Late at night on a Japanese highway, something is keeping pace with a car at 100 km/h. It is a dog with a man's face. A car it overtakes, the story goes, will crash.
That was jinmenken, the human-faced dog. In 1989 and 1990 the rumour ran through the whole country, and the mass media picked it up. The name is plain: 人 (jin, person), 面 (men, face), 犬 (ken, dog).
What does it look like?
It is a dog with a human face. Many tellings make the face a middle-aged man's, sometimes a tired one. Others give it an old man's face with long eyebrows.
The body is a dog's, but the rumours gave it unusual power. It could leap from building to building. It could jump more than 6 metres and clear a wall. One detail even said it left green droppings.
Two kinds of sighting
The stories fell into two groups.
In the first, it haunts the highway. It chases cars late at night at 100 km/h, and the car it overtakes has an accident.
In the second, it is almost a joke. It is digging through rubbish bins in a busy shopping street. A shop worker or a passer-by speaks to it. The dog says, "Leave me alone." Then it walks off.
Other parting lines went round too: "None of your business," "Shut up," and "Oh, it's just a human." Some said it said rude things to couples. Darker versions said a person it bit would become a human-faced dog too, or that the bite would make the body rot.
Some tellings end with a twist. Somewhere, they say, there is also a dog-faced human, who swapped faces with the dog.
Where did it come from?
People offered many explanations at the time. It was a yokai. It was a bioweapon made by genetic engineering. It escaped from a lab at Tsukuba University, where students in white coats hunted it with nets. It was born in a closed tunnel in Saitama, where wandering ghosts mixed with the spirit of a dog killed by a car. It was a mutation caused by pollution.
The best-known theory is less mysterious. The journalist Ishimaru Genshō later reported that, as a writer for the teen magazine Popteen, he and the editors took a reader's story, added to it, and spread it on purpose. Others have also claimed the credit. The actor Matoba Kōji said on a TV show that he and his friends made it up.
One more theory points to a manga. In Tsunoda Jirō's 1970s series Ushiro no Hyakutarō, a psychic dog called Zero sometimes shows a human face. The folklore writer Yamaguchi Bintarō says Tsunoda told him jinmenken was probably Zero.
Go deeper
Books worth owning if this world pulls you in.
- The Book of Yokai →Michael Dylan FosterThe most readable scholarly introduction to yokai — where they come from, what they mean, and the major creatures.
- Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien →trans. Hiroko Yoda & Matt AltThe complete Edo-period bestiaries that so many of these entries trace back to, in full English translation.
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Edo saw one long before
The 1989 rumour was new. The idea was not.
On the 8th day of the 6th month of 1810, in Edo, a bitch gave birth to a litter. One puppy had a face that looked human from the eyes down the nose. The writer Ishizuka Hōkaishi recorded what happened next in his Gaidan Bunbun Shūyō.
A showman heard about it and took the puppy and its mother to a show booth by Ryōgoku Bridge. Entry cost 12 mon (copper coins). The crowds were huge. The puppy soon died, but its body was shown for three or four more days, with incense burning. A broadsheet about it came out within two days. People whispered an ugly explanation, based on a superstition of the time about curing syphilis.
Nine years later it happened again. In 1819 a puppy born near Nihonbashi was said to have a human face, and all of Edo talked about it. So many people came that the neighbours shut the alley gate. A man from a brothel who went to look told the writer Katō Eibian it was not really human-faced. The skin round its eyes and nose had no hair, so it looked like a monkey. Only its high nose and clear eyebrows were a little human.
Jinmenken today
The kudan, a calf with a human face, was born to speak a prophecy and die. In the stories told here, jinmenken makes no prophecy. Often it just wants to be left alone with the rubbish.
