“I know somebody who saw a UMA.”
One of the freelancers we work with tipped us off about H, the man who witnessed the UMA, so we reached out to him.
When H arrived at our appointment, I thought he looked like a totally average person. To be honest, that reassured me because it meant his account was more likely to be credible.
We at the editorial department receive lots of tips every day, but many turn out to be fake. Some people even claim to be aliens. Reading a letter like that after working all night trying to put together a piece of reporting can be enough to push a person over the edge.
(Please understand the editorial department is in no way denying the existence of aliens or UFOs. These are separate matters.)
At any rate, the fact that H looked like a regular guy filled me with relief. He’d passed the first test, in other words.
H was a thirty-five-year-old office worker living in Tottori and employed by a big company. You’d never guess he had any cosmic or otherworldly connections.
But six years ago, on a family camping trip, he caught sight of a UMA.
Regular readers of this magazine hardly need another explanation of UMAs, but we’ll give a basic overview for any noobs (sorry!) picking this up for the first time.
UMA stands for Unidentified Mysterious Animal. As the name implies, it’s a general term for any creature whose existence is still unproven.
Because it uses English words, most people assume the name originates from overseas, but it was actually coined in Japan. Everyone knows that UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, and in 1976, a famous Japanese sci-fi magazine came up with UMA as a similar-sounding acronym. As a side note, people in English-speaking countries call these creatures cryptids.
One of the most famous UMAs is the Loch Ness Monster, affectionately called Nessie. Back in the seventies, the Japanese media went crazy for Nessie, spawning all sorts of local varieties, such as Issie in Lake Ikeda. Unfortunately for Nessie, the people involved with the famous photo later admitted it was a hoax, leaving the creature’s existence in doubt.
Other well-known UMAs include the large primate referred to as Bigfoot, mermaids (or sirens), and creatures called skyfish, which are said to rocket through the air at high speeds. As it happens, we covered that last creature a few years ago. Technically, the term UMA also includes aliens.
At this point, let’s take a moment to focus on Japan. Very few creatures in this country are categorized as UMAs. There are a few famous ones everyone knows about, such as kappa, the serpentine tsuchinoko, and the giant takitaro fish made famous by a certain fishing manga. But few Japanese people have heard of any others.
It has been said that Japan has so few UMAs because we have yokai instead.
Most people would call a kappa a yokai. The same goes for the long cloth-like creature called ittanmomen, the one-eyed hitotsume-kozo, and jinmenken, the human-faced dog that gained popularity in Japan a decade or so ago.
However, as long as people have claimed to see these creatures, they can be said to count as UMAs.
So it’s not that Japan doesn’t have many UMAs of its own, but that we have long put such creatures into a different category—that of yokai.
Debating whether an unidentified animal or creature in Japan should be a UMA or a yokai, however, is as unproductive as arguing over whether Ryoko Hirosue is an actress or an idol.
Kappa don’t care whether we call them UMAs or yokai. The media decides to portray them a certain way, and the public gradually comes to accept that portrayal. If you think about it, the media is the truly guilty party.
As the editor of a magazine focused on horror and the paranormal, I often fret over the best way to describe such creatures. But this time, in the hopes of spreading the term UMA in Japan, I have chosen to use that term for the remainder of this article.
Perhaps I spent a little too much time on that introduction. Allow me to finally introduce the UMA H witnessed firsthand.
H saw the UMA in the fall of 1992, at a campsite in .
He drove all the way there from distant Tottori for a one-night camping trip.
The campsite, aimed at motorists and nestled at the foot of a mountain near a dam, opened in 1985, just before the start of the camping craze. Initially, scores of young people jumped on the bandwagon, heading to the site to enjoy light hikes and other outdoor activities. Business boomed, and the place was filled to capacity even on weekdays.
H visited the campsite right at the height of the fervor. He was a vigilant observer of current trends and was especially excited to be doing something with his family. He bought a tent and a full complement of gear, and he’d already camped in several other places earlier that year with his family.
However, when they arrived at the campground that weekend, H and his family found it vacant, despite the nice location.
As a single person in their thirties who has no friends but does have a mind consumed by the paranormal, I cannot imagine why people would prefer an empty campground. But apparently when there is a crowd, those who camp with their family often run into problems with young people throwing late-night parties.
So H thanked his lucky stars and began setting up his tent with his wife, Y, and their son, M (who was six at the time). They then lit a fire and enjoyed the peaceful solitude.
Apparently, a woman’s intuition can also detect UMAs. Y was the first to feel that something was amiss. She said her head hurt, and she kept glancing off into the distance. H asked what she was looking at, and she pointed across the dam to the mountain, saying she felt something watching them.
Then the radio started acting funny. There was nothing wrong with the signal, but now and then, they would hear a man’s voice mixed in with the regular broadcast.
To H, it sounded like moaning. But M thought he heard it say something like “Heeey.” And as soon as M said that, H began to hear it, too. It was very faint, but he could just make out the word.
More strange occurrences followed. The family all made curry together for dinner. M nervously helped cut vegetables and cook rice. But the food had no flavor. H first assumed that his taste buds had malfunctioned, but the rest of his family also tasted nothing. They’d used a store-bought curry mix, but he had a hard time believing a spicy dish like curry could turn out so bland.