Hyakki Yakō

The oldest surviving pictures of the Night Parade are the Muromachi-period Hyakki Yagyō scrolls, and what marches in them is not only fanged demons. A biwa, a cooking pot, a paper umbrella, a pair of worn-out straw sandals — household objects that have sprouted eyes and limbs and joined the procession in high spirits. These are said to be tsukumogami: things discarded after long years of service, come back changed.

By the middle of the Edo period, each of these creatures had acquired a face and a name. The artist Toriyama Sekien published Gazu Hyakki Yagyō in An'ei 5 (1776), in three volumes titled Yin, Yang and Wind — beasts and mountain spirits, fires and human-shaped apparitions, and vast things that resist description, each drawn plainly with its name beside it. He followed it with Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779), Konjaku Hyakki Shūi (1781) and Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (1784), the last devoted entirely to tsukumogami. Nearly every yōkai picture since owes something to these books.

The Hyakki Yakō of EDO ONLINE is built on Sekien's catalogue. The three volumes of the first book become three bands of the tower: you begin among the beasts of the Yin volume, pass through the apparitions of Yang, and climb toward the great unnameable things of Wind.

Onmyōdō was the court's science of calendars, astronomy and divination, and its practitioners were the onmyōji. Tales of Abe no Seimei commanding shikigami at will appear again and again in medieval anecdote collections and later fiction — but they are legend, not documented fact. The image stuck all the same: a paper figure that works in a person's place, carried down through Edo-period chapbooks and kabuki alike.

Onmyōdō in the Edo period was not purely a court office. The Tsuchimikado house, held to descend from Seimei, was placed over the country's onmyōji from Tenna 3 (1683) onward, licensing those who made a living from calendars and divination.

The shikigami of EDO ONLINE come in nine lineages, taken from the Twelve Heavenly Generals of Rikujin-shinka divination — Byakko, Tōda, Tenkū, Genbu, Taijō, Seiryū, Suzaku, Taiin, and Rikugō as the lineage for those that belong to no single direction. Their attributes derive from the Senji Ryakketsu.