Japanese Folktales NOT for Children

O.K, we saw a book that was aimed at kids, now lets see the opposite.  Cracked.com is a pretty funny site at times (rough on the language) but it does not have a kid filter.  So if you want to see what these pictures have to do with Japanese mythology:

...you'll have to go to http://www.cracked.com/funny-6080-10-bizarre-japanese-mythological-creatures/ to find out.

Japanese Folktales for Children

Japanese Folktales for Children by Ty Hulse is a book I was asked to review.  I'm glad I was, for I enjoyed reading Hulse's work and I'm not very well versed in Japanese legend or mythology (and the mythology plays a large role in this book).

The basics of the book is that it is paperback, 37 pages long, has eight stories, and is illustrated in color.  In size, it is about the size of a magazine.

To start with some of the positives, the book provides eight stories of various lengths.  Included are:

• The Laughing Dumpling
• Crane Feathers
• The Badger and the Snail
• The Yokai
• The Mountain Kami and the Ugly Fish
• The Fox, the Puppy, and the Rat
• Two Frogs
• The Witch of the Mountain

The stories are well written and I enjoyed reading them.  They are especially effective in getting a foundation in Japanese lore without having to pour through a thicker anthology.  There is also a dictionary of terms that could be useful when browsing through.  

The book is illustrated by the author, who is a talented artist.  The art is pencil and watercolor and, while good, does not have a crisp, clean look as is common in many books.  It does have a nice mange-esque quality to it that doesn't go over the top.

The weakness of the book is the title.  The title specifically denotes this book to be for children, and while the author certainly delivers on a story-teller tone, the length of the stories are a little long for younger kids to self read (but would be good to read aloud).  I think the age group for this type of writing is more along the lines of middle school and up.  The word "Children" in the title effectively eliminates that audience.  I will provide this book in my class, but I'm going to have to find a way past the title.  

I also would have liked a more detailed glossary of terms.  The author includes "Kami," "Yokai," and "Juro-Jin" only.  I wish he had given more.  He mentions Oni in the book and Juro-Jin is mentioned as one of the seven lucky deities.  I wish he had mentioned the other six even though they don't make an appearance in the book.  But that is a small point.  

The author clearly has a desire to tell folktales.  It comes through in his writing.  I hope that he is able to grab the attention of a publishing company (the book is currently self published), which would have set the book in a smoother way, cleaned up the illustrations, and would have provided a better title.  I will certainly keep my eyes open for more of Ty Hulse's work.  I have a copy of a book of fairies by him that I am looking forward to reading.

With all this in mind, I give it a total of 3 lightning bolts out of five.

The book can be purchased at Amazon and the publisher's (Zeluna) website.

Don't Even Reply

Don't Even Reply is a web site that shows the e-mail exchange of a practical joker.  He finds people on the internet who are asking for services, selling things, or looking to buy.  He then sees how far he can jerk their chain before they give up responding.

The latest one is called The Glorious Master Translator.  This one brings in Japanese mythology to drive his victim crazy.  I was impressed that he got the myths correct for this.  He could have just put anything down and not many people would have known the difference (at least here in America). When you read his post, you should know these two Japanese myths:

Amanojako - this is a demon that provokes a person's darkest desires and then makes them do wicked things.  There is one story about an amanojaku which has eaten an innocent girl and then goes around wearing her skin so that it can do evil while looking like her.  The e-mail guy has it being an "audio demon".

Benzaiten - this is a Japanese name for a Hindu goddess.  She is goddess of all that flows, such as water, poetry, music, knowledge, words, etc.  She is also one of the Seven Gods of Fortune and a protector goddess.  He has her as a music goddess, which fits.

So, enjoy the Don't Even Reply post and be wary if you post anything on an internet classifieds!

Tails Never Fails

I was recently asked about the mythological significance of multiple tails, specifically in snakes, but also in other animals.  I have written before on multiple heads (at least I thought I had, but now I can't seem to find the post for it), but I can't say I really know much about multiple tails.  So this got me to thinking.  All I could come up with off the top of my head was that Cerberus had three snakes for tails.  Outside of that, I couldn't really say.  My curiosity was piqued and I wanted to at least make an attempt.  So here it goes...

My first look into multiple tailed snakes yielded a few pictures of freaky looking snakes with two tails and I would not dare show my wife as she is already scared of snakes enough without putting that image into her head.  Then I broadened my search to other animals and found several lizards who accidentally grew back an extra tail after a bird made off with one.  Then I came across this cool picture.

I don't care for cats anyway, but that is just freaky.

There is this whole web page devoted to looking like an actual dissertation on breeding polycaudal cats. However, despite many references to this page by other lesser quality bloggers, this page is just an April Fool's joke as indicated by the last reference it gives. It's an interesting read nonetheless.
The Japanese have quite a few stories about magical foxes named kitsune who have multiple tails.  They get one tail for each 100 years they live, the most being 10 tails, belonging to the mother of all kitsune.  These creatures are tricksters who serve the rice god, Inari.  There is a pretty good article comparing them to the Native American coyote trickster figure that you can read here: http://www.ranea.org/watts/writing/kitsune.html

Since my questioner already knew about the kitsune, I don't want to dwell too much on them.  So I continued my search for stories. It seems that the Japanese have cornered the market on multiple-tailed creatures. Japanese vampires can take the form of cats to sneak up on you.  You can tell if a cat is a Japanese vampire, by noticing that it has two tails.

A cat can become a bakeneko, or monster cat by living over ten years, weighing a lot (like Garfield), or growing its tail so long that it splits in two.  As a result, there have been some cases where Japanese people have chopped the tails off of their cats to avoid them becoming a monster.  I don't know any Japanese people personally who have done, but the Internet said it and it couldn't be printed on the Internet if it wasn't true, right?

Now, why would an ordinary household cat wish to turn into a monster?  The power of course.  Once a cat turns into a bakeneko, it can walk on it's hind legs, fly, talk, shoot fireballs, turn corpses into zombies, and shape shift into human form.  What do they use these powers for?  Usually just to torment/eat their human owners.  The sad thing is that this isn't even just some crazy myth.  If a person owns cats and dies of natural causes while at home, the cat will start to eat the corpse of its owner.  And you wonder why I'm not a cat person?

Also in Japan, there is the Isonade, Thunderbeast, and the Orochi.  All creatures with multiple tails. The Isonade is evidently some huge shark like creature with three tails.  The biggest tail is barbed and hooked.  He uses it to sink ships and eat the sailors.  The Thunderbeast is also known as the Raiju.  I only saw one place that mentioned it had multiple tails, but this little demon can take the form of almost any animal and likes to find people sleeping outside so that it can hide in their belly button.  I kid you not.  The last on is the Orochi.  This is an eight headed and eight tailed dragon that was killed by Susanoo, a Shinto storm god, thank goodness.  This guy made standard western culture dragons look pretty wimpy.

Outside of Japan, I was running out of luck finding examples of multi-tailed animals. Like I said, Cerberus has three tails (and even up to 50 as one legend has it).  Echinda, mother of monsters in Greek mythology has a snake tail and I found one web page that claimed she had a snake tail that was split in two, but that was not a thought echoed on most sites.  Egypt also has a story about the Set Animal.  This is an animal sacred to Set (duh) and resembles a wild dog and has a stiff tail that is often forked.  Not really multi-tailed, but I'm running out of possibilities.

Of course, Sonic the Hedgehog's friend, Miles "Tails" Prower lets us know that having two tails is mainly for twirling them like a helicopter and saving your friends when they get into a bind.

So Thomas, I'm afraid I have failed you.  It's at this point that I'm giving up on finding more myths about multiple tailed beasts.  There just isn't that many out there.  I'm calling on all of Bubo's Blog fan base (both of you) to volunteer any information that you have about this.

****************** Post Update

Anj made me aware of a story that I did not know about the hero Bruncvik.  He wandered around doing great deeds and came across a two tailed lion fighting it out with a nine headed dragon.  He helped the lion out and they became BFFs.   He even finds a super cool sword that chops everyone's heads off when he says, "Blade!  Heads off!"  The story is a big Czech legend and the lion has become a part of the national emblem.  Go here to read the whole story.  It's not long and it is worth the read.  http://archiv.radio.cz/history/bruncvik.html
Thanks, Anj!

To the Moon!

Well, while my Alaskan friend Dani Harper might not bee too impressed with this, we've just had 7 inches of snow over here and have had a blast.  When it snows in the south east US, everything shuts down for a while.  So it's been sledding with my boys and getting smacked with snow balls that are a bit too much ice.  Anyway, on with today's post.  I know I've been a bit deliquent in posting this past week, but as I've said, I've been outside.  Kind of hard to post while sledding.

We're going back to our space posts to add something new.  Kaguya is a space probe that has just gone to the moon.  It has been 50 years since any spacecraft has visited the moon (and with the recent news from Obama, the US won't be going back anytime soon), so this trip is a pretty cool thing, in my book.  It took some amazing pictures like this one of an Earth rise:

So why am I talking about this on a mythology blog?  Because Kaguya is, of course, a mythology name.  It is not Greek or Roman (although another name for the project is Selene, a Greek and Roman reference), but rather a Japanese one.  This makes more sense to me since the mission is from Japan.  Kaguya is a princess.  To make matters harder to research, she is also the name of a character on Sailor Moon.  The real Kaguya is the main character in Japan's oldest folktale, "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter," probably written in the 9th century or so.  Here are the basics of the story:

An old man one days notices a light coming from a stalk of bamboo.  Thinking this strange, he takes a closer look and spies a tiny girl.  He and his wife (there names are Okina and Ouna, which are the names of the two satellites that the lunar craft shot up to send it's images back) raise this little girl until she grows to be a very beautiful woman.  She is known as the Shining Princess of Supple Bamboo, but her friends called her Kaguya for short. 

Kaguya has many men call upon her hoping to win her hand, but she does not desire any of them, no matter how hard they try.  Some of them believe that persistence must be the key (hey, it worked for my dad).  The five most persistent of these suitors are assigned impossible tasks to prove their devotion.  We know enough to mythology to know that no task is impossible.  The first guy is to retrieve Buddah's beggin bowl.  Being a smart guy, he figured that it would take to long to travel all the way to India, so he gets a fake.  She doesn't fall for it.

The second guy has to get a branch from a tree from the island of Paradise.  The branch has jewels all over it.  Not learning from suitor number one, he too tries ot fake it.  This time, the deception works and Kaguya has to marry him.  Before the ceremony can take place, however, the jewellers who faked the branch show up and demand payment for their work, ruining his plans.

The other three all try to complete their tasks instead of lying and all three are unable to do so.  Did I say that all impossible tasks are possible?  Hmmm...  Oh yeah, I was thinking of Greek and Roman impossible tasks.  These, of course were Japanese and everyone knows that while you have a better than average chance of performing a Greek impossible task, you don't have squat when it comes to the Japanese impossible task!

Why did Kaguya refuse to marry these guys?  She has a secret.  Her secret is revealed when the emperor himself falls in love with her.  She comes from a race of people who live on the moon and she was punished by having to live on earth for a spell, a spell which is about over.  She has grown to like Okina and Ouna and does want to leave.  They try many things, but not going back to the moon is, well, impossible. 

All is not lost, however.  At least not for Kaguya.  Her people come to get her and seeing her grief, give here a feathered robe to wear.  She write a quick note for the emperor and then puts the robe on, which makes her forget her sadness and hops on their flying chariot and is never seen again. The note told the emperor that she really did like him, but oh well. Her adoptive parents, well they didn't get a robe of feathers to forget their grief.  In the end, they die of sadness.

The Ise Grand Shrine in Japan is actually several shrines (over 100) all dedicated to the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu.  Therse shrines have been around quite a while (since at least 4 BC). 

What will you see whe you get here?  Nothing.  This is a very sacred place and you're not getting in there.  But if you could, the main shrine (Naikū) has a mirror.  Not just any mirror, the Yata no Kagami, the eight handed mirror from Japanese mythology.  Now mirrors are honored for their reflective honesty, but this one more than others.

Many years ago, Amaterasu went into a cave and decided not to come back out.  They used this mirror and the Yasakani no magatama (a special necklace of jade) to lure her out again (she's not the only goddess to do things for a necklace, a Norse goddess slept with ugly dwarves to get one).

Eventually the mirror was given to Amatersu's grandson when he went to Japan.  From there it went to the Imperial family.  Now, the Shrine houses it (the priest of the shrine must come from the Imperial family).

Since the sun is a symbol of birth and rebirth, the shrine itself goes through a birth and rebirth process every twenty years.  They tear it down and rebuild it.  The next time it will get rebuilt is 2013.

Goddess of Small Pox

If you are used to classical mythology, then you are used to goddesses or beauty and wisdom, marriage and childbirth, the moon and the hearth.  However, the rest of the world was a bit more creative in their goddesses.  Take for example the many goddesses of smallpox.  That's right, you heard me, smallpox!

Sitala - a Hindu goddess that possesses people.  During her possession, you'd better feed her cooling food and cool liquids or her heat could really do some damage.  When she left you, you would be stronger than before . . . or dead.

T'ou-Shen Niang Niang - a Chinese goddess.  Her whole family got into the act.  each of her boys had a special part of smallpox that they looked after.  She especially liked to give smallpox to young children - beautiful young children, that is.  Some parents went as far to as to have their children wear paper masks at night while sleeping to keep her away from them.







These weren't the only ones.  You have Hoso-No-Kami of Japan, Sakpata of West Africa or Obaluaiye of a different part of West Africa.  It just amazes me that a disease gets its own goddesss.  The male chauvinist part of me also thinks it is funny that all cultures (that I found anyway) thought of woman when they thought of this horrible disease.  All joking aside, it just goes to show you how devastating this disease could be.  Today we pretty much have the thing licked and can worry about something as mundane as swine flu, but back then must have been a nightmare.

Tengu

Tengu, also known as The Heavenly Dogs. So why the picture of the bird guy?  Mostly due to translation issues between Japanese characters and Chinese characters led to the transforming of cultural ideas into one creature.

Tengus (tengi?) are humanoid monsters, sometimes giant humanoid monsters.  They have a human body, glowing eyes, and the beak (usually red) and wings of a bird.  The females are especially dangerous as they have the full head of an animal and fangs and large ears and noses.  

They are highly skilled in the martial arts and also highly aggressive.  If you are a warrior, go seek one out near Mount Kurama and try to defeat them and absorb their skills.  If you are a traveller, avoid them at all costs since they will make you go insane (I'm not crazy, I'm MAD!).

As the tengu legend grew, they became more tricksters, staring fires, misleading priests,  and even kidnappers of small, well, kids.

Tengu are born from giant eggs and tend to hang around tall trees.  When they take human shape, they tend to have long noses.  It is debatable from the sources I've seen if the tengu have regular bird wings or hummingbird wings.  Tengu can communicate without opening its mouth

Outside of muythology, Tengu have appeared in Batman.  Once Bruce Wayne had lost his role as Batman and took the mask of a tengu until he could reclaim his Batman outfit.  

If you want, you can have a tengu for your computer:

This little tengu plugs into your USB port and makes faces whenever you play music.  Why it is called a tengu, I do not know...