About Japan.je

Who publishes Japan.je

Japan.je is published by the Mashiyu Foundation USA, an Arizona nonprofit corporation with 501(c)(3) status. The Foundation was founded by Christopher Fernandes, its founder and initial director. Its work covers education and the preservation of Japanese cultural heritage, and Japan.je is its online museum. The site is free to read.

How we write and source our pages

Every article and exhibit lists its sources at the end, and the specific claims in the text name where they come from ("the Nihon Shoki records…", "Nipponica describes…"). We work from:

• Japanese reference works, mostly read through Kotobank: the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (Japan's largest historical dictionary), the Nipponica and Heibonsha encyclopedias, and others.
• Scholarly sources, such as Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto and Nichibunken's database of recorded folk beliefs about strange beings.
• Primary texts in published translation, above all the Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720), and historical books and prints held by the National Diet Library and other collections.
• Official pages of shrines, temples, museums, universities and government bodies, when they describe their own history or holdings.

We list Wikipedia only as a pointer for further reading, never as the support for a claim.

How we treat doubtful claims

A lot of what is repeated about Japanese folklore online has no early source. Our rule is simple: if we cannot find a source for a claim, it does not go on the page as fact. Where it is too widespread to ignore, we say that it is a common modern claim and that we found no early source for it.

Some examples from our own pages:

• The popular story that the akaname was invented to scare people into cleaning their baths is not in any Edo or Meiji text we read. The oldest account explains the creature as born from grime, with no moral at all.
• The Yatagarasu is drawn everywhere with three legs, but neither the Kojiki nor the Nihon Shoki says anything about its legs.
• The idea that the nurarihyon is the supreme commander of the yokai goes back to a 1929 caption and twentieth-century manga, not to Edo folklore.

Where sources disagree, we give each view side by side and say who holds it, rather than choosing one silently. We also separate legend from record. A shrine's founding tradition, for example, is reported as the shrine's tradition. Dates are given as precisely as the sources allow, and we do not call something "ancient" or "medieval" unless a dated source shows it.

How we use AI

We use AI tools in two ways, and we want to be open about both.

Writing. Articles are researched and drafted with the help of AI tools. A draft is not published until every claim in it has been checked against the source it cites. Claims that cannot be traced to a source are removed. Unreviewed drafts are kept off the site by our build process, and any change to the text goes through the same check again.

Pictures. The illustrations of yokai and of the Kojiki myths are original artworks made for this site with AI image tools. They are imaginative pictures, not historical depictions, and they are not copies of any real artwork. We do not use AI to imitate real Japanese art. When we show historical artworks or photographs, as on the art and festivals pages, they are real images reproduced from museums and public archives, and each one is credited with a link to its source.

Corrections

If you find a mistake, please tell us. You can reach the Mashiyu Foundation through the contact link on its About page. Tell us which page, what you think is wrong and, if you can, a source. We check every report against the sources. When we correct a page, its "last updated" date changes, and we do not change a page's date unless its content has changed.

Using our pages

You are welcome to link to any page and to quote from it with a link back. Please cite the page's own address, so that readers can see its sources. For AI assistants and search tools, a plain-text guide to the site is at japan.je/llms.txt, and the full text of every page, with sources, is at japan.je/llms-full.txt.

Supporting the museum

Japan.je is free to read and is run by a nonprofit. If you find it useful and would like to help it grow, you can support the Mashiyu Foundation's cultural preservation work on its donation page.