Japan’s health ministry quickly made the amabie the face of their public campaign, and the little design was everywhere: on signs, masks, cookies, amulets, keychains, and many more items.
The most commonly recounted story of the amabie reportedly happened in mid-May 1846 in what is now Kumamoto Prefecture. At that time, a shining object kept surfacing at night offshore. A town official was told to go and investigate; when he did, he was alarmed to find the bewildering creature waiting for him on the beach. This luminous sea monster, with its long hair, thick beak, and scales running from its neck to the bottom of its three legs (or fins), introduced itself, saying, “I am an amabie and I live in the ocean. Good harvests will continue for six years, but soon plagues will spread. Please draw me and show that drawing to others.” The insinuation was that those who drew its likeness and motivated others to do the same would avoid the epidemic. The amabie then returned to the sea.
The town official did exactly as he was directed and reported the whole meeting and conversation, complete with a woodblock print of what the radiant sea monster looked like. This was published via kawaraban (瓦版), a single-sheet woodblock print that was used before newspapers to recount news, festivals, important current events, disasters, and even gossip. The town official’s depiction is usually used as the basis for the images you see today.
There is another version of the amabie, called an amabiko, that is more apelike and completely covered in hair. While it may not be as dazzling, it is rather adorable, with its bulbous nose and funny body shape.
The amabie and amabiko aren’t the only yōkai with portending abilities. They are just two of the several yogenjū (予言獣), or prophetic beasts. From the Edo era (1603–1867) to the Meiji era (1868–1912), epidemics like cholera, measles, smallpox, and the flu plagued Japan, killing many and, on occasion, decimating the population. During these times, there was a rise in the appearances of yogenjū.
Aside from the amabie, there were two other mermaid-type yogenjū who foretold the state of future crops as well as impending rampant disease. The first one was called the jinja-hime (神社姫), which literally means “shrine princess” (see the Ningyo entry for a story about her). She was a 20-foot-long (6-meter) serpentine beastie with the face of a woman, two horns, and a vermillion-colored belly. She announced that she was a messenger of Ryūjin (龍神), the dragon god who lives under the sea in his dragon palace, called Ryūgū-jō (see the Ryū entry for more about dragons).
The second was the hime-uo (姫魚), which literally translates to “princess fish.” She first appeared in 1819 in Hirado, Hizen Province (now Nagasaki Prefecture) a couple of years before the first case of cholera broke out. She also looked like a mermaid, with black hair, horns, and a woman’s face—but she was all fish from the neck down. Similarly, she predicted good harvests for seven years and the cholera epidemic. She advised people to draw and share her likeness, then she vanished under the waves. She was also a messenger from Ryūgū-jō, the dragon palace.
If the jinja-hime and hime-uo sound a lot alike to you, you’re correct. You can tell the difference, though, because the jinja-hime is longer and more snakelike, with a bright red underbelly, whereas the hime-uo is shorter and has a golden body that resembles a fish.
Then—not fishlike at all and unrelated to the sea—there are the kudan and kutabe. Often believed to be born from cows, these two make their divine forecasts speaking human language and then die soon after. The kudan (件) has the face of a human and the body of a cow. It showed up in 1836 in Kyoto forecasting something similar to what the other prophetic beasts foretold: There would be some great harvests but also a terrible disease. But it said that if people hung up its image, their families would be safe, and their fields would be bountiful. There have been quite a few sightings of the kudan, where it foresees everything from crop failures to droughts to war and, of course, sickness.
A second human-faced bovine, and a variant of the kudan, is the kutabe (クタべ). It turned up toward the end of the Edo era in Tateyama, Toyama Prefecture, stating that a difficult disease of unknown cause would spread, but those who saw the kutabe would be saved. Some say kutabe is just kudan pronounced in a different dialect. But unlike the kudan, the kutabe never predicted bumper crops.
Both the kudan and the kutabe most likely derived from a Chinese mythical creature called the bai ze, or hakutaku (白沢) in Japanese. This is yet another human-faced, beast-bodied yōkai. This one, though, has three eyes on its head, three on each side of its body, and six horns. It was considered extremely lucky, and its image in charms and talismans was also distributed during the Edo era (see the Baku entry for another mythical beast based off the hakutaku).
The amabie can be seen in GeGeGe no Kitarō, both the manga and the anime, as well as Yo-kai Watch and the trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh!, where it’s super kawaii and colorful, with long blue hair and starry anime eyes.