Hyakki Yagyō

In Heian tales a courtier out late in the capital meets a procession of demons filling the street, and survives only because a sutra written on his clothing or a charm on his person makes him invisible to them. Court calendars marked nights on which the parade was abroad and people stayed indoors. The procession was of oni, and the word hyakki means a hundred of them.

In the Muromachi period painters turned the procession into something else: a line of walking tools, animals and small monsters crossing a scroll in the dark until the sunrise at the end scatters them. The scroll in the Shinjuan sub-temple of Daitokuji in Kyoto, attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu, is the model that Edo artists copied. Toriyama Sekien borrowed the title for his 1776 picture book, and this site borrowed it too: Yokai Night Parade is Hyakki Yagyō in English.