Japanese folklore

The tradition & historical record

Japanese folklore encompasses the informally learned folk traditions of Japan and the Japanese people as expressed in its oral traditions, customs, and material culture. In Japanese, the term minkan denshō (民間伝承; "transmissions among the folk") is used to describe folklore. The academic study of folklore is known as minzokugaku (民俗学). Folklorists also employ the term minzoku shiryō (民俗資料) or "folklore material" refer to the objects and arts they study. ¹

Men dressed as Namahage, wearing ogre-like masks and traditional straw capes (mino) make rounds of homes, in an annual ritual of the Oga Peninsula area of the Northeast region. These ogre-men masquerade as kami looking to instill fear in the children who are lazily idling around the fire. Those event is a particularly colorful example of folk practice still kept alive. A parallel custom is the secretive Akamata-Kuromata ritual of the Yaeyama Islands, Okinawa which does not allow itself to be photographed. Many, though increasingly fewer households maintain a kamidana or a small Shinto altar shelf. The Shinto version of the kitchen god is the Kamado kami (かまど神), and the syncretic Buddhist version is the Kōjin, a deity of the hearth enshrined in the kitchen. Japanese popular cults or kō (講) are sometimes devoted to particular deities and buddhas, e.g. the angry Fudō Myōō or the healer Yakushi Nyorai. But many cults are centered around paying respects to sacred sites such as the Ise Shrine (Ise-kō or okage-mairi) or Mount Fuji (Fuji-kō, by which many local mock-Fuji shrines have been erected). Pilgrimage to these meccas declined after the Edo period. But recently, the Shikoku Pilgrimage of the eighty-eight temple sites (commonly known as ohenro-san) has become fashionable. Popular media and cottage industries now extoll a number of shrines and sacred natural sites as power spots. There is a long list of practices performed to ward off evil (yakuyoke (厄除け)) or expel evil (yakubarai, oharai (yaku-barai)), e.g. sounding the drums. In some areas it is common to place a small mound of salt outside the house (morijio). Salt scattering is generally considered purifying (it is employed in sumo tournaments, to give a well-known example). ¹

As in most developed nations, it is increasingly difficult to find living storytellers of oral tradition. But there is a wealth of folktales collected through the ages. The name mukashi-banashi (tales of "long ago" or from "bygone times") has been applied to the common folktale, since they typically open with the formula "Mukashi..." (akin to "Once upon a time..."). They also close with some set phrase like "dotto harai" (a variant form being Dondo Hare). These tales had been told in their local dialects, which may be difficult to understand to outsiders, both because of intonation and pronunciation differences, conjugations, and vocabulary. Many folktales collected from the field are actually "translations" into standard Japanese (or more like adaptations, merging several collected versions). ¹

Classic folktales such as Momotarō, which most Japanese today are familiarized through pictured children's storybooks, manga, or other popularizations, can be traced to picture-books printed in the Edo period, though their prototypical stories may go back much further. The versions retold by children's story author Sazanami Iwaya (1870–1933; often considered the Perrault of Japan) had a strong hand in establishing the forms usually known today. ¹

Two creatures are particularly known for their abilities to transform into humans or other beings and objects, the kitsune (fox) and tanuki (the Japanese raccoon dog; pictured). They occur frequently in folktales of humorous nature, such as the tanuki, Bunbuku Chagama, who could shapeshift into a teapot. Marriages between humans and non-humans (irui konin tan (異類婚姻譚, "tales of heterotype marriages")) comprise a major category or motif in Japanese folklore. Japanese heterotype examples such as the crane story describes a sustained period of married life between the interspecies couple, in contrast to Western examples like the Frog Prince or the Leda myth where the supernatural encounter is brief. An unusual pairing occurs in the story of the Hamaguri nyōbo (蛤女房, "clam wife"), which exists in both a politer written version (otogi-zōshi) and in a more rustic and vulgar oral tale. The gender is reversed in the tale of Tanishi chōja where a bride is wedded to a tiny tanishi (river snail). ¹

A number of folktales were adapted for stage performance by playwright Junji Kinoshita, notably Yūzuru (Twilight Crane, 1949), based on the folktale Tsuru no Ongaeshi or "a crane who repaid its gratitude." ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Japanese folklore”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Japanese folklore is folk traditions of Japan, expressed in oral traditions, customs, and material culture, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 4 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²