In March 2020, Japan's Ministry of Health put a three-legged, scaly, beaked mermaid from 1846 on its official COVID-19 posters. This episode explains how that happened, starting with a glowing object off the coast of Higo province, a town official's reported encounter, and a cheap woodblock broadsheet called a kawaraban that recorded the creature's prophecy: six years of good harvests, and protection from disease for anyone shown its picture.

We reveal that the name Amabie may be a chisel slip, a single katakana stroke separating it from the older Amabiko family of prophetic beasts, and follow the creature's wild mutations into a torso-less ape head with three legs, a four-legged Daruma doll, and a nine-legged monk. Then we uncover the 19th century grift of peddlers selling Amabiko prints for five cents apiece with sightings set in fictitio ...