Invitation to different worlds – Specters, the spiritual world and foreign countries

Specters attempting to scare, or attack people are often depicted in ukiyo-e. Their appearances can be tremendously horrifying at times and humorous at others. There are also ukiyo-e of people confronting these odd-looking creatures without fear and defeating them. In this section, we will introduce the various monsters that come from different worlds.

Stories of people coming back to this world as ghosts after being killed by villains were often performed in kabuki plays and made into ukiyo-e portraits of the kabuki actors. There are also peculiar works which depict the judge of the afterlife and demons being defeated by a dead person raging in hell. Here, we will introduce ghosts and the world after death depicted in ukiyo-e, as well as the memorial portraits to commemorate the people who had died, called “shini-e.”

For people in the Edo period who had never been abroad or rarely had direct interactions with foreigners, foreign countries were beyond their imagination. The sceneries of these foreign countries were depicted in ukiyo-e, referring to limited documents, pictorial information, and sometimes fanciful imaginations. In this section, we will introduce works picturing Okinawa and Hokkaidō which were not part of Japan at the time, landscapes of China and Europe far across the ocean, and the foreign technologies such as steamships, trains and hot air balloons introduced to Japan at the end of the Edo period through the Meiji period.