Karasu-tengu

Also Known As: 烏天狗, “crow tengu”; also ko-tengu 小天狗 “lesser tengu” and ao-tengu 青天狗
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A winged, beaked mountain spirit in the dress of a yamabushi ascetic, able to fly, raise wind with a feather fan, throw illusions and disguise itself as a human priest.
Role in Mythos: It is the bird-bodied rank of tengu, the older form of the creature and, after the long-nosed tengu took over in the early modern period, the servant and sparring partner of the great tengu.
Relation to Humans: It carried off monks and children, dropped them in places they could not have walked to, and was blamed for the disappearances the Japanese call kamikakushi. It also taught: the swordsmanship legends of Mount Kurama turn on a boy who came up the mountain with no arrogance in him at all.

In a museum case in Gobo, on the Wakayama coast, stands a figure about thirty-nine centimetres tall on a small wooden rock. It has a beak. For much of the Edo and Meiji periods it travelled the roads of Japan on a mountain ascetic’s back, shut in a lacquered cabinet and opened for anyone who would pay to hear what blessings it could bring, and the people who leaned in to look understood that they were looking at the preserved body of a crow-tengu. In 2007 the prefecture put it through a CT scanner. Inside the clay and paper is the skeleton of a kite, assembled with real care, the bird’s beak pushed out through the modelled face so that it would read correctly at a glance. It is the only surviving tengu mummy of its kind in the country, it holds no cultural property designation, and it is quietly falling apart.

That object is a decent summary of the karasu-tengu itself: a bird of prey dressed as a holy man, and believed in hard enough that the dressing stopped mattering.

The creature stands upright on a man’s frame under a covering of dark feathers that thickens across the back into wings. The hands and feet end in talons. The face closes to a hard hooked beak, and though the name says crow, the plumage in most old paintings belongs to a hawk, a sparrowhawk or a kite rather than to any corvid. Over all this it wears the working clothes of a real profession: the checked robe of the yamabushi who walked the same ridges, the little tokin cap knotted at the forehead, the pom-pommed sash, sometimes the ringed staff a Buddhist monk carries to warn snakes off the path. In one clawed hand there is usually a fan made of feathers, and the fan is the dangerous part.

The name is much younger than the thing it names. The word tengu comes into Japanese from the Chinese tiangou, the celestial dog, and the first appearance is an astronomical one: in the second month of 637 the Nihon Shoki records a great star crossing the sky from east to west with a noise like thunder, and the priest Min, who had studied in China, telling the court that this was no shooting star but the heavenly dog, whose bark sounds like that. The Japanese text glosses the Chinese characters as amatsu-kitsune, heavenly fox, and for a while the tengu bewitched people the way foxes did. Only in the late Heian period did it settle into a bird. The tales of the Konjaku Monogatarishu are full of tengu in the shape of tobi, a word that then covered buzzards, kestrels and the middle-sized raptors generally rather than the black kite it means today. The 1296 picture scrolls known as the Tengu zoshi make the point visually and rudely, drawing the abbots of the great Nara and Kyoto temples with hawks’ beaks growing out of their faces.

The junior rank came first. The long-nosed, red-faced tengu everyone pictures now rose to dominance only in the early modern period, and it was at that point that the older bird-form tengu acquired the label karasu, crow, and slid down into the servant class. The scholarship on this is unambiguous about the direction of travel, and one of the standard studies is titled, flatly, from karasu-tengu to hanataka-tengu.

The hierarchy itself came out of a theological problem. The Genpei Josuiki explains that a proud priest cannot go to hell, being a Buddhist, and cannot go to paradise, having been a bad one, so he falls instead onto the tengu road. Learned men who fall that way become great tengu. Ignorant ones become lesser tengu. The rank was never really about feathers; it was about what the dead man had known while he was alive, and the bird’s body was the shape that spiritual failure took.

They behaved accordingly. The Konjaku tales have them hanging monks upside down in the tops of trees, planting false Buddhas in the branches to make the pious bow to nothing, possessing women, robbing temples and stealing the wits of anyone who chased them too far uphill. A tengu stripped of its powers and its wings was called a kuso-tobi, a dung kite, which tells you how much affection the storytellers had for them.

The gentler face of the legend is at Kurama, north of Kyoto, in a valley of steep cryptomeria where the cold comes up out of the ground. There the young Ushiwakamaru, the boy who became Minamoto no Yoshitsune, was said to have been trained in war by the mountain’s great tengu. In the fifteenth-century Noh play built on the story, a shabby mountain priest turns up at a blossom-viewing party and the monks walk out rather than share the afternoon with him; one child stays, out of plain politeness, and the priest, who is the Great Tengu of Kurama, decides to make him unbeatable. The detail that survives best comes later, when the boy is set to drill with the small tengu and will not begin without his teacher’s leave. That is the karasu-tengu’s actual job in the story. Not the master. The ones he practises against in the dark.

The other face is the vanishing. When somebody went missing in Japan, the standing explanation was kamikakushi, hidden away by a spirit, and the tengu were the usual suspects. Yanagita Kunio gathered cases of it for the Tono tales in 1909, and the pattern is consistent: the missing are often boys, they come back days or years later in places they could not have reached on foot, and they talk about moving through the air at impossible speed. One account from Ehime is almost domestic. A man took his child up Ishizuchi-san and glanced away for a moment, and the child was gone. They searched the mountain, found nothing, gave up and went home, and the child was already there. He said that while he was relieving himself behind the shrine on the summit a big man with a completely black face had come and told him mildly that he should not do that here, and that if he closed his eyes his uncle would see him home. He opened them in his own back garden. The local verdict was the crow-tengu of Ishizuchi.

Their powers are all powers of air and misdirection. They fly. They raise wind with the feather fan, enough to flatten a stand of trees. They throw voices, kindle lights, conjure images, take human shape and walk into a temple wearing it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some of them were promoted outright: the Akiha Gongen of Shizuoka, whose talismans show a crow-tengu standing on the back of a fox, is a fire-quenching deity, and households still take those slips of paper home against house fires.

The limits are equally consistent. A tengu belongs to one mountain and is weak away from it. In the folktales it is regularly outwitted by the sort of person who has nothing but nerve, traded out of its invisibility cloak or its gourd by a liar with a piece of bamboo. Woodsmen bought it off with an ugly little fish called okoze; in Ishikawa people carried mackerel as a charm against being taken. And the pride that made them is the flaw that undoes them, which the language itself records: to say that somebody has turned into a tengu is to say that success has gone to his head.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a karasu-tengu?

A karasu-tengu is the bird-formed rank of tengu in Japanese folklore, with a human body, dark plumage, wings, taloned hands and a hard hooked beak, dressed in the robe and cap of a yamabushi mountain ascetic. It is also called ko-tengu, the lesser tengu, and in the standard hierarchy it serves the great long-nosed tengu as messenger, foot soldier and sparring partner.

What is the difference between a karasu-tengu and a daitengu?

The daitengu is the great tengu, near-human in appearance with a long red nose, and it commands a mountain of its own. The karasu-tengu is the lesser rank, bird-headed and winged, and works in groups. The Genpei Josuiki sets out the reason for the split: proud priests who die learned fall onto the tengu road as great tengu, while the ignorant become lesser ones.

Why is the karasu-tengu called a crow tengu when it looks like a bird of prey?

The name is later than the creature. Medieval tengu were pictured as hawks, kites and other raptors, and only in the Edo period, once the long-nosed tengu had become the popular image, was the older bird form labelled karasu-tengu and pushed into the servant class. The plumage in the older paintings is a raptor’s, not a crow’s.

Did karasu-tengu really teach Minamoto no Yoshitsune to fight?

The legend says the boy Ushiwakamaru was trained on Mount Kurama by the mountain’s great tengu, with the lesser crow-tengu as the opponents he drilled against. It is a story, first fixed in medieval literature and the fifteenth-century Noh play Kurama-tengu, rather than a record of anything that happened, and it is the source of the tengu’s lasting reputation as a martial teacher.

What is the karasu-tengu mummy in Wakayama?

It is an Edo-period figure about thirty-nine centimetres tall, kept in a portable shrine cabinet and carried around Japan by mountain ascetics who displayed it as the body of a crow-tengu. A CT analysis carried out for Wakayama Prefecture in 2007 found it was built from the bones of a kite packed with clay and paper. It is the only surviving example of its kind in the country.