A blizzard is the breath of yōkai

Winter in Japan doesn’t begin with a postcard. It begins with disappearance. First the horizon disappears, then color disappears, and finally the certainty disappears that the world is still the same as it was yesterday. In the north, in Tōhoku and on Hokkaidō, snow can cover roads beyond recognition; on the Sea of Japan side — in the “snow country” stretching down from Niigata — moist winds bring snowfall so heavy that clearing a car isn’t, as it is for us, a quick brush over the roof, but a real excavation of the entire vehicle from under a two-meter layer of wet, heavy white. There are places where winter feels like a separate realm: buried mountain passes, forests where a step sounds like a verdict, and whiteness meshes with silence so completely that, as we walk, we’re afraid to think anything too loudly. In Japan, snow is not a cute decoration — it is a mighty element, like fire, or an earthquake.

And it is precisely there that winter yōkai are born: not as “colorful, cute little creatures” that pop culture has somewhat accustomed us to, but as an authentic Japanese way of thinking about what is hard to say directly. Yōkai are like sketches and caricatures of fears the human being carries in the body: fear of losing the path, fear of the world’s indifference, fear of one’s own exhaustion that whispers the worst shortcuts. It is no accident that winter spirits are so sharp and so quiet at once — in winter, whiteness removes details, soothing us, while at the same time frost sharpens instincts, awakening unease. When the landscape is uniform, every shadow becomes a sign; when the body is freezing, the mind serves up threats more quickly — and the intentions it imagines behind them.

Today’s text will be a journey through such encounters — a cold one, through Niigata, through white Tottori, through the solitary forests of Gifu, all the way to Zao with its entire procession of “snow monsters.” Each stop is not only a story, but a question: what does Japan project onto snow and frost — punishment, loneliness, compassion, relief? Or perhaps something harder: the truth that sometimes cold arrives from outside, and sometimes it begins inside a person long before the first snow falls.

Japanese Winter

Japanese winter has something in it that immediately shifts the imagination into a different mode. In many places it is not a “cool season,” but a separate element: snow can lie so long and so high that the landscape becomes almost unbelievable, and a person starts walking as if through a white void where every sound is muffled and every thought is louder than footsteps.

There are regions that practically beg for the name “snow country” (about Yukiguni I wrote here: Yukiguni – What Life Lessons Can Be Learned from Japan’s Snow Country?) — mountainous areas of the north, the belt of the Sea of Japan coast, my personally beloved Hokkaidō, places where at night the wind carries grains of ice within it, and a blizzard is not so much weather as a wall that cuts the world off. Buried roads there are not a metaphor but a daily reality, and a lonely inn in the mountains or by a forest track doesn’t sound like a literary ornament, only like the sole possible answer to conditions in which it is all too easy to get lost. In such a winter you do not need to look for horror — horror is the natural shadow of an unutterable beauty that can seize the heart and, at the same time, promises no safety.

And this is exactly why winter stories in Japan have an “icy breath”: they are born from the experience that nature can be ruthless, and that a person in a snowstorm becomes as fragile as March ice on a puddle. In summer, fear often arrives in the form of ghosts, because warm nights and festivals of remembering the dead bring the imagination closer to a world that is usually “on the other side.” In winter, however, something else happens. In winter, death does not need a story; it does not need a name or anger — it is simply the result of hypothermia, disorientation, loss of strength. And this is crucial: winter fears are more silent, more “natural,” and therefore more alien to us and harder to tame. Then culture does what it always does in the face of things too vast: it gives them shape, a face, movement, intention. It turns danger into a story, randomness into meaning, ice into a figure that looks at a human being as someone who has ventured too far from their safe, small houses.

Here we meet winter yōkai (more about the meaning of this name here: Kanji 妖怪: Yōkai Are Not Demons of Legend, But a State Where a Fragile Reality Becomes Uncertain) — not as simple “monsters,” but as a language of imagination through which Japan has for centuries described borderlands: between home and forest, between the familiar and the wild, between what is visible and what is only sensed.

The word yōkai is translated in many ways, but the most honest thing is to leave it alone: it does not want equivalents in other languages. In its wide shadow dwell misleading and cruel beings, funny and spiteful figures, sad, wounded entities, sometimes even compassionate ones — and even those whose absurdity leaves one speechless. Winter yōkai especially often grow out of communal experience: stories of travelers who vanished, of paths buried over, of hunger and poverty, of nights spent in places where only a thin layer of futon and someone’s goodwill separates a person from sleep.

That is why these tales so easily begin to speak about things that are no longer merely weather. Snow becomes a screen onto which loneliness is projected; frost becomes a trial that tests how much inner heat there is in a person and how much indifference; a blizzard becomes an image of disorientation — not only in terrain, but in life. In winter stories, surprisingly often, a motif returns of просьba and refusal, weight and compassion, hospitality and fear: someone stands on the trail and asks for help, someone hears a voice at night, someone sees a figure that should not be there, and yet is. And suddenly it turns out that this is not a “fairy tale about a spirit,” but the moral geometry of winter: what will you do when you are alone, when you are cold, when you are tired, when no one is watching? Will you take on another’s burden, or will you look away? Will you believe your own eyes, or your own fear?

It is also important that Japanese yōkai do not have to be pure evil. They can be like snow: they can enchant, they can kill, but not always out of hatred. Sometimes they are ruthless like weather conditions, sometimes cruel like chance, sometimes simply “alien” — and alienness, especially in winter, is a primal experience. A person in a snowstorm feels that the world is not built for them, and culture replies: good, then let us tell of it in a way that can be remembered. Let us make frost into a woman with a white face who steals breath; an avalanche into an old man racing at night down a slope; the forest’s silence into one-legged tracks that break off into emptiness; poverty into a futon that cannot stop speaking in a child’s voice.

Yōkai are not merely a folkloric album of curiosities. If we look at them only as colorful, interesting, cute little tales, we greatly impoverish our perception of Japanese culture. Yōkai are a story about how a community understands risk and guilt, how it explains suffering, how it teaches caution, how it tries to give meaning to the fact that sometimes someone close disappears and never returns. Winter spirits especially often touch the most painful matters: abandonment, solitude, poverty, homelessness, the violence of fate — but also the desire for relief that whiteness gives, that kind of silence in which the world, for a moment, stops pressing in. In this sense winter yōkai are paradoxical: they freeze, but they also arrange, because they transform the chaos of experience into the structure of a story.

And one more thing: in Japan, space itself can be saturated with memory. A mountain, a pass, a forest, an old road, a forgotten inn — these are not merely places “somewhere out there,” but points where history and imagination overlay one another like layers of snow. In winter this overlay is especially clear, because snow simplifies the world: it removes details, leaves forms, draws out silhouettes. In such a landscape it is easier to see a figure, easier to hear a voice, easier to believe in an encounter that can be both real and dreamlike. The oneiric quality of winter stories is not an ornament — it is a natural state of mind which, in silence and cold, shifts into survival mode, and at the same time becomes more susceptible to symbols.

From this perspective, we set out on the road. We will pass through Japan’s winter places and perhaps… meet someone or something? So — let us go.

Mountain forests around Hirosaki

(Mutsu Province, Tōhoku region, Northern Japan)

YUKINKO

A blizzard in the northern mountains of Iwaki-san has nothing of a postcard in it. First the horizon disappears, then sound vanishes except for the howl of the wind, and right after that disappears the certainty that you are walking in the right direction. Snow sticks to eyelashes, breathing becomes heavy and loud, and the body slips into that particular mode in which a person thinks only about reaching light, a roof, anything that has human temperature.

In a situation like this, as we are now, many travelers have found themselves over the centuries. And then — an encounter could happen. A figure. As if it emerged not from the forest, but from whiteness itself — it stands on the path. It is a woman. Motionless. Strangely calm. In her arms she holds a bundle, against her chest, like a child wrapped in a thick layer of cloth. She speaks, asking us for something. Between the loud blows of the icy wind, we hear her words.

「すみません……少しだけ。この子を、少しの間抱いてくれませんか。」

(Sumimasen… chotto dake. Kono ko o, sukoshi aida daite kuremasen ka.)

“Excuse me… just for a moment. This child. Could you hold it for me for a little while?”

In this story there is no “comfortable option,” because winter folklore in Japan is very often not about “evil spirits” hunting people, but about borderline situations where morality collides with the instinct to survive.

If we refuse, the woman, in despair, may push us off the mountain path into a snow-filled ravine — death banally quick, without pathos, simply a disappearance into a white hole. If we agree and take the child into our arms, it begins. The woman vanishes, and we walk on. But the bundle becomes heavier and heavier, minute by minute, heavier… First the fingers go numb, then the arms, then the legs. And when you can no longer take a step, snow begins to settle on you as it does on a stone. There is no screaming, no struggle. There is only that cruel, physical “I can’t anymore” — and frost that finishes the sentence for a person.

This child is called yukinko — a “snow child,” written as 雪ん子 (read ゆきんこ). In stories it looks like an ordinary toddler: a small human figure wrapped in thick clothes, like children from the northern mountainous regions of Japan where in winter the body is always “packaged,” and exposed skin quickly learns humility. The most important thing, however, is that yukinko rarely appears alone. It appears in the arms of a woman, a winter apparition which in many legends is the mother of this child, or at least its inseparable shadow. In this scene the “mother” is the face of the request, and the “child” is its truth: a burden that a human being takes on voluntarily, because in every culture the impulse to protect a child is something basic, almost automatic. And it is precisely this — this automaticity — that is mercilessly put to the test here.

What is most unsettling in this story is its precise psychological construction. It does not ask, “are you good or evil?”, but places us in a situation in which “being good” has a high cost. Compassion in this story is not a feeling; it is an action. And action has weight. Literally. If you take the child, you take on a burden that grows until it cuts you off from movement — and therefore from life. If you do not take it — you die for refusing. It sounds like a trap, but in the logic of winter yōkai a trap can be a form of truth: winter itself is a trap for the person who overestimated their strength, trusted the road, disregarded the weather, set out too late. Folklore gives it a human shape, because it is easier to talk to a shape than to impersonal temperature.

Let us note how strongly this scene touches themes that recur in Japan in stories about mother-spirits: the motif of ubume — a woman who died in childbirth or with a child, and who asks a passerby to take the infant into their arms. It is one of the most moving archetypes of the Japanese world of belief, because it mixes tenderness with dread: the child is innocent, and yet contact with it can draw a person into death, illness, a curse, into a weight that cannot be carried. Yukinko is a winter version of the same structure — only here, instead of a damp night and the hot breath of life, we have snow that steals breath, and cold that turns compassion into a test and a punishment. This “test,” then, is not merely an invention of horror; it is a story about how, in an extreme situation, a person can die both through cruelty and through softness of heart. And that sometimes the tragedy lies in the fact that there is no decision without cost.

In one of the legends, told in the Hirosaki region in the old province of Mutsu, however, a crack appears in this hopeless logic. A samurai walks through the mountains during heavy snow, meets a woman with a child, and hears the same request. He knows the stories. He knows that in the snow not everything is human, and that a request is not always innocent. And therefore — before he takes the child — the samurai draws a knife and clenches it between his teeth so that the blade points toward the head of the bundle. It looks brutal, but the meaning is different: he does not want to harm the child, he only protects himself in case this “child” turns out to be a treacherous yōkai and tries to kill him — the knife is to be his last lifeline, the boundary that allows him to keep a chance of survival while not giving up on helping the child. Then the samurai takes the bundle into his arms and endures the growing weight without losing alertness. This variant matters, because it shows that the “test” does not have to end in death: but for that, awareness of risk and cleverness are needed.

And here the most mature meaning of this tale begins. Yukinko is a child of snow, but in truth it is a story about the burden a person carries when they do not look away from another’s helplessness. This child grows in weight, because in the real world another’s suffering also grows when you try to help carry it; the more you commit, the more you feel how it slows you down, how it drains your energy, how it changes your life. And at the same time refusal — in the moral world, not only the folkloric one — can become an abyss after which it takes a long time to return to oneself. Japanese winter in this legend is therefore not only a backdrop, but a teacher: it says that compassion is sacred, but cannot be naïve; that boundless kindness can become death; and that sometimes the greatest wisdom is to know how to help in such a way that you do not freeze together with the one you are helping.

Winter yōkai can be cruel, because winter can be cruel. But in that cruelty there is something honest: it does not promise that the world will be soft. It promises that choices will have weight. And it leaves a person with a question more life-like than any fairy tale: can you carry another’s burden — not only for a moment, in a reflex of the heart, but all the way to the end of the road, with frost on your face, with awareness of risk, with a boundary that must not be crossed? Because if not — you may end up like the one you are helping.

Slopes above Yukiguni — around Hishiyama

(Niigata Prefecture, Sea of Japan coast)

YUKI JIJI

Niigata in winter is not “pretty.” Niigata in winter is real — heavy, patient, consistent. It is the side of Japan that faces the Sea of Japan and receives what it brings: moisture, wind, clouds, and then snow that does not fall like decoration, but like silence laid down layer after layer. In such a “snow country,” a person learns a rhythm that cannot be negotiated: shoveling snow, roads cut through white walls (cars in parking lots can be entirely buried in snow, the ground floors of buildings as well), roofs that demand care, fatigue in shoulders and lower back, winter life circling around warmth — small, domestic, earned. And that is exactly why, in Niigata, stories about winter do not need exaggeration. It is enough that they speak of what is.

And then the spring thaw arrives. Not “spring” in the European sense, but that treacherous moment when the sun sits a little higher on the horizon, snow begins to work, ice loses its unshakable calm, and mountains cease to be still. A person walks then beneath slopes that remember the roar of avalanches, and in their head is that human thought: better now, warmer now, it will be easier now. It is a thought not so much naïve as natural — because each of us, after a long period of tension, longs for a signal of relief. And precisely at such a moment, in one of Niigata’s stories (the village of Hishiyama is mentioned), an avalanche comes alive.

First there is sound: something like distant thunder, only more “granular,” as if thousands of small things moved at once. Then there is motion: a white boil that does not slide but rushes, and suddenly a person understands that snow is not soft at all when it weighs as much as a mountain. And then — as if in the very heart of that rush — a figure is visible. An old man. All white: white clothes, white skin, white hair. He does not “drown” in the avalanche; rather, he rides it, as if on a wild, gigantic snowboard. This is Yuki Jiji — the “snow old man” (雪爺), the rider of the avalanche, who should not exist, and yet in folklore exists exactly as all truths too large to leave unnamed exist.

In this story his appearance matters, because whiteness is double here. For an outsider, white is purity and calm. For someone who lives in a land of snow, white is also lack of contrast, lack of orientation, lack of any point of purchase. White can soothe, but it can also steal from a person the ability to judge: where the path is, where the edge is, where danger begins. Yuki Jiji is that whiteness that has taken shape. He does not leap from bushes like a predator, he does not hunt for blood. He appears at the moment when a person is ready to believe the world has already let them off.

Sometimes people speak of him as the male shadow of yuki-onna (the snow woman). This is an interesting pairing, because in Japanese winter stories gender is not merely a “character trait,” but a carrier of different kinds of threat. Yuki-onna often acts through closeness: beauty, breath, a face-to-face meeting that tempts, deceives, steals warmth literally and metaphorically. Yuki Jiji is different. He is the movement of mass. He is a force that cannot be bribed or pleaded with. If yuki-onna can be cold within a relationship, Yuki Jiji is cold within the world — impersonal, heavy, wholly uninterested in my story or yours. And that is why he works so powerfully on the imagination: because an avalanche in real life is exactly like that. It is not “evil.” It is unstoppable.

In the same logic, Yuki Jiji can also be someone who “misleads” — causing wanderers to lose orientation, to stray, and then to end like those whom snow covered in silence. Again, this need not be literal magic. Anyone who has ever walked in a dense snowstorm knows how quickly the psyche becomes fragile: you see less, you feel more, and fear does not need to shout — it is enough that it whispers “turn here,” “hurry,” “almost there.” And the mistake is ready. In this way Yuki Jiji becomes a story about how mountains forgive not so much bad will as illusions.

And here we come to the core that makes this figure more than a “snow monster.” Yuki Jiji is a teacher of humility — but not in the naïve sense of a moral fable. He does not say, “be modest because it is nice.” He says, “be modest, or you will die.” This is humility that is very Japanese in its practicality: it comes from living beside nature, not from an abstract virtue. In a country where earthquakes, typhoons, landslides, blizzards, and avalanches are part of real experience, maturity lies not in “winning” against the element, but in ceasing to pretend one has a right to victory.

There is one more quiet layer in Yuki Jiji: the old man as time. Winter in Niigata is long. It teaches patience, but it also teaches a certain dullness — a person begins to believe this state lasts forever, that it will be like this now. And then the thaw comes, and the person, hungry for change, makes a mistake. It is exactly in that passage — between “still winter” and “already spring” — that many disasters hide. Not because the person is stupid, but because they are tired and want relief. Yuki Jiji reminds us brutally: relief is needed, but it cannot blind you. There are moments when what looks like the end of danger is its most dangerous form.

An inn in Tottori

(Tottori Prefecture, Sea of Japan coast)

MONOIU FUTON

Tottori in winter has something severe and “northern” about it, even though it is not Japan’s farthest north. From the Sea of Japan side comes damp wind, snow can fall heavily and for a long time, and night in a traditional thatched house in the Itaibara chizu style has that particular silence in which everything is heard more clearly: wood creaking, breath, fabric rustling on tatami. We arrive at such a place tired from the road — without great expectations, longing for simple warmth. The owner is not a wealthy entrepreneur, so he furnishes rooms with whatever he managed to obtain cheaper: second-hand, through middlemen, from a pawnshop. It is a real gesture of poverty, and poverty in Japan — as everywhere — has its own smell: dampness, dust, old fibers, чужe life absorbed into material.

When we lie down to sleep, the futon seems like just a futon: a mat, a quilt, a bedding for a body that wants to stop fighting the cold. And then, in the middle of the night, something appears that cannot be explained away as “oversensitivity.” First there are voices — childlike, close to the ear, as if from the other side of the cloth. A question falls softly, almost tenderly:

「寒いの？ お兄ちゃん。」 (Samui no? Onii-chan.)

- “Are you cold, big brother?”

…and a second answer, just as soft, just as ordinary…:

「ううん……でも、君は寒いでしょ？」 (Uun… demo, kimi wa samui desho?)

 - "No… but you’re cold, aren’t you?”

This is exactly where the power of this legend lies. In closeness. And in a dialogue that should sound like home — and sounds like something that has lost home.

A person then does instinctively what one always does when afraid of darkness: pulls the quilt over the head, tries to cut off the sound. But here the sound is not “in the room” — the sound is in the futon itself. The more you hide, the clearer the voices become, as if the fabric has become a mouth. The terror is not that someone attacks. The terror is that you cannot escape into sleep, because sleep — the only shelter in a cold night — is taken away. The traveler flees the inn, then another, then another. The owner does not understand what is happening, until finally the truth comes to him when he himself decides to sleep in the “cursed” room: the futon has a history, and that history will not let it fall silent.

In the story preserved by tradition, the futon came from orphans. Two children, thrown out onto the street after the death of their parents, without money for rent, without a place that could be called “ours.” Their entire world of protection was one miserable futon — the only thing they had in that frost. If you think about it longer, you understand that this legend is, at bottom, not about spirits but about the temperature of social life. About what happens to a child when the community does not see them. About what winter looks like when a person does not even have so simple a privilege as a quilt. The voices from beneath the futon ask for nothing great — they ask only about cold. Because for those children, cold was everything.

This encounter is special also because there is no classic yōkai figure that comes out of the forest, has claws, a mask, or an icy breath. Here the “being” is an object. Old, everyday, domestic. Japan has an exceptionally strong imagination concerning things: tools, vessels, clothing are not merely dead matter, because for a long time they bear traces of human touch. In many stories objects can become tsukumogami (more about them here: Tsukumogami – Bizarre Youkai Demons Formed from Everyday Objects) — beings that “come alive” when they are used for a long time and then abandoned, as if accumulated time changed them into more than a thing. The futon from Tottori goes deeper still: it is not only “old,” it is soaked with suffering. And that suffering is so ordinary, so devoid of theatricality, that it becomes impossible to bear.

Here the legend becomes merciless, because it touches shame. This shame is the community’s shadow: something that remains when a person realizes that the tragedy did not happen “because of an evil demon,” but because of indifference, lack of resources, lack of empathy, sometimes the simple: “not my problem” — “Kankei nai.” This is precisely why winter stories can be more bitter than summer ghost tales. In summer it is easy to say: “the world of the dead is close.” In winter one must say: “the world of the living can be cold.” And a futon that remembers is like a conscience that no rational explanation can silence.

Snow-covered mountain forests of Hida

(Gifu Prefecture, Chūbu region)

YUKI NYŪDŌ

In the Hida mountains, in the northern part of Gifu Prefecture — where in winter snow can cover the world so tightly that morning looks like a blank sheet of paper — one walks differently. The forest is dense, the air tastes of ice, and the silence can be so complete that a person tries not even to think anything too loudly. And precisely then, when it seems there is no room in that whiteness for anything more, a sign appears: in fresh snow, after a night’s fall, you see large depressions — not the tracks of two feet, not animal prints, but single, heavy imprints, as if someone were hopping on one leg. They go across a clearing, enter among the trees… and suddenly break off into emptiness, as if the snow swallowed whoever it was.

In Hida people have long said then: these are the “tracks” of Yuki Nyūdō — 雪入道, literally a “snow nyūdō,” a snow “monk/ascetic” (the word nyūdō in Japanese tradition meant a person who “entered the path” — took up religious life; in folklore it often becomes a title for figures that are large, strange, a little “as if from another world”). In Hida stories this is usually a great ō-nyūdō — an enormous, monk-like creature with one eye and one leg, said to appear at night during a snowstorm or just before dawn, and its presence is betrayed precisely by that illogical pattern of depressions in untouched white powder.

Importantly: in many accounts Yuki Nyūdō does not have to “attack.” It does not leap from bushes, tear throats, leave behind blood. It leaves uncertainty. One eye — as if the world looks at you in a way that is incomplete and yet piercing; one leg — as if something moves across your terrain, not respecting the rules of biology. People in Hida repeated that such tracks appear after a snowy night and that children were frightened with them for generations: “don’t wander,” “don’t go alone,” “don’t go into the mountains when it’s snowing.” This is not folklore “for fun” — it is the language of safety, passed on in a form meant to stay in memory. Someone may forget a forecast, but it is hard to forget the image of a massive, one-legged monk hopping through a forest before dawn.

Popular descriptions add one more trait: Yuki Nyūdō is said to be able to “command icicles” — as if the ice hanging from branches and eaves were its tool. This addition is psychologically apt, because an icicle is the winter equivalent of a blade: beautiful, transparent, silent — and potentially deadly. All it takes is a jolt, wind, a moment of inattention. Folklore once again does what it always does: it takes a real risk (ice falling from height, sharp icicles in the forest and around buildings) and gives it an “agent,” so that the warning becomes more personal.

In Hida, especially around Takayama and the mountainous areas referred to as Okuhida, this yōkai still functions today as an element of local memory. In contemporary times it even appears in the form of handcrafted figurines inspired by oral accounts: raw, wooden, with clearly marked eye and mouth; it is sometimes emphasized that the red of the eye and mouth has an apotropaic meaning — protective, warding off evil.

This is a fascinating cultural detail, because it shows how Japan can simultaneously fear and tame — not by ridicule, but by transferring fear into a thing that can be placed on a shelf, as if to say to the world: “I know you.”

And here we reach the core of this story: the horror of Yuki Nyūdō is not “cinematic.” It is epistemological — it concerns knowledge. In winter, in a forest, a person relies on signs: tracks, lines, directions, differences. Snow takes those differences away. It leaves white, and white is treacherous: it is beautiful, but too uniform to provide certainty. When, in such white, a track appears that does not match any known pattern, the mind does something very human: it supplies meaning. And from this supplying are born the most subtle yōkai — those that do not need blood, because they feed on the lack of orientation.

Yuki Nyūdō is very “winter.” It is not a demon with theological evil, but a personification of a world that does not provide complete information. In that sense it is more realistic than most monsters: it reminds us that a person can be defenseless not only against the force of nature, but against their own need for meaning. In whiteness we want meaning even more, because whiteness is like emptiness — and emptiness awakens unease. Folklore therefore offers a figure: a snow monk, one-legged, one-eyed, appearing before dawn. And it does this not to deceive you, but so that your imagination — the oldest alarm system — works more attentively.

So if, in the snow-covered forests of Gifu, you ever see those single depressions, remember: the most important thing in this legend is not “whether it exists.” The most important thing is what the very consideration of such a possibility does to a person for a moment. How quickly you begin to listen to the silence. How cautiously you place your steps.

Mount Zao — border area of Yamagata and Miyagi

(Zao range, Tōhoku region, northern Japan)

JUHYŌ

We ride up Mount Zao, and the world beneath us slowly loses its everyday scale. The cable car lifts us above the forest toward the station on the ridge — and suddenly we see something we would never see in a city. A white army of silhouettes, packed densely on the slope, each different, each with its own hump, neck, head, as if someone turned ordinary trees into a procession of deformed beings. From afar they truly look like monsters. Up close it turns out that the “monster” here is simply a tree — only a tree that winter has built up into something that stops resembling botany and begins resembling myth, strongly mutated.

In Japan they are called juhyō and written with the characters 樹氷 — literally “tree ice,” “ice on trees,” “trees coated with ice.” The writing is honest: it says outright that there is no magic here in the supernatural sense; there is, however, magic in the phenomenological sense — the impression of something incomprehensible that is born when nature itself begins to create original sculptures. This phenomenon forms under very specific conditions: cold winds, moisture, and tiny droplets of water in the air (often in the form of supercooled fog) that strike the trees and freeze immediately, layer upon layer, until branches disappear beneath a thick crust of rime and ice. On Zao it accumulates for weeks, even months, until entire swaths of mountain slopes turn into a forest of “creatures.”

Why precisely on Mount Zao? Because Zao lies in a mountain range on the border of Yamagata and Miyagi prefectures, and its higher parts can receive the combination of height, cold, and wind that “glues” ice to trees like clay. Most often it is said that juhyō grow on the upper slopes, around runs and viewpoints accessible from the cable car, and that the “monster season” begins in December and lasts through winter, reaching its greatest scale in the middle of the season (tourist sources give different “peaks,” but the sense is constant: the phenomenon grows and culminates before spring begins to melt it).

And now the most important thing: this is not a yōkai in the classic sense. There is no single legend about a “Juhyō that eats wanderers,” no established genealogy, no fixed set of pranks and punishments. And yet people call them “snow monsters” — and this is the truth about folklore before it becomes a story: folklore begins with a look. With the fact that a person sees a shape they cannot immediately categorize, and so they give it a name on the border of reality and imagination. In everyday language, “monster” does not have to mean a demon. Sometimes it simply means something huge, strange, indecently different.

By day these “monsters” are almost clinical in their whiteness: they stand under a blue sky like thousands of mute figures, each with a different profile. Some are massive, as if they had broad shoulders; others thin, elongated; some give the impression of kneeling; others as if they had outstretched arms. Some look gentle — like fluffy animals — some look threatening, because ice and snow can arrange themselves into a “face,” into something the eye immediately reads as a hostile stare. And here we enter psychology: a human being has a deep reflex of anthropomorphization, especially in borderline conditions. In winter, when perception is narrowed and the body is set for survival, the mind searches for intention more quickly. A shape becomes a sign. A sign becomes a warning. A warning becomes “someone.”

At night, everything shifts to another level. Zao is famous for winter illuminations of the juhyō — in certain periods of winter the “monsters” are lit up, and then they truly look like a procession from a non-human world: in light they can be beautiful and unsettling at once, like a dream in which nothing is chasing you, and yet you are still afraid. There is something very Japanese in this: you do not need a story about blood to make a phenomenon “haunted.” All it takes is light on whiteness and a night that draws hidden faces out of shapes.

And in the end…

In the end we stand on the threshold of one more, final encounter — the most important of this entire winter journey. Before us is Yuki-onna: the snow woman, the lady of frost, a being beautiful and inhumanly ruthless, who holds a special place in the Japanese imagination because she is not only a “monster” — she is winter dressed in a (half-)human face.

In next week’s text we will learn her legends, regional variants, her presence in Japanese literature, and the psychology of breath, closeness, and a cold that can come not from the mountains, but from inside a person.

Meanwhile, keep warm!

どうぞ暖かくしてお過ごしください。

>> SEE ALSO SIMILAR ARTICLES:

Serious Snowball Fighting, Aka the Japanese Team Sport Yukigassen

The Silence of Endless White – Winter Haiku as a Mirror of the Soul

72 Japanese Micro-Seasons, Part 2 – Autumn and Winter in the Calendar of Conscious Living

Winter Whispering Dreams: 10 Names for Snow in the Japanese Language

The Mountain Witch Yamanba – Feminine Wildness That Terrified the Patriarchal Men of Traditional Japan

"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

of the page

    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

___________________

inari.smart

Would you like to share your thoughts or feedback about our website or app? Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you quickly. We value your perspective!