Amabie

What is Amabie?

Amabie (アマビエ) is a creature from the sea that foretold an epidemic and told people to copy its picture. It has long hair, a beak-like mouth, a scaly body and three fin-like legs. Until 2020 hardly anyone outside the circle of yokai specialists had heard of it. Then, in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became one of the best-known yokai in Japan.

Amabie is unusual because nearly everything about it comes from one printed sheet. Only that sheet uses the name "Amabie". Researchers have since shown that it belongs to a larger family of "prophetic beasts" (yogenjū). These creatures appeared in nineteenth-century prints and rumours, predicted harvests and plagues, and promised protection to anyone who kept their picture.

The broadsheet of 1846

The sheet belongs to Kyoto University Library. Its digital archive lists it as Higo no kuni kaichū no kai (Amabie no zu), "A Strange Thing in the Sea of Higo Province (Picture of Amabie)". It is filed in the library's newspaper collection, and the archive gives its sides as about 23 to 29 centimetres. It is a single woodblock sheet of the kind often called kawaraban. A long-haired figure rises from the waves on the left, and the text is on the right.

The text is short. Here is a rough translation, following the transcription given by the historian Yumoto Kōichi:

"In the sea of Higo Province, something shining appeared every night. When an official of the place went to look, a thing like the one in the picture appeared. 'I live in the sea and am called Amabie. From this year, for six years, there will be good harvests in every province. But disease will spread. Quickly copy my picture and show it to people.' With that it went back into the sea. The above is a copy sent from the official to Edo. Mid-fourth month, Kōka 3."

Kōka 3 is 1846. Higo is the old name of Kumamoto Prefecture. The sheet does not say which disease it means. Satō Kenji of the University of Tokyo notes that it was first discussed in print by Ono Hideo, in his book Kawaraban monogatari (1960). Yumoto says the sheet was shown in exhibitions about yokai from then on. He displayed it himself in 1993, at the museum where he worked. It was known to specialists long before 2020, but it was not popular.

Amabie or Amabiko?

Because the sheet stood alone, nobody could say what kind of creature Amabie was. Yumoto writes that some books even printed the name wrongly as amaebi, a kind of shrimp. His breakthrough came from Meiji-era newspapers. The Yūbin Hōchi Shinbun of 10 July 1882 reported a widow in Tokyo going from house to house handing out a "cholera charm". It showed a three-legged, monkey-like creature and a text that closely matches the Amabie sheet. A shining thing appears in the sea off Higo and calls out to people in a monkey's voice. It says it lives in the sea and is called amahiko. It foretells six years of good harvests but much disease in every province, with six in ten people dying, and says that those who copy its picture will escape illness. The paper added that the same picture had been sold in the streets of Edo during the cholera of 1858.

Yumoto went on to find more newspaper reports and Edo-period drawings and prints. All of them spell the name as some form of amabiko (尼彦, 天日子, 海彦). None says "Amabie". He concludes that the creature was really called Amabiko. Someone copying the report mistook the katakana コ (ko) for the similar エ (e), and the error survived because that sheet was the only one known. He suggests that amabiko, "heaven's echo", was coined on the model of yamabiko, the mountain echo (see the kodama). He admits he has found no document written that way. The researcher Nagano Eishun had also studied the beast, in a 2005 paper titled "Yogenjū Amabiko kō" ("A study of the prophetic beast Amabiko").

Satō Kenji traces the family further back. In his view Amabie is a variant of the jinja-hime, a fish with a woman's face whose craze was recorded in 1819 in Katō Eibian's essay collection Wagoromo. That in turn goes back to a mermaid scare in Etchū Province in 1805. The jinja-hime's sword-shaped, three-pointed tail, he argues, became Amabie's three legs. Its title hime ("princess") was answered by the male hiko in Amahiko. On these links to mermaid lore, see the ningyo.

Other prophetic beasts

The best-known prophetic beast is the kudan (件), a calf with a human face. Yumoto describes a broadsheet reporting a kudan that appeared on Mount Kurahashi in the twelfth month of 1836. The sheet called it a lucky beast that announced a great harvest. A kudan born in Izumo in 1867 is said to have predicted good harvests and an epidemic before dying three days later. In 1897 the newspaper Chūgoku reported a rumour that a kudan had been born, and that a terrible plague would follow unless people passed under seven shrine gateways without crossing a river. Folklore reports collected by Nichibunken repeat the pattern. A 1937 note from Hiroshima says a kudan is born to a cow, foretells famine, drought or war, is always right, and dies within days. A 1943 report mentions wartime rumours of kudan making predictions about the war.

Another relative is the yogen no tori, the "prophecy bird". The Nichibunken scholar Jiang Shan cites a cholera diary of 1858, now in the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum. It records that the bird appeared on Mount Hakusan in Kaga in the twelfth month of 1857. It foretold that nine in ten people would die, but those who revered its picture morning and evening would be spared. Jiang points out that Amabie and the prophecy bird combine the two roles found in these beasts: they warn of disease and they protect against it.

The 2020 revival

Amabie's return began on social media. Satō Kenji traces it to late February 2020, when news coverage was dominated by the infections aboard a cruise ship. A shop that sells hanging scrolls of yokai explained Amabie's power against plague on Twitter and invited everyone to draw it. The news site J-CAST, writing on 8 March 2020, reported that posts mentioning "Amabie" had numbered fewer than ten a day until about 27 February. In March they shot up to nearly 20,000 on 8 March, under the hashtag #アマビエ. The free illustration site Irasutoya added an Amabie on 5 March. Satō adds that a Kyoto University librarian posted the image of the original sheet on 6 March. This gave the craze what he calls historical reality.

On 9 April 2020 the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare published an awareness icon based on Amabie. The ministry's page describes it as an icon for young people featuring "the yokai Amabie, said to protect people from epidemics". It carries the slogan "Shiranai uchi ni, hirome-chau kara" ("Because you could spread it without knowing"). It asked people to keep avoiding unnecessary outings and the "three Cs" of closed spaces, crowds and close contact. The ministry invited households, schools and workplaces to use the logo freely and also offered an Amabie colouring page. Satō argues that this official adoption gave the craze legitimacy and set off a flood of products. He lists papier-mâché dolls, hand towels, sweets, fans, wind chimes, noodles, T-shirts, sake, and statues in bronze, stone and wood.

The original sheet was honoured too. In 2021, "Amabie, the yokai who drives away plague" won the free category of the 52nd Seiun Award, a Japanese science-fiction prize. Kyoto University Library accepted the award on Amabie's behalf and put the certificate on display.