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.
