Yama-waro

Somewhere above the Kuma valley a tree comes down. There is the crack, the long tearing rush through branches, the heavy final thump. The woodcutters look up from their axes at a slope where nothing has fallen. No dust hanging in the light, no raw stump, no undergrowth still shivering. The sound was perfect and the sound was a lie, and in the mountains of Kyushu that particular lie has a culprit.

Terajima Ryōan, a physician in Osaka, set the creature down in 1712 in his great illustrated encyclopedia and gave it the shape most often repeated since. It lives deep in the Kyushu ranges. It stands about as tall as a boy of ten. Its hair is long and coloured somewhere between persimmon and dark indigo, and a fine pelt runs over the rest of it. The trunk is short, the legs are long, it walks upright, and it speaks. Another printing of the same work puts them in Chikuzen and out among the Gotō Islands and hands them a stranger face: a round head, red hair hanging down into the eyes, ears pointed like a dog’s, and one eye set above the nose. It eats crabs, wild yam, and the roots of paper mulberry. The Edo painters sided with the single eye. In the Hyakkai Zukan and on the illustrated sugoroku sheets the yamawarawa appears one-eyed, with arms like snapped branches.

Late in the afternoon it comes down to the work site. A charcoal burner straightens up to find the small hairy thing already at the butt end of a felled cedar, hauling with both arms, matching him stride for stride down the skid track. Nobody is surprised. In the Ashikita district of Kumamoto, when there was more timber than hands, the men would say they should go and ask some of the young fellows of the mountain for help.

The wages were sake and rice balls, and the terms were rigid. What was promised is what must be handed over; substitute something else, however generous, and the creature goes into a cold fury and the misfortune follows. Pay it before the work is finished and it takes the food and runs. That is the whole contract, and it has survived in the record more consistently than any description of the creature’s face.

Ask what it actually is and the answer across western Japan is the same. It is the kappa, gone uphill. At the autumn equinox the river creature climbs into the mountains and becomes a yamawaro; at the spring equinox it comes back down to the water. The calendar varies with the valley. In the Kuma district the swap falls on the first of February, the Tarō Tsuitachi, when the kawan-tarō of the river and the yaman-tarō of the peaks trade places. At Minamata the garappa comes down to the rivers on the first of June. In Wakayama the gaoro of the water goes up to become a kashanbo, and in the Yoshino hills of Nara the kawa-tarō becomes the yama-tarō and back again. Kunio Yanagita, writing on what he called the crossing of the river children, read the whole migration as something older wearing a monster’s face: the god of the fields and the god of the mountain changing places with the seasons, announced, he thought, by the same bird calls that arrive at those turns of the year.

They travel in a body, along fixed routes. An osaki is the ground that runs down off a mountain, and it was held to be a poor place to build; the folk explanation is that a house raised across the traffic will be found with a hole opened in its wall. In Ōmine, in the Aso district, the paths have their own name, toorisuji. The one instruction attached to the crossing is not to watch it. Whoever catches sight of them going back up falls ill.

The characters Terajima chose, 山𤢖, were not Japanese to begin with. They belong to the sansō of the Chinese record: a mountain thing of the far western hills, said in the Shenyijing to eat roasted shrimp and crab, to loathe the bang of bursting bamboo, and to sicken anyone who wrongs it, and described in Ge Hong’s fourth-century Baopuzi as one-legged, its heels turned backwards, a thief of salt and an eater of crabs and frogs, driven off by being addressed with the right name. The Kyushu creature was filed under that heading by a scholar arranging the world into tidy categories. It went on eating crabs regardless, and it kept the single leg only in the loosest tellings.

Its real talent is imitation. Collectors in Kumamoto recorded it producing the noise of falling rock, of wind, of a carrying basket being tipped out, and of dynamite going off in a cutting. It copies human songs too, though the accounts note it never quite manages the words. The great felling sound with no fallen tree is its signature, the same phenomenon that further east would be laid at the door of the tengu, and in Oguni, where nobody tells yamawaro stories at all, it still is. Like the kappa it wrestles. It torments cattle and horses. It lets itself into houses and gets into the bath, and the water is left greasy and foul.

Against all of that the defences are small and domestic. Carpenters and sawyers in Kumamoto held that the creature cannot bear an inked line, so a snapped chalk line across a mountain work site was enough to keep it off. The rest of its limits are its own nature. It cannot break the bargain without also being bound by it, it cannot stay in the mountains past the equinox, and it cannot bear its own name: at Ōmine the word yamawaro was thought to anger it, so people called it seko instead, which is the sort of courtesy you extend to something that lives close by and lifts heavy things.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a yama-waro?

A yama-waro is a mountain yōkai of western Japan, especially Kyushu, described as a hairy creature the size of a ten-year-old child with a single eye above its nose. It helps woodcutters and charcoal burners haul timber in exchange for sake and rice balls, and it is famous for imitating the sound of trees falling where no tree has fallen.

Is the yama-waro the same as a kappa?

In most of western Japan, yes. Folk tradition across Kyushu holds that the kappa leaves the rivers at the autumn equinox, climbs into the mountains, and becomes a yama-waro, returning to the water at the spring equinox. Local calendars differ: in the Kuma district of Kumamoto the exchange happens on the first of February, a day called Tarō Tsuitachi.

How do you keep a yama-waro away?

Carpenters and sawyers in Kumamoto used the inked chalk line of their trade, believing the yama-waro would not come near ground marked with one. Beyond that, people avoided building houses across the routes the creatures use between mountain and river, and avoided watching them travel, since anyone who saw the crossing was said to fall ill.

What happens if you break a promise to a yama-waro?

It turns dangerous. The reward has to match exactly what was agreed, and it has to come after the work is done. Give it something other than what was promised and it flies into a rage and brings misfortune; hand over the food in advance and it simply takes the payment and disappears without working.

Where does the name yama-waro come from?

Yama-waro means “mountain child” in Japanese. The Edo-period encyclopedist Terajima Ryōan also wrote it with the characters 山𤢖, borrowed from the sansō of Chinese tradition, a one-legged mountain spirit described in the Shenyijing and in Ge Hong’s Baopuzi as a stealer of salt and an eater of crabs and frogs.

Related Entries

Kappa, Hyōsube, Enkō, Kawa-zaru, Shibaten, Yama-chichi, Yama-otoko, Yama-uba, Yama-biko, Soraki-gaeshi, Tengu, Hitotsume-kozō, Ippon-datara, Kawa-no-kami, Oyamatsumi