(Creature Feature Playlist)
The head and torso of a man rises up from the waves in the bay, followed by long tentacles oozing black venom. The Akkorokamui has come.
The Akkorokamui is a creature from Ainu folklore. The Ainu are the indigenous people of the Japanese islands. The monster is said to exist in a bay near Hokkaidō in Japan, though there have been sightings in Korea and Taiwan.
The original myth of the Akkorokamui dates as far back as the 1400s and deals with a curse placed upon a single man. This man was cursed to watch his whole village die and in order to make that happen the spirits sent the half man-half spider Yaoshikepu.
Yaoshikepu laid waste to the village and the cries of its victims invoked sympathy from the sea gods (kami). They transformed Yaoshikepu into Akkorokamui and thew it into the sea. Its spider legs had become reddish tentacles and in the sea it began to grow. Akkorokamui is said to be over 120 feet long with a powerful hunger.
As far as more recent sightings it is almost impossible to not draw the connections between the Akkorokamui and Giant Squid. The red color, the penchant for attacking ships, even the whole general shape and size of the thing. You can even see a bit of the Greek Siren in the description. This leads me to believe that the creature is an attempt to describe the very real Giant Squid. That being said the sheer amount of tales around sea monsters with human forms does make one wonder. What if we share more in common with the what lurks under the water than we thought possible?
There is an interesting book which features this cryptid called The Ainu and Their Folklore. (Which you can read on Google.) It also deals a lot more with the fascinating culture of the Ainu. It is well worth a read, though the quality of some of the scans are so-so.
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