Kirk here following William’s lead by writing about Kumamoto’s own yokai, Amabie:
“According to a legend, the mermaid-like yokai emerged from the sea off the Higo domain, now Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan, in Japan’s Edo period and told locals that they should draw a picture of it and show this to others in the event of a plague.”
https://www.nippon.com/en/news/yjj2020041300499/
Even though William has written about Amabie several times already (you can find the posts with the page’s search function), I didn’t take a special interest in the yokai at the time. I’m prompted to post about it today because I just heard an old podcast about yokai that talks about, among other things, how Amabie have become a “thing” since the start of the pandemic. If you like podcasts, check it out: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/return-of-the-yokai/
