The Museum of Ethnography has an exhibition about yokai, Japanese spirits. It sounded like fun and it’s been on my list for a while.

I misread the dates and thought that this was the last weekend, but that’s actually a year from now. Which is not a reason to go now!

The Japanese sure have a different kind of spirits in their world… and very specific ones. Spirits who lick ceilings and leave sooty smudges behind. Spirits who love to eat cucumbers and human anuses. Shy water spirits whose legs are so long that their knees are above their heads when they sit down. It’s such a different artistic tradition than the Western European one, with a lot more crude humour, overall silliness and inventiveness.

I liked the idea of tsukumogami, inanimate objects that become alive and self-aware because they have served their owners for one hundred years.

The exhibition as a whole was a bit underwhelming. Interesting information, yes, and the room design was atmospheric, but that on its own doesn’t make a good exhibition. A lot of it was simply posterboards with pictures and text, and just a very few actual original objects, whether paintings or otherwise. 90% of this exhibition could have been a book – or a website.

In the hall outside the exhibition itself, there was a series of AI-generated photorealistic images of yokai in modern settings – a tanaki in a laundromat; an octopus creature at a street food stall. Looked nice, but… was it really necessary to use AI for this? It made the whole experience feel a bit cheap.