There’s a Pokémon that drowns children. Another freezes travelers to death. One particular Poké crashes into your room at night and devours your thoughts — but my favorite Pokémon is the one that raises the dead and makes them dance like puppets.
All right, Pokémon don’t actually do that, but their spiritual ancestors the yōkai do, or at least did, in the folktales of old Japan. Over the years, yōkai have served as inspiration for many creatures in the Pokémon universe — albeit toned-down versions — creating a mixture of myth and pop culture that helps keep the stories alive and reinforces the Japanese identity of the series.
Japanese culture has always been interested in ghost stories and kaidan-“weird tales.” This fascination reached its peak in the Edo period with a parlor game called Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, that challenged participants to tell one hundred morbid tales, extinguishing a lantern after each one. The resulting demand for new stories of hauntings and violence created a boom in kaidan literature, woodblock prints, and folktale collections, many of which focused on yōkai, a category of supernatural monsters that could range from shape shifting animals to cursed humans. Yōkai quickly became an influential pop-culture phenomenon, appearing in books, on screens, and in newspapers. At one point, there was even a yōkai-themed card game known as Obake Karuta, which challenged players to snatch monster cards out of a lineup based on auditory clues. The player who collected the most cards won.
See where I’m going here?
While yōkai and Obake Karuta were not the inspiration for Pokémon, the massive cultural influence of kaidan was bound to seep into a game that featured strange monsters with supernatural abilities. Besides, yōkai are still a common sight in manga and anime, though they are often toned down in the same way that Disney blunted the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, and their portrayal in Pokémon fits this model of removing objectionable material.
Take Lombre, for instance. With his green, slimy skin, turtle-like head, mischievous nature, and the lily pad rain-catcher on his head, Lombre has all the hallmarks of the kappa, a river imp. However, unlike Lombre, kappa were said to kill horses, cattle, and fully grown men, though their favorite prey were unwary children playing by the water’s edge. Folktales describe the kappa as an ambush predator, erupting from the water to seize its prey and drag it into the depths. Once the victim stopped struggling, the kappa rammed its clawed, webbed hand into the victim’s anus, tore out his liver, and devoured it in a cloud of bloody water — an attack they seem to have left out of Lombre’s move set in Pokémon Pearl.
Developers apparently had no qualms about basing Lombre on a blood-drinking water demon, probably because the portrayal of the kappa has changed greatly over time. Once used as a boogeyman to keep children away from the water, today kappa are corporate mascots or playful friends, as shown in the anime Summer Days With Coo. Instead of their violent tendencies, modern media focuses on the kappa’s pranks and odd foibles. Kappa love cucumbers, for instance, and are extremely polite; in fact, one way of defeating a kappa is to bow to him, since he will always return the bow, and in doing so, spill the water from his head plate and become powerless. According to legend, if the human refilled the kappa’s head plate, the river demon would be eternally grateful and assist villages with irrigation or medicine.
Other Pokémon with checkered pasts have also benefitted from a PR facelift. Espeon is depicted as a powerful psychic that’s extremely loyal to its trainer, but with its feline shape and split tail, Espeon is clearly based on the nekomata, a sorcerous housecat that walked on its hind legs and was known for poltergeist-style hauntings, starting mysterious fires, and the ability to raise and puppeteer the dead. Sneasel and Weavile are nerfed versions of kamaitachi, sickle-clawed weasels that rode in a whirlwind and carved people up so fast that their injuries only became apparent later. Mawile, the cute little Poké with a pair of steel jaws coming out of the back of her head, took inspiration from the futakuchi-onna, a cursed woman whose skull split in the back to reveal a gluttonous second mouth that would scream when it wasn’t fed. And that’s not all: Electrabuzz derives from the man-eating oni, Shiftry’s long nose and single-tooth geta mark him as a tengu, and various Pokémon fit the description of tsukumogami — household items that have become animate after a century of use. Even Drowzee, with his pot belly and stoner stare, is based on a far more terrifying creature: the Baku, an enormous chimera that, when a frightened dreamer called for aid, would bound into the sleeper’s room and devour their nightmare — or if the dreamer was unlucky, all their dreams, leaving them an empty husk. (Personally, I find Drowzee pretty horrifying on his own, since according to the Pokédex he’s known to sneak into children’s bedrooms and suck the dreams out of their noses.)
On the other hand, there are some Pokémon that avoided this treatment due to their iconic status, or simply because their legends were less graphic. Raikou is essentially similar to his mythical counterpart, Raijū, the thunder beast that accompanies the Shinto thunder god Raijin. Both are beasts made out of electricity that operate on a godlike level, and both seem drawn to thunderstorms. (The folkloric Raijū leaps from tree to tree during storms in a sort of hyperactive fit. In old Japan, burn marks on the bark of trees were attributed to Raijū’s claws.) Ninetails also proved to be a fairly straightforward telling of the kitsune legend, showing the Poké as a hyper-intelligent fox given to ruses and illusions. One episode of the anime even alluded to the more sexualized kitsune-wife tales, when a Ninetails projected the image of a beautiful young woman in order to seduce Brock into becoming its new master — even offering to marry him. Finally, Froslass exhibits all the hallmarks of the ghostly yuki-onna, or “snow woman,” an ethereal beauty who floats through the frosty passes and forests of Japan, freezing travelers with her breath. Froslass too is said to stalk lost humans in snowstorms, and some Pokédex entries specifically state that she is the spirit of a woman who perished in the snow. Even Froslass’s design speaks of the legend, since her hollow body and flared arms resemble the white kimono of the yuki-onna, with a red stripe on her midsection reminiscent of an obi.
Making folklore family friendly will always be a controversial move, but I believe the use of famous yōkai in Pokémon, and other games like it actually serves to preserve these legends and pass them on to a younger generation. See, while kaidan and stories of yōkai still have value for their historic and literary significance (and their sheer weirdness) most of them have ceased having a function in society. Originally, yōkai served a purpose, either through teaching a lesson such as the kappa (stay away from ponds, kiddos), explaining natural phenomena like Raijū, or by giving voice to the fears and anxieties of the era. The first two are obviously obsolete — now that we have real horror stories from CNN, for instance, we no longer teach children about dangers through parable, and we use science to explain natural phenomena — but to understand why yōkai no longer raise societal anxieties we need to consider the era that formed them. In Edo period Japan, street lights were nonexistent and medicine, both Eastern and Western, could be hit and miss. It’s no accident that many kaidan feature travelers that stumble onto horror, since traveling from one place to another meant crossing rough country on foot or horseback, exposing yourself to danger from the elements or roadside bandits. Death could come very quickly, and it was not uncommon for people to disappear. Japan at this time could be a world of horrible fates, and it is natural for humans to provide equally horrible explanations for these events, both to provide closure, as well as to contextualize a world that often seemed random and brutal. In modern Japan, there is no widespread fear of freezing to death or being struck by lightning. Cars and trains encase people in metal fortresses as they travel from place to place, and no one worries about disappearing or being attacked by an unknown animal. These worries have been supplanted by modern folklore, which tends to play off of our fear of other people, such as serial killers. The most popular modern yōkai, for example, is kuchisake-onna, the ghost of a woman who had her mouth slit open by her husband. In the story, the ghost wears a surgical mask and accosts children, asking them if she is beautiful-no matter their answer, she reveals her wound and kills them with a pair of scissors. Some older yōkai have survived in their original form, since their stories play on universal anxieties (kitsune, for instance, plays on the fear that you never really know someone, even if you’re married to them) but largely yōkai are simply no longer scary.
With the element of horror gone, yōkai have found a new role: they serve as reminders of the past, a totem of Japanese culture that links modern Japan with its roots and helps mold children’s understanding of Japanese identity. You’ll find yōkai in picture books and anime targeted at youth, and yes, you’ll find them in games like Pokémon and its competitors, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. These monsters, though sanitized, are still a subject of fascination for the young and add to the richness of products that, though set in imaginary worlds, are still identifiably Japanese in character. In fact, I feel safe saying that without the yōkai legacy introducing a pantheon of weird and powerful beings, Pokémon might not exist in the form we know it today.
Therefore, when you hear that the Lombre loves to leap from the water and scare fishermen, or that Drowzee is a dream-stealer, or that Froslass ices down travelers and makes tableaus from their corpses, allow yourself a shiver. That was, after all, their original purpose, and underneath that plump exterior lurks something far older, and far stranger, than you can ever imagine.
Robert Rath is a freelance writer, novelist, and researcher based in Austin, Texas. You can follow his exploits at RobWritesPulp.com or on Twitter at @RobWritesPulp. Have questions about this topic? Tweet them to: @Crit_Int.
The author would like to thank Zack Davisson for his assistance with various questions relating to yōkai. (http://hyakumonogatari.com/)
