Urban Legends in Japan Part 1 1. Yellow ambulances are used for mental health emergencies. 2. ‘Tomino’s Hell’ is a poem which brings suffering and tragedy to anyone who reads it out loud. 3. 'Hitobashira’, or sealing live people into walls, pillars, or buildings, and is/was a popular act of human sacrifice to please gods. 4. Kashima Reiko is a ghost of a woman from Hokkaido who was attacked and brutally raped before being left for dead. She crawled onto a set of train tracks and was cut in two. She now appears in bathrooms, asking people questions about her death. 5. You can play hide and seek with a ghost ('Hitori Kakurenbo’). 6. There are two ways to check if your house is haunted. One is by imagining you are exploring your house (an unknown figure represents a ghost), and the other is to sit in the middle of a room and video the walls as you turn slowly in a circle, then video yourself and turn again. If you see a mysterious figure or something odd in the video, your house is haunted. 7. Whistling attracts snakes.
