So I’m a small guy, and I compensate by talking about big things.
Today’s compensation is about giant yokai.
Yokai are Japanese supernatural creatures.
There are millions of them, and they’ve been kept alive in folklore throughout Japanese
history to the modern day in order to make a living for Instagram artists.
For this video, I’ve captured 5 giant yokai the size of titans.
You know what I’m talking about if you’ve watched Attack on Titan.
These yokai are really big, is what I’m saying.
This video is also cursed. If you don’t watch until the end, a titan-sized yokai will come after you.
I’m sorry, you’ve fallen into my trap.
Okay Number 1. Hitotsume nyūdō 一つ目入道, or “one-eyed priest.”
One day, a man was walking on a road minding his own business, when he ran straight into a folktale.
He saw a long parade of people walking up the road.
It stretched as far as his eyes could see. “It must be some wealthy lord,” he thought.
“Or maybe some high-ranking priest. I must get a better view.”
The man walked closer and climbed a tree.
At the head of the column was a gigantic fancy Rolls-Royce palanquin carried by 20 men with spinning rims.
The palanquin stopped right next to the man’s tree, giving him a good view.
“What luck!” He thought, as the curtains parted.
Out stepped a monstrous giant with one eye like a cyclops.
“Oh,” he re-thought.
To his horror, the giant started climbing the tree, eager to get its hands around some man meat.
The man happened to be trained in swordsmanship for years, so he took out his
sword and swung frantically while forgetting all his training in the face of a real life opponent.
Strangely, the moment he fought back, the monster disappeared along with his entourage,
leaving the man alone wondering if he should get a refund for all those kendo lessons.
The monster in that story was the yokai called hitotsume nyūdō.
It usually wears fancy clothing
and rides around in a large palanquin carried by humans or even other smaller yokai.
There’s usually a long procession of people behind the palanquin, like the sort following a powerful lord.
People back in the day had nothing to do,
so whenever rich lords passed by with their long parade,
people would gather beside the road gawking, selling products, or selling their bodies.
This rubbernecking behavior was perfect for the hitotsume nyūdō,
who loves to attack humans and crush them under their feet. In a bad way.
Running from this yokai is not an easy feat.
Like certain religious leaders, this one-eyed monster can expand to a large size
when chasing after little humans. These giants have been known to grow taller than trees.
Sometimes a hitotsume nyūdō is born when a Buddhist priest dies.
For example, the temple of Enryakuji once had this devout and strict abbot.
He took pleasure in kicking lazy monks out of the temple, then probably beat himself up for taking pleasure.
He grew jaded with this world of evil men and grew angry at his own monks
for being corrupt and lazy.
When he died, his strong feelings turned him into a yokai,
and he used his powers to punish bad monks just like he did in life.
Alright, Number 2. Umi bōzu 海坊主, the sea monk.
When you’re traveling the high seas, and the waters seem calm, be careful because that’s when the umi bōzu strikes.
The light breeze would become a tempest and the waves would surge,
as a giant dark figure emerges from the water to smash your ship into pieces.
The umi bōzu is like nose hair on a woman.
No one knows what it looks like, and the ones who do don’t live long after.
Its body is totally dark except for two eyes staring out from its head.
It looks like the upper half of a giant man.
People call it a sea monk because its head is bald like a monk, not because it swims around
asking for rice from passing ships.
You only ever see them from the torso up, their bottom half is a mystery.
Some say they have two legs like a human. Some say they have tentacles like an octopus.
Some say other s--t.
There are all kinds of different legends about it depending on which region you live in.
People have claimed that they can shapeshift into beautiful women
lost at sea, and would invite you in only to drown you in their bosoms.
In some places, captains of fishing boats pray to the Goddess of the Sea before sailing out.
Or they would sacrifice the first catch of the voyage to the Goddess.
Those who don’t pay proper respect? They get umi bōzu’d.
Sometimes you don’t just get attacked by one umi bōzu, but a whole school of them.
And then they’ll give you a proper education on marine biology.
Sometimes you’ll hear them talk. Like if one gets hit by an oar, it’ll go, “Aitata.”
Which makes me believe that more than a few people have been mistaken for umi bōzu and have been hit with oars.
My favorite thing about this yokai is that it doesn’t always smash your ship.
Sometimes it kills you in the randomest way ever.
It demands that you hand over a bucket or a barrel,
and then uses it to scoop up water and pour it onto the ship, bucket by bucket.
Your ship will sink, eventually, but at least you’ll have time to cower in fear at the big sea monster.
There are ways to beat this monster though.
You can give it a bottomless bucket, meaning a bucket without a bottom.
The creature would keep trying to scoop up water, not understanding why the bucket’s defective.
As it’s grappling with the bucket, you can try to sail away.
You see this happen in many other giant monsters. Their brains grow so big they become smooth.
Umi bōzu are also weak against tobacco smoke for some reason, so always have a cigar ready.
Number 3. Mikoshi nyūdō 見越入道. It means “looking over priest.”
I know, that translation sounds like I just came over from Vietnam and took one English class,
but I assure you, I have failed multiple English classes.
Mikoshi means to peer over the top of something, like peering over the top of a fence.
Or it means to look past. This is another giant priest yokai.
Giant priests are actually a popular type of yokai called ōnyūdō 大入道. It means giant priest.
There’s quite a few of them.
You usually run into the mikoshi nyūdō at night on empty streets, intersections, and bridges.
Sometimes they may even be hiding in a tree.
This creature is a weird one. At first it looks like a normal sized Buddhist priest, maybe size 38,
but it has this weird power where it can grow larger depending on which part of it you look at.
If you start off looking at its body and turn your gaze upward to try and see its head,
it just keeps growing bigger and bigger the further you look up, so that you can never see its head.
Artists often draw the mikoshi nyūdō with a long tentacle neck because it looks cool,
but sometimes it’s just drawn as a really big priest.
It can kill you in a lot of fun ways.
If you fall backwards because of looking up too fast, it pounces and bites your throat out like a Dothraki.
Don’t worry though. I care about your safety,
so here are a few ways to survive an encounter with a mikoshi nyūdō.
You can look at it but start by looking at its head, then drag your gaze down to its feet.
This would hurt its titan-changing powers.
You could also chant “mikoshita mikoshita” over and over, which means “I’ve seen past you” and it may disappear.
Creatures who can shapeshift, like the kitsune or tanuki, love changing into the mikoshi nyūdō.
In one region, it was said that if a woman was on the toilet,
a kitsune disguised as a mikoshi nyūdō could show up and taunt her in a sinister voice,
asking, “Wipe your butt? Wipe your butt?”
When a creature disguises itself like a mikoshi nyūdō, for some reason,
it always carries some object like a bucket or a lantern.
This is where the shapeshifter’s real body resides.
To beat this creature, you just need to grab the object and the illusion would break and the priest would vanish.
As a bonus, you also end up with a yokai in a bucket.
Number 4. Ōgama 大蝦蟇. Giant toad.
When a toad reaches its 1000th birthday, it turns into a mega toad, an ōgama.
These toads can grow real large, and the larger they get, the more dangerous they become.
Some are so big they can look like boulders, resulting in people mistakenly sitting on them as the last thing they did.
Giant toads have these long, sticky tongues that snap out and pluck their
prey from the air or the ground.
They have rainbow-colored breaths that they breathe on animals like birds and snakes
to stun them before slurping them up.
Will giant toads attack humans? You bet.
The mountains and forests are dangerous places.
When toads grow big enough, they will eat humans.
They’ve even been known to hunt humans using spears.
Number 5. Hanzaki はんざき. The Japanese giant salamander.
There was a village that lay next to a pool that was home to a hanzaki.
The creature regularly ventured out to snatch livestock and people.
It would drag them back into the water and swallow them.
The villagers lived in terror of the hanzaki until one day,
they had enough.
This monster needed to be destroyed once and for all.
Not by them, of course.
They put out a call for a hero to vanquish the salamonster.
One brave young man from the village grabbed a sword and walked to the salamander pool.
With the villagers watching safely a hundred feet away, our young hero stared at the pool
with defiance before diving in and getting immediately swallowed by the monster.
The onlookers stared on with eyes that said, "I shoulda known."
But no!
The giant beast broke through the water’s surface as the young hero cut it in half from the inside,
killing it and saving the village.
It was a joyous event. The young man became a hero.
However, all was not well. Strange events started happening in the village.
Every night, our hero would hear a bang at the door, and screaming and crying coming from outside,
but whenever he opened the door, there would be no one there.
Soon, his family died.
The villagers believed that the spirit of the hanzaki was behind everything,
so they built a shrine to it and worshipped it as a god.
It worked, and the hanzaki’s curse was lifted.
Our hero’s name was Miura no Hikoshirō, and the village was called Yubara.
There’s a gravestone dedicated to Hikoshirō in Yubara today.
Every year, the people of Yubara hold a Hanzaki Festival, where they have a parade of two floats:
a black male salamander, and a red female salamander.
These giant salamanders are actually real animals in Japan.
You may remember them from your nightmares.
They grow up to 1.5 meters, smaller than the yokai version, but larger than your bravery.
For more yokai stuff, check out these videos.
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Marcella Casillas,
Maria Cichetti,
Donice Green,
and Danielle Saunders.
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