Ippon-datara

The innkeeper at Yunomine went out at dusk to straighten his guest’s sandals and found that he could not lift them. They were straw, woven from sedge, and they were enormous, and the cords had been worked down under the foot of the pillar so that the whole pair was pinned to the ground. The guest had come down out of the mountains dressed as a warrior, taken the detached wing of the inn for himself, and asked for one thing. Do not look at me while I am sleeping.

He looked. What lay across the eight mats was a boar the size of an elephant, asleep, with a stand of bamboo grass still growing along its back.

The people of Kamikitayama told it that way to an interview survey in 1982, and they tell it as the true beginning of the thing their mountains call the one-leg. Before the inn there was a hunt. A marksman named Iba Hyōgo went up onto Obagamine with a famous dog called Aka, and Aka began barking, and what they found was a boar that would not fall. He shot it and shot it and it kept its feet. In the end he put a ball through its leg to stop it moving, and that, the tellers say, is where all of it starts. The boar ran them both down until Hyōgo fainted on the slope. He came round to Aka barking beside his ear, and saw the animal at last lying in the valley below with the grass still standing on its spine, and from the grass it took its name, Inosasaō. It was too heavy to shift. They went back for it the next morning and it was gone. The place is still called Azuki-yokote, the red-bean slope, below a hill called Tsujidō, and the gravel there runs fine and red like a spill of beans.

So the wounded boar went down the back road in the shape of a samurai to take the waters at Yunomine, and the innkeeper looked, and in the morning it clapped for service and the innkeeper’s wife came out in her husband’s place, because her husband was still on the floor of the main house. What it said to her was plain enough. It was the master of the mountain of Obagamine. Its leg had been shot by Iba Hyōgo and it was lame. It wanted its mountain back, and the two things standing in the way were the dog Aka and Hyōgo’s gun, and would somebody kindly go and buy them. A messenger came down to Amagase with money. The people of Amagase found his manner odd, put questions to him until the whole thing came out, and refused outright: hand over that dog and that gun, they said, and Amagase goes back to waste ground.

What the ghost did then was take up a position. It settled at Tsujidō, which everyone crossing Obagamine has to pass, changed into a one-legged thing, and began eating travellers, and the pass stopped being a pass at all. The monk who ended it was Tansei Shōnin, who had come over the mountains with a project of his own, to make the Ōdai heights into a second Kōya that women could enter, and who was frail and died before he managed it. He asked why the village had gone so quiet, was told, and said he would pray the ghost down. He brought in a Jizō, the hi-giri Jizō, the Jizō of the set term, stood it at Tsujidō, and prayed a limit onto the creature: one day in the year it might come out and eat, and on every other day it must never appear. The day he set was the twentieth of the twelfth month by the old calendar, hate no hatsuka, the twentieth of the finish. Traffic returned, the village recovered, and the statue now stands at the mouth of the Obagamine tunnel.

That is one telling, and it is the best documented. It is not the only thing the name covers. In November 1916 Kume Chōmoku reported in the folklore journal Kyōdo Kenkyū that a creature called ippon-datara was still said to live in the Kumano mountains, that nobody had seen its shape, and that what people had seen was a line of prints left on the snow, each about a shaku across, one foot at a time, never a second foot anywhere. A survey in Nara seventy-odd years later put numbers on the same thing: prints a little over a foot long with roughly eight feet of untouched ground between one and the next. The collections made in Wakayama in the 1980s add movement to it. It does not run so much as fly, clearing a couple of yards at a bound; it comes up out of the river and goes to live in the mountain; one man said he had seen it partway up a pine. When it goes past, the hair lifts on the back of your neck. It calls to people in a loud voice, which is why you do not shout on that mountain. A hunter who shot one went out of his mind afterwards. Meeting it, in most of Wakayama, does not kill you. It makes you ill.

Along the Hatenashi range on the Nara side the accounts are almost gentle. There the ippon-datara is a one-legged giant, male, with eyes like flat dishes, and the record from 1924 and the prefectural history of 1988 both say the same thing about him: he does people no harm. Only on hate no hatsuka is he dangerous, and on that day nobody went over the ridge, and the road ran out of travellers. Some say the range got its name from exactly that, Hatenashi, without end, because at the end of the year the end of the traffic came with it.

The record does not agree with itself.

It disagrees about the creature’s history as much as its temper. At Obamine pass some said it once had two legs and lost one to a strongman who came to kill it. Around Kashiwagi in Kawakami the thing underneath is not a boar at all but an old cat. Elsewhere on the same pass it is a horse with one eye and one ear, the horse Minamoto no Yoshitsune turned loose in the hills, and it will go for ordinary travellers but has never once touched the postman. One Wakayama account makes it the lingering grudge of a criminal executed long ago. And in a Yoshino legend written down for children in the 1970s the one-leg came to Obako-dake as a beautiful woman, and a hunter out of Amano, west of Kōya, emptied his gun at her while she picked the balls out of the air and threw them away. He went and prayed at the Niutsuhime shrine for the loan of one more week of life, and was told to fire two balls at once. He climbed back up, shot until she stopped counting, and sent the last two together, and she never saw the second. She begged for her life. He made her swear off human beings, and she asked to be allowed the ones who crossed on the twentieth, and he thought a single day could hardly matter, and gave it to her.

There is a fourth strand, from the coast. Minakata Kumagusu, writing on Kumano tradition, records a Hitotsu-tatara at Nachi that made a habit of carrying off and eating the temple’s monks. A man called Gyōbu Zaemon went after it and could not hit it, because it fought with a temple bell pulled down over its head, and he wore his quiver down to a single arrow. So he threw his bow away and shouted that he was finished, and the creature shrugged off the bell and sprang, and he killed it with the arrow he had left. It had always gone about, Minakata adds, with a mallet of camellia wood and a three-legged cock. A note collected near Nachi in 1949 calls the same one-eyed, one-legged thing of Ōkumotori-yama either a monster or a bandit, and does not pick.

The reading that makes all of this tidy is the one about the forge, and it deserves naming for what it is. A tatara is the foot-bellows of an old iron furnace, and modern folklorists, Tada Katsumi among them in 1990, read the missing leg and the missing eye straight off the smith’s working life: the leg that treads the bellows wastes away, the eye that watches the fire goes blind, and the creature haunts ground near worked-out mines. On the same reading it is a ruined form of Ame-no-Mahitotsu, the one-eyed god of smiths. It is an elegant argument and it is an argument. Nara Prefecture’s own account of the creature says outright that nobody knows where the name comes from and mentions a rival gloss in which tatara simply means a giant, which is precisely what the 1924 note calls him. The local stories, where they bother to explain the leg at all, blame a bullet, a sword blow, or a hanging, and never a bellows.

What it can do is quickly listed. It crosses ground faster than sight follows, it is strong enough that the mountains were surrendered to it, and it has a voice that carries far enough to make silence a rule for anyone working the slopes. Against that, its limits are unusually clerical. It is held to one calendar date by a term a monk prayed onto a stone statue, it cannot come through a shut door, it can be beaten by a hunter willing to insult it into breaking cover, and in one district it will not go near a man in a postman’s uniform. Two days after the twentieth, the Kii passes are as safe as they ever were, and the Jizō stands at the tunnel mouth with the term still running.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Ippon-datara?

The Ippon-datara is a one-legged yokai of the Kii mountains on the border of Wakayama and Nara Prefectures in Japan, often described as one-eyed as well. In the Kumano records nobody has ever seen its body, and the only evidence is a line of single footprints about a foot wide left in the snow. Its name is also written Ippon-tatara or Hitotsu-tatara, and in Nara it is often called simply Ippon-ashi, the one-leg.

Why does the Ippon-datara have one leg?

The local stories give several answers and do not agree. The Obagamine legend says it was a giant boar shot lame in the leg by the hunter Iba Hyōgo, one account has a strongman cutting a leg off a two-legged creature, and another makes it the grudge of an executed criminal. Modern folklorists have separately argued that the single leg and eye come from the tatara ironworker, who treads the furnace bellows with one foot and watches the fire with one eye, but Nara Prefecture’s own account states that the origin of the name is not actually known.

What is hate no hatsuka?

Hate no hatsuka, the twentieth of the finish, is the twentieth day of the twelfth month of the old lunar calendar, the one day of the year on which the Ippon-datara is free. In the Obagamine legend the monk Tansei Shōnin sealed the creature with a Jizō statue on the condition that it could roam on that single date. Villages in the Kii range kept off the mountains and passes entirely on that day.

Is the Ippon-datara dangerous?

The records disagree, and the disagreement is geographical. Along the Hatenashi range the field accounts say flatly that it does people no harm except on hate no hatsuka, and much of Wakayama holds that meeting it makes you ill rather than kills you, while the Obagamine tradition has it seizing and eating travellers on the pass. One account from Obamine says it attacks ordinary people but never the postman.

What is the connection between the Ippon-datara and the boar Inosasaō?

Inosasaō was a giant boar of Obagamine with bamboo grass growing along its back, shot by the hunter Iba Hyōgo, and its ghost is identified with the Ippon-datara in the Nara tellings. In the version recorded from Kamikitayama villagers in 1982, the wounded boar went to the Yunomine hot spring disguised as a warrior and was exposed when the innkeeper broke its rule against being watched asleep. It then took station on the Obagamine crossing as a one-legged creature until the monk Tansei Shōnin bound it.

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