Sunakake-baba

Also Known As: 砂かけ婆, “sand-throwing hag”; also written Sunakake-babaa or Sunakake-babā; called Sunahori-babā, “sand-flinging granny,” in parts of Shiga; from suna, sand, plus a verb of scattering, plus baba, an old woman
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She throws sand down on people from above without ever being seen doing it.
Role in Mythos: She is the local explanation for a specific roadside noise, the clatter of grit falling out of the dark beside a shrine or a lonely wood.
Relation to Humans: She startles travellers rather than killing them, and in most tellings the sand does no lasting harm beyond the fright and the stinging eyes. In one district of Shiga, though, people said those hit by her sand lost the use of their legs or fell ill.

The sound arrives first. A dry rattle in the branches over the path, like rain that has forgotten how to be wet, and then grit against the back of the neck and a hard sting in the corner of one eye. By the time anyone turns, the lane past the shrine is empty and the trees are still. In Nishinomiya, in Hyōgo, people were adamant that the noise came down out of one particular pine, that they heard the sand land all around them, and that no sand ever actually touched them at all.

Sunakake-baba is the old woman who throws it. That is the whole of her. She has no genealogy, no myth cycle, no swordsman who cornered her at a crossroads and lived to describe it. What she has instead is a habit and a set of addresses: the shade beside a shrine, the dark side of a stand of trees, the underside of a torii gate after nightfall. Walk there alone and something above you flings a handful of sand and enjoys the flinch.

The oldest record of her is short enough to give in full. The Osaka physician and folklorist Sawada Shirōsaku collected it in Nara for his book of old Yamato tales: among the ghosts there is one called Sunakake-baba, and when a person passes the shadow of a lonely wood or the shadow of a shrine, she scatters sand down with a clatter to startle them, and no one has ever seen her shape. Yanagita Kunio, the founder of Japanese folklore studies and a friend of Sawada’s, quoted that sentence in his Yōkai Dangi, and the quotation is what carried her out of one Nara district and into the national record.

Other reports came in from Hyōgo, and they are stranger. A 1938 note in the folklore society’s journal gives the Nishinomiya pine, where the sand was audible and never present. Around the Inari shrine in Amagasaki, they said sand came down on anyone who walked under the gate at night, and something similar happened along the Shōge River, which runs through the same city.

No one has ever seen her.

That absence is the most durable thing about her. There is no medieval scroll painting of Sunakake-baba, no ink sketch by one of the Edo yōkai illustrators who drew nearly everything else. One late explanation says she keeps out of sight because she cannot bear how ugly she is, which is a very human reason and almost certainly a later gloss. There is also a persistent suspicion that the baba in her name was never an old woman: a dialect word baba means filth or slops, which would make her a sand-and-muck creature with a grandmother accidentally attached.

The people who actually lived on those roads usually reached for a smaller answer. In both Nishinomiya and Amagasaki the culprit was named as a tanuki. Across Japan the same nuisance runs under animal names: sunamaki-danuki, the sand-scattering tanuki of Tsugaru and Sado, or a creature no bigger than a cat that climbs a tree along the Tone River and shakes its coat out over whoever walks beneath. In Tokushima the sunafurashi throws sand to spoil a traveller’s sense of direction until they wander into the water. On the Okinazaka slope in Niigata a sand-throwing weasel not only pelts people but snuffs out the flame they are carrying, which earned it the blame for the fire-stealing spirit of that road.

One of those animals was pious. An old sand-scattering tanuki was said to live at Myōshō-ji on Sado, the island where Emperor Juntoku had been exiled, and when his daughter Princess Tadako came to visit her father it would go ahead of her and lay sand along the rough track to smooth and purify it. Villagers who saw the sand falling knew what day it was without being told.

Inland, in Shiga, she keeps her human shape. At Kusatsu they spoke of a sunahori-baba squatting in a corner of a bamboo grove and pitching sand at anyone who used the path, and children turned it into a game, tearing off bamboo leaves and flinging them at each other while chanting that the sand-flinging granny lived in there. In the next town the same grove creature was identified as a tenkoro, said to be a cross between a tanuki and a weasel, rustling in the thicket to frighten passers-by. At Yōkaichi in Higashiōmi the sand came from the river, and there it was not funny at all: those it struck were said to lose the use of their legs or to sicken.

The folklorist Toshitarō Yamaguchi noticed that Nara throws sand on purpose. At Hirose Taisha in Kawai, every February the eleventh, worshippers pelt one another with sand in a rain-prayer rite where the grit stands in for rainfall, and elsewhere people have thrown sand at each other while shouting the hag’s name. His suggestion is that the festival and the creature have been holding each other up. Mizuki, more prosaically, thought some of the incidents were birds shedding the dirt caught in their feathers as they flew over.

Her powers are almost nothing, and that is the point. She works only in the narrow band where hearing outruns sight: darkness, an overhanging branch, a lane with a shrine wall on one side. She cannot be caught, because there is nothing there to catch. Against a lantern, a companion, or a plausible weasel, she simply stops existing, and one by one every district that reported her eventually named an animal instead.

She survived anyway. Mizuki Shigeru put her in GeGeGe no Kitarō as a leathery, kimono-wearing granny fighting on the hero’s side, and she became one of the best known yōkai in Japan on the strength of it. The novelist and yōkai scholar Kyōgoku Natsuhiko traced that face to a mask used in the ondeko drum performances of Sado. In Fukusaki, the Hyōgo town where Yanagita was born, she now sits on a public bench with the other local monsters, waiting for tourists, still throwing sand nobody can prove landed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Sunakake-baba?

Sunakake-baba is a yōkai of Japanese folklore whose name means “sand-throwing hag.” She is said to scatter sand down on people walking past shrines or through lonely woods at night, startling them without doing serious harm. She was recorded in Nara and Hyōgo prefectures in the early twentieth century.

What does Sunakake-baba look like?

No traditional source describes her. She appears in no old picture scroll and nobody in the folklore records claims to have seen her, which is stated explicitly in the earliest account. The familiar image of a stooped old woman in a kimono comes from the manga artist Mizuki Shigeru, and Kyōgoku Natsuhiko has traced its face to a mask used in the ondeko performances of Sado island.

Where does the Sunakake-baba legend come from?

The oldest written account was collected in Nara by the physician and folklorist Sawada Shirōsaku, and Yanagita Kunio quoted it in his book Yōkai Dangi, which spread the story nationally. Separate reports came from Hyōgo prefecture, including a pine tree in Nishinomiya and the Inari shrine gate in Amagasaki.

Is Sunakake-baba really an old woman?

Often not. In both Nishinomiya and Amagasaki, locals blamed a tanuki rather than a hag, and similar sand-throwing animals appear across Japan under names such as sunamaki-danuki and sunafurashi. There is also a suggestion that the baba in her name comes from a dialect word for filth rather than from the word for an old woman.

Is Sunakake-baba dangerous?

Mostly she is a fright rather than a threat, and the sand does nothing worse than sting the eyes. The exception is Yōkaichi in Shiga prefecture, where people said anyone struck by the thrown sand might lose the use of their legs or fall ill. In Tokushima the related sunafurashi was blamed for confusing travellers until they stumbled into water.