Kuchisake-onna: The Masked Woman Japanese Children Feared in 1979

You're walking home at dusk. Under a streetlight up ahead stands a woman in a red coat, a white mask over half her face. The next time you look up, she's right in front of you. Tonight, Yoi tells the rumor of Kuchisake-onna, the Slit-Mouthed Woman, the way Japanese children told it in 1979, then follows it back to where it was born and how it crossed the whole country in about six months. Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:34 Welcome, traveler 1:15 The Way Home 2:03 Am I Pretty? 2:41 How to Get Home 3:31 Where She Was Born 4:53 Across Japan in Six Months 6:12 Older Shadows, New Shores 7:23 Closing About this story Kuchisake-onna is an urban legend, not a real person. The first half of this video retells the rumor as children told it; the scenes on the way home are dramatized. The history of the rumor (where it started, how it spread) is introduced as described in the sources below. We have not seen the original 1979 newspapers or magazines ourselves, and the sources disagree on some details, such as the town where the rumor began. The illustrations are new pictures made for this video. Sources Wikipedia (Japanese), "Kuchisake-onna": https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%... Wikipedia (English), "Kuchisake-onna" (citing Michael Dylan Foster 2008 and others): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuchisa... nippon.com, "Japanese Urban Legends from the 'Slit-Mouthed Woman' to 'Kisaragi Station'" (interview with Iikura Yoshiyuki, Kokugakuin University, 2019): https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topic... Bunshun Online (Japanese), Yoshida Yuki, from "Gendai Kaidan-ko" (2022): https://bunshun.jp/articles/-/53564 Shukan Josei PRIME (Japanese), on the 1979 Kuchisake-onna boom (2021): https://www.jprime.jp/articles/-/21670 Credits Narration: synthetic voice (Kokoro TTS). Voice of the masked woman: VOICEVOX:暁記ミタマ, VOICEVOX:離途. Illustrations: AI-generated. #Kuchisakeonna #JapaneseUrbanLegend #Halloween