Aka-oni.

Aka-oni (赤鬼) is the red-skinned form of the Japanese oni (鬼), usually shown with curved horns, glaring eyes, fangs, a tiger-skin loincloth, and an iron club. The red body makes the figure feel immediate and heated. Even within the broad world of oni, this color gives the demon a special charge, as though rage and appetite have risen visibly to the surface.

Aka-oni appears less as the hero of one fixed legend than as a moral image used in ritual and instruction. In Setsubun, the red oni is among the demon forms symbolically driven out by beans and shouted formulae. In popular explanation, it stands for greed and hungry attachment, the vice that keeps taking and never reaches satisfaction. The figure therefore works as a warning more than a character.

The red oni grows out of the larger Japanese oni tradition shaped by early chronicles, Buddhist hell imagery, and medieval narrative, but its color-coded meaning belongs to a later didactic layer. Popular five-color systems map human faults onto differently colored oni, and the red form is commonly aligned with greed or grasping desire. That mapping is not the oldest stratum of oni belief, yet it became one of the clearest ways to explain the demon's moral force in public culture.