Yuru-chara: Japanese Mascots, Part 2

about the origins of the Urukira concept. Rob shared some of his experiences with these characters on a recent trip to Japan, and we talked about a couple of our favorite examples, including the Kuma Moto mascot, a real megastar called Kuma Man, which looks like a bear but apparently is not a bear. You'll listen to the episode you'll understand, and then the more obscure park associated mascot Hako Geo. And we're back today to talk about some more.

me and my family were big Studio Ghibli fans. Of course, we made our way to visit Ghibli Park during our trip to Japan, so we spent two nights in Nagoya to do so, and while traveling on the Nagoya Municipal Subway, we frequently encountered helpful signs that featured its mascot, its official mascot, Hatchi Hatchi is well, I would say to the uninformed guidjin I Hatshi is a humanoid uniform Nagoya City subway employee, but his head is a golden fish

with a human cartoon face, complete with fins on the side and an upward cresting tail on the back of the head.

and shachi actually apparently means orca in Japanese. Now, the origins of this mythical creature ex seemingly extend back through Chinese and Vedic influences, namely connecting to the chai Win and the Makara in those different mythologies, both creatures that were often used as rooftop guardian sculptures, so comparable in some ways to like a gargoyle in the West. Okay, though some sources still when talking about the shatshi, go

with more of a literal. This was modeled after a killer whale, but, as we often discussed in The show Man, are generally born of like multiple reference points, there can be a lot of different things going on when a monaster has created wholesale or when it you know, makes the journey from one culture into another, and then add you know, one hundred two hundred years or more on

top of that, uh huh. So the sashi joko, this golden fish with upturned tail is frequently found as a traditional Japanese architectural flourish, so great golden fish upward tail, generally gleaming gold in appearance, and traditionally employed as a

means of supernatural fire prevention. Because the mythical fish here was said to hold water in its belly and it could control the rain, So you know, you can think of this as an invocation of a protective spirit while you're doing other things as well, of course, to try and keep fires from getting out of hand and burning down buildings or districts.

always a possibility. So I imagine you could also make a case for employing a mythological creature associated with fire prevention against subway fires or maybe more generally, against unwanted safety related scenarios in general. You know, like it's employed on buildings as a protective spirit to help protect against like sort of worst case scenarios. And likewise, in the subway, our friend here than the mascot hot sheet, is here to help.

The answer is it's Funasi, the unofficial mascot of Funabashi Chiba. Now, you might wonder, unofficial, how does a city end up with an unofficial mascot? So I was reading about in a couple of blog posts, one on a Kawhi culture site called you May Twins and also on the Mondo Mascots blog, Rob, I think you name dropped this one in the last episode in you.

salaryman or Edo period merchant. He's wearing typical clothing for the period and glasses. And I have to agree it is It is not a thrilling design. It's also not even super cute. It's just like an adult guy.

while participating in a luchador exhibition in Mexico in twenty sixteen. Now, for whoever's writing this character's sort of backstory, As we mentioned in the last episode, a lot of these mascot characters have more extensive personal histories and backstory reason sort of storylines then you might expect. You know, we talked last time about the ones that were falling in love with each other and all that stuff. We uh, But but so this one really likes getting into extreme experiences

and you know, the loud headbanging and all that. And I wonder if that is in fact a reaction to the fact that this character filled the void of a character who was perceived to be too boring.

out there. I mean, I don't think he's having official matches, he's getting out there.

Maybe it's a piece of fruit with a stem poking off. And then oh, also so if his head and body is an upturned clay flower flower pot, he has two legs underneath that are right side up clay flower pots of a smaller size, and then sort of a green loin cloth. That that's what I get.

belt in his mascot form. And then that black apparatus on the top of his head, well, that's those are the upper extremes of the the television tower itself.

in parent or teacher, you know, father television. And it also reminds me of that old Simpson's line from Treehouse of Horror Television teacher mother, secret lover.

But basically, this is a large, slightly scary, purple and pink creature with a single glowing eye with a yellow pupil, and he lives in the gap in the subway stations.

so his mission here is. And there are a lot of I think objectively cute signs warning people of all ages, but especially children, about the dangers of closing doors and the gap on Japanese trains and subways, So Gaijen may be more used to you know, mere mind the gap and watch for the closing doors announcements, but Japanese subway

and train systems are generally more proactive on this. Oftentimes there are automatic gates in front of the gap that help you know, that help make sure that people are not getting too close, And then you have initiatives like this, And yeah, I love him because Sukima Morey isn't just a cute lax fellow to make you feel chill about public transportation. He is very cute, but he could also be mistaken for one of the darker Pokemon. Perhaps you

know some of the ghost types. But again, his whole deal is about reminding you of the dangers of the gap, so he needs to be a little bit scary, even if he is not malicious. Like, I want to be clear, Sukima Moury is not here to grab your children and pull them into the gap.

get go. And he was created by j R. West Railways, again largely a serve as a reminder for children and adults and parents, kind of a nursery bogie, you know, to scare kids away from the danger zone. And this was in response to apparently troubling stats at the time about gap related accidents with kids. So you know, there was a real reason to roll out this mascot. It wasn't just a situation where wouldn't it be cool if

we had a cute mascot. This again seemed to have been a very mission first scenario.

treasure trove. He loves declaires, So you know, you do have some just sort of like neutral information about him, and we can we can relate to that.

So again, it would be unfair to Classifyzukimamori as a malevolent force, but he's at least adjacent to dangerous realities and as such, you know, he reminds me a bit of past discussions of things like Jenny Green Teeth and indeed, like the Kappa, you know, a superstitious supernatural monster to warn people away from water related dangers, and in this case, it's it's subway oriented.

guy and some interesting reactions to him. But he's doing good work, so I applaud him.

We're always trying to drag him in from different parts of the world, and it is, but it is often observed that Japanese culture offers a particularly powerful trifecta of cultural influences that may help us understand some of the energy underlying the appeal of their mascots, of their hero

ki era. You know, why are they such a big deal compared to other parts of the world that also have cute, you know, imaginary beings that may be invoked in various ad campaigns and public awareness and typical mascot work and so forth. And on one hand, there is certainly and this is you know, sit in a lot a lot of sources we're looking at. There is the polytheistic nature of Japan's Shinto religion and the presence of supernatural kami in all things in Shintoism. So this absolutely

can't be overlooked. You know. It's it's a traditional worldview in which there are multiple supernatural agents of power that can reside in pretty much anything that's very sort of like fast and loose. There's a lot more to Shintoism than that, but basically, like in terms of like the key points we might reference in understanding something as far far more simple as Japanese mascots. Essentially, you can look

at that Shintoism as one possible leg of understanding them culturally. Now, I think we do have to also be careful here not to other the situation too much, because while there does seem to be a uniquely Japanese emphasis in play here, we can of course point to the coexistence of various mythic, folkloric, and otherwise at least supernatural adjacent beings in various cultures, regardless of the dominant religion or religions in that culture,

and beings from outside traditions have a way of working their way into even those religions, at least into the periphery. Okay, So there's Shintoism, and then, as we we've already referred to several examples of this, but they're also the yokai, which we've discussed in greater detail on the show before, a catch all for various monsters, supernatural phenomenon and ghosts. Though yuri, which are more in line with the haunting ghosts of Western tradition, are kind of their own separate category.

Yokai ghosts are kind of they're more in line with this idea of kami and that they're they're everywhere, and they might be just completely neutral to humans, or they might be a little bit mischievous. It just depends. So you know, we've talked about them before. They occur in various places throughout one's daily life, according to the traditions, often associated with things such as bathrooms, restaurant, kitchens, alleys,

and so forth. And there's a very strong case to be made that the Pokemon as well owe a lot of their popularity to these traditions. And various Pokemon are directly based on yokai, and some yokai and some Pokemon are also uukiara, so you know, it's all kind of interconnected. I should also know that we've discussed sukumogami on the show before, household objects that are thought to become animant

through age and Japanese traditions. There seems to be this slide towards personification, which of course ties into the very basic human tendency to identify human like qualities and animals, plants, and various inanimate or even non corporeal things. I think sometimes examples like this from another culture just give us

the distance to recognize the larger global phenomena. Uh huh. Also, kind I'm going to present as kind of like the third leg of the tripod here potentially to understand eurokiara as and this also ties into just sort of cuteness

in general in kawai. But as Eddie yl Chang points out in the twenty eighteen article, let the Eurokiara do the job, there's also this long standing popularity of small things in Japanese culture, particularly the small sculpture art form of netsuki, combined with long standing appreciation for animal forms and cute things in general.

sculptures like netsuki. Specifically regarding the one leg of the tripod here of yokai, I wanted to come back to something from an essay that I mentioned in part one. So and the last time I talked about the essay about Kumaman the bear or not Bear Yurukyara of the Kumamoto Prefecture. This essay was called Kumaman, Japan's surprisingly cheeky mascot. That was in a book called Introducing Japanese Popular Culture

three from Rutledge, edited by Elisa Friedman. The essay was by Deborah j Ochi, and this part that I'm about to mention was in the context of a paragraph talking about how urukia are sometimes deployed by authorities after large, frightening public events. One big example is the March twenty eleven earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear incident at Fukushima, after which Ochi says that the number of mascots in Japan increased, as did the perception of their healing power for the people.

And I've also read that the figure of Kumaman specifically was widely used to comfort the public after the devastating twenty sixteen Kumamoto earthquakes. So there's a sense that part of the role, part of the cultural role of these like these sort of cute, positive informal characters, is that they help people feel better after a tragic event. On the topic of linking kumaman to pre existing yokai, here's

the quote I wanted to discuss Ochi writes quote. During the COVID nineteen pandemic, yurukiara were again mobilized across the linguistic landscape, appearing on public notices and backdrops for televised official announcements. Kumaman occasionally appeared along with his Kumamoto ancestor Amabi, a folkloric yokai spirit associated with pandemic relief who was also widely used. So I had to learn more about this Amabi, and I did so by consulting the Book

of Yokai by the folklorist Michael Dylan Foster. I've talked about this book before on the show. He is a scholar currently affiliated with UC Davis, and the section on the Amabi, I think it's from the expanded recent edition of the book. So, according to Foster, the earliest image we have of this yokai is printed on a kawaraban

broadsheet from the year eighteen forty six. Now, kooraban means tile block printing, and it was a type of media similar to a newspaper or a tabloid, considered very ephemeral, so printed roughly on cheap paper, with the idea that it would be read once and then tossed away, and it was used in the Edo period for reporting major news events and for reporting official announcements, but also on scandals, rumors,

and gossip, including things of a supernatural character. So you might read about the effects of a recent typhoon, you might read about the siege of a castle or a murder in the city. But also you might read about a ghost woman who turned into a giant spider.

off of a present day Kumamoto Prefecture. When a local official went out to take a look, something like what is in the picture here appeared and said, I live in the sea and am called Amabi. For the next six years, there will be abundant harvests throughout the provinces, but disease will spread. So make haste to copy an image of me and show it to the people. So saying it returned back into the sea. And Rob, I've included here a photograph of this broadsheet, including the illustration.

So this is the first representation of the Amabi and the text that showed up next to it. Now, I was thinking, man, the face really reminds me of something, but I was not able to figure out what it was. Robin the notes you figured out what it was it was reminding me of. But the Amabi is a three legged Avian mermaid. So it's got a bird's beak, a diamond diamond shaped eyes, though we can usually only see one of its eyes because its head is turned in profile.

It's got long hair reaching down to her feet, and of which there are three by the way. She has three feet, three toes on each foot, and a body covered in shingled rounded scales like a fish. But I was trying to think, what does the face remind me of? And you got it exactly what is it?

I'm assuming I'm picturing a boat trip sees this three legged avan mermaid with a beak. It says, I live in the sea. I'm called a mobbi. You're gonna have six years of good harvests, but you are also going to have an epidemic of deadly disease. Share my picture with people and the implicate that I read into it here, and I think what it is meant is that sharing the image will prevent the disease from spreading. And then

finally the yokai goes back underneath the waves. Now, Foster writes that this is the first written record we have of belief in the Amabi, but there is a very similar being that slightly precedes it, called the Amabiko or sometimes Amahiko, which appears in at least eleven documents from the eighteen forties through the eighteen eighties, and Foster cites a folklore scholar named Yumoto Koichi who argues that these are actually the same creature and that Amabi is simply

a transcription error of the word amabiko that caught on and then got copied done the line. So possibly the same, possibly different, but in either case they're very similar creatures. What's the deal with the amabiko? Some are said to rise out of the sea, others appear in the mountains, but they tend to give similar predictions and warnings to

what we heard in the first story. For example, there's an eighteen forty four story of an amabiko that appears in the Bay of Echigo and says disease is gonna spread and seven out of ten people in Japan are going to die. But if you look at a picture of me, you will be spared. And then rob I've attached a picture of what the amabiko looks like in this eighteen forty four document. Different kind of look more like a three legged black octopus dolphin.

their very simple drawing of a strange creature. And it's just it's more like, know that I exist, see what I look like, and that will give you an advantage against disease.

with two horns. She predicts both seven years of plenty, but also the spread of a deadly disease, a named disease in this case called koori, and if you draw her picture and share it with everyone you know, they will be spared. There's another one called the hime Uo, which is said in an Edo based tale to have

emerged off the coast of the island of Hirado. And interesting detail here, Foster writes, quote Hirado might have been selected as the location for the hime Uo because it was a distant, marginal location and also a region historically associated with foreign ships and traders, and thus a gateway for both prosperity and potential disease.

and show it to everyone you know. And these are categorized by some scholars such as Eumoto Koichi as yoginju or prophecy beasts, and Foster talks about the many different kinds of motivations somebody might have to spread a story like this. On one hand, it could just be a desire to excite and entertain the reader, you know, it's kind of like an interesting, entertaining story. In some cases, it could be a simple desire to sell broad sheets.

In some cases, it could be a genuine desire to give people the hope of protection in the face of frightening, uncontrollable forces like infectious disease.

an optimism to it. There's a hope intrinsic in the design of the creature that is giving me this information.

But after news of COVID nineteen first began to spread in early twenty twenty, the image of the amabi surged in popularity on the Internet. Foster mentions several posts on Twitter from February and even one at the end of January twenty twenty that included renderings of the amabi communicated the lore that we've just talked about, and I think jokingly encouraged the proliferation of its image as a protective

measure against infection. And while it's pretty clear to me that most of these posts had a spirit of irony about them, like the use of the amabi was sort of meant as kidding, the amabi really caught on as a symbol of defense and vigilance against the virus both

virtually and in physical media and consumer culture. So there was like a viral Twitter hashtag called Amabi Challenge where people posted alongside they posted the hashtag along with like images of homemade renderings of the merd bird, and the Amabi imagery was also used on all kinds of products, from like keychains, t shirts, tote bags, to rice crackers

and beer. There were actual invocations of the Amabi in public religious rituals and prayer, and then eventually the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare officially produced an Amabi logo warning people that they could spread COVID nineteen without realizing it and advising people to take measures to limit exposure.

read a passage from Foster here. Foster writes, quote the Amabi's sudden rise exemplifies the eloquent adaptability of yokai, with perfect ease and no contradiction. The Amabi straddles life and death concerns like COVID nineteen and lighthearted fun t shirts and beer, vernacular creativity, individuals circulating their own versions and institutional promotion a government icon, heartfelt belief in religious ceremonies,

and rampant commodification in charms and key chains. So he notes that this kind of goes along with the fact that beliefs about yokai seem to thrive in the context of uncertainty, as like a way of coping with mysterious threats and questions that can't be answered or can't yet

be answered. I think we can all recall those like early months of the pandemic when there was just like so much uncertainty and we just didn't you know, there's just like so much not knowing what to do, and so the beliefs of this kind sort of provide people

a sense of control in some way. And while the traditional apotropaic use of the amabi image may have been interpreted as like literally efficacious in protecting against disease back in the day, the way I'm reading it is that I think the majority of the use in the early

months of twenty twenty was more playful and symbolic. Not that most people sharing it thought that it would literally mechanistically prevent the virus from entering and infecting their tissues, but that it actually would do something, because of course, on one hand, would provide a type of psychological comfort and that feeling of control over an uncontrollable situation, but also that by spreading the image of the okai you were increasing front of mind public consciousness of the virus,

which meant people would be more likely to take actual direct steps to limit contagion. And it strikes me that apart from messaging about the pandemic, you're a kiara like

kumaman have a similar dual function. There's like, on one hand you have emotional comfort, and then on the other hand you have information consciousness, and that could mean either spreading information directly, like telling you something you don't know, or increasing the salience of information you already have, making you think about what you do know.

these various euroka ara much like these older forms. You know that again they have the information, they also have this emotional comfort like you've been discussing that brings with it, you know, sort of cuteness and hope all sort of tied together in a package. And I wish there was more of this in the world, you know, because aside from messaging aim directly at children, I feel like so much of the more serious messaging out there, at least in the US, is it's just purely fear based, or

at least that's how it often feels to me. You know, sometimes there's this layer of hope to it, or an image of like a smiling adult where it's like, oh, this is what happiness looks like, this is what this is what protection looks like, or so forth, or you know, the hope is wrapped up in the purchase of something that's going to protect you from the scary thing. And I don't know, I would rather live in a culture

of cuteness and hope than a culture of fear. I feel like we could overall, we could all push things a little more towards hope and cuteness from just the pure fear. I mean, the fear is always going to be there. The cuteness and the hope doesn't erase that fear. But you know, if it makes it feel a little like if your experience going to the subway is is less like, don't you dare get near the gap because you'll be torn in half, you know, less shake hands

with danger and more Urukiara. Sorry, it's a bit of a rant there.

love to hear from everyone out there. What are your experiences with Urukiara, with the lax mascots, what are your favorites right in because we'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder, This Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form episode. On Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. You can get all of this any Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed.