ScholarWorks@경상국립대학교

초록

It has been said that yōkai (妖怪), which often appear as main characters in movies and animations, is a key concept for understanding Japanese culture. However, it is not well known that in premodern Japanese culture, the word yōkai meant “strange” and “mysterious” as an adjective. To demonstrate the complexity of this word, this article analyzes two disaster-related yōkai in the past and present, which I categorize as Disaster Yōkai (Saigai Yōkai). Namazu (catfish) is a yōkai that stands out through Namazu-e (catfish painting) after the great 1855 Edo earthquake while Amabie has become the symbol of COVID-19 as yōkai in Japan via social networking sites such as Twitter. Previous scholars of Yōkai Study (妖怪学), such as Yanagita Kunio and Komatsu Kazuhiko, focused on collecting and classifying supernatural beings in folklore and defined them as supernatural beings that control mysterious situations but differ from deities. However, this view does not explain the distinctive features of yōkai, especially Disaster Yōkai. Therefore, this article examines the process of becoming yōkai to understand the continuity between yōkai and deities. It concludes that the distinctions between yōkai and deities are too vague to grasp the full meaning of yōkai. The new approach to seeing yōkai, as a transformation of ordinary beings through certain processes using certain media makes a uniquely meaningful contribution towards discussing yōkai in specific disasters and towards understanding the broader complex of issues in the definition of monsters, deities, and supernatural beings in religious studies.

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