Amabie is a mermaid-like yokai with a mouth like a bird’s beak and three legs or tail-fins. According to the legend, in mid-1846 (the fourth month of Kōka 3) a glowing object was seen in the sea off Higo Province, now Kumamoto Prefecture, almost every night. When a town official went to investigate, the creature appeared, named itself an amabie, said that good harvests would continue for six years, and told him that if disease spread, people should draw its picture and show it to the sick. Then it returned to the sea.
The story spread through kawaraban, woodblock-printed bulletins, together with its portrait. The only known record is a single 1846 print held by the Kyoto University Library, which is why amabie is often conjectured to be a miscopying of “amabiko,” a related prophecy beast attested a dozen or so times, including copies from around 1843–1844.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 it returned on Japanese Twitter under a hashtag, with manga artists posting their own versions. The prescription that spreading the image is itself the ward still worked, some one hundred seventy years on.