Kappa
河童（かっぱ）
A child-sized water yokai whose strength lives in the water held by the dish on its head.
River and Water Yokai
Yokai of rivers, ponds and waterfalls
Fresh water in Japan has its own population: the river child with the dish on its head, the otter that walks ahead of you, the spider at the waterfall, and the sounds heard by the stream at night with nobody there.
10 yokai
Jorōgumo
絡新婦（じょろうぐも）
At a waterfall in Shizuoka, a spider winds one fine thread around a man's foot—and reveals enough strength to tear a mulberry stump from the earth.
Azuki-arai
小豆洗い（あずきあらい）
A bean-washing sound repeats beside a dark stream, but the person making it cannot be found.
Kawauso
川獺（かわうそ）
In Gunma in 1956 the kawauso was a figure on a riverside road at dusk who glances back and beckons — not a traveler, but an otter in human form.
Samebito
鮫人（さめびと）
In a story Lafcadio Hearn published in English in 1900, a man on the Long Bridge of Seta shelters a creature banished from the Dragon Palace — and is repaid in tears that harden into jewels, which only come when the grief behind them is real.
Kawa-akago
川赤子（かわあかご）
Toriyama Sekien drew an infant-shaped creature rising from the water plants of a mountain river in 1779, watching a man on a raft — and admitted in the caption that he was guessing about what it was.
Suiko
水虎（すいこ）
A Chinese pharmacological encyclopedia describes a river creature the size of a small child, armoured in scales that arrows cannot pierce, which keeps its body underwater and lets only its two tiger-pawed knees break the surface.
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.
Chabukuro
茶袋（ちゃぶくろ）
A tea-steeping bag that hangs in the air on eerie stretches of road in the Hata district of Kōchi, recorded in 1938, with illness blamed on anyone it strikes; related bags hang from trees in Kagawa and float on rivers in Wakayama.
Yamawaro
山童（やまわろ）
The hairy mountain child of Kyushu: a 1950 Ashikita record of one snapping twigs all night beside a charcoal burner, the rice balls and sake it works for, the paths where no kiln may stand, and the belief that it is the kappa gone up the mountain for the winter.