Modern Anxiety and Medieval Fears: Japanese History through Yokai

To truly understand a society, study what it fears. This was the premise behind the sequence of courses I developed called Medieval Monsters: A Japanese History and Japan’s Modern Myths and Monsters in 2020-2021. Japanese Studies hosts an impressive catalog of academic scholarship on the phenomenon of “the weird” in fields as diverse as literature, history, anthropology, sociology, and religious studies. I had long wanted to teach a course on Japanese monsters, or yōkai, but the fears triggered by the global covid lockdown made the creation of such classes seem imperative despite the challenge of doing so in a hybrid teaching environment. Tapping into extant materials in translation, the courses became immersive experiences where students sought to understand how historical context drove actors while reading contemporaneous stories of the uncanny—even as students struggled through their presentist, culturally-specific visceral reactions to those same narratives during a heightened state of anxiety due to covid. Students with little-to-no background in Asian history developed advanced facilities in the vernacular ideologies of fear in Daoism, Shintoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. We historicized tales of fallible gods, cannibalistic demons, vengeful ghosts, catfish that caused earthquakes, famine-victims’ skeletons who stalk wealthy landowners, inanimate objects that seek revenge on humans by becoming sentient, and the afterlives of these stories in contemporary popular culture. In an era where faculty must always be mindful of the attack on the humanities, these classes opened a door for students to appreciate the critical thinking and analytical skills that university-level history classes have to offer. While we may have been learning about phantasms, teacher and students alike developed the twenty-first century skills required to wade through unfamiliar mythologies and evaluate the very real impact that fear has on history.