Amabie, from a single news sheet of 1846

In April 2020 Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare put Amabie on an icon asking young people to help stop the spread of Covid-19, calling it the yōkai “said to protect people from epidemics”.⁶ The name on that icon comes from one cheap print of 1846, and from nothing else.⁷ Yumoto Kōichi, a collector and historian of yōkai, thought the name was a mistake made by whoever copied the text.²

The print is a kawaraban, a single sheet sold on city streets, and the Fukui Prefectural Archives judge its cutting, text and picture alike, crude.⁸ On the left half a creature with very long hair, a pointed beak and a scaly body stands in waves, with three leg-like shapes below; on the right are seven columns of brush-written text and a date.⁹ It survives in the newspaper collection of Kyoto University’s Main Library as Higo no kuni kaichū no kai, “a marvel from the sea of Higo”.¹⁰ The library says it came with newspapers bought in 1941 and 1942 from Nakagami Toshito, a former Osaka Shimbun reporter, and an oval stamp on the sheet dates its accession to 30 May 1942.¹¹¹⁰

Seven columns, read in order

The whole text is transcribed and translated. It opens:

That is all the setting there is: a province, “the sea”, no village, no date for the sighting, no name for the official.⁴ Other amabiko texts name a district called Shinji and a witness named Shibata; Nagano Eishun found the district names in no place-name dictionary, and reads the bareness of the oldest texts as a sign of their age.¹² One text dated 1843, three years before the sheet, already has both.¹³

づ stands for 図, “the picture”.¹⁴ The text describes the creature no further than “a shining thing”; the hair, the beak and the scales exist only in the woodcut.¹⁴⁹

The last kana of the name is ヱ, an older letter for the sound e, not the modern エ.³ Both published transcriptions, the library’s and Nagano’s, read it that way.³

The sheet predicts the illness outright.³ Modern reference books soften it: the Digital Daijisen Plus has Amabie tell people to copy its picture if illness spreads, and Murakami Kenji’s Yōkai jiten (2000), as Nagano quotes it, gives six months of good harvests, not six years.¹⁵ Six years is the usual span: Nagano counts five amabiko texts that promise six years of plenty before an epidemic.¹⁶

It does not say what the copy will do.¹⁷ The older amabiko texts do: whoever sees the picture escapes death or disease.¹⁸¹⁹

The date follows: 弘化三年四月中旬, the middle ten days of the fourth month of Kōka 3, which is 6 to 15 May 1846 by our conversion.²⁰ It dates the sheet, not the sighting.²⁰ Nagano thinks the report to Edo is a device to make the news look official, and that no such report existed.⁵

Amabiko on paper, 1843 to 1882

None of the five records from 1843 and 1844 is a print.¹ They are entries in the records that domain retainers kept for their lords, in essay collections and in a farming family’s manuscript, and Castiglioni reads them as copies of kawaraban that are now mostly lost.¹¹⁸ He finds the name written あま彦 in kana, 海彦 with the character for sea, and 雨彦 with the character for rain.²⁵

The encyclopedia Kōbunko, published in 1916, prints a text of 1843 under the heading “strange bird”, with a small drawing of a hairy creature with a beak. Its source is a copy of a letter about strange events in Nagasaki, taken from a collection the Kōbunko calls 昔日叢書, and dated the eighth month of Tenpō 14 (1843).¹³ At a place called Shinji in the Kumamoto domain of Higo, a shining thing came out night after night and called to people in a voice like a monkey’s. A retainer named Shibata Gorōzaemon went to look, and it told him it lived in the sea and was called アマビコ. There would be six years of good harvests, it said, but much illness in every province, and six-tenths of the people would die; those who saw a drawing of it would escape the illness, and he should spread the word to every province quickly. Then it vanished.¹³

The Tsubokawa copy, a single leaf now in the Fukui Prefectural Library, was made by a farming family of Taneike village; it is dated Tenpō 15, the dragon year 1844, but nobody knows when it was copied.¹⁸ Its creature has a shaven head, round eyes, short hair all over and three long legs, and Nagano, who published it in 2005, transcribes its words as:

The name is written 海彦, with ruby giving the reading amahiko.¹⁸ It foretells no harvests and no epidemic, only the deaths.¹⁶

The Kanamori family’s record, the Zasshodome, turned out in 2020 to have an amabiko entry.¹⁹ In Castiglioni’s translation the creature calls out at night with a voice like a kite’s, promises six years of good harvests and then a disease that will kill more than half the people, and says that those who look at its shape will escape.¹⁹ The copyist noted beside the drawing that the mouth was red and the fur black.¹⁹

By the Meiji period the name was being written with 天 (heaven) or 尼 (nun).²⁵ In 1875 the Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun found houses in the post town of Yuzawa with the creature’s picture pasted by the door, and its reporter guessed that a monk or a yamabushi had started it.²²

Borrowed parts

Some researchers call creatures like this yogenjū, prophecy beasts, which appear, foretell a harvest or an epidemic, and say how to escape it.²⁶ Amabiko was not the first. Nagano lists a jinja-hime, a fish with a human face, recorded in 1819, and several kudabe between 1827 and 1829.²⁶ Yumoto, as Nagano reports him, traces the three legs of the Kyoto picture to the jinja-hime, which has long hair, scales and three sword-like tail fins.²⁶

Looking at a picture as a remedy was older too. Nagano points to handbills for animal shows, such as a camel shown in Edo in 1824, which promised that a child who looked at the picture would get through smallpox and measles lightly.²⁷ Castiglioni calls this “ocular luck”, ganpuku.²⁷

Both scholars see an ape. Nagano notes that several amabiko cry with a monkey’s voice, and suggests that a rumour of 1814, three talking monkeys foretelling that seven-tenths of the people would die, may have shaped the earliest ones.²⁸ Castiglioni calls the amabiko “an oceanic ape” and looks back to the monkey god Sarutahiko.²⁸

A misread letter

Yumoto’s argument is that whoever copied an amabiko text onto the Kyoto sheet wrote エ where the original had コ.² Castiglioni repeats it, the Digital Daijisen describes Amabie as a changed form of amabiko, and the Yumoto Kōichi Memorial Japan Yōkai Museum in Miyoshi calls it the leading theory.²

Nagano accepts it and draws the consequence: if the carver misread a katakana コ, an earlier sheet must have given the name in katakana, since nobody could turn 尼彦 into Amabie.⁵ The 1843 text in the Kōbunko does write the name in katakana, アマビコ.¹³ That fits his argument, though we have the text only in the encyclopedia’s printing of 1916; the link is our reading. In a 2023 essay he goes further. He thinks prophecy beasts were news made up by kawaraban writers in the cities, and notes that no tradition of Amabie was ever recorded in Higo itself.⁵

Castiglioni and the Miyoshi museum both write the slip as コ read as エ, but the sheet has ヱ, and we found no scholar who discusses the difference.²³

What ama means is disputed.²⁹ Nagano thinks 海, sea, is the original character, since almost every amabiko comes out of the sea, and that 天 and 尼 were added later to lend authority or for ornament; he reads Yumoto as treating 天, heaven, as the creature’s essence.²⁹ Castiglioni reads the variants together, sea and heaven both, as the water element.²⁹

The widow of Honjo

On 10 July 1882 the Yūbin hōchi shinbun reported that for three or four days a widow named Izawa Masa, of Honjo Sotodechō, had been going from door to door handing out a charm against cholera.²⁴ Its lower half showed a three-legged beast like a monkey; the text above told the Shinji story again, with a man named Shibata Gorōemon going to look.²⁴ “We are amabiko, who live in the sea,” it said, and it promised six years of good harvests, then illness everywhere and six-tenths of the people dead, and safety for anyone who drew its likeness.²⁴

The paper said the text matched, word for word, a picture cried through the streets of Edo at a good profit in 1858, when the disease it called korori first struck the city.²¹ It guessed that the old woman had found one in an old purse and reprinted it to help people and earn merit for the next life.²⁴ It closed: