Methodology, sources and credits

How a scroll is made, what we trust, and who made the pieces.

How a scroll is made

1. Choose the being. Five categories of nine beings each, chosen so the set covers living worship, folk belief, ghosts, legendary heroes and Buddhist guardians. Names must be playable: four to fourteen letters once spaces and hyphens are removed.
2. Open the sources. At least four, including one scholarly or institutional source that is not an encyclopedia entry.
3. Write in our own words. We state the earliest source we could verify, its date and its kind.
4. Write five clues from vague to clear, taken from the text.
5. Check. Length (at least 900 words), structure, links, dates, and that no clue contains the answer.

Preferred sources

• Encyclopedia of Shinto (Kokugakuin University) and Japanese government cultural-heritage records.
• Folklore and yokai databases kept by the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken).
• Collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art and the Library of Congress.
• Official shrine and temple pages for living practice.
• Public-domain texts: Basil Hall Chamberlain's Kojiki (1882), W. G. Aston's Nihongi (1896), Lafcadio Hearn's retellings, and F. V. Dickins's translation of the bamboo-cutter tale (published 1887; the printing we read is dated 1888).

Names and spelling

We use Hepburn romanization. In titles and in the game we drop macrons, so you will see "Fudo Myoo" rather than the long-vowel form. We show no kanji, because we do not ship a Japanese font and prefer not to print characters we cannot check on every device.

Dates on each scroll

Published is the day the scroll first went online. Sources checked is the day its sources were opened for the version you are reading. When we correct a scroll, the second date changes and the change is listed on the corrections page.

Limits

These are introductions, not scholarly monographs. Traditions vary by region, shrine, temple and sect, and a single scroll cannot cover every variant. If you know a local practice that differs, tell us.

Image and font credits

All illustrations on this site (the seal, the lanterns, the category artwork and the share images) are drawn by us as SVG shapes. We use no photographs, no ukiyo-e and no third-party artwork at present. If that changes, each work will be listed here with its title, artist, year, link and license.

Fonts are served from this site, not from a third party. The license texts are included with the font files.

Last updated November 9, 2026.