Most English pages about Japanese ghosts open the same way. The ghost is a woman. She wears a white robe. Her black hair hangs loose. She has no feet.
The pages then explain why. Women were powerless. Women held grudges. A wronged wife came back.
By October 2026, we had filed 39 creatures under Ghosts & Yūrei. So we stopped explaining and counted them.
The first count agrees with the cliché: 25 of the 39 are women.
The second count breaks it. Only three of those women are clearly dead people.
How we counted
We read all 39 entries and asked two questions of each.
Does the entry give the creature a gender? And is it the spirit of a person who died?
Gender is not a field in our data. Nothing in the site stores it. We read what each entry actually says, which is why the second question matters more than it looks.
Twenty-five of the thirty-nine are women
| How many | |
|---|---|
| Female | 25 |
| Male | 3 |
| No gender given | 11 |
So the cliché survives the first count. Nearly two out of three are women.
The three men are tesso, noderabo and abura-akago.
Eleven have no gender. Four are yurei itself, zashiki-warashi (a child), inugami (a dog) and en-enra (smoke). The other seven are hitogitsune (foxes), gedo (a weasel-like spirit), tobyo (a snake), notsugo (a cry on the road), shichinin-misaki (seven of the dead, men and women), akai-manto (a voice) and shibito-tsuki (whatever moves into a corpse).
Now ask which ones are dead
Few lists ask this question. A ghost is a dead person. Being a monster is not the same thing.
| How many | |
|---|---|
| The spirit of a dead person | 6 |
| Disputed | 12 |
| Not a dead person at all | 21 |
Twenty-one of thirty-nine are clearly not dead, and only six clearly are. Put the two counts together and the shape changes.
| Dead | Disputed | Not dead | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Female (25) | 3 | 6 | 16 |
| Male (3) | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| No gender (11) | 2 | 4 | 5 |
Only three of the twenty-five women are clearly dead. Of the three men, one is clearly dead and two are disputed.
The three are ubume, who died in childbirth. Hone-onna, who knows she is dead and visits her lover anyway. And sarakazoe, who is Okiku, counting plates at the old well where she died.
Six women are disputed. Ao-nyobo is a court lady in a ruined palace, but no source says she died. Sekien guessed that kerakera-onna was a dead woman's ghost. Some regions say yuki-onna died in the snow. In one old telling, Kiyohime dies before she becomes a serpent. Every story of hanako-san's life ends in her death, but some versions have no girl at all. And on one Aichi road, a turbo-baba is said to be the ghost of a woman killed in a motorcycle accident.
The three names you already know
English lists of Japanese ghosts tend to give the same three women.
Okiku counts plates at the old well where she died. In some versions she is thrown in. In the Banchō version she jumps. She is on our shelf as sarakazoe, and she is one of the three dead women above.
Otsuyu arrives with a peony lantern and visits her lover through the nights of Obon. She sits inside our hone-onna entry, because a skeleton is what everyone else sees.
Oiwa is the poisoned wife of Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan, the kabuki play of 1825. She is not on our shelf at all. She belongs to the stage, not to the bestiaries.
All three are dead women. All three are famous. That is how a genre gets mistaken for a census.
The women are mostly not ghosts
Look at what the other sixteen actually are.
Dodomeki is a living thief. An eye opens on her arm for every coin she takes. Futakuchi-onna is a living wife with a second mouth in the back of her head. Taka-onna stretches her body to look into upper windows. Rokurokubi sends her neck out at night and wakes up in the morning.
In most tellings, Kiyohime is alive when she becomes a serpent. Kurozuka and kokuri-baba are women living in bad houses, doing terrible things while still breathing. Nanahiro-nyōbō grows seven fathoms tall on a night road. Name-onna is a rich family's daughter with a cat's rough tongue.
None of that is haunting. Most of it is transformation. A living woman changes shape, and the shape records something she did, or something done to her.
The men are said to be dead, and still working
The three men are said to die first, then carry on with the job. Only one death is firmly on record.
Tesso is the monk Raigō. A promise to his temple was broken. He shut himself away and starved to death over a hundred days. His grudge came back as rats that ate the scriptures.
Noderabo is the monk of a ruined temple, still ringing the evening bell for a parish that no longer exists. Sekien gave no caption. Later books say his grudge became a yokai.
Abura-akago begins with a man who stole lamp oil and died. Sekien guessed that the oil-licking baby was this man, born again.
Each one had an office or a trade, and death did not release him from it. The women change bodies, and the men keep their posts — that reads as a pattern, not a proof. The counts under it are plain enough.
Then where does the woman in white come from?
Not from this shelf. From pictures.
The image is usually traced to Maruyama Ōkyo, whose mid-eighteenth-century hanging scroll shows a footless female ghost. Kabuki took the look and made it standard. Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan opened in 1825 and gave the stage its most famous wronged wife, Oiwa.
The details are funeral details. The white robe is a shini-shōzoku, the kimono a corpse was dressed in. The loose hair is funeral hair, because Edo women bound theirs up in life.
So the famous look is a convention of painting and theatre. That convention is female. "Japanese ghosts are women" describes a genre of picture, not a population of the dead.
Our shelf has a second bias, and it is one man
There is one more thing the count shows.
For 20 of the 39, the source field names a Toriyama Sekien print — his books of 1776, 1779 and 1781.
Nine of those also name something older: Edo kaidan collections, or the Heike Monogatari tradition behind Raigō. For the other eleven, the print is all there is.
Even ao-nyobo, kerakera-onna and jakotsu-baba had only scraps before Sekien. He gave them bodies and names, and in one case wrote his own note explaining the name.
So part of that 25 is not what villages believed. None of the thirteen we added since September names him, so this bias is weaker now. It is what one Edo artist chose to publish.
What the count is, and is not
Our 39 are not a census of Japanese ghost lore; they are the creatures English readers look up. Gender is read from our own text, and rokurokubi is the least settled of them — in Lafcadio Hearn's 1904 telling, the headless ones include men. Twelve cases are genuinely disputed and we counted them as such. Besides those named above, one reading of zashiki-warashi makes it a dead child, and en-enra is smoke that is only rarely said to be a dead person. In some villages notsugo is a child who died too young, and in Tokushima gedo is the spirit of someone who died a violent death.
The clearly dead are a small group: three women, one man and two with no gender. Twelve more are disputed. What is overwhelmingly female is something else: the living woman who turns into something.
So the sentence people repeat is true, and it is not about ghosts. The woman in the white robe is a picture from the 1700s, and the thing English readers call a Japanese ghost is mostly a woman who never died.
