Today we talk about women with really long necks, and some folktales about them.
Now Japan has an issue with babies.
There aren’t many of them.
Okay so the birth rate problem is overblown.
People often exaggerate it, like they think in 2 years Japan will run out of kids and
they’ll have a civil war over who gets the last remaining babies and people will be forced
to marry their brothers and sisters to repopulate, but that’s all ridiculous.
No one’s gonna force brothers and sisters in Japan to marry.
They’ll do it by choice.
But even though it’s exaggerated, it’s still a problem.
Anonymous online experts have proposed many reasons for the declining birth rate,
but one reason that does not get enough attention
is that Japan has way too many monsters disguising themselves as women to kill men.
It’s crazy, there are a million stories of these male murdering monsters in Japan,
it’s no wonder men cower in the vicinity of women.
Let’s talk about one of these creatures so we can better understand our enemies, or our friends.
This yokai is called rokurokubi 轆轤首. It means “pulley neck.”
A yokai means any Japanese supernatural creature.
There are male rokurokubi, but most of the time they’re female.
Their main power is the ability to stretch their necks so long that they never have to
use a step ladder to find the flyswatter above the fridge again.
A rokurokubi can only do this while her body is asleep.
At night, the head would extend really long to go around eating bugs and rodents,
scaring people for funsies, or even biting people to death.
When she awakes, she has no memory of what happened, almost like her head was a separate creature.
In old drawings, their necks range from normal thickness to baby carrot thickness.
And they can extend up to the average length of an Asian Wang.
They’ve been known to drink the oil from lanterns, because why not.
Rokurokubi are usually normal women who were cursed at some point with this condition.
Old stories in Japan liked to teach Buddhist lessons about karma.
The idea was, if you do good things, good things will happen to you.
And if you do bad things, bad things will happen to you.
These were nonfiction stories, obviously.
The rokurokubi curse was an example of a bad thing that could happen to you.
In one story, a Buddhist monk casts his vows aside and runs off with a woman.
They’re happy for a while, but one day she gets sick and they realize that her medicine
would cost all their remaining money.
Wise men say that you will only truly know the strength of a relationship in times of
difficulty, and the man shows us the strength of this relationship when he kills her and
takes the money himself because he didn’t ask for this life.
Later, having cast aside his wife like he did his Buddhist vows,
the man meets an innkeeper’s daughter and sleeps with her.
While they’re in bed, the girl’s neck stretches like a stretched baby carrot and
her face turns into the face of his dead girlfriend.
The hatred and heartbreak pours out of her mouth and into his ears.
In a surprising twist, the man understands and regrets his actions.
He goes to the innkeeper and tells him, “Hey I was sleeping with your daughter under your
roof and she turned into my dead girlfriend but with a long neck for some reason.
Also, I killed my ex and stole her money.”
The innkeeper listens, and says, “Oh yeah me too.”
“What?” the monk asks.
And the innkeeper reveals that he killed his own wife and took her money to open this inn.
Unfortunately, karma caught up with him and punished him by making his daughter a rokurokubi.
Now why did his daughter change into the ex-monk’s wife in bed?
Because folktale.
After this, having gotten away with murder, the ex-monk goes back to the temple and becomes an ex-ex-monk.
He builds a grave for his dead lover and prays for her.
And so the moral of the story is, if you murder your wife and steal her money,
you’ll have a successful business.
And if your father committed a crime, you will get punished for it.
Justice is served.
In many stories, being a rokurokubi was shameful.
One couple had a daughter whose neck stretched every night.
When the whole town found out and shamed them for it,
the family just packed up and left without telling anyone, because they couldn’t face the embarrassment
of living in a town of jackasses.
The curse can be passed on to their daughters.
There are stories of families who sold their rokurokubi daughters to brothels and traveling circuses,
or forced them to commit suicide.
Sometimes a woman killed herself rather than live as a monster that hurt people.
There is a type of rokurokubi called nukekubi 抜け首, or “detachable neck.”
This is a woman whose head detaches completely from her body while she’s asleep.
The nukekubi acts a lot like a normal rokurokubi, it flies around eating bugs and rodents.
Some stories claim that it flies by flapping its itty bitty little ears like wings,
which is cute until it bites you and drinks your blood like the vampires that run blood donation drives.
That’s right, nukekubi are flying vampire heads.
It seems like the nukekubi came first, from Chinese folklore.
There were old Chinese stories about tribes of people with heads that flew around at night
and returned when morning came.
Whole nukekubi villages were a thing.
One Japanese story told of a village where everyone wore scarves to cover a line around their necks.
It was called Hogwarts.
People often thought nukekubi were women who suffered from a disease that made their spirits
escape their bodies.
Many stories equated their heads with their spirits.
It’s interesting because it makes you question what people back then believed the spirit was.
When a nukekubi wakes up, she has no idea what her head did the night before.
What was her head then?
Was it her spirit?
Was a spirit different from the person?
Was a person the head, the body, or both?
And what does it mean for the body to be asleep, but the head to be awake?
We don’t know exactly the answers to these questions, but what we do know is that if
you subscribe to this channel, you’ll get answers to other questions about
Japanese folklore and yokai on your feed, so try it out.
For more about Japanese folklore, check out these videos.
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