Folk Legends of Japan, page 2
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We may now return to the question of why Japan possesses such an abundance of folk legends. All the elements favoring the creation of folk legendry coalesce in the Land of the Rising Sun. A stationary people have lived in their village communities since the dawn of history. No frontier march has drawn the population toward virgin land, save for the late nineteenth-century push to Hokkaido—and some Japanese today speak slightingly of Hokkaido in contrast to the "real Japan." No colonial empire has sucked out the people to foreign shores, except for the abortive expansion that ended in 1945. For three centuries, by imperial decree, no Japanese could leave nor foreigner enter the home-land. As a national boundary ringed in the islands, so did a village boundary fence in each mura, a formidable barrier erected by folk belief, which increased the natural isolation of mountain fastness and sequestered isle. Beyond the village boundary lay an unknown outside world beset with danger and mystery. Each returning villager purified himself with proper ritual when he recrossed the mura's edge. Dwellers in each farm village worshiped their own local deity, of whom indeed they all regarded themselves as descendants. Hence each mura possessed a powerful sense of its own individuality and tradition. Still, travelers and strangers crossed the boundary from time to time—itinerant monks, singing priestesses, woodworkers, peddlers, performers, blind musicians, tax collectors from the daimyo—bringing with them hearsay and traditions which easily adapted themselves to new homes. In spite of the tight clannish organization of the village society, one can find an identical legend scattered in fifty or a hundred mura the length and breadth of Japan.
The rice farmers or deep-sea fishermen and their families, living compactly in each hamlet, furnished the human reservoirs for the storing up of legends. An ancient history extending back into mythical origins presented a panorama of stirring events from which legends sprouted. From southern Kyushu to northern Aomori one hears of settlements founded by the Heike nobles who fled from the battlefields of the twelfth-century civil wars after their defeat by the Genji, and whose supposed descendants now live on as anonymous peasants. A spectacular landscape honeycombed with mountain ranges, watered with lakes, rivers, hot springs, and quiet pools, and covered with forests and shrubbery invites all manner of legendary association. We have simply to scan the titles of a typical collection of Japanese densetsu to see the ties between topography and tradition: "The Waterfall of Seven Pots"; "The Strange Willow Tree of Shigekubo"; "The Pond That Does Not Reflect the Moon"; "The Bridge Where Saigyo Turned Back"; "The Hot Spring Where the Son of a God Took a Bath"; "The Foundation Stone That Shed Blood"; "The Mound of Seizo the Strong Man." Collection after collection rings the changes on these themes, until it would seem that every willow tree, mound, and meadow carries its own special story.
Related to Japan's long history and varied geography, and of primary importance for legend material, is the little-understood folk religion of the land. The formal religions of Shintoism and Buddhism have been carefully described for Western readers, but even the Japanese scholars themselves are only beginning to explore the complicated web of folk ideas that preceded and still underlie the institutional religions. These ideas are expressed in seasonal agricultural ritual, farm-village festivals to honor local deities, household taboos and observances, shamanistic auguries by blind old women, shrine offerings to placate hostile spirits —indeed, scarcely an aspect of rural life but touches in some way on religious folk beliefs. There is a god of the hearth; a god of the privy; a god of the rice fields, who descends from his winter home in the mountains every spring and returns after the harvest in the fall. Hence the importance of mountains in Japanese minkan shinko (folk religion); often the mountains are considered as possessing spirits or gods, and woodcutters purify themselves before venturing into the hallowed forests on the mountainside.
This vast body of folk custom and ritual contributed to the growth of legend in various ways. Spirits of the dead who nourished some grievance or hatred toward the living at the time of their deaths must be placated by the erection of shrines. Only if the shrine is regularly attended and annually propitiated will the spirit restrain its power to harm. So the ancient tale of human sacrifice or vengeful murder stays alive in the memory of the kin group obligated to tend the shrine, and of the villagers who daily pass by. The curious feature of this belief, to a Westerner, lies in the veneration of an enemy. Sometimes the enshrined spirit has acted nobly and heroically, as when a young boy allows himself to be buried alive in order to appease the god of the lake and keep its waters from flooding the dam. But in many instances the now-honored person lost his life after an act of treachery or wanton cruelty or hand-to-hand strife on the battlefield. Lafcadio Hearn gives an ironic example of this perverse attitude in his Kwaidan, where a dishonest servant is beheaded by his master and dies with a curse on his lips. The other servants in great fright beseech their lord to build a shrine to his spirit, but the lord refuses, finally explaining that all the malice of the spirit was expended when the head rolled on the ground and chewed a stone, to fulfill the servant's dying threat. Customarily, of course, the spirit's venom is never drawn by such last-minute diversions.
Besides the spirits of the long dead, Japanese villagers fear also a host of demons. These odd-appearing and malevolent creatures are thought to be the degenerate corruptions of ancient divinities. By far the best known is the kappa, a manlike goblin with a saucer-shaped indentation in the top of its head that holds water; if the water is spilled, the kappa loses his power. Kappa inhabit rivers and prey on children who swim in their waters or upon horses tethered by the river bank. They enter their victim through the anus and draw forth his intestines. Hence when a drowned person is discovered with a distended anus, a kappa is believed to have pulled him under. Recently a Japanese sociologist came upon a village in Kagoshima Prefecture whose people still worship at a kappa shrine, a fact supporting the theory that the kappa descends from a monkey messenger of a river god. The tengu is a winged demon with a long pointed nose who lives in the top of tall pine trees and abducts human beings. Since he is found in mountainous regions, and even on occasion serves as protector of a mountain shrine, some historic connection appears to exist between mountain divinities and tengu. Today at Shinto festivals the guide in the procession bearing the portable shrine (mikoshi) wears the mask of a tengu, representing the Sky World deity Saruta-hiko. Divinity may also lurk behind the yama-uba, an ogreish witch whose name itself signifies "old woman of the mountains." Legends arise from the experiences of the villagers with these and other anthropomorphic monstrosities.
In a different though related class fall the animals who enchant and deceive—foxes and badgers and serpents. They assume the guise both of ordinary animals and of human beings. They may marry with humans, haunt families, bring treasure to those who have befriended them, and cause humiliation and death to their enemies. A close link binds the kitsune, fox, with Inari, the Rice God, whom he serves as messenger, a vestige perhaps of a primeval era of fox worship. Buddhism has influenced the conception of the badger, who is pictured as a full-bellied Buddhist monk. In folk tales and popular belief the serpent, snake, or dragon often assumes the form of a comely maiden or handsome suitor. In ancient times people considered the serpent a mountain god incarnate. The Japanese mythologist Higo Kazuo has identified the serpent with a pre-Buddhist water god, who demands human sacrifices. Since the serpent always ends up in the bottom of a pond, which is ever after known as his lair, his legendary home is clearly marked. Foxes and badgers are not so closely associated with landmarks, but carry on their mischief in country and even city districts, where their outrageous tricks enter into family and village saga.
Because of this pervasive force of minkan shinko, the Japanese idea of densetsu means something more than our "legend." Densetsu intimately and continuously affect the lives of the farming and fishing families. They are not idle and picturesque legends broadcast by chambers of commerce to lure tourists to scenic spots, but traditions based on ancient beliefs. The word "religion," even coupled with "folk," again clouds the issue, for the tissue of beliefs in minkan shinko does not carry the ecclesiastical overtones of formal Christian worship. These taboos, rites, festivals, offerings do not linger underground like the folklore of Christianity, with its hidden Devil and witches, ghosts and charms, but survive openly and publicly. The densetsu never move very far from this central core of compulsive and time-honored beliefs that dominate Japanese country people. A tradition about a vengeful spirit is remembered not just for itself, but because a shrine has been built for that spirit, which must be tended and served. A powerful wrestler to whom legendary feats of strength are ascribed is said to have obtained his power from a god. A hunter with marvelous skill received the gift of unerring aim from a goddess of the mountain whom he aided in childbirth. Even tricks of a scapegoat, retold in other countries for their comic sauce, in Japan become involved with minkan shinko; the knave deceives the god or impersonates a priest. Legends about choja, or rich peasants, are inspired by Buddhist ideas of impermanence and the humbling of the rich and prospering of the poor. Ancestral spirits become village deities, deities degenerate into demons, the old nature-religion endows trees and stones, mountains and rivers with spirit life, the imported Buddhism introduces new gods and saints who perform miracles, and every phase produces its growth of folk legends.
European folklorists of the nineteenth century speculated on the origin of folk tradition which, under the glare of civilization, took on the guise of quaint and curious survivals from a pagan society. European and American legends of haunted houses, spiteful fairies, and shape-changing werewolves do seem anachronistic alongside motorized highways and television sets. But densetsu belong to the living folk-culture of Japan, and are supported by the institutions of the culture, like Shinto shrines and national festivals and Kabuki and Noh drama, which honor the old traditions. The intellectuals may not believe in a god of the privy or the transformation of foxes, but they are thoroughly familiar with such ideas and should never regard them as quaint or curious. Families still become fox-possessed, and yet bear scales that testify to snake ancestors. While I was in Japan the newspapers carried a story: "Tokyo Restaurant Cook Haunted by Cat's Ghost" (Asahi Evening News, June 19, 1957). The story broke first when a secretary of the Austrian Embassy wrote to the papers exposing an act of cruelty she had witnessed while dining out. A cook in a fit of irritation at a stray cat that had been pestering him threw the animal into a hot oven. The restaurant fired the cook, the police fined him, and the cat too exacted revenge:
The restaurant cook who hurled a tomcat into a roaring oven in a fiery rage told police today the animal's ghost has begun to haunt him.
The cook, Koji Hayama, said every night since Saturday when the cat was roasted to death in the oven of Tokyo Kaikan's Grill Rossini, he has been suffering pains in his legs and hips and has been sleeping fitfully.
According to Japanese superstition, anyone killing a cat will be haunted by the animal's ghost.
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The accurate collecting of Japanese legends began only in the present century. Indeed the science of folklore in Japan is no longer than the life of eighty-four-year-old Kunio Yanagita, whose duties as a young man in the agricultural branch of the government brought him in contact with farmers in the rice paddies, and eventually directed his energies toward rural folk-culture. His own enormous labors and wide influence brought about the precise recording of village customs and tales, including the densetsu found so abundantly in every village. The first serious attention to legends was given by Toshio Takagi in a work entitled Nihon Densetsu Shu (Collection of Japanese Legends), published in Tokyo in 1913. Takagi was a disciple of Yanagita, and with him co-editor of the first Japanese folklore journal, Kyodo Kenkyu, founded in 1913. A student of German literature and mythology, Takagi conceived the idea of assembling Japanese traditions from the people, much as the Grimms had done in Germany, and advertised for them through the pages of the Asahi newspaper. From the considerable number of replies he selected two hundred and fifty legends, sent in from all over the country, classified them according to their principal element, and published them in simplified form. Some of his twenty-three divisions merely suggest general subjects ("Legends of Trees," "Legends of Stones"), but others pin down variations on a single legendary theme ("The Curse of the Golden Cock," "Legends of Stone Potatoes and Waterless Rivers").
Kunio Yanagita himself devoted considerable attention to legends in several books and in 1950 published an extensive classification, Nihon Densetsu Meii (Index of Japanese Legends). He sought to study densetsu by the comparative method and to explain the changes they underwent in different localities. Also he sharpened the concept of densetsu, pointing out differences from the fairy tale (mukashi-banashi), such as the simpler structure of the densetsu; its flexible length, depending on the individual narrator; and its attachment to an "immovable evidence."
The bibliography in the Nihon Densetsu Meii reveals the forward strides in the field collecting of folk legends from the 1920's on. Nearly fifty volumes exclusively devoted to densetsu are listed by Yanagita, and since his index appeared they have continued to be published at the rate of two or three a year. Many of the collections were undertaken as cooperative projects by local high schools and educational societies. Others were compiled by enthusiastic amateurs. A postmaster in Yamanashi Prefecture, Riboku Dobashi, has issued two collections in the last four years. When I visited Kumamoto City in April, 1957,1 learned of four local collectors of densetsu, including a newspaper reporter, a radio script-writer, and a professor of folklore at a junior college. A collection represented in the present book, from Niigata and Sado, was undertaken by a local political party official whom I met in Niigata. A good portion of such volumes are locally published (one in Miyazaki was subsidized by a bank); but they are published in small editions, and are difficult to come by. Because these are largely amateur productions, they do not satisfy all the demands of professional folklorists, who wish to see every text documented with the name of the storyteller and the date of the narration. Sometimes such information is given, but more often it is withheld. Nevertheless, these local groups and individuals have performed invaluable service by bringing together the oral legends of their localities which the handful of professional folklorists, concentrated in Tokyo, attached to universities, and studying many aspects of folklore besides densetsu, could never have procured. Some local pride and boosterism for special legends can be observed in different regions, which are in any case vain of their products and attractions. Throughout the southern island of Kyushu one encounters in the shops carved figures of kappa in endless variety, for Kyushu is reputedly its original home. On Sado Island, off the northwestern coast of Honshu, a spot frequented by Japanese tourists but rarely penetrated by Westerners, I kept seeing the image of a lovely dancing girl with a sweeping long-brimmed hat nearly hiding her features, displayed in dolls, etched on lacquer ware, painted in pictures. This was the likeness of Okesa, who danced as a geisha to make money for a needy old couple on Sado after they befriended a stray cat. To help them out, this cat took the form of a lovely girl and entertained. The memory of her dance and costume stays green and even Tokyo geisha perform the Okesa dance.
Apart from these rare exceptions, the mass of Japanese folk legends remains still the exclusive property of the village communities. None have been widely reprinted and translated as have certain fairy tales, like "Momotaro" (The Peach Boy). The Western world indeed knows very little about these densetsu. Early translators concerned themselves chiefly with the mukashi-banashi, and only Lafcadio Hearn gave serious attention to the legendary traditions that permeated the land he cherished. Kwaidan is entirely devoted to somber traditionary tales, but they recur throughout Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Kotto, In Ghostly Japan, Kokoro, and his other books. Hearn tells us that he heard some from a young acolyte he met in a Buddhist temple, while others he took from esoteric Japanese writings. Hearn did not of course have access to field collections of densetsu, and his own literary instinct and religious bent turned him to educated priestly informants and to poetic treatments. Nor did he intend any systematic description of Japanese folklore. Still, he provides a trustworthy guide into unfamiliar corridors of Japanese folk ideas, and those who dismiss Hearn as a dewy-eyed romancer should consider his grisly and macabre legends.
The present book is intended to bring a representative selection of Japanese folk legends to Western readers. During the ten months I spent in Japan, from October, 1956, to August, 1957, as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tokyo, I had the good fortune to live close by the Japanese Folklore Institute in Seijo-machi. There I met Professor Yanagita and his associates, and there I spent many hours with Miss Yasuyo Ishiwara, who made literal translations for most of the legends printed here. Miss Ishiwara had served as principal assistant to Mr. Yanagita in the work on his Nihon Densetsu Meii, and was admirably fitted to steer me through the unfamiliar bibliography and acquaint me with characteristic legends. The Institute closed in May, 1957, for lack of funds, a tragic blow indeed to Japanese folklore studies. Other translations were made by a talented student of mine at Tokyo University, Miss Kayoko Saito, who in addition obtained a number of densetsu directly from her grandmother. When I met the grandmother, a wholesome, rotund woman of surprising girth for Japan, she told me— through Kayoko—of hearing village tales from her own grandmother on the southerly island of Shikoku; she could even remember the exact year of her childhood when she first heard a particular story.
