In February 2022, a small, fragile body left Enjuin, a Buddhist temple in Asakuchi, western Japan, to be scanned. It was a mermaid about thirty centimetres long, with teeth, fingernails and hands raised beside its face, as if it had died protesting. Inside the scanner, its human appearance fell apart.15
A photograph leads back to the box
In February 2023, a research team in Okayama announced that the temple’s mermaid was a manufactured object. The investigation had taken about a year. It explained what the body was made of, a body that had drawn prayers and speculation, but it could not say who made it. Enjuin made no announcement that the mermaid would be thrown away. The local broadcaster KSB reported that the temple would go on keeping it.2
The mummy has a scaly lower body, a small head and an open mouth. Being kept at a temple had given it a very different setting from a fairground booth. A temple could keep an unsettling object safe while letting it gather associations with protection and good health. By the time the researchers arrived, its current custodian was willing to let instruments examine something people had until then approached through faith.1
The investigation began with a photograph. Hiroshi Kinoshita, a board member of the Okayama Folklore Society, came across a picture of the mummy among papers left by the natural historian Kiyoaki Sato. Sato, who died in 1998, had collected and written about the supernatural creatures known as yōkai. Kinoshita traced the object to Enjuin and proposed a joint project to the temple and a local university.1
So this was a rediscovery within local history, not an unknown corpse suddenly emerging from the ground. In August 2020, RSK radio had visited an exhibition about Sato at the library in Satosho. Among its attractions was a rediscovered photograph of a mermaid mummy. The programme then went to Enjuin and talked to the priest, describing the teeth and nails, the scales on the fish half and the history of earlier owners kept with the body.3
That visit catches the object before it became an international science story. In the library, the photograph sat among documents, plants and people connected with a local naturalist. At the temple, the mummy was something to look after. RSK reported that it was not usually on public display, and that the priest wanted to care for it in future. Neither setting needed a new species to make the object interesting.3
The box supplied a much older beginning. According to the note kept with it, the creature was caught in a fishing net off Tosa, the old province that is now Kōchi, during the Genbun era in the eighteenth century. It was taken to Osaka, bought by an ancestor of a family near Fukuyama and kept as a treasure. A later change of hands was dated to November of the 36th year of Meiji, 1903.3 The university’s historians could verify neither the people named nor any direct link between that account and this mummy.4
A net, a market and a family heirloom give the story a reassuring order. The mermaid starts in the sea and passes into private hands through an ordinary purchase. What is missing is any independent record that would let the story be followed through those hands, and there is no reliable account of how it reached Enjuin. The body and its written history had arrived at the laboratory together, but they posed different problems.1
Inside the borrowed mermaid
The university announced the project on 9 February 2022, a week after the work began. The temple had agreed to collaborate with Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts, Kinoshita and the Kurashiki Museum of Natural History. Takafumi Kato, a specialist in fossil mammals, would study the upper body, the fish specialist Hitomi Yamano the lower half, and Hiroshi Takemitsu would carry out the molecular work. Folklore and history were part of the investigation from the start.5
The first loan was short. X-rays and CT scans were carried out on 2 and 3 February 2022, along with close examination of the surface, photography and the collection of fragments that had already fallen off. The examination went on into 4 February, and the mummy was returned to the temple that afternoon. The university stressed that it had gone back safely. Much of the later work could be done with images and loose fragments, leaving the fragile body with its keepers.5
The interim findings, dated 29 March and released in April 2022, showed why appearances were misleading. The face looked like a primate’s, but the teeth were curved cones, with none of the molars a mammal would have. Parts of the arms and shoulders had scales unlike those on the lower body. No internal organs could be seen. The team could see bony material in the jaws, fins and tail, and needles in the neck and dorsal fin.6
Those details mattered because they broke the creature into parts. A hand, a face and a fish tail invite recognition before anyone asks how they are joined. The first examination made those joins and surfaces the subject of the inquiry. It also let the researchers choose small loose pieces for further tests, without treating the body as something to be taken apart.
Results were first expected in September. The university postponed the final report to get higher-resolution CT images and carry out more detailed analysis, and later updated its notice with the date of the press conference, 7 February 2023. The extra months went on trying to see how the mermaid was put together.7
The final findings described a modelled upper body made of cloth, paper and cotton wadding, a plaster-like material, layers of paper, pufferfish skin and animal hair. The lower body was covered in fish skin with features of the croaker family, Sciaenidae. The jaws came from a meat-eating fish of unidentified species. There was no skull, spine or rib cage forming a continuous animal skeleton, and small metal needles remained inside. No DNA was detected. Radiocarbon dating of a loose scale pointed to the late nineteenth century.4
What the date means: The scale gives a likely period for material used in the mermaid, not a maker’s signature or the year it was assembled.4
The answer was more skilful, and stranger, than the familiar idea of a monkey sewn onto a fish. The creature had been built. Different materials supplied its bulk, its surface and its recognisable features, and much of the illusion lay in persuading the eye to read those features as one body.2
A creature with several lives
Long before scanners, Japanese writers were asking where such bodies belonged. The historian Andrea Castiglioni has followed the ningyo, literally the “human-fish”, through the culture of the Edo and Meiji periods. In his research, the creature moves between entertainment, household protection, religious practice and natural history, and those worlds overlap. A fabricated mermaid could draw amused crowds and serious attention without everyone experiencing it in the same way.8
One of his examples begins far from any Japanese temple. On 1 March 1873, the historian and painter Kume Kunitake visited a museum in The Hague with the Iwakura Mission, Japan’s diplomatic tour of Europe and the United States. Among the museum’s Japanese holdings were manufactured creatures. Kume recognised the hand of the craftsman. He also noticed that objects not necessarily thought of as art at home could become museum attractions abroad.8
As Castiglioni reads it, Kume’s reaction mixed scepticism and admiration. Scientific scrutiny would expose the illusion, but the work still showed the skill of Japanese makers and their success in stirring European curiosity. The museum had given the object new surroundings and a new audience. An impossible animal could sit between art and natural history, valued partly for how cleverly it crossed that line.8
Enjuin’s mummy belongs to the same broad world of manufactured human-fish, though its workshop and early travels are unknown. The examples abroad make an export trade plausible as a general background, but they cannot identify its first buyer. An object now kept at a temple might have started out as a commercial curiosity, a household possession or an offering. Its present home is the latest chapter, not an explanation of the first.48
The word “mermaid” can also hide what the body meant. Japanese ningyo traditions do not boil down to a beautiful woman with a tail. In the stories, human features sit within something frightening or hard to classify. Kimie Itakura, writing for Nippon.com, describes the legend of Yao Bikuni, a girl who eats mermaid flesh, stays young for centuries and eventually becomes a Buddhist nun. Versions vary, including one from Okayama that gives her a thousand-year life.9
In that tradition, the alarming creature brings a benefit by being eaten, while elsewhere pictures or preserved bodies could be credited with protective powers, and Nippon.com records links with long life, health, safe childbirth and warding off misfortune. These uses help explain why a mermaid could be worth keeping in a religious setting even when it looked grotesque, because beauty was never the point.9
At Enjuin, the pandemic gave protection an immediate meaning. The chief priest compared the mummy with Amabie, the legendary creature said to ward off plague, and told the Asahi Shimbun:
We have worshipped it, hoping that it would help alleviate the coronavirus pandemic even if only slightly.
Amabie offered a comparison, not an anatomical identification. The temple’s mermaid could join a living practice of hope without matching every detail of another creature’s story. And the priest’s readiness to support the research makes it hard to cast the investigation as a clash between a secretive temple and outsiders determined to open its box.15
Seven coins and a packed lunch
The mermaid also had a paying public. Castiglioni draws on a diary kept by Asaba Nisaburō, a village headman in the Miura district. In the first month of 1857, members of his household went to a ningyo show in the Kodenma-chō district of Edo, organised by a man called Ōsakaya Jihei. Admission cost seven mon, and visitors were given a packed lunch to eat inside the booth.8
The diary is a small but useful correction to the picture of sideshows filled only with the gullible or desperate. These visitors belonged to a village headman’s household, and when they came out they found that five or six other people from their village had been too. Seeing the mermaid was a day out, shared across a local network and recorded in the same spare prose as other errands.8
The entry leaves the exhibit itself blurred. Castiglioni cannot tell whether the visitors saw a preserved body or a performer wearing a fish-like costume, and both could be presented as ningyo. The uncertainty is revealing: a diary can record the price of admission and the lunch more reliably than the anatomy of the attraction.8
Satirical prints played openly with that ambiguity. Castiglioni discusses pictures in which a human performer and an artificial fish tail come apart, exposing the stage trick. The joke depended on the audience knowing the mermaid was a composite. Showing how the deception worked could be entertaining in itself, just as an obviously impossible body could start an argument about how it was made.8
So a mermaid’s appeal went beyond deciding whether a strange animal was real. People might come to see a marvel, admire a piece of craftsmanship, enjoy a performance or seek protection, all in the same booth. A newspaper advertisement or a later museum label tends to squash that range into a single promise that the creature was genuine.8
Western retellings often supplied a simpler villain. In his Eccentricities of the Animal Creation, published in 1869, John Timbs reproduced an account from an 1841 book about Japan. A fisherman supposedly joined the top half of a monkey to a fish, claimed he had caught it alive and charged people to see it. Before it died, he said, the creature foretold several prosperous years followed by a deadly epidemic.10
The cure, in the story, was to own a picture of the mermaid, so the maker could profit both from the show and from selling pictures. Timbs then followed a specimen, or perhaps a copy of the first, through Dutch hands and Batavia to an American who exhibited it in Europe in 1822–1823. Even his account admitted it might not have been the same body at every stage.10
It was a tale of enterprise wrapped around a warning about credulity, tying together an exotic animal, a prophecy of plague and a saleable picture, with money as the motive. It helps explain the assumptions later made about manufactured mermaids. It does not supply a life story for the little body in Enjuin’s box.10
Timbs also described the London exhibition at the Egyptian Hall in 1822, putting daily attendance at three to four hundred. He quoted a critic who admired the workmanship while rejecting the animal. Being exposed did not empty the hall. Visitors kept coming, and an argument over a mermaid could keep it in the public eye as well as any advertisement.10
The naturalist and his own monster
A nineteenth-century sceptic could have a blind spot very close to home. In 1885, the natural scientist Matsumori Taneyasu wrote about a ningyo owned by his household in Tsuruoka. He had sketched it in 1856 and examined it again in 1883, noting that much of the fur had come away from its face and fingers. His interest had lasted for decades.8
As Castiglioni describes it, Matsumori’s later drawing turned the body into something that could be measured, with letters labelling its parts and the distances between them recorded, so the result looked like an anatomical specimen ready to be classified. Its head and large hands suggested a small monkey and its lower half a fish, and the precision of the drawing placed the creature within scientific study.8
Matsumori knew that manufactured mermaids existed. He blamed their spread on Western buyers and dismissed many mermaid stories as baseless. Then he made an exception for his own family’s specimen. In its face, he believed he could see a hidden animal nature that no craftsman could have reproduced. What convinced him was a sense of authenticity in the very feature that had been designed to make people recognise something human.8
His argument also protected a boundary, because Matsumori treated the creature as a beast, not a person, whose chest was too short to be human and whose belly looked like a fish’s. Believing in a natural human-fish did not, for him, mean admitting that a human torso had been joined to a fish, so he could reject the composite and keep the creature.8
A different reaction appears in an 1888 Tokyo newspaper story analysed by Castiglioni. A pharmacist near Yotsuya owned a preserved ningyo as a private treasure. The report discussed an anatomical examination and suggested that the head and fish body had been put together. The owner was willing to accept that it was artificial, while remembering the creature’s reputation for protecting against fire.8
He also mentioned written testimony that powerful men had prized its special virtues. How the body was made and the history of the people who valued it remained bound up together. A pharmacist could admit it was manufactured and still care about who had cherished it, what had been claimed for it and why it had survived. His response anticipates the question facing Enjuin after the scan: what exactly should a custodian now be preserving?8
Two enquiries: Anatomy asks how the body was put together. Provenance asks who made, sold and kept it. A successful scan can answer the first and leave the second open.48
Mermaids under museum lights
The Horniman Museum in London offers a closer technical parallel. Its merman had been catalogued as a Japanese monkey-fish, but when the curator Paolo Viscardi examined the teeth, they did not match a primate’s mouth, and X-rays and CT scans revealed a constructed object while DNA sampling produced no useful identification. Investigation replaced an inherited description with evidence of how it was made.11
The archive then produced a different surprise, in a 1919 auction listing that described a mermaid with a papier-mâché body, sold as the property of an unnamed officer. The object’s artificial nature had been on record long before a later label invited visitors to imagine a monkey-fish, but the officer’s anonymity stopped the ownership trail there.11
Viscardi and his colleagues later published a study setting that work alongside an investigation of a mermaid at Buxton. Their starting point was a familiar problem: many museums held such objects, but their origins were poorly recorded, and interpretations fixated on whether they were genuine. Stories about the famous Feejee Mermaid had encouraged the assumption that all such bodies were stuffed combinations of monkeys and fish.12
Their research also followed objects collected by Henry Wellcome as they were dispersed. Mermaids had passed through auction rooms into different museums, where their classification and interpretation could change. An object might be stored with natural history because it was taken for taxidermy, or treated as a historical curiosity. A curator’s choice of category could reinforce untested assumptions about what it was made of.12
A study published in 2023 examined another example at Milan’s Natural History Museum. That mermaid, about thirty-one centimetres long, had wooden supports and wire in its hands, and folds suggesting a rib cage were sculpted on its surface. Its investigators identified real animal parts among the modelled material, while leaving some identifications tentative and its early history unknown.13
The Milan mermaid differs from Enjuin’s, not least in its internal frame. The comparison shows why the name of the attraction is no guide to how it was made. Mermaids that look alike can reflect different choices about how to make a head, hold up a hand or hide a join. Each survivor can repay close study even when the broad answer, a manufactured body, is already obvious.13
These investigations recover the maker’s work as well as exposing the illusion. Whoever made a mermaid had practical problems to solve: a recognisable face, a convincing surface and a pose that would survive handling. The materials could reveal those decisions long after the workshop had gone. The Enjuin examination put its anonymous maker back into the object’s history, even if no name or place can yet be attached to the work.48
What the temple keeps
The examination also revealed a less dramatic threat than exposure. The 2022 interim report recorded damaged fingertips, peeling nails and torn skin. White patches near the shoulders might have been mould, apparently inactive at the time, and the loose debris contained dead mites and insect remains. The researchers recommended dry, stable storage and advice from conservators.6
A manufactured mermaid can decay because of its own mix of materials. Looking after it means knowing what is at risk, which parts are fragile and how it has been treated in the past. That is one practical benefit of the research: knowing how the body was made can help its keepers preserve the features that make it recognisable.
After the final announcement, the priest told KSB that the mermaid carried the feelings of the person who first made it and of everyone who had inherited and looked after it since. His job was to guard it and pass it on. That did not depend on reviving the claim of a captured animal. It made the long line of people connected to the object a reason to go on caring for it.2
As of 7 November 2026, the university’s 2023 analysis shows that the body was manufactured, but its maker, its workshop and its route to the temple are still unknown.4
The temple keeps both the mermaid and the story of what people once believed they had bought.42
Linked case files
Sources13
- Scientists try to unravel mystery of eerie mermaid mummy Kunio Ozawa / The Asahi Shimbun · 2022-02-19 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- 「人魚のミイラ」 約1年の研究結果を報告 KSB News · 2023-02-07 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- 里庄町立図書館＆円珠院 RSK radio, Kyou no Rajimaru · 2020-08-26 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- 圓珠院所蔵「人魚のミイラ」研究最終報告 Enjuin research team / Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts · 2023-02-07 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- 円珠院所蔵「人魚のミイラ」研究について Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts · 2022-02-09 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- 円珠院所蔵「人魚のミイラ」研究中間報告 Enjuin research team · 2022-03-29 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- 円珠院所蔵「人魚のミイラ」研究 最終報告延期のお知らせ Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts · 2022-09-22 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- Reframing the Human-Fish in the Edo and Meiji Periods: Eroticism, Taxidermy, Oracles, and Modernity Andrea Castiglioni · 2023-05-30 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- Ningyo: Japanese Merfolk and Auspicious Mummies Kimie Itakura / Nippon.com · 2022-05-18 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- Eccentricities of the Animal Creation John Timbs · 1869 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- Manmade Mermaids Paolo Viscardi / Horniman Museum and Gardens · 2014-04-06 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- Mermaids Uncovered Paolo Viscardi, Anita Hollinshead, Ross MacFarlane and James Moffatt · 2014 · Accessed 2026-11-07
- The Milan mermaid Nicolò Bagnasco, Giorgio Bardelli and Luigi Garlaschelli · 2023-09-27 · Accessed 2026-11-07