S P O T ／ SPOT-281

Oboke Roadside Station (Yokai Yashiki and Museum of Stones)

道の駅大歩危（妖怪屋敷と石の博物館）みちのえきおおぼけ ようかいやしきといしのはくぶつかん

Deep in the mountainous heart of Shikoku, where the Yoshino River carves the steep Oboke Gorge, sits a roadside station hiding one of Japan's stranger pairings of exhibits. Climb to the first floor and you enter the Yokai Yashiki — a Monster House where some seventy folk demons from the surrounding Yamashiro district stand frozen in dim light: pot-bellied river imps, a skeletal apparition with a lolling red tongue, the crouching Konaki-jiji whose cry, legend says, drove travelers mad on these very mountain paths. This valley markets itself as a "village of yokai," and these figures are the proof: living oral tradition, made of plaster and shadow. Then, with no transition whatsoever, the second floor becomes the Museum of Stones — conglomerate schist designated a natural monument, a purported fragment of Mars, rocks counted among the oldest on Earth. Folklore and geology, the land's ghosts and the land's bones, sharing a single building beside a parking lot. It is the kind of place you stumble into between hairpin turns and never quite forget.