🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº0555
ACTIVE
Kuchisake-onna
Kuchisake-onna is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Gifu Prefecture, Japan, JP. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.
Where and when was Kuchisake-onna sighted?
- Location
- Gifu Prefecture, Japan, JP
- Date sighted
- Unknown
- Coordinates
- 35.391, 136.722
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
What is Kuchisake-onna?
Kuchisake-onna, the "slit-mouthed woman", is not old folklore but a rumour with a traceable start date. A woman in a face mask stops a passer-by, usually a child walking home, and asks "Am I pretty?"; when she pulls the mask down, her mouth is cut open to the ears. The rumour began circulating in Gifu Prefecture around the end of 1978 — Minokamo, Yaotsu and the city of Gifu have all been proposed as the starting point — and the National Diet Library, checking its microfilm, confirmed that its earliest known appearance in print is a page-one editorial column in the Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun of 26 January 1979. Within about six months it had reached Aomori in the north and Kagoshima in the south, carried by children who met across school-district boundaries at evening cram schools. Police cars toured neighbourhoods telling children to go home early and several municipalities organised group walks home from school; by 15 June 1979 the same Gifu paper was reporting that the alarm was subsiding, and it faded at the start of the summer holidays. Children traded countermeasures: she hates hair pomade, and she will let you go if you offer her bekko hard candy.
What is the history of Kuchisake-onna?
Most files in this atlas start with a legend and work backwards, hoping to find a date. Kuchisake-onna is the opposite case. The date is recent enough that a librarian can put the newspaper on a microfilm reader and check it — and someone did.
A rumour with an address. Around the end of 1978 a story began to move through Gifu Prefecture: a woman with a mouth cut open to the ears had been seen. The folklorist Iikura Yoshiyuki, of Kokugakuin University, gives the version he considers most likely — an elderly woman in a farming household in the town of Yaotsu saw her standing in the corner of the garden — while noting that other accounts of the starting point exist. Gifu Prefectural Library, which keeps the local newspaper index, records the same uncertainty in its own files: the candidates it lists for the point of origin are Minokamo, Yaotsu and the city of Gifu. What is not in doubt is the prefecture, or the season.
The first line of print. The date usually given for the rumour's arrival in the press is 26 January 1979, in the Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun. In 2018 a reader asked the National Diet Library to check whether that was true. The library went to its microfilm — call number YB-255 — and confirmed it, with a detail that changes the picture: the item is in the morning edition of 26 January 1979, on page one, in the column Henshū yoki, "Editor's notes". The library also searched 23 to 29 January and found nothing else on the subject in that paper. In other words, the slit-mouthed woman did not enter print as a news report of an attack. She entered as an editorial aside about something the children were saying.
How it travelled. Within about six months the rumour had gone from Gifu to Aomori in the far north and Kagoshima in the far south. Iikura's explanation is structural rather than psychological, and it is the most interesting part of the case. Until then, he argues, a children's rumour rarely crossed a school-district boundary; there was no route out. What opened the route was the juku, the private evening cram school, which had begun to take in far more pupils in the late 1970s and which mixed children from several districts in one room. A child heard at cram school what was happening at another school, carried it back to their own, and it went on from there by telephone to relatives — until other newspapers and the television stations picked it up and did the rest.
The same institution supplies the fear. Cram schools started in the evening, so when they finished, children were turned out in groups onto night streets they had never seen before, full of adults they had never seen either — women on their way to nightlife work, drunks coming out of the bars. The anxiety about who among them might hurt you, Iikura argues, is what the slit-mouthed woman is made of.
What the children actually said. The best surviving corpus was gathered by the folklorist Nomura Jun'ichi, who collected direct written replies from female students from 1981 onwards over about three years — some twelve hundred of them — and published fourteen as examples; Tsunemitsu Tōru, reviewing Nomura's work in 2021, notes that the first chapter of Nomura's Nihon no sekenbanashi (1995) is given over entirely to her, under the heading "Kuchisake-onna — where a story goes". Read today, in the transcription given by Itō Ryūhei, they are startlingly practical:
From Naha, Okinawa: she wears a large white mask reaching to her ears, stands facing away from you, turns suddenly and asks "Am I pretty?"; if you do not answer she threatens you with a knife; she runs a hundred metres in three seconds; she hates the pomade people put on their hair. From Chiba: she comes out between dusk and night, and "because the slit-mouthed woman likes bekkō candy, if you give her some she will forgive you."
What the adults did. Two of Nomura's replies record the response rather than the figure. From Hiratsuka, Kanagawa: "When the rumour was going round, a patrol car went round the neighbourhood warning people — 'The slit-mouthed woman appears. Go home early.'" From Kushiro, Hokkaido, a woman who was then commuting to high school from Akan: the woman reached Sapporo two or three days after appearing in Tokyo, Kushiro two or three days after that, and appeared in the Shirakabadai and Sakuragaoka districts between four and five o'clock — "because of that, pupils going home in that direction were told to be careful." Itō notes that several municipalities organised group walks home from school because of the rumour, and that Kushiro was one of them. Iikura's summary is the same: teachers and parents were worried too, and they patrolled and arranged for children to go home in groups.
The end, and the afterlife. It burned out fast. On 15 June 1979 the Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun ran an evening-edition piece headed "The slit-mouthed woman, born in Gifu — the fuss at last dying down", illustrated with an artist's impression of her; Gifu Prefectural Library found it while correcting its own index, which had the date wrong by a day. Iikura dates the collapse to the start of the summer holidays, when the classroom stopped being a room. Itō, who was in his first year of primary school and heard the rumour in Chitose, Hokkaido, dates his own classroom conversations to early July at the latest — and remembers his mother saying that she could not now wear a face mask without thinking about it. The commercial version arrived just after the rumour died: the September issue of Corocoro Comic, published on 15 August 1979, carried a manga called "Weird! The Slit-Mouthed Woman" by Hosoi Yūji.
Timeline: the documented record of Kuchisake-onna
- Late 1978 A rumour about a woman with a mouth cut open to the ears begins to circulate in Gifu Prefecture. Gifu Prefectural Library records three competing candidates for the point of origin in its own files: Minokamo, Yaotsu and the city of Gifu.
- 26 January 1979 Earliest known appearance in print. Asked in 2018 to verify the date, the National Diet Library checked its microfilm of the Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun (call number YB-255) and located the item in the morning edition of that day, on page one, in the column Henshu yoki, “Editor's notes”. It searched 23 to 29 January and found nothing else on the subject.
- Spring 1979 The rumour reaches Aomori in the north and Kagoshima in the south in about six months. Iikura Yoshiyuki attributes the jump to the spread of evening cram schools, which for the first time mixed children from different school districts in one room, and then to telephone, other newspapers and television.
- 1979 — Hiratsuka, Kanagawa A police patrol car tours the neighbourhood announcing that the slit-mouthed woman is appearing and that children should go home early. The account was given to Nomura Jun'ichi by Ando Yukiyo and published among his fourteen sample cases.
- 1979 — Kushiro, Hokkaido Pupils walking home towards the Shirakabadai and Sakuragaoka districts are warned to be careful. Ito Ryuhei notes that several municipalities organised group walks home from school because of the rumour and that Kushiro was one of them.
- 15 June 1979 The Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun runs an evening-edition article headed “The slit-mouthed woman, born in Gifu — the fuss at last dying down”, illustrated with an artist's impression of her. Gifu Prefectural Library found it while correcting its own newspaper index, which had dated it a day later.
- Early July 1979 Ito Ryuhei, then a first-year primary pupil in Chitose, Hokkaido, dates his own classroom conversations about the figure to before the summer holidays at the latest. He remembers his mother saying she could no longer wear a face mask without thinking about it.
- Summer 1979 The rumour dies down around the start of the summer holidays. Iikura Yoshiyuki records that teachers and parents had until then been running patrols and arranging for children to walk home in groups.
- 15 August 1979 The September issue of Corocoro Comic, published on this date, carries a manga by Hosoi Yuji titled “Weird! The Slit-Mouthed Woman”. The commercial exploitation begins as the rumour itself is ending.
- 1984 Nomura Jun'ichi publishes “Kuchisake-onna and other matters” in Comparative Studies of Oral Tradition I, the essay that opens academic work on the case. His fourteen examples rest on direct written replies from female students gathered from 1981 over about three years — some twelve hundred in all. An expanded version appears in Nihon no sekenbanashi in 1995.
- 1993 Tsunemitsu Toru gathers his work on school ghost stories, begun in 1986, into Gakko no kaidan, the study that establishes children's school rumour as a folklore field in Japan.
- September 2019 The kuchisake-onna haunted house in the Yanagase arcade in Gifu city closes after five seasonal runs from 2012.
- 2021 Ito Ryuhei argues that most of what circulated in 1979 was folk belief rather than narrative — written in the present tense, without characters or plot — and that this, rather than any national mood, is why a child in the first year of primary school could pass it on and why it covered Japan in six months.
Is there a rational explanation for Kuchisake-onna?
The useful question here is not whether she existed. Nobody at the time thought they were dealing with a ghost, and no source we read documents an attack attributable to her. The useful question is what kind of thing this was, and on that there is a genuine and recent scholarly answer.
It was not a story. In 2021, four decades after the event, Itō Ryūhei went back to Nomura Jun'ichi's corpus and noticed something nobody had made much of: almost every account is written in the present tense, not the past. Not "her mouth was slit to the ears" but "her mouth is slit to the ears"; not "she was standing there" but "she stands there". That is the tense of a general rule, the tense of "the sun rises in the morning". The reports have no characters, no setting, no beginning and no end — only a list of attributes: she wears a mask, she carries a sickle, she wears a coat, she asks "am I pretty?", she runs fast. Itō's comparison is deflating and exact: it is the same form as saying that a kappa has a dish on its head and a shell on its back. It is not a narrative. It is, in the technical vocabulary of Japanese folklore studies, folk belief (zokushin) rather than tale (setsuwa) — and Itō's conclusion is that this, and not anything about 1970s Japan's psyche, is why it spread as it did: "the reason the slit-mouthed woman spread across the whole country is, it seems, that this was not a tale but folk belief."
The mechanism is simple once stated. A story has to be told from beginning to end; drop a motif and it collapses into nonsense. A list does not. A child in the first year of primary school, with no narrative skill at all, can pass on a list, and anybody can add an item to it without rebuilding anything. That is exactly what happened: the "three sisters", the failed cosmetic surgery, the traffic accident, the escape from a psychiatric hospital were all bolted on later, each one answering a child's question about why she does this. Itō reads these additions as the rationalising and shrinking of the uncanny — and it is worth saying plainly that the psychiatric version was a piece of ordinary stigma, doing damage to real people who had nothing to do with any of it.
The countermeasures are the give-away. Nomura's own reading, which Itō reports, was that the rumour carried the machinery of the old folktale inside it: the sickle comes out of folk custom, the escape-tale (tōsōtan) is a recognised type — the same shape as Kuwazu nyōbō, Ushikata yamauba, Sanmai no ofuda — and, most tellingly, "pomade" functions as a jugon, a spell-word. A rumour that arrives with its own antidote is a rumour a child can use. Say "pomade", or wear it; carry bekkō candy. Fear plus a usable defence is a far more transmissible package than fear alone, and it lets the listener become a participant rather than an audience.
She was not a monster, which is why adults believed it. Itō makes the point that the children of 1979 did not classify her as a yōkai at all; the popular idea of a yōkai, shaped by Mizuki Shigeru, was something in premodern dress. Strip out the one impossible detail — the running speed, "faster than a motorbike" — and every remaining attribute could belong to a human being. The novelist Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a high-school student at the time, put it flatly: "When I first heard it, the context was that a woman with a mental illness was doing harm to children, so I really believed it. There was nothing yōkai or occult about it." Itō adds the part that should stop anyone treating this as a funny story: attacks on children were genuinely happening around the country, adults read the rumour in that frame, and that is why police were deployed and group walks home were organised. The response was not credulity. It was a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable-sounding report about child safety.
What the sources do not support. The claim that circulates in English — that folklorists trace her to Edo-period tales of scorned or mutilated women — is not what the folklorists who actually worked on the case say. Itō places her instead in a modern lineage of child-snatching bogeys known from children's rumour: Kamasu-shoi, Kakurezatō, Fukurokatsugi, Aburatori, Aka-manto. He proposes a category for them, kaijin — neither human, nor ghost, nor shape-shifting fox, but taken by children with a monster's weight. We could not find, in any of the specialist literature we read, an argument deriving the 1979 rumour from an Edo text. Nor could we verify the tidy modern symmetry in which both possible answers doom you, or the instruction to shout "pomade" three times; neither is in the earliest corpus.
Psychological readings exist and should be labelled as such. Akiyama Satoko in 1988 read the mouth as a "toothed womb" and the figure as the mother's tenderness and cruelty at once; Itō, who is polite about it, says that psychological work on this case looks to him like fitting the evidence to a conclusion already chosen, though it is interesting as a mirror of its moment. The sociologist Misumi Jōji, writing in 1991, filed the slit-mouthed woman among the urban legends that mutate by what makes a good telling rather than by what can be checked — he lists her top speed at 60 km/h beside the tsuchinoko's 80 and the human-faced dog's 150, and argues that it would be wrong to read those figures as witnesses exaggerating: what shapes an urban legend is the double criterion of being interesting as a story and staying inside the bounds of the plausible.
Can you visit Kuchisake-onna?
There is nothing to visit, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The slit-mouthed woman has no house, no crossroads, no shrine and no grave. The town of Yaotsu, the strongest candidate for where the rumour started, has no marker and no site connected with it, and residents of a small farming town are entitled not to be treated as an attraction. What does exist is the paper trail, and it is unusually easy to reach.
Gifu Prefectural Library — the library that answered one of the reference questions this file is built on. It holds the Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun and the prefectural index of local newspaper articles, and its staff located the 15 June 1979 evening-edition piece by working through the pages when the index proved wrong. Address: 4-2-1 Usa, Gifu 500-8368 (tel. 058-275-5111). Open Tuesday to Friday 09:00–20:00 and Saturday, Sunday and public holidays 09:00–18:00; the lobby opens at 08:45. Closed Mondays (the following Tuesday when Monday is a holiday), the last Friday of each month for stock-taking, and 28 December to 4 January. From JR Nishi-Gifu station it is a fourteen-minute walk, or the Nishi-Gifu community bus to the "Kenritsu Toshokan / Bijutsukan" stop; from JR or Meitetsu Gifu station, the Gifu Bus Kagashima-Ichihashi line to "Ken Bijutsukan", then three minutes on foot. Seven car parks are shared with the prefectural art museum next door, 446 spaces, all free.
The National Diet Library, Tokyo, holds the same newspaper on microfilm under call number YB-255 — the reel that settled the 26 January 1979 question. Both reference cases are published in full and free to read in the NDL's Collaborative Reference Database, linked below, and both of the Japanese folklore articles cited here are free PDFs on the site of the Society for Folk Narrative Research of Japan. You can check this file without leaving your desk.
Do not go looking for the haunted house. Gifu city's Yanagase shopping arcade ran a kuchisake-onna attraction called Kyōfu no hosomichi, "The Narrow Road of Terror", for five seasonal runs between 2012 and 2019. It closed in September 2019.
If you want yōkai in a display case, the nearest thing is the Yumoto Kōichi Memorial Japan Yokai Museum (Miyoshi Mononoke Museum), 1691-4 Miyoshi-chō, Miyoshi, Hiroshima (tel. 0824-69-0111). Open 09:30–17:00, last admission 16:30; closed Wednesdays as a rule (the next day when Wednesday is a holiday) and over New Year. Admission ¥1,000 adults, ¥600 high-school and university students, ¥300 primary and junior-high pupils, with lower group rates for parties of twenty or more; preschool children free; free for holders of a disability certificate and one carer. An annual pass is ¥4,000 (¥3,000 for students). Two wheelchairs, a pushchair and a walking stick are lent free at reception, and the accessible toilet is in the adjoining community building. Photography is allowed in most rooms, but no flash, no tripods, no selfie sticks and no video. By train, Hiroshima to Miyoshi is about 1 hour 20 minutes by rapid service on the JR Geibi line, then five minutes by car or about ten by local bus; there is also a highway bus straight to the museum from Hiroshima Bus Centre, about an hour and a half. Be clear about what you will see: the collection is the Yumoto Kōichi archive of premodern material, built around the Edo-period Inō Monogatari books and scrolls. There is no slit-mouthed woman in it. That absence is, in its way, the point of this file.
Sources consulted
- Itō Ryūhei (伊藤龍平), «口裂け女は話されたか ―「俗信」と「説話」― (Was the Slit-Mouthed Woman Ever Told? 'Folk Belief' and 'Tale'), Studies in Folk Narrative no. 44, pp. 214-227 — includes the transcription of Nomura Jun'ichi's sample cases (the Hiratsuka patrol car, the Kushiro warning, the pomade and bekko candy), the note that several municipalities organised group walks home, and the argument that the rumour spread as folk belief rather than as a story» — 口承文芸研究 / Society for Folk Narrative Research of Japan, 2021 academic
- National Diet Library (国立国会図書館), «Collaborative Reference Database, case 1000247055: microfilm verification that the kuchisake-onna item in the Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun is in the morning edition of 26 January 1979, page one, column 'Henshū yoki', with nothing further between 23 and 29 January (call number YB-255)» — Collaborative Reference Database (レファレンス協同データベース), 2018 archive
- Gifu Prefectural Library (岐阜県図書館), «Collaborative Reference Database, case 1000034864: the artist's impression of the slit-mouthed woman in the Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun evening edition of 15 June 1979, article 'The slit-mouthed woman, born in Gifu — the fuss at last dying down'; includes the librarian's correction of the newspaper index and the note that Minokamo, Yaotsu and Gifu city were all proposed as the point of origin» — Collaborative Reference Database (レファレンス協同データベース), 2007 archive
- Iikura Yoshiyuki (飯倉義之), interviewed, «Japanese Urban Legends from the 'Slit-Mouthed Woman' to 'Kisaragi Station' — interview with the folklorist Iikura Yoshiyuki on the Gifu origin, the cram-school transmission route, the patrols and group walks home, and the collapse of the rumour at the summer holidays» — nippon.com (Nippon Communications Foundation), English edition, 27 December 2019, 2019 interview
- Tsunemitsu Tōru (常光徹), «野村純一と世間話研究 ―『日本の世間話』から― (Nomura Jun'ichi and the study of sekenbanashi) — the contents and argument of Nomura's Nihon no sekenbanashi (1995), whose first chapter is devoted to the slit-mouthed woman» — 口承文芸研究 no. 44 / Society for Folk Narrative Research of Japan, 2021 academic
- Misumi Jōji (三隅譲二), «都市伝説：流言としての理論的一考察 (Urban Legend: a Theoretical Approach to the Phenomenon of Rumour), Japanese Sociological Review vol. 42 no. 1, from p. 17 — classes the slit-mouthed woman among urban legends that change according to what makes a good telling within the bounds of plausibility rather than according to what can be verified» — 社会学評論 / Japan Sociological Society, 1991 academic
- Yumoto Kōichi Memorial Japan Yokai Museum (Miyoshi Mononoke Museum), «Museum visitor information: opening hours, closing days, admission and concessions, loan of wheelchairs, photography rules and the composition of the Yumoto Kōichi collection» — miyoshi-mononoke.jp, 2026 web
- Gifu Prefectural Library (岐阜県図書館), «Library guide: address, opening hours, closing days, transport and parking» — library.pref.gifu.lg.jp, 2026 web
- Iikura Yoshiyuki (飯倉義之), interviewed, «「口裂け女」から「きさらぎ駅」まで — Japanese edition of the Iikura interview, which names the Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun as the paper that reported the rumour in early 1979 and traces its spread from Gifu to Aomori and Kagoshima in about six months» — nippon.com (Nippon Communications Foundation), Japanese edition, 27 December 2019, 2019 interview
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-01 · How we verify our content
📎 Source: Enigma Atlas
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