A yokai name found in Edo-period picture scrolls and board games. It is typically depicted as a hairy face emerging from dark clouds, with a huge tongue and clawed hands. Full-body depictions and clear traits are not recorded. In Toriyama Sekien’s Gazu Hyakki Yagyō it appears above a sluice gate, but without commentary. The name also occurs in contemporary picture-sugoroku like Jikkai Sugoroku and in Hyakki Yagyō emaki. A similar motif titled “Red Mouth” appears in various scrolls. Scholars have suggested links to Onmyodo deities Akashita or the calendrical Akashita day, but no proof exists.
Folklore & Legends
Early-modern materials transmit Akashita mainly as an image, with little written about its nature or origins. Sekien’s sluice-gate scene has invited later symbolic readings, yet his book provides no explanation. A related image labeled “Akakuchi/Red Mouth” appears in Sawaki Suushi’s Hyakkai Zukan and elsewhere, prompting discussion of ties to the Rokuyō’s “Shakkō/Red Mouth” day. Explanations from the Shōwa era onward and stories such as Tsugaru water-rights legends are considered later reinterpretations or retellings, not verifiable traditions in early sources.
Akazashita is a rare case where imagery precedes textual records. Its core features are a colossal tongue thrusting from black clouds and a bestial face. Toriyama Sekien placed this figure over a sluice gate, and later scholars offered symbolic readings drawing on notions of filth such as scum and grime and on proverbs that cast the mouth and tongue as gates of calamity, but Sekien left no notes. In many early modern sources the sluice gate is absent, and the name wavers between Akazashita and Akakuchi. Links to the Onmyodo guardian name Akazashita-shin of the Grand Duke direction or to the Rokuyo day Akakuchi have been noted but cannot be firmly genealogized. Since the Showa era, fable-like explanations and local tales have spread, yet statements beyond the base sources should be avoided.
Character Profile
This section is our own creative profile for storytelling. It is not historical fact or scholarship.
The diagram below is a diagnostic evaluation chart for Iconographic Tradition: Akazashita (Toriyama Sekien lineage). The higher the value of each item, the stronger that characteristic is expressed.
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