Jinmenken (人面犬): The Human-Faced Dog That Fled the Rumours

What is Jinmenken?

You are driving on the expressway at night and a dog is running alongside the car. It is keeping up — at a hundred kilometres an hour. You look over, and it looks back, and it has the face of a middle-aged man. Or: you find a stray going through the rubbish behind the shops, and when you shine a light on it, it lifts a man’s face and says, Leave me alone.

That was the jinmenken, the human-faced dog, and in 1989 and 1990 every schoolchild in Japan knew about it. In January 1990 the weekly Asahi Journal ran a piece on it as a case of a children’s rumour network that had pulled the mass media in after it; a doctoral thesis on children’s rumours later gave it a chapter of its own. It is not a sighting. It is a record of what people said.

What does jinmenken mean?

The name is written 人面犬: jin, a person; men, a face; ken, a dog. The human-face dog. It is pronounced jeen-MEN-ken. Like the kuchisake-onna a decade before it, the name is a plain description of the one thing every version shares.

The dog in Yamagata

In 1992 the folklorist Takahashi Toshihiro published notes on the rumours going round Yamagata. A first-grader told him that the human-faced dog had lived in Tokyo, but people had made so much fuss about it that it had run away to Yamagata. Another child knew where it appeared: around Nanokamachi, in the middle of Yamagata city.

That is the most interesting version on record. The rumour had become so loud that, in a child’s telling, even the monster wanted somewhere quieter.

Appearance

A dog’s body and a human face — usually a middle-aged man’s, sullen rather than frightening. Our illustration gives it a tired face on a small-town street at night.

Behavior and abilities

• It looks back at you. The shock of every version is the face.
• It speaks, in some versions. Usually to tell you to go away.
• It moves. On the expressway, in some tellings; out of Tokyo, in Yamagata.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

None are recorded. The jinmenken is almost never dangerous in the rumours. It is startling, rude, or simply sad.

Documented rumour and later imagery

Documented rumour. A human-faced dog rumour among Japanese children around 1989–90, reported in the press and studied afterward; a 1992 Yamagata record of a first-grader who said it had fled Tokyo because of the fuss, and of its haunt around Nanokamachi.

Later imagery. The jinmenken is now a staple of lists of Japanese urban legends, often given a single origin — an escaped laboratory experiment, a man and his dog killed together in a crash — or linked to Edo-period sideshow puppies with human faces. None of those connections is established by the records. What the Yamagata note keeps is the strangest detail of all: a rumour so big that its own subject went looking for peace and quiet.