Yokai born in the twentieth century
Not all yokai are old. Some were built by schoolchildren in a single summer, some by a magazine writer, and one came back from an 1846 broadsheet to become a pandemic mascot. These are the ones with a date of birth.
6 yokai
がしゃどくろ
Gashadokuro, the giant skeleton, looks ancient. It was created by the writer Saitō Morihiro in 1966, taken into Mizuki Shigeru's yokai collection in 1968, and later matched to a Kuniyoshi print from the 1840s that never used the name.
口裂け女（くちさけおんな）
Kuchisake-onna is not an old yokai. She is a rumour that swept through Japanese schoolchildren in 1978–79: a masked woman asking 'Am I pretty?' Almost every other detail changed from school to school.
テケテケ
Teke Teke is a modern school ghost story, best known as the upper half of a woman who drags herself along on her elbows. Its origin cannot be traced, and one recorded version from a Kobe high school puts it in a mirror instead.
人面犬（じんめんけん）
Jinmenken, the dog with a human face, swept through Japanese children's rumour around 1989–90. A first-grader in Yamagata had his own version: the dog had left Tokyo because people would not stop talking about it.
アマビエ
A printed sheet dated 1846 tells of a creature with long hair and a beak that rose from the sea off Higo, foretold six years of good harvests and an epidemic, and asked people to copy its picture and show it around.
件（くだん）
An 1836 broadsheet from Tango described a kudan — a cow's body with a human face — and promised that any house that put up its picture would prosper. Other kudan of the same century foretold disaster instead.
