Kudan

Also Known As: (件), the character written as the “person” radical beside “ox”; the kutabe or kudabe of Mount Tate is treated as a variant
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Born from an ordinary cow, it speaks human language from birth, delivers one prophecy of harvest, plague or war that is held never to fail, and dies within days.
Role in Mythos: It is the best known of Japan’s prophecy beasts, the yogenjū, whose printed image was pasted up in houses as a charm against the disaster it had just announced.
Relation to Humans: It appears in farm byres and mountain villages at moments of famine, epidemic and war, and speaks directly to the people who own the cow that bore it. Its picture, cut from a broadsheet and stuck to a wall, was believed to bring prosperity, keep sickness out of the house and secure a good harvest.

On the thirteenth day of the fifth month of 1819, in a farmhouse at Kaminoseki on the Suō coast, a cow calved and the calf had a man’s face. It was still wet. It looked at the household and spoke to them in their own language, and what it said was recorded that same year in an official’s diary: I am three days old already. Today you are to give me the name Kudan. Do not hate my strange shape and kill me. There is a reason I have come into the world. For seven years from now the harvests will be good, and from the eighth year war will break out. The diarist copied all of this down, and then, in the manner of a careful man, added a final line noting that he had not yet heard whether any of it turned out to be true.

The name is a joke and a proof at once. Write the character for person, put an ox beside it, and you have 件, kudan. Japanese contracts and deeds have closed for centuries with the formula yotte kudan no gotoshi, meaning roughly “thus, as set out above,” and the broadsheets of the 1830s take that phrase and hand it to the beast: the creature is so incapable of lying that legal documents invoke it to swear they are telling the truth. The etymology is nonsense. It is also exactly the kind of nonsense that makes a story stick.

The kudan arrives with a printing press behind it. In the twelfth month of 1836 one was reported in the mountains at Kurahashi, and a woodblock kawaraban was struck in Yosa district and sold in the street, and hand-copies of it were still being made in distant provinces years afterward. The sheets cannot agree on whether the mountain stood in Tanba or in Tango, which is the sort of detail that gets lost when a story travels by broadsheet. What they do agree on is the offer. The body is an ox, reads the text, the face resembles a man’s; a kudan came out in the same month of 1705 and good harvests followed for years afterwards, as is written in an old book; and if you paste this picture up, your household will prosper, sickness will pass over you, every calamity will be escaped, and the year will be abundant. Truly, an auspicious beast.

Look at the date. The twelfth month of 1836 was the pit of the Tenpō famine, the year rice failed across the country and villagers were eating straw. A cheap sheet of paper was on sale promising a great harvest, and it cost almost nothing, and it had a picture of a cow with a human face on it, and people bought it. Superstition is often just a market meeting a need.

Nobody who described one had seen it for long, because the kudan does not last. It speaks, and then within a few days it dies, and by the closing years of the Edo period the printed sheets were saying flatly that it dies as a three-day-old newborn. This is the whole shape of the creature. It has one sentence in it. The mountain variant called the kutabe, set on the slopes of Mount Tate in Toyama, is stranger to look at, drawn sometimes with a long-haired woman’s face, sometimes with the bald head of an old man, and given clawed paws rather than hooves, and its prophecy is narrower: an unknown disease will come in four or five years, and whoever has once looked upon its image will not catch it. Behind both of them, at a distance, stands the Chinese Bai Ze, the omniscient beast that lectured the Yellow Emperor on every spirit in the world, and which Japanese painters had long since given a human face and an animal body.

What a kudan actually looked like is less mysterious than it sounds. Calves are occasionally born with deformities that flatten and foreshorten the skull into something that reads, to a frightened eye at four in the morning in a dark byre, as a human face. The calves die quickly. The rest is what a village does with a shock.

And what a village does with a shock is push it one valley over. In 1963 a folklorist collecting in the mountains of Okayama was told in the village of Yatsuka that a kudan had been born and had prophesied a great war for the following June, and that it had been born, in fact, in Kawakami, the next village along. In Kawakami he was told it had been born in Chūka, and had foretold a bumper crop with an epidemic riding in behind it. In Chūka he was told it had been born back in Yatsuka, and had said only that a great wind was coming. Three villages, three prophecies, and the calf always in somebody else’s byre.

Its power is simply that it cannot be wrong, and that its picture works. Its weakness is that it has no second sentence. It cannot be questioned, cross-examined, kept, or sent for. It surfaces where the anxiety already is, which is why the sightings cluster so tightly: before the wars with China and with Russia, and then thickly through the Pacific War, when a kudan was rumoured in the mountains of Hiroshima, at Iwakuni, at Matsuyama, and was said in the last months to have prophesied defeat. Uchida Hyakken had already used it in 1921, in a short story in which a man wakes to find he has become a kudan himself and that a crowd has gathered in the field to hear him prophesy, and he has nothing to tell them. After the Kobe earthquake, and again after the tsunami of 2011, the sightings started up once more, passed hand to hand as rumour rather than woodblock. The beast has never needed to be believed in. It only needs the year to be bad.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kudan?

The kudan is a prophecy beast of Japanese folklore, born from an ordinary cow with the body of a calf and the face of a human. It speaks the moment it is born, delivers a single prophecy about the harvest, an epidemic or a war, and dies within a few days. Its prophecies are said never to fail.

What does the kudan predict?

The kudan predicts events that affect whole communities rather than individuals: bumper harvests, famine, plague, storms and war. The most famous surviving broadsheet, printed after a sighting in the twelfth month of 1836, announces a great harvest, which was published at the height of the Tenpō famine. Later rumours during the Pacific War held that a kudan had foretold Japan’s defeat.

Why is the kudan’s picture used as a charm?

The printed sheets instruct readers to paste up the image of the kudan, promising that the household will prosper, escape disease and every calamity, and receive an abundant harvest. This puts the kudan among the yogenjū, Japan’s prophecy beasts, whose standard bargain is that viewing or displaying their likeness protects you from the disaster they have just announced.

What does the name Kudan mean?

The name is written with the character 件, formed from the “person” radical placed beside the character for ox, which describes the creature exactly. Japanese legal documents traditionally end with the phrase yotte kudan no gotoshi, and the broadsheets claim the formula exists because the kudan is so honest that its name became a guarantee of truthfulness.

Is the kudan real?

There is no kudan, but there are calves. Cattle are occasionally born with skull deformities that give the head a crudely human appearance, and such calves usually die soon after birth, which matches the folklore closely. Records of kudan births cluster around periods of famine, epidemic and war rather than around any particular place.