Where the Records Were Made
Fourteen places that appear in the articles by name, with the year of the record
14 places
Every article on this site lists the places where its yokai was recorded, with the year and the kind of record. These are the ones you can go to. A pool, a waterfall, a bridge and a valley road are still where the records put them; a temple, two shrines, a museum and a river port stand on the ground the tales name. The page for each place says what the record was and what has been built around it since.
Kappa-buchi and Jōkenji カッパ淵と常堅寺
A quiet pool on a stream behind a temple in Tōno, the place the town points to when it tells its kappa tales.
Yokai you will meet: Kappa
Jōren Falls 浄蓮の滝
A 25-metre waterfall in the Amagi hills of Izu, with wasabi beds along the stream below and a spider in the pool.
Yokai you will meet: Jorōgumo
Morinji 茂林寺
The temple of the tea kettle that was a tanuki, with a row of tanuki statues up the approach and the kettle itself on show.
Yokai you will meet: Bake-danuki
Oiwa Inari: Tamiya Shrine and Yōunji 於岩稲荷田宮神社・陽運寺
Two small shrines facing each other across a lane in Yotsuya, on the ground where the Tamiya family lived and where the play put Oiwa's ghost.
Yokai you will meet: Oiwa
Sesshōseki, the Killing Stone 殺生石
A boulder in a bare volcanic hollow above the Nasu hot springs, the stone the nine-tailed fox became; it split in two in 2022.
Yokai you will meet: Tamamo-no-Mae, Kitsune
Nue Pond and Nue Daimyōjin 鵺池・鵺大明神
A small stone-edged pond in a city park north-west of Nijō Castle, where the arrow that killed the nue was said to have been washed.
Yokai you will meet: Nue
Seta no Karahashi 瀬田の唐橋
The bridge at the outlet of Lake Biwa where a hero shot the centipede of Mount Mikami and a shark-man wept rubies.
The Konaki-jiji Statue at Fujikawa Valley 児啼爺の碑（藤川谷）
A stone statue of the crying old man by a mountain road above the Ōboke gorge, in the valley where the 1938 record placed him.
Yokai you will meet: Konaki-jiji
Warei Shrine 和霊神社
The shrine of a murdered retainer on the edge of Uwajima, where the ushi-oni of the summer festival come to pay their respects.
Yokai you will meet: Ushi-oni
Miyoshi Mononoke Museum 三次もののけミュージアム
A museum of yokai pictures and objects in the town where a sixteen-year-old was haunted for thirty nights in 1749.
Yokai you will meet: Ōkubi
Mount Mikami 三上山
The conical mountain east of Lake Biwa that the great centipede wound itself around, climbed in forty minutes from the shrine at its foot.
Yokai you will meet: Ōmukade
Kuzunoha Inari Shrine, Shinoda Forest 信太森葛葉稲荷神社
The shrine in what is left of Shinoda forest, where the fox wife of the tales looked at herself in the well and went home.
Yokai you will meet: Kitsune
Mitsuishi Shrine and the Oni's Handprints 三ツ石神社（鬼の手形）
Three granite boulders in a city grove where an oni pressed its hands into the rock as an oath, and gave the prefecture its name.
Yokai you will meet: Oni
The Kappa Landing Stone at Yatsushiro 河童渡来之碑（徳渕の津）
Two stones by a bridge at the old river port where, the tale says, nine thousand kappa came ashore from China under their chief Kyūsenbō.
Hours, admission and closing days change, and this site does not list them. The link goes to the place's own page, with the date we last checked it.