Hyakki Yagyō

Hyakki Yagyō^[2] (hyakki yagyō or hyakki yakō, 'the night march of a hundred demons') is the Japanese conception of a procession of a hundred demons and yokai through the streets of the imperial capital. Its roots run deep: the imported Chinese idea of nocturnal cohorts of spirits crossed the older Japanese sense of mountainous otherworld and chthonic local divinities, and crystallised, in the aristocratic Heian city, into a peculiarly urban form of fear.

Three features distinguish the night march. First, the setting is urban — not the mountainside but the boulevards, side-streets and bridges of the capital. Second, the number is fixed at 'one hundred': the subject is the procession as a body, not any single yokai. Third, the encounter is lethal — though a religious escape hatch is provided in the form of the Sonshō dhāraṇī, the Heart Sutra, or any other powerful Buddhist incantation. Together, the three features yield a quintessentially urban taboo: do not walk the streets at night; if you must, carry the texts.

The phrase survives in contemporary Japanese as an idiom. To say of some place or moment that it is 'like a hyakki yagyō' is to compare the people in it to a procession of unrecognisable demons going about peculiar business — a usage that descends from medieval literary tradition. A thousand-year-old conception of urban dread, embedded directly in the modern lexicon: like the vengeful spirit and the kappa, an unusually living trace of folklore at the level of language.

The best-known literary record of the night march is volume 14, episode 42, of the Konjaku Monogatari-shū^[1], 'On escaping demons by the power of the Sonshō dhāraṇī'. Fujiwara no Tsuneyuki (836–875), walking a wide street of the capital at night, runs straight into the procession. Because he is wearing the Sonshō dhāraṇī — a paper amulet given him by his mother on which a powerful Buddhist text is inscribed — the demons fail to see him; the procession passes him by. This is the source text for the standard pairing in folklore, 'night march' and 'dhāraṇī'.

A parallel tale appears in the Ōkagami (late eleventh century). In Tenryaku 10 (956), the Minister of the Right Fujiwara no Morosuke (909–960), withdrawing one night from the imperial palace, sees, at the Yōmei Gate, a procession of strange figures: the marchers turn out to be deceased nobles. Morosuke recites a dhāraṇī and escapes. The Uji Shūi Monogatari (early thirteenth century), with its monk-on-pilgrimage, and the Kokon Chomonjū (1254) carry the form. Across the Heian and Kamakura periods the night march stabilises as a recognised literary genre — the procession of the otherworld encountered by aristocrats in the streets of the capital.

The Shūgaishō (a thirteenth-century reference compendium) translates the conception into a calendrical taboo. For each month a particular sexagenary day was designated as a 'march day' (yagyō-bi): the first month's day of the rat, the second month's day of the horse and so on, varying from month to month. To go out at night on such a day was forbidden. The Chinese calendrical sciences were here being applied to a particular Japanese fear: the result, embedded in the daily life of the aristocracy, was a precise behavioural rule for avoiding the night march. The urban supernatural had been written into the calendar.

In the Muromachi period (fifteenth–sixteenth centuries), the night march underwent a decisive visual reinvention. The Hyakki Yagyō Emaki^[3] held by the Shinjuan sub-temple of Daitokuji in Kyoto (sixteenth century, traditionally attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu) does something quite specific with its marchers: it abandons the older repertoire of animal- and human-form demons, and depicts instead a procession of tsukumogami^[4] — old household objects that have come to supernatural life. Tea kettle, suit of armour, biwa, sedge hat, water-bucket: the worn furniture of human life, animated and walking together at night. The cast of the night march has shifted, from the inherited menagerie of demons to the material culture of the city.

The literary support for this picture is the contemporaneous Tsukumogami Emaki^[5] (Muromachi, fifteenth–sixteenth centuries). In Kyoto, old household objects discarded at the end-of-year cleaning conclude, between themselves, that 'a hundred years of service and they throw us out — what callousness' — and band together, become yokai and march on the imperial court for revenge. In the end an esoteric Shingon monk subdues them and they are converted to the Buddhist Way. The structure pairs a Buddhist-inflected animism (the idea that objects can carry spirit) with a soteriology of conversion: a thoroughly medieval-Japanese combination.

The reach of the Shinjuan scroll is hard to overstate. Copies and variants travelled the country; surviving versions can be found at the Tokyo National Museum, the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, the New York Public Library and the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The conception 'yokai = transformed objects' became, from the Shinjuan scroll onwards, the bedrock of Japanese yokai culture. Toriyama Sekien at the end of the Edo period, Mizuki Shigeru in the twentieth century, and the procession of yaoyorozu kami in the bathhouse of Spirited Away (2001) — all stand in its shadow.

In the late Edo period the night march was reinvented a second time. Toriyama Sekien^[6] (1712–88), in his Gazu Hyakki Yagyō^[7] (An'ei 5 / 1776), restructured the procession as a sequence of individual encyclopedia entries. Three volumes (Yin, Yang and Wind), fifty-one yokai, each presented one to a page with name and a short commentary — the format of the printed yokai encyclopedia.

Sekien followed this with three sequels — Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779), Konjaku Hyakki Shūi (1781) and Hyakki Tsurezure-bukuro (1784) — and the resulting four-volume series systematises roughly two hundred yokai. Kappa, tanuki, fox, tengu, oni, the one-eyed boy and the long-necked rokurokubi, on through the tsukumogami of the late volumes (Biwa-bokuboku, Shamichōrō, Boroboroton) — the work attempts the entire vocabulary of yokai. The popular knowledge of yokai in Edo can be said to have been completed inside this four-volume set.

Sekien's other achievement is the manufacture of new yokai. Many of the entries in the later volumes — Nari-kama, Shiro-uneri, Kinu-tanuki and others — have no traceable folkloric source and are now generally thought to be Sekien's own inventions, generated from the look of an old object and clever play with the characters that name it. The Edo public believed them, Mizuki Shigeru collected them, and they now stand, indistinguishable from inherited folklore, as 'traditional yokai'. Yokai 'tradition', here, turns out to be in part the construction of early-modern artists: not a fixed core of folk material but a living, mutable culture.

In the Meiji period, Kawanabe Kyōsai^[8] (1831–89) carried the inherited yokai-painting tradition into the modern era. Kyōsai's idiosyncratic style — a fusion of the Kanō school with ukiyo-e — found its yokai expression in the posthumously printed Kyōsai Hyakki Gadan (1889), a culmination of the Sekien lineage. He also began to use yokai imagery as a tool of political caricature, taking on the Civilisation and Enlightenment of the new regime through demons in Western dress — a painter who stands at the seam between yokai as folklore and yokai as social criticism.

Kyōsai's pupils included Josiah Conder, the British architect of the Rokumeikan, and his work travelled abroad early. Substantial holdings at the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert testify to his role as the principal channel through which Meiji-period Japanese yokai imagery reached the Western art world. Within the broader Western enthusiasm for 'Japanesque', his demon parades took their place alongside landscape and beauty prints as exemplars of what the West understood as 'the Japanese'.

The line continued through Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's New Forms of Thirty-six Ghosts (1889–92) and the yokai prints of Ochiai Yoshiiku, and so into the illustrated magazines and books of late Meiji and Taishō. The principal vehicle of yokai representation had shifted from woodblock to printed press, but the visual genealogy that descended from Shinjuan was unbroken. Kyōsai occupies the strange double position of 'last yokai painter of Edo' and 'first yokai painter of the modern period'.

It was Mizuki Shigeru^[9] (1922–2015) who took yokai culture, in the post-war decades, into the national mainstream. Born in Sakaiminato, Tottori prefecture, having lost his left arm in combat in Rabaul, Mizuki worked his way up through kamishibai street-theatre and rental-library manga and, in the 1960s, broke through nationally with GeGeGe no Kitarō. He read Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō with care and folded its yokai into his own work, faithful entry by faithful entry; the late-Edo inventions — Kinu-tanuki, Nari-kama, Shiro-uneri — passed through Mizuki's manga to the postwar public, who henceforth knew them as 'traditional yokai'.

Mizuki's contribution worked in two registers at once. First, he took the yokai that Edo-period painters had pinned into discrete encyclopedia entries and restored them to continuous narrative as characters who walk, talk and act over time. Kitarō, Medama-oyaji, Nezumi-otoko, Sunakake-babā — yokai now had names, personalities and viewer-rapport. Second, his folkloric scholarship was rigorous: he travelled the country recording local traditions, especially in his native San'in region. The combination of folkloric seriousness with mass-cultural reach is rare in any tradition.

After Mizuki, yokai became one of the central materials of Japanese subculture. Kyōgoku Natsuhiko's Ubume no Natsu (1994) and the Kyōgokudō series invented the 'yokai novel' as a genre; the assembled deities of Spirited Away (2001), the spirits of Natsume's Book of Friends (2003–), the demons of Demon Slayer (2016–20) — all stand at the end of the line that runs Shinjuan → Sekien → Mizuki. The night march that began in the Heian capital is now one of Japan's largest cultural exports.

The physical site over which the night march was said to pass is the Ichijō Modori-bashi^[10] in Kamigyō Ward, Kyoto. A small bridge over the Horikawa, but a bridge of the same name has stood at essentially the same spot from the Heian period to the present. 'Modori-bashi', 'the bridge of return', takes its name from the legend that the dead would briefly return to life upon it — and for a thousand years it has functioned as the sacred site of Kyoto strangeness.

The lore deposited on the bridge is layered. The Senjūshō (mid-Kamakura) records that when Miyoshi Kiyoyuki's funeral procession crossed it, his son Jōzō prayed over the body and his father, briefly, came back to life — the source of the bridge's name. The Tale of the Heike (early Kamakura), in the 'Sword' chapter, has Watanabe no Tsuna, on the bridge, cut off the arm of Ibaraki Dōji disguised as a woman — the famous scene of Minamoto no Yorimitsu's four heavenly kings against a demon. Stories descending from the Konjaku Monogatari-shū have Abe no Seimei (921–1005) hiding his shikigami beneath the bridge; here Kyoto's onmyōdō tradition acquires its own sacred site.

On top of all this sits the late-medieval tradition that the night march passes over the bridge. Kyoto's contemporary tourist literature presents the bridge as 'Japan's oldest haunted spot'. The bridge was rebuilt in 1995, but the older bridge's newel posts are preserved at Seimei Shrine, a five-minute walk away. A millennium of strange lore that has left physical traces on the ground: a rare thing indeed.

Ichijō Modori-bashi^[10] (Horikawa-Ichijō intersection, Kamigyō Ward, Kyoto). City bus route 9 from Kyoto Station, five minutes on foot from the Horikawa-Nakadachiuri stop. The bridge itself is small and unprepossessing, but a thousand years of strangeness are sedimented here. Five minutes' walk away, Seimei Shrine (Horikawa-dōri, Ichijō-agaru) preserves the older bridge's newel posts and material on Abe no Seimei. The natural starting point for any pilgrimage of Kyoto's yokai and onmyōdō.

The Hyakki Yagyō Emaki of Shinjuan^[3] (Shinjuan, Daitokuji, 52 Murasakino, Daitokuji-chō, Kita Ward, Kyoto). Not normally on view; viewable only during special openings (usually in autumn, varying by year). When the Shinjuan original is unavailable, special exhibitions at the Kyoto National Museum and the Tokyo National Museum often show copies and related work. Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō can be browsed page by page on the National Diet Library's digital collection — a piece of infrastructure that makes serious yokai research possible from anywhere on earth.

The sacred site of Mizuki Shigeru^[9] is Sakaiminato in Tottori. The Mizuki Shigeru Road (about 800 metres) runs from JR Sakaiminato station and is lined with 153 bronze yokai statues; the Mizuki Shigeru Memorial Museum stands at one end. As the contemporary end-point of the line that runs Shinjuan → Sekien → Mizuki, the road condenses the whole history of yokai culture into one walk. Pair Kyoto's bridge (origin) with Sakaiminato's road (present), and the night march can be traversed in person.

In Tokyo, the Ōta Memorial Museum of Art (Harajuku, ukiyo-e) and the Mitsui Memorial Museum mount occasional special exhibitions of Sekien and Kyōsai. The National Diet Library's digital yokai holdings are open to the general public from anywhere in the country — more than a hundred Edo-period yokai prints at high resolution, free to browse. To be able to walk a thousand years of yokai tradition from one's living room is, in the end, one of the largest gifts that the digital age has made to Japanese culture.