Enjuin's mermaid mummy is younger than its box paper says

A paper kept in the box at Enjuin, a temple in Asakuchi, Okayama, says the mermaid inside was caught in a fisherman’s net off Tosa, now Kōchi, in the Genbun years, which the university’s report glosses as 1736 to 1740.⁶⁷ Radiocarbon on its scales, measured for a team from Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts, points to the second half of the 1800s.⁸⁹⁷ The report says the same paper records a sale in November 1906.⁴

On our reading, the 1906 sale is the last event on the paper, so the paper was written in 1906 or later if one hand wrote it all. The report does not say when the paper was written.¹⁰

A pedigree nobody could check

The paper gives the mummy a pedigree: a place of capture, a market, a buyer, a family and a sale.⁶⁴ The report says the research team could find no reliable information on the people the paper names, and nothing in it that ties it directly to the mummy at Enjuin.⁴

Nobody knows how the mummy reached the temple.⁵

A year of scans

The mummy is about 30 centimetres long, and a note in its box calls it 人魚干物, “dried mermaid”.¹¹ The study began on 2 February 2022 with the head priest’s cooperation.¹²¹³ Kato Takashi took the upper body, Yamano Hitomi the fish part and Takemitsu Hiroshi the DNA work, with Kinoshita Hiroshi on the folklore side.¹⁴ An interim report in April 2022 described hands with five fingers, hair, eyebrows and ears, and the teeth of a meat-eating fish.¹⁵ The final report was put off in September 2022 for a higher-resolution CT scan and was dated 7 February 2023.¹⁶

By the end the team described a made object: a body of cloth, paper and cotton with fish skin, animal hair and animal horn laid over it.¹² The upper body sits on a base of cloth, paper and cotton stuffing with a plaster-like material, under layered paper, pufferfish skin and animal hair.¹ The fish part is covered with croaker skin, which the report identifies from the fins and scales, not from DNA.¹¹⁷ The report says the head and upper body recall a monkey but were modelled.¹

The hair is mammalian and the nails are animal horn.² The CT scan found no skull, spine or ribs, and no core of wood or metal; only the jaws and the fin and tail bones remain.³ Metal needles sit in the neck and in a fin, and the report puts the second one in the dorsal fin.¹⁸ The surface carries a coating of sand and charcoal powder in a glue-like paste.¹⁹

DNA could not be detected, and X-ray fluorescence found none of the preservatives used in taxidermy.²⁰

A date without a laboratory

The dating is radiocarbon (14C-AMS) on scales peeled from the fish part, and the report’s wording is that the object was probably made in the second half of the 1800s.⁹ The report gives no laboratory, calibrated range, sample count or error.⁹

The report dates the making of the object. On our reading, scales from the 1800s cannot come from a creature caught in the 1730s.

The paper against the report

Dried mermaids on sale

Mermaid mummies were made in numbers from the end of the Edo period, and some went abroad.²¹ The report names examples in the British Museum and the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden.²¹ It counts twelve known in Japan before this one, with two more in Okayama Prefecture.²² The university’s press release adds that a mummy at Saikō-ji on Kōyasan has been designated a prefectural folk cultural property, and that a CT study of one on Amami Ōshima found fish bones and skin, bamboo, paper and wood.²³ The Hokkaido Museum says the National Museum of Japanese History holds a recent reconstruction built from a small monkey’s upper body and a large salmon’s lower half.²⁴

What a visitor was promised survives on a handbill. The Hokkaido Museum holds the printed pitch for a mermaid show, which it dates to 1836 although the text is signed Tenpō 10, 1839.²⁵ The pitch tells of an Ezo fisherman who caught the mermaid and dried it, and of a man of Noto who acquired it by trade and meant to give it to a shrine.²⁵ It ends with a promise:

The museum calls such promises a stock phrase of Edo shows.²⁵ Kinoshita Hiroshi told KSB that mermaid legends often involve immortality and that the mummies were believed to have medicinal uses.²⁶ Nippon.com calls the story of Yao Bikuni the most widely told mermaid tradition in Japan: a girl in Wakasa eats mermaid flesh and stays young for 800 years as a nun.²⁷ Kinoshita also told Nippon.com that such mummies were probably made from the late Edo period into the early Meiji period, with skilled craftsmen involved.²⁸

On our reading, the handbill and the Enjuin paper tell a story of the same shape: a fisherman, a catch and a chain of owners.⁶²⁵ The handbill’s own dates do not agree.²⁵

Who keeps it

The interim report announced a showing at the Kurashiki Museum of Natural History from 16 July to 25 September 2022, and the final report thanks the head priest for making the study possible.¹³²⁹ Kato Takashi said, as Bunshun Online reported it, that the aim was to help preserve the mummy so local people could keep caring for it.³⁰

The head priest told KSB that the thoughts of the first maker and of the many people who kept it live in the mermaid, that his first duty is to protect it and pass it on, and that it will stay at the temple.³¹