Akashita

Akashita is a hairy kaii that manifests at weirs and water gates. It appears in Toriyama Sekien's illustrated compendium Pictorial Book of the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, 1776), where it is depicted with a long red tongue extending from within a black cloud. In Aomori Prefecture folklore, it is described as a kaii associated with water rights disputes and irrigation conflicts. According to local tradition, it appears as a punishment when wrongdoers attempt to divert water unlawfully.

In representative accounts, when villages quarrel over water distribution to their rice paddies and one side unjustly diverts the flow, a red tongue appears at the offending weir, causing the wrongdoers to return the water. During the Edo period, this image—a black cloud rising above a water gate with a red tongue protruding from within—became standardised across illustrated tale collections and woodblock prints. As a regional legend, it is chiefly centred in the Tsugaru region of Aomori Prefecture, where it serves as a didactic narrative linking agricultural water rights to moral causality.

Toriyama Sekien's 1776 compendium marks the earliest documented literary reference. From the modern period onward, folkloristics scholar Yanagita Kunio included accounts in his writings, and the entity has been catalogued in reference works such as the Comprehensive Dictionary of Japanese Yokai (2005) and the International Research Center for Japanese Culture's Database of Kaii and Yokai Folklore.