Yōkaigaku

Inoue Enryō, a Buddhist philosopher and founder of the school that became Tōyō University, set out in the 1880s to rid modern Japan of superstition. He gathered reports of hauntings and possessions, lectured on them from 1893 as yōkaigaku, the study of yokai, and sorted them into false mysteries that science could explain and the one true mystery that remained; the public called him Dr. Yōkai. His work spread the word yōkai across the country even as it tried to retire the things themselves.

The folklorists who followed collected rather than debunked, and the yōkaigaku of the last forty years, led by cultural historians, studies yokai as a record of how people have imagined fear, place and the past. The two senses of the word are both still in use.