There is a new exhibit at the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park and it’s perfect for Halloween.
Momoka Nakajima, visitor engagement coordinator with the garden, has some monsters she wants you to meet called yōkai.
"Yōkais are Japanese ancient monsters," Nakajima explained. "People from old time, they embodied their thoughts and fears into any item. So their anxiety or fears turned into yōkais. They believed that each item, anything has a soul in it."
Which is why you will find umbrellas with single large eyes and a tongue in the exhibit space.
"The umbrella is a great manifestation of this idea of the spirit that's within everything," added Ramie Tateishi, arts and humanities professor at National University. "It could be in a stone. It could be in tools. There's a whole subgenre of these tool yōkai. And so the umbrella is one of those, and they manifest themselves with an eye and usually a tongue. And you can see examples of these umbrellas, and also lanterns."
But yōkai can be more than just monsters.
"Yōkai describes any phenomenon that's out of the ordinary or is unusual," Tateishi said. "It could take the form of these monsters, but it could even be just any unexplained natural happening."
So yōkai can be an ordinary household item that comes to life when it’s older than 100 years or it can be spirits, ghosts, shape-shifting monsters and anthropomorphic animals.
Tateishi recalled one that made an impression on him as a kid: "As I'm looking at this wonderful gallery here of the yōkai, the yuki-onna really stands out to me because it’s actually my favorite one. It's a spirit that comes back for revenge or has some reason for sticking around in the material world. There was a television series called 'Kaiki Daisakusen" ("Operation: Mystery!" for its U.S. release), and in the final episode, about the yuki-onna, it turns out that she is real."
The exhibit has the 1968 film known in the U.S. as "The Great Yōkai War" running for visitors to watch.
Like Tateishi, Emiko Scudder, who is the exhibit coordinator for the Japanese Garden, has childhood memories of yōkai in pop culture.
"We grew up with yōkai," Scudder said. "It was more cartoonish, scary stories."
A more traditional rendering of the yōkai can be found in the art of Matthew Meyer, which is featured in the exhibit.
"We have in a partnership with an American artist. His name is Matthew Meyer," said Scudder. "So he is fascinated by the yōkai. He is introducing Japanese yōkai to the world. So we have nicely been in a partnership with him, and he allowed us to use his illustrations."
The Yōkai Pop-Up Exhibit at the Japanese Friendship Garden may be small but it will open your imagination to a wide new realm of supernatural possibilities this Halloween and beyond.
