ALA19 Interview: Zack Davisson

Usually during interviews, it’s the first time I’ve heard or met the guest. Zack Davisson was a name that I was familiar with thanks to the Supernatural Beings: Yōkai Past & Present Presentation hosted by Japan House of Los Angeles and Kaibyo: The Supernatural Cats of Japan, From Nekomata to Nekomusume presentation hosted by Japan Foundation of Los Angeles.

Davisson has studied yokai and has worked to translate and share the knowledge of the mythos to the world. During the interview, I was also pleasantly surprised to learn of his connection to the Wayward comics by Jim Zub!

It was a delight to interview Davisson on his enthusiasm for all things yokai during Anime Los Angeles 19.

SQUEEDAR: Please introduce yourself and your history

ZACK DAVISSON: My name is Zack Davisson and I am a writer, translator, folklorist, lecturer, you know, jack of all trades. I’ve been doing this professionally for about 15 years now. I've always been interested in the folklore and supernatural.

Growing up in Washington.I've been introduced to bigfoot and all are sort of local legends. And then in 2001, I went to japan on the JET program and when I went on the JET program, I was just blown away. Just,by all the folklore, they have there and also by just how little I knew about it and i thought I knew quite a bit, but i really didn’t know until I got there.

Going to Japan was like hitting the motherload of folklore. Especially in terms of ghosts and all this other stuff. And and it was really interesting but it was so difficult to understand. Like, why would you do this? Why does this happen? You know and the answer was alway, ‘oh because ghosts’ or ‘because it’s folklore’ or because something like that. There was no information readily available as to the background of that. I was just infinitely curious.

That really just spawned my curiosity to learn more about it. When I started doing my master's degree over there, that's when I did a focus on yurei (a Japanese ghost)

Copies of Lafcadio Hearn is available via Tuttle Publishing

I was certainly not the first foreigner in Japan to ever have that experience. Lafcadio Hearn was there in the late 1800s. He wrote this book called “Japan” and attempted interpretation. In one of his chapters called, “the rule of the dead”, he wrote that if you don't understand Japan's relationship with their dead, you can never truly understand Japan. I have found that to be true also.

SQUEEDAR: Did you have any difficulty being like a foreigner learning about yokai in Japan? I bet there was a huge language barrier

DAVISSON: I spoke no Japanese when I went there

SQUEEDAR: what?!

DAVISSON: Yeah! When you go to Japan, especially when you're on the JET program, like i was, you know, you could do it one of different ways. You can just go there and live in a little English bubble, never speak a word of Japanese and come home fine. People do that all the time, it's probably far more common.

Or, you can do what I do, which is just like just deep dove into it. I just really, really wanted to learn Japanese because so much of the stuff I wanted to know was never English, right?

Japanese was the key to unlocking all of this stuff. Because if you only encounter what's in English, you're extraordinarily limited. What is available is stuff that are curated for western or what people think will sell to westerners.

Mizuki Shigeru (Image from Mizuki Shigeru Museum)

Another thingI found in Japan that also prompted my in-depth study was this manga artist, Mizuki Shigeru. It was just crazy, he was everywhere. Like, he is like Walt Disney level famous in Japan. He's one of the foundational creators of all anime conventions that we have. All of it rests on the shoulders of Mizuki Shigeru.

I had never heard of him before and it was amazing for me to know that the Japan that we know here in the US and the actual encounter are entirely different. We have a very curated picture of Japan. When you get to japan and find out what Japan likes and what the west likes are two different things.

Japan loves Mizuki Shigeru.So i got really interested in that. If I was going to read his work, I was going to have to learn Japanese. There was no other way to do it.

SQUEEDAR: So you definitely benefited while you were there or else you would never know about any of it!

DAVISSON: I would never have. There's so much that you would just never know until you're there and also I found it impossible to study Japanese without that. People always ask me ‘what's your main advice to learn Japanese? Move to Japan.

SQUEEDAR: In your biography snippet, you are an award-winning translator. Can you share what does that mean for translating?

DAVISSON: There's this award for comics, called the Eisner Awards. If you're in the comics industry, it is extraordinarily important. If you're not, no one's ever heard of them. It's like the Oscars for comics essentially is what it's called.

SQUEEDAR: Super big, it’s super big

DAVISSON: Yes. Super big. Yeah, most people never even get nominated in their life. Most people will never win one, but I’ve won two. One for my translations of Mizuki Shigeru

SQUEEDAR: Wow! Congratulations on that. Thank you. I also noticed from your bio that you have a connection to the “Wayward comics”

DAVISSON: I do.

First issue of Wayward Comics by Jim Zub from Image

SQUEEDAR: “Wayward” is one of my favorite comics! I just wasn't sure what you're involvement in it was?

DAVISSON: That was a good, fun thing to do. A lot of what you'll have in the comics industry or in this business comes through networking. People always ask that too, ‘how do you get jobs?” The vast majority is through networking.

I was doing my translations and then I met a guy named Brandon Seifert who was doing a folklore based comic called “Witch Doctor, and I got to be friends with him. And then he knew another guy named Jim Zub, who was starting to write this comic, about Japanese folklore and he was asking Brandon, do you know anyone or anything about Japanese folklore?

Then Brandon e-mailed me, um, and it was awesome because I’ve always wanted to work in western comics as well. That was my first entry point into working.

When Jim first sent me an email, ‘would you mind doing one thing for the series?’, I read his script and it was so good. I'm like no Jim, I will not do one thing, I will do all the things. I am now a part of the team. I know you didn't ask me to but now I am. Basically, I just hired myself onto the “Wayward” team.

SQUEEDAR: So it was more of a consulting role?

DAVISSON:I wrote the backup essays and everything in there. I added a bunch of stuff .One of the things that Mizuki Shigeru did in his comics, was he did these things called yokai files.

Kitauro image from Mizuki Shigeru Museum

At the end of each “Kitaro” comic, there'd be a description and everything of the yokai. So, I did that for “Wayward.” I've been able to carry that on, like when I did “Demon Days” with Marvel, we did yokai files for that. That's always been my way to sort of honor Mizuki Shigeru but also by taking that idea and bringing it into Western audience

SQUEEDAR: You wrote this amazing book called “Kaibyo”.Can you talk about this journey?

DAVISSON: Actually, it’s genesis came from “Wayward.”

My first book that I wrote and published was “Yurei: The Japanese Ghost” through Chin Music Press. That was essentially my Master’s thesis. I did my Master’s thesis, rewrote it as a book and I published that.

When I was working on “Wayward”, one of the main characters Ayane was a neko-musume. I had done all this research for her character. The more research I did, the more I just went down a rabbit hole. I was researching all this cat stuff because Japan had just great cat lore, even beyond the needs of the character.

I did so much of it, and then my book editor, she just looked at me and she's like, you have a book's worth of research done. I never intended to do anything with it. My editor said we can just take all this research you’ve done, package it, and sell it as a book. And that's how “Kaibyo” came out.

SQUEEDAR: the best outcome for a deep dive.

DAVISSON: The book that I never even intended to write ended up becoming my best-selling book of all time. Because of course, it's about Japanese magic cats, you know?

SQUEEDAR: And it's fantastic. Like you said, we don't have as many resources to know about folklore, whether it's Japan or any other country. Are you just going to focus on Japan or any other country?

DAVISSON: Japan's, that's my niche, you know, I don't know anything else. People will ask me questions about Chinese ghosts and I don't know. Find a Chinese folklore specialist. I only know the one thing (both laugh).

I find all of that super interesting, and if other people write those books I will be more than excited to read them but I'm certainly not qualified to write them,

SQUEEDAR: From what you experience on your journey and how you started doing the translation, would you encourage others?

DAVISSON: Absolutely! A lot of people ask me that too. Like, how did you start your career? I just kind of forged my own path. I wanted to do it, so I did it. Everyone else can do the same thing. Even in Japan, there's still unexplored niches out there. There's got to be something that I've neer heard about that you think is the most fascinating thing on earth. Write a history of kabuki makeup. There's got to be so much stuff, there's still so much.

I feel like by now, there's more than enough general Japan stuff. We've got that covered. No one else needs to write a general book on Japan. There's hundreds of years of that but there's still a lot more granular, deep dive stuff that you can find out about out there that I think is still fascinating.

SQUEEDAR: Do you think that Japanese people are welcoming to non-Japanese people to come and learn more about these topics?

DAVISSON: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I would say for the most part they don't really care. It's not a really big deal to them. It doesn't really affect their lives in any way shape or form.

A part of it is like there's a certain fashion in the world today where it's like you want to learn Japanese folklore from a Japanese person, totally valid. Absolutely valid. But also, outside our perspective is equally valid. There's so much of our own lives and our own folklore that we never question because we grew up in it and so we never asked why. Never. We just accepted, this is the way it is, and it takes an outsider to come in and say like, why do you do this?

That was really brought home to me the first time I brought my wife Miyuki home. We got married in Japan, I brought her home for Christmas to meet my family, brought her into my house and she had all these questions about why we did things. She's like, why do you nail socks to the wall? And I have never asked in my life why we put up Christmas stockings! You need an outsider to come in and ask these questions of why, because if you've grown up in the culture, you never question it. You’re just like, this is our tradition. This is what we do.

The one thing that an outsider can never do is tell you how it feels. I could tell you in detail the history of this stuff just like a japanese course but not be able to tell you how It feels to wake up in the morning and dream of Santa and all that excitement and everything. So both perspectives are necessary and valid

SQUEEDAR: What are your thoughts about folklore being a part of modern life?

DAVISSON: Folklore is always important. You're like that's one thing about human existence and I also find that really amazing when you study this stuff is that we always tell stories and we always make new folklore and it is vital to human existence. You cannot take that aspect of humanity away.

Like we will anytime, there is something that is unknown, we will fill that unknown space with stories. And it certainly changes. In the old times, what was the unknown? It was the forest and the oceans and all these places that was hard, mountains, that was what was unknown.

So we populated them with gods and monsters because that's what we do. If there's an unknown space, we will populate the shit out of that with god's and monsters. Those are no longer mysteries, we no longer fear the mountains, we no longer wonder what's in the forest, we no longer question what’s under the water.

There are new unknown spaces. And once again, we are populating them with gods and monsters. The main unknown space now is the internet. Like, most modern folklore is based on the internet on finding a website that you're not supposed to find on creatures that live between the spaces.

The other is, of course, outer space, which ones and we just populate with monsters. For as long as there are unknown spaces, there will be a need for folklore.

SQUEEDAR: I still argue that here's something way, way, way deep in the ocean.

DAVISSON: We can still fill them up with monsters, we're not that completely done yet

SQUEEDAR: Giant squids are already frightening enough.

DAVISSON: They are!

SQUEEDAR: You mentioned in your book and your lectures that there are always cats in anime. Can you share any anime or manga titles that would expand people’s knowledge of cats?

DAVISSON: I’m trying to think about cats and yokai. I mean for yokai, I mean, obviously, it's “GeGeGe no Kitaro”. That's Mizuki Shigeru’s book, it’s seminal. It's basically the foundation for everything you know, like “Naruto”, Pokemon, all of that if you're all of that basically rests on the shoulder of Mizuki Shigeru and “Kitaro”.

A lot of stuff like I love like Rumiko Takahashi’s “Lum” or “Urusei Yatsura” which is absolutely a yokai comic. It's interesting because that comic is basically the translation and stripped of all the yokai parts. So if you read the English version, you would never know that it was a yokai comic. When it was translated back in the 90s, that was kind of the fashion of the time. If we were to translate it now, we would do it differently.

If you read interviews with Rumiko Takahashi, she's always like. ‘oh yeah, this is my homage to Mizuki Shigeru. I grew up on Kitaro and I wanted to basically make Kitaro in space and that's what Lum is’. So it's entirely yokai.

It's there everywhere. It's amazing, especially with how “Demon Slayer” created this yokai boom.

The good thing about that stuff is that you can read at several levels. You can read the story for entertainment and know nothing about the background. And that's perfect. That's how it should be. You shouldn't have to go to college to read a manga or something like that. You shouldn't have to study. But if you read it on that level and then if you want to you can go to level deeper, you can sort of learn the different “why’s” and “wherefores” and all this.

You can sort of learn the history and it's fun to learn the history and see what they did differently and what they changed, and all the other stuff.

SQUEEDAR: it's a good gateway.What do you think people would be surprised to know is a yokai. Like, i didn't know for a long time that Mario in Super Mario Brothers wore a tanuki suit.

DAVISSON: I don't know, I don't play video games! (laughs) I think the thing that people be most surprised to find out is that the stuff that they learn about in video games and the authentic folklore is quite different. I had someone come up to me and say, ‘the goddess Amaterasu, she's a wolf” and I’m like, no, that's the video game “Okami”. I know that that's where you got it from and I'm sure for that game, yes, she is but that's not this folklore.

This stuff changes over time. And I think people are surprised to find out how recent some of this is. Some of it is literally just made up by particular manga artists and that is totally fine, because most original yokai were made up by Toriyama Sekien. Making up new yokai is part of the deal.

Image of Toriyama Sekien work from the The Met

I wrote a book called “Yokai stories” where I specifically made up a new yokai. If all you ever do is look at the past, you're not creating anything new. Every single yokai person not only study the old stuff but then they also add to it. If you're not adding anything, you're not really pushing the ball forward.

I describe it like this incredibly long song where everyone adds a new verse. If you're not adding a new verse then you're not really doing it, right?

SQUEEDAR: Then the song ends and you don’t want the song to end! In the intro to your book, it ends with a cryptic sentence: family names don't contain the kanji for cats. Why is that?

DAVISSON: I don't know…I've actually heard someone say that that may be an incorrect statement because there are obscure names that carry the kanji. It came up while I was doing my research.Ii don't know. There's a lot of mysteries in the world and that happens to be one of them.

There will be a lot of different animal names . There's lots of tigers out there that are just sort of wedged in the names there.

SQUEEDAR: Maybe someone will answer that at some point.

DAVISSON: One of the things about cats in Japan is that because they're not native, there's a sense of otherness about them as opposed to endemic animals, like tanuki and kitsune. Cats are not Japanese. Even Hello Kitty, she's british. Her passport, her nationality is British because cats are always “other”. They're very rarely Japanese.

Tanuki and kitsune are natural animals. Whereas cats were introduced from the outside into Japan, so they're actually an invasive species.

SQUEEDAR: I love that. Well, they've invaded all our lives.

DAVISSON: Yes, they did! They're an invasive species everywhere, but more so in Japan.

SQUEEDAR: Finally, in your dedication in the book, you mention you live with ghosts. Do you still?

DAVISSON: Oh yeah. And we live in a 100 year old house in Seattle, You live in a house that old there's always going to be a few spooky things roaming around.

SQUEEDAR: Any upcoming projects or any future works?

DAVISSON: I’m doing my first book with Tuttle Publishing that came out in June, “The Ultimate Guide to Japanese Yokai”. I'm really excited about that book because one of the things I wanted to do was a yokai encyclopedia. The fashion of today has been to narrow the field of what is a yokai. People just narrow and narrow and narrow that definition and I decided to go the opposite way. Just broaden the definition as wide as possible.

SQUEEDAR: Yeah just blow it up! Like throw a dynamite in there. Yeah. Yeah.

DAVISSON: It might be the first yokai encyclopedia to contain an entry for kaiju, which I'm very excited about.

SQUEEDAR: Whoa, that sounds like a project!

DAVISSON: i think kaiju are modern yokai. Godzilla, 100% a yokai! Tototo, that's a yokai, too. They're just all modern yokai.

SQUEEDAR: Thank you so much for the interview

To learn more and follow Zack Davisson check out his official website.