The kudan (件) is written with the “person” radical beside the character for “cow,” and it is exactly that: a prophecy beast with a human face and a bovine body, spread as rumor and news from the Edo period on. A samurai scribe’s diary already records it in 1819 as “human-faced, cattle-bodied.” The best-known notice is a kawaraban reporting a kudan on “Mount Kurahashi” in Tango Province (now Kyoto Prefecture) in the twelfth month of Tenpō 7 (1836); it foretold years of bountiful harvest and instructed people to paste up its picture at home to ward off evil and prosper.
Like other Japanese prophecy beasts, the kudan does not only announce plague or plenty but prescribes how to avoid harm: look at its image, or copy it. The printed flyer was therefore both a news sheet and an amulet in its own right. The claim that the stock phrase “kudan no gotoshi” (“as in the matter stated”) at the end of deeds refers to the monster is considered spurious, since the phrase dates back to the Heian period.
Later the prophecies turned to war. During the Second World War a kudan was rumored to have predicted Japan’s defeat, while among Japanese immigrants in Brazil a kudan was said to have predicted victory. The novelist Hyakken Uchida also discusses the makeup of the character in his story “Kudan.”