Aka Manto (赤マント): The Red Cloak of Tokyo, 1939

Who is Aka Manto?

In the third week of February 1939 the children of Tokyo’s elementary schools and girls’ schools were telling one another the same thing. At night a hunchbacked man in a red cloak appeared and sucked the blood of women and children who walked alone. He had first been seen at Kita-Senju. Some said policemen had been among his victims. Letters about him reached the police stations at Ōji and Takinogawa. The principal of a girls’ school warned her pupils at morning assembly not to say the words “red cloak”. On the evening of 22 February the Metropolitan Police had a denial read on the seven o’clock radio news, and the next morning’s papers reported that every precinct had been ordered to crack down on the rumour, with up to twenty-nine days’ detention for anyone caught spreading it. The head of the police information section told a reporter that his own daughters kept pestering him to catch the man.

That is the Aka Manto on record: not a sighting but a rumour, with dates, a neighbourhood, a radio broadcast and a penalty. In April a well-known critic wrote in a monthly magazine that the “red cloak affair” had held the whole capital for barely a month and reached the neighbouring prefectures, and he read it as the voice of a public that no longer believed its newspapers. By early summer the red cloak had reached Osaka, where the police went after the street picture-show men who had put a magician in a red cloak into their stories.

What does aka manto mean?

Aka is red. Manto is the Japanese form of the French manteau, a cloak or cape, the long garment that a gentleman of the 1930s might wear over a suit. The name is the whole description: a colour and a garment, and a man inside them whom nobody had seen.

What the man was said to want

The rumour did not stay still. He sucked blood; he wanted livers; he took only virgins; the blood of girls in the third to fifth grades would cure a dreaded disease. Some adults heard in the red of the cloak the red of communism. The police official guessed that the figure came from the picture-show craze of a few years before, whose caped hero had drawn crowds of children on every corner, with a recent pistol robbery thrown in. A boy in the third grade at a school in Negishi remembered, decades later, that the vampire in the red cloak had been in Hibiya Park first and then in the Yanaka cemetery, that the schools had warned them at assembly, and that the radio had called it a hoax.

Later writers have pushed the story earlier. A collection published in 1987 gathered memories of a red-cloaked vampire from around 1936 and 1937, and of a Nagano school where the question “red cloak or blue cloak?” was already being asked; one theory ties the figure to the officers of the army mutiny of February 1936. These are recollections set down half a century on. The dated records begin in February 1939. A picture-show man’s memoir put the panic in 1940, a year late, and the mistake has been copied since.

The man in the toilet

The Aka Manto that Japanese children know today lives in a school toilet, and he arrived there by way of another story. In 1972 a folklore journal printed a tale from Amagasaki in which a voice in the school toilet asked, “Shall I give you red paper, or white paper?”, and the younger pupils went to the toilet in a chain for fear of it. In 1985 and 1986 junior-high pupils in Tokyo told a teacher the same question in three colours: red paper and you are found bloody, blue paper and you are strangled with your face gone blue, white paper and nothing happens. In 1990 a pupil in Fujisawa knew a women’s staff toilet where a voice asked three times, “Shall I put a red cloak on you?”, and anyone who refused was found as a figure run through with a sword.

The cloak and the paper merged. The man in the next stall asks whether you want the red cloak or the blue; red means your back is slashed and the cloak is your own blood, blue means you are strangled or drained until you are blue. A children’s book of 1990 that collected school ghost stories fixed him there, and he has not left.

Appearance

In 1939, a hunchbacked man in a red cloak, seen by no one. In the toilet stories, a voice, and then a figure in red. The games and animations of the last decade have given him a mask and a handsome face. Our illustration keeps to the 1939 street: a man in a long red cloak, seen from behind under a street lamp, who could be anyone.

Behavior and abilities

• He appears at night. To women and children walking alone, in the 1939 rumour.
• He takes blood. Or livers, or only from virgins, depending on who was telling it.
• He spreads. From Kita-Senju across the city and into the neighbouring prefectures in a month, and to Osaka by summer.
• He asks. In the toilet version, red cloak or blue, and each answer is a death.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

In 1939 the countermeasure was the radio: a police denial at seven in the evening, and a fine for repeating the story. It did not work for a month. In the toilet, the rule the children worked out is the one that applies to every such question. Do not answer. Say you want neither, or say nothing, and the voice goes away. Choose a colour and the colour is what happens to you.

Documented rumour and later imagery

Documented rumour. A rumour among Tokyo schoolchildren from about 20 February 1939 of a hunchbacked man in a red cloak who sucked the blood of women and children, denied on the radio by the Metropolitan Police on the 22nd, reported in the papers on the 23rd and 24th, and described in April by a critic as a month-long panic across the capital; an Osaka scare in July 1939 involving picture-show men; recollections, published in 1987, of a red-cloaked vampire around 1936; and the toilet tales of 1972, 1986 and 1990 in Amagasaki, Tokyo and Fujisawa.

Later imagery. The school version is the one that travelled abroad. A horror game of 2019 made him a masked pursuer in a school at night, and in January 2026 a television series about a ghost-fighting teacher put a masked man in a red cloak in front of three pupils to ask whether they liked red, blue or white. The man of 1939 asked nothing. He was never seen at all, and for a month a city of six million could talk of nothing else.