So if you’re thinking of secksy sirens on the beach or The Little Mermaid, think again.
Japanese mermaids are more like if the Little Mermaid swam through Fukushima waters, mutated
into Fishy Krueger, went down a spiral of despair into crazyville, and developed a hunger
for human meat.
What I’m saying is, Japanese mermaids are more mer than maids.
They’re called ningyo (人魚), human fish.
Old school ningyo were ugly and only brought bad luck, as we’ll see when I retell one
of the most famous ningyo stories.
But we do see a shift in Japanese stories to show more ningyo of the type that Westerners
are used to.
This happened around the time a certain fairy tale by a certain Hans Christian Andersen
came to Japan, can you guess which one in the comments?
So what does a ningyo look like?
You basically have the body of a fish, then you put the head of a human or a monkey on
it, and then you enable that Snapchat ugly filter.
A ningyo.
Do you know what freak shows were?
They were really popular in the 1800s and 1900s in Europe the United States.
You had traveling companies touring the country showing off people who were different, like
intersex people who were born with a pillar, stones, and a well.
Or like the Seal Man, who had no arms.
They also showed off these nightmare creatures that they made by stitching parts of different
animals together.
The Japanese saw those abominations and said “Hold my calamari.”
In the Edo Period, these mermaid mummies started popping up in sideshows in Japan.
One of these even made its way to London.
People called it the Fiji mermaid.
It wasn’t real, of course.
We don’t know who made it originally, but Japanese Dr. Moreau took a fish tail and sewed
it onto a monkey’s torso and head, which is quite the coincidence because that’s
what I want to happen to my body when I die.
Anyways, that’s what a ningyo looks like.
Ningyo stories are really old and probably swam to Japan from China.
The earliest mention of fish people happened more than 2000 years ago in China.
Over the years, these stories injected all kinds of superstitions into Japan.
Ningyo flesh granted powers.
They said eating ningyo flesh was like using Missha Time Revolution First Treatment Essence,
it magically prevented aging.
Don’t fall for that SK-II overpriced piece of crap.
Ningyo were also bad luck.
Fisherman who caught one and brought it home were inviting an earthquake or tidal wave
upon their village.
And if you ever saw a ningyo washed up on the beach, it was a sign of imminent war or
disaster.
There is speculation that the idea of the ningyo originated from this creature called
the dugong.
People in Okinawa actually avoid eating dugong, because it’s a crime against a manatee.
There’s a famous ningyo story called Yao Bikuni (八百比丘尼), or 800 year nun.
A fisherman caught weird fish with a face that was eerily human.
He thought, what a special fish, let me invite my friends over for dinner to taste it.
At the dinner party, one of the friends got curious and slipped into the kitchen to look
at the special fish, and saw a hideous human face staring back at him.
He rushed out and warned the others not to partake.
When the fisherman came out with the fish meat, his friends all politely pretended to
eat it, but secretly wrapped their portions in paper so they could throw it away later.
One of his friends got home, but was so drunk he forgot to throw it away.
To his horror, his daughter found the enticing meat and ate it.
After a few tense days, nothing happened, so they thought nothing of it.
The years passed and the daughter got married.
She soon noticed that something was not right.
Her husband got older, but she didn’t age at all.
That Missha treatment really works, she thought.
When her husband died, she was still a young woman, so she remarried.
And she kept remarrying because her husbands kept on dying of old age.
She got tired of seeing husbands pass away and became a nun and wandered the country.
After 800 years, she came home from her travels, weary of life, and killed herself.
There’s another story of children suffering from their father’s screw up.
A fisherman caught a ningyo while he was out doing his fisherman obligations.
The creature begged for mercy as the fisherman gutted it.
He brought the dead creature home and stored it in a box.
When he went fishing the next day, his three children at home were hungry, so they opened
the box and ate the entire thing, human face and all.
But they didn’t understand that ningyo flesh was cursed.
Fish scales pierced through their skin from beneath like a million needles.
The fisherman came home to find them on the floor, covered in scales like a fish, their
faces frozen in cold agony, and he wept.
That night, he dreamt of a god who told him that although his children were gone, he could
ensure their spirits pass on to heaven if he journeyed to Togakushi far away and planted
three cedar trees to remember them by.
And so he did.
The trees were called the Three Cedars of Togakushi, and they still stand today.
Japan’s ningyo stories changed throughout the years until in the Edo Period, there were
a lot more stories of beautiful ningyo, who seduced and married men.
And in the early 1900s, a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen came to Japan called
The Little Mermaid, did you guess right?
After this, the idea of Western mermaids caught on and lived alongside the older Japanese
tales.
We started seeing more stories of ningyo as objects of men’s desires, like this fun
story of the mermaid body-stealer.
There was a man in a mental institution who had a fear of the color green, and the story
is about how he arrived at his phobia.
While swimming, he came across a green colored mermaid who hooked him with her beauty.
He convinced her to let him take her home, where he kept her in a bathtub.
They lived together for a while, but one day he opened the bathroom door and saw...
himself staring back.
It turned out, the gorgeous creature in his bathtub had been gorging on bits of his flesh
at night.
Her powers regenerated his flesh into whole body parts until she could morph into him
and run around town having fun with his body.
Don’t worry, he managed to kill her, causing her to dessicate into one of those mermaid
mummies.
Oh, then he developed a fear of the color green.
You win some, you lose some.
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Welcome, good sir knight.
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Alright, much love, and spread the knowledge!