Karakasa-obake, the Yokai That Grew Up in Pictures

Karakasa-obake may be the best-known "haunted object" yokai in Japan. And yet, compared with other famous yokai, there are said to be surprisingly few local legends about someone in some village actually meeting one. This yokai seems to have grown up not in the mountains or by the rivers, but inside pictures and toys.

Famous, but rarely met

The kappa has its rivers, the tengu its mountains. Most yokai come with a place where they appear and with stories from the people who lived there. With karakasa-obake, though, everyone can picture it, yet local tales of encounters are said to be hard to find.

Instead, karakasa-obake has been drawn, again and again. A folded umbrella, one eye, a long tongue, and a single leg. Rather than coming from someone's eyewitness story, this familiar look is thought to have taken shape little by little, as artists kept drawing it.

An umbrella's build becomes a face and body

You can see where the look comes from once you know how a wagasa, a traditional Japanese umbrella, is made. Thin strips of split bamboo form the ribs, paper is stretched over them, and the paper is coated with oil so it sheds the rain. Folded up, it becomes a long, slim cone, with a single handle running through the middle. Open, it spreads wide; closed, it slims right down. That ability to change shape may be one more reason it seemed almost alive.

Karakasa-obake is simply that shape imagined as a living thing. The folded canopy serves as both head and body, and the straight handle becomes its one leg. When the paper tore after years of use, perhaps the holes started to look like an eye or a mouth. Even its single eye feels a little like a hole that has opened up in the paper.

Bangasa, sturdy everyday umbrellas, and janome-gasa, umbrellas with a bull's-eye ring pattern, were all part of daily life. Because everyone handled that shape so often, an umbrella yokai could be recognized at a glance, and that made it a very strong character.

A star of toy prints and card games

From the later Edo period into the Meiji era, children are said to have played with omocha-e, "toy prints" crowded with rows of monsters, as well as yokai-themed karuta card games and sugoroku board games. In games like these, karakasa-obake was a regular face.

Not too scary, fun to look at, and instantly recognizable: it was a perfect yokai for children's pictures. Even today, in haunted houses and picture books, it shows up as a classic alongside another haunted object, Chochin-obake, the paper lantern yokai.

One-legged friends, and caring for our tools

Karakasa-obake isn't the only one-legged yokai. Ippon-datara, said to live in the mountains, is also told of as having just one leg. A mountain spirit and a haunted umbrella come from completely different worlds, but to people long ago, a creature hopping about on one leg may simply have felt like something not of this world.

The idea that tools used for a long time can gain a spirit has been told in many parts of Japan. A wagasa is the kind of tool you can mend and re-paper even after its ribs snap or its paper tears. If you ever spot an old umbrella asleep in a corner of a storeroom, maybe say a quiet hello. On Karakasa-obake's Yokaipedia page, you can see it hopping in pixel art.