This is my substory for the school newspapers October issue. We focused on halloween and horror stuff, I am a fucking weeb- have been for years- so I wrote about two japanese urban legends. I was gonna do Asia in general, maybe one from Singapore or something, but the video i remembered watching as a kid was japanese only, and the top ten lists of Asian urban legends are very... well theyre not how I remember them being back in 2017. I wrote so much we could barely fit it on the page! Had to be in 11pt font. I think thats enough introduction lmao, heres my first ever newspaper article.
Autumn, the leaves are falling, campfires are lit, and with campfires there are two guarantees- marshmallows and scary stories. Scaring people around the fire is universal, every culture has at least a handful of urban legends, and Japan is no different.
Okiku’s doll
Okiku’s doll is a doll whose hair keeps growing, the story starts in 1918, but apparently the story only came out in 1970 when the Hokkaido newspaper covered the doll and its backstory. The legend has since become popular and minor aspects of the story have changed, but it goes something like this.
In 1918, Ekichi Suzuki, who was 17, took a trip to Sapporo for a marine exhibition. While he was there, he bought a doll for his little sister. It wore a beautiful kimono and had an okappa hair style, which is similar to a bob with bangs. When he brought the doll home his little sister loved it, Kikuko (sometimes referred to as Okiku) brought it with her everywhere, she even slept with it at night. Unfortunately, the next year she fell terribly ill, dying at only 3 years old because of a bad cold. The family decided to display the doll on an alter to remember her and pray. As the weeks went on, they started to notice the dolls hair growing. Okiku’s restless spirit had possessed or gotten trapped in the doll, causing her hair to grow. In 1938 the family had to move, and entrusted the doll to the care of the Mennenji Temple in Hokkaido, where her hair has continued to grow, and the monks that care for the temple have made sure to keep trimming her hair.
Okikus doll still stands in the temple today. some say that scientists have tested trimmings of her hair and found it to be real human hair, others say that the temple won’t let anyone take the doll to test it, and no one is allowed to take pictures. But some say that her mouth is slowly opening and if you look closely, you can see her new teeth growing.
Futakuchi-onna
Futakuchi-onna, also known as the two mouthed woman, is a Japanese yokai, or supernatural creature. The Futakuchi-onna is a woman who has two mouths, her normal mouth and a mouth, hidden behind her hair on the back of her head. The mouth is insatiable, constantly hungry, it eats double what the woman would eat normally. The mouth whispers cruel things to the woman, threatening her and demanding food. If she doesn’t feed it the mouth will shriek, causing the woman horrible pain. The mouth can also use her hair as tendrils to feed itself.
The reason the mouth develops varies, some say they’re Yama-uba (meaning mountain witch), another yokai, who disguises herself as a young woman to feed the mouth. Or they’re women who are cursed for taking poor care of their children- especially stepchildren. But the most common reason is that the mouth develops when a woman doesn’t eat enough.
In one story a miser marries a woman who doesn’t eat, because he could either barely afford food or because he was stingy and didn’t want too. After they marry and are living together portions of the rice go missing, despite never seeing his wife eat. One day he pretends to leave for work so that he can spy on his wife, to see if she had been eating the rice. After he ‘leaves’ she lets her hair down, revealing a large mouth on the back of her head, lips and teeth and all, it uses her hair as tendrils, using them to shovel rice balls into the maw. What happens after he sees this varies, in one he plans on divorcing her, but she finds out. She traps him in a bathtub and carries him to the mountain, but he manages to escape, hiding in a lily marsh so she wouldn’t be able to find him. In another he freaks out and she notices him, using the tendrils to choke him to near death, but he also manages to escape.
In another story a woman who had a child from another marriage, marries a man who also already had a child, making her a stepmother. She feeds her own child very well, but barely feeds her stepchild, leading to her starving to death. A month and a half later she gets a horrible migraine, the back of her head splits open, with teeth, lips, and mouth form. It constantly ached until shed feed it, when it screams and speaks to her it’s the voice of her stepchild, and she suffers the hunger pangs her stepchild would suffer.