Obake

Part of a series on
Japanese mythology and folklore
Mythic texts
Fudoki Kogo Shūi Kojiki Konjaku Monogatarishū Kujiki Nihon Ryōiki Nihon Shoki
Divinities
Amaterasu Ame-no-Uzume Inari Izanagi Izanami Kami Myōjin Seven Lucky Gods Susanoo Tsukuyomi
Legendary creatures and urban legends
Kitsune Oni Onryō Tengu Yōkai Yūrei
Mythical and sacred locations
Izumo Jigoku Mount Fuji Mount Hiei Ryūgū-jō Takamagahara Yomi
Sacred objects
Ame-no-Nuboko Kusanagi Tonbokiri Three Sacred Treasures
Shintō and Buddhism
Bon Festival Ema Setsubun Torii Buddhist temples Shinto shrines
v t e

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Japanese. (February 2019) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Japanese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,487 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at [[:ja:お化け]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ja|お化け}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Obake (お化け) and bakemono (化け物) are a class of yōkai, preternatural creatures in Japanese folklore. Literally, the terms mean a thing that changes, referring to a state of transformation or shapeshifting.

These words are often translated as "ghost", but primarily they refer to living things or supernatural beings who have taken on a temporary transformation, and these bakemono are distinct from the spirits of the dead.^[1] However, as a secondary usage, the term obake can be a synonym for yūrei, the ghost of a deceased human being.^[2]

A bakemono's true form may be an animal such as a fox (kitsune), a raccoon dog (bake-danuki), a badger (mujina), a transforming cat (bakeneko), the spirit of a plant—such as a kodama, or an inanimate object which may possess a soul in Shinto and other animistic traditions. Obake derived from household objects are often called tsukumogami.

A bakemono usually either disguises itself as a human or appears in a strange or terrifying form such as a hitotsume-kozō, an ōnyūdō, or a noppera-bō. In common usage, any bizarre apparition can be referred to as a bakemono or an obake whether or not it is believed to have some other form, making the terms roughly synonymous with yōkai.^[3]