What are Yokai?
The yokai are the things that go bump in Japan's night. Written with the Japanese characters for "otherworldly" and "weird," yokai has typically been translated in a great many ways, from "demon" to "ghost" to "goblin" to "spectre," all of which are about as imprecise and un-evocative as translating "samurai" as "Japanese warrior" or "sushi" as "raw fish on rice." Yokai are yokai.
Some are said to live alongside and quietly co-exist with humans. Others are blamed for causing various inexplicable natural phenomena, pestilences, or disasters. A few could be called physical incarnations of idioms or puns. Some are helpful. Many are mischievous. And more than a few are thought to be very, very dangerous. They are Japan's bogeymen, always watching but rarely seen, stand-ins for largely unpredictable forces of nature. And once the lights went out, they are always there.
Albert Einstein once said, "the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Japan's yokai inhabit this very intersection. They dwell in the space between fear and wonder, superstition and the rational, the natural and the supernatural.
