Posted by Aka Manto, the “red cloak”, is the voice in Japanese school toilets that asks: “Do you want red paper or blue paper?” Whichever colour you pick, you die. To survive you must refuse, or pretend you heard nothing and leave. The legend has a surprising history: it grew out of a rumour that frightened Tokyo in the 1930s, about a man in a red cloak who kidnapped children, and out of old beliefs about toilet spirits.
Tokyo, the late 1930s. In the working-class districts, children run home before dark. A rumour is going round, and parents repeat it as fearfully as their kids: there’s a man in the city who wears a red cloak. He kidnaps children, kills them and, some say, drinks their blood.
Nobody has really seen him. But the rumour spreads so fast that in Osaka, a writer would later recall, police seized a children’s street show starring a magician in a red cloak. And in April 1939 one of Japan’s best-known journalists, Ōya Sōichi, devoted a whole essay to the man in red in Chūō Kōron, one of the country’s leading magazines.
Within a few decades, that man would move somewhere much smaller: the last toilet stall at the end of the corridor, in elementary schools.
Red paper or blue paper?
The version told today is simple, and that’s why it works. You’re in a public toilet, usually at school, almost always in the last stall, the one nobody uses. Sometimes it’s evening and the school is empty. You realise there’s no toilet paper.
Then a voice, seemingly from the wall or the ceiling, asks: “Do you want red paper or blue paper?”
Answer red, and you’re cut to pieces, or your throat is slit, until your clothes are soaked red with blood. Answer blue, and hands squeeze your neck until your face turns blue, or all your blood is drained away and you’re left livid. In some versions the hands come straight out of the toilet bowl.
The clever ones think they can dodge the trap by asking for another colour. It doesn’t work. Name a different colour and hands burst from the floor to drag you to hell. Say yellow, in a variant more humiliating than deadly, and your head gets pushed into the toilet.
In some versions the question changes: not paper, but a cloak. “Do you want a red cloak or a blue cloak?” And the red cloak is your own skin, peeled from your back. Other times it’s a vest, a padded jacket, a cape.
How to survive
There is a way out, and it’s the simplest of all: refuse. “I don’t need any paper.” Faced with a flat no, the voice falls silent and goes away.
Other tellings say you can also pretend nothing happened: don’t answer, finish quickly and leave without looking back. As in many Japanese ghost stories, the spirit only has power over those who agree to play by its rules. If you don’t choose, you can’t lose.
That may be the most interesting part of the legend. There’s no amulet, prayer or magic formula. Only the nerve to say no to a question designed to make you believe there are only two answers.
The man in the red cloak
To understand where Aka Manto comes from, we have to go back to the 1930s. According to the collections of writer Miyoko Matsutani, who spent her life recording modern folk tales, around 1936 people in Tokyo said a man in a red cloak was attacking people and leaving bodies in the streets. Some called him a vampire.
Nobody knows for sure where the rumour began. There are at least three theories. The first points to a real crime: the murder of a little girl in Tokyo’s Yanaka district, which shocked the city. The second blames kamishibai, the paper theatre that travelling storytellers brought around the streets on their bicycles. One of these shows, titled Aka Manto and written by Kōji Kata, told the harmless tale of a magician in a red cloak who takes a shoeshine boy as his apprentice. But the title, mixed up with the murder, was enough to turn him into a monster.
The third theory goes back further, to 1906, when in Fukui Prefecture a man wrapped in a blue blanket knocked on a family’s door at night and led them away on a pretext. Their bodies were found later. The killer was never identified. The case of the “man in the blue blanket” became a story told to frighten, and some think it paved the way for the man in red.
Whatever its origin, the rumour caught the attention of Ōya Sōichi, journalist and critic, regarded as one of the fathers of rumour studies in Japan. His 1939 essay, The Sociology of the Red Cloak, was one of the first serious attempts to analyse a modern urban legend. These were years of war and frayed nerves, and some have read political anxieties of the moment into that fear of “red”.
From the alley to the toilet
Around the same time, though, schools were already telling a different story. Matsutani reports that around 1935, in an elementary school in Nagano Prefecture, children talked of a presence that asked: “Do you like the red cloak or the blue cloak?” Those who said red were killed and left a bloody figure. Those who said blue had their blood drained and were left pale, almost blue.
Japanese scholars are cautious: the two stories share a name and a colour, but there’s no proof one came from the other. What’s certain is that after the war, the man in red disappeared from Tokyo’s alleys, while the voice in the school toilet lived on, generation after generation.
And the toilet wasn’t a random choice. In Japan the toilet has a long history of spirits. There was the kawaya-gami, the toilet god, who received offerings in some regions. And in Kyoto people told of the kainade, a mysterious hand that on the night of Setsubun, at the end of winter, reached up out of the toilet to stroke whoever was sitting there. To keep it away, people said, you recited a formula: “Shall I give you red paper or white paper?”
So the question already existed. It was a formula to drive the spirit away. Over time, in children’s mouths, it became the spirit’s own question.
A cloak that changes colour
Like every school story, Aka Manto never stays still. Sometimes he’s a tall man in a white mask. In one popular version, in life he was a beautiful boy hounded by admirers, who hid his face behind a mask and died hiding in the girls’ toilets. Sometimes he has no body at all: he’s just a voice.
From the 1980s on, he merged with the other great queen of school toilets, Hanako-san, the girl who answers when you knock three times on the last door. There are stories where Hanako wears a red skirt, stories where Hanako is really Aka Manto, stories with a brother or rival, Ao Manto, the blue cloak.
Why it still scares us
The school toilet is one of the few places where a child is truly alone. The closed door, the sound of water, the echoing tiles, the empty corridor after class. It’s an intimate, vulnerable, in-between place, and it has always attracted ghost stories.
And then there’s the question. Aka Manto doesn’t chase you or wait for you in the street. He asks you to choose. It’s a perfect trap because it seems to give you a chance, and instead takes every chance away. The only right answer is the one he didn’t offer.
Maybe that’s why Japanese children love it, and why it keeps passing from one class to the next. It’s a small lesson hidden inside a scary story: when someone gives you only two options, it’s worth asking whether there’s a third.
If you like bathroom ghosts, read the story of Toire no Hanako and the Western legend of Bloody Mary. And for another question your life depends on, there’s Kuchisake-onna.
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- Gendai Business, the case said to have inspired the man in the red cloak (in Japanese)
- Yokai.jp, Aka Manto: from pre-war rumour to school story
- Japanese Wikipedia, 赤マント
- Wikipedia, Aka Manto
- The Ghost in My Machine, Aka Manto
- Yokai.com, Kainade
- Miyoko Matsutani, Gendai minwa kō, vol. 7, Chikuma Bunko
Featured image: Takanawadai Elementary School, Tokyo (1935), photo by scarletgreen, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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