Aka Manto

The question comes from behind the door, in a school toilet, after the other children have gone home. The tiles are cold and the tap drips. A voice asks the child on the other side whether it wants the red cape or the blue one. There is no good answer, and that is the point.

Aka Manto means simply “red cape,” and in Japan the name belongs to two things that grew into one. The older is a rumour. The younger is a ghost story, told in school corridors for the better part of a century, about a caped figure who waits in the lavatory and offers a choice. The first gave the second its costume and its appetite for children.

The rumour is the better documented of the two. At the start of 1939 Tokyo was gripped by talk of a man in a red cape who lurked about the city and carried off children. It was loud enough that the journalist and critic Ōya Sōichi wrote it up for the April 1939 issue of the magazine Chūō Kōron under the title “The Sociology of the Red Cape: A Protest Against Print Journalism.” By his account the story of the caped man held the whole capital for about a month. Later writers traced its route west along the old Tōkaidō to Osaka, and by 1940 it had reached Kyushu and Japanese schoolchildren in colonial Korea. Some accounts put its first stirrings earlier, around 1935 or 1936, in Osaka schoolyards.

What the red cape did depended on who was whispering. In the versions the children’s-culture scholar Honda Masuko gathered in a 1986 essay, his prey was schoolgirls and his purpose was their blood or their livers. The cape gave that fear a silhouette, something a child could claim to have glimpsed at the end of a crowded street.

Nobody has pinned down where the silhouette came from, and several candidates have been proposed. The kamishibai storyteller Kata Kōji, who worked the street paper-theatre trade in those years, wrote in 1971 that the panic mixed a real assault and murder of a girl near Yanaka Cemetery in Tokyo with a kamishibai play called Aka Manto. That play, by his telling, was harmless: an adaptation of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s story “Toshishun,” in which a gentleman magician in a red cape takes a shoeshine boy as his apprentice. The Osaka police confiscated it anyway. The writer Asakura Kyōji objected in 1996 that the rumour was already running before the date Kata gave for the seizure, and that the police had grabbed the play because it looked like the rumour, not the other way round. Asakura pointed instead at the February 1936 army mutiny in Tokyo and the censored, rumour-thick weeks that followed it. Others have offered Edogawa Ranpo’s master thief the Fiend with Twenty Faces, serialized from 1936, and an unsolved murder of 1906 in Fukui, where a stranger wrapped in a blue blanket called a family out into the snow one by one and was never caught. The stories disagree, and no single one of them has won.

The toilet came later, or at least it reaches the record later. The folklorist Matsutani Miyoko, whose collections of modern Japanese folk narrative are the standard record of this kind of material, printed in 1987 the recollection of a woman named Shiohara Tsuneko. Around 1936, she remembered, a caped man was said to stand at the entrance to the toilets at Toyoshina Elementary School in Nagano and ask each child, “Red cape or blue cape?” A child who answered red was cut by knives until the blood made a cape of its own. A child who answered blue had the blood drawn out until the body turned blue. It is a memory written down fifty years after the fact, and it should be read as one.

The trick of the story is that the answer becomes the injury. The colour chosen is the colour worn. A child cannot argue with that logic, only obey it or refuse.

After the war the tale kept moving and kept shedding its details. In many schools the capes became sheets of toilet paper, and a voice asked whether the child wanted red paper or blue paper, a form the folklorist Tsunemitsu Tōru treated in his 1993 study of Japanese school ghost stories. One version remembered from Nara in the 1930s asked about red paper or white paper instead. The pairings shift from school to school, and the punishments shift with them, but the structure does not: a closed stall, a disembodied question, and a choice that is no choice at all.

The record is silent on a great deal. There is no origin story for the spirit, no name beyond the garment, no death that made it and no ritual that lays it. Nobody in the older sources describes a face. English-language retellings of recent decades give him a mask, and sometimes a handsome face behind it that draws girls to him, and they add that choosing any third colour drags the chooser down to the underworld. Those are later layers, told online far more than in the schoolyards where the story was collected.

His power is the question itself. The cape, the knives and the draining are only the enforcement. Aka Manto kills through a rule, and the rule is that whatever the victim asks for arrives in the victim’s own blood.

His weakness sits inside the same rule. The tale that grants him only one move also grants the listener one defence. In the school versions the safe course is to refuse the game, to give neither colour or to say nothing, and to get out of the stall. A figure who can only act through an answer is helpless against silence. Several schools taught a third answer, a white or a yellow, that was supposed to be safe, and whether it worked depended on which playground told it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Aka Manto?

Aka Manto, meaning “red cape,” is a Japanese urban legend about a caped figure who haunts school toilets and asks whether you want a red cape or a blue cape. Whatever colour is chosen becomes the way the victim dies. The legend grew out of a real rumour panic in Tokyo about a child-snatcher in a red cape in the late 1930s.

Where did the Aka Manto legend come from?

Aka Manto began as a rumour about a man in a red cape who abducted children, which gripped Tokyo for about a month in early 1939 according to the critic Ōya Sōichi, writing that April in Chūō Kōron. Proposed sources include a kamishibai paper-theatre play called Aka Manto, the February 1936 army mutiny, and an unsolved 1906 murder in Fukui. None of these explanations has been settled.

What happens if you answer Aka Manto’s question?

In a school version recorded by the folklorist Matsutani Miyoko, answering red meant being cut with knives until the blood looked like a red cape, and answering blue meant having the blood drawn out until the body turned blue. The victim’s chosen colour becomes the injury. Later versions swap the capes for red and blue toilet paper.

How do you escape Aka Manto?

In most school tellings the way to survive Aka Manto is to refuse to choose, giving no colour at all and leaving the stall. Some schools taught a supposedly safe third answer, such as white or yellow. Modern English retellings warn that naming any other colour drags the victim to the underworld.

Is Aka Manto related to Hanako-san?

Aka Manto and Hanako-san are both part of the Japanese tradition of school toilet ghost stories, and both are tied to a particular stall. Aka Manto differs in that it has a documented origin in a 1930s rumour about a caped kidnapper, and its threat always takes the form of a question about colour.

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