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Edo-Tokyo Museum, Tokyo and Abeno Harukas Art Museum, Osaka
Yokai in the title of this exhibition is one of those Japanese terms that cannot be directly translated into English or any other foreign language. In the most general sense, and that sense on which this exhibition is based, it indicates a supernatural being or phenomenon beyond our daily life and common understanding, including a ghost, goblin, monster, phantom, demon, apparition, specter, and so on. It also represents an important aspect of Japanese culture from ancient times to today; therefore, "yokai studies" is a popular established academic field in various disciplines including folklore (Yanagida Kunio), literature (Koizumi Yakumo), and psychology (Inoue Enryo) in Japanese academia. This is why the exhibition organizer used this unknown Japanese word as it is rather than adopting a simple misleading translation.
This "art historical" exhibition claims to interpret the visualization of yokai as expressing our awe of another world and illustrates this through a variety of visual images made in the past 4,000 years between 2000 BCE and 2013 CE. The exhibition is full of visual treats-thirteenthcentury paintings of Buddhist hell, Tosa Mitsunobu's painting scroll of a hundred yokai marching by night, Katsushika Hokusai's colored woodblock prints of Hundred Tales, and Maruyama Okyo's female ghost in white kimono with black long hair. Moreover, its message is disclosed...