Why Is the Gashadokuro a "New" Yokai?

The most interesting thing about the gashadokuro is that for such a famous yokai, it barely shows up in old records. The towering skeleton is a familiar sight today, but if you search through Edo-period yokai paintings and old folktales, you will have a hard time finding a creature called "gashadokuro." It is generally said to be a fairly recent addition, one that spread during the Showa era (1926-1989).

So where did its look and its name come from? Follow the trail and you find two streams from very different times: an Edo-period woodblock print, and the yokai encyclopedias of the twentieth century.

Missing from the Old Yokai Paintings

The Edo period (1603-1868) was a golden age for yokai pictures. Toriyama Sekien's "Gazu Hyakki Yagyo" series in particular shaped how later generations imagined yokai (see "Toriyama Sekien and the Gazu Hyakki Yagyo").

Yet the gashadokuro is said to be absent from these Edo yokai collections. Skeletons and bone spirits had been drawn for a long time, but the specific idea of "a giant skeleton made from the bones of people who died in war or famine," paired with this particular name, seems to have come much later.

In other words, the gashadokuro did not grow out of a folktale rooted in a particular village. It is thought to be a yokai that became known through books and pictures.

Its Roots: Kuniyoshi's Giant Skeleton

The image most often named as the source of the gashadokuro's look is "Soma no Furudairi" (The Ruined Palace at Soma) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, a woodblock print artist of the late Edo period. Spread across three joined sheets, it shows an enormous skeleton tearing through the blinds of a ruined palace and leaning out toward the viewer.

The print is based on the tale of Takiyasha-hime, said to be the daughter of the rebel warrior Taira no Masakado, who uses sorcery to carry on her father's cause. In the story, her magic summons a crowd of skeletons, but Kuniyoshi is said to have combined them into a single gigantic one.

Every bone looks carefully studied, and the skeleton seems almost too big for the frame. That sheer impact later became the model for the idea of a "giant skeleton yokai." Still, Kuniyoshi's skeleton was simply a product of sorcery within the story. It was never called a gashadokuro.

How the Showa Encyclopedias Named It

The name "gashadokuro," along with descriptions like "formed from the bones of the unburied dead" and "wanders at midnight with a rattling 'gasha, gasha' sound," is said to have spread from around the middle of the Showa era through children's magazines and yokai encyclopedias.

These books typically gave each yokai a name, a short description and a dramatic illustration. Kuniyoshi's giant skeleton was layered onto this new entry, and the gashadokuro quickly became a yokai everyone felt they had seen before. Children who met it in encyclopedias grew up and passed it on to the next generation, and through that cycle the newcomer came to look like an old-timer.

New, but Still a Yokai

You might wonder: if it was born in the twentieth century, is it a "fake" yokai? But yokai have always changed shape as people told stories about them, drew them and copied each other.

Edo-period artists also invented new yokai from wordplay, and storybooks turned figures like the tofu-kozo into popular characters. Many of the creatures in Sekien's books are said to have spread largely through the pictures themselves. Seen this way, the gashadokuro shows that the same creative tradition carried on into the Showa era.

The regrets of people who died in war or famine and were never mourned, gathering into one shape: even in a newly told yokai, that idea carries the long-held feelings people had toward the dead. If you are curious about where the lines fall between yokai, ghosts and gods, try "Yokai, Yurei and Kami: What Is the Difference?"