Amabie

Amabie is attested in mid-19th-century kawaraban and hand‑copied leaflets; a woodblock print dated 1846 records a sea‑dwelling creature that identified itself as an 'amabie' and delivered prophecy and a remedial instruction. Scholarly notes in the sources treat 'amabie' as a manifestation within a broader cluster of prophetic beings (amabiko / amahiko), and the name may be a variant or misspelling of those related forms rather than the origin of a discrete long tradition.

In the canonical 1846 woodblock it is depicted as a mermaid‑type being with long hair, scales from the neck down, a beak‑like mouth, and three legs (or three tail‑fins). Other amabiko/amabie corpus examples vary widely: some are three‑legged or have odd numbers of legs, some are quadruped or daruma/ape‑like, and at least one hand‑painted 1844 pamphlet shows an ape‑like, three‑legged, short‑haired bald form with human‑like eyes and ears. Iconographic elements noted across sources include luminous appearance at night in some accounts and occasional ape‑like vocal qualities.

Sources record prophetic speech (forecasting good harvests and warning of disease) and a remedial instruction: if disease spreads, people should draw a picture of the creature and show it to those who fall ill. Some variants are reported to cry with ape‑like voices at night and to glow in darkness. The beings appear in coastal or wet‑field contexts and function in the pamphlet record as portent‑bearers and distributors of an image‑based remedy.