Like all Asians, the Japanese are a very strange people and the culture in Japan is also strange to us. From the ancient culture of Japan, the modern Japanese inherited unusual monsters, deities and monsters in which they continue to believe. Strange Japanese vermin next..
Akaname
Akaname literally means "licking the dirt." Whether it resembles something scary or something extremely sexy, it depends on taste. The peculiarity of this spirit is that it has an extremely long tongue. Akaname appears in filthy public baths and licks off the accumulated dirt or mucus with his tongue.
Akaname doesn't do anything else. According to popular beliefs, he cannot kill a person, eat his relatives or even curse anyone, he will not crawl out of the TV and flood you with your own blood - he simply cleans the bathhouse. However, if a person takes a bath in a licked akaname bath, it may cause some kind of illness.
Ittan-momen
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If you wake up from a restless sleep and find that you are tightly covered with a sheet that is firmly stuck to your legs and waist, then there is only one way out - pull your knees to your chin and fall asleep again. Now imagine that this is not a hallucination and your sheet is trying to kill you.
Ittan-momen translates to "a piece of cotton cloth" - a ghost made from a piece of cotton about three meters long and narrow like a towel. At night he looks for a victim for himself, and when he finds, he turns around her face and strangles her to death, and then flies with her into the sky. Japanese folklore does not explain why these evil towels kill people.
Nupeppo
Most of the Japanese monsters have in common that they seem to have no objective reason to harm people - they lack both motivation and purpose. Watch a few Japanese horror films: it often seems that events happen for no reason and are not related to each other at all.
In the Japanese version of The Ring, there is a scene where a guy looks through a security camera and sees a ghost killing a girl, despite the fact that she has never watched the fatal tape - just like that, for no reason, this is how the story unfolds. What does this have to do with nupeppo, you ask? The most direct.
Nupeppo is an amorphous drop of flesh. The folds give the body of the monster a human-like shape - arms, legs, face, but by and large the monster is a muscle amoeba that smells like rotten meat and wanders through abandoned urban areas at night.
At the same time, he does not pursue any goals and, by and large, does nothing at all. Nevertheless, if you manage to catch it and eat it, then you can be granted eternal youth. True, you have to ignore its disgusting smell and appearance.
Nurarihyon
The Japanese are people who attach great importance to customs and formalities. Decency is very important to them, and any Japanese strives to always do something important in the right way, and not at random. If this is true for most Japanese people, then they are overwhelmingly Nurarihyon, or the worst guests that can come into the house.
So, Nurarihyon comes to your house while you are absent or busy, pretending to be you, drinking tea and generally behaving like a business - for example, taking some of your belongings and forgetting to return. Various sources indicate that he is the head of a whole pantheon of other creepy ghosts, and, perhaps, picky spirits are fascinated by the fact that the Nurarihyon is both gallant and at the same time the way he pleases. It is only interesting what the household and the owner himself do if they find a substitution.
Sazae-oni
Sazae-oni are extremely sexy sea snails. Yes exactly. Why is not necessary to know, a person should not at all understand the nature of otherworldly forces. In Japan, there is a belief that some girls drowned in the sea become just snails, then, at will, turn back into beautiful girls.
In Japanese folklore, there is a story about sailors who found a beauty at sea. They were lucky: she turned out to be just a sadzae-oni and agreed to sleep with every man on board overnight. True, she treated them in a strange way - she bit off the genitals with some, cut off the others. But the story doesn't end there.
After the castration of all sailors, including the latter (probably either the most disgusting, or the most unobservant), the snail offered the men to ransom their parts for the stolen gold. Naturally, they all paid, and the snail swam away happy.
Bake-zori
Bake-zori is a sandal ghost that dwells in homes where shoes are not properly cared for. It's hard to know exactly what is considered wrong - perhaps you don't clean your shoes at night or you often walk in the mud. All options seem like minor reasons for the evil spirit to enter the shoe. Well, unless you like kicking too much.
The revived sandal will protest you: it will wander around the house at night and shout something unintelligible, and it is impossible to silence it. She will probably stop the disgrace if you start caring for her or, as an option, throw her into the trash bin - for some reason the ghost cannot return to the house on his own. Well, yes, these are shoes.
Sirime
Shirime literally means "eye on the ass" - the monster really has an eye in the place of the anus and performs the function of both at the same time.
Here is one legend about shirime. The samurai wandered the streets alone - at night, of course. Just imagine: a samurai in the era of feudalism patrols the streets, the sound of his footsteps drowns out the night fog, a huge yellow moon shines in the black sky. And suddenly a rustle attracts the warrior's attention - someone is following him! An otherworldly voice resounds in the night: “Wait! Wait, please!"
The samurai instantly turns around and sees how a man is moving towards him down the street with the grace of a drunkard on all fours and looking at him with what should be an anus. Possibly blinking.
You should already have guessed how the story ends, although all Japanese fairy tales do not quite usually end. Do you think the samurai kicked the monster? Or poked a finger in his eye? Or chopped into steaks? No. They had a love affair, where the eye played a key role.
According to another version, the eyes began to emit a strange glow, and the samurai fled. True, it contains a hint that the monster caught up with him and, obviously, avenged the alternative ending. The only lesson to be learned from this whole story is that if you see this monster, then you have to push him in the back and run away while he is disoriented and blind.