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It's a bonus monster month in June, because everything is awful and learning about monsters will take our minds off the awfulness. This week let's learn about some mysterious stories from around the world that feature huge octopus or squid!\n\nFurther watching:\n\nRiver Monsters episode about the Lusca\n\nA colossal squid, up close to that gigantic eyeball:\n\n\n\nBlue holes in the ocean and on land:\n\n \n\nA giant Pacific octopus swimming:\n\n\n\nThe popular image of the kraken since the 1750s:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nLast week\u2019s mystery bird got me thinking about how far away Halloween feels and how we haven\u2019t really had a lot of monsters or mystery animals lately. So let\u2019s have an extra monster month in June! We\u2019ll start with a topic I\u2019ve touched on in past episodes but haven\u2019t covered in depth, three stories of GIANT OCTOPUS TYPE MONSTERS from around the world.\n\nIf you haven\u2019t listened to episode 142, about octopuses, that ran last October, I recommend you listen to it for information about octopus biology and habits. This week we are all about the mysterious and gigantic octopuses.\n\nLet\u2019s jump right in with a monster from Japan, Akkorokamui. Its origins trace back to the folklore of the Ainu, a group of people who in the past mostly lived on Hokkaido, the second largest island in the country. These days they live throughout Japan. The story goes that a monster lives off the coast of Hokkaido, an octopus-like animal that in some stories is said to be 400 feet long, or over 120 meters. It\u2019s supposed to swallow boats and whales whole. But Akkorokamui isn\u2019t just an octopus. It has human features as well and godlike powers of healing. It\u2019s also red, and because it\u2019s so big, when it rises near the surface of the water, the water and even the sky look red too.\n\nAkkorokamui is supposed to originally be from the land. A humongous red spider lived in the mountains, but one day it came down from the mountains and attacked a town, stomping down buildings as the earth shook. The villagers prayed for help, and the god of the sea heard them. He pulled the giant spider into the water where it turned into a giant octopus.\n\nThe problem with folktales, as we talked about way back in episode 17, about the Thunderbird, is that they\u2019re not usually meant to be taken at face value. Stories impart many different kinds of information, especially in societies where writing isn\u2019t known or isn\u2019t known by everyone. Folktales can give warnings, record historical events, and entertain listeners, all at once. It\u2019s possible the story of Akkorokamui is this kind of story, possibly one imparting historic information about an earthquake or tsunami that brought down a mountain and destroyed a town. That\u2019s just a guess, though, since I don\u2019t understand Japanese\u2014and even if I did, the Ainu people were historically treated as inferior by the Japanese since their ancestors came from other parts of Asia, so many of their stories were never recorded properly. The Ainu people today have lost some of their historic cultural memories as they assimilated into Japanese society.\n\nSo we don\u2019t know if Akkorokamui was once thought of as a real living animal, a spiritual entity, or just a story. There are a few reported sightings of the monster, but they\u2019re all old and light on details. One account from the 19th century is supposedly from a Japanese fisherman who saw a monster with tentacles as big around as a grown man. It was so big that the fisherman at first thought he was just seeing reflected sunset light on the ocean. Then he came closer and realized what he was looking at\u2014and that it was looking back at him from one enormous eye. He estimated it was something like 260 feet long, or 80 meters. Fortunately, instead of swallowing his boat, the monster sank back into the ocean.\n\nWhether or not the folktale Akkorokamui was ever considered to be a real animal,