Mythical Creatures [EDITING]

Bake-Kujira

The Bake-Kujira, or ghost-whale, is the skeletal spirit of a dead whale.

It is said that the creature was from Shimane prefecture, in western Japan. It is supposedly humongous, and is always accompanied by a host of strange birds of fish. In one story, a fisherman threw his harpoon at the Bake-Kujira to try to catch it, but the harpoon passed right through it, and the whale and host just floated away into the night. Other legends say that the ghost-whale brings a powerful curse with it. "The curse of the whale", as it's creatively called, is said to bring famine, plague, fires, and other kinds of disasters to the villages it hits.

This is the worst nightmare for the villages because it is the complete opposite of what finding a whale usually brings. For the ancient villages, whales were rare and important. They would sometimes come inland, or beach themselves on the shore. Fishermen hunted these whales in a practice called Passive Whaling, using harpoons to kill the whale that was trapped in the shallows. This was a rare and auspicious event - a single whale provided vast amounts of meat and resources for the village, and seemed like a gift from the gods. And the whale itself was only a piece of the bounty. Whales often came in followed by large schools of fish, so their arrival meant an abundance of sea life beyond the leviathan itself. The arrival of a whale could save a village teetering on the edge of starvation and ruin, it was mana from the oceans.

There are three recognized sightings as fact. More may be discovered from ancient script or future encounters.

This is a legend told by many Japanese fishermen and sailors that describes the Bake-Kujira:

One rainy night long ago, some fishers living on the Shimane peninsula witnessed an enormous white shape off the coast in the Sea of Japan. Squinting their eyes, it appeared to them to be a white whale swimming offshore. Excited for the catch, they rallied the townspeople, who grabbed their spears and harpoons and took to their boats to hunt down and catch their quarry. They soon reached the whale, but no matter how many times they hurled their weapons, not one of them stuck true. When they looked closer, through the dark, rain-spattered water's surface, they realized why: what they thought was a white whale was actually a humongous skeleton swimming in the sea, not a single bit of flesh in its entire body. At that very moment, the sea became alive with a host of strange fish nobody could recognize, and the sky swarmed full of eerie birds which nobody had ever seen before, the ghost-whale then turned sharply out to sea, and swiftly vanished into the current, taking all the strange fish and birds with it, never to be seen again. The terrified villagers returned home, realizing that the skeletal whale must have been a Bake-Kujira - the ghost of a whale turned into a vengeful spirit. While the ghost was never seen again, other villages in Shimane felt the whale's curse, being consumed by conflagrations and plagued by infectious diseases following whale beachings. 

There are also two other stories that are known.

In 1983, an intact whale skeleton was spotted off the shores of Anamizu, Ishikawa prefecture. The press jumped on the story naming it a "Real-Life Bake-Kujira."

Another story included a whale dressed in a kimono was said to have brought the secrets of rice cultivation to Japan. This could have been the good opposite the the Bake-Kujira, like yin to yang.

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Information from cryptidz.wikia.com  

Image from serialwordsmith.blogspot.com