1.
Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon
2.
Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki
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Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki is the second book of Japanese artist Toriyama Sekiens famous Gazu Hyakki Yagyō series, published ca. These books are supernatural bestiaries, collections of ghosts, spirits, spooks and these works have had a profound influence on subsequent yōkai imagery in Japan. The three volumes were titled 雨, 晦, and 明, from this book, Toriyama added captions. Gazu Hyakki Yagyō Konjaku Hyakki Shūi Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro Toriyama, Toriyama Sekien Gazu Hyakki Yagyō Zen Gashū. Kon-jaku ezu zoku hyakki Yōkai Taikan Hyakki Yagyō, Mae Kōjō
3.
Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro
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Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro is the fourth book in Japanese artist Toriyama Sekiens famous Gazu Hyakki Yagyō series. The title is a pun, hyakki, normally written with the hundred and oni, is instead written with hundred. This hints that the majority of the yōkai portrayed in its pages are of the variety known as tsukumogami, published in 1781, it was inspired in part by Tsurezuregusa, a 14th century essay collection by the monk Yoshida Kenkō. The book takes the form of a supernatural bestiary of yōkai, also unlike the other books in the series, Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro has a rudimentary narrative framework, described as the record of a strange dream in early printings. The book is compiled in three sub-volumes, Jō, Chū, and Ge The imagery below is from the printing of the book. Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, National Diet Library of Japan, Gazu Hyakki Yagyō Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki Konjaku Hyakki Shūi
4.
Bestiary
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A bestiary, or bestiarum vocabulum, is a compendium of beasts. Originating in the Ancient world, bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals, the natural history and illustration of each beast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson. This reflected the belief that the world itself was the Word of God, for example, the pelican, which was believed to tear open its breast to bring its young to life with its own blood, was a living representation of Jesus. The bestiary, then, is also a reference to the language of animals in Western Christian art. Following the Physiologus, Saint Isidore of Seville and Saint Ambrose expanded the religious message with reference to passages from the Bible and they and other authors freely expanded or modified pre-existing models, constantly refining the moral content without interest or access to much more detail regarding the factual content. Nevertheless, the often fanciful accounts of these beasts were widely read, a few observations found in bestiaries, such as the migration of birds, were discounted by the natural philosophers of later centuries, only to be rediscovered in the modern scientific era. Mediaeval bestiaries are remarkably similar in sequence of the animals of which they treat, bestiaries were particularly popular in England and France around the 12th century and were mainly compilations of earlier texts. The Aberdeen Bestiary is one of the best known of over 50 manuscript bestiaries surviving today, bestiaries influenced early heraldry in the Middle Ages, giving ideas for charges and also for the artistic form. Bestiaries continue to give inspiration to coats of arms created in our time, two illuminated Psalters, the Queen Mary Psalter and the Isabella Psalter, contain full Bestiary cycles. The bestiary in the Queen Mary Psalter is found in the decorations that occupy about the bottom quarter of the page. In fact the bestiary has been expanded beyond the source in the Norman bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc to ninety animals, some are placed in the text to make correspondences with the psalm they are illustrating. The Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci also made his own bestiary, a volucrary is a similar collection of the symbols of birds that is sometimes found in conjunction with bestiaries. The most widely known volucrary in the Renaissance was Johannes de Cubas Gart der Gesundheit which describes 122 birds, Medieval bestiaries often contained detailed descriptions and illustrations of species native to Western Europe, exotic animals and what in modern times are considered to be imaginary animals. The description was then followed with an artistic illustration of the animal as described in the bestiary. Bestiaries were organized in different ways based upon the text, the descriptions could be organized by animal groupings, such as terrestrial and marine creatures, or presented in an alphabetical manner. However, the texts gave no distinction between existing and imaginary animals, descriptions of creatures such as dragons, unicorns, basilisk, griffin and caladrius were common in such works and found intermingled amongst accounts of bears, boars, deer, lions, and elephants. This lack of separation has often been associated with the assumption that people during this time believed in what the modern period classifies as nonexistent or imaginary creatures, however, this assumption is currently under debate, with various explanations being offered. To state that the animal in question didnt exist was to defy the truth of the word of the Church, the contents of Medieval bestiaries were often obtained and created from combining older textual sources and accounts of animals, such as the Physiologus, with newer observations and writings
5.
Japanese literature
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Early works of Japanese literature were heavily influenced by cultural contact with China and Chinese literature, often written in Classical Chinese. Indian literature also had an influence through the Diffusion of Buddhism in Japan, since Japan reopened its ports to Western trading and diplomacy in the 19th century, Western and Eastern literature have strongly affected each other and continue to do so. Before the introduction of kanji from China, Japanese had no writing system and it is believed that Chinese characters came to Japan at the very beginning of the fifth century, brought by immigrants from the mainland of Korean and Chinese descent. Chinese characters were further adapted, creating what is known as manyōgana. The earliest literary works in Japan were created in the Nara period, one of the stories they describe is the tale of Urashima Tarō. The Heian period has been referred to as the era of art. During this era, literature became centered on an elite of nobility. The imperial court patronized the poets, most of whom were courtiers or ladies-in-waiting. Reflecting the aristocratic atmosphere, the poetry was elegant and sophisticated and expressed emotions in a rhetorical style, editing the resulting anthologies of poetry soon became a national pastime. The iroha poem, now one of two standard orderings for the Japanese syllabary, was developed during the early Heian period. Genji Monogatari written in the early 11th century by a woman named Murasaki Shikibu is considered the pre-eminent masterpiece of Heian fiction, other important writings of this period include the Kokin Wakashū, a waka-poetry anthology, and Makura no Sōshi. The Pillow Book was written by Sei Shōnagon, Murasaki Shikibus contemporary and rival, as an essay about the life, loves, another notable piece of fictional Japanese literature was Konjaku Monogatarishū, a collection of over a thousand stories in 31 volumes. The volumes cover various tales from India, China and Japan, the 10th-century Japanese narrative, Taketori Monogatari, can be considered an early example of proto-science fiction. The protagonist of the story, Kaguya-hime, is a princess from the Moon who is sent to Earth for safety during a celestial war and she is later taken back to her extraterrestrial family in an illustrated depiction of a disc-shaped flying object similar to a flying saucer. During the Kamakura period, Japan experienced many civil wars led to the development of a warrior class, and subsequent war tales, histories. Work from this period is notable for its more sombre tone compared to the works of previous eras, with themes of life and death, simple lifestyles, and redemption through killing. A representative work is Heike monogatari, an account of the struggle between the Minamoto and Taira clans for control of Japan at the end of the twelfth century. Other important tales of the period include Kamo no Chōmeis Hōjōki, despite a decline in the importance of the imperial court, aristocratic literature remained the center of Japanese culture in the beginning of the Kamakura period
6.
Japanese art
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It has a long history, ranging from the beginnings of human habitation in Japan, sometime in the 10th millennium BC, to the present. Japan has been subject to invasions of new and strange ideas followed by long periods of minimal contact with the outside world. Over time the Japanese developed the ability to absorb, imitate, the earliest complex art in Japan was produced in the 7th and 8th centuries in connection with. After the Ōnin War, Japan entered a period of political, social, in the state that emerged under the leadership of the Tokugawa shogunate, organized religion played a much less important role in peoples lives, and the arts that survived were primarily secular. Painting is the artistic expression in Japan, practiced by amateurs. Until modern times, the Japanese wrote with a rather than a pen. With the rise of popular culture in the Edo period, a style of woodblock prints became a major form, Japanese ceramics are among the finest in the world and include the earliest known artifacts of their culture. In architecture, Japanese preferences for natural materials and an interaction of interior and exterior space are clearly expressed and they built simple houses of wood and thatch set into shallow earthen pits to provide warmth from the soil. They crafted lavishly decorated pottery vessels, clay figurines called dogū. The next wave of immigrants was the Yayoi people, named for the district in Tokyo where remnants of their settlements first were found. These people, arriving in Japan about 350 BC, brought their knowledge of rice cultivation, the manufacture of copper weapons and bronze bells. The third stage in Japanese prehistory, the Kofun period, represents a modification of Yayoi culture, the period is named for the large number of kofun megalithic tombs created during this period. In this period, diverse groups of people formed political alliances, typical artifacts are bronze mirrors, symbols of political alliances, and clay sculptures called haniwa which were erected outside tombs. The transmission of Buddhism provided the impetus for contacts between China, Korea and Japan. Throughout the 7th and 8th centuries, however, the focus in contacts between Japan and the Asian continent was the development of Buddhism. The most common designations are the Suiko period, 552–645, the Hakuhō period, 645–710, the earliest Japanese sculptures of the Buddha are dated to the 6th and 7th century. After the Chinese Northern Wei buddhist art had infiltrated a Korean peninsula, many historians portray Korea as a mere transmitter of Buddhism. The Three Kingdoms, and particularly Baekje, were instrumental as active agents in the introduction and formation of a Buddhist tradition in Japan in 538 or 552 and they illustrate the terminal point of the Silk Road transmission of art during the first few centuries of our era
7.
Tengu
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Tengu are a type of legendary creature found in Japanese folk religion and are also considered a type of Shinto god or yōkai. Buddhism long held that the tengu were disruptive demons and harbingers of war and their image gradually softened, however, into one of protective, if still dangerous, spirits of the mountains and forests. Tengu are associated with the practice of Shugendō, and they are usually depicted in the garb of its followers. The tengu in art appears in a variety of shapes and it usually falls somewhere between a large, monstrous bird and a wholly anthropomorphized being, often with a red face or an unusually large or long nose. Early depictions of tengu show them as kite-like beings who can take a form, often retaining avian wings. The tengus long nose seems to have been conceived in the 14th century, the tengus long noses ally them with the Shinto deity Sarutahiko, who is described in the Japanese historical text, the Nihon Shoki, with a similar proboscis measuring seven hand-spans in length. In village festivals the two figures are portrayed with identical red, phallic-nosed mask designs. Some of the earliest representations of tengu appear in Japanese picture scrolls, such as the Tenguzōshi Emaki,1296, which parodies high-ranking priests by endowing them the hawk-like beaks of tengu demons. Tengu are often pictured as taking the shape of some sort of priest, beginning in the 13th century, tengu came to be associated in particular with the yamabushi, the mountain ascetics who practice Shugendō. The association soon found its way into Japanese art, where tengu are most frequently depicted in the distinctive costume, which includes a tokin. Due to their aesthetic, they are often shown wielding the Shakujo. Tengu are commonly depicted holding a magical ha-uchiwa, fans made of feathers, in folk tales, these fans sometimes have the ability to grow or shrink a persons nose, but usually they are attributed the power to stir up great winds. Various other strange accessories may be associated with tengu, such as a type of tall, the term tengu and the characters used to write it are borrowed from the name of a fierce demon from Chinese folklore called tiāngoǔ. Chinese literature assigns this creature a variety of descriptions, but most often it is a fierce and it makes a noise like thunder and brings war wherever it falls. One account from the Shù Yì Jì, written in 1791, describes a dog-like tiāngoǔ with a beak and an upright posture. The 23rd chapter of the Nihon Shoki, written in 720, is held to contain the first recorded mention of tengu in Japan. In this account a large shooting star appears and is identified by a Buddhist priest as a dog, and much like the tiāngoǔ of China. Although the Chinese characters for tengu are used in the text, M. W. de Visser speculated that the early Japanese tengu may represent a conglomeration of two Chinese spirits, the tiāngoǔ and the fox spirits called huli jing
8.
Yama-uba
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Yamauba, Yamamba or Yamanba are variations on the name of a yōkai found in Japanese folklore. They can also be written as 山母, 山姫, or 山女郎, and in the town of Masaeki, Nishimorokata District, Miyazak Prefecture, there wasnt anything unusual about it, but it was said that when she sat to the side of it, the floor would creek. Sometimes she would also nurse children who go missing for three days and its said that theres splotches on her body and she has her breasts attached to her shoulders as if theres a tasuki cord. In Kumakiri, Haruno, Shūchi District, Shizuoka Prefecture, there are legends of a yamauba called hocchopaa, mysterious phenomena, such as sounds of festivals and curses coming from the mountains, were considered to be because of this hocchopaa. In the Higashichikuma District, Nagano Prefecture, they are called uba, and the legends there tell of a yokai with long hair and one eye, Yamauba have been portrayed in two different ways. In these tales, the yamauba was a fearful monster trying to eat humans, theres also the tale ubakawa, where a yamaba would give a human good fortune. In Aichi Prefecture, theres a legend that a house possessed by a yamauba would quickly gain wealth and fortune, depending on the text and translator, the Yamauba appears as a monstrous crone, “her unkempt hair long and golden white. Her kimono filthy and tattered, ” with cannibalistic tendencies, in another story the yōkai raises the orphan hero Kintarō, who goes on to become the famous warrior Sakata no Kintoki. Yamauba is said to have a mouth at the top of her head, in one story it is related that her only weakness is a certain flower containing her soul. In one Noh drama, translated as, Yamauba, Dame of the Mountain, Konparu Zenchiku states the following, Yamauba is the fairy of the mountains and she decks them with snow in winter, with blossoms in spring. Wild white hair hangs down her shoulders, her face is very thin, there was a courtesan of the Capital who made a dance representing the wanderings of Yamauba. It had such success that people called this courtesan Yamauba though her name was Hyakuma. Steve Bermans short story, “A Troll on a Mountain with a Girl” features Yamauba, lafcadio Hearn, writing primarily for a Western audience, tells a tale like this, Then saw the Yama-Uba, —the Mountain Nurse. Legend says she catches little children and nurses them for awhile, the Yama-Uba did not clutch at us, because her hands were occupied with a nice little boy, whom she was just going to eat. The child had been made wonderfully pretty to heighten the effect, the spectre, hovering in the air above a tomb at some distance. Had no eyes, its long hair hung loose, its white robe floated light as smoke, I thought of a statement in a composition by one of my pupils about ghosts, Their greatest peculiarity is that they have no feet. Then I jumped again, for the thing, quite soundlessly, jynx from the media franchise Pokémon is said to be a reference to Yama-uba, with the same golden-white hair, red kimono, and prominent mouth. The dark skin could be attributed to the tendency in Noh theater to play the Yama-uba character in blackface, also, Yama-uba is known to seduce her victims by dancing, which is often referenced by Jynxs Pokédex entries within Pokémon games
9.
Kappa (folklore)
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A kappa, also known as kawatarō, komahiki, or kawatora, is a yōkai demon or imp found in traditional Japanese folklore. The name is a combination of the words kawa and wappa, in Shintō they are considered to be one of many suijin, their yorishiro, or one of their temporary appearances. A hairy kappa is called a hyōsube, in Japanese Buddhism they are considered to be a kind of hungry ogres. Therefore, Sha Wujing, who is a character from the Chinese story Journey to the West is described like a kappa in Japan, Kappa are distinguished for having a small pool of water suspended on top of their head, signifying their life force and habitat. There are more than eighty other names associated with the kappa in different regions, including kawappa, gawappa, kōgo, mizushi, mizuchi, enkō, kawaso, suitengu, along with the oni and the tengu, the kappa is among the best-known yōkai in Japan. These various names of the creature vary by region and local folklore, Kappa have been used to warn children of the dangers lurking in rivers and lakes, as kappa have been often said to try to lure people into water and pull them. Kappa legends are said to be based on the Japanese giant salamander or hanzaki, the best known place where it has been claimed Kappa supposedly reside is in the Kappabuchi waters of Tōno in the Iwate Prefecture. The nearby Jōkenji Buddhist temple has dedicated a komainu dog statue to honor the kappa, the Kappa is also venerated at the Sogenji Buddhist temple in the Asakusa district of Tokyo where according to tradition, a mummified arm of a Kappa is enshrined within the chapel hall. The kappa is typically depicted as humanoid in form and about the size of a child. Its scaly reptilian skin ranges in color from green to yellow or blue, Kappa supposedly inhabit the ponds and rivers of Japan, and have various features to aid them in this environment, such as webbed hands and feet. They are sometimes said to smell like fish and they can swim like them, the expression kappa no kawa nagare conveys the idea that even experts make mistakes. This cavity must be full whenever a kappa is away from the water, if it dries out. Another notable feature in some stories is that the arms are said to be connected to each other through the torso, while they are primarily water creatures, they do on occasion venture on to land. When they do, the plate can be covered with a cap for protection. In fact, in versions of the legends, kappa spend spring and summer in the water. Although they are reported to live throughout Japan, they are said to be particular to Saga Prefecture. Kappa are usually seen as mischievous troublemakers or trickster figures, folk beliefs claim the cucumber as their traditional favorite meal. As water monsters, kappa have been blamed for drownings, and are said to try to lure people into water
