Akateko

Also Known As: 赤手児, “red hand child”; recorded in kana as アカテコ and written 赤テコ in the earliest account, and listed as Agateko in a later national dictionary
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It is a small red child’s hand that lowers itself out of a particular old honey locust tree and does nothing else.
Role in Mythos: It belongs to the class of local Japanese apparitions bound to one named tree in one named town rather than to any story cycle or pantheon.
Relation to Humans: It appears to people walking past the tree, most of them schoolchildren and most of them unharmed. The danger attached to the site is not the hand at all but the young woman said to stand at the roots, whose face brings on a fever.

The tree stood in front of an elementary school in Hachinohe, at the cold northern end of Honshū, and by the 1920s nobody in the town bothered to guess its age. It was a saikachi, a Japanese honey locust, the kind of tree whose trunk grows clusters of branching thorns like something defending itself, and whose seed pods hang down a foot or more, curved and dark and full of a pulp that generations of households boiled up for washing clothes. Children walked under it twice a day. Out of it, so the town said, came a hand.

Not an arm. Not a figure in the branches. A hand, small and red, the size of a child’s, lowering itself through the leaves as somebody passed underneath. That is the whole of it, and it is worth sitting with how little that is. The oldest surviving account runs to a single sentence and does not describe a wrist, a sleeve, a sound, or a face looking down. Something like a red child’s hand hangs from the old tree in front of the school. Whatever else Hachinohe knew about it was carried in conversation and never written down.

At the foot of the same tree there was a second thing, and the second thing was worse. A young woman would sometimes be standing there, seventeen or eighteen years old, in a furisode, the long swinging sleeves worn by unmarried girls. She was beautiful. Anyone who saw her went home and came down with a burning fever. The tellings do not say whether she spoke, or whether she was there on the same evenings as the hand, or whether the two had any business with each other at all. There was also a small shrine at the roots, called Wakamiya, and later writers have been careful to say that nobody has established what the shrine, the girl and the hand have to do with one another. Three strange things sharing one patch of ground is not the same as one story, though it is very hard for a passer-by to keep them separate at dusk.

Picture the ordinary version of the encounter, which is the only version there is. A child comes back along the road with the light going, the thorned trunk on the left, the pods knocking softly against each other overhead in the wind off the bay. Something comes down out of the leaves at about head height, red, open, close enough to touch. Then nothing. It hangs there. The child runs.

The akateko surfaces in print in February 1924, in an essay by Sasaki Kizen, the Tōno storyteller whose collected local material had already given Yanagita Kunio the substance of the Tōno Monogatari. It is not the essay’s subject. Sasaki was writing about the zashiki-warashi, the child spirit of Iwate houses, and the Hachinohe hand appears on page six as one more thing people said, sitting in a magazine called Kyōdo Shumi among other regional oddments. The entire literary existence of this creature rests on a folklorist mentioning it in passing while thinking about something else. Ten years later the naturalist Satō Kiyoaki picked it up for his nationwide dictionary of current yōkai, spelled it Agateko, and set it beside a companion he thought belonged with it: the akaashi, the red foot, reported from the Shiwaku Islands of Kagawa, which shows itself at a bend in a mountain road and tangles around a walker’s legs so that the walking will not come right. A hand in the north and a foot in the west. At least one later collector took the obvious next step and suggested they are the same being, divided by distance into two spare parts.

Its powers, such as they are, come to almost nothing, and that is the interesting part. It cannot follow. It has no reach beyond the shade of one tree, and it appears to have no appetite, no grievance and no errand. What it can do is arrive suddenly at the height of a face. The real harm at that address, the fever, travels by sight and belongs to the woman under the branches, and it does not need to touch anyone to work.

The limits are just as plain. Cut down the saikachi and there is nothing left to haunt, because the akateko is not a creature that lives somewhere so much as a property of a particular piece of wood. It does not travel, it does not multiply, and it does not seem to be able to do anything to a person who simply keeps walking. It is a monster that can be beaten by not stopping.

English retellings have lately started giving it teeth, describing a hand that takes the traveller by the neck and pulls him apart at the joints. That version is not in the Japanese record, which is unanimous that the thing is a fright and no more. The embroidery is understandable. A red hand that comes out of a thorn tree, opens, and then just hangs there is a difficult monster to sell, and it has survived a century of retelling anyway, which suggests the plain version was doing something the improved one does not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the akateko?

The akateko is a Japanese yōkai reported from Hachinohe in Aomori Prefecture, in what was formerly Mutsu Province. It takes the form of a small red child’s hand that hangs down out of an old honey locust tree in front of a local elementary school, with no arm or body attached to it.

Is the akateko dangerous?

In almost every account the akateko is harmless and only startles the people who walk beneath its tree. The danger at that location is attributed instead to a young woman in a long-sleeved kimono who appears at the roots, since anyone who sees her is said to fall ill with a fever.

Where does the akateko come from?

It was first written down in February 1924 by the folklorist Sasaki Kizen, in a single line inside an essay about the zashiki-warashi published in the regional magazine Kyōdo Shumi. The naturalist Satō Kiyoaki recorded it again in his 1935 national dictionary of yōkai under the name Agateko.

What is the akateko’s connection to the akaashi?

Satō Kiyoaki treated the akateko and the akaashi, or red foot, as a matched pair. The akaashi is reported from the Shiwaku Islands of Kagawa, where it appears at mountain-road junctions and clings to travellers’ legs to hinder their walking, and some later collectors have argued the two are simply the same yōkai showing different parts of itself.

Why is the akateko tied to one specific tree?

The akateko belongs to a large class of Japanese apparitions attached to a single fixed location rather than roaming freely. Its tree is a saikachi, or Japanese honey locust, a thorny species whose long seed pods were traditionally used for washing, and the creature has never been reported anywhere apart from that one schoolyard tree.