Amabie Goes Global: Talismanic Images from Japan

Japanese-inspired talismanic images responding to the Covid-19 crisis are circulating through global social media. Claire Voon in Atlas Obscura reports that images of the folkloric spirit “Amabie,” said to safeguard makers and viewers against epidemics, are now being reproduced widely and shared on line worldwide

1846 drawing and article on Amabie

"Amabie" is written in katakana, the Japanese syllabary script used to write foreign loan terms and regional dialects, as アマビエ. The creature, Voon notes, first appeared in print in  a 1846 Kawaraban, tile-block prnted, newspaper article (see image to left), documenting a supposed encounter with a yōkai, or spirit on the shores of Higo Province, now Kumamoto Prefecture on the southern island of Kyūshū.  The spirit, which manifested itself, surrounded by bright lights, as a long-haired fish like creature with three legs or tails and a bird’s beak, is said to have instructed a local official to draw and circulate its image as protection against a coming plague. In recent weeks, versions of Amabie have been created by artists and posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, offering comfort and  protection in the face of SARS-COR-2. (See some examples at Know Your Meme.)

Hybrid mythological beings are hardly unusual in East Asia. The classical Chinese and Japanese dragon is said to be composed of nine different animals, a “camel’s head; deer's horns; rabbit's eyes; cow's ears; snake's neck; frog's belly; carp's scales; hawk's claws and tiger's paw” (Chinese Sage)   Speculatively, the Amabie’s fusing of fish and bird like qualities may be evocative of these creatures’ capacities to cross borders through air and sea, and the mythical being moves across watery and terrestrial realms. Similarly,  as diseases such as cholera penetrated national boundaries during the late Tokugawa era. Unusually long and unkempt hair similarly protrudes across conventionally restrained bodily boundaries; the spirit’s extra leg may assist in long-distance travel or transmission. The logic, as is often the case in Japanese popular cosmology, seems to be homeopathic: it takes a superlative border-crosser to defeat the border-crossing curse of a foreign affliction. 

Kaori Hamura Long (by permission of artist)

A particularly imaginative rendition of Amabie is showcased by Voon at the start of her article. The work was recently created by artist Kaori Hamura Long  during the period she self-quarantined with suspected Covid-19 symptoms in the city of Fukuoka in northern Kyūshū. In one version of her work, the spirit wears a face mask over her beak, her long fair flapping like wings as she floats above the waves, in an aesthetic inspired by the original monochrome 1846 image and by colorful Meiji-Taisho ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Another version, shown here, shows Amabie without a mask, smiling, heralding the hoped-for return of health and normalcy to the world. 

Amabie are also being created, sometimes through knitting and crocheting, in three dimensional form, as amulet-like ‘masukotto ningyo” (mascot dolls). Some are made with small loops attached to their heads, so they may be hung from school backpacks,for protection, like regular amulets or mascot dolls.   Photographs of the dolls are then posted on line, sometimes with prayers for health and safety during the pandemic; these can be  tracked through the hashtag #アマビエ (‘amabie’):

One of the most interesting aspects of the entire Amabie phenomenon is the way in which global Pokemon, manga and anime aesthetics are helping, almost overnight, to create a transnational “imagined community” at a time of intense physical separation, Copying and adapting this instantly recognizable “cute”  aesthetic, and then circulating the resulting images through Twitter and other social media platforms seems to be a kind of antidote to the anomie threatened by our moment of Shelter in Place.  

Front and rear views of mascot "Quaran"

It may be that Japan’s official mascot of the quarantine, “Quaran,” is partially inspired by this long-term imagery.  Created by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare before the novel coronavirus crisis, the mascot has become the visible face of Japan’s response to the emergency, especially at airports where individuals wearing the Quaran costume remind international visitors to self- quarantine.  As I have published elsewhere, the global term "Mascot," popularized by Edmond Audran’s 1880 operetta La Mascotte, is derived from the Provencal concept of the "mascotte," a magical wish-granting being or inanimate object; in Japan, the new term was integrated with millennia-old sensibilities about the spirit- bearing capacities of images and object that resembled the human figure.  (See Ellen Schattschneider, The Bloodstained Doll, " Journal of Japanese Studies. Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2005. pp. 329-356)  The modern mascot Quaran, now safeguarding sites of international border-crossing, seems to reproduce this classical ritual function. As is so often the case with powerful images, the manifest function of this representative form is didactic or formally communicative, but an older ritual aesthetic, echoing a cultural logic of spiritual prophylaxis, evidently endures.