Itsumade

Kanji: 以津真天
Kana: いつまで
Pronunciation: Ee-tsoo-mah-deh /i.tsɯ.ma.de/

TRANSLATION: Until when?
ALTERNATE NAMES: Itsumaden
ORIGIN: 14th century; Taiheiki war chronicle; later named in Toriyama Sekien's Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779)

HABITAT: Night skies over plague-struck cities, battlefields, and disaster zones
DIET: The lamentation of the neglected dead

ABILITIES:

• Haunting cry of "itsumade, itsumade" heard across the night
• Flight in slow circles above unburied corpses
• Omen of plague, famine, or wartime neglect

WEAKNESSES:

• Master archery (a single kabura-ya signal arrow can bring it down)
• Resolution: burying the dead and easing public suffering stops it from returning

OVERVIEW: Itsumade is a giant bird yokai with a human face. It appears at night over places of mass death and cries "until when?" to ask the living for action.

APPEARANCE: The Itsumade has the face of a human and a long curved beak with saw-like teeth. Its body is like a snake, and it has broad wings and talons as sharp as swords. Its wingspan is about 4.8 meters. Some Edo battle paintings show it as a black cloud over the battlefield rather than a clear bird shape. Toriyama Sekien drew the most famous image of the creature in 1779.

BEHAVIOR: The Itsumade flies in slow circles all night above the corpses of those who died from plague, famine, or war. The bird cries the same two words, "itsumade, itsumade," which is "until when?" — that is, "until when will this body be left here?" It does not attack the living. The Itsumade is the vengeful spirit of the neglected dead, returned in bird form.

INTERACTIONS: In the fall of 1334, the Itsumade appeared night after night over the Shishinden of the imperial palace in Kyoto. The court remembered how Minamoto no Yorimasa had brought down the nue, and called on the archer Oki no Jirōzaemon Hiroari. Hiroari brought the bird down from the sky with a single whistling signal arrow. The court gave him the name Mayumi, meaning "true bow," and his grave is still in Mayumi, Miyama City, Fukuoka.

OTHER FORMS: The Itsumade has no transformation. Shōwa-era yokai books also read its name as "Itsumaden." In Edo battle illustrations, the same creature appeared as a black cloud or a shapeless monstrous bird, but only Sekien's woodblock print has the name. Modern works like Nioh and One Piece include the Itsumade as a fearsome chimera.