Akaname
垢嘗（あかなめ）
Sekien drew a crouching figure with a long tongue in a bathhouse in 1776 and called it the grime-licker. He wrote nothing else about it — and everything you have been told about dirty bathrooms was added afterwards.
Yokai Night Parade
百鬼夜行
Discover the spirits, monsters, and strange encounters of Japanese folklore.
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Konaki-jiji
児啼爺（こなきじじい）
A 1938 record from the Miyoshi mountains of Tokushima gives an old man's appearance and an infant's cry, in a single line. The famous part — that it grows unbearably heavy once you pick it up — is not in it.
Sunekosuri
脛擦り（すねこすり）
A naturalist writing a national dictionary of yokai in 1935 gave the Sunekosuri of Oda district about one line: dog shaped, on rainy nights, brushing between a traveller's legs as it passes. Everything else you have read about it came later.
Betobeto-san
べとべとさん（べとべとさん）
On a night road in Uda you hear a bita-bita footfall coming along behind you. There is nobody there. Step aside, say the words, and it stops — which is the entire record.
Tsuchigumo
土蜘蛛（つちぐも）
A monk appears at a sick warlord's bedside and throws spider silk at him. That is the tale. But the same word, centuries earlier, was what the court called people it wanted to treat as outsiders.
Ōmukade
大百足（おおむかで）
A warrior who walked over a serpent lying across the Long Bridge of Seta was asked by the dragon clan for help — because a centipede large enough to wrap a mountain was killing them, and they could not stop it themselves.
Featured Short
Akaname: A Name, a Tongue, and No Explanation
Sekien drew a crouching figure with a long tongue in a bathhouse in 1776 and called it the grime-licker. He wrote nothing else about it — and everything you have been told about dirty bathrooms was added afterwards.
Read the articleAbout the Project
Yokai Night Parade pairs 30-second folklore shorts with referenced articles. We separate documented tradition from later popular imagery, cite our sources, and label every illustration as a reconstruction — never as a historical image.