Japanese Urban Legends: The Stories and Their Roots

What Are Japanese Urban Legends?

The Japanese term is toshi densetsu, literally “city legends”: stories told as if they really happened, usually to a friend of a friend. Like urban myths and legends everywhere, they spread by word of mouth, in classrooms and, more recently, on message boards and social media.

Modern Japanese urban legends differ from older Japanese folklore. Traditional tales are full of yōkai, the broad family of supernatural creatures and spirits that includes shape-shifting foxes (kitsune) and mountain goblins (tengu). Modern legends seldom use them. Instead they center on yūrei, the ghosts of dead people, and especially the onryō, a vengeful spirit that returns to punish the living for a wrong done to it.

Japanese urban legends also cluster in specific places: schools, toilets, train lines, highways and, from the late 1990s on, the internet. Many work as cautionary tales. The term also covers non-supernatural rumors, such as claims about a company or a cursed sports team, and those turn out to be some of the most revealing. For the older traditions behind all this, the folklore and legends section of the journal is a good place to keep reading.

Hanako-san, Aka Manto and the School Bathroom Ghosts

Bathrooms come up again and again in Japanese urban legends, and the most famous resident is Hanako-san, or Toire no Hanako-san, “Hanako of the Toilet.” The legend says she is the spirit of a young girl who haunts school bathrooms.

Accounts disagree on who she was. In one version she died during an air raid in World War II. In another she took her own life after being bullied by other students. That second version shows what the story is partly about: the cruelty children can show each other, and the fear that it could come back to them. The legend is especially popular in primary schools, where children challenge classmates to summon her. It is a dare more than a ritual, passed down from one class to the next.

Aka Manto: the red cloak

Aka Manto (“Red Cloak”) is darker. He is described as a male spirit in a red cloak with a mask hiding his face, haunting public and school bathrooms, often the last stall in the women’s room. According to the legend, he asks the person inside to choose between red paper and blue paper. In some versions it is red or blue cloaks instead.

Every answer is a trap. Red means being slashed to death. Blue means strangulation or having the blood drained away. Naming a color he did not offer gets the victim dragged down to an underworld, and in some tellings saying “yellow” gets their head pushed into the toilet. The only way out, the story says, is to ignore him, refuse to choose, or run.

That structure, a question with no safe answer and a loophole for the quick-witted, appears across this whole body of legend.

Kuchisake-onna: The Slit-Mouthed Woman

Kuchisake-onna (“Slit-Mouthed Woman”) is among the most retold Japanese urban legends, at home and abroad. She is an onryō with a mutilated mouth, covering the lower half of her face with a mask or some other object and carrying a sharp tool, usually a knife or a large pair of scissors.

The legend says she stops people and asks whether they think she is pretty. Answer “no” and she kills them. Answer “yes” and she removes the covering to show that the corners of her mouth are slit from ear to ear, then asks again. Saying she is ugly, or screaming, is fatal. Saying “yes” a second time gets the victim’s own mouth cut to match hers. Running away does not work either.

The escape clauses are some of the strangest in the tradition. People who survive her, the story goes, answer with something that confuses her, such as calling her “average.” Others distract her with money or with bekko ame, a traditional Japanese hard candy, or say the word “pomade” three times.

Folklore all over the world gives vengeful women this kind of power over the living. Compare the banshee of Irish folklore, whose cry warns of a death instead of causing one. Kuchisake-onna is the threat itself, and the only defense is to give the right answer.

Teke Teke and Kisaragi Station: Ghosts of the Railway

Japan’s rail network runs through many Japanese urban legends, and two of the best known belong to it completely.

Teke Teke

Teke Teke, called Kashima Reiko in some tellings, is said to be the ghost of a young woman or schoolgirl who fell onto a railway line and was cut in half by a train. Like Kuchisake-onna she is an onryō, and she haunts urban areas and train stations at night. With no legs, she pulls herself along on her hands or elbows, and the scraping sound this makes, teke teke, gives her the name. If she finds someone, she chases them down and cuts them in half at the waist with a scythe or another blade.

There is no record of a real victim, and no reason to treat Teke Teke as anything but a legend. As a story, though, it gets its message across: stay off the tracks, and don’t hang around stations alone at night.

Kisaragi Station

Kisaragi Station is an internet-era legend with a precise starting point. In 2004 an anonymous user posted in a 2channel thread for strange personal experiences. 2channel is a huge Japanese anonymous message board. The poster, later known as “Hasumi,” said she was on her usual commute along the Enshū Railway line in Shizuoka Prefecture when she noticed that every other passenger was asleep and the train was not stopping where it should.

She posted in real time as other users offered advice. As the thread has been retold, the train stopped after about an hour at a deserted station called Kisaragi. Other users urged her to get away, but she stayed. There were no taxis. Her parents, reached by phone, could not find the station on any map, and when she called the emergency services she was taken for a prank caller. Then came a tolling bell and drumbeats. A voice warned her off the tracks, and when she turned she saw a one-legged man who vanished. She fled through a tunnel, hurt herself in a fall, and met a friendly stranger who offered her a ride. Instead he took her deeper into the mountains, muttering to himself. Her last post said her battery was nearly dead, that she planned to make a run for it, and that this would be her last post for now.

Nothing outside the thread confirms any of it. Skeptics point out that anonymous live-posting is an ideal format for collaborative fiction: a story unfolds in real time, an audience reacts and advises, and no one outside the thread can verify a word. That same feature is what keeps the story compelling. It reads like a transcript, and after that final “for now,” nothing more ever came.

Born Online: The Red Room Curse, Kunekune and Gozu

Several Japanese urban legends are about media themselves: a pop-up ad, a photo taken from far away, a story too frightening to read.

The Red Room Curse

The Red Room Curse (Akai heya) is one of Japan’s earliest internet legends. While browsing, the victim sees a pop-up with black text on a red background asking “Do you like...?” Closing it doesn’t help. It comes back finishing the question, “Do you like the red room?”, and the screen turns red, showing a list of the room’s previous victims. The person senses something behind them, blacks out, and is later found dead in a room painted red with their own blood. It is the old chain-letter curse, rewritten for the dial-up era.

Kunekune

Kunekune (“wriggling body”) is about distant apparitions over wide rice or barley fields on hot summer days: a tall, thin white shape, something like a strip of paper or a sheet, that twists and ripples as if in the wind even when there is none. According to the legend, anyone who tries to get a closer look goes mad, and anyone who touches it dies. Early reports turned up on several websites around the same time.

The ordinary explanations are down to earth. The shape may be a scarecrow moving slightly in the breeze, or a wick drain, a tall drainage strip set into soft ground to pull water out of the soil. The legend may also draw on older local stories about scarecrows that come alive at night. As with the will-o’-the-wisp, an odd sight in an open field at the edge of vision can grow into a legend.

Gozu, the “Cow Head” story

Gozu (“Cow Head”) is a legend about a story. Supposedly, “Cow Head” is so horrifying that anyone who reads or hears it shakes with fear for days until they die. The full text is said to have been broken into fragments that are survivable on their own but still cause terror. It was sometimes rumored to be an unpublished work by the science fiction author Sakyo Komatsu, but no evidence links him to it. An unrelated Ukrainian folktale called “Cow’s Head” exists, about a woman rewarded for taking in a disembodied cow’s head one night.

Creatures, Dolls and Games: Jinmenken, Living Dolls and Kokkuri

Jinmenken are human-faced dogs said to appear at night in Japanese cities. They can supposedly run along highways fast enough to overtake cars and then look back at the drivers. They can talk, but they would rather be left alone. In the more comic versions, someone finds a dog going through garbage, it looks up with a human face and snaps something like “leave me alone.” Proposed explanations within the legend include genetic experiments, or the ghost of a person hit by a car while walking a dog.

The idea goes back further than it seems. A “human-faced puppy” was reportedly displayed at a misemono, a street sideshow, as early as 1810. Rumors may have gone around among surfers in the 1950s, but the modern legend is first known to have spread nationally in 1989. A dog with a human face appears in the 1978 American film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and jinmenken turn up in the anime and game franchise Yo-kai Watch. For creatures from the wider world, see the journal’s list of cryptids by type and region.

Living dolls are another modern thread. The American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand described the Japanese belief that dolls can take on spirits of their own after being played with and talked to, and may take revenge if they are mistreated or thrown away. One example concerns a deformed, “three-legged” Licca-chan doll left in a public toilet. A woman who found it and tossed it aside in disgust is said to have been cursed, lost her mind, and died in a psychiatric hospital.

Then there are the games. Kokkuri-san, which became popular in the Meiji era (1868 to 1912), resembles a Ouija board. Players write out hiragana characters, rest their fingers on a coin and put questions to a spirit. The legends around it focus on rules. Some say the spirit only reveals the date of your death. Others say the game must be ended properly, by saying goodbye before leaving the table or by getting rid of the coin and the pen’s ink within a set time. A four-player game called Square, also known as the Corner Game, is said across East Asia to summon an entity. Here, too, the stories are about the danger of breaking the rules, more than the game itself.

Japanese Urban Legends With Real Roots

The most revealing Japanese urban legends have no ghosts at all. They attach to real events, real companies and real grief.

The Shirokiya fire, 1932

On 16 December 1932, a fire at the Shirokiya Department Store in Tokyo killed 14 people. A story spread that saleswomen in kimono, trapped on the roof of the eight-storey building, refused to jump into the firefighters’ nets because they wore nothing underneath and feared exposure. The story was said to have led stores to require underwear and pushed Japan toward Western-style undergarments. Shoichi Inoue, a professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, rejected this: most people were rescued, he said, and the modesty story was invented for Western audiences. No evidence supports the claimed change in fashion, yet the tale made it into reference books, including some from the fire authorities.

The Sony timer

The “Sony timer” rumor claimed that Sony built devices to fail just after the warranty ran out. It has never been substantiated, though at the company’s 2007 shareholders’ meeting, then-president Ryoji Chubachi said he was aware of the term. Rumors like this one fit right in with the claims examined in the conspiracy theories section.

The Curse of the Colonel

In 1985, fans celebrating the Hanshin Tigers’ first and only Japan Series title threw a statue of Colonel Sanders from a KFC into Osaka’s Dōtonbori River. When the team kept failing to win again, some fans blamed the statue and said the curse would last until it was recovered. It is Japan’s counterpart to baseball’s Curse of the Bambino.

The cursed Kleenex commercial and Inokashira Park

Between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, Kleenex aired Japanese commercials, one of them showing actress Keiko Matsuzaka in white sitting on straw beside a child dressed as an oni (an ogre), with “It’s a Fine Day” by Edward Barton and Jane playing. Viewers complained it was unsettling. False rumors followed, saying the cast and crew had died in accidents or that the actress had suffered a breakdown. None of it was true. In Tokyo’s Inokashira Park, meanwhile, legend says couples who take a rowing boat out together will break up, and some versions blame the jealous goddess Benzaiten, who has a shrine there.

Ghost passengers in Tōhoku

Stories of ghost taxi passengers go back to the Taishō period (1912 to 1926), but they returned strongly after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Drivers told of picking up passengers, often soaking wet or cold, who vanished before reaching their destination and sometimes left a puddle, a glove or the fare behind. Many were described as young people visiting the homes of loved ones, some seemingly unaware that they had died.

Yuka Kudo of Tokyo Gakugei University tried to interview more than 100 taxi drivers about these experiences, though many declined to answer. Ishinomaki psychiatrist Keizo Hara and others have suggested the accounts may reflect grief hallucinations or a form of collective post-traumatic stress. That explanation does not dismiss the drivers. It treats their experiences as real events in grieving minds, an area the journal covers in its consciousness, dreams and the mind section. Some drivers, the accounts say, did not mind paying the fare themselves out of respect for the dead.

Why Japanese Urban Legends Endure, and How to Read Them

Urban legends exist because they do a job. Japanese urban legends are set in places nearly everyone passes through: the school bathroom, the last train, the dark street home. Each one comes with a warning. Stay off the tracks. Don’t go alone. Be careful what you answer when a stranger asks you something. Many also include a set of rules, such as the candy, the word “pomade,” or refusing to pick a color, and that makes them easy to share and fun to repeat.

They also change with the times. Hanako-san belongs to the school building, the Red Room to early web browsers, Kisaragi Station to anonymous live-posting. Grief shapes them too, as the Tōhoku taxi accounts show. Manga, anime, games like Yo-kai Watch and horror cinema keep pulling these figures back into circulation, so each new generation meets them in a new format.

Common mistakes when reading these stories

• Treating one version as the real one. Hanako-san’s death, Aka Manto’s colors and Kuchisake-onna’s escape tricks all vary. The variation is the legend.
• Assuming they are ancient. Most modern Japanese urban legends are twentieth- or twenty-first-century stories about yūrei, not old yōkai folklore. Jinmenken has older roots, but the modern legend dates from 1989.
• Taking “based on true events” at face value. The Shirokiya story was presented as true for decades, yet the scholar Shoichi Inoue rejected it as invented. Real events can carry invented details.
• Calling every account a hoax. The taxi drivers of Tōhoku were not spinning creepypasta. What they described deserves serious, careful attention, whatever its cause.

For more ghosts, apparitions and accounts from around the world, browse paranormal accounts and hauntings. For long-form conversations about the unexplained, the Troubled Minds Vault collects the radio show’s public back catalog.

Questions and answers

What is the urban legend of Hanako-san?

Hanako-san, or Toire no Hanako-san (Hanako of the Toilet), is said to be the ghost of a young girl who haunts school bathrooms. Tellings disagree about how she died: some say during a World War II air raid, others say after being bullied by classmates. The legend is especially popular in Japanese primary schools, where children dare one another to call her. No evidence shows that a real girl named Hanako is behind the story.

Is Teke Teke real?

No. Teke Teke is a legend, and no documented case or credible evidence supports it. The story describes the vengeful ghost of a young woman or schoolgirl cut in half by a train, who drags herself along on her hands or elbows with a scratching 'teke teke' sound and chases people at night near stations. It works best as a dark cautionary tale about railway tracks and walking alone after dark.

What is the most famous Japanese ghost?

Among modern Japanese urban legends, Kuchisake-onna (the Slit-Mouthed Woman) and Hanako-san of the school bathroom are probably the most widely retold, inside Japan and abroad. Both are yūrei, ghosts of the dead, and Kuchisake-onna is an onryō, a vengeful spirit. Older traditional folklore has its own famous ghosts, but these two dominate the modern legends told in schools and online.

Why are there urban legends?

Urban legends spread because they are told as true, happen in places everyone knows, and carry a useful warning. Japanese examples are set in school bathrooms, on late trains and on the walk home, and they often include rules for survival, which makes them easy to retell and test. Some grow out of real events, like a deadly fire or a disaster, and pass on fear, grief or suspicion in story form.

What is Kisaragi Station?

Kisaragi Station is an internet legend that began in 2004 on the Japanese message board 2channel. An anonymous poster, later known as Hasumi, described a commuter train on the Enshū Railway line in Shizuoka Prefecture that stopped at a deserted station missing from every map. After a string of strange events, she posted that her battery was dying and never posted again. Nothing outside the thread confirms the story.

Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.