The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons: Tsukumogami, Medieval Picture Scrolls and Edo’s Yokai Culture
From Invisible Terror to Visible Wonders: Darkness and the Origins of the Night Parade
When night falls and silence wraps the town, strange beings beyond human understanding appear. In ancient and medieval Japan, the darkness of night was both a sacred realm and a demonic one that humans should not enter, a terrifying territory where invisible spirits and monsters ran wild. The most vivid visual expression of that fear and mystery is the Hyakki Yagyo Emaki, the picture scroll of the "Night Parade of One Hundred Demons," a remarkable work in the history of Japanese painting.
In the Muromachi-period scroll preserved at Shinju-an, a sub-temple of Daitokuji in Kyoto and designated an Important Cultural Property, countless strange yokai march through the capital at night carrying torches, drawing viewers into a fantastical world where the eerie and the comic blend together. Why did the Japanese not simply fear and avoid yokai, but carefully paint them in scrolls and even come to feel affection for them?
Tracing that journey reveals changes in medieval thought and a distinctive Japanese spiritual culture toward "things."
The idea of yokai goes back to the wild gods described in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki and to beliefs about mononoke, malevolent spirits. For ancient people, inexplicable epidemics, natural disasters and senseless calamities were all believed to be the work of angry gods or the vengeful spirits of those who had died unjustly. They were feared as invisible presences and spiritual forces with no fixed shape.
In Heian aristocratic society, too, strange phenomena remained ominous signs to be avoided. The Konjaku Monogatarishu tells a tense story of a young nobleman who went out at night, encountered the night parade of demons, and barely survived thanks to the power of a sacred Buddhist incantation sewn into his clothing. In this era, the night parade was an absolute symbol of death and ruin; to meet it could mean losing your life on the spot.
The Impact of Tsukumogami: How Muromachi Scrolls Brought Humor and Form
These invisible, overwhelming terrors gained concrete, visible bodies and were dramatically transformed into somewhat comical and endearing figures in the Tsukumogami Emaki and the Hyakki Yagyo Emaki, both created in the Muromachi period.
The idea of tsukumogami played a decisive role in this change in medieval thinking about yokai. Japan had long held an animistic belief that gods and spirits dwell in mountains, rivers, plants and natural objects. In the medieval period, this belief expanded to man-made things, creating a unique idea that tools and utensils made by humans would gain a spirit after a hundred years and begin to transform and trick people.
In the Tsukumogami Emaki, old tools such as brooms, pots, biwa lutes, koto, prayer beads, umbrellas and sutra scrolls, thrown out onto a roadside rubbish heap during the year-end cleaning, are furious: "We served humans faithfully for so many years, and they throw us away without a second thought. What ingratitude!" They turn into yokai and vow revenge on humanity.
Look closely at the yokai in the Shinju-an scroll and you will notice that many of the stars are these object spirits. A biwa and koto walk on bird-like legs, a temple gong stretches out arms and legs to march, and an old pot with a red apron bounces happily along. They are sinister, yet at the same time strangely human and humorous. By painting these feared beings and fixing them in visible form, medieval people unconsciously tamed the fear of darkness and gained the wisdom to accept the uncanny with laughter and wit.
Toriyama Sekien's Yokai Encyclopedias and Edo Townspeople's Culture: From Fear to Entertainment
The yokai, which in the medieval period carried meanings of religious warning and the calming of spirits, went through a decisive transformation in the Edo period. In Edo, where long peace continued and woodblock publishing flourished, yokai fully shed their role as objects of fear and became stars of entertainment.
The key figure was the ukiyo-e artist Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788), active in the late eighteenth century. Beginning with Gazu Hyakki Yagyo in 1776, Sekien published a four-part series of illustrated yokai encyclopedias. He gathered a wide variety of yokai from folk legends, classical literature and tale collections across Japan, classified and organized them in book form, and drew them in a detailed style.
Many of the standard images of yokai we know today, such as the kappa, rokurokubi (long-necked woman), yuki-onna (snow woman), tengu and nurikabe, were systematized by Sekien's brush.
Sekien did not merely record legends. Drawing on his rich learning and intellectual humor, he also invented many new yokai. In Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, full of yokai born from old tools, he playfully parodied phrases from Yoshida Kenko's Essays in Idleness and created new tsukumogami. The townspeople of Edo eagerly bought these yokai picture books and enjoyed them as material for card games, illustrated storybooks and rakugo comic storytelling.
From the Energy of Late Edo to Today: A Cultural Legacy of Coexistence and Storytelling
From the end of the Edo period into the Meiji era, yokai culture was lifted to new artistic heights by brilliant artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Kawanabe Kyosai. Kuniyoshi's giant skeleton in The Old Palace at Soma and his battles of sorcerers thrilled the public with dynamic compositions and overwhelming power.
From the Meiji era onward, as modernization advanced and Western rationalism rose, yokai were for a time in danger of being driven out of education and public discussion as premodern superstition. Yet thanks to the folklorist Yanagita Kunio's re-evaluation in The Legends of Tono, Inoue Enryo's studies of yokai, and Mizuki Shigeru's manga GeGeGe no Kitaro in the Showa and Heisei eras, Japanese yokai came back to life as a national cultural treasure.
Yokai culture has also left deep traces in the Japanese language. Everyday expressions such as itachi-gokko, "a weasel's game" (an endless back-and-forth), kappa no kawanagare, "even a kappa can be swept away by the river" (even experts make mistakes) and tengu ni naru, "to become a tengu" (to become conceited), along with describing a baffling experience as "feeling bewitched by a fox," show how Japanese people have put invisible feelings and chance events into words by imagining them as the work of yokai.
The yokai of the night parade scrolls are not just painting motifs; they continue to function as important linguistic and cultural tools shaping the depths of Japanese sensibility and imagination.
The teaching of tsukumogami, that objects used with care over many years gain a soul, and the imagination of the night parade, which gave names and forms to unexplained natural phenomena in order to live alongside them: yokai are the crystallization of a rich Japanese spiritual culture that faced the unknown and the presence of darkness not with rejection and destruction but with familiarity and storytelling.
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References
- Komatsu Kazuhiko, Yokai Bunkaron no Tenkai, Iwanami Shoten, 2010
- Komatsu Kazuhiko, Hyakki Yagyo no Ezugaku, Seikyusha, 2008
- Toriyama Sekien, Toriyama Sekien Gazu Hyakki Yagyo Zengashu, Kadokawa Sophia Bunko, 2005
- Yanagita Kunio, Tono Monogatari (Iwanami Bunko)
- Tanaka Takako, Hyakki Yagyo no Mieru Toshi, Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 2002
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