Smooth. Empty.

In Japanese tales of terror, the most frightening monsters are not those with horns, fangs, and claws. The most terrifying are the ones who look human — but something is wrong with them. Nopperabō, the “faceless person,” does not frighten with deformity. It frightens with absence. It is a gesture of erasure, a silent sweep of the hand that wipes away eyes, nose, and mouth. This yōkai does not attack, does not hunt, does not chase. It simply stands before you, with nothing to say — because it has no face, and therefore no self. In a culture where the face is not merely a physical form but a map of relationships, reputation, and identity, such a sight strikes deeper than any scream. This is not the horror of blood. It is the horror of nothingness.

In Japanese society — so deeply infused with shudan ishiki, the group consciousness that orders relationships like an invisible mesh — one learns from childhood two languages of existence. The first is tatemae 表, the official “outer face,” meticulously smoothed, polite, aligned with group expectations. The second is honne 本音, intimate feelings and desires, hidden deep inside, revealed only in spaces of absolute trust — or not revealed at all. Tatemae must be impeccable: even as the surface of a chawan bowl, calm as the smile of a clerk in a konbini, always in harmony with social decorum. Honne is often quiet, unsaid, shy; something a Japanese person allows themselves to feel only at night, after work, behind a closed shōji, when the world is no longer watching. When no one is watching.

And it is precisely here that a contemporary fear is born — psychological, existential, painfully real. If for years you shape a tatemae that becomes ever smoother, ever more polite, ever more predictable and fully controlled… if every day you rehearse self-presentation, tone of voice, polite smile, compliance with the expectations of others… if you reveal your honne so rarely that you no longer remember the last time you allowed yourself a sincere feeling — then one day something may happen. You may attempt to take off this social mask, if only for a few minutes of solitude. Because no one is watching. Because you are finally alone. Because you need a breath of honesty. To shed, for a moment, the layers of tatemae and simply be with yourself.

You remove the mask — and underneath, there is nothing.
Nopperabō — let us meet this unsettling yōkai today and try to learn something from it.

Nopperabō — what does the word mean?

Before we begin to examine the meanings hidden in the legends of Nopperabō, it is worth looking at the word itself, which — as is often the case in Japanese — is not merely a label but a tiny cultural capsule. The most common written form is 野箆坊, read phonetically as のっぺら坊 (noppera-bō).

The first two characters — 野 (“field,” “wilderness”) and 箆 (“spatula,” “flat tool”) — are not the true etymology but ateji, characters chosen to represent sound rather than meaning. This was a common practice for supernatural beings, especially in Edo-period folklore, when kanji were often selected through playful association rather than precise semantics.

Only the third character, 坊, reveals a fragment of meaning. Bō can be translated as “boy,” “youth,” but also “monk” — the same 坊 we see in the word 坊主 (bōzu), referring to a Buddhist monk. In the names of yōkai, this suffix personified the creature: it made the being something more than a “phenomenon,” giving it a faintly human contour, somewhere between a neighborhood boy and a wanderer with a slightly suspicious aura.

The root of the name — noppera — is more transparent. It comes from an old word in some Japanese dialects: nopperi or noppeta, meaning “smooth,” “smoothed out,” “featureless.” In folk Japanese, there existed an entire spectrum of terms describing this unsettling “smoothness”: nopperi, nopperatto, noppeta, all carrying the sense of something so smooth it becomes unnatural. The same root appears in a regional variant from northern Honshū: zunberabō from Aomori. Zunbera in the Tsugaru dialect means precisely “a smooth, featureless surface.” These small phonetic variations matter — each shows that legends of “faceless beings” were not a local quirk of Edo folklore but a motif scattered across Japan, interpreted differently by various communities.

For centuries, Japanese people have attached importance to the face not only as a physical part of the body but as a social sign above all. Kao (顔) means both “face” and “reputation.” Let us pause here: a single character means both “face” and “reputation” — which, in Japanese eyes, has always been one of the most important qualities. On this single character a whole set of idioms essential to relational culture was built. Kao o tateru — “to preserve face,” kao ga tsubureru — “to lose face,” kao ga hiroi — “to know many people (faces), to have wide connections.” None of these expressions concerns anatomy; all concern credibility and social standing, the way an individual exists within a web of relationships. In this light, Nopperabō becomes far more unsettling: it is not merely a person without eyes and a mouth, but someone without reputation, relationships, history — nothing that can be read.

The face in Japan is also central to theatrical and religious concepts. In Nō theatre, the mask — 面 (men) — does not hide emotions but sublimates them. The minimalism of its features opens the path to ambiguity: one angle of light can change its expression from melancholy to anger. A Nō mask is smooth, yet not “empty” — within its smoothness, life resides (more about Nō masks here: Chimerical Masks of Noh Theatre – A Form Truer than Content). Nopperabō, on the other hand, is smooth in a definitive sense; its face holds not even the potential for emotion. It is the smoothness of absolute absence, the smoothness of nothingness.

It is also worth viewing the name Nopperabō through the lens of two key concepts that describe Japanese communication: tatemae (表) and honne (本音). Tatemae is the official, public face — the mask we wear to function socially. Honne is true, intimate feeling. Nopperabō is a radical inversion of this dichotomy: it has no tatemae, because it has no face; it has no honne, because there is no “self” that could feel them. It is a being that does not hide emotions — it simply has none to hide.

When we bring all these elements together — the ateji concealing meaning beneath phonetics, the dialectal variants emphasizing the folk roots of the phenomenon, the cultural idioms and the symbolism of the face as the vessel of identity — we begin to understand that the word “Nopperabō” evokes a fear far deeper than “lack of a face.” It is not merely the name of a yōkai but a key to understanding why, for centuries, Japanese people have feared not aggression or violence, but the merciless smoothness of absence in which their own culture of social masks is reflected.

Encounters with Nopperabō — Edo folklore

Nopperabō grows from the very core of Edo’s urban imagination — a city of light and shadow, where incense-scented temples stood beside suspicious alleyways, and late-night returns of samurai, craftsmen, and couriers became fuel for stories whispered in the dim glow of an andon lamp. It is precisely in this setting, in the 17th-century Tokugawa capital, that the first written accounts of “faceless people” appear, recorded in kaidan literature and popular collections of eerie tales. One of the most important is Asai Ryōi’s Otogi Boko, a bestseller of early Edo, blending moral fable, grotesque, and pure folk horror. Ryōi does not describe nopperabō systematically — he gives snapshots, short episodes that indicate the motif of the smooth face was known to readers and considered one of the “ready-made” devices of frightening.

In the classic scenario, the protagonist wanders at night along a deserted road, often in a symbolic place — at the border of villages, along a cemetery path, beside a pond, or near a solitary jinja. There he notices a figure, usually a woman in a white kimono, crying, bent over, turned away. In Edo, the figure of a woman at night was itself a sign of unease: she could be a prostitute, a renegade monk in disguise, a yūrei or onryō, a yamanba, an oni demon or yōkai, a swindler, or simply someone best avoided.

Yet the protagonist, following the norms of Edo no bunka politeness, approaches and asks whether she is alright. Then the figure lifts her head, turns around — and has no face. We hear only the faint sound of breathing, and before our eyes is a smooth, motionless mask of skin. The victim flees, usually in panic, and runs into another person. An innkeeper, a street vendor, a passerby — each, after hearing the account, replies: “Ah, you saw something like that? …” and with a single sweep of the hand wipes away their own features. Nopperabō thus often act “in groups” or “contagiously,” “epidemically,” as if their joy lay in the very structure of fear: escalation, intensification, closing the loop with terror that makes it impossible to believe the ordeal is over.

Sources from Edo suggest that nopperabō could be either independent beings or one of the favorite disguises of two archetypal tricksters of Japanese folklore — kitsune (see here: “A Fox Has Settled on Her” – Kitsune-tsuki Possessions of Women in the Japanese Countryside) and tanuki (see here: Tanuki Swinging His Coin Pouch – How Did Japanese Woodblock Artists See This Rascal?). Both animals were believed to take on human form and had a fondness for pranks that danced on the boundary between harmless mischief and genuine danger.

Fox spirits, with their reputation as seductive illusionists, and the badger spirits tanuki, known for transforming into monks, young girls, and even cooking pots, loved to make use of the nopperi effect — the “smoothing of the face” — to provoke panic and laughter at the same time. Even more often the blame was placed on mujina, a term whose meaning in historical Japanese is imprecise: sometimes it means badger, sometimes raccoon-dog, and at other times a general category of nocturnal, mischievous creatures capable of transformation. That it was not a “real” spirit but a disguised animal yōkai was supposedly evidenced by the thick hairs left on the clothing of the unlucky traveler — a detail that frequently appears in setsuwa records and in Edo-period illustrations.

The best-known story, which entered global consciousness thanks to Lafcadio Hearn and his “Kwaidan” (more on him here: Japanese spirits took him in – the wandering of Lafcadio Hearn, author of Kwaidan), is “The Mujina of Akasaka.” Hearn based it on a legend already popular in Edo, a tale that must have been told hundreds of times in various versions: a lone traveler, a crying woman, a smooth face, a panicked escape, a soba-ya (inn) that turns out to be a nest of further nopperabō. Hearn added European-style dramaturgy and a melancholic tone, which made the story one of the most famous literary images of Japanese horror.

Less known, yet important to Japanese folkloristics, is the tale from Aomori about the zunberabō — a northern variant in which the being acts more dispassionately and resembles a city prankster far less. In the Tsugaru dialect, “zunbera” denotes a smooth, featureless surface, and the legend itself carried a warning against wandering at night along the region’s frozen roads.

Another classic is the legend of the sacred koi (carp) pond, also known as the story of profaning kannabi, a space inhabited by kami. Here the nopperabō is not a trickster but a guardian. A fisherman — or rather a stubborn angler, one might say even a poacher in old-fashioned terms — who ignores warnings about the pond’s sacred character is not punished with violence but with pure terror: first he sees the smooth, featureless face of an apparition, and moments later the equally smooth face of his own wife, who turns out to be yet another spirit. The horror carries a moral function — in a sense consistent with the educational and satirical tradition of kana-zōshi and early ukiyo-zōshi.

All these stories share a common origin: they are children of the great city of Edo, where night — in an age without electricity — had its own language and its own laws. The entertainment quarters of Yoshiwara, the narrow lanes of Nihonbashi, the long roads stretching through rice fields and temple groves formed a dense topography of fear.

Merchants returning from work, samurai after night duty, craftsmen heading home after the workshops closed constantly passed strangers whose faces, in the glow of paper lanterns, took on unnervingly flat shapes. From these half-shadows, from perceptual mistakes, from urban loneliness and the pace of life arose the most developed forms of the nopperabō legends — spirits that look exactly like us, except for the absence of what is most important in Japanese culture: the face, that is, kao, reputation, relational identity.

The motif of the face in Japanese culture — a broader view

In Japanese culture (and not only there, of course), the face is far more than a fragment of the body. In language, custom, aesthetics, and everyday social relations, the face functions as a symbolic interface through which the individual communicates their position, intentions, and belonging to a group. In a society shaped by shudan ishiki — collective group consciousness (more on this here: “The ‘I’ is wide and can hold much – shūdan ishiki and the Japanese way of being together) — the face is not so much an image as a social obligation, a calling card that must be protected, maintained, and presented properly. This is why the loss of face in Japan is not a metaphor but a profound violation of social order, akin to losing one’s position, reputation, and even one’s sense of “self.”

The Japanese idiom kao o tateru — “to preserve face” — speaks of the necessity to maintain harmony, proper presentation, and the dignity of oneself and others. Its counterpart, kao ga tsubureru, “to lose face,” refers not so much to shame as an emotion but to the destruction of a social structure in which the individual was embedded. The face is therefore symbolic status, not individual expression. In this sense, Japanese culture is sociologically different from the Western one, where the face is often understood as a space for expressing the individual’s nature; in Japan it is primarily a carrier of relationships, a part of a complex network of obligations. Less an expression of individuality and more a definition of one’s place within society, of one’s relationships and responsibilities.

This system derives in part from the classic uchi/soto tension — “inside” and “outside” — which determines what emotions may be expressed. Uchi is home, family, the closest group; soto is the outside world, public and demanding ceremonial distance. The face, observed and evaluated by soto, must be smooth, calm, polished, untouched by inner turmoil. In everyday interactions this means a recurring gesture of self-censorship — softening movements, muting expression, smoothing out one’s facial reactions. Even a smile may be primarily a mask: polite, social, not emotional.

This is why the figure of the nopperabō — a being with a completely smooth, featureless face — becomes something more than a yōkai of horror. It is an anti-face, a radical version of social invisibility. Nopperabō is inhuman not because it lacks eyes or a mouth but because it cannot be read. It reveals no position, no intention, no type of relationship. It cannot be classified as friend, enemy, member of one’s own circle, or outsider. For a culture in which the face is the primary interpretive matrix, such a being is the embodiment of an ineffable unease — suspended between uchi and soto, between “someone” and “no one.” One could say that the nopperabō is an empty sign, a signal without content, which introduces chaos into the structure of communication.

This fear of unreadability has deep roots also in aesthetics. In Nō theatre, one of Japan’s oldest stage traditions, masks called men (面) are beautiful yet impenetrable. The mask’s face, almost motionless, appears cool, subdued, absent — and yet in the right light it can change the character’s age, emotion, even gender. What is seemingly devoid of expression becomes intensely alive. The viewer, looking at the actor behind the mask, projects onto it their own fears, memories, and fantasies. Nopperabō works similarly, but without the aesthetic distance: it forces the observer to “fill in” emotions that cannot be read and that — in the empty face — appear only as echoes of one’s own anxieties.

Psychology calls this phenomenon the “uncanny valley.” It is the moment when something looks almost human, but not quite; this subtle mismatch evokes disgust, unease, a biological sense of threat. Nopperabō, with a body entirely human but devoid of expression and identity, falls right into the heart of this valley. It is not a monster — it is an empty human form, a form that does not speak, does not express, does not reveal. It is not the lack of eyes that terrifies, but the lack of what eyes convey. Emptiness.

In a society so deeply attuned to the nuances of nonverbal communication as the Japanese one — where a minimal grimace may signal conflict, and a slight shift of tone reveals relational tension (more on this here: Not the right smile, not the right pause. The grammar of silence in Japan’s high-context culture) — the nopperabō embodies the ultimate fear: fear of complete opacity. This yōkai does not scream, does not attack, does not cause physical harm — but it removes the fundamental tool of social relations: the ability to understand the face. In this sense, its horror is profound, cultural, and at the same time universal. In Japan it has its own precise meaning, yet in every human being it awakens the same echo: the fear of someone who looks human but whose identity, intentions, and very existence as a “someone” remain unknowable.

What did people in Edo say about Nopperabō?

In tales from the Edo period, the nopperabō always appears first as someone, never as something. It is precisely this insidious ordinariness that is the source of its power. Seen from afar, it resembles a passerby returning from work, a servant carrying a bundle along Nihonbashi, a young woman with a paper lantern, or sometimes an old man in a straw hat who has stopped to rest by a well. Always turned with its back to you — it never looks straight ahead. The people of Edo believed that this subtle positioning of the body was itself a sign: “a person who does not show their face is hiding their intentions.”

Only when the victim comes closer does this seemingly ordinary person perform a calm, almost ceremonial gesture — they raise a hand and with a single stroke wipe away the face, as if clearing mist from a mirror. In folklore, this gesture carries immense significance. Unlike other yōkai whose true nature is revealed suddenly (like a kitsune vanishing in a puff of smoke), the nopperabō erases its human façade. It is not a transformation but an act of nullification. Those who recorded the old kaidan wrote that the skin where the face should be is matte like porcelain and cold like the stone of a well on a November night.

Variants of its appearance differ regionally. In Edo, the dominant image was of a nopperabō with a face smooth as an egg, but in northern Honshū people told stories of the zunberabō, whose face seemed blurred, like ink spilled on wet washi paper. In Kantō there was a version with a slight sheen to the skin — people said it was the reflection of the moon “sliding down” the empty visage. Old yōkai handbooks also mention a variety in which the face appears to have the outline of a mouth or eye sockets, but only when illuminated by an oil lamp; when the flame flickers, these “features” vanish. Yet there is never anything there that could be called an expression.

Nopperabō do not wander along crowded streets — their kingdom is the places where night thickens. The former inhabitants of Edo listed such places so often that they almost became fixed elements of the city’s topography of fear: forest paths leading to the outskirts of town, notorious bridges (especially those over canals running to the rice granaries), old wells that no one had looked into for years, temple ponds where, after dark, only the watchman’s lamp was reflected. Inns were particularly favored places — travelers, weary and often after sake, were easy prey for illusions and fear, and the nopperabō loved to appear precisely there, by the extinguished hearth or in the corridor leading to the outhouse.

Although they terrify, they never show physical aggression. This is a psychological yōkai, a being that works by destabilizing one’s sense of reality. In sources from the Edo period it is often emphasized that the nopperabō “feeds on reaction” — not on pain, not on blood, but on terror, especially terror that intensifies in silence. Their favorite tactic was to create chain encounters. First, one nopperabō reveals its empty face and disappears, the victim flees like someone possessed, only to run into another passerby. A second, a third, a fifth — each of them repeats the same gesture: “Ah, you saw something like that? Maybe… like this?” Many accounts end with the victim fainting, losing their way in the forest, or dying from a fall off a cliff during a panic-stricken escape.

The symbolism of Nopperabō – the man who did not exist

In the Japanese landscape of spirits, few figures are as painfully contemporary as the nopperabō. Although born in the world of kaidan, it frightens not with blood or deformity, but with emptiness — emptiness that has a human silhouette and walks at night down the street. In this sense, it is one of the most psychological figures in all of Japanese folklore. It is not a monster from outside but a reflection of the inner fractures of the human being: the fear of losing the “self,” the pressure of conformism, the unsettling space of void that lurks beneath the skin of everyday gestures.

Psychology of the individual: loss of the “self”

Nopperabō is a spiritual diagnosis. It calls to mind experiences that contemporary psychology describes as depersonalization and derealization — states in which a person feels that their “self” has become thin as paper, and the world around them has lost sharpness. In such an experience, a face that cannot be read is like a mirror that does not reflect an image: something ought to appear in it, but does not.

In Japanese culture, the face is a map of identity. It is also — to use the language of psychoanalysis — a container of personality. When the nopperabō wipes away its face with a single gesture, it does something more radical than changing form: it cuts itself off from its own “self,” it cancels it. The empty face is a symbol of a person who has ceased to exist in a psychological sense, yet still walks and breathes.

This is precisely why the nopperabō is so frightening in the stories: because it looks like someone who was once human but has lost something fundamental — name, memory, intention, direction.

Japanese literature is acutely aware of this fear. In Akutagawa’s work, we encounter a protagonist who gradually fades, dissolving into a sense of his own nothingness. Otsuichi creates entire worlds in which a person becomes a shadow of themselves. In Murakami’s fiction, someone suddenly disappears from an apartment, names vanish, memories vanish, and the protagonist is left alone before a white, silent void. It is the same fear: that there is nothing stable within us, that we are only a role, a projection, a reflection of other people’s imaginings. Nopperabō is just such a projection — living, walking, but devoid of a core personality.

Social psychology: conformism and masks

Japan is a society built on a delicate architecture of norms and unwritten rules. The tatemae/honne system — the tension between what we show the world (tatemae) and what we truly feel (honne) — creates in the individual a constant state of “double-ness.” Everyday life requires wearing masks — not in a half-metaphorical sense, as in Europe, but in a very literal psychological sense: the face becomes a tool of adjustment to the group, and that adjustment is one of the highest priorities.

The stronger the social expectations, the greater the risk that the mask will “stick” permanently.

In an extreme version, a person loses the features of the honne “face” — all that remains is tatemae. And when, in solitude, out of the sight of others, they remove their public tatemae mask… it may turn out there is nothing underneath.

Nopperabō is thus a grim metaphor for conformism pushed to the brink of the disappearance of the “self.” It is not a monster — it is a person who has become completely legible from the outside yet empty on the inside. The body remains, but the interior has been smoothed out like porcelain.

In a world of urban anonymity — in Tokyo or Warsaw — in a sea of faces we will never remember, faces that pass one another without eye contact, this fear is particularly visible. In such a world, the nopperabō is not a ghost — it is a metaphor for the passerby you see every day but know nothing about. It is the reflection of modern loneliness in the crowd.

Existentialism: the terror of nothingness

And so we descend into the third and deepest layer. In Buddhism, emptiness — śūnyatā (Jap. 空 kū) — is a space of liberation. It is a promise of unboundedness, openness, awakening. But the nopperabō embodies a distorted emptiness, an emptiness without a path, without light. It is not the emptiness of enlightenment — it is the emptiness of a missing core, emptiness in the existential sense: cold, indifferent.

Ancient monks used to say that “a person who does not recognize their true nature is like a shadow without a source.” The nopperabō is such a shadow. It speaks in the voice of the ultimate fear: that beneath layers of habits, roles, titles, masks, and appearances there may be nothing. No person, no desire, no meaning.

The nopperabō’s face is an empty screen upon which our own anxieties are projected:
– the shame of who we are,
– the loneliness we cannot name,
– the slow disintegration of meaning, arriving like evening mist over a pond.

This is why the nopperabō is such a universal symbol: it does not warn us against monsters, but against ourselves. It poses the same chilling question to everyone who encounters it — a question that sends a cold shiver down the spine:

“If I take away your face — what will remain?”

The Nopperabō survives into the present

Modern imagination has not abandoned the nopperabō — on the contrary, its shadow permeates films, games, and pop culture, changing form while preserving its essence: a face that should say something, yet remains silent. Japanese cinema and animation have long employed this motif, because in a culture that places immense value on reading nonverbal signals, facelessness is a perfect device for horror and unease.

The best-known character often associated with the nopperabō is Kaonashi (カオナシ), “No-Face” from “Spirited Away.” Though Hayao Miyazaki never explicitly called him a nopperabō, his name — literally “without a face” — is no coincidence. Kaonashi appears, at first glance, as an empty shell, an absorbent being who takes in the emotions, desires, and voices of those he encounters. This marks an important difference:

– the nopperabō does not absorb — it vanishes,
– Kaonashi does not vanish — he absorbs, dissolving the boundaries between himself and others.

But the fundamental fear is the same: a visage that offers no clues. A being that ought to be human, but is not. A relationship that should form, but cannot.

This thread leads further, to video games — a medium that excels at creating spaces of unease. In the Silent Hill series, monsters almost always have faces erased, distorted, or entirely smoothed over. The most iconic are the nurses from “Silent Hill 2”: humanoid, feminine silhouettes with bandaged heads, whose faces are not only invisible but impossible to interpret. We do not know whether these creatures “see” us, whether they possess awareness, or whether they act mechanically. Their horror stems not from aggression but from unreadability — just like the nopperabō.

In Japanese horror cinema, this tension reaches its peak. Films such as “Kojiro,” “Onibaba,” and modern J-horror works (for example the distorted faces in “Kuchisake-onna”) often reference the motif of the “anti-mask.” A Nō mask is a tool of expression in theatre; a horror mask is its negation. Instead of revealing the inner world of the character, it closes it off, cutting off access to intention. Though they may seem similar at first glance — they are opposites. The Nō mask is used to distill and precisely express emotion and the inner movements of the character. Horror masks, inspired by the nopperabō, ensure that the viewer has no idea what is happening within the figure. Does it feel anything, want anything — is there anything there at all?

The motif of facelessness has even become part of global pop culture:
– Slenderman is essentially a Western nopperabō — a humanoid silhouette without a face, appearing at the edges of vision, in forests, in shadows.
– In the Body Snatchers films, people are replaced by copies that look the same, yet something is wrong — as though they were hollow inside.
– In “It Follows”, the threat takes the form of people with empty gazes, walking slowly, without emotion.

All these beings are variants of the nopperabō — monsters too close to human to dismiss as pure fantasy, yet too dehumanized to feel safe around. Their horror is born from familiarity and foreignness at once.

Why do we fear beings without faces?

The fear of a face that cannot be read is older than folklore. It is a biological reflex. Human brains are wired for swift face recognition — a fraction of a second is enough to read emotion, age, intention. Neuropsychological research shows that the brain’s fusiform face area (FFA) reacts even to extremely simplified facial patterns, and any disruption of this process triggers profound unease.

A being that should have a face but does not slips off the cognitive map. It is as though a sentence (in any language) lacked a verb — the entire structure collapses. Facelessness is not merely “the absence of a feature”; it is a radical disruption of social communication.

When we cannot read another being’s emotions, we are defenseless.

When we cannot guess its intention — we can only speculate, and speculation is the seed of fear.

Social psychology tells us that the face is the foundation of relationships: it creates trust, empathy, a sense of safety. Therefore, facelessness is the severing of connection before it can form. The nopperabō does not simply frighten — it invalidates the relationship at the very moment it might begin.

It is not a beast leaping from the dark. It is someone standing before us, refusing to be read. What should be human is not human — and that is why it terrifies. In this sense, the nopperabō is one of the most universal archetypes of fear. It is not a demon that destroys the body. It is a being that destroys cognitive certainty.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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