In more extreme cases the music supposedly changes or terrifying forms and faces flicker across the screen, as well as numerous other distortions and anomalies, and sometimes the power to the entire residence apparently cuts out. In some cases, the red ogre becomes blue, or the color of the woman’s dress changes. Another oddity noticed by some viewers was that if the commercial is watched at the stroke of midnight, or after recording it and playing it back, then certain details will change. The typical stories of people going insane, having seizures, or losing consciousness while watching it began to surface, but there were also even more ominous claims of some people dropping dead while watching it. As soon as it did, there were immediately all sorts of weird reports of something awry. In 2006, the old Japanese Kleenex commercial was dusted off and presented for a new generation of viewers when it hit YouTube.

Japanese TV commercials can be weird, but this one really takes the cake. It is perhaps because of this that this simple commercial has gone on to become an incredibly pervasive scary urban legend in Japan, surrounded by all manner of sinister rumors and spooky tales.

The commercial, which you can see here, is rather short, and the first thing one might notice other than the sheer surreal bizarreness of it and how it has nothing at all to do with tissues, is just how incredibly creepy it all is, and unsettling on some primal level that is hard to place.

Not a single word is spoken in the entire 30 second run time, and it is all overlaid by the eerie, melancholic tune “It’s a Fine Day” by Edward Barton and Jane. In the commercial, they are sitting upon a bed of straw with a box of tissues placed between them, and as the little ogre sits there with arms crossed and an inscrutable expression on its face, the woman leans over, pulls out a tissue, and then lets it float off into the air. If you were to have been in Japan in 1985 and turned on the TV, you might have been treated to a one strange commercial for Kleenex brand facial tissues, which features a woman in a white dress and a child-sized, impish one-horned ogre with red skin played by a child actor.

Strange story japanese