Yama-otoko

The pass called Fuefuki-tōge had been the short way over to the coast for as long as anyone could remember, a thread of packed earth running from the Tōno basin toward Tanohama and Kirikiri. Then people began meeting someone on it. Not a bandit, not a bear. Something tall, standing where the trees thinned, watching the traffic go past. Crossings grew fewer. Eventually the district gave up on the pass altogether and opened a new road over Sakaige-tōge, more than seven kilometres longer, and let the old track go back to grass.

What they were avoiding was a yamaotoko. The word means nothing more elaborate than “mountain man,” and that plainness is part of the problem, because the stories collected under it come from mountain districts scattered the length of Honshu and do not describe the same creature twice. Yanagita Kunio, sifting the records in 1913, noticed that encounter accounts cluster in only a dozen or so upland areas and that nobody reports one from a small island. The oldest written notices he could find came out of Suruga and Tosa, two provinces where sightings kept turning up into the Meiji period.

The physical descriptions are where the disagreement gets loud. The Ehon Hyaku Monogatari of 1841 puts him in the deep hills behind Akiha in Enshū, in what is now Hamamatsu, and gives his height as two jō, which is roughly six metres. The Hokuetsu Kidan of 1812 has him at six shaku, about the height of a tall man, with red hair and grey skin and otherwise nothing to distinguish him from a person, except that he produced only a low sound like a cow. On Akakura-dake in Aomori he was the ōhito, taller than a sumo wrestler. At Tōno he is not hairy, not huge, not obviously anything: ordinary clothing, ordinary face, unusual height, and something faintly off about the eyes.

The Echigo version turned up at the fire. Men working the winter hills near Takada, in the country around present-day Jōetsu, kept an irori burning in the hut at night, and he would come in out of the dark and sit down with them to warm himself. He never spoke, though he clearly followed what was said. He wore nothing but leaves knotted at the waist, and one of the men suggested he try animal skin instead. The next night he arrived with a deer he had caught, and they taught him how to work the hide.

That is the shape most of the friendly stories take. He does an enormous amount of labour for almost nothing: carrying loads down to the edge of the village, stripping bark, clearing a path. Around northern Akita the going rate was tobacco. In Aomori it was fish. In Enshū it was sake, and only sake, since he would not accept coin. In Sagami, at Hakone, the essayist Tsumura Sōan recorded a yamaotoko who caught fish up in the mountains and brought them down to market days to trade for rice, moving so fast on the return that no one could follow him home, and the lord of Odawara issued instructions that nobody was to shoot at him, on the reasonable grounds that he had never hurt anyone.

The best of these stories concerns a man from Enshū called Matazō. He was on his way to fetch a doctor for a sick person, missed his footing, went down into a ravine and hurt his leg badly enough that he could not stand. A yamaotoko came down to him, got him onto his back, carried him all the way to the doctor’s door, and was gone before anyone could thank him. Matazō went back to the ravine afterwards with sake. Two of them came out to meet him, drank it with obvious pleasure, and left.

Set against that is Tale Thirty-One of the Tōno collection, which runs to a single sentence: every year in the Tōno district, many children, especially girls, are carried off. The fullest version concerns a farmer’s daughter from Kamigō who went up to gather chestnuts and did not return. Her family held a funeral over her pillow. Two or three years later a hunter working the lower slopes of Mt Goyō found her living in a cave behind a screen of boulders. He asked her what the man looked like. She said he looked like anyone else, only very tall, and that the colour of his eyes was somewhat threatening. She had borne several children. He said the children did not resemble him and were not his, and they had all been taken away somewhere. Every so often, between market days, four or five others exactly like him would gather, talk about something, and go.

There is a story from Wano in Tochinai village that catches the whole ambiguity in one incident. A hunter named Sasaki Kahei, out deep in the mountains as a young man, saw a very tall woman sitting on a rock combing black hair longer than she was, her face extremely white. He shot her. Then he cut off a lock as evidence, coiled it, tucked it into his robe, and started home. Sleep hit him so hard on the way that he had to lie down in the shade, and while he was still half under, a man, also very tall, reached into his robe, took the coil of hair and ran. Kahei woke as it happened. He said afterwards it must have been a yamaotoko.

Nobody has ever agreed on where such a thing comes from. The Ehon Hyaku Monogatari says he is the mountain’s own vital force taking a human shape, which at least has the merit of not pretending to be zoology. The yōkai scholar Tada Katsumi reads the figure as a composite assembled from several Chinese mountain spirits catalogued in the Wakan Sansai Zue, the yamawaro and the kakuen and the sansei and the mōryō, sharing out their traits until a single silhouette emerged. Yanagita took an entirely different line and argued that the yamabito were the surviving descendants of an earlier population pushed into the high country by the ancestors of the modern Japanese. That reading is his own, dating from 1913 and softened by 1917, and it belongs to Meiji and Taishō anthropology rather than to anything the storytellers themselves claimed. Minakata Kumagusu demolished it to his face in a letter of December 1916, describing how he and an assistant had once come charging down a Wakayama hillside half naked, waving sticks and butterfly nets, and sent a group of village women running in terror from what they took for stone gods turned into monstrous men. That, Minakata wrote, was your yamabito. The folklorist Murakami Kenji has since noted how often the mountain man of local report turns out to have been a person who lost his mind and stayed up there. No one ever produced a body.

His abilities follow from what he is: something built for the terrain that defeats everyone else. He carries a grown man up out of a ravine and hauls what two porters would struggle with. He goes up a slope where there is no path, quickly enough that following him is pointless, and the Hakone accounts describe him crossing ground that has no footholds at all. He endures winter nights naked at altitude. He understands human speech perfectly while producing none of it, and he picks up a gesture the first time he is shown it, which is how the bargaining gets done.

What undoes him is appetite and attention. He can be bought for a rice ball, a cup of sake, a pinch of tobacco, and once bought he keeps coming back, which makes him findable. He can be shot at, as Kahei demonstrated, and he can be caught: the Tōbu Danso records a wild, fingerless, frog-eating man who appeared in the garden of Sunpu castle in 1609 and was released only because Tokugawa Ieyasu forbade killing him, and the Toshū Engakushi has a huge man called Yama-miko brought down from the deep mountains of Toyonaga to Kōchi in the spring of 1642, fed, looked at for two or three days, and sent back. Most of all he cannot survive being seen by the wrong person. At Onizawa near Hirosaki an ōhito befriended a farmer named Yajūrō, worked his fields and cut irrigation channels that the whole village benefited from, and stopped coming the day Yajūrō’s wife laid eyes on him. Yajūrō went up into the mountains after him and became one himself. The shrine that stands there was built by the villagers out of gratitude, and the thing kept inside it as the god-body is an enormous hoe.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Yama-otoko?

The Yama-otoko is a giant or oversized wild man of Japanese mountain folklore, recorded in Edo-period essay collections and in Yanagita Kunio’s early twentieth-century fieldwork. He is best known for two contradictory habits: doing heavy labour for woodcutters in exchange for sake or tobacco, and carrying off women and children who go into the mountains alone.

How big is the Yama-otoko?

There is no single answer, because the regional accounts disagree. The Ehon Hyaku Monogatari of 1841 makes the Enshū yama-otoko about two jō tall, roughly six metres, while the Hokuetsu Kidan of 1812 describes an Echigo one at six shaku, around 180 centimetres, with red hair and grey skin. The Tōno versions are simply very tall men with oddly coloured eyes.

Does the Yama-otoko help people or hurt them?

Both, depending on the district. In Enshū, Echigo, Akita and Aomori he hauls loads, strips bark and works fields for small payments of sake, tobacco, fish or cooked rice, and refuses money outright. In the Tōno stories collected by Yanagita Kunio he abducts women and children, and around Akakura-dake in Aomori simply seeing him was believed to make a person ill.

Can the Yama-otoko talk?

Generally not. Most accounts have him producing no words at all, with the Echigo version making only a low sound like a cow, though he understands human speech without difficulty and learns gestures almost immediately. A few regional traditions do credit him with speech, which is one of the many points on which the sources fail to line up.

What did Yanagita Kunio think the Yama-otoko was?

Yanagita argued in 1913 that the yamabito were the surviving descendants of an earlier people driven into the mountains by the ancestors of the modern Japanese, an interpretation he softened by 1917. This was his own modern theory rather than a traditional belief, and Minakata Kumagusu rejected it in a letter of December 1916, suggesting that sightings came from ordinary people mistaken for monsters.

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