Yuji Watanabe's Yōkai: Photographing Japan's Supernatural Creatures

Japanese photographer Yuji Watanabe, who splits his time between Tokyo and Paris, presented a solo exhibition titled Yōkai (妖怪) at 229GALLERY in Tokyo in September 2024. The show explores Japanese folklore's supernatural creatures—spirits, monsters, shape-shifters, and animated objects—through analog photography. Watanabe's images depict human bodies transfigured into ambiguous, grotesque forms that emerge from domestic darkness rather than legendary forests. The exhibition text quotes ethnographer Yanagita Kunio: "the yōkai is the fallen form of a god," suggesting that these beings are degraded remnants of the sacred, now inhabiting everyday anxieties. Watanabe draws visual inspiration from traditional Japanese theater (nō and kabuki), with costumes resembling ritual garments and faces partially hidden, suspending identity. His work distinguishes between yōkai and yūrei (ghosts), referencing the systematic cataloging by Toriyama Sekien in the Edo period and Yanagita's foundational folklore studies in Tōno Monogatari (1910). Watanabe's photographs use expired film, dim urban light, and contemporary models to suggest that the sacred has not disappeared but retreated into poorer, more ambiguous forms close to daily unease. His "monstrous" images unsettle not through Hollywood horror but through proximity: recognizable human bodies slightly misaligned, as if the creature was always hidden beneath ordinary skin.