Urban Legends in Japan
1. There is a notorious classroom in the Tokai region which is haunted by the ghost of a seven-year-old boy. Teachers claim to feel tugging on their hands when no-one is around, and many teachers refuse to stay after lesson hours due to seeing him peeking from behind furniture.
2. In a classroom outside Kyoto, younger students have claimed they are bothered by the ‘black-haired woman with the white dress on the TV’, and ask the teacher to turn off the television program. The classroom televisions supplied by the company are usually not allowed to be switched on during lesson times (unless part of the lesson plan), and are only able to play the cartoon videos supplied by the company due to being pre-digital. The videos supplied by the company do not include a woman in a white dress.
3. Teachers are often stalked and harassed by local residents. In Shiga Prefecture, a teacher reported hearing sounds from within her company-owned apartment ceiling. Upon checking the manhole connecting the ceiling space to her cupboard, she discovered magazines, bottled water, and convenience store food. It seems someone had broken into her apartment and had been living in the ceiling for a while.
4. There is a company-owned apartment within inner-city Kyoto which has had a number of disturbances. These include: finding clumps of black hair within the cupboards and under the sinks; hearing bumps and voices from the wall of the vacant apartment next door; long scratches and hand-prints marking the wooden floorboards despite there not being anything the morning before; the feeling of being watched; someone or something standing close by at all times; and a phantom hand which touches people on the neck and face at night.
5. Parents have reportedly cancelled classes and withdrawn their children from classrooms, stating students have complained of seeing ghosts during lessons.
6. As well as often being stalked and harassed, attempted kidnapping of teachers is not unheard of. As working hours tend to run late into the night, teachers are easy targets for predators.
7. A teacher complained to the head office after a student was dropped off at a classroom by their mother and grandmother. Although the mother departed shortly after, the grandmother remained; peeking through the windows of the classroom and refusing to leave when the teacher tried to shoo them away. Once the lesson had finished, the teacher tried to complain directly to the mother about the grandmother’s refusal to leave. Upon hearing the complaint, the mother reacted with surprise and explained she and her child had arrived at the classroom alone, and the grandparents of both sides in her family were deceased.