Folk Legends From Tono: Japan's Spirits, Deities, and Phantastic Creatures Read online

  Then a pretty girl, aged sixteen or seventeen, opened the side gate to the grounds and came in. She was clearly seen collectively by everyone present. At that moment Keijiro said, “This girl is named Komatsu and she lives next door to me. She is seriously ill with a fever and typhoid and could not be here. I think she is going to die.” Sure enough, she died the next day. This was explained by Koyashiki Tokubei, one of the people who saw the girl. (51-160)

  A few years ago, when the mother of Mr. Sasaki’s friend was ill, the doctor made a mistake and gave her an overdose injection of morphine painkiller. For about ten hours, her pulse and breathing seemed weak. Around nine o’clock in the evening, she stopped breathing and her body became cold. The next morning, she started to breathe again. It seemed like a miracle.

  When she spoke about what happened while she was unconscious, she said that her body was heavy, and she couldn’t walk as she wanted to. She imagined a beautiful place, and she wanted to get there quickly. She walked fast along a broad street lined with pine trees on both sides. Then, from behind, she heard all of the family calling her to come back. She thought they were being selfish. Gradually the voices calling got closer and closer until they were beside her ears. She had no choice but to turn back. Coming back was most unpleasant. She is in good health now. (52-155)

  It is said that on the way to the “land of the dead” you pass over a river. I don’t know if this is what is commonly referred to in Buddhism as the “river crossing,” but there are many stories of people dying and then being blocked from entering the other world by a river. They ultimately return home.

  A young man named Segawa Shigeji from Tsuchibuchi village suddenly had a stomachache, became dizzy and disoriented, and then fainted (magureru). This happened about ten years ago. After he recovered, he said, “It was scary! I was going along quickly on Matsubara road, and just as I was about to cross a fine bridge, old man Onuma Tora, carrying a hoe, and a local policeman stopped me. I regained consciousness.”

  The young man is fine now. Sasaki Kizen’s great-grandfather also fainted once. After he recovered, he said, “I was walking along a wide road and there was a bridge. On the other side I could see a fine Buddhist temple on a high stone wall. Lots of children’s faces, symbols of the other world, could be seen peeking out from the cracks in the stone wall. They were all looking at me.” (53-158)

  This is a story heard directly from the wife of a friend of Sasaki Kizen. When she had her first child, the birth was difficult and she became delirious. She herself felt fine and imagined that she had to go somewhere in a hurry. Her memory was vague, but she was on a road walking briskly and then found herself in a large, bright room. Just as she thought she would open the sliding door and go into the next room, a countless number of young children surrounded her. They blocked her way, and she couldn’t pass.

  Later, when she attempted to go back, the young children formed rows on either side of the road, opening the way. This repeated several times, and then she heard someone calling her off in the distance. She reluctantly retraced her steps.

  When she regained consciousness, she was being held in the arms of neighbors. Everyone seemed excited. The first thing she recalls was the smell of vinegar that her mother had poured on a hot charcoal stick. For about a month after, she could still smell the vinegar, and it was terrible. When someone is giving birth, the smell of vinegar is very useful. It is said that you must use home-brewed vinegar for it to be effective. (54-159)

  During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), there were a number of unusual happenings on the Manchurian battle front. Russian war prisoners said that Japanese soldiers who wore black uniforms fell down when they were shot, but soldiers wearing white uniforms (ghosts?) didn’t fall no matter how many times they were shot. According to Nitakai Fukumatsu (1873–1937) of Tsuchibuchi village, who served in the Russo-Japanese War and distinguished himself in the Japanese army, there were no Japanese soldiers with white uniforms. (55-153)

  There was a child living in the other side of Tono who was very sick and on the verge of dying. The man who usually took care of the child went off one day to the cemetery at the Jodo sect Buddhist Manpukuji Temple (founded in 1571) to clean up the family grave site. Then the child, not very steady, came to the cemetery.

  The man thought it strange since there was no reason for the child to come to the grave site at that moment. He said, “Hurry up home!” and the child left. But the man was concerned, and on the way back from the temple, he stopped by the child’s home to see how he was. He was told that the child seemed to have taken his last breath a short while ago but was now showing signs of coming back to life. It is said that everyone was quite excited about this. (56-152)

  This is an actual story told by someone who worked in the Tono city hall (established in 1889). A man’s uncle had been very sick and in bed for a long time. One evening at home, the man went into the room with the dirt floor between the living quarters and the horse stable. Because of the importance of horses, the Tono magariya (L-shaped) farmhouse has this distinct design with a stable extension off to one side of the farmhouse.

  From the opening in the stable door, a ball of fire (a soul flame) sailed into the dirt floor room and gently circled the room close to the floor. Thinking it strange, the man chased the ball of fire around with a broom. Finally he was able to contain the ball of fire under a washbasin.

  Soon after, someone came to the farmhouse and said that he had better come because his uncle was on the verge of dying. Hurriedly, he stepped down onto the earth floor, but before he went off, he remembered about the ball of fire and lifted up the washbasin.

  He went to his uncle’s house, which was close by, and found out that his uncle had recovered his breath and seemed to be coming back to life. The uncle moved his body and opened his eyes a little, saying, “I recall going to your house, being chased around by a broom, and then had a washbasin put over my head.” He sighed and said, “It was terrible.” The man was frightened and uncomfortable listening to what his uncle said. (57-151)

  Mr. Kikuchi, an agricultural expert born in Aozasa village, works in the Tsuchibuchi village administrative office. The following happened one summer a few years ago while he was at the Morioka prefectural agriculture experimental station. One day, because it was hot and he didn’t want to be in the house, he and a friend went to the bank of the Kitakami River and sat there chatting. Suddenly he looked up, and floating on the river was a clear scene of the kitchen in his hometown house. There was a distinct image of his elder sister with her back to him hugging her child. Then the phantom (maboroshi) scene faded and disappeared. Shocked by this strange appearance, he sent a letter to his home asking if anything was wrong. Before his letter could have arrived, he received a telegram informing him that his sister’s child had died. (58-161)

  Mr. Tawarada, a friend of Sasaki Kizen, was well educated and became a professor at a Morioka agricultural college. When he was young, whenever he was sick with a fever, he would have extraordinary visions. In senior high school and later, he remembered having these experiences six or seven times. In one of the first ones, something like a large round vapor or gas came toward him quietly. Then it became smaller and smaller and disappeared.

  In a later experience, there was an indescribable glittering road that seemed to go off into the distance. Something with kaya grass woven into it was spread out on the road like a carpet. His mother, who had died when he was ten years old, was there. As they walked the road together, they came to a beautiful river area. There was a bridge with arches crossing the river. It wasn’t made of gold or silver. His mother went through the arches and motioned for him to come with her, but he couldn’t do it. Then he gradually regained consciousness.

  When he was a child, his very first experience like this was when he was running down a hill from the fortress on Mt. Nabekura. He had a bad tumble and was knocked unconscious. After he fell, off in the dist
ance, he saw a beautiful place like a Dragon Palace. Keeping an eye on it, he ran as fast as he could toward it. He came to a bridge like the one mentioned earlier, and his dead mother was on the other side motioning for him to come. But he was called back by family members and regained consciousness. He tells this story quite often. (59-157)

  In the same year that Nitakai Fukumatsu joined the Imperial Guard Regiment (formed in 1874 to protect the Imperial Palace), someone with the first name of Nitaro from the same Tsuchibuchi village also joined. Nitaro was good at standing on his head and did it all the time. One summer, when the six o’clock wake-up bugle call sounded, Nitaro went over to a block of wood and stood upside down on his head as he usually did, but something happened and he fell down. He was unconscious until about three in the afternoon. Nitaro said that when he was upside down on the block of wood, he remembered feeling strange but couldn’t recall anything else.

  He often thought that if he had some free time, he would like to go home. At the moment he fell down, he also thought that he would like to go home and quickly left the military barracks. His mind raced ahead, but his legs wouldn’t move. He hopped two or three steps, then sprang ten or twenty steps. Impatient, he finally decided to fly. He flew about two meters above the ground all the way back to his village.

  He didn’t remember what happened when he was flying, but when he got above the village, it was just about the time when people were coming home from the fields for lunch. He saw his wife and sister-in-law in front of the house, legs extended, washing their feet in the stream. He flew into the house and sat down in his usual seat at the hearth as head of the family. His mother was smoking a long bamboo pipe. She smiled and watched him intently. Even though he had made a special effort to come home, nobody seemed to notice him. He thought it would be better if he returned to the barracks, and he flew out of the house.

  He returned to the Tokyo barracks, and just as he thought he entered the squad room, there was the strong smell of medicine and he opened his eyes. He looked and saw that he was surrounded by a military doctor, nurses, and soldiers from his dormitory. They said, “Are you awake?” and “Pull yourself together!” After about a week, he fully recovered.

  It bothered him that he had made the round-trip to his home in Oshu while he was unconscious. He thought it must have been an out-of-body experience (omaku). He wrote a detailed letter home about the situation at the time, but his letter crossed with one that came from home. The letter from home said, “Around noon one day when your wife and sister-in-law were washing their feet outside, you [Nitaro] in a white uniform [he had no white uniform] came flying back into the house. You sat at your usual place by the hearth and your mother was smoking a bamboo pipe. Then you suddenly disappeared. Seeing this, we thought something must have happened, and so we wrote this letter.” It is said this happened at the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). (60-154)

  The village leader of a certain village in Tono was born in Aozasa village. When he was young, he served as a clerk in the village office. That spring he had to make the semi-annual rounds of the village hamlets with a policeman as part of the enforcement of new sanitary and hygiene regulations. One night, in a dream, he met someone from the village carrying a dead gray horse. The next day, he actually came across people carrying a dead gray horse. Perhaps they were going to bury the horse? The location and setting were exactly as they had been in his dream. This dream was so unusual that every now and then he recalls it. This story was heard directly from him. (61-149)

  3

  Family, Kinship, and Household Deities

  Between life and death, there is the real world. The challenge for human survival in agricultural society is to align individual human behavior with the social needs and functioning of the larger community. The extended family—a network of kinship ties, adoption and marriage, and cooperative work projects—provides the glue for collective survival in a farming community. The tales in this section show how folk culture organizes to deal with these fundamental issues.

  Temple gods often help the peasants in their work. One year, during the rice-planting season, everyone in the caretaker’s family of the Juodo Temple in Ege was sick with a fever and couldn’t work. Villagers noticed that the caretaker’s rice fields were the only ones that were still mud and hadn’t been planted.

  Neighbors were concerned, and one morning they went to take a look at the caretaker’s fields. They were surprised to find that the fields had now been planted. They also found the caretaker’s family still suffering in bed, not capable of doing any field work. Suspicious, they peeked into the Juodo Temple and found several Buddhist statues covered in mud from doing the planting. (62-68)

  In Chinese and Japanese astrology, there are lucky and unlucky ages for men and women. It is best to make arrangements to have a child adopted (sute-go) if it is born during an unlucky year for its parents.

  The farmer’s outhouse is basically a hole in the ground covered with spaced planks to stand on while going to the toilet. In arranging a child’s adoption, you first conceal the child under the planks used to straddle the toilet. Then take the child out to a crossroads and set it down briefly. The arrangement with the person picking up the child has been made in advance. The person is waiting and formally receives the child. Many of these adopted children are given names with the Chinese ideographs for sute in them, meaning “abandoned.” Boys are sometimes named Sute-kichi or Sute-zo. Girls are named O-sute, O-yute, or Yutego. (63-247)

  It used to be that various households (ie) were affiliated with certain maki groups of households. Maki, sometimes referred to as dozoku, is a group of families or households related in a network of main and branch units. Kinship and economic elements were intermixed. Maki grew out of the patriarchal extended family system. There were various maki: Emon-maki, Bei-maki, Suke-maki, Nojo-maki, and so on. People’s names were defined by their maki. Mr. Sasaki’s household was of the “emon” group. There were no family names. Generation after generation, the family was called Zen-emon of Yamaguchi. The families of the maki were Kichi-emon, Saku-emon, Mago-emon, Mago-zaemon, etc. (64-249)

  In Kamikumi, they had one of the two Tono sculptures of the legendary ruler Shotoku Taishi (572–622). Some children had fun pulling the sculpture around using a rope. Someone saw this and stopped it. That evening, Shotoku Taishi appeared in that person’s dream and chastised him for interfering with the children’s joyful play. The person apologized and was forgiven. (65-54)

  Spirits (kami) and Buddhist figures like to play with children and get angry if someone attempts to interfere. There is a dirt mound at the entrance to the Kotobata community, and on the mound there is a meter-tall, beat-up wooden sculpture. Children use the sculpture as a sled when there is snow. Once an old man passing by scolded them for doing that, and that evening he came down with a high fever. It is said that this was because he bothered the children who were having fun playing.

  The forest in Kotobata was destroyed by fire some years back, and the sculpture on a dirt mound was also burned. The sculpture wanted to fly off to its sister in Kyoto but couldn’t because its body was too heavy. Instead, it rolled down into the pond below and was severely damaged. When asked who knew about this, the miko Shinto shrine maiden of Nozaki said everyone knew. (66-55)

  At the Ashura Shrine in Kashiwazaki, there is a three-faced Buddhist statue. It is a large, meter-and-a-half statue. It was taken out of the temple by the neighborhood children and played with at the base of the hill as if it were a boat in water. The grandfather of Senkuro, who was nearby, saw this and scolded the children. He was cursed by Ashura, but after he apologized to the miko Shinto shrine maiden, he was forgiven. (67-52)

  The Goddess of Mercy (Kannon) of Kubo is a statue with a horse head. It was taken out of the temple by the neighborhood children, rolled down a slope, climbed on, and played with as if it were a snow sled. The keeper of the shrine came out and scolded the
children for what they were doing. That evening he fell sick.

  According to the miko shrine maiden, the keeper was sick because the Kannon enjoyed playing with the children, and the groundskeeper’s meddling hurt the deity’s feelings. When the keeper apologized, he finally recovered. The person who told this story was old Nitta Tsurumatsu, who was one of the children from the village at that time. (68-51)

  The Juodo Temple is at Ege in Tono. Children were riding an old battered Buddhist statue as if it were a horse. A neighbor scolded them for treating this Buddhist deity so badly and quickly put the statue back into the temple. That evening the neighbor had a fever and became sick. The deity Juodo appeared in the man’s dream and scolded him, saying that it didn’t appreciate his finding fault when the spirit was having fun playing with the children. The man promised the miko shrine maiden that he would be careful in the future, and he was forgiven. (69-53)

  Zashikiwarashi, or parlor child, is usually a boy spirit about twelve or thirteen years old. It is generally not seen, but it brings good fortune to the house it resides in. Originally there was a “parlor child” who was a former princess in the house of Tazaemon of Isagozawa. When the parlor child left, the family became poor. (70-87)

  In the Murahyo merchant family in Tono, there was a parlor child (okura-bokko or zashikiwarashi) living in the storehouse. If chaff from the rice is scattered on the floor of the storehouse, then later you can see the footprints of where a small child had walked. Later, when the child abandoned the house, the family’s fortunes gradually declined. (71-88)