All new regimes know their enemies. Having swept away the forces of the shogunate, the architects of the 1868 Meiji Restoration found themselves facing another foe. This fifth column was invisible: Its ranks were made up of yokai (ghosts) and bakemono (monsters), kappa (water sprites) and tengu (goblins).

The Meiji program of "civilization and enlightenment" would have no truck with these creatures, which were especially active in rural Japan. "There is no such thing as tengu" was the Education Ministry's official line on Japan's most-celebrated homegrown monster that was to be formally condemned in textbooks from 1903. Nor did the new Imperial highways accommodate hashi-hime, the "bridge princesses" who guarded river crossings in folk tales from the Middle Ages onward. One unconventional author, Kyoka Izumi, penned a 1897 short story titled "Kecho (Chimera)" in which a modern-day hashi-hime ekes out a living collecting bridge tolls -- but his ghost stories earned him the ridicule of the Meiji literary establishment for "bringing monsters into Tokyo."

Folk explanations for the events of rural life were discouraged and rational theories offered in their stead.