This study examines how the term yōkai (妖怪) was translated, circulated, and recontextualized in colonial Taiwan through the Chinese-language edition of the Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō. Although yōkai has become a prominent category in contemporary Taiwanese cultural production, its earlier semantic history remains insufficiently explained. Drawing on conceptual history, lexical analysis, and newspaper discourse analysis, the study identifies sixteen occurrences of 妖怪 in the corpus examined and compares them with the more frequent terms 怪物 (54 occurrences) and 怪異 (64 occurrences). The sixteen items are coded by geographical setting, genre, semantic function, and possible translation from literary texts published in metropolitan Japan. Preliminary analysis shows that 妖怪 functioned neither as a stable, unified category nor as a simple Japanese replacement for existing Chinese terms. Instead, its meanings shifted among anomalous phenomena, concrete nonhuman beings, metaphorical usages, and emerging scholarly terminology. Some examples suggest the mediation of Japanese narratives through the colonial press, while others retain Chinese-language understandings of strangeness and transformation. By treating the newspaper as a site of translation and conceptual negotiation, this study argues that Taiwanese yōkai discourse developed through layered interactions among Chinese lexical traditions, Japanese yōkai knowledge, colonial media, and local narrative contexts. It thereby provides a historical basis for understanding the later localization and reinvention of yōkai in Taiwan.

Authors:
Chengyu Liang, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
LIANG CHENGYU is a master's student at National Cheng Kung University. His interests include yōkai studies and Taiwanese and Japanese folklore. His current project examines the modern concept of yōkai in colonial Taiwan's newspapers.

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