Have you heard of the “mysterious sticker” that’s been making the rounds on the internet lately?
Our readers have been asking us to look into it for a while, and our editorial team has finally decided to uncover the truth.
• The Mysterious Sticker
Start by looking at the picture. It shows a white square, ten centimeters on each side, with an indescribable human figure standing underneath a large black torii. The figure most closely resembles the popular image of Tsuno Daishi, or the Great Horned Master, featured on protective talismans from Enryaku Temple on Mount Hiei. Though the figure has no horns, its bizarrely long limbs and abstract style give off an ominous aura. And in each corner of the sticker is the character for woman, 女.
Lately, these creepy stickers have inexplicably been appearing all over the place.
• Distribution
Our editors hit the streets and found these stickers all around Tokyo, mostly on utility poles and walls. We also discovered some on the bottom of public mailboxes, on the windows of abandoned buildings, and in many other locations hidden from view. With this in mind, it seems unlikely the stickers are primarily meant to get people’s attention.
The stickers aren’t copies. Instead, the same image has been drawn by hand with either a pen or a brush, and the details and styles vary.
We also scoured the internet for clues. The phenomenon is widespread enough to have warranted dedicated threads on various forums, and a group of internet sleuths has suggested creating a distribution map covering the whole country.
According to the thread, the stickers can be found throughout Japan, from Hokkaido to Okinawa, but most have been spotted in western Japan.
• A Specialist’s Opinion
Our editorial team felt that the design might have religious significance and wondered if the sticker could function as some kind of talisman, so we reached out to a university professor who specializes in religious studies.
The following was their response:
“I am not aware of any talismans like this one. Since it depicts a torii, I expect it’s connected to a shrine rather than a temple. Talismans typically have more than just an image, though. They usually contain text with the name of the god being invoked, or the shrine they came from. This sticker only has the character for ‘woman’ in the corners. And this humanoid figure… I’ve never seen anything like it before. As you noted, it does resemble Tsuno Daishi. But in my opinion, it looks like an original creation, rather than an attempt to re-create an image of Tsuno Daishi. My assumption is that an amateur was attempting to create a protective talisman with some purpose in mind.”
• Testimonies
Our editorial team managed to interview several people with knowledge of the stickers. Here is what they told us:
Testimony of O (fifty-two, male, security guard)
I was assigned to the headquarters of a major company. I won’t tell you the name, but you’ve definitely heard of it. I worked the day shift, and a coworker and I took turns checking the entrances and the parking lot.
One day, the building sent a request to my security company. They asked us to tighten our patrols because somebody had done something to the walls.
They were talking about this sticker. Someone had stuck a bunch of those creepy stickers on the walls of the building. Some were about hip height, while others were way lower, and still others were high enough that we couldn’t reach them without standing on tiptoe. All four walls had been vandalized.
Following that request, we would peel off the stickers whenever we found one. If we just tore them off, it would leave some residue, so we had to be careful. It was a real pain. The janitors removed them every single day. And it wasn’t only that building, either. People found them in parks and on the walls of restaurants in the area, too.
But how should I say it…? It seemed like the stickers were put up randomly. Whoever did it wasn’t trying to display them—they just wanted to put them up. Maybe they were marking territory, or something like that.
When more stickers appeared on our building, it felt less like harassment or some kind of prank, and more like they were simply compensating for the ones we’d peeled off.
The weird thing is we never saw anyone putting them up. We would just find them.
After the request, we increased our rounds. This was our job, after all. We even started checking the area around the building. But the stickers kept appearing.
I was transferred soon after, so the rest of this is stuff I heard from a coworker. The stickers continued after I left. It never stopped, so the building installed extra security cameras outside.
The day the security company installed them, they had someone from both the day and the night shift sit in the monitor room and watch the camera feeds, including the new ones. But the guards didn’t see anything. The next day, however, when my coworker clocked in to take over for the night shift, a huge commotion had broken out.
There was a sticker on the outside of one of the second-floor windows. Even three grown men standing on each other’s shoulders couldn’t reach that high. A morning janitor had found it. From inside the building, it just looked like a white square, but when the sunshine hit it from the other side, it became clear it was one of those stickers. The janitor was terrified. Apparently, none of the security cameras monitored the second floor directly, but footage from other cameras in the area was examined, and nothing suspicious was found.
Testimony of T (forty-eight, male, reporter)
This happened in 2003, when I was covering a story about a family in Saitama that went missing (*see Editor’s note).
It was a really strange case. The editorial department was amazed that an entire family of four could have been spirited away. The police must have considered it a potential criminal case, because they refused to release any information about it. I really struggled to find any leads. The story dominated the news at the time, and every newspaper was desperate to get their hands on even the tiniest bit of info.
I was the same. I rarely do this anymore, but back then, I was working day and night to gather information. Then a detective I’d known for a long time let something slip.
“That case is really creepy. If possible, I’d rather not get involved.”
I thought he might be about to give me a big scoop, but I was wrong.
I begged him for leads, but all I got were little details about the strange state of the family’s house.
Plenty of reports had mentioned that the family seemed to have vanished into thin air, but apparently that wasn’t the only strange thing about the case.
The family had left their half-eaten breakfast on the dining room table. Beside the table was a couch facing a TV, with a low table in between. When they weren’t eating, the family probably spent most of their time in the area with the sofa and the TV—a very common arrangement. But it was the low table that caught the investigator’s attention.
He said there were four bundles of square paper on the table. Each stack was about ten centimeters tall, so roughly two hundred sheets. Beside the bundles of paper were four pens.