Arikura-no-baba, a hero in Japanese mythology

Arikura-no-baba (蟻鞍の婆)

Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: She used arts nobody could account for. The record credits her with two acts: quieting a rumbling mountain, and turning a hot spring cold.
Role in Mythos: A local wonder-worker of the Hida highlands, known from a single case recorded at Takayama in 1935.
Relation to Humans: The source says she lived at Arikura and used strange arts. It records no dealings with her neighbours beyond the two acts themselves.

The entire record of the old woman of Arikura is one article in a local journal. The Kaii-Yōkai Denshō Database at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies holds exactly one case for her in the whole country, catalogue card 1830007: reading Arikuranobaba, locality Takayama in Gifu Prefecture, source an article titled Iwataki no mukashibanashi, part two, in Hidabito volume 3 number 9, published by the Hida Archaeological and Folklore Society on 1 September 1935, pages 24 to 26, with the item itself at pages 24 to 25. The author signed it with a pen name. The Japanese Wikipedia article cites that same piece and nothing else; the English one carries no citation at all.

Three things are recorded about her, and this is all of them. She was an old woman living at Arikura in Takayama who used strange arts. When one side of the mountain began to rumble she prayed to the gods on the seventh night and stood an awl upright at her gateway, and the noise stopped. And finding that a hot spring was doing the young men of the district no good, she put a horse’s hoof into it, and the water turned cold.

There is nothing else. No description of her face or her clothes, no account of where the arts came from, no parentage, no death, no second telling, and no variant from a neighbouring village. She survives as two acts and a place name.

The place name is a small pleasure in itself. Arikura, written with the characters for ant and saddle, is a crease in the mountains near Takayama in the old province of Hida, high, folded, timbered and volcanic country where the rivers come down hard off the slopes and steam rises where the rock runs close to something molten. Her two feats answer precisely the two things that country does to people. That is worth noticing without being turned into a thesis: it is an observation about the setting, not a fact the source supplies.

One detail should be flagged rather than smoothed over, because the two surviving witnesses disagree. The mountain that rumbled is named 小鳥山 in the Nichibunken summary, which reads as Odori or Kotori, and 小烏山 on Japanese Wikipedia, which reads as Kogarasu, the little crow. One of them has swapped the character for bird for the character for crow, and they differ by a single stroke. Hida has a real Odori district, with an Odori river and an Odori pass, which favours the Nichibunken reading. Earlier versions of this page confidently called the mountain Kogarasu. That confidence was not earned, and the question needs the 1935 article itself to settle it.

It is worth saying what she is not. Japanese folklore is full of old women with power and most of them are dangerous: the yamauba waiting in the deep mountains, the hag at the river of the dead who strips the drowned. The woman of Arikura is remembered only for protective acts. That makes her unusual in the company she is normally filed with, though with three sentences of record it would be a mistake to build much on it.

A second root would most likely be found on paper rather than online: the National Diet Library’s holding of that issue of Hidabito, Murakami Kenji’s Yōkai Jiten of 2000 and Nihon Yōkai Daijiten of 2005, or the Takayama city history and the Gifu prefectural folklore collections. Until one of them is opened, this page rests on a single 1935 article and says so.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Arikura-no-baba?

An old woman said to have lived at Arikura, near Takayama in the Hida highlands of Gifu Prefecture, who used arts nobody could explain. She is remembered for two acts: quieting a rumbling mountain, and cooling a hot spring.

How is she recorded?

In one article: Iwataki no mukashibanashi, part two, in the journal Hidabito, volume 3 number 9, 1 September 1935, pages 24 to 25. Japan’s national folklore database holds exactly one case for her, and every later account traces to that piece.

What exactly did she do?

When the mountain rumbled she prayed on the seventh night and stood an awl upright at her gateway, and the noise stopped. When a hot spring was doing the young men no good, she put a horse’s hoof in it and the water turned cold. That is the whole of the record.

Which mountain was it?

The two surviving witnesses disagree by one character. The Nichibunken summary gives Odori-yama; Japanese Wikipedia gives Kogarasu-yama. Hida has a real Odori district, which favours the first, but only the 1935 article can settle it.

Was she a yōkai?

She is filed among Japan’s supernatural beings but reads more like a local wonder-worker: a human woman with unexplained arts, remembered for protecting her district rather than for harming anyone.