What A Lot Of Fuss,

over nothing,

 if you don’t know about the Momo Hoax that has spread globally and caused a whole bunch of uproar over nothing, you can read about it here, if you read the whole link you will see it is a case of a 'classic moral panic',

the real victim of the hoax is Keisuke Aiso, the artist who created a sculpture whose image was subsequently misappropriated as the face of the hoax, Aiso (whose last name 相蘇 was mistakenly reported in the Western media as Aizawa) is the head of Link Factory, a Japanese company that creates props and special effects for movies and television, one of his specialties is creating horror based imagery,

in an interview with Buzzfeed Aiso said that, given the nature of the show, he wanted to dial up the fear factor, so he set about creating a representation of Ubume (姑獲鳥), a Japanese yokai, according to folklore, the part-bird, part-human ghost is an embodiment of women who died giving birth,

Aiso exhibited his piece in the art show, which took place during the summer of 2016, and that should have been the end of the story, but 2 years later, during the summer of 2018, the artist started receiving hate mail in English, Spanish and other languages too, He went online to figure out what was going on, only to discover that an image of his sculpture had been misappropriated, and had taken on a new life as the face of an online hoax, at its peak, Aiso says he was getting about 30 emails per day, this activity eventually died down but has picked up again as media outlets have recently been reporting on the hoax,

and that is exactly what it is, a hoax, always remember, research first, then despite the truth makeup a good story!, above an example of some of the special effects that Aiso’s company produces, what a great story about a hoax, you could not make it up, wait a second someone did! as an aside, Aisawa confirmed in March 2019 that the sculpture had been thrown away in 2018, after its material, rubber and natural oils had rotted away.