior vary by locale, ranging from a beggar of striking beauty to a fearsome woman with blackened teeth and disheveled hair.

Ōnyūdō is a giant, priest-like apparition—and sometimes a towering shadow figure—reported across Japan. The name means “great monk,” yet it does not always appear in clerical form; accounts describe colossal humanoids or amorphous shadows looming overhead. Its glare is said to make onlookers faint or fall ill. While its true nature is often left unstated, some traditions claim it is a transformed animal—fox, tanuki, weasel, or otter—or even a bewitched stone stupa.

A bizarre apparition in which an enormous woman’s head appears in the sky or at a house’s doorway. It is often shown with ohaguro—blackened teeth—suggesting a married woman. Toriyama Sekien included an image in his mid-Edo Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, where the head drifts in a rainy night sky. While Sekien’s rendering is considered satirical, anecdotes and essays from many regions report encounters with giant female heads, interpreted as vengeful spirits, lingering grudges, or foxes and badgers in disguise.

The Great Zato is a yokai depiction of a blind guildsman (zato) illustrated by Toriyama Sekien in Konjaku Hyakki Shūi. Wearing tattered hakama, wooden clogs, and leaning on a staff, it roams the main roads on stormy nights. When questioned, it replies that it “always plays the shamisen at brothels.” The image caricatures the nighttime presence of professional blind performers, blending otherness and social satire into a yokai form.

The Great Spider is a spider that has lived long enough to gain supernatural power, troubling people and monks. It hides in the mountains or in temple rafters, brushes people’s faces late at night, and drains their vitality, causing illness. It may take human form—often as an old woman—and ensnare victims with silk. References appear in records and essays; it may also be called “mountain spider” or “tsuchigumo,” though details and abilities vary by region.

A shape-shifting tanuki specter from Keida in Mishō Village, Miyoshi District, Tokushima. It appears when boats anchor late at night at the Aoiseki (Blue-Stone Rapid) on the Yoshino River, extending an enormous kiseru pipe and demanding tobacco. If you can pack the pipe full, it causes no harm—but the amount required is absurdly large. If your supply runs out, it capsizes the boat or triggers strange disturbances. It is a waterside tanuki that frightens travelers and boatmen, told as a cautionary tale.

Ootakemaru is a demon god said to have made his stronghold at Mount Suzuka and the Suzuka Pass, located on the border between Ise and Omi provinces. In Otogizoshi and the Tamura stories, he appears as a Great Demon King who steals tributes meant for the capital and repels armies with black clouds, lightning, and rain of fire, only to be slain by Tamuramaru (modeled after Sakanoue no Tamuramaro) and Suzuka Gozen. The Tamuramaru of the story is not the historical Shogun himself, but a heroic figure born from the overlapping of medieval Kiyomizu Kannon worship, boundary beliefs of the Suzuka Pass, and Tamura legends from the Tohoku region. Ootakemaru is also sometimes cited as one of the "Three Great Yokai" alongside Shuten-doji and Tamamo-no-Mae. The fact that his severed head and remains are later incorporated into tales of treasures, temple origins (engi), and burial mounds reflects the medieval significance of a "slain great enemy".

Shuten-dōji is the central figure in medieval oni-slaying tales that pit an oni king, who carries people away from the capital, against warriors sent into the mountains by imperial command. The stories are set in the reign of Emperor Ichijō and include the historical commanders Minamoto no Yorimitsu and Fujiwara no Yasumasa, but they are not contemporary Heian-period records. The Important Cultural Property *Ōeyama Ekotoba*, held by the Itsuō Art Museum, is the oldest surviving picture scroll of the Ōeyama tradition; it was made in the fourteenth century, during the Northern and Southern Courts period. Reading the Heian setting separately from the work's medieval creation prevents the tale from being mistaken for a record of an actual bandit suppression. Instead, it reflects the world later audiences imagined through Heian warriors and an oni king. His name, too, has never had a single spelling. *Ōeyama Ekotoba* chiefly writes 酒天童子, and the dōji himself says that his retainers call him Shuten-dōji because of his deep love of drink. Other spellings include 酒伝童子 and 酒顛童子 (酒顚童子); 酒呑童子 is now the most widely used. The word *dōji* alone does not establish a particular age, hairstyle, or clerical status. In the Noh play *Ōeyama*, the first-half shite appears in the guise of a youth, while *Ōeyama Ekotoba* portrays his daytime form as a dignified figure about one *jō* tall. The tale broadly divides into a tradition that places the oni king at Ōeyama and another that places him at Mount Ibuki in Ōmi Province. The *Shuten-dōji Emaki* (酒伝童子絵巻) at the Suntory Museum of Art, made in 1522, is considered the oldest surviving example of the Mount Ibuki tradition. These are not simply the same story with one mountain name substituted for another: the cast of characters, the name of the sake, and the oni king's appearance and past all differ among copies. Accounts of Ōeyama, Mount Ibuki, Echigo, and Oinosaka therefore cannot be joined into one certain biography for a single Shuten-dōji. In the oldest text of the Ōeyama tradition, disappearances continue in the capital until Abe no Seimei's divination points to the oni king of Ōeyama. Imperial orders go to the two commanders Yorimitsu and Yasumasa, who head for the mountain with their retainers. Reducing the story to the later, familiar tale of Yorimitsu and his Four Heavenly Kings obscures the structure of the early copies. In the mountains the party receives yamabushi dress and special sake from manifestations of deities and buddhas, enters the oni castle, and joins the dōji's banquet. By day the oni king takes the form of a dōji about one *jō* tall, displaying dignity and wisdom; at night he becomes an oni roughly five *jō* tall. His head and torso are red, his left foot black, right hand yellow, right foot white, and left hand blue; he has fifteen eyes and five horns. Once he has grown drunk and fallen asleep, the divine manifestations hold him down and Yorimitsu, Yasumasa, and their followers cut off his head. The head still flies through the air and bites the three helmets Yorimitsu wears one over another. Shuten-dōji is not merely a straightforward evil oni overcome by drink. He receives guests as the master of a splendid oni castle and tells of his own wanderings, even as he uses his captives for food. Courtesy toward guests and cruelty, intelligence and an immense oni body, defeat and the flying head stand together in the same story. Noh, *otogi-zōshi*, picture scrolls, printed books, jōruri, and kabuki each circulated different images of Shuten-dōji. Toriyama Sekien also depicted Shuten-dōji, under the spelling 酒顛童子, in his 1779 *Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki*, placing the drunken, reclining dōji and other oni on a page of his yōkai picture book. Rather than a monster fixed in a single form, Shuten-dōji is one of Japan's best-known oni kings, retold through manuscripts, performing arts, and the memories of particular places.

At the beginning of spring break, an unintelligible humanlike sound comes from a farm garden. After a sound wavering between po and bo, a hat passes above a hedge about two meters high, and a woman in a pale dress appears through a gap, her head higher than the hedge. Hachishakusama is one of modern Japan's best-known internet ghost stories, beginning when familiar proportions suddenly cease to make sense. When the narrator tells his grandparents, their manner changes at once. His grandmother says that the Hachishakusama in their district is, as her name implies, about eight shaku tall. She may look to different witnesses like a young woman in mourning clothes, an old woman in a formal kimono, or a middle-aged woman in work clothes. What remains constant is a female form, abnormal height, something worn on the head, and an uncanny laugh like a man's voice. Under the modern standard of measurement, one shaku is ten thirty-thirds of a meter, so eight shaku is about 2.424 meters. The text leaves the hat's color and shape, hair, and face undescribed, making room for diverse later imagery. The setting is a district about the size of an ōaza, with its city and former-village names withheld. Four Jizō statues stand at the village boundaries in the cardinal directions, blocking Hachishakusama's routes. The narrator spends the night from sunset until 7:00 the next morning in an upstairs room protected by paper talismans, sealed windows, salt at the four corners, a small Buddhist image, and prayer. In the night, a voice nearly identical to his grandfather's calls outside the door as something lightly taps the window. The next morning he sits at the center of a nine-seat vehicle, surrounded in eight directions by seven distantly related men and K in the front passenger seat; her prayers and vehicles before and behind carry him beyond the district. Ten years later, a call says that the Jizō on the road to his home has been broken, leaving the fear that the voice may return. The earliest verifiable starting point is posts 908 through 916 of "Shall We Collect Stories So Scary They Are No Laughing Matter? 196," posted to the Occult Board of the anonymous forum 2channel on August 26, 2008. The same anonymous user made nine consecutive posts in roughly nine minutes, from 9:45:56 to 9:54:54 a.m. The thread welcomed personal accounts and fiction alike, and no independent source is known to substantiate a real place or event. Hachishakusama is internet lore born from the union of a story shaped like an old memory of the land and the rapid, consecutive-post form of an anonymous message board. By September 22, 2008, less than a month after the post, it had been reposted under the title "Hachishakusama" on a Sharekowa compilation site. It later became a subject of folklore and narrative research, while the video anthology *Fūin Eizō 16: Hachishakusama no Noroi* and the novel *Otherside Picnic* and its anime adaptation gave it a voice, face, clothing, and movement through new storytellers. Its cultural history lies in the way an apparition that began without an official illustration grew as it passed from bodies that read, to bodies that listened, to bodies that watched.

Ōmagatoki (逢魔時) is a term that designates the dim twilight just before and after the sun sets as a "bad hour" when one is prone to encountering the uncanny. Rather than a single yōkai with a distinct form or will, it refers to the shifting boundary between day and night itself, when it becomes difficult to distinguish human faces or distant objects. The *Seisen-ban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten* (Concise Edition of the Comprehensive Dictionary of the Japanese Language) defines it as the dim hour of dusk, namely twilight. It is not a fixed timeframe of "from this hour to that hour," but rather shifts according to the season and location based on the time of sunset. The variable hour system (futei jihō) widely used during the Edo period also divided day and night based on sunrise and sunset, meaning Ōmagatoki cannot be uniformly converted to a modern time like 17:00–19:00 or exactly 18:00. There are multiple layers to its reading and written forms. Dictionaries list variations such as Ōmagatoki (大禍時 - Hour of Great Calamity), Ōmaji (大魔時 - Hour of the Great Demon), Ōmagatoki (逢魔時 - Hour of Meeting Demons), and Ōmōji (王莽時 - Hour of Wang Mang), recording phonetic variants like *ōmagatoki*, *ōmagadoki*, *ōmagatoki* (with different kanji), and *ōmadoki*. It is explained that, in addition to *Ōmagatoki* (大禍時) understood as the "time of great calamity," the perception of the sound *ga* as a grammatical particle and *ma* as "demon" (魔) gave rise to the spellings *Ōmaji* (大魔時) and *Ōmagatoki* (逢魔時, "meeting demons"). Hayashi Razan documented the "Hour of Wang Mang" theory, comparing the day to the Former Han dynasty, the night to the Later Han, and the twilight in between to Wang Mang's Xin dynasty; Toriyama Sekien later introduced this older theory as well. Rather than viewing one of these as the sole, fixed spelling established in ancient times, it aligns better with historical sources to see them as variant transcriptions where associations of calamity, demons, and historical figures were superimposed onto a pre-existing sound. While *tasogaredoki* (twilight) is a neutral term broadly indicating dusk, Ōmagatoki is unique in that it overlays this with a vigilance against disaster and the supernatural. The word *tasogare*, derived from "Who goes there?" (*taso kare*), and *kawataredoki*, derived from "Who is that?" (*kare wa tare*), also convey the sensation of finding it hard to identify others in the dim light. However, *kawataredoki* was used for both dawn and dusk, and today it tends to refer specifically to dawn, so it is not perfectly synonymous with Ōmagatoki. Furthermore, unlike the Hour of the Ox (*ushimitsu-doki*), which is a specific time deep in the night, the core of Ōmagatoki lies not in the "middle of the night" but in the brief boundary transitioning from day to night.