Wartime rumor
Japan · 1930s
- Status
- Prewar rumor
- Reading time
- 8 minutes
- Origin
- Prewar Tokyo rumor / school toilets
- Confidence
- Rumor wave documented; origin theories compete
Red or blue?
Aka Manto
First a caped stranger who was said to snatch children from the streets of Tokyo, then a voice from the next stall asking a question with no good answer. The same name covers both.
By the Yokai Signal editors · Published
Every legend leaves two records: the story people repeat, and the path it took to reach them.
01 / THE STORY
Two figures under one name
The older Aka Manto (赤マント, “Red Cape”) is a street figure. In Japanese descriptions of the early Shōwa era he is a sinister man in a red cloak who kidnaps and kills children, most often girls. Some versions add that he is a vampire or that he leaves corpses behind. He is the kind of villain parents could point to as a reason to come straight home.
The newer Aka Manto lives in school toilets. A child alone in a stall hears a voice, usually from above or beside, asking whether they want a red cape. In the form retold by the writer Asazato Itsuki for Gendai Business, the answer “yes” brings a stab in the back and a body covered in blood. The best-known English version changes the question to a choice of paper, red or blue, and that is the form many readers meet first.
Both figures share a costume and a menace, but they function differently. The street Aka Manto is a warning about strangers. The toilet Aka Manto is a trap built from a question.
The cape did not change; the place where children met it did.
02 / THE WORDS
Manto, red and blue, and the paper
Manto (マント) is the borrowed word for a cloak or cape. English-language folklorist Matthew Meyer notes that in the 1930s it referred to a shorter, sleeveless, kimono-style jacket, whereas today it suggests a long cape, so each generation pictures a slightly different costume.
Red and blue (赤と青) form the ‘choice’ that gives the toilet version its shape. In the Nagano school version that Japanese sources attribute to the mid-1930s, choosing red brought a bloody end and choosing blue brought death by blood loss. When the legend became the ‘Red Paper, Blue Paper’ (赤い紙・青い紙, Akai Kami Aoi Kami) version, toilet paper took the place of the cape.
The same pattern, a colored garment offered by a voice, appears in related legends such as Akai Chanchanko and Akai Hanten, named in the Gendai Business article. They are separate stories sharing a grammar.
03 / THE TRACE
The late-1930s rumor wave
The street legend is the older of the two and belongs to the mid-1930s. A Gendai Business article, citing Matsutani Miyoko’s folklore collection Gendai Minwakō 7, places the story in Shōwa 11–12 (1936–37): a red-caped figure attacking people and leaving bodies, sometimes said to be a vampire. The same article raises the February 26 Incident of 1936, the army mutiny in Tokyo, as a possible spark, since a rumor held that the officers wore red capes and martial-law censorship would have left plenty of room for distortion.
Beyond that, the geography is murky. Some accounts describe a rumor that fanned out from Tokyo to other cities, and others suggest a caped-man story from elsewhere, an Osaka school for instance, travelled in the opposite direction. We could not tie either route to a document we opened, so we do not claim to know which city came first or how quickly the story moved. Rumors of this kind travel by children and by word of mouth, which is exactly why they leave so few dated traces.
Matthew Meyer’s English summary puts the schoolyard rumor as early as the 1930s, which is consistent with the Japanese material. A one-line caution applies: the precise date of any ‘panic’ is not given by the sources we could open, and we did not find a contemporary newspaper account. This page therefore speaks of a rumor wave, not a documented incident.
We could confirm that researchers date the rumor to the mid-to-late 1930s, but not locate an authoritative contemporary report. Treat precise day-and-place claims with caution.
04 / ORIGIN
Competing theories about the cape
Several models have been proposed, and they are theories, not facts. The oldest candidate, as Gendai Business describes it, is the unsolved ‘Blue Blanket Man’ (Aogetto no otoko) case in Mikuni, Fukui, on 11 February 1906: a man in a blue blanket lured out a shop clerk, then the clerk’s mother and wife; the two women were found dead in rivers the next day, the clerk was never found, and the statute of limitations ran out in 1921. The article itself notes that the blanket is blue, not red, and that it is unclear when the colour changed.
Other proposed sources are Edogawa Ranpo’s Kaijin Nijūmensō, the masked villain of his juvenile detective fiction, and a kamishibai (paper-theater) show titled Akamanto, which Gendai Business also lists. Each is plausible; none is proven. Treat all of them, including the February 26 theory above, as candidate ingredients rather than an answer.
A single origin is unlikely. The folklore here looks like a composite: several real frights, a literary villain and a children’s costume merged into one figure, because each was easy to tell and hard to check.
05 / VARIATIONS
From the street to the school toilet
When did the cape move indoors? The Nagano school version dated to about 1935–36 in Gendai Business’s account suggests the shift began early. The same article notes that the school-ghost-story form moves the setting into the school toilet, where the voice asks if you want a red cape and punishes a ‘yes.’ Matthew Meyer describes the ‘red paper or blue paper’ form, in which choosing either is fatal and refusing both may help.
English-language references such as Yokai.com record a range of variants: a red or white paper choice, in which a red tongue licks the student or a white hand touches them from below; a yellow-paper variant; and a kainade version, in which a hairy toilet-dwelling yōkai strokes the student’s behind, which is far less violent. The fourth stall is the usual location, since four (shi) sounds like the word for death.
The ‘Red Cape, Blue Cape’ school-toilet form is generally understood to have shaded into ‘Red Paper, Blue Paper’, and the tradition kept producing local variants, which is typical of oral folklore among children.
06 / CONTEXT
A kidnapper, a war and a toilet
Interpretation: both versions are built from a real parental fear. A street figure who takes children makes sense in a crowded city. The prewar years were also a time of censorship and anxiety, and rumor often fills the space left by missing news; the suggestion that the story rode on the unrest around the February 26 Incident belongs to this line of thinking.
The move to school toilets coincides with the postwar growth of school ghost stories, a genre later given a name and a boom by Tsunemitsu Tōru’s 1990 book Gakkō no Kaidan, as another Japanese overview notes. In a school, the toilet is one of the few spaces where a child is alone and unobserved, which makes it a natural stage for a voice from nowhere.
Meyer observes that Aka Manto’s question, red or blue, is an impossible one in which any answer is terrible, and he suggests it reflects student anxiety. That is an interpretation, but it explains why the legend is easy to retell: the rule is one sentence.
07 / AFTERLIFE
A legend that never quite retires
Aka Manto remains one of the standard Japanese toilet ghosts. Yokai.com says its popularity has persisted even as newer toilet legends have emerged.
We found no verified film or game of record for the legend in the sources we opened, and English-language references list none, so we do not claim any. The better evidence of its afterlife is the way the structure, a voice that asks you to choose, has been reused in other ‘colored object’ legends.
08 / WHY IT WORKS
A question that cannot be answered
Interpretation: the toilet Aka Manto succeeds because it is a game. It tells a child that the danger lies in a particular question and offers escape routes: bring your own paper, say you want none, or run. The legend trains its audience in a verbal defense, which is why it is still passed on as advice as much as terror.
That also explains the long life of the earlier version. A caped stranger needs only a costume and an unlit street, and both are available in every era.
09 / TIMELINE
The record, in order
- 1906
The unsolved ‘Blue Blanket Man’ case in Fukui, which Gendai Business calls the oldest candidate model for the legend.
- 1935
Nagano school accounts of Red Cape/Blue Cape are dated to about 1935–36.
- 1936
The February 26 Incident in Tokyo, which Gendai Business lists among the candidate models after a rumor that the officers wore red capes.
- 1936–37
Period in which, according to Matsutani Miyoko’s folklore collection as cited by Gendai Business, a red-caped attacker was rumored.
- 1990
Tsunemitsu Tōru’s Gakkō no Kaidan starts the school-ghost-story boom in which the toilet legends flourish.
10 / QUESTIONS
Common questions
What does Aka Manto mean?
Aka Manto (赤マント) means ‘Red Cape.’ Manto is the Japanese word for cape or cloak, though in the 1930s it could refer to a shorter, sleeveless kimono-style jacket. The name covers a prewar street legend of a red-caped child-kidnapper and the later school-toilet voice that asks whether you want a red or blue cape or paper.
Is Aka Manto a real person?
No real person has been identified. Researchers propose several models, including an unsolved 1906 Fukui murder case, a Tokyo child-murder rumor combined with a paper-theater story, the February 26 Incident, and fiction by Edogawa Ranpo. These are theories, not established facts.
What is the ‘red paper, blue paper’ version?
It is the school-toilet form in which a voice asks which color of paper you want. In the commonest telling both answers are deadly, while escape tricks include saying you want none or bringing your own. Variants swap in a red-or-white choice, a yellow paper, or a hairy yōkai called kainade. It derives from the red-cape/blue-cape question.
When did the Aka Manto rumor start?
Researchers date the street rumor to the mid-to-late 1930s. Folklore collected by Matsutani Miyoko mentions Shōwa 11–12 (1936–37), and Gendai Business cites it for a red-caped attacker said to be a vampire. We found no contemporary newspaper account. The school-toilet version is dated by Nagano accounts to roughly 1935–36 but is better known from later decades.
11 / SOURCES
Follow the signal
Sources are listed by what they help establish. A source documenting a legend’s circulation is not proof that the supernatural event occurred.
12 / RELATED
Continue the trail
Browse the full archive or see every legend on the timeline.