Timeline of Yokai
When each yokai, book, picture and rumour on this site entered the record, period by period. Every entry links to the articles, glossary terms and folklore records it concerns.
60 entries
To 794 Asuka and Nara
The first chronicles name the things that would later be called yokai: oni, the people the court called earth spiders, and strange happenings at the palace.
- Text
The first chronicles are compiled
Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720) set down the myths and early history of the court. The character 鬼 is in them, and so is tsuchigumo, the earth spider: not yet a monster but the name the Yamato court gave to people it refused to count as its own. - Picture
The kirin arrives with the art of Tang China
Among the treasures of the Shōsōin at Nara, the auspicious one-horned beast of Chinese tradition appears on objects brought from or modelled on the continent. It is the oldest creature on this site to be pictured in Japan. - Text
The word 妖怪 is written in a court chronicle
Shoku Nihongi records a purification of the palace because of repeated yōkai, strange happenings, within it. The word that now means a creature meant an event: something uncanny that had occurred and needed to be dealt with.
794–1185 Heian
The court at Kyoto gives the oni, the tengu and the fox their first stories, and the night parade its first witnesses.
- Text
Nihon Ryōiki: the first tale collection
A monk at Yakushiji gathers over a hundred Buddhist tales of reward and retribution, the oldest setsuwa collection in Japan. A man in Mino marries a woman who turns out to be a fox; she leaves him, and he calls her back to sleep with him, which the tale offers as the origin of the word kitsune. - Event
Sugawara no Michizane dies in exile and becomes a god
The scholar-minister, driven from the court by rivals, dies at Dazaifu. Plague, lightning on the palace and the deaths of his enemies follow, and the court enshrines him as Tenjin to turn his anger into protection. The pattern of the vengeful spirit placated by worship is set. - Text
A dictionary explains the word oni
The Wamyō Ruijushō, the first Japanese-Chinese dictionary, glosses oni as a thing that hides itself from people: an invisible spirit of the dead rather than a horned giant. The horns, the tiger skin and the iron club are centuries away. - Event
The court of Emperor Ichijō, where the demon-slaying tales are set
Minamoto no Yorimitsu, called Raikō, serves the court in these years, and the later tales place his exploits here: the earth spider that comes to his sickbed as a monk, and the oni lord of Mount Ōe who carries off the daughters of the capital. The stories are written down three centuries afterward. - Text
Konjaku Monogatarishū: a thousand tales
The largest of the tale collections gathers stories from India, China and Japan, and its Japanese volumes hold the first large store of yokai: an oni at a city gate, tengu who possess monks and fall from the sky, foxes in disguise, and a courtier who meets the night parade and lives because of a sutra on his clothes. - Tale
Yorimasa shoots the nue over the palace
Every night a black cloud settles over the palace roof and the emperor falls ill. Minamoto no Yorimasa fires an arrow into it and brings down a creature with a monkey’s head, a tanuki’s body, a tiger’s limbs and a snake for a tail. The Tale of the Heike sets the episode in this year; the text was compiled in the following century.
1185–1573 Kamakura and Muromachi
Warriors fight monsters in tales and on the Noh stage, and painters draw the first parades of tools and demons on scrolls.
- Text
The Tale of the Heike and Uji Shūi Monogatari are compiled
The war tale that holds the nue episode takes its written form, recited by blind musicians to the lute. Uji Shūi Monogatari retells the best of the older strange tales, including the night parade and the oni who takes a lump from an old man’s cheek. - Text
Tsurezuregusa reports a rumour of the nekomata
In his book of essays the monk Kenkō notes a rumour that a cat-monster that eats people lives deep in the mountains, and that an old house cat can also become one; and he tells of a priest walking home at night who is knocked into a ditch by what he takes for a nekomata and turns out to be his own dog. Sekien borrowed the book’s title for his fourth yokai book four centuries later. - Picture
The first monster-slaying scrolls
The oldest surviving Shuten-dōji scroll, the Ōeyama Ekotoba, and the Tsuchigumo Zōshi are painted in this century: Raikō and his men disguised as monks at the oni’s palace on Mount Ōe, and the earth spider’s lair found at the end of a trail of blood. The tales will be copied in scrolls and booklets for the next three hundred years. - Text
The Taiheiki tells of Tawara Tōda and the centipede
The war chronicle includes the legend of Fujiwara no Hidesato, who crosses the serpent lying on the Seta Bridge without flinching, is asked by the dragon clan of Lake Biwa for help, and kills the giant centipede wrapped round Mount Mikami with an arrow wetted in his own saliva. - Stage
The Noh stage takes up the monsters
The masked drama shaped by Zeami and his successors turns the tales into plays that are still performed: Nue, Tsuchigumo with its spider threads thrown across the stage, Yamanba with the mountain woman as a dancer, and Sesshōseki, which gives the fox Tamamo-no-Mae a killing stone the earlier tale did not have. - Text
The Tamamo-no-Mae tale is written down
A monk’s diary of 1453 mentions the story of the fox at the court of Retired Emperor Toba being told; the Tamamo-no-Mae Monogatari of 1470 is among the earliest written versions. The most learned lady at court is exposed by divination, flees to the plain of Nasu as a fox, and is shot. She has two tails here, not nine. - Picture
Tsukumogami-ki and the otogi-zōshi
A picture scroll tells how household tools thrown out at the year-end cleaning rise in anger, take on bodies and parade through the capital until they are converted. In the same decades the short illustrated tales called otogi-zōshi give Ōtakemaru of Suzuka and the other oni of the mountains their stories. - Picture
The Hyakki Yagyō Emaki of Shinjuan
The scroll kept at the Shinjuan sub-temple of Daitokuji in Kyoto, attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu, shows the night parade as a procession of walking tools, animals and small demons crossing the paper until the sunrise at the end scatters them. Edo painters copied it for two centuries, and this site takes its name from it. - Tale
The tanuki's kettle at Morinji
At Morinji temple in Tatebayashi, the monk Shukaku produces a tea kettle that never runs dry however much is drawn from it. The temple’s tradition dates the kettle to this year and the monk’s revelation as a tanuki to 1587; the children’s tale Bunbuku Chagama grew from it.
1573–1868 Azuchi–Momoyama and Edo
Print gives the yokai their names and faces: encyclopaedias, picture books, broadsheets, the kabuki stage and the artists of the night parade.
- Text
Otogi-bōko: Chinese ghost stories become Japanese
Asai Ryōi adapts a Ming collection of strange tales to Japanese settings. The peony lantern and the night visitor who is a skeleton by daylight enter Japanese fiction here, and with them the printed kaidan as a genre. - Text
Shokoku Hyakumonogatari is printed
The first collection to take its title from the game of a hundred stories: a hundred tales from the provinces, told as true, with a candle to be put out after each. The format will be copied for the next two centuries. - Text
Wakan Sansai Zue, the illustrated encyclopaedia
Terajima Ryōan’s 105 volumes describe heaven, earth and humanity with a woodcut for nearly every entry, and file the giant ape, the mermaid and the clam that breathes mirages beside the ordinary animals, each with a description and often a Chinese source. - Picture
Sawaki Sūshi paints the Hyakkai Zukan
A scroll of about thirty named monsters, each standing alone: the yamabiko, the otoroshi with its hair over its face, the nure-onna, the ushi-oni. Sekien takes their shapes almost line for line into his first book forty years later. - Tale
A month of apparitions in a house in Bingo
In the seventh month, in Miyoshi, a samurai boy named Inō Heitarō is visited by a different apparition every night for thirty nights, among them a giant old woman’s face that fills the doorway. The account is painted as scrolls and copied across the country. - Picture
Toriyama Sekien publishes Gazu Hyakki Yagyō
Three volumes, one creature to a page, each with its name: the kappa, the tengu, the snow woman, the fox fire, the nekomata dancing in a towel, the akaname in the bathhouse, the ushi-oni on the shore, the kodama by its pine. The book that most people mean when they say a yokai is in Sekien. - Picture
Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki: the parade continued
Sekien’s second book adds notes to the pictures. The flaming wheel wanyūdō, the flying-squirrel nobusuma, the skeleton bride hone-onna, the mind-reading satori and the crying kawa-akago at the river’s edge appear, several of them in no other source. - Picture
The tofu boy appears in a comic booklet
In the yellow-covered kibyōshi of Edo, a small boy under a large hat carrying a tray of tofu begins to follow people along the road at dusk. He has no village and no witness, only the comic page, and he does nothing worse than drop his tofu. - Picture
Konjaku Hyakki Shūi: gleanings from Chinese books
Sekien’s third book reaches into Chinese encyclopaedias and Buddhist lore. The shin, the clam whose breath builds mirages; the keukegen, a lump of hair that brings sickness; the mokumokuren, eyes opening in every panel of a torn screen. - Picture
Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro: the tool spirits
Sekien’s last book is almost all tsukumogami: a lute with a priest’s head, a koto rearing like a dragon, a quilt that smothers its sleeper, a heap of scrolls standing up to lecture, a general made of crockery. Most of them exist nowhere else. - Rite
The festival ushi-oni of Uwajima is first recorded
In Uwajima, in southern Ehime, a huge ox-demon of cloth and bamboo is carried through the streets ahead of the portable shrine. The town dates the first written mention of the procession to this year; it is still carried every summer. - Stage
Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan opens in Edo
Tsuruya Nanboku IV’s play has Oiwa poisoned under the name of medicine, disfigured, betrayed and dead, and returning scene after scene to pursue her husband Iemon. On stage she bursts from a burning lantern. It is the model for every Japanese ghost that follows. - Text
Hokusō Sadan describes the thunder beast
A printed book of essays sets down accounts of the raijū, the animal that falls with lightning: its size, its claws, where it was caught. The thunder beast is one of the yokai that Edo writers treated as natural history. - Picture
Hokusai's Hyaku Monogatari prints
Hokusai’s series of ghost prints, named for the game of a hundred stories, includes Oiwa’s swollen face peering out of a paper lantern and the skeleton Kohada Koheiji looking over the edge of a mosquito net. The lantern picture fixed Oiwa’s image for good. - Rumour
A broadsheet reports a prophesying calf in Tango
A printed sheet tells of a calf with a human face born on Mount Kurahashi that foretold good harvests, and promises that any house that puts up its picture will prosper and escape misfortune. Other kudan of the century foretell famine, epidemics and war. - Text
Ehon Hyaku Monogatari gives each monster a place
Five volumes of illustrated tales in the form of a hundred-story session, with each creature set in a named province: the isonade in the waters of Matsuura, the futakuchi-onna as the fate of a stepmother who starved a child. - Picture
Kuniyoshi's giant skeleton at the old palace of Sōma
Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s triptych shows a vast skeleton leaning through the torn blinds of a ruined palace, summoned by the princess Takiyasha. The print never uses the name gashadokuro; the name was invented in 1966 and attached to the picture afterwards. - Rumour
The Amabie sheet is printed
A single broadsheet dated to the fourth month of Kōka 3 tells of a long-haired, beaked, three-legged creature that rose nightly from the sea off Higo, foretold six years of good harvests and an epidemic, and asked that its picture be copied and shown to people. Nothing else about it survives. - Picture
An Osaka print shows the umbrella monster as a dancer
A kabuki actor hops on one bound leg as a one-eyed oil-paper umbrella in an actor print made in Osaka. It is the clearest early history of the karakasa-kozō, a yokai known through pictures and stage rather than through any sighting. - Event
Cholera reaches Edo and the hakutaku goes up on walls
In the epidemic of this year the people of Edo buy printed pictures of the hakutaku, the white beast that knows the name of every demon, and put them up at home as protection. The charm prints are the creature’s main presence in Japan.
1868–1926 Meiji and Taishō
Scholars try to explain the yokai away, a foreign writer carries their stories into English, and the first folklorists begin to write down what villages say.
- Event
A stuffed giraffe is shown in Japan and takes the kirin's name
The name that a Chinese court had given to a living giraffe in 1419 comes to Japan with the animal: a giraffe is kirin in Japanese from this year, and the auspicious one-horned beast has to share its name for good. - Scholarship
Inoue Enryō lectures on yōkaigaku
The Buddhist philosopher publishes his lectures on the study of yokai, sorting hauntings, possessions and omens into false mysteries that science can explain and the one true mystery that remains. The public calls him Dr. Yōkai, and the word yōkai spreads across the country with his work. - Text
Lafcadio Hearn's Shadowings
Hearn retells the story of the samebito, the shark-man exiled from the Dragon Palace, met on the Long Bridge of Seta at Lake Biwa and taken in by a kind man; his tears of gratitude turn to rubies. - Text
Kwaidan is published
Hearn’s collection of strange tales, from old books and from his wife’s telling, gives English readers the snow woman who spares a woodcutter, the faceless mujina on the Akasaka road, and the flying heads of the rokurokubi. He dies in Tokyo the same year. - Scholarship
Tōno Monogatari
Yanagita Kunio prints 119 tales from Tōno in Iwate as told to him by Sasaki Kizen: the zashiki-warashi in the old houses, red-faced kappa in the river, women taken into the mountains. A few hundred copies are sold, and Japanese folklore studies begin. - Scholarship
The journal Kyōdo Kenkyū is founded
Yanagita and Takagi Toshio start a journal for reports from the provinces, and the oldest records in this site’s library come from its first two years: the kappa of Kikuchi that fills its dish before leaving the water, and the kappa that pass an inn on Tsushima at night on their way to the sea.
1926–1989 Shōwa
Most of the records behind this site are collected, a manga artist gives the yokai their modern bodies, and a rumour runs through every school in the country.
- Scholarship
Yama no Jinsei: the lore of the mountains
Yanagita’s book on life in the mountains gathers the mountain men and women, the children taken by kamikakushi, and the one-legged ippon-datara of the Kumano hills, which leaves a single footprint in the snow. - Scholarship
Tabi to Densetsu begins publication
The monthly Travel and Legend prints reports from local correspondents for the next sixteen years. The snow woman of Niigata, the iso-onna of the Nagasaki coast, the crying old man konaki-jiji of Tokushima and the mountain echo yamabiko are among the records it carries. - Scholarship
Minkan Denshō is founded; a yokai dictionary is published
Yanagita’s new journal Folk Tradition starts, and in the same year Satō Seimei’s Genkō Zenkoku Yōkai Jiten lists the yokai still spoken of across the country, district by district, with the sunekosuri of Okayama among them. - Scholarship
Yōkai Meii: Yanagita's glossary of yokai names
About eighty names with the district each was reported from, a line or two each, printed in Minkan Denshō. The nurikabe of Onga, the ittan-momen of Kōyama, the nobusuma, the sunekosuri and the azuki-arai enter the record here, and from here they will pass to Mizuki Shigeru.- Nurikabe
- Ittan-momen
- Nobusuma
- Sunekosuri
- Azuki-arai
- Mikoshi-nyūdō
- Yanagita Kunio
- Folklore record
- The night road becomes a wall; sweep the bottom with a stick
- A monster shaped like a bolt of cotton
- The flying-squirrel thing that covers your eyes and mouth
- A bean-washing sound at the water's edge
- Bamboo rustling overhead, and the words that save you
- Scholarship
The dictionary of folk vocabulary is completed
The Sōgō Nihon Minzoku Goi gathers thousands of local words from the journals, and yokai names heard in a single district become entries: the betobeto-san that follows you on a night road, the makura-gaeshi that turns your pillow. Yanagita’s Yōkai Dangi, his collected essays on yokai, appears in 1956 as well.- Betobeto-san
- Kawauso
- Makura-gaeshi
- Yuki-onna
- Ittan-momen
- Nurikabe
- Minzokugaku
- Yanagita Kunio
- The white bolt that dazzles and attacks
- The nurikabe, also called nuribō
- The woman who walks ahead on the riverside road and beckons
- The zashiki-warashi who turns pillows but harms no one
- The hunter's son told not to make a sound
- Media
Mizuki Shigeru's Hakaba Kitarō
The one-eyed yokai boy appears in the rental-manga market. Serialised in a weekly magazine from 1965 as GeGeGe no Kitarō, it will make Mizuki the artist through whom most Japanese people meet the yokai. - Media
The gashadokuro is invented for a girls' magazine
The writer Saitō Morihiro creates the giant skeleton that walks the fields at night, bones clattering, for a magazine feature. Taken into Mizuki’s yokai books in 1968 and matched afterwards to Kuniyoshi’s print, it is the clearest case of a modern yokai that looks ancient. - Media
GeGeGe no Kitarō comes to television
The first animated series gives the country the nurikabe as a grey wall with eyes, the ittan-momen as a flying cloth with a face, the konaki-jiji and the sunekosuri as characters. Yanagita had recorded the names in a line each; Mizuki gives them bodies that everyone now knows. - Rumour
The slit-mouthed woman runs through every prefecture
From Gifu in the winter of 1978–79 the story of the masked woman who asks whether she is pretty spreads through children, then newspapers and television, to Sendai, Kitakata, Kagoshima and Iwate within months. Police take reports; schools send children home in groups. Japan’s first urban legend of the television age.
1989– Heisei and Reiwa
Urban legends, school ghost stories, an online database of the records, and a sea creature from an 1846 broadsheet that came back during a pandemic.
- Rumour
The human-faced dog
A dog with a man’s face is said to run alongside cars on the expressway at a hundred kilometres an hour and turn to look at the driver. The rumour sweeps schools and the media; in Yamagata a first-grader explains that the dog left Tokyo because people would not stop talking about it. - Media
School ghost stories are collected and filmed
A series of books gathers the stories children tell about their own schools, and a run of films follows from 1995. Hanako-san of the toilet, the moving anatomical model and the woman who drags her upper body along the ground become known nationwide, and folklorists begin to record them. - Rumour
Teke-teke-san in a Kobe high school
Students at a high school in Kobe describe a Teke-teke-san who lives in a mirror and chases anyone whose eyes meet hers, in a version printed in a folklore journal. The same year Spirited Away, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi in Japanese, takes the word for spiriting away around the world. - Scholarship
The folklore database goes online
The International Research Center for Japanese Studies opens its Database of Folklore and Yokai Phenomena, a card index of tens of thousands of records from the journals and local histories of the previous century. The records library on this site is built on its cards. - Rite
UNESCO inscribes the visiting deities
Ten rites in which masked figures visit the houses of a village at the turn of the year, the Namahage of Oga among them, are inscribed together on the list of intangible cultural heritage as Raiho-shin, ritual visits of deities in masks and costumes. - Event
Amabie comes back
In the spring of the pandemic, the creature of the 1846 broadsheet that asked for its picture to be copied and shown to people is drawn and shared across Japan by the million, adopted by the health ministry, and becomes the best-known yokai of the year. - Media
Yokai Night Parade begins
The first thirty-second shorts and their reference articles are published in July 2026, starting with the faceless noppera-bō and the kappa. The map, the records library, the glossary and this timeline follow in the autumn.
A text is placed at its compilation or first printing, a picture at its date, a tale at the year it is set only when the entry says so. Period names and dates: Periods of Japanese history