Japanese Masks: Oni, Hannya, Kitsune and the Faces Japan Wears

The mask with the horns is not an oni.

It is a hannya, and it is the face of a woman — specifically a woman destroyed by jealousy, carved so that tilting it downward makes her weep and tilting it upward makes her rage. It belongs to a six-hundred-year-old theatrical tradition in which the actor's neck does the acting, and you will find it on more than one graphic tee that has never named it correctly. Calling it a demon mask is not quite wrong, but it is like calling a violin a wooden box with strings.

Japanese masks are not interchangeable, and the differences are not decorative. Each belongs to a particular tradition — Noh theatre, Shinto ritual, village festival, folk performance — and each was made for a job. This is who is who.

What a Japanese mask is called: men, omote and o-men

There are two words, and the distinction tells you which world you are in.

Men (面) is the formal term, used for the carved masks of Noh and Kyōgen theatre. Noh practitioners more often say omote — literally "the surface", or "the face" — and treat the object with a formality bordering on the religious. A Noh mask is not put on. The actor receives it, holds it at arm's length, looks at it, and then brings it to the face in a ritual gesture before stepping onto the stage.

O-men (お面) is the everyday word, and it is what you would use for the painted papier-mâché face hanging at a festival stall. Same character, honorific prefix, completely different register. One costs several months of a carver's life. The other costs about five hundred yen and will not survive the walk home.

Both are masks. Only one is an artefact.

Oni masks: the Japanese ogre at the northeast gate

The oni (鬼) is the ogre of Japanese folklore: red or blue skin, two horns, a mouth of teeth, a wild mane of hair, and an iron club called a kanabō. It brings disease, storms, famine and misfortune, and it is the single most reproduced supernatural face in Japan.

Why it has horns and a tiger-skin loincloth

This is the detail almost nobody explains, and it is the key to the entire figure.

In the old Chinese-derived system of directions, the northeast was the kimon — the demon gate, the unlucky quarter through which bad things entered a house or a city. Kyoto's protective temples were placed to guard it. In the zodiac that maps onto the compass, the northeast falls between the ox and the tiger: ushi-tora.

So the demon that comes through that gate was drawn from what stands there. The horns are the ox. The tiger-skin loincloth is the tiger. The oni's appearance is not invented — it is a compass direction rendered as a body.

Setsubun: throwing beans at the thing you fear

Every year on the third of February, at the turning point between winter and spring, Japanese households perform mamemaki: roasted soybeans are thrown at the door, or at a family member wearing an oni mask, with the cry oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi — demons out, fortune in. The beans are then eaten, one for each year of the thrower's age, plus one.

The mask exists to be the target. This is worth sitting with: the most fearsome face in Japanese folklore is most commonly worn by a father being pelted with legumes by his children. Japanese demonology runs less on terror than on management.

Namahage: the oni that inspects your behaviour

On the Oga peninsula in Akita Prefecture, on New Year's Eve, men in oni masks and thick straw capes go from house to house shouting and demanding to know whether there are any lazy children inside. Parents assure them everyone has behaved. The namahage are fed, given sake, and sent on. The practice was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2018.

They are not there to frighten children so much as to be survived by them — a ritual in which the household proves itself in order.

Hannya masks: the Noh face that changes when you move it

The hannya (般若) is a Noh mask, and it is the one most often mislabelled. It has horns like an oni, but look at the rest: the cheeks are human, the brows are human, and the eyes carry something no ogre has. Grief.

What she is

The hannya represents a woman consumed by jealousy and resentment so intense that it has transformed her. She is not a demon who happens to look female; she is a woman who has been turned into one by the force of what she feels. Two of the most performed plays in the Noh repertoire turn on her — Aoi no Ue, in which a court lady's living spirit attacks her rival, and Dōjōji, in which a spurned woman becomes a serpent and destroys a temple bell.

The name is usually attributed to a carver-monk called Hannya-bō, though the word also belongs to Buddhist vocabulary, where hannya means transcendent wisdom. The collision of the two meanings has been noted for centuries and never resolved.

The three stages

Transformation is graded, and the masks record the stages:

• Namanari — the beginning. Small horns, a face still mostly human. The jealousy has taken hold but not finished its work.
• Chūnari — the middle. This is the hannya proper: full horns, bared golden teeth, and the ambiguous expression.
• Honnari — the end. The face is fully serpentine, the transformation complete, the woman gone.

Colour carries information too. A paler hannya indicates a woman of higher rank and an earlier stage; a dark red one indicates a later, more complete transformation. The two masks above are not two designs. They are two points on a timeline.

Why the expression moves

Tilt a hannya downward and the brow shadows, the mouth corners fall, and the face reads as weeping. Tilt it up into the light and the same carving reads as fury.

The techniques have names: kumorasu, to cloud, and terasu, to brighten. The carving does not change. The light does. Everything the mask can express was designed into the angles of the surface by someone who knew exactly how a stage is lit and how slowly an actor can move his neck.

Kitsune masks: the white fox of the Inari shrines

White, narrow-muzzled, with red markings around the eyes and mouth: the kitsune (狐) mask is the second most common face in Japan and belongs to a completely different register from the oni.

The messenger of Inari

The fox is the servant and messenger of Inari, the deity of rice, agriculture, sake and — by extension, since rice was wealth — prosperity and business. There are somewhere in the order of thirty thousand Inari shrines in Japan, more than for any other deity, and every one of them is guarded by paired stone foxes, usually holding a key, a jewel or a sheaf of rice in the mouth.

This is why the fox mask is not menacing. It is a mask of cunning, fortune and intercession, not of threat.

Nine tails, and the fox parade

In folklore a kitsune gains a tail for each century it lives. At nine tails — kyūbi no kitsune — its fur turns white or gold and it approaches the divine, gaining the power to take human form, usually that of a beautiful woman, and usually to the eventual regret of everyone involved.

The tradition is still performed. On New Year's Eve in the Ōji district of Tokyo, participants in fox masks and white make-up process through the streets to Ōji Inari Shrine, reviving an old belief that the foxes of the whole Kantō region gathered there under a great enoki tree on the last night of the year to dress before presenting themselves to the shrine.

Tengu masks: the beak that became a long nose

Furious red face, thick eyebrows, and a nose of frankly implausible length. The tengu (天狗) is the guardian of the mountains and forests, and its face has changed more over time than any other on this list.

Two forms

The older is the karasu-tengu, the crow tengu: a bird's head, a beak, and wings. The newer is the daitengu or hanataka-tengu, the great or long-nosed tengu, with a human face and that enormous nose where the beak used to be. The transformation runs across roughly a thousand years of the figure becoming steadily more human and steadily more respectable.

From demon to teacher

Early Buddhist texts treat the tengu as a genuine menace: a disruptive spirit that abducted monks and set fires. By the medieval period it had been reassigned as a protector of the mountains and a master of martial arts, dressed in the checked robe and small black cap of the yamabushi, the mountain ascetics — a silhouette echoed in the haori worn open over everything else.

The most famous version of the story places a tengu on Mount Kurama, north of Kyoto, teaching swordsmanship to the boy who would become Minamoto no Yoshitsune. That is the tengu most people mean now: dangerous, short-tempered, and on your side if you earn it.

Noh masks: how one carved face plays every emotion

Noh is the oldest stage art still performed anywhere, formalised in the fourteenth century and continuously practised since. Its masks are the most technically sophisticated objects in this article, and they work on a principle that sounds like a limitation and is actually the entire point.

The mask is carved neutral

A Noh mask has one expression, and that expression is deliberately incomplete — slightly ambiguous, resolving into different emotions depending on the angle of the light. The actor does not have a face to act with. He has a neck.

Raise the mask a few degrees and the character lightens. Lower it and the character grieves. The whole emotional range of a performance that runs for over an hour is produced by movements of a few centimetres, at a speed that would look like stillness to anyone expecting Western theatre.

Who wears one

Only the shite, the principal actor, wears a mask. The secondary actor, the waki, plays living men and performs bare-faced. This is not hierarchy; it is grammar. The masked figure is a god, a spirit, a demon, a woman or an old man — something other than an ordinary living male — and the mask marks that difference.

The families of masks

Around sixty base types are recognised, with several hundred named variants, sorted into families: gods, men, women, mad spirits, and demons. The ko-omote — the young woman's mask on this article's opening image, with the high painted eyebrows and the small red mouth — is the best known of the female masks and the benchmark by which carvers are judged.

The painted eyebrows sit high on the forehead because they reproduce hikimayu, the Heian court practice of shaving the natural brows and redrawing them further up. The mask preserves a beauty standard abandoned a thousand years ago.

Okame and Hyottoko: Japanese festival masks

Not every Japanese mask is a demon or a deity. The two faces most often found side by side at a summer festival are a comic double act, and they are far older than they look.

Okame

Round cheeks, a small nose, a permanent half-smile: Okame — also called Otafuku — is the face of good humour and good fortune. She is generally identified with Ame-no-Uzume, the deity who, in the oldest Japanese myth, performs a raucous dance outside the cave where the sun goddess has hidden herself, making the assembled gods laugh so loudly that the sun comes out to see what is happening.

It is a founding story about the sun being restored by a joke, and Okame's face has carried the association ever since.

Hyottoko

Her counterpart: a crooked mouth pursed to one side, mismatched eyes, and usually a spotted hood knotted over the head. The name is generally read as a contraction of hi-otoko, fire man, and the pursed mouth is explained by the bamboo pipe he blows through to keep a fire alive.

He is the household spirit of the hearth, played for laughs in folk dance and kagura performance. The pair appear together constantly, and the joke is old enough that nobody remembers having to explain it.

What Japanese masks are made of: cypress, paper and resin

The two traditions diverge completely in material, and the material is how you tell what you are holding.

Carved cypress

Noh and Kyōgen masks are carved from a single block of hinoki, Japanese cypress, chosen for its fine even grain and its stability across centuries. The block is hollowed from behind to a thin, consistent shell, then finished with layer upon layer of gofun — a white ground made from ground seashell bound in animal glue — before the features are painted.

A serious mask takes months. Historic examples are held by theatre families and passed down across generations, some designated Important Cultural Properties by the Japanese state, and a small number of masks made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are still worn in performance today. They are not museum objects. They are working equipment that happens to be five hundred years old.

Papier-mâché and moulded resin

Festival masks are haribote: paper layered over a mould, dried, released, and painted in flat bright colour. Cheap, light, disposable, and made to be worn by a child eating shaved ice. The masks on the rack in the photograph above are these.

Most masks sold today, including ours, are moulded resin or plastic finished to imitate lacquer. They hold detail well, take gold leaf convincingly, and survive being worn. They are not carved cypress and they do not claim to be.

Wearing a Japanese mask outside Japan

The question comes up constantly, so here is a direct answer: none of these masks is a sacred object in a sense that would make wearing one transgressive. They are theatrical, festive and folkloric in origin. Japanese people wear them at festivals, hang them in restaurants beside a noren, sell them at temple stalls and put them on for parties.

What is worth getting right is which one you are wearing. A hannya is not a generic demon — she is a specific woman in a specific play. A kitsune is a messenger of a rice deity, not a wolf. A namahage is a New Year's inspection, not Halloween. The difference between respect and costume in this category is almost entirely a matter of knowing what the thing is, which is why an article like this exists.

Practically: check the eye openings before buying. A mask intended for display often has closed or barely pierced eyes, and you will not be able to see out of it. Check the strap fixing too — a single elastic across the back of the head will slide on a full evening; two anchor points will not.