Encountering Japanese Yokai in Beitou

Starting this summer, Beitou Museum and the Koichi Yumoto Memorial Japan Yokai Museum (Miyoshi Mononoke Museum) have joined forces to present the Hyakki Ryōran: YOKAI WORLD special exhibition (part of a series of yokai-related activities in Taipei City’s Beitou District). For this special exhibition, Japanese yokai imagined over the course of centuries are appearing in a Japanese-style wooden building dating to 1921 located in Beitou, a place itself rich in legend, inviting visitors to rediscover cultural memories scattered across the district’s landscape, lore, and everyday life.

Beitou Museum uses the corridors and rooms of its traditional Japanese-style architecture as exhibition spaces, integrating images of yokai into the historic building and turning a walk through it into a journey of discovery.

When Beitou meets the yokai

Why do Beitou and yokai seem such a natural match?

Wang Pin-chuan, deputy director of Beitou Museum and curator of the exhibition, points to Thermal Valley, where steam hangs in the air year-round and which was once known as “Ghost Lake” and “Hell Valley.” Also, the nearby Fudō Myōō Grotto preserves a tale of the Buddhist deity of the same name subduing a green snake and a white snake. And the Beitou community of the Ketagalan Indigenous people told of Sansiyao, a mischievous creature said to slip into homes in the dead of night and pull away sleepers’ blankets and bedding.

Beitou’s distinctive geothermal and hot-spring landscape has long stirred people’s imagination about nature’s unknown forces, giving yokai stories a place to take root. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Indigenous legends, Han folk beliefs, hot-spring culture inherited from the period of Japanese rule, and the volcanic landscape have all made Beitou a place of layered cultures. When discussions with the Japanese side began, Wang proposed a Fbroad approach: “We didn’t want simply to use this historic building as a venue for an exhibition. We wanted to draw on Beitou’s history, culture, and landscape to create a civilizational exchange between Taiwan and Japan.”

Within Beitou Museum’s Japanese-style wooden interior, yokai move through corridors and are set off by light and shadow, adding another layer of intriguing dialogue between these creatures and the historic building.

Wang Pin-chuan says the exhibition does more than use a historic venue: It opens a civilizational dialogue between Taiwan and Japan grounded in Beitou’s history, culture, and landscape.

When yokai enter everyday life

The Hyakki Ryōran: YOKAI WORLD special exhibition presents far more than images of yokai. Featuring everything from illustrated handscrolls, multicolored woodblock prints, and books on yokai to kimono, arms and armor, vessels, toys, and netsuke—small traditional Japanese carvings originally used as fasteners or anchors for practical accessories hung from the waist—the exhibition shows how Japanese yokai gradually moved from the realm of imagination, born of encounters with nature and the unknown, into everyday life.

Plates, sword guards, netsuke, and other objects feature yokai in many guises, leaving traces of yokai culture in everything from everyday utensils to collectible crafts.

Nōsatsu, votive slips once common in Japanese folk practice, also bear a wide range of yokai designs, reflecting the interplay between yokai culture and popular belief.

Spanning several centuries, the 104 exhibits include an Edo-period Night Parade of One Hundred Demons picture scroll. Many of the painting’s yokai have transformed from musical instruments, Buddhist implements, and ordinary household objects, calling to mind the Japanese concept of tsukumogami—tools and objects that acquire spirits and become self-aware beings. Appearing in groups in the dead of night, the creatures form the richly imagined world of the scroll.

Illustrated handscrolls are among the oldest surviving forms of visual documentation of yokai.

Images of warriors heroically vanquishing yokai embodied people’s hope for courage and safety. An Edo-period firefighter’s protective coat is lined with a scene of a warrior defeating a tsuchigumo, or “earth spider,” demon. After a fire had been extinguished, the coat could be turned inside out to display the image, transforming that hope into a symbol of victory.

Wang explains that people have long given visual form to their fear of the unknown through yokai. Once made concrete and familiar, the creatures became less frightening over time and even gradually became more humorous and an accepted part of daily life.

Wang Pin-chuan displays the exhibition brochure, whose design was inspired by cards from an old yokai game.

When these objects appear in Beitou Museum’s tatami-floored rooms and wooden Japanese-style interiors, a cultural encounter takes shape—and a question arises: Why have Japanese yokai come to Beitou? The fact is that yokai offer an intriguing point of entry, a starting point, from which to rediscover Beitou’s own cultural memories dispersed across its landscape, legends, and daily life.

Starting a conversation with yokai

Discussing the demon/monster cultures of Taiwan and Japan, Wang says: “The truly interesting question is not which Taiwanese yokai corresponds to which Japanese yokai. It is how the two societies have used different approaches to negotiate the relationships between people and nature, people and death, and people and the unknown.”

What Taiwan and Japan share is the use of stories to understand a world that cannot be fully explained. The clearest difference, Wang feels, lies “in how yokai have been recorded, visualized, and given material form.”

Japanese began depicting yokai in illustrated handscrolls at an early date, and the “Night Parade of One Hundred Demons” became one of the best-known themes. During the Edo period, artists repeatedly copied and reimagined it. Today, Kodai-ji Zen Temple continues to invite artists to reinterpret the procession. The current Kodai-ji: Night Parade of One Hundred Demons exhibition at Beitou Hot Spring Museum (another of the district’s series of yokai-themed activities) presents contemporary picture scrolls, paintings on sliding doors, and video works, revealing how yokai culture continues to evolve.

In Taiwan, by contrast, yokai tales are scattered across local gazetteers, literati writings, oral traditions, sung narratives, and the myths and legends of different peoples. In modern times, newspapers, fiction, and folklore surveys also became ways of recording these stories.

Today, yokai can also be seen in new ways. Wang says that in January 2027 the Beitou yokai series will extend to Beitou Center New Village with Yokai Forms and the Multitude: Habitats and Transformations of Contemporary Yokai, inviting contemporary Taiwanese artists to reinterpret yokai through the lens of contemporary art.

When yokai leave the museum

On entering Beitou Museum, visitors first see the key visual for Hyakki Ryōran: YOKAI WORLD. The poster features familiar Japanese yokai—the long-necked rokurokubi, the water-dwelling kappa, the nine-tailed fox, the long-nosed tengu, the azuki-bean washer, and the tofu-carrying tōfu kozō—yet each has acquired a distinctly Taiwanese touch.

Created by Taiwanese illustrator Chiaos Tseng, who specializes in the supernatural, the exhibition’s core poster incorporates local (Taiwanese) details; the organizers also invite visitors to search for yokai on Beitou’s street corners.

Wang explains that the museum invited Taiwanese illustrator Chiaos Tseng, who specializes in the supernatural, to create the poster as a starting point for this exchange between Taiwan and Japan. In it, the tōfu kozō demon wears a blue-green happi coat representing Beitou’s green sulfur hot springs, while the tofu it carries has become a serving of Taiwan’s own famous stinky tofu. Meanwhile, the umbrella yokai rides a kick scooter and wears blue-and-white flip-flops, adapting with ease to life on Taiwan’s streets.

To complement the exhibition, Beitou Museum has introduced yokai-themed dishes that carry the experience from gallery to table.

The yokai have also stepped out of their display cases and onto the table. For the exhibition, Beitou Museum created a limited-time yokai-themed menu inspired by the forms and legends of the nine-tailed fox, the long-necked rokurokubi, the shape-shifting tea kettle Bunbuku Chagama, and other creatures. Beyond seeing the exhibition, visitors can continue the yokai experience through cuisine and wagashi sweets.

This exchange between Taiwan and Japan extends beyond the exhibition space. The museum’s Beitou Yokai Stroll Passport stamp-collecting program leads visitors through the district in search of ten yokai. The tengu has settled at Radium Kagaya International Hotel, echoing the nearby historic site of the Tengu-an inn; the sound-associated azuki-bean washer appears at Xinbeitou Historic Station, which frequently hosts musical events; and the water-loving kappa has moved into Beitou Plum Garden. No longer confined to display cases, the yokai have become clues guiding travelers through Beitou.

“Cultural exchange is not simply about Taiwan learning about Japan,” Wang says. “It is about seeing our own culture anew through someone else’s.”

Following Japanese yokai into the streets of Beitou, Taiwan’s own daily life, memories, and local culture subtly become part of the search.