ABOUT
There are a couple of things going on with this urban legend. First of all, there have been reports of people getting nose bleeds after eating chocolate. This is more due to food allergies, and the fact that the blood vessels in the nose are extremely thin. With the high sugar content found in most chocolates, this causes the blood vessels to expand as they deal with the sugar rush and it can result in bursting the vessels in the nose, particularly in people who already have a history of dry or sensitive noses.
Some people have accused chocolate of causing nose bleeds due to the caffeine content in it, but the amount of caffeine in regular chocolate is so minuscule that it has very little effect on the body, and certainly not enough to cause a nose bleed; not without other underlying problems, anyway.
But the reason this legend is so interesting in Japan is because of chocolate’s history with the country. Chocolate was first introduced to Japan in 1877. Japan had no history of drinking cow’s milk at the time, so this food made using it wasn’t received very well. There was also some confusion about what exactly it was made from. It’s said that people initially confused the words ushi no chi (cow’s milk) with the very similar sounding uchi no chi (cow’s blood). While the chi in this case uses a different kanji for both milk and blood, it’s easy to see how someone might confuse the two in spoken language. This led many people to believe that it was cow’s blood in chocolate, not milk, and there was an old assumption that if you consumed the blood of a creature, it would multiply within your own body. Thus, if you ate chocolate made of “cow’s blood” then you would be increasing the amount of blood in your own body and the only direction for it to go would be out, causing a nose bleed.
Around the 1950s, however, chocolate started to be seen as a luxury food. Not wanting their children to eat a lot of chocolate, thus causing them to spend a lot of money, mothers started telling their children this tale in an effort to curb their junk-eating habits. Whether it was successful or not remains to be seen, but once again a legend was born.
Fan death
When the days are hot during summer you can see many people using electric fans. But, depending on how you use them, they could be extremely dangerous.
It was a hot summer night, and on this particular day the heat was unbearable. As night fell, a university student who lived alone, A-san, was unable to sleep. In order to save money he used an electric fan rather than the air conditioner, and on this night he planned to use it once again to beat the heat. He set up a desktop fan next to his pillow, turned it on and went to sleep. But this time he set the fan to stay in one position rather than rotate from side to side.
The next morning, A-san’s friend arrived at his apartment and found his dead body. The cause of death was unbelievable considering it was the middle of summer; it was determined that he had frozen to death. The wind from the electric fan focused entirely on his head, and as his body temperature dropped, a tragedy occurred.
When people are asleep, it’s difficult for their bodies to control their own body temperature. You should avoid using electric fans unless you set them to rotate.
ABOUT
This myth is actually most prevalent in Korea, but it’s now extremely common in Japan as well. When I was working in Japan, I often had teachers tell me during summer that I shouldn’t sleep with the fan on. When I asked why, I was told because it was dangerous. Why is it dangerous? There are several reasons for this.
Heat stress. Blowing around hot air during periods of extreme heat is thought to warm the body and potentially bring on heat exhaustion.
Hypothermia. Like this particular legend warns, body temperature drops at night and people become more sensitive to the surrounding temperature. This has led many to think that running a fan all night can cause the opposite of the above and drop one’s temperature so much that they end up with hypothermia.
Asphyxiation. There is a fear that running a fan in an unventilated room will cause a build-up of carbon dioxide leading to death. It’s been proven that very few rooms are sealed well enough to cause this, but it’s a commonly held belief in many places, even today, and was one of the things I was often warned against as well.
Dehydration. Many claim that running a fan overnight can lead to dehydration and then embolism (a blockage in the blood vessels), causing death.
Another common theory you’ll hear in Japan regarding electric fans left on overnight is that you’ll catch a cold. This is likely related to the hypothermia myth, and the theory persists to this day. This one isn’t related just to fans but air conditioners as well. If it’s hot, you better suck it up and deal with it, or your fan/air conditioner/open window is going to give you a cold and kill you instead.
There was an incident reported in the Mainichi Newspaper in the 1970s where a man left his fan on after getting out of the bath and grew so cold while he slept that he had a heart attack and died. In 1971, baseball player Yoshizawa Takeo was found death on his 38th birthday because of a cerebral hemorrhage. Newspapers at the time reported that this was because he forgot to turn his fan off as he went to sleep that night. In 1987, there was another report in the same newspaper of a person who died in their sleep while their air conditioner was left on. There have been no reports of fan-related deaths since the 80s, however, but it’s likely that a lot of the fear in modern Japan about sleeping with fans on comes from these reports.
Death by soy sauce
There is a common food that you should be careful not to partake too much of because it can kill you. That food is soy sauce. If you drink a bottle of soy sauce all at once, you will die.
ABOUT
According to medicine, a dosage of salt from 30-300 grams is enough to kill a grown man. A single 1.8 litre bottle of soy sauce contains 14% salt, giving you 252 grams a bottle. This is enough to kill a man, making this urban legend true.
A 19-year-old man from Virginia drank a quart of soy sauce after being dared by his friends and went into a coma. Too much salt in the body causes the brain to lose water, making it shrink and bleed. It was reported the man started to have seizures after he drank the soy sauce and was taken to the hospital to have the salt flushed from his system. He luckily survived, but remained in a coma for three days.
It’s not uncommon for people in Asia to try to commit suicide by drinking large amounts of soy sauce. The Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine published a report in 2011 that detailed the case of a 55-year-old woman who drank a large amount of soy sauce and later died. The woman was clinically depressed.
There are also tales of soldiers from years passed who drank soy sauce to avoid being drafted, or who drank a cup of soy sauce so they could return home from war. Doing so would cause many of the symptoms described above, and they would be declared unfit for battle. Whether these rumours are true remains to be seen, but the legend persists to this day.
Burnt food gives you cancer
If you are cooking and happen to burn your food, whatever you do, you mustn’t eat it. The reason for that is because the burnt part contains carcinogens, and if you ingest those it can cause such things as esophageal and stomach cancer.
ABOUT
This is a common legend not just in Japan but in the West as well. The author of one urban legend website mentions that his mother often told him this story as a kid, and a quick search on the internet brings up 1000s of results from journals, blogs and medical websites featuring people asking if they’ll get cancer if they eat burnt food.
The reason this legend came about is because of the danger of acrylamide, which forms once food has been burnt, particularly in carbohydrate-rich food. High amounts of acrylamide in one’s system can cause cancer, but thus far scientists haven’t established that the amount of acrylamide humans consume from their typical diet is enough to cause cancer.
Hair vitality
Men whose hair grows fast are thought to be full of vigour and thus sexy, and alternatively, men who have no hair are also thought to be full of
vigour and thus sexy.
ABOUT
This one might be a little confusing at first glance. This is a legend many Japanese men have heard over the years, and it has to do with their hair (or lack thereof). This legend stems from the belief that men who have hair that grows fast have a lot of the male hormone which in turn makes them more masculine, vigorous and sexy.
On the other hand, men who are bald are thought to have an excess of the male hormone because it’s not being used on their hair at all (being that they have none), and thus they are manly, full of vitality and attractive to the opposite sex. It’s one or the other, with no room for those in-between.
I came across this legend in the wild myself. I mentioned to my junior high students one day that my hair grew fast and was greeted with rounds of knowing nudges and “that means you’re a pervert!” The word used was hentai, which many English speakers have probably heard at some point or another, particularly if you watch anime, but the basic premise is the same. How fast your hair grows correlates to your sexual appeals and desires, and it’s apparently no longer limited to just men.
Menthol cigarettes
Menthol cigarettes are particularly popular amongst women, but for men who continue to smoke them something terrible will happen. You see, menthol cigarettes will mess with your male hormones, causing you to lose your vitality. In a worst-case scenario, you may even become impotent.
ABOUT
This urban legend made its way to Japan from the United States. There are several rumours regarding menthol cigarettes, including that they are controlled by the KKK, that they contain fibreglass, or that they make men impotent. Of the most concern to Japanese consumers was the last point, and that is the legend that is still passed around today.
In reality, menthol cigarettes cause no more damage to a man’s ability to get it up than regular cigarettes. There was supposedly a rumour that saltpeter was used in menthol cigarettes to help keep them lit, a substance that is said to reduce “carnal urges,’” but this just isn’t true and the addition of menthol to a cigarette makes absolutely no difference in that regard.
Human stew
One winter morning during a long cold snap, a young woman with no relatives got into the bath of her old apartment. The bathtub was also an old type, and feeling that the water was lukewarm, she started heating up some more. However, the woman had a heart attack and died. The bath was old, with no timer or safety switch, and so it continued to heat the water unabated.
Two days later police received a report from the woman’s neighbour of an awful smell, and they discovered her dead body. Only her shoulders were sitting above the hot water. Feeling pity for the girl, the officer tried to lift her out of the bath. But when he did, the rest of her body crumbled back into the water, leaving her spine dangling above.
The woman’s flesh was boiled in the water as it continued to heat. The pleasant aroma of cooked meat filled the room, much like that of a stew.
ABOUT
This tale exists as a warning not to fall asleep in the bath. It’s common in Japan for people to take a bath, rather than a shower, before retiring for the night. Often this is done at the end of a long work or school day when both the mind and body are tired, so when you step into the warm water it’s easy to let drowsiness take over, especially during winter. But is there any truth to the legend?
There is. Over 14,000 people die in their bathtubs every year in Japan, over 85% of those the elderly, so there’s a justifiable fear of dying when you go to take a bath. Old Japanese bathtubs in particular are huge and resemble something like a large human washing machine than a modern day tub. They’re supposed to be deep enough to fit your entire body in to soak muscle pains away, and the water is heated by a separate component. They also come with a foldable lid that can cover the entire surface area, so to someone who has never seen one before, these old bathtubs can resemble a type of strange torture chamber.
According to the book Nihon Kaiki Zone, a woman was discovered in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture in the same manner this legend describes during the 1960s. The woman lived alone with her pet dog. There was an accident involving the gas, and the woman died while she was in the bath. She remained there for 10 hours as the water continued to boil, causing her flesh to melt off, and her skin and hair to become like soup in the water. The landlord, finding it strange that steam was rising from the bathroom the entire day, entered the house to check on the woman and discovered her abnormal dead body in the tub. At first he thought the woman was boiling something for her dog in the tub, but when he saw the hair and bones, he realised it was a human body. They never found the woman’s femur, however, and they suspected that the dog may have eaten it in the meantime.
There have also been several police reports over the years of accidents where people fell asleep in their bathtubs and met the same fate as this legend, often with accompanying photographs. Some of these photographs have even found their way to the internet if you really want to search for them.
VARIATIONS
There are a few slight variations on this legend. The story can feature either a man or a woman, and if the setting isn’t a cold winter day, then it tends to be after a hard day’s work, like in the following version:
A man returned home from work tired and got in the bath. The water was a little lukewarm, so while he heated up some more the man fell into a pleasant doze.
A friend came looking for the man a few weeks later as he had gone missing. But when he looked in the bathroom, he found all the fat from the man’s body had melted into the water, and nothing but his skin and bones remained.
Often these variations will end with a friend of the missing person entering their residence and noting a “pleasant smell” before discovering their boiled flesh in the bathtub, just like a human stew.
The other most common variation of that of an elderly person suffering a heart attack in the tub and then dying. When his or her family comes to visit the next day, they find the elderly person boiled in the tub.
Entertainment
The true meaning behind Spirited Away
Spirited Away was released in 2001 by Studio Ghibli and became a huge hit. You’ve likely seen it yourself. But few people know that the real setting for this production is the Japanese “soap lands,” or prostitution baths.
In order to save her parents who have turned into pigs, the heroine Chihiro begins work in Aburaya as a yuna. Yuna were women from the Edo Period who worked in urban bathhouses that assisted male customers with such things as scrubbing, hair trimming and so forth, but they were also prostitutes who provided sexual services as well. In reality, all the customers who visit Aburaya are male gods. Not only that, when Chihiro begins working at the bathhouse she is given the name “Sen.” Taking a new work name was common practice for women in the Edo Period who worked in red-light districts as prostitutes.
Spirited Away is a tale in which the young heroine is forced to lower herself to prostitution in order to pay for the sins of her parents.
ABOUT
There are a lot of urban legends surrounding Studio Ghibli films, but this one holds the most merit. Director Hayao Miyazaki once gave a magazine interview in which he stated “When thinking about what would be the most suitable picture to paint of today’s world, well that would be the sex industry. Don’t you agree that Japan has become a society where everything revolves around sex?” The story behind Spirited Away was said to symbolise the realities that young girls in Japan face today, emphasising Miyazaki’s feeling that Japan as a country had become too sexualised.
Renowned film critic Tomohiro Machiyama, who lives in America and runs a website called Film Critic Tomohiro Machiyama’s American Diary, went even further and looked at Yubaba, the owner of the bathhouse herself. He said, “Even Americans should be able to understand just by looking at her. I mean, Yubaba’s clothes are exactly like those of a madam running a 19th century Western brothel.”
There are rumours that Miyaza
ki once overheard a producer who said, “I heard that girls who aren’t very good with social situations change once they start working at cabaret clubs; it’s like training for opening up to the outside world.” It was there that Miyazaki began to grow the seeds that would turn into Spirited Away, his story written for young girls in a world where they have very little choice and often have to pay for the sins of their elders.
The true story behind My Neighbour Totoro
There are many hidden truths behind the popular Studio Ghibli movie My Neighbour Totoro. Have you heard of them before?
The first states that My Neighbour Totoro is based on a real life murder case. On May 1, 1963, a high school girl from Sayama City, Saitama Prefecture, was kidnapped, raped, and murdered. The crime came to be known as the “Sayama Incident.” There were many problems surrounding this case; the discrimination of burakumin living in the area, several police errors at the beginning of the investigation, and the mysterious suicide of a man who lived in the girl’s neighbourhood. The man convicted of her murder, a man from the discriminated burakumin community, to this day protests his innocence.
Toshiden: Exploring Japanese Urban Legends: Volume One Page 13