NINGEN

Opening

The ningen is a huge white creature, part human and part whale, said to surface in the Antarctic Ocean near Japanese research whaling ships. Unlike most sea monsters, it has a known date and time of birth: 13:21 on 11 May 2002, when an anonymous poster calling themselves Baito-kun, "the part-timer", passed on some hearsay in a thread on the Japanese textboard 2channel.

No ship's log, photograph or named witness has ever surfaced. What exists is a clear trail of how an internet story became a magazine monster, a pop song and a worldwide YouTube cryptid, documented in detail by researchers Felicity Greenland and Philip Hayward in the journal Shima in 2020.

Timeline

11 May 2002, 13:21The 68th post in a "Giant Fish, Monster Fish" thread on 2channel's occult board says a person involved in government research whaling in the Antarctic told the poster about white, human-shaped objects tens of metres long. Some look like a human with four limbs and a head, some like two human upper bodies joined. The crews call them hitogata buttai, human-shaped objects.

11 May 2002, 9 p.mA dedicated thread opens. It runs through five continuation threads.

May 2002Baito-kun explains the name. Her source, "Mr F", was singing along to "Odoru Dame Ningen", a 1991 song by the band Kinniku Shōjo Tai whose refrain repeats the word ningen, human, when he asked whether she knew there were ningen in Antarctica.

17 May 2002Baito-kun announces a temporary break and never returns. Her involvement lasted six days.

December 2003The last 2channel thread ends. The story goes quiet.

2007The manga artist Tenkyōin uses the ningen in Anata no Shiranai Mikakunin Seibutsu. Later that year the paranormal magazine Mu prints a Google Earth image said to show a white, limbed figure about 19 metres long off Namibia, suggesting it might be the monster "called ningen or hitogata".

April 2008Mu publishes a ningen supplement.

2008The producer KaikoP releases "Nankyoku no Ningen", sung by the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, with a video in which Miku rides a friendly ningen.

Around 2010English-language websites and YouTube videos pick the story up.

2016The UK Daily Mirror runs blurry footage of a "blubbery monster human". In April, the TBS variety show Makotoshiyaka airs a segment ending with presenters calling the ningen "the Godzilla of whales".

January 2018The Japanese YouTuber Naokiman reviews the standard images and concludes the creature exists only in the media.

Key figures

Baito-kun and the unnamed Mr F are the only sources for the original story, and neither has been identified. Shin'ichirō Namiki wrote the 2007 Mu article and a chapter in a book of urban legends that credited the 2channel origin. Greenland and Hayward's Shima paper is the only scholarly study I have found.

Physical and documentary trail

The trail is entirely media. The 2channel threads are archived and dated. The images that circulate are a Google Earth frame, a much-reproduced underwater still and assorted Photoshop work by forum users, none with a known photographer or location. No statement about it from Japan's research whaling program has surfaced.

Taking into account its size, it might be a human-shaped monster called ningen or hitogata.

Things you might not know

• Its name comes from a rock song. "Odoru Dame Ningen" translates roughly as "Useless Dancing Person" and has nothing to do with the sea.
• The forum built it together. Users compared it to belugas, giant squid, the Kraken and the folkloric sea spirit Umi Bōzu, and one cited an "Antarctic Godzilla" supposedly seen in 1958 by the crew of the icebreaker Sōya-maru.
• Mu found it an ancestor. The 2008 supplement pointed to a tale in the Heian-period collection Konjaku Monogatarishū about a huge white female creature washed up on a beach.
• The song was a joke about the legend. KaikoP said the video's images were made to poke fun at how much the early ningen borrowed from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.
• It has an Arctic cousin. Versions of the story place a similar creature in northern seas under the name hitogata.

Competing explanations

A real, unrecognised animal. Supporters point to the whaling fleets' remoteness and secrecy, and say a sighting could be kept quiet to protect the program. No specimen, sighting record or crew member has come forward.

Misidentified ice, whales or light. One online writer quoted in the Shima paper noted that in still images the creatures mostly look like ice. That covers the pictures but not the original post, which described no particular sighting.

A modern legend. Greenland and Hayward read the ningen as media-lore that grew out of Japan's arguments over Southern Ocean whaling: a creature half human and half whale, appearing to the people who hunt whales.

Later life of the case

The ningen now sits in cryptid lists beside long-established creatures, usually without its 2002 birth date. In Japan it lives on mainly in anime and manga-style art.

Finding

The ningen is a legend whose origin can be dated to the minute. Every later image and article goes back to one anonymous second-hand post, and the forum that received it openly helped shape it. That is not proof that nothing strange was ever seen in Antarctic waters, but no evidence for this creature exists outside the story.

What still will not resolve: who Mr F was, and whether anyone on a Japanese whaling ship ever told the story first.