Tantan-kororin

Also Known As: タンタンコロリン; also Tankororin; closely tied to the Tohoku persimmon spirits known as kaki otoko, “persimmon man”, and kaki no sei, “spirit of the persimmon”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: An old persimmon tree that takes human shape when its fruit is left unpicked, gathering the fallen crop into its sleeves and scattering it across the surrounding country.
Role in Mythos: It is the reproach of an untended tree made visible, and the agent by which persimmon seed travels beyond the garden wall.
Relation to Humans: It frightens people without ever harming them, and the households that meet it are the ones who have stopped harvesting. The cure is not a charm or a prayer but the work itself, since a tree stripped of its fruit produces nothing to walk.

Late in the year the persimmons around Sendai turn the colour of hot coals, and in a good season the branches sag under the weight of them. Most get picked. At one old house on the edge of town, where the couple who owned it had long since lost the knack of ladders, five or six big trees were left to do as they liked. The fruit went soft, split its skin, and dropped into the grass, and by evening the air under the branches was thick and sweet and faintly rotten, the way an orchard smells when nobody is working it.

That was when the neighbours began seeing the monk.

He came out at dusk, tall enough that people looked up at him, robed like a priest and walking at a priest’s unhurried pace. His face was round and flushed a deep orange. His sleeves hung heavy, packed to bursting with ripe persimmons, and as he walked the fruit worked loose and fell, one and then another, knocking on the road and rolling off into the ditches. Nobody spoke to him. They followed at a careful distance, right around the town and back to the old gate, where he crossed the yard, stepped up to the largest tree, and was not there anymore.

The name most likely comes out of that sound. Kororin is the noise a small round thing makes rolling, and it turns up all over the folklore of the northeast attached to objects being rolled rather than to any creature. Yanagita Kunio made exactly that point in his collected work, and it is hard to improve on: the yokai may be named for the sound of its own fruit going down the lane.

The trouble is the paper trail. The Sendai story in the form told above reaches us through Yamada Norio, who put it in a children’s book in the nineteen seventies, and Yamada gave no sources for it. The 2022 Tohoku volume of the Nihon Kaii Yokai Jiten says flatly that his references are unknown and that whether the tradition ever actually existed is open to doubt. This matters because Yamada has form. His 1974 Tohoku Kaidan no Tabi presents itself as the fruit of his own travels and collecting, yet among the hundred and sixty-odd tales sit akashita, uwan, otoroshi and kosamebo, creatures lifted from Edo-period yokai picture books and set down in the northeast as though they had always lived there. A charming source is not the same as a reliable one.

What survives that scrutiny is smaller and considerably stranger. The bare entry in Murakami Kenji’s yokai dictionary keeps only the essentials: an onyudo, an old persimmon tree in altered shape, appearing where the fruit is left to hang. Underneath the name lies a genuinely dense Miyagi tradition of persimmon spirits, one the folklorist Sasaki Tokuo went looking for deliberately and found in quantity, with the same tales cropping up across Iwate and Akita, parallel versions built around pears and apples, and Ainu stories in which the spirits of the ubayuri lily and wild mountain garlic behave in very much the same way.

Those older tales are not decorous. In one, a strange man walks into a mountain temple and finds the young acolyte alone. He grinds his own excrement in a mortar and orders the boy to eat it. The boy refuses, the man’s temper rises, and the boy gives in, and the paste in his mouth is sweet and clean and tastes of perfectly ripe persimmon. He tells the head priest, and the two of them follow the man up into the hills until he vanishes beside an enormous old tree standing in a drift of its own windfall. They gathered every fruit they could carry and took it back with them. The man never came again. A version collected in Kurihara gives it to a maidservant who had been eyeing the fruit in her master’s garden; a red-faced giant appears at her side by night with an equally unappetising instruction, and the taste is again sweet persimmon. In the morning the fruit on the tree had holes gouged out of it the size of a finger.

The confusion that followed is almost as well documented as the creature. In Aomori there is a separate bogey called tankororin, invoked to shut up a sulking child, and the same word shows up in the incantation a fox is supposed to speak when it means to kill someone, and in a tale where a fox rolls a stick smeared with three-year-old miso across a roof, tankororin, to take the life of the person sleeping beneath. When Mizuki Shigeru drew the persimmon yokai he filed it under the Aomori name, and the rest of the yokai bookshelf followed him. There is now a bronze figure on Mizuki Shigeru Road in Sakaiminato, on the far side of the country in Tottori, of a Sendai creature standing under a name borrowed from Aomori.

Its powers are the powers of a tree and nothing more. It cannot curse, cannot possess, cannot pursue. What it can do is move seed, and it does that on a scale no tree manages alone, carrying a whole autumn’s crop through the streets in its sleeves and losing it steadily along the way, so that by the time the sleeves are empty the persimmon has been sown across a district. Nobody is hurt in any of these stories. The worst it inflicts is the discomfort of being watched by something large and quiet at the end of your own road.

Its limits are equally domestic. It only exists in the gap left by fruit nobody wanted, and if the fruit comes down the yokai does not come out. That is the logic of the temple story too: the priest does not exorcise anything, he simply harvests the tree, and the visits stop. The remedy is a ladder and an afternoon.

An unpicked persimmon tree in November tells you something about a household. Somebody is ill, or old, or gone, and the crop is going over in full view of the neighbours. The yokai is what that looks like from the road at dusk, with legs under it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tantan-kororin?

Tantan-kororin is a Japanese yokai from Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture, described as the spirit of an old persimmon tree that takes on human form. It appears as an onyudo, a towering monk-like figure with a round orange face, and shows up where ripe persimmons have been left on the branch instead of being harvested.

What does Tantan-kororin do?

It fills its sleeves with fallen persimmons and walks a circuit of the town at dusk, dropping fruit as it goes. The persimmons roll away and scatter seed over a wide area before the spirit returns to its own tree and disappears. It does not attack anyone.

Is Tantan-kororin dangerous?

No. Tantan-kororin causes no physical harm in any recorded version of the story, and people who encountered it simply kept their distance and watched. The only real consequence is unease, since it is large, silent and unmistakably not human.

How do you get rid of Tantan-kororin?

Pick the fruit. Tantan-kororin only appears where persimmons have been left unharvested, so a tree that has been stripped gives it nothing to carry and no reason to walk. In the related temple tale, a priest ends the hauntings simply by gathering up the fallen persimmons from the tree in the mountains.

Is Tantan-kororin the same as Tankororin?

They are not the same, although the two names are constantly mixed up. Tankororin is a separate figure from Aomori Prefecture, used to frighten sulky children, while Tantan-kororin is the Sendai persimmon spirit. The confusion spread widely after Mizuki Shigeru published the persimmon story under the Aomori name.

How reliable is the story of Tantan-kororin?

The famous version, in which the monk walks through Sendai spilling fruit from his sleeves, comes from a 1970s book by Yamada Norio that gives no sources, and a 2022 reference work on Tohoku yokai treats it as doubtful. The wider tradition of persimmon spirits in Miyagi, Iwate and Akita is much better attested, appearing in Sasaki Kizen’s Kikimimi Soshi of 1931 under the title Kaki Otoko.