From The Slit-Mouthed Woman to Kisaragi Station, looking back on the transformation of urban legends and society in the Showa and Heiwa periods.
From The Slit-Mouthed Woman to Kisaragi Station, looking back on the transformation of urban legends and society in the Showa and Heiwa periods.
(original 27th December 2019)
Previously, strange and scary stories would be passed by word of mouth as plausible ‘This really happened nearby’ stories. Nowadays though, they are spread via the internet. A folklorist explains the background of these ‘urban legends’ and how they came to be and the change in society that can be seen through them.
A young boy is passed by an unknown woman wearing a mask and is asked: ‘Am I pretty?’. When the frightened boy answers ‘yes’, the lady says ‘even now?’ and removes her mask. Her mouth has been slit from ear to ear. Even across different generations, most Japanese have heard the story of the Slit-Mouthed Woman (Kuchisake Onna). In recent years this Japanese-made horror story has become famous abroad, too.
‘The Slit-Mouthed Woman is in all likely-hood the first urban legend that originated purely in Japan.’ says Professor Yoshiyuki Iikura who researches folklore at Kokugakuin University. How exactly did urban legends like The Slit-Mouthed Woman originated and how have they changed over the years?
The Slit-Mouthed Woman was a report of a suspicious person
According to Professor Iikura, around the end of 1978 in Yaotsu City (it is suspected), Gifu Prefecture, there was a rumour that an older farmer woman saw a lady with a mouth slit from ear to ear standing in the corner of her garden. ‘Beginning in 79, this rumour was reported in the Gifu Nichinichi Newspaper and from then children began to spread this and it became exaggerated. For example, she was wearing a mask, or a red coat. She was holding a sickle or could even run 100 metres in 6 seconds. She hated pomade and would spare you if you gave her a boiled sweet’.
In half a year, the rumour of the Slit-Mouthed Woman spread from Gifu to Aomori and Kagoshima prefectures. ‘The reason for this was that the number of children attending cram school at the time had increased. Until then, there weren’t many rumours that crossed the boundaries of individual schools. At cram schools though, students from various schools gathered and so the children would say ‘This happened at my school’, ‘Wow, that’s scary. It’ll probably come to mine, too’ and the stories were then spread in other schools. They were passed to relatives over the phone too and then ended up being reported in other newspapers or on TV.
To children, The Slit-Mouthed Woman was the object of fear and mystique. ‘As cram schools began in the evening, when they ended the children were dismissed into the night as a group and would see types of adults that they had never seen before. Women who were heading to their night jobs or those who were hideously drunk. There was a worry that amongst them, there would be those who would hurt you and this fear was projected upon The Slit-Mouthed Woman.’
‘In the beginning, teachers and parents were worried too and so measures like patrols and leaving the schools in groups were implemented. Around the beginning of the summer holidays of 79, the rumours quietened down. However, that intense character remained in people’s memory and had established itself as one of Japan’s monsters.
The first boom was the media’s focus on the youth’s word of mouth
The word ‘Toshi Densetsu’ (urban legend) was introduced to Japan in 1988 in a translated publication of Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand’s work ‘The Vanishing Hitchhiker’ (1981). The translation was done by keen young researchers at in Japan at the time with the intention to cause a stir in the world of folklore research which, until then had only focused on old forms such as folktales and legends. Instead of those, they dug into the background of present-day stories and rumours and how they are in modern cities.In the latter half of the 1970s when the story of The Slit-Mouth Woman spread, the economic structure of Japan was changing and it was the period when the city lifestyle was being spread across Japan, via infrastructures such as television, cars and telephones that were being laid out across the country.
Brunvand coined the term ‘urban legend’ to describe these new stories that apparently happened to a friend of a friend in an urban setting. Stories like a hitchhiker being a ghost, or a serial killer being under your bed, for example. The ghost hitchhiker story is a theme that can be traced back to the 1800s during the period of horse drawn carriages. On top of the change toward a society with cars, development of new media, transmission of these stories accelerated. For example, stories being read in a newspaper column, or heard on the radio were begun to be conveyed as if they had occurred in a small town and across the USA, these stories would have characteristics of each state added to them and then were spread like that.
‘In Japan in the 80s, attention was drawn to the word-of-mouth stories of the youth. In ice-cream shops such as Hobsons or Baskin Robbins, stories would spread in the queues such as ‘Boston/Club bags are all the rage now’ or ‘A strange phenomena is suddenly killing middle and high schoolers.’ Within middle schools and high schools in the capital, stories about something popular spread in the blink of an eye. In the background, family restaurants and convenient stores were established and high schoolers and university students begun to get part time jobs and had extra money to spend. As Japan was heading toward its bubble economy, the spending power of children including middle schoolers increased, too.
A representative of successful marketing was Lotte’s biscuit snacks ‘Koala March’. There was a rumor, spread by word of mouth of female high schoolers that ‘If you find a Koala with eyebrows, it’s your lucky day.’ Hearing this, Lotte decided to increase the number of designs of koala and as such, welcomed it’s 35th year as long-time best seller in 2019.
‘Other rumors circulating at the same time were that if you touched the postman character’s red loincloth on the Sagawa Post delivery truck, you would be happy, or that if a couple were to ride the boat on the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park, they would break up. Magazines and such compiled these rumours and published them into a special urban legend publication.’ The writers gathered these types of stories and intentionally exaggerated them to create a buzz. An example of this was the Human-Faced Dog introduced in the popular Pop Teen magazine. It was said that it spoke like a human, had the face of a middle-aged man, and could chase a car that was going over 100kmph.
‘These urban legends reached the peak of their popularity at the beginning of the Heisei Era in the start of the 90’s and suddenly fell silent by 1995. With the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the Underground Sarin Gas attacks by Aumu Shinrikyoku, this wasn’t a time for ghost stories. Ghost stories weren’t picked up by the media at all.’
The Second Boom Lead by Scary Stories Formulated on the Internet.
As we entered the 21st century, urban legends were once again reborn lead by the popularity of the internet. ‘The first wave was the stories and rumors told by children being picked up and made popular by media outlets like TV and magazines. From the year 2000, plain text sites were in their heyday and blogs were also a trigger. Blogs collecting the older urban legends became popular and these stories finally became novelized. Since then, books about urban legends have been published continually. It was nostalgic for those who were university students at the time, and those who didn’t follow the craze at the time began to pay attention and enjoy it again.’
Again, stories that appeared on 2channel were picked up by magazines and tv and became new urban legends. Stories like Kune Kune, a sinister white thing found in the country by children in a rice paddy, Kotoribako, a cursed box and Yasaka, a female monster over 2 metres in height became well known. ‘Most of these were stories that were longer than could be told orally. These stories began to be created one after the other on the internet.’
From around 2010, stories focused around social media began to appear. Amongst them, Kisaragi Station had spread from 2channel to Twitter and was passed on for about 10 years. This started as a post on 2channel saying ‘I took a train from Shin Hamamatsu Station. It was the same train that I always commute on but we’ve arrived at an abandoned station that I’ve never heard of. What should I do?’. Posts poured into this post veiled as a consultation, and the story continued.
‘If the story became long enough, someone would create a ‘summary site’, that would once again be passed around. Written in a pseudo-voice, it gives the impression that this was an actual conversation that happened at that place. Connecting the real-time conversations, it became an urban legend. This was characteristic of the 2nd wave of urban legends on the internet. There were now lots of horror stories again. There was also the desire to take part in dare games such as ones called “Ghost Experience”, “Touch the Mysteries of the world”.’
To compare to the previous urban legends that were centred around word-of-mouth, the stories spread through a digital channel were of both extremes. In some, the development of the story didn’t change at all, but in others, they changed wildly. ‘As the word-of-mouth stories were told from memory every time, even if the details changed a bit, the main plot of the story did not change. In the case of those on the internet, you can copy and paste the whole thing, but if you wanted to change it, you could do so as much as you pleased. As you can spread the story instantly, physical distance didn’t matter at all. It also sped up the introduction of these stories abroad, too.’
After the year 2000, The Slit-Mouthed Lady too, begun to attract attention abroad through the internet. For example, in South Korea it had different characteristics like the woman wearing a red mask amongst others. ‘In places like Okinawa, Taiwan, South Korea and China it is said that demons can only proceed in a straight line, so in South Korea, the Slit-Mouthed Woman was said to be unable to turn corners, or even climb stairs. There was also a story saying that she had a slit-mouthed boyfriend with a shaved head. Once these urban legends are introduced to urbanised countries, features are added bit by bit in order to fit in with the culture of the country.’
Websites becoming echo-chambers and fake news
During the second wave of urban legends, performers making urban legends an art appeared. ‘An example of this was around 2006, when former comedian Akio Seki became popular.’ Originally, variety shows had a segment in which entertainers would introduce urban legends which gather attention. The phrase ‘Whether you believe it or not is up to you’ became famous and even now ‘Overdone Urban Legends’ is still active on tv shows or available to see live.
Recently, a popular youtuber who make videos verifying Urban Legends has been gaining attention. ‘For example there is a story called The Elevator to Another World. This story says that if you ride an elevator alone in a building with more than 10 floors and push the buttons in a specific order, you will be able to go to another world. This youtuber tries it out himself.’
The previous urban legends on the level of ‘I heard through a friend of a friend’ were told as if they realy happened somewhere close to home are being spread much faster and to a wider area in the digital age, much like a popular game would. However in recent days the number of urban legends that reach that many people are beginning to decrease, says Iikura.
‘The reason is that many websites have become echo chambers. There is a noticeable trend for people who view a website to be gathered with those whose opinions are aligned with them and these groups do not mix with others. Also, there is an increase in the number of people who, without debating the authenticity, believe the things that they are interested in and reject the things that they aren’t. The fun that was previously present in the ambiguity of whether something was true or not, is not no longer recognised.’
Nowadays, political methods that project our worries and anxieties onto real-life counterparts are being used around the world, sighs Iikura. ‘The subjects are illegal immigration, China, South Korea or even Japan. In projecting these anxieties onto The Slit-Mouthed Woman or ghosts, there is a feeling of security that comes from the assumption that a real person wouldn’t do that sort of thing. I feel that globally, the breeding ground for these urban legends is being lost. It’s likely that with this feeling of obstructing being felt globally, there is a desire to cling onto something certain, amidst this vague sense of unrest. Within that, it is ironic that there is an increase to the number people who cling to the false information and fake news that researchers like to call Urban Legends.’
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