Toshiden: Exploring Japanese Urban Legends: Volume Two

by Tara A. Devlin

  Favourite Type

  The oldest living man in Japan was asked, “What type of woman do you like?”

  The man answered, “It must be older women, of course.”

  ABOUT

  This joke has been passed around for many years now, so long that in most cases the man’s name is never mentioned. The oldest man in question here actually refers to Izumi Shigechiyo, who died on February 21, 1986, just shy of turning 121 years old.

  He was initially verified as the oldest living person on Earth by Guinness World Records, but that title was withdrawn and given to Christian Mortensen when it came to light that Izumi might not have been as old as he claimed. According to Guinness World Records, the birth certificate Izumi submitted may have belonged to his brother and not him, making him 105 years old and not 120.

  Regardless of Izumi’s real age, he was a jovial old man and supposedly gave the above answer during an interview shortly before his death. These days it lives on as a popular joke, even if many may not remember who originally said it.

  Is That All You Can Do?

  A male university student had a habit of twiddling his thumbs. During his job interview he sat with his hands in his lap, rotating his thumbs around each other.

  The interviewer, irritated that the man was so fidgety, said to him, “Is that all you can do?”

  “No,” the man answered. “I can go the other way as well.” He started rotating his thumbs back in the other direction.

  Shortly after the interview, the man was offered a job.

  ABOUT

  For Japanese university students, shuukatsu season, or job hunting season, usually starts around October of their final year, a full six months before they’re expected to start work at the beginning of the business year in April. This is a stressful time, and each year it gets more and more difficult to secure full-time work. To get that elusive job offer you need to not only have the skills required, but you need to stand out from the crowd. Clearly the man’s literal interpretation of his interviewer’s question was enough to make him stand out, because he got the job.

  This legend has been around for well over a decade, with the earliest records I can find of it online coming from 2006. It’s no doubt been around for much longer, however, and it’s still a beloved joke shared online today.

  Hanage

  After being under discussion for several years, an international meeting has finally arrived at an answer to a long-held problem. That problem is “How to express pain in units.”

  Until now, there has been no accurate way to describe pain, and so a unit of measurement to do so has become a necessity. Finally, an agreement has been reached to accurately describe one’s pain levels.

  The unit of measurement is to be called “hanage” (nose hair). This measurement name was submitted for proposal by Japan. For this new measurement, pain can be measured as so: One hanage means it is equal in pain to removing one nose hair.

  With this, people can easily describe their pain levels in an understandable way.

  ABOUT

  As the legend states, hanage literally means “nose hair” in Japanese. Pain can be a difficult thing to describe, and it varies from person to person. Wouldn’t it be neat if there was a uniform measurement we could use to describe our pain?

  Rather than on a scale of one to ten, where one person’s “3” might be another person’s “9,” here we have a clear and straight-forward way of conveying how much pain you are in. One hanage is equal to one nose hair being pulled out. Everyone can imagine that, even if they’ve never done it themselves before. Two hanage is equal to two nose hairs being removed, and on and on it goes. 100 hanage is probably equal to the feeling of somebody’s head exploding from the inside, I imagine.

  This story is, of course, flagrantly false. Not only do we not measure pain in units of “hanage,” but there was no such meeting or proposal to begin with. This story was originally published on the joke website Yayuyo Kinen Zaidan on November 22, 1995. It was posted as literal fake news; a joke created by the website. However, in autumn of 1998, information from the fake article was taken and used in a chain letter that swiftly spread throughout the internet. As the letter (or in this case, email) continued to spread, an “official” source was added to give it more authenticity, claiming the information had come from the November 16 morning edition of The Nikkei newspaper.

  The chain emails slowly gathered new information as they were passed around. One of these changes included the name of the person who supposedly suggested that “hanage” be used as the official measurement of pain worldwide. There were two variations on who this was, however. One said it was a certain professor from the medical department of Hokkaido University. The university confirmed that nobody with such a name worked there. The other claimed it to be a professor from Muroran University… A university that doesn’t actually exist.

  The legend grew so large that in 2000, it found its way off the internet and celebrities such as Muroi Shigeru (who will show up in later legends in this book) spoke of their suspicions of the story being true. The story was also used for a segment of the variety show Takarajima no Chizu in December 2000, where they tried to come up with units of measurement for other things such as “evilness” or “fleetingness.”

  If you’re interested in checking the original article out, it still exists on the Yayuyo Kinen Zaidan website. It’s been made into a permanent link, perhaps in commemoration of the lofty heights it reached. You can find it at yayuyo.org/?p=9. The page is in Japanese, but it’s a small part of living internet history that you can still touch today, well over 20 years after the fact.

  Crime

  Lost Girl

  A man was driving along a mountain road one night when he saw a young girl run past. Confused, he soon saw a man come running as well.

  “Have you seen a young girl around here?” the man asked. Thinking he was the girl’s father, the driver pointed in the direction she had gone and continued on his way home.

  The next day, the driver heard on the news that there was a murder on the same mountain road he had been driving on the night before. The murderer was the man who asked him about the girl. The girl had, in fact, been trying to escape him.

  ABOUT

  This urban legend goes by various names, such as “Lost Girl,” “The Man Looking for the Girl,” or even “Girl on the Night Road.” The story is always the same, and possibly one you’re familiar with in your own country. A young girl is seen running in a place you would not expect to see (for example, a mountain road at night), and shortly thereafter a man appears asking about her. Innocent and unaware, the witness points the man in the direction and soon forgets about it. The next day he discovers the girl was murdered, and the man was not her father but a crazed criminal. Whoops.

  Stories of this legend have been circulating for several decades now. While the above version is one of the most popular told today, there is another version that sees a young woman, not a young girl, running down the mountain. In this case she’s covered in blood and the witness (or sometimes witnesses) think that she is a ghost and run from her. Then a man appears and informs them “I just hit a girl with my car. I turned away for just a second and she was gone. Have you seen her?” The end result is the same, but it’s thought that this particular version was actually the predecessor to the above.

  Around the early 2000s, variations started to claim that the man was actually Miyazaki Tsutomu, the Little Girl Murderer, and the girl he was chasing was his final victim. Others also placed the girl running towards Aokigahara Forest. This version is also quite popular in modern times, but given what we know about Miyazaki’s crimes, his victims, and how he was arrested, it’s unlikely this urban legend was created because of him, but rather that he was slotted into it after the fact because of the horrific nature of his crimes. Miyazaki’s final victim was murdered more than a month before his arrest. He lured her to his car where he then killed her and kept her until her body sta
rted to decompose. None of his crimes took place anywhere near Aokigahara, but considering that forest’s history, it’s not difficult to see why people would add that part to the story as well.

  Stalker

  A young woman who lived alone was being troubled by a stalker. Someone had been through her garbage, and a man was often seen standing in front of her house, staring at it. However, what bothered the girl most were the silent phone calls. Every day someone called her and then said nothing when she picked up.

  One day, at the end of her rope, the woman answered the phone and started screaming. “Leave me alone, you pervert! I’m calling the police!” Silence briefly filled the air, and then she heard a low, deep voice on the other end of the phone. “I’ll kill you.” Then the phone hung up.

  Scared, the woman immediately called the police. The detective who listened to her story told her he would come around and place a trace on her phone. “If anything happens, I’ll come right over,” he told her and then left.

  That night, the woman received another phone call as usual, only this time, it wasn’t silent. A man was laughing on the other end. The girl, scared, wanted to hang up immediately, but she did her best to stay on the line so the police could trace it. The man continued to laugh. What felt like forever seemed to pass, and then the girl got a call on her cell phone. It was the detective.

  “Listen closely,” he said, his voice nervous. “I want you to get out of the house right now.”

  But the woman couldn’t move. What if the man was waiting for her outside? Perhaps suspecting that was what she was thinking, the detective continued.

  “We have the results of the phone trace. The phone call is coming from inside your house. The criminal is inside your house!”

  Surprised, the woman hung up and ran. She could still hear the man’s laughter echoing throughout the house, even with the phone hung up…

  ABOUT

  Sound familiar? It should. It’s thought this urban legend is based on “The Babysitter,” a popular American legend which follows the same general plot. It also ends with the strange phone calls coming from the killer who is upstairs on the second floor, calling from inside the house. Babysitters aren’t a thing in Japan like they are in America, so the original story didn’t have as much appeal to a Japanese audience. By switching the babysitter to a regular young woman, and the criminal to a stalker, the story becomes more familiar for the Japanese to identify with and, once again, a legend is reborn.

  If You Had Turned on the Lights…

  A female university student was drinking at her friend’s apartment. When the party was over, the girl started walking home. She soon noticed that she had forgotten her phone at her friend’s place. She went back and rang the buzzer.

  There was no response.

  She turned the doorknob and realised it was unlocked, so she went inside. The lights were off, so she assumed her friend was already asleep. ‘How careless,’ the girl thought. She considered turning the lights on and waking her friend up, but she was pretty drunk at the party, so instead she fumbled around in the dark for her phone.

  “Just came back for my phone,” she said and then left once more.

  The next day, as the girl was passing by her friend’s apartment once more, she noticed a large number of police officers outside. When the girl heard what was going on, she was shocked. Apparently her friend had been murdered. Her apartment was a mess, and the police suspected it was a robbery.

  ‘If only I’d turned the lights on and woke her up to warn her to properly lock the door…’ The girl was filled with regret. She mentioned to one of the officers that she was in the apartment the night before. A detective then emerged and told her he had something he wanted her to see.

  “We found this message left inside the room. It’s been troubling us. Do you by chance happen to know anything about it?”

  The girl looked at the note and her face went pale.

  “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the lights?”

  The girl’s friend was already dead when she returned to get her phone, and the murderer was hiding in the room with her. If she had turned on the lights, then…

  ABOUT

  Once again, this is a familiar American urban legend that’s been slightly modified for a Japanese audience. While stories like this one, the phone call coming from within the house, and even the man under the bed have been around for quite some time, they are relatively recent stories to Japan. While America was developing a tradition of scary tales involving immediate, real-life threats, Japan was more focused on kaidan, or ghost stories. Kaidan went through a boom during the Edo Period, and that continued well into the 20th century. Ghosts were the monster of choice for the majority of scary stories, and it wasn’t until much later that these American legends started to infiltrate and find a new home.

  Some have suggested the reason these “evil men” were able to become popular in modern Japan was because of the growing crime rate and public unrest. In a country traditionally enamoured with the spiritual, these real-life monsters were able to break in and take root thanks to growing public unease. However, most stories needed to be adapted slightly to fit Japanese tastes, and make them more identifiable. With the spread of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, these stories became easy to copy, paste, and share with friends, becoming some of the earliest “copypastas” on the Japanese internet.

  Fake Police Officer

  One evening after work, a woman was waiting for the elevator at her apartment building. As it descended, she noticed a suspicious man hiding his face as he stepped out.

  The next morning, the woman was watching the news when she saw that a murder had taken place in her apartment building the night before. Around lunchtime, a single police officer came to her room trying to find out more information.

  “Yesterday evening, did you notice anyone suspicious around here?” he asked.

  The woman, remembering the strange man she saw get off the elevator, lied and said, “No, I didn’t see anything.” She didn’t want to deal with all the hassle of admitting she had seen someone.

  “Is that so?” the police officer said before leaving. “I’m glad there were no problems then.”

  A short while later, the woman saw on the news that the suspect had been arrested. When she saw the face on TV her blood ran cold.

  It was the police officer who had come to question her.

  ABOUT

  Also known as “Witness” or “Man on the Elevator,” This legend began to spread in 2003 after actress Muroi Shigeru spoke of it on the TV show Morita Kazuyoshi Hour Waratte Ii Tomo. It was also published in her book Anata ga Kowai Suppin Damashi 5 the same year. The story was told to her by her stylist and presented as a true story. Imada Koji, another TV personality, then shared the story with Matsumoto Hitoshi of comedic duo Downtown. Matsumoto in turn then shared the story on his TV show Downtown no Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahen De!, as well as his radio show Matsumoto Hitoshi no Housoushitsu. He presented the story as a Muroi’s actual experience, and many took him at his word. After passing through numerous celebrities and various types of media, a legend was born.

  This story was later picked up and recreated by shows like Yonimo Kimyou na Monogatari and in the manga Midnight. It was also featured in the manga Tokyo Densetsu, where a police officer went around warning people of a serial rapist, and it later turned out that the officer was the rapist.

  Variations of this legend include the man greeting the woman as he gets off the elevator, and in others she even notices blood on his shirt as he leaves. In some versions he comes inside her apartment to talk, in others they talk through the door. In some versions he is arrested the very next day, in others a few days later. Minor details change, but the main points remain the same.

  The original story was, of course, a work of fiction told to Muroi by her stylist. However, after being retold several times, as urban legends are wont to do, Muroi herself was disentangled from the story and i
t became a standard cautionary tale not to trust anyone, even police officers who show up at your door asking for help. After all, they might be criminals as well.

  As in other countries, police officers in Japan work in pairs, so if a single police officer shows up at your door then yes, you have every right to be suspicious. But in this case, a story is just a story, and there is no truth behind the legend.

  The Terrorist’s Gratitude

  A woman was walking down the street when she noticed a foreign man holding a map. He appeared to be lost. The woman approached him and asked where he was going. She gave him detailed directions and, in thanks, the man said something to her.

  “You are a very kind person. Let me repay your kindness. One week from now, you must not get on the subway. Okay?”

  With that, the man left. At first, the woman was confused, but she soon had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach and went to the police. The detective she spoke to turned pale and showed her a series of photos.

  “Is the man you saw in here?” he asked. Nervously the girl looked through the photos, and then she found the man she helped.

  “The people in these photos are terrorists,” the detective solemnly informed her.

  ABOUT

  This version of the legend first began to spread shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, when people’s fears of terrorist attacks were growing. The reason this particular story mentions a subway attack is likely because of how fresh the Tokyo sarin gas attack was in people’s minds. Initially, the man in the story was only referred to as a foreigner, but after the 2003 Iraq War broke out—which Japan was involved in—the foreigner was usually mentioned as an Arab or Islamic man as fears of retaliation grew. The target of the attack varied as well, from an airport to a railway to any number of large, public places, depending on the person telling the story.