S P O T ／ SPOT-244

Mizuki Shigeru Memorial Museum

水木しげる記念館みずきしげるきねんかん

In the port town of Sakaiminato, the whole place has been handed over to monsters. This is the hometown of Mizuki Shigeru (1922–2015), the manga artist who made yokai — Japan's traditional spirits, demons and goblins — into postwar pop culture through 'GeGeGe no Kitaro,' and the town has thanked him by lining its main street with 177 bronze yokai statues, running 'Kitaro trains' on the local line, and lighting its lamps with the shape of Medama-oyaji, the walking eyeball. At the heart of it all stands the Mizuki Shigeru Memorial Museum. Opened in 2003 and completely rebuilt on the same site in April 2024, the new museum tells his story in chapters: the boy who grew up here listening to ghost stories; the soldier who lost an arm in the war; the manga artist; and the obsessive yokai researcher who catalogued Japan's spirit world like a naturalist. That last role is the key to the place — Mizuki treated folklore as something to be collected and respected, not just drawn, and the museum (and the entire monster-soaked town around it) is the most complete physical realization of that vision anywhere in Japan. Walk the street, ride the train, and you are walking through a folk imagination made concrete.