The other day, my wife asked me to watch a show on Netflix called Yo-Kai Watch. This concept originated as a Nintendo game and is not a cartoon series running across the world, but in the United States, it’s on Disney XD.
You can buy the Yo-Kai Watch at stores like Wal-Mart which carry children’s toys. It’s not really a watch. It’s a plastic wrist band that’s suppose to confer a special ability to the wearer. Someone bought my son one, and he brought it home, unbeknownst to us. He learned about the Yo-Kai Watch on Disney Channel commercials and from his friends at day care.
Yes. Disney. So it must be safe, right?
Well, for those who don’t know Japanese, Yo-Kai (also spelled yokai) are a class of spirit beings from Japanese folklore, including ghosts, demons, and monsters. For our purposes., a ghost is the spirit of a dead human, a demon is a two-legged earth-bound evil spirit, and a monster is a four-legged earth-bound evil spirit.
A Yo-Kai Watch, then, would be a device to be able to watch demons… or to see spirits.
But surely, the children’s video game, toys, and Disney Channel television show isn’t about seeing demons, is it?
My wife noticed that our 6 year old son was watching the Yo-Kai Watch show on Netflix, and immediately realized this was basically a bold and basic lesson spiritualism from a pagan perspective.
The complete breakdown of this includes 28 pictures from the first 15 minutes or so of the pilot, resulting in an article too large for one post. So, I broke it down into a series of articles, starting here.
Here is the opening title sequence (later changed to remove the farting demon, but this one is on Netflix).
“Gera gera po” is the name of the song, and it translates as “giggle giggle” or”Ha ha haaa!” The jokes on you.
Let’s breakdown the spiritualism lesson beginning here.