柳田国男（やなぎたくにお）
Yanagita Kunio
The founder of Japanese folklore studies (1875–1962), who collected the names of yokai from the countryside.
A government official and later a journalist, Yanagita turned the stories of the countryside into a field of study. After Tōno Monogatari (1910) he founded the journal Kyōdo Kenkyū in 1913 and Minkan Denshō in 1935, and the network of local correspondents who wrote for them is the source of most of the records on this site. Yama no Jinsei (1926) gathers the lore of the mountains, including the one-legged ippon-datara.
His Yōkai Meii of 1938–39, a glossary of about eighty yokai names with the district each was reported from, is where the nurikabe, the ittan-momen, the sunekosuri and the nobusuma enter the record, in a line or two each. His view that yokai are gods who lost their worship, and his distinction between a yokai that haunts a place and a ghost that follows a person, are still the starting points of the subject.
Related yokai
Nurikabe
塗り壁（ぬりかべ）
A night-road obstruction that stops travelers like a wall, though the early record does not describe a visible body.
Ittan-momen
一反木綿（いったんもめん）
A white bolt of cloth that flutters across a rural night road, dazzles a traveler and attacks.
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.
Nobusuma
野衾（のぶすま）
A 1938 Tokyo record describes something like a flying squirrel that drifts down onto a traveler and covers the eyes and mouth — and stops there.
Ippon-datara
一本だたら（いっぽんだたら）
In the Kii mountains a one-legged thing leaves enormous single tracks in the snow — and Yanagita Kunio, reporting them, declined to conclude a one-legged creature from footprints alone.
Zashiki-warashi
座敷童子（ざしきわらし）
In Tōno Monogatari, an unfamiliar child crosses the corridor of an old house — and the family that shelters the spirit is said to prosper.