It became a big topic how junior high and high school students could drive major demand, whether through the lines at ice cream shops like Hobson’s and Baskin Robbins or the trend for Boston bags. “In late 1980s Japan, there was great interest in word of mouth among young people. People related these stories as things they had heard from local newspaper and radio accounts the tales took on local colors and details, traveling across the whole of the United States. The motif of a phantom passenger dates back to the era of nineteenth-century hackney coaches, but adapted itself to the age of the automobile, spurred on by the growth of the mass media. The up-and-coming Japanese researchers who conducted the translation are said to have wanted to overturn the idea in the academic world that oral literature meant only old tales and legends, and to open up the possibility of investigating the gossip and rumors of the contemporary city.īrunvand defined the urban legend as a bizarre but believable tale in an urban setting that is said to have happened to a “friend of a friend.” A hitchhiker turns out to be a ghost, for example, or an escaped killer is hiding under the bed. The term “urban legend” came to Japan via a 1988 translation of American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand’s 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker. When the kuchisake onna legend spread in the late 1970s, the Japanese economy was changing as households across the country acquired the basic elements of urban cultural life: televisions, cars, and telephones.
The haunted house attraction Kyōfu no hosomichi (The Narrow Road of Terror), based around the kuchisake onna, in the Yanagase shopping arcade in Gifu, Gifu Prefecture, had five seasonal runs from 2012 to 2019. But the powerful image of the slit-mouthed woman lingered in everyone’s memories, establishing itself as another monstrous figure.” The rumors died down around the start of the summer holidays in 1979. “At first, teachers and parents were also worried, conducting patrols and arranging for children to return home in groups. They saw adults they had never seen before, like women going out to their nightlife entertainment jobs or drunks on their way home from the bars.” As Iikura notes, this boosted anxiety among the young students about the possible presence of people who could hurt them-an anxiety projected in the kuchisake onna. “Cram schools started in the evening, and when they ended children came out in groups onto the night streets. As they passed them on further to relatives and other contacts by telephone and so on, other newspapers and television stations picked up the story.”Īs well as being a scary tale, for children the kuchisake onna represented the kind of characters they might encounter. But cram schools brought children from different areas together, and they took the stories they heard about other schools to share them at their own. Before, it was rare for rumors to cross over to another school district. “This was a time when the number of children going to cram schools was increasing. Six months later, the rumor had spread nationwide. Or they’d say that she could run a hundred meters in six seconds, that she hated hair pomade, or that if you gave her bekkōame hard candy, then you could get away. “There were all these different variations, like they might say that she wore a mask or a red coat, or that she carried a sickle. The local newspaper printed an article about the story and the legend spread and grew through repetition among the children of the area. Around the end of 1978, a rumor circulated that an old woman in a farming family in the town of Yaotsu in Gifu Prefecture spotted a woman with the now notorious slit mouth standing in the corner of the garden. Iikura offers one theory of origin for this particular legend. But how do such stories emerge and develop? A New Monster on Japan’s Streets “The kuchisake onna must be the first purely Japanese urban legend,” says Iikura Yoshiyuki, a Kokugakuin University associate professor who researches oral literature. No matter their age, almost everyone in Japan has heard the story of the kuchisake onna, or “slit-mouthed woman,” and it has become increasingly well known around the world. A woman wearing a face mask asks a passing child, “Am I pretty?” If the frightened youngster says she is, she asks, “Even like this?” and removes her mask to reveal a face slit from the corners of her mouth to each ear.