Jinmenken, the human-faced dog

A Japanese urban legend about a talking dog with a man's face that races cars at night. AERA dot and Japanese Wikipedia both report that the leading theory is that Popteen magazine's editors and a writer planted it.

English Wikipedia describes jinmenken as human-faced dogs that people say show up at night in Japanese cities. They are said to be fast enough to pass cars on the highway, then turn to look at the drivers. They can talk but want to be left alone. In some versions, often told as jokes, a person finds a dog going through rubbish; it looks up, shows a human face and tells them to go away. Iikura Yoshiyuki of Kokugakuin University told Nippon.com that magazines gathered stories like this into urban-legend features, and their writers worked to build interest. It was Popteen, he says, that brought out the human-faced dog, with a middle-aged man's face, able to speak and to chase cars at more than 100 km an hour.

Who started it is disputed. Writer Yamaguchi Bintarō, in AERA dot, and Japanese Wikipedia both say the leading theory is that writer Ishimaru Motoaki and the editors of Popteen planted the rumour on purpose, adding invented details to a reader's letter. Yamaguchi notes that Popteen had enormous standing with teenage girls then, so its readers' page could well have produced an urban legend. None of these sources quotes Ishimaru himself.

There are rival claims. AERA dot and Japanese Wikipedia both report that actor Matoba Kōji said on the Yomiuri TV show Downtown DX that he and his friends made up the rumour, and Yamaguchi says Matoba has told him the same in person. Japanese Wikipedia adds that Tanaka Yūji of Bakushō Mondai said on a radio programme that a broadcast writer, a former comedian, put the rumour out on purpose to study how rumours spread. It also lists two possible influences: the psychic dog Zero in Ushiro no Hyakutarō, sometimes drawn with a human face, and a human-faced dog in a science-fiction film released in Japan as SF/Body Snatcher.