Ittan-momen

There is no single mythic cosmogony recorded for ittan-momen in the provided sources. Traditional accounts present it as an animate strip of cloth that appears at night in local oral reports from Kagoshima (Kimotsuki). Folklorists have proposed natural-seed hypotheses — for example, windblown mourning cotton flags used in some funerary practices, gliding animals such as the musasabi (giant flying squirrel), or optical afterimage effects when bright objects move in darkness — as plausible origins for eyewitness reports, but these are scholarly proposals rather than a consolidated traditional origin myth.

Traditional/folkloric descriptions portray ittan-momen as a strip of white cloth about one tan in length and narrow in width — the folkloric report commonly cited gives an approximate dimension of roughly 10.6 metres long by about 30 centimetres wide — that flutters or flies through the evening air. Older witness reports emphasize a non-anthropomorphic flying cloth with no eyes or arms. Modern popular depictions (notedly Mizuki Shigeru's GeGeGe no Kitarō) have anthropomorphized the creature with eyes, arms, and speech; those features are inventions of later fiction.

Folkloric accounts attribute nocturnal flight and fluttering, the capability to wrap around people's faces and necks (leading to suffocation), and in some tales the cloth spins or lifts a wrapped person into the air. Anecdotal reports include attempts to cut the cloth: one story records a man cutting a white cloth that had wrapped his neck with his wakizashi, after which the cloth vanished and his hands were bloody. Modern-era sighting claims describe fast-moving cloth-like objects (including alongside trains), though scholars treating these reports note possible misperception or media influence.