And if someone is lucky enough to find one of the fabled creatures, they stand to receive a 20 million yen reward from the Yoshii Municipal Government.
Though none from the teeming throngs of bounty hunters has yet managed to get their hands on the cash they stand to earn from catching a tsuchinoko, Yoshii retailers have certainly developed a yen for the creature. Sales of locally produced tsuchinoko rice cakes, tsuchinoko cakes and tsuchinoko wine have skyrocketed.
Tsuchinoko fever hit Yoshii on May 21 after a farmer cutting grass swore he saw a snake-like creature with a face resembling cartoon cat Doraemon slither across his field. The farmer slashed the creature with his weed whipper, but it fled into a nearby stream and escaped.
Four days later, 72-year-old Hideko Takashima was talking with a couple of friends in Yoshii when she found the creature's body lying beside the stream it had dived into to escape from the farmer. She picked it up and buried it.
"It had a cute, round face and was clearly not a snake," Takahashi says. "I've seen something like this around here before, and it makes a chirping sound."
Yoshii Municipal Government officials heard the rumors of a tsuchinoko and headed out to look over Takahashi's find. They exhumed the body and sent it to Kawasaki University of Medical Welfare to be examined. Kuniyasu Sato, the professor who probed the reptile, said that the creature may indeed have been the tsuchinoko often referred to in Japanese fairy tales, but "scientifically speaking, it was a kind of snake."
Unperturbed, Yoshii residents declared their town to be the home of the tsuchinoko. Yoshii Mayor Ryuichi Arashima has no doubts.
"We've had sightings plenty of times in the past. It's definitely somewhere," he says. "If anyone catches a tsuchinoko, we'll give 'em 20 million yen and up the price by a million each year until someone gets one."
In the meantime, Yoshii Municipal Government has set up a project team clad in easily recognizable "tsuchinoko hunter" uniforms and caps patrolling the town and listening to stories from elderly residents who say they remember seeing the creature during their younger days.
The project team will gather information about tsuchinoko and file a report on its influence on Yoshii. It is also setting up a tsuchinoko exhibition and providing information to those heading in to Yoshii to try and pick up their bounty.
Some have apparently even come close to catching one of the slippery creatures. Mitsuko Arima, an 82-year-old from Yoshii, says she saw a tsuchinoko swimming along a river on the morning of June 15.
"I was surprised. I just pointed at it and asked 'Who are you? Who are you?' It didn't answer me, but just stared. It had a round face and didn't take its eyes off me. I can still see the eyes now. They were big and round and it looked like they were floating on the water," Arima says. "I've lived over 80 years, but I'd never seen anything like that in my life."
Huge Reward For Capture Of Japanese Monster
[Original headline: Bounty put on mythical reptile]
YOSHII, Okayama - A snake-like creature with a moon-face and what looks like a silly grin has turned rustic Yoshii into a hotbed for bounty hunters this summer.
People from throughout Kansai and as far away as the Kanto region have thronged to the town in central Okayama Prefecture in the hopes of finding a tsuchinoko, a presumably mythical reptile bearing at least some resemblance to a snake.
Mainichi Shimbun [Daily News] / Japan | By Nami Idemizu - August 27 2000
