Kesaran-pasaran

In the spring of 1821, in the village of Ishihara near Kawagoe, a man named Masuda Hanzo dreamed about a horse. The animal told him its history: it had once been a lord’s mount, had come down in the world to hauling for farmers, and had died and been left in a field where nobody had troubled to bury it. Bury me, it said, and in return take the ball that is inside my body. Hanzo went out to the place the dream had shown him. The carcass was there in the dry grass, and so was the ball. Takizawa Bakin wrote the incident down a few years later, and gave the object its two names. It was a sato. It was also a heisarabasara. You used one of them to call down rain.

That is the oldest thing standing behind the fluffy white creature that Japanese children of the 1970s kept in shoeboxes, and the distance between the two is the whole story.

The modern kesaran-pasaran is a ball of white down, thumb-sized, weightless, the sort of thing that drifts across a garden on a still warm afternoon and stops in mid-air as though it had noticed something. Catch it and you have caught your luck. What you do next is prescribed with a precision that folklore rarely bothers with. It goes into a small wooden or lacquered box. You sprinkle it with oshiroi, the white face powder of the old cosmetic trade, because that is what it eats. It will grow on the powder, and in time it will produce young, and the household’s fortune will improve. Bore holes in the lid, because a sealed box suffocates it. Say nothing to anyone. Families in the northeast are supposed to have passed them down for generations in exactly this way, quietly, on the shelf where the household gods are kept, and shrines and old houses in Yamagata and Miyagi have kept them as treasures.

Here is where the honest account has to be made. Scholarship on the subject, gathered in the standard Japanese encyclopedia of the strange, is blunt: the beings people now file under this name are basically three different objects. There is a hair ball of animal origin, tensarabasara, in one explanation the fur of a rabbit killed by a predator, left on the snow and dried into a rolled white lump. There is a hard sphere of mineral origin, heisarabasara, which is a bezoar, a stone that forms in the stomach of a horse or an ox. And there is the plant one, the true kesaran-pasaran of the fluff-catching schoolchild, which is a pappus, the parachute of down that carries the seed of a thistle or another composite flower on the wind. Similar shapes, similar names, similar reputations. In the Showa period the three were quietly merged into one, and the merged creature travelled by newspaper and television until everyone in Japan knew what a kesaran-pasaran was.

It is a seed, or a stone, or what is left of a rabbit.

Knowing that does not dispose of it, because a good deal of what is bolted onto the modern creature is genuinely old, and some of it is documented in the field. The mineral heisarabasara was already a curiosity in the Edo period, imported along with its name. The word comes from the Portuguese pedra bezoar, the bezoar stone that European and Persian medicine prized as an antidote, and Japanese sources treat it as a rare and valuable thing to be found inside a large animal, useful against poison and, in Bakin’s account, useful for calling rain out of a dry sky. The horse in the dream was not offering a pet. It was offering a medicine.

The face powder is old too, and it has strange company. A folklore survey of the old village of Koizumi in Miyagi, published in 1982, recorded a piece of local gossip about a house in nearby Utatsu that had a zashiki-oboko living in it, one of the child spirits who bring a family prosperity and then, one day, leave. The house spirit had a name. It was called Keseran-opasaran, and it ate white face powder. The two beliefs, the luck-bringing child in the back room and the luck-bringing fluffball in the box, were already leaning on each other in the Tohoku countryside before the boom ever started.

The boom is a matter of record. Through the 1970s the creature went from regional oddity to national craze, with children combing gardens and roadsides for drifting white fluff and adults writing to newspapers about the things their grandmothers had kept, and Japanese folklorists have since studied the decade itself as a case of a name creating a creature. One woman published a diary of her own specimen in 1980. She put it in a paper box, she wrote, and hunted out an old tin of face powder she had not used in ten years, because this peculiar living thing was supposed to grow on the stuff.

What it can do is short and specific. It brings good fortune to the household that holds it. It multiplies if it is fed and left alone. In its hard old form it draws rain. What it cannot do is survive close attention. It must have air, so the box needs holes. It must have powder, so it needs an owner willing to keep buying an obsolete cosmetic. It must be kept secret, since luck spoken about is luck spent, and a family that boasts about the box has already lost the advantage. And it will not hold up to a magnifying glass, where the sacred white fluff resolves into the fine hairs of a seed head, still doing what seed heads do, still going wherever the warm air takes it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kesaran-pasaran?

A kesaran-pasaran is a mysterious white ball of fluff or fur in Japanese folklore that is said to bring good fortune to whoever keeps it. It is stored in a small box, fed white face powder, and believed to grow and multiply. The belief is strongest in the Tohoku region of northern Japan, especially Yamagata and Miyagi, where old families and shrines have kept them as treasures.

What does a kesaran-pasaran eat?

White face powder, the traditional cosmetic called oshiroi. Owners keep the creature in a small wooden or lacquered box, sprinkle powder over it, and expect it to grow and produce young. The lid must have air holes, because a kesaran-pasaran shut in a sealed box is said to suffocate.

Is a kesaran-pasaran real?

The objects are real, but they are not one creature. Japanese scholarship separates three things that share the name: an animal hair ball, sometimes explained as rabbit fur left by a predator and dried on snow, a mineral sphere which is a bezoar stone from the stomach of a horse or ox, and a plant pappus, the down that carries the seeds of thistles and similar flowers on the wind. These three were merged into a single creature during the twentieth century and spread through the mass media.

Where does the name kesaran-pasaran come from?

The related name heisarabasara comes from the Portuguese pedra bezoar, the bezoar stone, and entered Japanese in the early modern period along with the object itself. Under that name the ball appears in Edo-period writing as a rare stone found inside a horse or a cow, valued as an antidote and used in rainmaking. The playful doubled form kesaran-pasaran attached itself later to the soft white fluff that everyone now pictures.

Does a kesaran-pasaran bring good luck?

That is its entire purpose. Tradition says the owner of one enjoys good fortune, and that the creature will breed if it is properly fed and left in peace. It also says the owner should tell nobody, which is why some families are supposed to have passed one down for generations without the neighbours ever knowing.

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