Yokai: The Real Places Behind Japan's Monster Folklore

Yokai — the broad category of monsters, spirits, and supernatural oddities in Japanese folklore — are enjoying a very online second life through anime, but the folklore itself is centuries old and tied to real, visitable places, not just fiction.

Sakaiminato: the town that became a yokai theme park

The clearest example is Mizuki Shigeru Road, an 800-metre shopping street in Sakaiminato, a port town on the Tottori coast. It's lined with 177 bronze statues of yokai, almost all drawn from the work of Shigeru Mizuki, the manga artist born in the town who is most responsible for yokai's modern pop-culture image through his series GeGeGe no Kitaro.

The street wasn't always like this. It opened in 1993 with just 23 statues as part of a "greenery and culture" town-revitalisation project — a fairly modest attempt to give a declining port town something to draw visitors. It worked well enough that statues kept being added for decades, turning what was originally an ordinary shopping street into one of Tottori's biggest tourist draws.

One of 177 bronze yokai statues lining Mizuki Shigeru Road — expanded from an original 23 installed in 1993.

Yokai were never purely fictional

Before they were manga characters, yokai functioned as a kind of folk explanation for the unexplained — strange noises in old houses, drownings blamed on kappa (river spirits), disappearances blamed on tengu (mountain goblins). Specific yokai are still tied to specific real places in local folklore: certain bridges, wells, and forests across Japan carry yokai stories the way parts of the US carry ghost-story lore, and some of these sites still have small shrines or markers referencing the legend.

Why this is having a moment

Anime and manga have pulled yokai back into global pop culture — GeGeGe no Kitaro adaptations, Yokai Watch, and countless yokai cameos in other series — and that's translating into real travel interest in the folklore's actual anchors, not just Tokyo's anime shops. It sits in the same bucket as anime pilgrimage travel more broadly: fans increasingly want to see the places behind the fiction, and yokai folklore happens to have an unusually concrete, mappable version of that.

Visiting Sakaiminato

It's accessible from Yonago Kitaro Airport — yes, that's the airport's actual branding — or by train via the JR Sakai Line, whose trains are themselves decorated with yokai characters. The Mizuki Shigeru Memorial Museum sits at the end of the road and is worth visiting alongside the statues.