Photo/Illutration The city of Sakaiminato’s Mizuki Shigeru Road is home to bronze statues of Shigeru Mizuki’s characters, including Kitaro, left, and his father. Mizuki made this small port town a Tottori Prefecture tourist attraction. (Photo by Lisa Vogt) 

The wooden sandal song, “Karan Koron no Uta” (The Clap-Clopp song), always sends an eerie but delightful shiver down my spine. I look around and I think I feel a presence.

Or two. I don’t see anything extraordinary, but when you stop and think about it, our eyes can only see a narrow range.

Ultraviolet and infrared, for example, exist and are just beyond what our eyes can register. Same for sound. We all know that animals can hear frequencies that we cannot. So, to “feel” a presence cannot simply be attributed to one imagining what’s not real. Something may be right there next to you.

I’m more curious than the scaredy-cat type, and I wanted to see the realms beyond our “real” world, whether it be the fairies-and-angel world or the goblin-and-ghouls variety.

The perfect place to do so is in a particular area of Sakaiminato, Tottori Prefecture, where you can “see the unseen” all over town.

Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015), creator of the horror manga series “GeGeGe no Kitaro,” grew up in this coastal city. Here, a local woman he called NonNonBa taught him about “yokai” (monsters) and the supernatural, igniting his interest in otherworldly beings. He started creating unique drawings.

There’s benevolence and evil in everything (although it could be argued that it’s all a matter of perspective). The one-eyed yokai boy Kitaro and Medama Oyaji, his tiny eyeball father who lives atop Kitaro’s head, fight the bad characters, human and monster alike.

Their goal? Like those who identify as “woke,” the pair aim to create a world where we all live in harmony, respecting diversity--whether human or not.

Out of nowhere, I hear, “Hey, Kitaro,” and turn around, then look up. I’m surrounded by hilarious bronze yokai statues and the weirdest and most wonderous lampposts I’ve ever seen. Glowing round eyeballs light the pathway from the train station toward Mizuki Shigeru Road, where shops sell all kinds of merchandise.

You can buy Kitaro beer and sake, Neko Musume (ghost cat girl) and Nezumi Otoko (rat man) candy, Medama Oyaji “wagashi” sweets and tons of other only-here items.

There’s a 10-meter life diorama on display at the Mizuki Shigeru Museum where we learn the depths of the manga’s creator. He was drafted into World War II and sent to Papua New Guinea, where he lost his left arm.

The atrocities he witnessed cemented his pacifist viewpoints, and he penned several historical works about the war period and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). He reflects upon Japanese as victims of their leaders and victimizers of others.

Our world is made up of worlds we can and cannot usually see, good and bad. “Karan Koron ...”

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This article by Lisa Vogt, a Washington-born and Tokyo-based photographer, originally appeared in the Feb. 19 issue of Asahi Weekly. It is part of the series "Lisa’s Wanderings Around Japan," which depicts various places across the country through the perspective of the author, a professor at Meiji University.

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