part0021

Although the Japanese are enthusiastic tourists today, their xenophobic past is still reflected by an urban legend they tell.

I got this one from Professor Robert Bethke of the University of Delaware, who came across it in a folklore term paper written by Sachiko Shudo, a Japanese-born student there. Shudo recounts the legend as she heard it from a cousin:

“A Japanese newlywed couple went to Europe for their honeymoon. In Paris, the wife spent hours shopping for clothes. At one trendy boutique, she wanted to try on several dresses. So the husband waited outside the dressing room.

“A long while passed and the wife didn’t come out. So the husband began to wonder what was keeping her. He inquired of one of the shopgirls; she checked, then told him, to his surprise, that the dressing room was empty.

“His initial reaction was that his wife was playing a practical joke on him. So he went back to their hotel. But she was not there. Still thinking it a joke, he sat down to wait for her.

“As the hours passed, he became more and more anxious. And when she had not returned by the following morning, he was distraught. He called the police, the boutique, and all the Paris hospitals. There was no trace of her anywhere.

“The police did what they could, but after three weeks, there wasn’t a single clue. Exhausted and in despair, the husband returned to Japan.

“Five years passed. And then the husband, finally having gotten over the loss of his wife, received a phone call from a friend who had just returned from a trip to the Philippines. The friend told him that he had seen the wife in Manila—as the featured attraction of a freak show.

“When the husband asked how his beautiful bride could possibly be exhibited this way, the friend explained, with great sadness, that her arms and legs had been mutilated.”

How was the wife removed from the dressing room?

In one variation, Shudo says, the wife is kidnaped through a trap door in the dressing-room floor. In another, the setting is a restaurant in New York City, and the bride is abducted in a restroom.

Why does this story appeal to the Japanese? Shudo points out that the country has only one race of people, who for centuries were intentionally isolated from the rest of the world. While the isolationism has passed, distrust of foreigners may linger.

Shudo mentions a Japanese children’s song called “The Red Shoes,” which was popular in the years before World War II. One line goes, “A girl wearing red shoes was taken away by an ijinsan [foreigner].”

Also, Shudo says, Japanese parents customarily discipline their children by telling them that they will be sold to a circus if they don’t behave. Circuses in Japan are run by foreigners, Shudo says, and most of them do have freak shows.

I would add to these speculations that the mention of the Philippines as the place where the mutilated bride is found may reveal the tellers’ antagonism toward Filipinos (Japanese forces occupied the Philippines during the war). Or it may reveal their guilty feelings.

Tourist horror tales like this one are told elsewhere, of course. The one I’ve heard most often describes a woman traveler, usually from Scandinavia or the United States, who disappears from her tour group while traveling in Turkey. Several days later her clothes turn up at a bazaar in Istanbul. What has happened to the woman is never discovered.

Another one describes a couple backpacking in the Far East. One morning, according to the story, they are found dead in their sleeping bags; their heads have been cut off and switched with each other.