Japanese folklore

Men dressed as namahage, wearing ogre-like masks and traditional straw capes (mino) make rounds of homes,[1] in an annual ritual of the Oga Peninsula area of the Northeast region.

Japanese popular cults or kō (講)[5] are sometimes devoted to particular deities and buddhas, e.g. the angry Fudō Myōō or the healer Yakushi Nyorai.

A stock routine in period or even contemporary drama involves a master of the house telling his wife to scatter salt after an undesirable visitor has just left.

The word kimon [ja], "ogre's gate", colloquially refers to anything that a person may have constant ill luck with, but in the original sense designates the northeasterly direction, considered to be unlucky or dangerously inviting of ill-intended spirits[9] (cf.

Closely connected is the Yin-yang path or Onmyōdō, and its concepts such as katatagae ["direction changing"] also known as kataimi,[11] which was widely practiced by nobles in the Heian period.

These tales had been told in their local dialects, which may be difficult to understand to outsiders, both because of intonation and pronunciation differences, conjugations, and vocabulary.

Classic folktales such as Momotarō, which most Japanese today are familiarized through pictured children's storybooks, manga, or other popularizations, can be traced to picture-books printed in the Edo period, though their prototypical stories may go back much further.

The versions retold by children's story author Sazanami Iwaya [ja] (1870–1933; often considered the Perrault of Japan)[15] had a strong hand in establishing the forms usually known today.

An unusual pairing occurs in the story of the Hamaguri nyōbo [ja] (蛤女房, "clam wife"), which exist in both a politer written version (otogi-zōshi) and in a more rustic and vulgar oral tale.

But one must realize that many beings or stories about them were spun and deliberately invented by professional writers during the Edo Period and earlier, and they are not folkloric in the strict sense.