Why Did Tono Become the Place Where the Most Folklore Remains in Japan? — Japan Otherworld Map #25

To Tono

I headed to Tono City in Iwate Prefecture.

Tono is a basin located between the inland area of Iwate Prefecture and the Sanriku Coast.

In Tono, it is said that kappa pull horses into rivers, and tengu teach people the way in the mountains. Mountain women comb their hair on rocks. Those who should be dead return through their usual doorways. It seems that what we would now call yokai coexisted with the villagers in Tono. There are many such legends in Tono.

At the end of the Meiji era, Kunio Yanagita turned his attention to the folklore of Tono.

Yanagita later established Japanese folklore studies. Folklore is a discipline that considers people's lives through their customs and beliefs. Yanagita compiled the legends passed down in Tono into about a hundred short pieces and named it "The Legends of Tono".

Although it was published over 100 years ago, Japan was already modernizing at the time. Trains were running, electric lights illuminated the night streets, telephones existed, and X-ray photography was available. In such an era, the existence of a region where many kappa, tengu, and other types of yokai lived was unbelievable even to Kunio Yanagita.

And, in The Legends of Tono, Kunio Yanagita wrote this:

The "people of the plains" are what we would call city dwellers today. Yanagita hoped to tell the stories of Tono to those who had been tainted by modernization and had forgotten about things like yokai, and make them tremble.

I, too, am one of those people of the plains. I packed The Legends of Tono into my outdoor backpack and began my field research in Tono.

The Eve of The Legends of Tono

At the end of the Meiji era, two men sat facing each other at Kunio Yanagita's home in Tokyo.

One was Kizen Sasaki, who had come to Tokyo from Tono. He grew up hearing stories of kappa and tengu from his grandmother and the village elders.

The other, Yanagita, was a bureaucrat dealing with rural policy. Although he was interested in folklore at this point, his title was that of a bureaucrat.

Kizen told Yanagita about the various legends passed down in Tono. Kizen's stories were extremely realistic. Which house did a kappa appear at? Who in which village in Tono saw a mountain woman? Which house did the dead return to? These stories were tied to specific addresses and houses in Tono, and some of the witnesses were still alive at the time.

Kizen visited Yanagita's house many times, and Yanagita wrote down the stories. It was only after the manuscript was almost finished that Yanagita visited Tono for the first time. Yanagita learned of Tono through Kizen's voice before he ever saw the land itself.

The two of them compiled these traditions and recorded them as text. While Yanagita wrote them down, Kizen also drafted and proofread them.

Thus, 'The Legends of Tono' was completed.

Yanagita published this small book at his own expense. Eventually, The Legends of Tono became a masterpiece of folklore studies.

The Kappa Legends of Tono

I arrived in Tono. First, I decided to investigate the kappa legends.

Many kappa legends remain in Tono. One of the places where these legends persist is Kappa-buchi.

The kappa imagined in general has a certain charm. However, the kappa of The Legends of Tono are not such characters. Babies with webbed hands were called that, or ugly children with bright red bodies and large mouths were called kappa. Because of this influence, the kappa of Tono are red.

The kappa of Tono are less like supernatural creatures and almost human, closer to ugly infants. Furthermore, it seems there are cases where children who were victims of 'infanticide' were considered kappa, as if that were an absolution for the act.

In The Legends of Tono, there are stories of people trying to abandon ugly infants, or stories of children born between a kappa and a human being chopped up and disposed of.

What is the true identity of the kappa? There is a theory that infants abandoned due to the reduction of mouths to feed during famines became kappa. It is a theory that sees drowned or abandoned children as the beginning of the kappa legend. There are also deep-rooted urban legends that the plate on the head is the appearance of hair falling out of a drowned body, and the frog-like figure is the appearance of a drowned body that has bloated.

Tono has been hit by poor harvests and famines many times in the past. Also, in Tono, there is the legend of Dendera-no, where the elderly were moved outside the village due to poverty, which is the legend of Ubasuteyama (the mountain where the elderly were abandoned). Famines and the Ubasuteyama legend seem to be materials that reinforce the 'kappa = abandoned child' theory.

I imagined the side of the parents who abandoned their child. The parents, too, had to stand in the fields the next morning. Perhaps they told themselves this in their hearts to convince themselves.

'That was a kappa's child. I returned it to the river.'

The Red-Faced Mountain God

In Tono, there is a giant rock called the Tsuzuki-ishi. This is also a setting for The Legends of Tono.

Long ago, a man nicknamed Tori-gozen met a red-faced man and woman near the Tsuzuki-ishi. When Tori-gozen teased the woman, he was enraged and kicked by the man. Tori-gozen lost consciousness but was discovered by his companions. However, he died three days later. When his family, who did not know the circumstances, consulted a mountain ascetic, he replied, 'You must have been cursed because you disturbed the mountain god while he was playing.'

That is the story (The Legends of Tono, Episode 91).

The red-faced male and female mountain gods appearing in this story are thought to refer to Tengu. In other stories from the Tono Monogatari, Tengu are also described as having red faces. There are several Tengu legends in Tono, and there is even a Tengu Forest where Tengu are said to appear.

I believe there must be some underlying reason for the existence of so many Tengu legends in this area. This is because the Tengu legends of Tono are depicted more as 'humans with red faces living in the mountains' rather than as types of yokai or gods.

I suspect that these red-faced people likely refer to white people. This is because white people can sometimes appear to have reddish faces.

White people in Tono. At first, I thought they might be Christian missionaries. The oldest church building was established two years after the Tono Monogatari was published, but Christian organizations themselves existed even before that. In fact, Kizen Sasaki was a Christian. However, if they were missionaries, they would likely have interacted with the local people as much as possible, and it is hard to imagine them being treated as 'mysterious mountain gods'.

I re-read the Tono Monogatari. The incident where a large man with a red face was seen in Tengu Forest is written as having occurred 20 to 30 years before the publication of the Tono Monogatari, which would be around 1880–1890. In another story, there is an account of a woman, who was 35 or 36 at the time, meeting a mountain god when she was around 12 (Tono Monogatari, Story 102). This corresponds to around 1886–1889.

This period overlaps with the time when Western engineers entered the Kamaishi Mine, which also spans Tono. In the 1870s, mining engineer Benjamin Smith Lyman conducted local surveys, followed by other Western engineers who worked at the mine.

Also, near the Sennin Pass, which is a pass leading to Tono, railway surveying was conducted by foreign engineers.

On the other hand, Tono had legends related to mountain gods and Tengu even before the Western engineers arrived. Therefore, I do not think the Western engineers themselves were the origin of the Tengu, but rather that people who saw white people, who were rare at the time, interpreted them by superimposing them onto the stories of Tengu legends.

To summarize, it looks like this.

1. In Tono, there was originally a concept of 'beings different from ordinary humans,' such as mountain gods, Tengu, and mountain men.

2. In the early Meiji period, engineers, surveyors, and prospectors, including Germans and Americans, entered the mountainous regions of Tono.

3. Villagers in Tono encountered Westerners in the mountains. Unable to communicate and seeing these large, red-faced Westerners, the villagers interpreted them within the existing framework of mountain gods and Tengu.

4. The story of 'being driven away by a large man' became 'being driven away by a Tengu,' and 'blue or gray eyes' became 'eyes that glowed,' which eventually led to it being included in the Tono Monogatari.

That is the flow. In other words, perhaps the Western engineers served as a catalyst for the pre-existing Tengu legends, fleshing out the stories and turning them into realistic folklore.

The Topography That Made Tono What It Is

Why do so many such legends remain in the Tono region?

More than the individual legends themselves, I became curious about 'the reason why Tono became Tono.' Simply being a rural area along the mountains away from urban centers is a weak basis. After all, more than 60% of Japan is forest, and Japan's urban areas are only a very small fraction when viewed as a whole.

So, what is the reason Tono became Tono? I believe one of the answers lies in Tono's geographical conditions.

Tono is located between the inland plains and the Pacific Ocean. Between them lie deep forests and mountains, and within that lies the Tono basin. In a sense, I think Tono has an island-like structure.

Islands tend to retain their own unique cultures. Even in Japan, the Ogasawara Islands and the Amami Islands still retain rare cultures not seen on the mainland.

There is another reason why Tono became Tono. It has been a key transportation hub between the inland plains and the sea since ancient times.

Around Tono in Iwate, Tono is the only large settlement between the sea and the plains. For this reason, despite being a difficult place to access, many people seem to have visited. On market days, it was said to be so bustling that it was called 'a thousand horses and a thousand people'.

Tono is an island-like place where unique culture is easily preserved, while at the same time, it has been a transportation hub where cultures from other regions have entered.

I superimposed the holy land of Jerusalem onto this Tono. The city of Jerusalem in Israel is also a terrain surrounded by mountains and valleys. At the same time, as a city on the Mediterranean coast and a city connecting the Middle East and Africa, it was also a transportation hub. And it is the setting of the Bible, a land where Judaism and Christianity developed.

An island, a transportation hub. I think these are the reasons why Tono became Tono.

The Legends of Tono and Tono 100 Years Later

I stayed in Tono for a little over a week. Every morning, I would put 'The Legends of Tono' in my backpack and walk to as many of the places recorded in the book as I could.

There is a pool where a Kappa appeared. There is a rock where the god of the mountains played. There is the house of a girl who was spirited away, and there is the grave of Kizen, who brought the stories to Tokyo.

So many stories remain within this small basin. Moreover, the stories still have addresses today. Every time I found one, I felt as if I had stepped into the book.

The stage that captivated Kunio Yanagita through the voice of Kizen was certainly here.

About a hundred years have passed since then. On the summit of the mountain where the Tengu once lived, giant wind turbines of a wind power plant look down on the town.

I felt a little lonely when I saw that scenery, but I immediately reconsidered. This is Tono. The Legends of Tono is a snapshot of the history of this land, and it is only one aspect. As an outsider, I had strongly linked the land of Tono with the Legends of Tono, but that is a selfish expectation and interpretation.

Thinking of the Kappa and the Tengu, and just as the atmosphere of Tono began to soak into my body, I finished my stay and returned to Tokyo. As I left Tono, white blades were slowly turning on the mountain ridge.