Osakabe (Hyogo)

Osakabe (also Osakabe-hime) is the female yokai said to dwell in the keep of Himeji Castle in Hyogo. She is treated as the lord and guardian of the castle, said to meet the castellan once a year and disclose the castle's fortunes. She is enshrined at Osakabe-jinja within the Himeji Castle compound and stands as a representative example of the himegami-type castle yokai. In the canonical narrative she lives at the topmost story of the keep and is sighted at night as a woman walking the inner corridors. Episodes connect her to successive castellans including Honda Tadamasa and Sakai Tadazumi, and to a tradition that the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi subdued the yokai of the keep (recorded in the Gekiken Sodan and elsewhere). Early-modern Himeji-han gazetteers, the miscellany Kasshi Yawa (Matsura Seizan), the Gekiken Sodan, and the Edo work Shin Kashoki by Ihara Saikaku preserve cognate cases. Modern treatments include Yanagita Kunio's castle-yokai studies, Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005), and the Nichibunken Strange Phenomena and Yokai Folklore Database. Her true identity is variously read as a local guardian deity, the ghost of a sacrifice, or a fox-spirit.