Mystery Timeline｜1868–1945
From the age of The Legends of Tono to the days when Nessie and the coelacanth made headlines around the world: mysteries from the Meiji era to the end of World War II.
The opposite of utopia: a society in which people's freedom has been taken away by total control, surveillance and oppression. Known through novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is sometimes told like an urban legend, linked with real surveillance technology and conspiracy theories.
A legend that just before the fall of the Edo shogunate, its huge war chest was secretly buried somewhere. The theory that the shogunate's finance commissioner Oguri Kozukenosuke hid it on Mount Akagi in Gunma Prefecture is famous, and large TV excavations drew attention, but nothing has been found.
A form of divination and spirit summoning in which a 10-yen coin moves across a sheet of written characters to answer questions. It became popular when Western "table turning" reached Japan in the Meiji era, and it was a huge craze among children in the 1970s.
A "library of cosmic memory" said to record every event since the beginning of the universe, down to people's thoughts and feelings. Talked about in 19th-century Theosophy, it spread in the spiritual world as a way to learn about past lives and the future. There is no scientific support for it.
An urban legend about the doll hung from the eaves to wish for sunny weather, and the children's song about it. Because the song's third verse says the doll's head will be cut off if it doesn't clear up, frightening stories about its origin are told.
An urban legend about the children's song "Akai Kutsu" (Red Shoes). There are rumors that the girl taken away by a foreigner was kidnapped, or that the "foreigner" in the lyrics was really a "great-grandfather." A sad true story is told about the girl said to be its model.
A rumor of a sinister figure in a red cape who kidnaps children. It spread in Tokyo in the early Showa era and caused an uproar. Later it changed into a school toilet ghost story in which a voice asks, "Red cape or blue cape?"
An urban legend that in 1943 the U.S. Navy conducted a secret experiment to make the destroyer USS Eldridge invisible, and that the ship vanished, teleported to another port, and crew members ended up fused into the walls. The Navy says no such experiment took place.
