What is Amabie?
Amabie is a mermaid-like yokai with long hair, a bird-like beak, a scaly body and three legs. It is said to have appeared in the sea off Higo Province (present-day Kumamoto Prefecture) in 1846.
An Edo-period news sheet
The story of Amabie is recorded in a kawaraban, a printed news sheet of the time. According to it, something glowed in the sea off Higo every night, and when an official went to investigate, a creature calling itself Amabie appeared. It announced that there would be good harvests for six years, but that disease would spread, and that people should then draw its image and show it to others. Then it returned to the sea. The news sheet is held by Kyoto University Library. Yokai that predict the future and tell people to copy their image are called “prophetic beasts”; the kudan and the hakutaku belong to the same group.
The Amabie boom of 2020
In 2020, as COVID-19 spread, pictures of Amabie went viral on social media as a charm to ward off the disease. Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare even used an Amabie illustration in its campaign to prevent the spread of infection, and sweets, charms and goods featuring Amabie were made all over the country. More than 170 years after its appearance, an Edo-period yokai became a symbol of people’s hopes.
