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Michael Dylan Foster is a professor of Folklore and the current Chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at the University of California, Davis. His work has focused on Japanese literature and culture. He has published several short stories, articles, and novels.
Foster joined the University of California Davis in 2016. [1] Foster previously worked in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, and in the Department of Comparative Literature & Foreign Languages at the University of California Riverside. [2]
Much of his work on Japanese folklore has centered on tales of the supernatural, which was the subject of his first book, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai. [3] The book received the Chicago Folklore Prize in 2009. [4] [5]
Foster studied for a bachelor's degree in English at Wesleyan University, and graduated with Honors. He studied for a master's degree in Japanese Literature and Folklore at University of California, Berkeley. [6] He completed an intensive language study in Yokohama, Japan and studied History and Folklore at Kanagawa University. [4] He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University, in the department of Asian Languages: Japanese. [6]
{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)Michael Foster's interests include Japanese folklore, [9] history, festival, literature, supernatural, and popular culture. [10]
He has been is working on a book entitled Visiting Strangers: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Gods, which will look at tourism, festivals, and ethnographers in Japan. [11] [12]
Yōkai are a class of supernatural entities and spirits in Japanese folklore. The kanji representation of the word yōkai comprises two characters that both mean "suspicious, doubtful", and while the Japanese name is simply the Japanese transliteration or pronunciation of the Chinese term yaoguai, some Japanese commentators argue that the word yōkai has taken on multiple different meanings particular to a Japanese context, including referring to a large number of uniquely Japanese creatures.
A kappa—also known as kawatarō, komahiki, with a boss called kawatora or suiko—is a reptiloid kami with similarities to yōkai found in traditional Japanese folklore. Kappa can become harmful when they are not respected as gods. They are typically depicted as green, human-like beings with webbed hands and feet and turtle-like carapaces on their backs. A depression on its head, called its "dish" (sara), retains water, and if this is damaged or its liquid is lost, the kappa is severely weakened.
Yūrei are figures in Japanese folklore analogous to the Western concept of ghosts. The name consists of two kanji, 幽 (yū), meaning "faint" or "dim" and 霊 (rei), meaning "soul" or "spirit". Alternative names include Bōrei (亡霊), meaning ruined or departed spirit, Shiryō (死霊), meaning dead spirit, or the more encompassing Yōkai (妖怪) or Obake (お化け). Like their Chinese, Korean, and Western counterparts, they are thought to be spirits barred from a peaceful afterlife.
Inoue Enryō was a Japanese philosopher, Shin Buddhist priest and reformer, educator, and royalist. A key figure in the reception of Western philosophy, the emergence of modern Buddhism, and the permeation of the imperial ideology during the second half of the Meiji Era. He is the founder of Toyo University and the creator of Tetsugaku-dō Park 哲学堂公園 in Tokyo. Because he studied all kinds of mysterious phenomena and apparitions in order to debunk superstitions, he is sometimes called "Professor Specter" and the "Spook Doctor".
In Japanese folklore, tsukumogami are tools that have acquired a kami or spirit. According to an annotated version of The Tales of Ise titled Ise Monogatari Shō, there is a theory originally from the Onmyōki (陰陽記) that foxes and tanuki, among other beings, that have lived for at least a hundred years and changed forms are considered tsukumogami. In modern times, the term can also be written 九十九神, to emphasize the agedness.
The Great Yokai War is a 2005 Japanese fantasy film directed by Takashi Miike, produced by Kadokawa Pictures and distributed by Shochiku. The film stars Ryunosuke Kamiki, Hiroyuki Miyasako, Chiaki Kuriyama, and Mai Takahashi.
Kuchisake-onna is a malevolent figure in Japanese urban legends and folklore. Described as the malicious spirit, or onryō, of a woman, she partially covers her face with a mask or other item and carries a pair of scissors, a knife, or some other sharp object. She is most often described as a tall woman of about 175-180cm, however, some people believe she is up to 8 feet tall, having long, straight black hair, white hands, pale skin, and otherwise being considered beautiful . She has been described as a contemporary yōkai.
The nurikabe is a yōkai, or spirit, from Japanese folklore. Its name translates to "plaster wall", and it is said to manifest as an invisible wall that impedes or misdirects travelers walking at night. Sometimes referred to in English as "The Wall" or "Mr. Wall", this yōkai is described as quite tall, to prevent people from climbing over it, and wide enough to dampen any attempts to go around it. Japanese scholar and folklorist Kunio Yanagita recorded perhaps the most prominent early example of nurikabe and other yōkai in his books. Manga artist Shigeru Mizuki claims to have encountered a nurikabe in New Guinea, inspiring a nurikabe character in his manga Gegege no Kitarō.
Ubume are Japanese yōkai of pregnant women. They can also be written as 憂婦女鳥. Throughout folk stories and literature the identity and appearance of ubume varies. However, she is most commonly depicted as the spirit of a woman who has died during childbirth. Passersby will see her as a normal-looking woman carrying a baby. She will typically try to give the passerby her child then disappear. When the person goes to look at the child in their arms, they discover it is only a bundle of leaves or large rock. The idea that pregnant women who die and get buried become "ubume" has existed since ancient times; which is why it has been said that when a pregnant woman dies prepartum, one ought to cut the fetus out the abdomen and put it on the mother in a hug as they are buried. In some regions, if the fetus cannot be cut out, a doll would be put beside her.
Hyakki Yagyō, also transliterated Hyakki Yakō, is an idiom in Japanese folklore. Sometimes an orderly procession, other times a riot, it refers to a parade of thousands of supernatural creatures known as oni and yōkai that march through the streets of Japan at night. As a terrifying eruption of the supernatural into the real world, it is similar to the concept of pandemonium in English.
Gazu Hyakki Yagyō is the first book of Japanese artist Toriyama Sekien's famous Gazu Hyakki Yagyō e-hon tetralogy, published in 1776. A version of the tetralogy translated and annotated in English was published in 2016. Although the title translates to "The Illustrated Night Parade of a Hundred Demons", it is based on an idiom, hyakki yagyō, that is akin to pandemonium in English and implies an uncountable horde. The book is followed by Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, Konjaku Hyakki Shūi, and Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro.
The term yamabito (山人) or sanjin, as understood in Japanese folklore, has come to be applied to a group, some scholars claim, of ancient, marginalized people, dating back to some unknown date during the Jōmon period of the history of Japan.
Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare is a 1968 Japanese fantasy horror film directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda. It is the second in a trilogy of films produced in the late 1960s, all of which focus around traditional Japanese monsters known as yōkai.
Kokkuri or Kokkuri-san (こっくりさん) is a Japanese game popular during the Meiji era that is also a form of divination, partially based on Western table-turning. The name kokkuri is an onomatopoeia meaning "to nod up and down", and refers to the movement of the actual kokkuri mechanism. The kanji used to write the word is an ateji, although its characters reflect the popular belief that the movement of the mechanism is caused by supernatural agents. The modern version is similar to a Ouija board.
Hyōsube (ひょうすべ) is a Japanese yōkai. There are legends about them in many areas such as Saga Prefecture and Miyazaki Prefecture.
Hanako-san, or Toire no Hanako-san, is a Japanese urban legend about the spirit of a young girl named Hanako who haunts school toilets. Like many urban legends, the details of the origins of the legend vary depending on the account; different versions of the story include that Hanako-san is the ghost of a World War II–era girl who was killed while playing hide-and-seek during an air raid, that she was murdered by a parent or stranger, or that she committed suicide in a school toilet due to bullying.
Josei Jishin is a Japanese weekly women's magazine, which has been in circulation since 1958. Published by Kobunsha, it is the first weekly women's magazine in Japan, which targets single-working women.
Bakemono no e, also known by its alternate title Bakemonozukushie, is a Japanese handscroll of the Edo period depicting 35 bakemono from Japanese folklore. The figures are hand-painted on paper in vivid pigments with accents in gold pigment. Each bakemono is labeled with its name in hand-brushed ink. There is no other writing on the scroll, no colophon, and no artist's signature or seal.
Death Kappa is a 2010 kaiju film directed by Tomoo Haraguchi. An international co-production of Japan and the United States, it stars Misato Hirata, Mika Sakuraba, and Ryuki Kitaoka. In the film, a series of military experiments result in the appearance of a giant irradiated monster rivaled by a colossal mutant kappa.
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