Amabie (アマビエ): The Sea Creature That Asked to Be Shared

What is Amabie?

Every night, off the coast of Higo — now Kumamoto — something shone in the sea. An official went out to look, and a creature rose from the water. It had long hair falling over its body, a beak, scales, and three leg-like limbs below. It spoke. I live in the sea, and my name is Amabie. For six years from this year there will be good harvests in every province — but disease will spread as well. Copy my likeness quickly and show it to people. Then it went back under.

That is the whole text of a woodblock broadsheet dated the middle of the fourth month of Kōka 3, 1846, now in Kyoto University Library. It closes by saying it is a copy of the report the official sent to Edo. It is the only Edo-period record of the creature.

What does Amabie mean?

Nobody knows. The name is written in kana only, アマビエ, and the sheet offers no characters for it. The likeliest explanation is that it is a mis-copying of Amabiko, a similar prophesying creature of several other nineteenth-century broadsheets — a scribe’s slip that gave the beast a name of its own. That remains a proposal rather than a settled fact. It is pronounced ah-MAH-bee-eh.

What it does and does not promise

Amabie makes a prophecy and a request. The prophecy is mixed — plenty and sickness together. The request is to share its picture. The sheet never says what the picture will do. It does not promise that showing it will ward off the disease or cure anyone. It asks to be copied, and a printed broadsheet was exactly the kind of thing that could be.

Appearance

Long hair over the body, a beak-like mouth, a scaled body and three legs. Our illustration follows those features and adds colour and a shoreline; it is our own image, not a copy of the sheet.

Behavior and abilities

• It shines. It is first noticed as a light on the sea at night.
• It foretells. Six good harvests and an epidemic.
• It asks to be shown. That request is the whole of its instruction.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

None are recorded. Amabie is not a danger in the record. It is a messenger, and what it asks for is attention.

Documented sheet and the 2020 revival

Documented sheet. Higo no kuni kaichū no kai, Kyoto University Library, dated 1846: a long-haired, beaked, scaled sea creature appears to an official in Higo, foretells six years of good harvests and an epidemic, and asks that its likeness be copied and shown.

2020 revival. In the spring of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Amabie spread across Japanese social media as people drew and shared their own versions, and the Ministry of Health put it on its posters; a 2022 study in the Japanese Journal of Psychology examined the role it played. It became a symbol of hope and of staying home — a meaning the 1846 sheet never states, but one that grew directly out of its request. A creature that asked only to have its picture shared got its wish, a hundred and seventy-four years later.