ROBERT SCHNECK: Japanese platypus?

Dear Jon,

While looking at the wonderful Pink Tentacle blog, I came across a section devoted to the Kaikidan Ekotoba. It is:

"a mysterious handscroll that profiles 33 legendary monsters and human oddities, mostly from the Kyushu region of Japan (with several from overseas). The cartoonish document, whose author is unknown, is believed to date from the mid-19th century. It is now in the possession of the Fukuoka City Museum."

Most of the drawings depict what look like typically bizarre yokai, but the first two are particularly interesting.

"The black creature on the right was born by a dog that mated with a bird in the city of Fukuoka in the early 1740s. Next to the bird-dog hybrid is an amorphous white monster -- also encountered in Fukuoka -- which is said to have measured about 180 centimeters (6 ft) across. People at the time believed this creature was a raccoon dog that had shape-shifted."

I would suggest that the white monster is what we would call a globster (which explains nothing, but demonstrates how another culture interprets the strange lumps that wash up on their beaches), and that the bird-dog hybrid is a Duck-billed Platypus. What a platypus was doing in Fukuoka in the 1740s is anyone's guess.

http://pinktentacle.com/2010/04/kaikidan-ekotoba-monster-scroll/
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/mammals/platypus/Duckbillprintout.shtmling.com/subjects/mammals/platypus/Duckbillprintout.shtml