All the best travel guides include the imaginary.  Japan, Real and Imaginary by Sydney Greenbie, 1920.  See our own unusual travel guide to what many consider the most unusual village on earth: Puzzling Portmeirion.

A spooky eye in the rose wallpaper.  From The Judge, 1912.

My modest collection of haunted wallpaper is downright uncanny.

This is easily our favorite presumption of the centuries, that everyone has seen a Japanese crystal ball raised on the wings of an impossible dragon.  Would that it were so.  From "Of Camera Obscuras and Japanese Crystals" by Herbert Copeland, 1892.

"Japanese talisman brings good luck."  From Popular Mechanics, 1914.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to reveal the Gay Caballero.
Irumagawa AFB, Honshu, Japan, 1946.

If it's true that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then it only makes sense that a Shoemaker would venture Eastward to the Land of the Morning (Michael Myers Shoemaker, 1893).

"A Japanese hero in the rain taking off his hat to a lady of surpassing beauty," from Once a Week, 1860.

Here's our internet exclusive on the meaning of "lupacchi magic" in the TV Asahi series Kamen Rider Wizard.  Recall that the titular wizard is a combination of two archetypes, the stage magician and the occult magus.  Hence, "lupacchi" alludes to something that serves both as a stage magician's prop and a magus' animal familiar.  The root "lupa" is not the she-wolf you might expect but rather a derivation of the Latin "lepus," meaning a hare.  The suffix "-acchi" is from the Italian "-acchio," which gives both a diminutive and instrumental connotation.  So "lupacchi magic" literally means "little helpful rabbit magic."

"The Japanese poet" by Ethel Plummer for Cartoons Magazine, 1917.

"Shake, but be careful of my sore thumb."  From Cartoons Magazine, 1919.

The secrets of How to Be Your Own Cat go back to the Meiji period of Japan, when cat people wrote books in between naps.  For example, the author of the Japanese classic I Am a Cat was himself a feline: "Choosing a kitten for the main character has a two-fold meaning as Sōseki was, in fact, himself a stray kitten" (Aiko Ito & Graeme Wilson's introduction to Sōseki Natsume's I Am a Cat).  Our illustration from a 1906 edition of the book.

Here's a giant spider crab from Japan, featured in The American Museum Journal, 1904.

"Mount Fuji seen through the waves at Manazato no hama, in the Izu Penisula, south of the mountain."  Colour woodcut by Hiroshige, 1852.

The dial of a Japanese astronomical clock, from Time and Its Measurement by James Arthur, 1909.

"Daikokuten, a god of wealth, throws money to people below while Namazu, a giant catfish of earthquakes, is held down by Kashima/Takemikazuch, a god of thunder and swords."  Circa 1855.  Scanned by the University of British Columbia Library.

Here's an ancient precursor to the finale of Michael Jackson's "Thriller," in which the protagonist turns around to scare the audience a second time by revealing yellow eyes.  The Japanese yokai demon Shunoban (or Zhu-no-Bon, しゅのばん) scares people twice.  The first time he simply reveals his bright-red monster face and horn to startle his victims and cause them to flee.  He gives chase, then disguises himself as someone providing assistance.  Having lulled his target into a false sense of security, with his back turned, he goes back to his monster face and frightens the person a second time by looking over his shoulder.  (Haunted by the fear of seeing that face once again, victims ultimately die of fright 100 days later.)  These events occur in the same order in the short film "Thriller," with Michael Jackson's character turning into a monster, giving chase, disguising himself as a rescuer, and then, after turning his back, looking over his shoulder to display demonic eyes.  The yokai card in our illustration is from the very charming Obake No Karuta deck, available via Amazon Japan.  We're translating the Japanese texts that come with each card — e-mail us if you'd like those translations.  (Our e-mail address is at our "About the Author" link.)

"Won't someone press the shutter for me?"  (This demonic camera can't take its own pictures, luckily.)  From Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger.

In the farce Kid Curlers by Dorothy Waldo (1916), something that "looks like a game of tic-tac-toe" is mistaken for Japanese script.  (Spoiler: it's neither.)  We wondered which X- and O-like characters of katakana might make sense in a tic-tac-toe arrangement.  Here's what we came up with:

Reading right to left, up to down, we have a call for someone not to resign due to a particular circumstance:

ya me ro (stop)

ya me na (don't quit)

me na na (because of it)