When I mentioned to Abdul Rashid Yusof that I may write about koro, he burst into his typical controlled laughter.

I was responding to his request that I consider contributing articles to this portal.

“Koro, tu bahasa Kedah,” he said excitedly.

In the Kedah Malay dialect, koro refers to depression or, at the very least, lack of energy and enthusiasm.

Koro could be caused by, among other things, sadness or illness. The standard term for it is murung.

But koro that I was alluding to is much more complicated than that. When I came across koro 14 years ago, when reading The Harper’s magazine, my reaction wasn’t dissimilar to that of Abdul Rashid.

“What, Harper’s is writing about koro? Is this the koro that I heard about during my teenage years in my home state, Kedah?”

In a June 17, 2008 posting in my Blog, The Scribe, I wrote that in his gallant effort to keep the interest in koro alive and to warn us of the danger of being struck down by this dreadful malady, the magazine’s writer, Frank Bures, took us halfway around the world from Africa to China.

Like many researchers and writers before him, Bures, who frequently wrote about Africa, suggested that koro is of Southeast Asian origin.

He said a certain Benjamin Matthes, who was compiling a dictionary of Bugis dialect, had come across the term “lasa koro” in 1874 on the island of Sulawesi. Incidentally that was the year that koro was reported to have caused mass panic.

The effects of koro are so dreadful that sufferers were known to have resorted to extreme measures, including murder. To save themselves from embarrassment and humiliation, they accused others of causing their sexual incapacity.

There had been reports as recent as 2001 that mobs lynched witchdoctors and innocent bystanders accused of thefts that caused the victims to suffer koro. At least 12 suspected thieves were lynched in Nigeria, according to the Harper’s Magazine report.

Yet investigations by the police and examination by doctors continuously found that nothing was lost to koro and the prized possession remained intact. But it didn’t stop the belief in koro from continuing to spread among West African cultures.

A similar and more historic koro syndrome occured specifically among populations of southern China while the bio-medical cultures such as the United States maintain their own versions of koro.

My own reading on the subject did not find any report of the koro outbreak occurring in Malaysia although there were reports of it happening in Singapore in July 1967, Thailand in November 1976, and in India and China during the 1980’s.

Bures went on to write a book entitled “The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes”.

While researching for the book, Bures noted that in August of 1984 on the island of Hainan in southern China, a fortune teller predicted “1985 would be a bad year and that all of the people would suffer from many disasters,” according to a report published by the Guangzhou Brain Hospital.

Soon after that, he added, rumors began circulating that a “fox ghost,” sometimes disguised as an old woman, was roaming the land, collecting penises in baskets she carried on her shoulder pole. Two young men approached her to see what was in her baskets. When they looked, they saw that the baskets were filled with penises. They died instantly of fright, according to the story.

Panic began making its way around the island. The ghost struck at night, when villagers were asleep. A chill would creep into the room, and a victim would feel his penis shrinking inward. He would grab it and run outside for help. 

In the case of one 28-year-old office worker, he was home at night when he heard a gong being beaten and the terrifying noises from people in a nearby neighborhood. Then he suddenly became anxious and felt like his penis was shrinking. He shouted for help. Several men in the neighborhood rushed into his home and tried to rescue him by forcefully pulling his penis and making loud sounds to chase away the ghost.

Could it be that the koro attacks went unreported and unspoken in Malaysia because the victims were too ashamed to admit it or that koro is so common that it’s not worth fussing about?

One published source noted that koro’s cultural location is Southeast Asia. The history of koro in Southeast Asia began much earlier than the African phenomena.

Koro could have originated as early as 2,200 years ago and was first mentioned in the Huangdi Neiching, the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor or Esoteric Scripture of the Yellow Emperor. It is an ancient Chinese medical text.

There were suggestions that koro came from the Malay language (Franzizi 1995: 156) and could have a similar meaning as keruk or kerut, which in Malay means shrink or wrinkle, or the words kura, kura-kura and kuro, which all refer to tortoise.

Medical science defines koro as genital retraction syndrome (GRS). Generally koro is considered a culture bound delusional disorder in which individuals have an overpowering belief that their sex organs are retracting and will disappear, despite the lack of any true longstanding changes to the genitals.

Koro, also known as shrinking penis, is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Real or imaged, it’s useful to investigate the reason for those Kedahans to be in a koro state.

Could they have lost their manhood to koro and was too ashamed to tell anyone?

For the rest, if you think that your prized possession is at risk of being snatched by the “fox ghost”, beat the gong.