Tachikawa Folktales and Legends: A History Walk Through Old Stories

Tachikawa’s folktales and legends: a river of giant-snake blood, a polite escort wolf, foxes in potato fields, a flying Buddha and a medieval slur on the name.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

On the west side of Showa Kinen Park (the Showa Memorial Park) in Tachikawa (立川), western Tokyo, flows a river called the Zanbori. Strictly speaking, it often doesn’t flow at all. Apart from rainy days and just after them, it is not unusual to find nothing but the stones of the riverbed lying dry and white.

There is a story about this river and a giant snake. Around the start of the Meiji era (1868–1912), a man who had gone out to cut grass was seized by a snake that wrapped itself around him. No matter what he did, he could not shake it loose, so he bit through the snake with his teeth. At that, the snake swelled before his eyes into a giant serpent and writhed about, and its blood flowed for three days and three nights. The trail it left, they say, is the Zanbori River.

Tachikawa means a station, department stores, a monorail and a former base town. It looks like the place least connected with old tales and legends. I thought so too. But once I began to look, out came foxes and wolves and giant snakes, and even a Buddha that could fly. Beneath Tachikawa’s ground, stories lie piled in thick layers. Why have such old stories survived on land that wears the face of a new town? And why don’t we know them? I start walking from the river of the giant snake.

Tachikawa does have folktales and legends: 61 “old stories”

Let me begin with numbers.

There is a book called Zoku Tachikawa no Mukashibanashi (More Old Tales of Tachikawa), published by the Tachikawa City Board of Education and distributed at places such as the Tachikawa Museum of History and Folklore. According to the city, it gathers 61 tales selected from more than 180 folktales collected at the city’s request by the Jomin Bunka Kenkyukai (a folklore research group studying the culture of ordinary people), which had been surveying the folktales of the Tama area — the broad suburban belt of Tokyo west of the 23 central wards. It covers everything handed down by word of mouth in Tachikawa, from folktales in the narrow sense, which begin “Long, long ago…”, to gossip and legends. The stories are recorded as far as possible without altering the words, in the tellers’ own tone of voice, with turns of phrase like “…and that was that, you see.”

More than 180 stories. Every time someone from Tachikawa says, “There’s nothing in our town,” at least 180 stories have been listening in silence.

The city’s description also mentions a few of the tales in the collection. “Hanasaka Jijii” (The Old Man Who Made Dead Trees Bloom), in which the withered tree that bursts into flower becomes the cherry trees along the Edo Kaido road. “Shitakiri Suzume” (The Tongue-Cut Sparrow), in which tests are set along the way. And “Kachi-kachi Yama” (Crackling Mountain), complete with babaa-jiru — “granny soup.”

The withered tree of the Old Man Who Made Dead Trees Bloom becomes the cherries on the road to Edo. A folktale told all over Japan, once told in Tachikawa, makes its flowers bloom along a proper Tachikawa road. Folktales grow by slowly absorbing the map of the land where they are told. The “granny soup” in Crackling Mountain is the most terrifying scene in that story, in which a raccoon dog (tanuki) turns the old woman into soup. It is the part children’s picture books tend to leave out — and Tachikawa’s storytellers, it seems, did not. Tachikawa’s folktales are, unexpectedly, merciless.

There is one more, newer record: Shibasaki no Kosho Bungei (Oral Literature of Shibasaki), a research report published by the city’s new history-compilation project. According to the city, under “stories” it gathers about 120 tales heard from people in Fujimi-cho, Shibasaki-cho, Nishiki-cho, Takamatsu-cho and elsewhere, recorded in the local speech exactly as told — from things of doubtful truth such as will-o’-the-wisps, escort wolves and being bewitched by foxes, to memories of abundant nature and frugal farm life, childhood accounts of fleeing through the air raids, and tales of children’s exploits around the era of rapid economic growth. Under “words,” it also records nearly 1,300 dialect expressions handed down by one woman in Fujimi-cho.

Tales of being bewitched by foxes and the boasts of children from the boom years, side by side in the same book. A folktale is not a story about the past; it is a story people pass on by mouth. Seen that way, the bragging of Showa-era children about their mischief is a perfectly respectable Tachikawa folktale.

So what creatures appear in these stories? Let’s go back to the beginning and take a look at the river of the giant snake.

The giant snake of the Zanbori: three days of blood, and a river where only the ditch remains

The source of the giant-snake story can be checked in the “Database of Folkloric Strange Phenomena and Yokai” of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken). According to the database, the story appears in “Folktales of Tama (1): The Plains,” published in a 1982 issue of the Jomin Bunka Kenkyukai’s journal Jomin Bunka Kenkyu, and is recorded as a story from Tachikawa City.

Its summary, written out as it stands, goes like this. Around the start of Meiji, there was a man who went to cut grass and got tangled up with a snake. It would not come loose, so when he bit through the snake with his mouth, it became a giant serpent before his eyes and writhed about there, and the trail where its blood flowed for three days and three nights is the Zanbori River.

The story was written down in 1982 (Showa 57). In the same issue, an escort-wolf story told by the same teller is also preserved as a Tachikawa tale. That wolf story begins, “Back when there were no trains or buses.” Then: the people who told these stories remembered a time when the only way home at night was to walk. Now: in Sunagawa, north of Tachikawa, where the Zanbori flows, there is Musashi-Sunagawa Station on the Seibu Haijima Line, opened in 1983, and the Tama Monorail crosses Tachihi Bridge near where the river runs into the Tama River. Many of the folktales quoted in this article were left behind by word of mouth at the end of the Showa era by a generation that remembered night roads with no trains or buses.

Bit through it with his mouth. What astonishes me most in this story is not the snake but the man. It’s wrapped around him, it won’t come off by hand — so he goes in with his teeth. The nerve of a Meiji-era grass-cutter in Sunagawa was no ordinary nerve. If it had been me, the story would probably have ended while I was still shouting for help.

What kind of river is the Zanbori? According to an encyclopedia entry, it rises at Sayama Pond in Hakonegasaki, Mizuho town, near the western end of the Sayama Hills, flows through Musashimurayama, Tachikawa and Akishima, and joins the Tama River at Shibasaki-cho in Tachikawa. It is thought originally to have gathered the water of small streams in the Sayama Hills and flowed southeast into the Yagawa stream. Its course has been changed again and again since the Edo period (1603–1868): in 1654 (Joo 3) it was connected to the Tamagawa Aqueduct; in the Meiji era it was made to pass under the aqueduct; and in 1963 (Showa 38) it was changed the other way round, so that the aqueduct passes under the Zanbori. That history is told in detail in this series’ piece on the Tamagawa Aqueduct.

After later improvement works, the Zanbori began frequently to suffer segire — “flow breaks,” in which, apart from during and just after rain, almost no flowing water can be seen. The encyclopedia writes that in places it has become, true to its name, “a river where only the ditch remains” — a pun on the characters of Zanbori (残堀), which can be read as “remaining” and “ditch.” As for the cause, it introduces the view that digging the riverbed down to the gravel layer made the water more likely to sink underground.

Here, the story comes together. A river where a giant snake’s blood flowed for three days and three nights. And a river where, today, almost no water flows. The legend says something once flowed here. Science says the water has vanished from here. I think I understand how the people of Tachikawa, looking at the dry riverbed, felt the urge to tell of something that once flowed through it.

The river has one more mystery: its name. The city’s history-compilation newsletter writes that the place name Sunagawa is said to come from the Zanbori having been a “river of sand” (suna-kawa), its sand and stones laid bare. The origin of the name Zanbori, I could not confirm. “The trail of a giant snake’s blood” was, at least for the teller, explanation enough.

Tachikawa folktales and legends by the numbers

• 180 — Tachikawa folktales collected by the Jomin Bunka Kenkyukai. The “town with nothing in it” has been half-listened to at least 180 times.
• 61 — Tales chosen from those for More Old Tales of Tachikawa. The remaining 119 are still waiting for their turn somewhere.
• About 120 — “Stories” in Oral Literature of Shibasaki. Will-o’-the-wisps and the exploits of Showa schoolchildren share the same book.
• 1,300 — Dialect words, in the same book, handed down by one woman in Fujimi-cho. A one-woman dictionary.
• 3 days and 3 nights — How long the giant snake’s blood is said to have flowed in the Zanbori. A river short of water, with a long flow only in the story.
• 20.8 — The diameter, in metres, of the burial mound reconstructed by ground-penetrating radar at Sawa Inari, a shrine mound in Shibasaki-cho that may be an ancient tomb. Under the feet of the fox god, someone from 1,300 years ago may lie.

The fox’s “Oh, it’s deep,” and the night two moons came out

After the giant snake, the fox. Tachikawa’s foxes were forever bewitching people. In Japanese folklore, the fox (kitsune) is a shape-shifter and trickster, and also the messenger of Inari, the deity of rice and harvests.

The same database has collected several Tachikawa fox stories from “Folktales of Tama (2),” published in Jomin Bunka Kenkyu in 1983. Let me lay out a few, as summarized.

At times of celebration, if you prepared osatsu — sweet potatoes and the like — a fox might take them. There is a story of someone walking through a sweet-potato field saying “Oh, it’s deep, oh, it’s deep,” thinking it was a river. If you put spit on your eyelashes, you won’t be fooled.

In another teller’s story, someone hitched up their kimono to their backside and waded into a potato field saying “Oh, it’s deep, oh, it’s deep.” A fox in the woods over the way had bewitched them, it is said.

Picture the scene. At night, in a potato field, a grown adult with the hem of their kimono hitched up to the hips, placing each step with care to cross a river that isn’t there, saying “Oh, it’s deep.” The next morning, the owner of the field, seeing the trampled ridges, probably cursed the fox. Or perhaps there was someone else to blame — but if you blame the fox, nobody gets hurt.

This “deep, deep” pattern is not Tachikawa’s alone. The same database also records a story from Nagara town in Chiba Prefecture, in which the wife of an oil merchant was led astray on a dark mountain road and made to go round and round in a rice paddy saying “Deep, deep” — the work of a fox. In the paddies of the Boso Peninsula and the potato fields of Tachikawa alike, foxes made people wade invisible rivers. A different place means a different crop in the field you wade. In Tachikawa, it was sweet potatoes.

Tachikawa’s fox stories go on. Someone set out with their spouse to make udon noodles and take them to an old woman. On the way there was a river, and a large lantern could be seen. That too, it was decided, must have been a fox’s doing. An old man was leading a horse when two moons came out. As he walked on, they disappeared. Stories like that, people had heard. On a spring night, on the way home, the sky suddenly lit up and then the fire went out. When they went to look, there was nothing there. What the blazing fire was, they never found out. This is recorded as kitsunebi — “fox fire.”

A lantern on the way to deliver udon is very Tachikawa. As this series’ piece on noodles explains, in plateau villages where rice would not grow, udon was a feast. The fox, too, must have had its eye on those noodles.

And one more, the most romantic of them. Coming home from a night out, someone passed through a wood, and a beautiful woman appeared and said, “Let us be together,” so they got together. The child they had ate nothing but aburaage, deep-fried tofu. The ending is remarkably brief. There is no scene where her true form is revealed, no tearful parting. Only that the child ate nothing but fried tofu. And that tells the listener everything — fried tofu being, in Japanese lore, the fox’s favourite food. Tachikawa’s storytellers don’t over-explain.

Read on through the fox stories and you notice one more thing. Every one of them is a story of night roads, fields and rivers. Tachikawa’s nights were that dark, its fields that wide, its roads that lonely. The fox lived in that darkness.

But foxes were not the only things out on Tachikawa’s night roads.

The traveller’s detour quiz

The area of Otemachi in central Tokyo, where the “Masakado-zuka” — the mound said to hold the head of Taira no Masakado, a 10th-century rebel — stands, was once called what?

1. Shibasaki village (B) Sunagawa village (C) Tachikawa village

The answer is on the last page.

Say “gokurosama” to the escort wolf: Tachikawa’s well-mannered beasts

Stories of the okuri-okami, the “escort wolf” that follows people along mountain roads at night, are told widely from the Kanto region to the Kinki region. If you fall, it devours you; but if you behave properly, it will instead guard you all the way home — so goes the encyclopedia’s explanation. Give it some food or one of your straw sandals as thanks, it is also said, and it will go home satisfied.

Tachikawa’s escort wolf is a little different. The Tachikawa story preserved in the database goes like this. Back when there were no trains or buses, a man who had been followed by an escort wolf went into his house without saying gokurosama — “thank you for your trouble.” In the morning, when he opened the door, it was still outside. “You didn’t say gokurosama, did you,” it said. So he said “Gokurosama,” and it went home.

It doesn’t devour him. It doesn’t threaten him. It just waits outside the front door until morning, until it is thanked. And once thanked, it leaves, properly. I love this story to bits. Tachikawa’s wolves were strict about manners. To walk someone home all night and not get a single word of thanks — that is, indeed, rude. I suspect the listeners laughed less at the wolf talking than at the wolf having a perfectly reasonable point.

Many of Tachikawa’s creature stories wear this face of “upbringing.”

If you don’t wash your hands properly, a pheasant will swap hands with you. The pheasant is clever, its wings are big and its claws are strong, so it tears off a child’s hand and swaps it for its own. I know of no other story that teaches the importance of handwashing so forcefully. I’d love to see it adopted in today’s elementary-school handwashing lessons. Though there is a risk of children bursting into tears one after another.

A woman went to the field with her daughter, saw a thick snake, and threw dirt at it. Then, by the snake’s curse, the grandmother’s eyes hurt so much she could not open them. When they offered eggs and sake at the well and apologized, she got better. It was the daughters who threw the dirt and the grandmother who was cursed — the weight of collective family responsibility in the old household seeps through.

When the Oinu-sama — the “Honourable Dog” — was not given an offering lamp, it seems the Oinu-sama came every night to the threshold and put its paw on it. What Oinu-sama refers to cannot be told from this short record alone. But every night it puts its paw on the threshold, pressing for its lamp. Like the escort wolf, when Tachikawa’s beasts are shown bad manners, they come quietly, persistently, to collect.

None of these stories has a malicious monster in it. What appear are creatures who want things done properly. Say thank you. Wash your hands. Don’t throw dirt at living things. Never forget the offering lamp. Tachikawa’s folktales frightened people while teaching them the manners of daily life.

There is only one story that cannot be settled with manners.