Ghost in Japanese

Ghost in Japanese is 幽霊, said yuurei: the spirit of someone who died and has not moved on. Two kanji, 幽 (faint, hidden) and 霊 (spirit), twenty-four strokes between them. The everyday word for anything spooky is お化け (obake), from the verb for changing shape. Written in hiragana yuurei is ゆうれい, and in katakana ユウレイ.

Ghost in Japanese

Ghost in Japanese has two answers, and a summer night shows you both.

At a shrine festival in August, a line of children waits outside a plywood booth hung with black cloth and paper lanterns. The sign says お化け屋敷 (obake yashiki), the haunted house. Inside, a teenager in a white kimono and a long black wig will lurch out of a cupboard, and the children will scream and come out laughing. That is obake, the word for spooks in general, the thing under the bed.

Later, on a veranda, a grandmother turns down the lamp and tells the old story of a woman betrayed by her husband, who comes back after death with her hair loose and her face ruined, whispering うらめしや (urameshiya), how I resent you. Nobody laughs. That is a 幽霊 (yuurei), a ghost with a name, a grievance and someone in particular to visit.

English uses “ghost” for both. Japanese keeps them apart.

Yuurei and Obake Meaning

Yuurei (幽霊) means the soul of a dead person, and especially one that appears to the living because grief, love or a grudge holds it back. In hiragana it is ゆうれい, in katakana ユウレイ, and it is said “yoo-ray,” with a long u. You will also see it spelled yurei or yūrei. All three are the same word.

The word has a second, everyday sense that surprises learners: something that exists on paper but not in fact. A 幽霊会社 (yuurei gaisha) is a shell company, and a 幽霊部員 (yuurei buin) is a club member who signed up and never came back. Most school clubs have a few.

Obake (お化け) comes from the verb 化ける (bakeru), to change form, so an obake is literally a thing that has transformed. Foxes and tanuki that take human shape, an old umbrella that grows an eye and a tongue: all are obake, also called 化け物 (bakemono). In casual speech, and above all with children, お化け covers ghosts too. It is the soft, round word on picture books and haunted-house signs.

Japanese folklorists draw the line carefully. A yuurei appears as someone recognizable, chooses the person it visits, and can follow them anywhere. An obake haunts a fixed place, a bridge or a crossroads, appears to whoever passes, and keeps to its own hours. One is a person who will not leave. The other is a place that is not right.

Around them sit more specific words: 亡霊 (bourei), a departed spirit, more literary; 怨霊 (onryou), a vengeful ghost, covered on onryo; and the loanword ゴースト (goosuto), used mostly in film and game titles. For the whole family of supernatural creatures, see our yokai field guide.

The Kanji for Ghost: 幽霊

• Character: 幽
• On’yomi: ユウ (yuu)
• Kun’yomi: none on the Jōyō list; older texts read it かす(か) (kasuka, faint)
• Stroke count: 9
• General meaning: faint, deep, secluded, hidden, dim
• Radical: 幺 (tiny thread), Kangxi radical 52

And the second half of the word:

• Character: 霊
• On’yomi: レイ (rei), リョウ (ryou)
• Kun’yomi: たま (tama, spirit)
• Stroke count: 15
• General meaning: spirit, soul, the spirit world
• Radical: 雨 (rain), Kangxi radical 173

Both are on the Jōyō list of everyday kanji, and 霊 is learned in secondary school rather than primary. 化, the character in お化け, is a simple four strokes: 亻 (person) beside 匕.

Japanese Symbol for Ghost

幽 is a mountain with something faint inside it. The outer frame is 山, and set within it are two 幺, the tiny-thread element, as fine as silk. Its meaning runs from faint to deep to hidden: a place you cannot quite see into. That is exactly the 幽 of 幽玄 (yuugen), the profound, half-seen beauty of yugen. A ghost, in Japanese, is a dim spirit.

霊 carries rain on its head, and the reason is ritual. Its traditional form, 靈, still used in traditional Chinese, stacks three small mouths over 巫, a shaman. The scholar Shirakawa Shizuka read the whole as a shaman setting out vessels and praying for rain. Modern Japanese compressed the bottom half into a lighter shape, which took the character from twenty-four strokes down to fifteen. Simplified Chinese went further still, to 灵.

The 霊 in a ghost is the same 霊 in 霊感 (reikan), a sense for spirits, and in 霊園 (reien), a park cemetery. For how 霊 differs from 魂, the soul of a living person, see soul in Japanese.

How to Write 幽霊 in Japanese

Twenty-four strokes, and the order inside 幽 is not what most people guess.

幽 takes nine. Start with the short vertical in the middle of the mountain. Then the left 幺 in three strokes, two angled folds and a dot, then the right 幺 the same way. Only then the mountain’s outline: the stroke that runs down the left side and along the bottom, and last the right vertical that closes it.

霊 takes fifteen. The rain crown 雨 comes first in eight: the top horizontal, a short stroke on the left, the stroke that crosses and turns down the right side, the central vertical, and then four dots, the left pair before the right pair. The lower half takes seven: two horizontals, then two short verticals hanging from the second, a dot on the left, a slant on the right, and the long base line last.

Keep the rain crown flat, or it squashes the seven strokes underneath.

How to Say Ghost in Japanese

Yuurei is four short beats in Japanese, yu-u-re-i, which an English speaker hears as “yoo-ray.” Hold the u for two beats; the long vowel is the difference between this word and nonsense. Obake is three even beats, “oh-bah-keh,” and nothing is stressed.

Real sentences:

• この家には幽霊が出るらしい。(Kono ie ni wa yuurei ga deru rashii.) They say a ghost appears in this house.
• 幽霊を見たことある？ (Yuurei o mita koto aru?) Have you ever seen a ghost?
• お化けなんていないよ。(Obake nante inai yo.) There’s no such thing as ghosts.
• お化け屋敷に入ろう。(Obake yashiki ni hairou.) Let’s go into the haunted house.
• 彼はテニス部の幽霊部員だ。(Kare wa tenisu-bu no yuurei buin da.) He’s a ghost member of the tennis club.

Notice the verb in the first sentence. Japanese ghosts do not so much haunt as 出る (deru), come out, the same verb used for a rash appearing or a train leaving.

Words and Compounds With 霊 and 化

The two haunted houses are a useful pair. 幽霊屋敷 is a real house with a reputation, the one at the end of the street nobody will rent. お化け屋敷 is the attraction at the fair, built to scare you on purpose.

霊感が強い (reikan ga tsuyoi), to have a strong sixth sense, is what people say about the friend who refuses to enter a certain room. And 化け猫, the cat that changes, has its own story on nekomata.

Ghost in Japanese Culture

The word did not always mean something frightening. In early use, 幽霊 meant simply the soul of the departed, and it appeared in memorial prayers. The shift toward the restless, grudge-bearing ghost came in the medieval period, and the Noh stage made it vivid: in 船弁慶 (Funa Benkei), the drowned general Taira no Tomomori rises from the sea to attack the boat of his enemies.

The Edo period gave the ghost its uniform. Yuurei came to wear what the dead were buried in, a white robe and a small triangle of white paper on the forehead, the 額烏帽子 (hitai eboshi) placed on a corpse at a funeral. Around the 享保 (Kyōhō) era, from 1716 to 1736, pictures began to fade the lower body away, and a 1732 collection of ghost stories already draws them thinning below the waist. The famous footless ghost scrolls attributed to Maruyama Ōkyo helped fix the image for good. Our page on yurei tells that story in full.

And ghosts belong to summer. During Obon in August the dead are welcomed home, and the hottest nights are traditionally the time for 怪談 (kaidan), ghost stories, told to raise a chill. Out at sea the danger was different: 船幽霊 (funayuurei), the drowned, who rise beside a boat and ask for a ladle to fill it with water. Sailors knew to hand one over with the bottom knocked out. Our guide to Japanese urban legends carries the tradition into the modern city.

As a Tattoo

幽霊 says “ghost,” and a Japanese reader will read exactly that. It is not offensive, but it is very literal, and it carries that second meaning of something present only on paper. A 幽霊 tattoo can read as a joke about being a no-show as easily as a statement about the dead.

Think twice about 霊 alone. It means spirit, but on its own it calls up the vocabulary of funerals: 霊園 (reien) is a cemetery, and 霊柩車 (reikyuusha) is a hearse. If what you want is the soul as the self that endures, 魂 (tamashii) is the usual choice.

Check pairings carefully. 悪霊 (akuryou) is an evil spirit and 亡霊 (bourei) is a ghost of the past. Kanji placed side by side form dictionary words, not a sum of ideas.

On script, this word has a real trap. Japanese writes 幽霊. Traditional Chinese writes 幽靈, with the old twenty-four-stroke form, and simplified Chinese writes 幽灵. If your reference image shows either of those, it is not the Japanese form. And お化け, written in kana, reads as playful and childlike, closer to “spooky” than to “ghost.”

Twenty-four strokes is a lot of ink, and the four rain dots in 霊 fill in first. Give the word real size, and set it vertically.

Confirm with a native speaker before you ink. You can preview the characters in vertical and horizontal layouts with the Japanese Tattoo Generator, and read the wider background in our guide to japanese tattoo meanings.

Related Kanji

• Soul in Japanese
• Death in Japanese
• Dark in Japanese
• Shadow in Japanese
• Demon in Japanese

For more characters from the darker side of the language, browse the kanji library.

Sources and Further Reading

• 常用漢字表 (Jōyō Kanji Table, 2010), Agency for Cultural Affairs ユウ as the only Jōyō reading of 幽, the readings レイ, リョウ and たま for 霊 with its bracketed form 靈, and お化け as the example for 化ける
• 霊 in KANJIDIC2, WWWJDIC, Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group fifteen strokes, radical 173, secondary-school status, and the variants 靈 and 灵
• 霊, Jitsū (Kotobank) the twenty-four-stroke traditional form and its reading as a shaman praying for rain
• 幽霊, Digital Daijisen, Heibonsha World Encyclopedia and Nipponica (Kotobank) the meanings of yuurei, the folklorists' line between yuurei and bakemono, the Kyōhō-era fading of the feet, the 1732 illustrations and Maruyama Ōkyo
• Fear and Reverence: Japanese Views of Souls, Spirits, and Ghosts, Nippon.com how yuurei shifted from the departed soul to the grudge-bearing ghost, and Tomomori in Funa Benkei

FAQ

How do you say ghost in Japanese?

The main word is yuurei, written 幽霊 and said “yoo-ray” with a long u, for the ghost of a dead person. The everyday word for spooks in general is obake, お化け, “oh-bah-keh,” which children use for ghosts and monsters alike. The loanword ゴースト (goosuto) appears mostly in titles.

What is the difference between yurei and obake?

A 幽霊 (yuurei) is the spirit of a particular dead person, who appears to someone they knew and can follow them anywhere. お化け (obake), from 化ける, to transform, is any shape-shifting spook, usually tied to one place and appearing to anyone. Casual speech blurs them, but folklorists keep them apart.

What is the kanji for ghost?

Ghost is written with two kanji, 幽霊. 幽, nine strokes under the thread radical 幺, means faint or hidden. 霊, fifteen strokes under the rain radical 雨, Kangxi number 173, means spirit. Together they make a dim spirit. The 化 in お化け means to change form.

Why do Japanese ghosts have no feet?

Because of Edo-period art. Earlier ghosts were imagined with feet. From around the Kyōhō era (1716 to 1736), illustrators began fading the lower body away, a 1732 book already shows ghosts thinning below the waist, and the footless scrolls attributed to Maruyama Ōkyo made the image standard.

What does yurei buin mean?

幽霊部員 (yuurei buin), a ghost club member, is a student who is listed in a school club but never takes part. It uses the second, everyday sense of 幽霊: something that exists on paper but not in fact. The same sense gives 幽霊会社 (yuurei gaisha), a shell company.

Is 幽霊 the same in Chinese?

Not exactly. 幽 is shared, but the second character differs. Japanese uses 霊, traditional Chinese uses the older 靈, and simplified Chinese uses 灵, so the word appears as 幽霊, 幽靈 and 幽灵. For a Japanese tattoo, make sure your reference shows 霊.