Tradition: Japanese Mythology
Alternative Names: Terracottal, Terracotta Yokai
Category: Object
The Myth
Terracottal is a mysterious being described in Shigeaki Yamauchi’s 1968 book World Horror Thriller Collection (2): Monsters of the World. The story appears in a chapter titled “God or Yokai?” and describes an encounter with a strange creature whose true nature remains uncertain. In ancient times, a pale fireball reportedly fell into the forest at Kamegaoka, in Aomori Prefecture, with a tremendous roar. Wondering whether it was a star or a fragment of the sun, a villager ventured into the forest and encountered a yokai with an enormous eyeball and narrow eyes extending horizontally across its face.
The villagers fled in terror, while their chief offered sacrifices and prayed to the gods. Perhaps in response to these prayers, the creature remained in the forest, and the pale fireball returned to the heavens that same night. According to the story, someone in the village made clay figurines based on the strange being. Thousands of years later, these figures were supposedly unearthed at Kamegaoka. The author leaves the creature’s identity unresolved, suggesting that it might have been a god, a human, a yokai, or even a visitor from outer space. He named it Terracottal, drawing on the word terracotta, which refers to fired or unglazed clay.
The story was inspired by distinctive dogū clay figurines discovered at Kamegaoka in 1886. Known as shakōki dogū, or “light-shielding dogū,” these figures have large, unusual eyes resembling goggles used to protect against snow glare. From around the 1960s, some writers began speculating that such prehistoric figurines represented ancient astronauts or extraterrestrial visitors. These ideas gained international attention through works such as Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1968. Terracottal emerged from this wave of speculation, illustrating how the term yokai was sometimes used in children’s literature to describe mysterious beings inspired by archaeological discoveries and theories about extraterrestrial life.
Sources
“Terracotta.” 新版TYZ 妖怪図鑑 (New TYZ Yokai Encyclopedia). https://tyz-yokai.blog.jp/archives/1074701727.html