Hidetake and his wife lie on brand new tatami mats, wearing thick quilted robes. On the shelf are celadon porcelain bowls, lacquerware, and a tea set with tenmoku cups. These were all precious items from China, usually displayed in the imperial palace or the shogun’s castle.

A portable heater keeps them all nice and warm. Behind them hang fancy clothes, and in front of them, a servant.

The place looks fancy, expensive, and as tasteless as a bad case of COVID. Even the couple looks rough: him with the big ugly nose, her with the messy hair. The whole scene is supposed to be an example of a poor person who suddenly ran into wealth and immediately went out to buy spinning rims, splurge on gaudy jewelry, and fill his previously simple, white house with gold.

Hidetake says, “Think back to when we had only a single garment to cover us. Now we wear priceless garments. We’re covered in wealth. It’s thanks to your suggestion and encouragement that we have reached this level. I should sing the praises of womanly virtue. What do you think?”

His wife says, “What fortune laden farts you have produced!” Not a direct response to what he said, but certainly a response.

The couple is just rolling in dough, or rice. The servant says, “I must measure and store this rice quickly, but there is so much of it!”

Did you think that was their only servant? Here, we see two women pound rice, another sifts grain, and a delivery man delivering things.

One of the women pounding rice complains, “I’ve been pounding so hard my arm is getting numb.” The one sifting grain laments, “My arms ache from working the whole day on this rice.” The delivery guy says, “I’ve brought this gift from the lord’s house. Its quality is great.”

A messenger at the bottom left arrives, saying, “Is the master of incense in? I bring tidings from the nobleman who requests your services. If you continue to perform well, more rewards await you.”

Now we’re introduced to some exciting new characters, who look as pleasant as a dead body. They’re Hidetake’s neighbors.

The wife asks, “How did that Master of Incense come by his talent and is always in demand? I can’t figure it out. But for you, a man who does everything for others, no good thing comes. Why don’t you try being his disciple, learn his skill? I really envy him.”

The man’s name is Fukutomi. “Yes, yes, I agree. I doubt he would surrender his secret that easily, but I’ll give it a try.”

And so Fukutomi kneels before Hidetake. “For many years I’ve intended to pay my respects to you. Today I come for more than just an exchange of pleasantries. I want to become your student so that I may learn your marvelous skills. Please, no matter the cost, I ask that you do what you can. Please teach me.”

Thinking that he must make the offer enticing, Fukutomi appeals to Hidetake’s vanity. “I do this because I am worried that your talent could be lost to future generations. I can carry it on for you.”

Hidetake says, “Fine, if you desire. Learn well and maintain these skills. Don’t let me down. Don’t reveal to anyone what I will teach you, or your mastery will never be complete. You must always keep it secret. When you perform, it must be exactly according to my instructions. Remember, if you really want to master this skill, you cannot tell anyone.”

Will Hidetake really tell him the secret? Hidetake says, “Go to the house of a nobleman and recite this magic phrase: ‘koko te io pichi pichi.’”

What does the phrase mean? Nothing, actually. Seems to be some onomatopoetic words that evoke a sense of bouncy, exciting readiness.

Hidetake gives more sage advice. “To whomever greets you, tell him it is ridiculous that the unskilled Hidetake has received so much praise for his pathetic performance. When they bring you before their master to perform, tell them you need a cup of sake and recite some prayers. As you drink the sake, secretly swallow ten morning glory seeds.” This sounds like great advice so far, if you know what morning glory seeds do.

“Wait for a bit and you will soon feel an ache in your stomach. Run immediately before the lord. Hold your breath tight and contract your anus. Then the most beautiful sounds will emerge from you, more beautiful than I have ever been able to release.”

An ecstatic Fukutomi returns home, in disbelief that someone with a monopoly on the sphincter like Hidetake would present his secret wide open for another to snatch so easily.

And so, after giving it a lot of thought and zero practice, Fukutomi visits the lord’s home. The servant greets him. Fukutomi declares, “I am Fukutomi, a public servant from Shichijō. I’ve heard that your master loved the performance of the man named Hidetake. He is my pupil. It was I who taught him the secrets, but he only acquired a small part of my skills. You have yet to see the best parts. If you will allow me to demonstrate, the noble people will surely love me.”

Bold claims, Fukutomi. The servant runs off to inform his master.

Fukutomi says “Koko te io pichi pichi” perfectly.

Before the lord (in orange) and the assembled nobles, Fukutomi performs the most important act of his life. The scene is a mirror of Part 1 of the story where Hidetake gave his performance, a funhouse mirror.

Fukutomi bends over, his non-magical anus making a huge mess in his pants due to the morning glory seeds. Everyone laughs at the poor guy like they’ve never seen a greedy man learn his lesson before.

One woman on the right says, “What a horrible thing! Throw him out, my lord!” Another woman, at the top, says, “He is only a sorry old man. Just get him quickly out of my sight.”

The lord turns out to be pretty vicious. “Beat this fool and drive him out. Even his face is hateful and disgusting. Stomp on his hips until he is within an inch of dying. He’s filthy! Beat him until he learns his lesson.” An attendant happily bashes him with a cane.

The guy next to the lord holds his nose. “How shocking that he would dare come before our master and act like this. What a shameless fellow. Beat him to the point where he would never again think of doing such an outrageous thing.”

Fukutomi must be illiterate because he can’t even read the room. Instead of running out of there, Fukutomi says, “Please help! Please stop and let me try a bit more. I have so much more talent to show you.”

One attendant can’t believe what he’s hearing. “What do you mean? We’ll pound you until you get this lesson straight!”

Fukutomi walks home, reeking, bloody, and defeated. Seeing him in this state really affects the townsfolk, and they come over to help mock and laugh at him. The children say, “Look at that! The pooping and farting old man has been beaten.”

At the food shop, someone says, “Look! It’s Fukutomi of Shichijō. His good fortune was star-crossed. He was beaten.”

The man on the left says, “Oh no! It is indeed Fukutomi of Shichijō. How could such a fate have befallen him?”

Fukutomi’s wife sees him in the distance. She gets super excited and demonstrates that you shouldn’t count your chickens before they come home, or something. “My husband has been rewarded with beautiful colored clothes. I’ll burn all his old clothes, then. Oh, I am so happy!”

She actually burns all his clothes, the madwoman. “Burn these quickly, these filthy old things,” she says. “Keep burning. He has been given the most beautiful garments and won’t need these anymore.”

A young girl helps. She’s probably their daughter.

The neighbor at the top left is the sole voice of reason in this whole story. “Aren’t you being a bit hasty burning these things? Shouldn’t you wait, to be certain?”

The next scene shows the aftermath. Fukutomi’s wife complains, “How disgusting! Look at these dirty things! How could you wear them? It’s better to sit naked.”

His wife uses a stick to remove his poop-covered robes. An elderly nun states the obvious. “You burned his things too soon. You should have waited until he came back.”

The wife explains, “Hidetaki was given such beautiful clothing. I thought that you would receive luxurious brocades and satins. So of course I burned your old robes. Who could have guessed you would receive such horrible treatment?”

She goes on while Fukutomi sits naked and shivering. “What ridiculousness are you spouting about? You are a man of standing over sixty years old, but you act like you’re three. Everyone knows eating even one morning glory seed can cause diarrhea. Obviously, eating ten on an empty stomach would cause disastrous results. I’m surprised you were able to make it home. Take some medicine to try and calm your stomach.”

Fukutomi does not take this sitting down and launches a diatribe. “Though I’m almost shivering to death, I could never put on those filthy rags. You foul faced old woman. Woman, you’ve caused me grief. You should have at least waited to see the results before burning all my clothes.” Fair.

“I told you this would be a hard skill to master, but you insisted. I followed your advice not thinking that you would lead me astray. I wanted to be his student and he seemed happy to go along. I believed him. But now I realize why he kept stressing I needed to keep the art a secret. If I had mentioned the part about the morning glory seeds to anyone, they would have urged me to stop with the whole business. Oh, it’s okay for Hidetake to play his little game since he was the one given the gift. I was stupid for even attempting to copy him.”

All things considered, Fukutomi seems to be taking it well.

I never would have guessed that Fukutomi’s wife is an ashiatsu masseuse. She steps on his back, saying, “Is this where you want me to step? Oh, my poor man, how many times did they beat you?”

Fukutomi is in a bad state, and still hasn’t forgiven her. “Oh, I feel like I’m dying! You silly old woman! This is because of your envy. Is this the fruit of my old age? Is this what has become of me? How terrible!”

The young girl gives him some soup or medicine. “Please, take a sip of this.”

The wife kneels, praying. A crow stands before her. It’s supposed to be an incarnation of a god of fortune or one that oversees the future. If you think she’s praying for her husband to recover, that would make sense. But you’d be wrong.

She says, “The man named Takamuko no Hidetake tricked my husband. Give this man to me. Give me his life. He told my husband to eat morning glory seeds. His sin is vast. Confuse his protecting spirits so he may lose favor and end up in the streets like a beggar.”

Sorry if you’re eating while reading this. Fukutomi takes a heavy bio break while his wife gives him a cup of medicine. She says, “This is good medicine. Please just take a sip. How can you pull yourself together and get on with things if you are so fixed on that notion? Do you want to drive this poor old woman mad?”

Fukutomi says, “You! Don’t say anything. Whatever it is women do, I can’t take it. I can’t even look at your face.”

Fukutomi’s wife gets some medicine from a doctor.

The attendant on the right says, “This is the wife of Fukutomi, a leader in the community of Shichijō. He was tricked by the farter Hidetake into eating morning glory seeds and now suffers from diarrhea. Based on the symptoms, please prescribe a treatment.”

She says, “This man deceived my husband into eating ten morning glory seeds. Now he must endure loose bowels. It flows from him like water. He is old and suffers so I beg you for a cure.”

The doctor laments, “Even one morning glory seed can cause an upset stomach. Imagine what ten can do. Give him this medicine. It can’t hurt.”

Fukutomi’s wife cannot bear her husband’s suffering and decides some payback is in order. She attacks Hidetake, tearing his clothing with her hands and teeth. Hidetake struggles to get away from this crazy woman.

She screams, “Let them see! Let them look! Maybe I’ll die doing this. He! He!” Hidetake says, “Please, stop this! Decent women shouldn’t behave this way. People are watching. Please let go! Take your hands off me! I give up, I give up! Madam, please let me go. Ladies, help me!”

On the right, a man says, “Fukutomi’s wife is entirely justified.”

Also on the right, a woman watches with her daughter. “What a wild woman! The incense master can’t handle her.”

A man with a shaved head says, “What’s going on? Can’t she just flip him and throw him to the ground?”

On the left, someone asks, “What are they looking at?”

One monk asks his companion, “What’s all the laughter?” The other monk responds, “I think they are laughing at the incense master and Fukutomi’s wife.”

What’s it all about?

Besides being a funny, poopy story, Fukutomi zōshi is also a story about gekokujō 下剋上. The term dates back to the Kamakura period (1185 - 1333). It was a known story trope that means those of a lower position overthrowing those of a higher position.

In Japan, the social ladder was more like a pole slathered with oil. But the times, they were a-changing, and some people were a-angry about it. It was a time of social change, where an overconfident emperor tried to take power from the warriors, then was overthrown by other warriors.

In the story, two lower-class couples sought to rise above their station with as little effort as possible. And when Hidetake and his wife become rich, they immediately decorate their place with all sorts of expensive and loud items. Like many newly rich, they have no taste or modesty.

It satirizes people who are religious for their own gains. Both couples pray to benefit themselves. It also mocks nobles who spend their time enjoying useless and obscene hobbies, like those at the noble’s residence who gather to watch a dude fart while dancing.

Behind the smell lies also a message against the changing culture of Japan in the 1400s. A warrior class was rising in the countryside and they were bringing their vulgar customs to the capital, to the chagrin of this story’s author who preferred his culture less agricultural.

For example, dog hunting and dengaku dance were trending in the Kyoto capital. The story seems to compare dengaku to fart performances. Hidetake’s dance does sort of look like dengaku dances.

Part 1: HERE (in case you missed it)

Something else vulgar.

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References

1. Second scroll: https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1953.358

2. Ulak, James Thomas (1994). Fukutomi zōshi.

Today’s tale of burning interspecies love regularly pops up in Japanese art and literature. Its earliest known source is the Dainihonkoku Hokekyō Kenki 大日本国法華経験記 (Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sutra from Japan), a collection of stories compiled between 1040 and 1043 by a Buddhist monk. The Lotus Sutra is one of the most important texts in Buddhism, and this collection was meant to convince people how awesome it is.

Two monks set out on a pilgrimage to Kumano 熊野, one young and handsome, and one old and not sure why he’s in this story.

They stopped at an inn kept by a young widow, who promptly fell in love with the handsome young monk. When she tried to sneak into his bed he told her he had taken a holy vow of celibacy, and he could not sleep with any lustful wenches, widowed or not. Until after his pilgrimage. But he promised to totally stop by on his way back from Kumano.

The handsome monk did not take a holy vow of not lying, so on their way back home the two monks took a different road and avoided the inn. When the spurned widow realized what had happened, the treachery killed her. But that wasn’t the end. Her tormented spirit transformed into an enormous serpent filled with rage.

The two monks found themselves pursued by the giant snake, so they took refuge in Dōjō-ji 道成寺, a Buddhist temple. In an effort to hide, the young monk stood underneath the large temple bell which was then lowered over him. Dying of asphyxiation in a claustrophobic space seemed preferable to sexy times with a large, angry snake. This monk don’t want no anaconda unless she’s a chaste nun, hun.

The anaconda in question was anything but pleased with the tintinnabulary arrangement, and coiled around the bell. In a feat that defied biology and physics, she bled from her eyes and spewed poison gas from her mouth to burn the bell.

Only ash remained of the handsome monk. The old monk returned home alone, sad at having lost his friend and at having contributed absolutely nothing to the plot.

Remember, this was all supposed to be Lotus Sutra propaganda. So one of the wiser monks at Dōjō-ji organized a mass reading of a chapter of the Lotus Sutra, whose miraculous power was enough to save the spirits of both the widow-snake and ash-monk and reincarnate them in less snakey and ashy circumstances.

Later versions of the story name the younger monk Anchin and the woman Kiyohime. The snake transformation is also more carefully and scientifically explained. Kiyohime pursues the monks in human form until she reaches a river. The monks had begged the ferryman to deny the crazy stalker lady passage. In anger and desperation, Anchin throws a hissy fit, changing into a giant snake to swim across.

Kiyohime stranded by the river, ready to get her snake on.

The story is a staple of Nō (Dōjōji 道成寺), Kabuki (Kyōganoko Musume Dōjōji 京鹿子娘道成寺), and Bunraku puppet theatre (many versions), and the river crossing scene in particular is very well known.

References

1. Salz, Jonah (ed.) A History of Japanese Theatre. Cambridge, 2016, pp. 411–415.

2. Ury, Marian. Tales of Time Now Past: Sixty-Two Stories from a Medieval Japanese Collection. U of Michigan, 1979, Chapter 14.

3. Waters, Virginia Skord. “Sex, Lies, and the Illustrated Scroll: The Dōjōji Engi Emaki,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 59–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/2385487

Japanese literature is full of beautiful, poetic works of high art full of meaning and symbolism, and then you have today’s story about a man who gains mastery over the art of passing wind, a work of literature that puts the rest to shame.

Some time in the Muromachi period (1336 - 1573), someone sat down and thought, “You know what Japan truly needs? A fart epic,” then drew a picture scroll called Fukutomi zōshi 福富草紙, or the Tale of Fukutomi. The name of this literary genius has been lost to time, possibly because historians kept laugh-fainting halfway through their research, but luckily we still have copies of his masterpiece.

Many versions of this scroll exist, the oldest copy we have today was made in the mid-1400s, though sadly we don’t have the original.

I present to you the first half of the story here. The second half, you’ll have to wait for the next post, because suspense works best when you feel a little pressure building. I’ll describe both the art and text. The details and dialogue really pull you into the story.

So sit back, relax, and empty your bowels for a fantastical tale of greed and people trying to rise above their station in life, a story that blows away the others.

In Kyōto, there lives an old man named Takamuko no Hidetake and his wife. You can see from the sad condition of their house that their relationship to money is similar to the relationship between those who invest in crypto and success.

Their room is pretty much bare. The two curl together, the cold obviously biting them through thin sheets. They’re getting up there in age and unless something changes, their twilight years will be as dark as their unlit house.

Deciding they must do something before it’s too late, the couple makes a gohei.

Hidetake asks, “What should I do with this thing?”

His wife responds, “You need this for a proper visit to the shrine. It is a symbol of prayer. No matter what it costs…if you keep praying, there will surely be a sign from the gods.”

Hidetake walks barefoot to the shrine of the god of talent. Now Hidetake’s not some spring chicken, he’s more of a leftover drumstick. His creaking body can barely survive the journey, but he hopes that the gods will acknowledge his effort.

The words say, “The shrine is close now, that’s a relief. The morning wind stings my face and this old body can hardly endure any more. But in spite of all this, if the god of talent sees my miserable state and recognizes my determination, he will have mercy.”

Kneeling before the shrine, Hidetake prays, “I am Takamuko no Hidetake. I pray to you today and make this offering in hopes that in some small way you could grant some bit of grace and relieve the suffering of this old man. I beseech you over and over. Please grant me a sign.”

The man’s serious. He visits the shrine every morning for seven days. On the seventh morning, Hidetake has a strange dream, and goes to a fortune teller to ask what it means.

Hidetake says, “During months and years of oppressive poverty I had no hope or expectation that my luck would change. But entertaining the slightest possibility that change would come, I made a pilgrimage to the shrine on seven successive mornings and prayed that some sign would be given me.”

Then he reveals the dream. “At dawn of the seventh morning, I had a dream that I received a small iron bell, the size of a mandarin orange. And I pondered over the meaning of this.”

The fortune teller tells Hidetake something that fills him with hope, and more. “Surely you should be very thankful and humbled by this dream. A dream that occurs just before dawn will soon come to pass.”

Then his words become strangely specific, and, as we’ll see in a few moments, awfully accurate. “From inside your body, something unexpected will emerge. A voice will speak or come out. You will receive generosity from a nobleman and you, old man, will be given a new life.”

The fortune teller asks the old man to show off the gift he has just been given, the voice that rings.

Hidetake suddenly feels an urge deep within, something yearning to be free. He was no prison guard, who was he to keep a thing locked up? From his rump comes a sound deep and full, and it doesn’t stop until a whole song passes through his sonorous sphincter. Everyone in the room laughs, having a grand ol’ time.

The fortune teller wheezes, “What a rare thing we are witnessing! I’ve figured this dream out precisely and, if I do say so, am quite impressed with myself. What a funny thing! My gut is twisted from laughter.”

An old nun on the lower right says, “I’ve never seen such a thing. What a pleasure it is to witness this in my old age. I’m so thankful. Amida butsu, amida butsu.” Amida butsu is the name of the main Buddha in Pure Land Buddhism.

A young woman behind the screen is speechless, but not so speechless as to be unable to generate speech. “I am speechless,” she says. “I can’t find words to describe this sight.”

Overjoyed, Hidetake takes his gift to the streets, farting whole concerts. The crowd just keeps getting bigger. News of his performance spread faster than his odor.

“Take a look at this fellow! What an amazing talent!”

“This fellow is so funny that the thought of selling my wares has completely escaped my mind.”

As he’s performing, a messenger comes over and invites Hidetake to his master’s residence. “Come quickly, come quickly! I was instructed by the master to bring you back as quickly as possible!”

Hidetake replies, “I would go soon if I had the proper footwear. Things are a bit disorganized at the moment. When I think I am about to emit a little cough, a much greater sound emerges from me.”

Luckily, a child on the right comes to the rescue. “Here, I’ve found where the shoes were placed!”

And so the soon-to-be platinum selling fartist agrees to visit the nobleman, and as he’s walking over he realizes that, oh my gods, it’s the grand residence of some wealthy nobleman. The winds of fate clearly have his back.

Hidetake makes the performance of his life in front of all the nobles, his clothes flapping from the wind of his astounding anus. The audience couldn’t take their eyes off, so enraptured they didn’t even mind the smell.

People watch from the sides, attendants from the veranda. One person gasps, “What a low life! What a character! Is that smell coming from the cooking pot?” Another remarks, “Look! His garments are flapping as if blown by the wind.” A boy says, “He farts so well!”

Women peer from their drapes. “Tell him to visit regularly,” says one.

Some men on the left seated inside the house say, “He is so old he could be killed by this wind. Save some for next time. Don’t let him kill himself in his enthusiasm.”

Further left, commoners sneak looks from holes in the fence, saying, “I have never seen such a fellow before! Those sounds are strange and rare. How did he acquire this skill?”

The nobleman watches from behind a screen. “What an amazing fellow, this chirping man. Bring him the scarlet robe.” An attendant comes bearing a red robe for Hidetake. To the left of him, a man says, “Whirling and spinning madly! How skillfully he plays the melody! Give it to him!”

The nobles shower him with gifts, which he hires people to carry home.

A young man on the right says, “Careful! Don’t let the wata slide out!” Wata is a bit of a cheeky pun. It can mean cotton fabric, or it can mean guts or bowels. Either way, we can all agree it is best to keep it inside.

His bag carriers say, “What a load he has collected from various places! If he does this everyday, think of how much more he will be able to amass.” And below that, “This thing is so heavy I think my neck is going to break!”

Hidetake’s looking back, thinking, “I’ve hired a neighbor to carry those things. Hey! Don’t drop it!”

His wife opens the gifts with an enormous smile. In one day, they’ve gone from having nothing to even their farts being valuable.

He says, “Here sits the one called Hidetake. A man justly proud of his skills. I was summoned to the residence of a nobleman and received the red robe. Other nobles collected gifts for me. This hunter’s garment which I wear was a gift from someone living in a small residence.

“Many others pressed me to perform for them but I couldn’t, so I escaped. Being old is so difficult. Were I younger, I could perform all day. Day after day I wonder how much I could accumulate?”

Ever the good husband, he thanks his wife, “All of this happened because of your encouragement, dear wife. Because of this I treasure you. You are wonderful.”

His wife gives a whole speech. “There are no others with skills to match yours. If all other competitors were lined up, you would excel them all. How pleased I am! How happy!

“Although I did encourage you, this is the work of the gods. These skills are not of this earth, not human talents. I’m not the one you should be thanking. I am shocked. This is all beyond my wildest imaginings.

“When we were poor and unhappy, you complained all the time, but now your face has completely changed. The brightness of your face fills me with pleasure.

“What act of the gods caused this all to happen? We were so unhappy and despaired of even surviving the winter. We were so sad. But we didn’t give up hope and the world, beyond all our imaginings, did not end.”

Hidetake is not a man who forgets those who helped him. He goes back to the shrine to thank the priest and give offerings.

“Because I have recently experienced a special blessing from the god of this shrine, I bring these offerings of thanks. I pray for continued success with this skill and that my talents will expand. Henceforth, I intend to make offerings on the first day of each month. Please don’t tell my wife that I am heaping praise on you. Your shrine will soon experience a new wave of supplicants. Because of you I have had great success.”

The priest replies, “Indeed, it is just as you say. You have experienced the power of the god of this shrine. You are receiving the great benefits bestowed on those who worship here. All of your good fortune is owed to this shrine.” This priest should pray for some modesty.

At this point, it seems like a heartwarming story about a poor couple who changed their lot in life. But this is only the first half of the story, the half they normally had you in.

Sometimes you find a good friend who is supportive and genuinely happy when you achieve success. Hidetake and his wife did not have one of those. The rest of Fukutomi zōshi is a story of jealousy, greed, and consequences.

Next: The exciting conclusion, it will crack you up.

References

1. First scroll: https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2542430/1/5

2. Ulak, James Thomas (1994). Fukutomi zōshi.

Why does the sea taste like ramen broth? And how did Vikings give us anime?

Once upon a time, there were two brothers. The younger brother spent his life helping others, giving away his meager possessions, and generally being a nuisance by making everyone else look bad. The older brother maintained the karmic balance by being greedy and mean. Lucky for us, these personalities guaranteed they’d star in their own fairy tale.

One New Year’s Eve, the younger brother had no rice left to make an offering to the gods. When he asked his sibling for some rice, he got a hot, steaming lecture on not giving your hard-earned rice away.

The poor brother left, his stomach empty, as well as his spirit. He ran into a completely unmysterious old man whom he told all his woes, at length. The old man nodded sagely and gave him a manjū 饅頭 (a sweet steamed dumpling) and some advice: “Go find the gnomes who live in the forest and give them this manjū. Insist that they trade you their stone handmill for it. It will solve all your problems.”

The younger brother went off into the woods and found the gnomes who were very excited when they spotted the manjū and offered all sorts of items in trade. The man held fast and insisted on a stone handmill until they finally agreed.

The gnomes said: “This is a special handmill, and it’ll make anything you wish. Simply say what you want, then turn the mill to the right. When you have enough, turn it to the left to stop it making more.”

The man was skeptical (such a device could simply produce infinite manjū, so why trade it for any finite number of manjū, let alone a single one? Because folktale).

Satisfied with his unequal trade, the man took the handmill home. He made himself rice for the New Year’s offering and some new clothes. While he was at it, he made a mansion, a barn, and a few warehouses.

The older brother’s eyes nearly popped out of their stingy sockets when he saw his poor brother strutting around in a fine kimono. Also, where did all this instantaneous architecture come from?!

That afternoon, the older brother peeked into his sibling’s suspiciously new window and saw him use the mill. Big brother immediately snuck off again, unfortunately before seeing the crucial part: how to stop the mill.

That night, he waited for the younger brother to fall asleep, then stole the handmill. He got on a boat and rowed out into the enormous lake surrounding Japan to try his new toy in privacy.

He decided to wish for salt, as it was expensive and would make him a rich man. “Salt!” he cried, and turned the mill to the right. Salt poured forth, gleaming and aplenty like the coins he would trade it for. Quite aplenty. Too aplenty.

Soon, the boat was loaded with salt, but the mill kept on producing. The man tried everything he could think of, but he wasn’t terribly bright so lefty-stoppy didn’t occur to him. Overwhelmed by salt and greed, the boat sank to the bottom of the sea. The handmill is still there to this day, and until someone thinks to go down and crank it to the left it’ll continue making salt grain by grain, century after century.

And that’s why the sea is salty.

The earliest Japanese versions of this tale are just over 100 years old, but the story is much older than that. Stolen-magical-item-bites-thief-in-the-butt stories existed in Asia for centuries, but the handmill making the sea salty appears to have come from Europe.

An old Norwegian folktale, Kvernen som maler på havsens bunn (“The handmill that grinds at the bottom of the sea”), was published in a collection of Norwegian folktales in 1852, and translated into English soon after. It’s likely that the story was brought to Japan by sailors during the late 19th or early 20th century.

So about those Vikings, then...I lied a little (we call it “clickbait” in the trade). The Viking Age ended around 1100, and the earliest known manuscripts for a Norse story about a magical grinding mill are from the Gróttasǫngr in the 1200s. So Viking-ish.

The gnomes (in Japanese kobito 小人, literally “little people”) don’t appear in the Norse sources and may be a Japanese addition. Gnomes and dwarfs are pretty common in the stories of many cultures. There’s evidence of a Russian version of the story told in Japan in 1923 which involved a gnome, but there are also many native Japanese stories with gnomes.

Because toy companies hadn’t invented collectible card games and tie-in merchandising yet, early anime was often based on folktales. One such relic is the silent 1935 short “Why the water of the sea is salty” 海の水はなぜからい which you can watch here:

You can’t get enough of stories about wicked characters choking on their karma, like this one about a man who thought he could trick his wife.

References

1. Mayer, Fanny Hagin (trans.) & Yanagita Kunio. “Yanagita Kunio: Japanese folk tales,” Folklore Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1952, pp. 65–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1177324

2. Mayer, Fanny Hagin & Kunio, Yanagita. The Yanagita Kunio Guide to the Japanese Folk Tale. Indiana UP, 1986, p. 91.

3. Seki, Keigo. “Types of Japanese Folktales,” Asian Folklore Studies, 25, 1966, p. 92 (Tale 173) https://doi.org/10.2307/1177478

4. Seki, Keigo. Folktales of Japan. U of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. 134–138. https://archive.org/details/folktalesofjapan00seki/page/134/mode/2up

5. https://www.nishikata-eiga.com/2013/12/why-is-sea-water-salty-1935.html

6. https://talesfromtheenchantedforest.com/2023/01/01/why-the-sea-is-salt/

Who doesn’t love a little spice with their pumpkin latte?

In the 1920s, women had all sorts of new, exciting opportunities. Apart from farmers, geishas, and housewives, they could now also be factory workers, typists, telephone switchboard operators, and café waitresses!

As we’ve seen before, cafés were starting to get popular in Ginza in the early 1910s, but things really took off after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Large parts of Tokyo were destroyed, but death and misery were apparently fertile grounds for coffee. Cafés popped up everywhere.

A lot of the money for the rebuilding came from Osaka, and with it came some of Osaka’s louder, brasher style. Like neon lights, jazz, and the cinema, the new cafés were trendy, fastpaced, and sexy. With these new cafés came a new type of café waitress.

Waitresses were called jokyū 女給 (the kanji literally mean woman & salary, possibly short for 女給仕, female waiter, or woman-salary-service).

If you think this means jokyū were paid a fair wage, then the jok’s on yū. Jokyū received salaries so low they were sometimes nonexistent. If you try to tip in Japan today, you get panicked looks and the bills handed back with an apology. If you didn’t tip a jokyū in the 1920s she’d never talk to you again. Because she’d starve.

Jokyū had to pay for their own work outfits, laundry, and food. And the salary of the kitchen staff. Oh, and they paid for any food or services their customers consumed: if the customer dined and dashed, it wasn’t the café owner that got stuck with the tab, but the jokyū. Finally, because such a cushy job had to have some downsides, café owners would fine jokyū for being late and charge them for any crockery broken by a customer.

In the 1920s, jokyū began offering more and more…intimate services. Why the sudden sexification?

First, the tipping culture. Jokyū earned about the same amount as a female typist, which was about half of an entry level male government clerk’s salary. They were as thirsty for sponsorship as YouTubers, and their Raid: Shadow Legends and BetterHelp were slightly dodgy male customers, so Jokyū had a far better deal. An extra smile or a casual touch, and NordVPN-san was willing to sponsor another kimono!

Second, the influx of Osaka money and culture. In Osaka, there were closer, friendlier relations between customers and staff. Many jokyū stopped wearing aprons, started speaking to customers like a friend or a girlfriend would, blurring the lines.

Some Tokyo cafés expressly advertised that their jokyū were from Osaka. In 1930, Bijinza Café (Beauties Café) lived up to its flashy, modern, sky-age image by flying in thirty jokyū from Osaka as an advertising stunt.

Third, intense competition between cafés, especially once the Great Depression hit at the end of the 1920s. 1929 also brought the beginning of a government crackdown on some of the more non-coffee related activities, among them jazz, dancing, and sex. So in one year, there were suddenly fewer customers with money, and the tools to attract the remaining customers were partly outlawed.

Larger cafés were mostly able to continue operating (often because they were in “entertainment” districts where the new laws did not apply), but smaller cafés were forced to change. Some tried to stay clean, turning into soda fountains or restaurants, but many went underground and screwed their customers. For money.

Small café owners “encouraged” their jokyū to offer more and more erotic services. A popular service was the slit in the skirt through which a customer was allowed to slip his hand.

Remember that Café Puratan was founded in 1911 for artists and intellectuals to talk about muse-worthy things. It’s nice to know that in the 1920s this legacy wasn’t entirely forgotten. The orugan sābisu オルガンサービス (organ service) was a respectful link to this artistic past: a jokyū would lie across the laps of several customers, who were then invited to touch her body wherever they wished. The waitress would then sing appropriate notes, like an organ keyboard. A beautiful expression of the musical arts.

References

1. Seidensticker, Edward. Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake. Harvard UP, 1991.

2. Tipton, Elise K. “The Café: Contested Space of Modernity in Interwar Japan” in Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, U of Hawaiʻi, 2000, pp. 119–136.

3. Tipton, Elise K. “Pink Collar Work: The Café Waitress in Early Twentieth Century Japan.” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 7, March 2002. https://doi.org/10.25911/EYWE-1Y58

4. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. University of California Press, 2012.

While Mizuno Ryo’s Café Paulista was slamming down the hammer of big caffeine capitalist chain conformity, plenty of hipster independent coffeehouses popped up in early 20th century Tokyo. Let’s explore three of the most famous: Purantan, Lion, and Tiger.

Purantan

Matsuyama Shōzō 松山 省三 was a painter in the newfangled Western style, and he wanted a place to meet with like-minded people to discuss art, drink overpriced frappuccinos, and argue over the correct way to pronounce “croissant.” In 1911, probably beating Café Paulista by only a few months, he opened the first place in Tokyo to do an innovative thing: it used the word “café” in its name. Kafē Purantan was a katakana version of either Café Printemps or Café Plantain.

Matsuyama was inspired by Parisian cafés of the time, especially Le Procope. These places were like cozy bistros, with food, wine, coffee, and a lot of arguing about art, philosophy, and whether subs or dubs are superior. Subs, obviously.

Western food and drink were still novelties, so Purantan’s customers were progressive students and intellectuals. The first six months Kafē Purantan was an exclusive salon, with about 35 members, all writers, artists, critics, and politicians. Even after the membership requirement was dropped, Purantan kept its artsy intellectual vibe.

The waitresses at Purantan were elegant and beautiful. One 1930s Japanese writer described them as “the noble virgin type.” While Purantan kept its elegant, virginal image, not all places were quite so chaste.

Lion

Before there were cat cafés for you to pet kittens and enjoy your allergies, there were big-cat cafés for you to fondle waitresses allergy-free.

Kafē Raion (Café Lion) roared to life in Ginza, also in 1911, and focused more on entertainment and less on discussions of high art and philosophy. Lion was owned by the same people who had opened the first Western-style hotel and restaurant in Tokyo in 1872, and it was known for its juicy steaks, which cost 50 sen (ten cups of coffee at Café Paulista!).

It was housed in a huge, modern building of three floors, and included a bar, dining rooms with singing geisha, and the exciting choice of Japanese or Western toilets in the restrooms. A hundred years ago the Japanese were excited to try a Western toilet A hundred years ago the Japanese were excited to try a Western toilet, whereas these days they go around poo-pooing them.

Tiger

In 1923, everybody got shook, and half of Tokyo was destroyed. During the rebuilding, many new cafés sprung up. One was Kafē Taigā (Café Tiger), which pounced onto the scene in 1924. It was a somewhat sexier version of Café Lion, and right across the street. A copycat. Coffeecat? Waitresses who were fired from Lion for “misbehaving” (let your imagination run wild) were promptly hired at Tiger.

Lion and Tiger were famous enough that they were mentioned in a 1928 pop song, Today’s Ginza Festival. The first line of the third verse is:

東京銀座は怖ろし所　虎と獅子とが酌に出る

Tokyo’s Ginza is a scary place where tigers and lions come out to serve drinks

Song Tangent

I promised you the history of coffee, but psych! Now you’ll have to suffer through some history of recording and linguistics because I find it interesting. I’m a fickle and sadistic sensei.

Before Spotify, humanity had to endure 78 RPM records which could only hold about 3 minutes to a side, so longer songs would be split up into two parts, and you’d have to flip the record over in the middle. In the snow, uphill, both ways. Here’s a 1928 recording by Satō Chiyako 佐藤千夜子 of Today’s Ginza Festival 當世銀座節. The Tiger & Lion line is the first one in the third verse, at 0:31–0:33 in the second video.

Verse 1 & 2

Verse 3 & 4

Now for three short lessons in linguistics.

First, if you listened carefully to that line, you might have been confused, since it sure doesn’t sound like she’s saying “taigā to raion” (“tiger and lion”). You’d be correct. She’s actually saying “tora to shī,” which are the native Japanese words for tiger and lion. In modern Japanese you’re more likely to hear raion than shī for lion, though tora is still the standard word for tiger.

Second, the first character in the song’s title (當) is old-fashioned and was simplified in the script reform of 1946. If you want to find the song on a modern streaming service, you’ll want to search for this instead: 当世銀座節.

Finally, the song’s title is of course the old-fashioned 當世銀座節 on the record label...but written from right to left. Classical Japanese was written vertically, with columns read top to bottom and right to left. When written horizontally due to space constraints, like on a horizontal shop sign or above a temple gate, it was always read from right to left. Only later in the 20th century did the left-to-right horizontal direction become the standard. You can see the same right-to-left archaic business in the picture below on the big sign on the front of Café Tiger where it says Taigā タイガー (katakana ta-i-ga and a horizontal line to lengthen the last vowel). Delightfully olde timey!

Next article: Sexy coffee maids!

References

1. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. University of California Press, 2012.

2. Seidensticker, Edward. Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake. Penguin, 1985.

3. Seidensticker, Edward. Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake. Harvard UP, 1991.

4. Tipton, Elise K. “The Café: Contested Space of Modernity in Interwar Japan” in Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, U of Hawaiʻi, 2000, pp. 119–136.

5. Fukuda, Ikuhiro. “La transformation des pratiques et des sensibilités alimentaires après le désastre de 1923.” Géographie et cultures, Vol. 86, 2013, pp. 13–29. (in French) https://doi.org/10.4000/gc.2809

Hyping up something is fine, especially if that something is a museum exhibition, but sometimes hype turns into falsehood.

Someone sent me this article from The Independent with an eye-catching headline:

Half of Japan’s samurai were women, groundbreaking new exhibition at British Museum says”

Oookay. Mr. Independent here is being a tad cheeky with his words. This sentence stands right at the edge of misleading, then absolutely falls down that cliff.

To most people, “samurai” were those badass Japanese guys in armor with swords who kill themselves from dishonor the moment they drip tea on their lord’s sandals. You mean to tell me half of them were badass women instead? Nice, nice. I’d watch that anime.

But wait. We’re not “most people,” you and I. We know that being a samurai was not a job. You didn’t just put on some armor, walk into a battlefield, and get called a samurai. It was a hereditary social class. People usually became samurai by being born into a samurai family.

Knowing this, the exhibition doesn’t seem that groundbreaking. The ground is quite still. Half the people in samurai families were women? You don’t say.

If you look in the article, it clarifies:

The samurai emerged in the early medieval period in the 1100s to 1600 as wealthy households hired warriors for private security provision.

The mercenary group developed into a rural gentry and by 1615 they had moved away from the battlefield to serve as government officials, scholars, and patrons of the arts.

It is here where half of the samurai class were women and although they did not tend to fight they were a vital part of the elite order, playing a key role both on and off the battlefield.

Better, but still off the mark. They’re talking about the Edo period (1603 - 1868), where samurai were indeed not warriors, but bureaucrats. It was peacetime and there was rarely a need for warriors.

However, I don’t like the “mercenary group” framing. It makes them seem like groups operating privately, when samurai were very much part of Japan’s military government. For example, in the Kamakura period (1185 - 1333), direct vassals of the shogunate were samurai called gokenin 御家人, who owned land and had policing power.

But I don’t really blame The Independent for repeating the “half of samurai were women” line, because it’s from the British Museum’s own page:

…the samurai evolved into a social class, half of whom were women.

Sigh.

The Independent article goes on to talk about Tomoe Gozen:

According to the exhibition, the most celebrated female samurai was Tomoe Gozen who died in 1247, and whose exploits are the subject of The Tale of the Heike. She was reported to have ripped off the head of the samurai Uchida Saburo leyoshi who tried to capture her for ransom.

After calling samurai a class, we get a paragraph about Tomoe Gozen, a female warrior. To me, this reinforces the headline, making it seem like the women in samurai families were also fighting in the battlefield. Women were not regular participants in battle. This seems misleading, but that’s just me. What do you think?

The exhibition looks cool though, regardless.

Before we had viral TikToks and memes, uncreative people had to make do with proverbs. Here’s an old-timey Japanese proverb: “a pilgrimage to Zenkō-ji chasing after a cow” 牛にひかれて善光寺参り. If I tell you the story behind this moom...meme, can you guess its meaning?

Once upon a time, a greedy, meanspirited, unenlightened woman lived in Shinano Province, not far from Nagano. She spent her days enthusiastically ignoring the sage teachings of the Buddha.

One day, she paused her ignorations to do some laundry, as if washing the stains from her clothing could remove the blemishes from the immortal soul she didn’t believe in. Foolish wench!

Suddenly, a cow made a dashing entrance! The unexpectedly enterprising bovine wrapped its horn in a piece of laundry and galloped off into the sunset. The woman ran after the surprisingly nimble animal until they arrived at Zenkō-ji 善光寺 in Nagano. This was one of the oldest Buddhist temples in Japan, and conveniently one of only a few pilgrimage sites that women were allowed to visit.

The ninjacow disappeared into the shadows, but left behind a poem written in disgustingly divine drool: “Do not think this a mere cow’s prank, the mercy of Buddha has led you to righteousness.” The livestock spit sonnet managed to teach the woman what a lifetime of experience had failed to. She immediately repented her past wickedness and spent the night at Zenkō-ji, praying to Buddha to help her achieve enlightenment (and to return her damn laundry already).

Did you figure out the meaning of the proverb? It means doing or experiencing something good due to an unexpected event, especially one that occurs despite your own reluctance. A similar English proverb nobody remembers or uses is “to make a virtue out of necessity.” Humans are the same everywhere!

In some versions of the story, the woman passed a small temple on her way back home. Inside, she found her laundry hanging on a statue of Kannon, the goddess of mercy. She promptly decided to become a nun and dedicate her life to tending this temple. Some people claim the temple was Shakuson-ji 釈尊寺 on Nunobiki Mountain 布引山 (“Cloth Pull Mountain”!). You can visit it today, if you like stunningly beautiful places likely to cause vertigo:

Zenkō-ji meanwhile claims to be the home of the oldest Buddhist statue in Japan. The statue is so holy (or so rotten and falling apart) that no one is allowed to see it, even Buddha himself. There’s a replica statue, but even that is only brought out once every seven years for people to (very carefully) ogle.

If you visit Zenkō-ji during the sacred replica statue viewing festival, you can cleanse your soul by having your picture taken in this totally-not-tacky-at-all cut-out:

If you like this folklake about a cow, you’ll love this one about a bunny and crocosharks.

References

1. Dorson, Richard M. Folk Legends of Japan. Chales E. Tuttle, 1962, pp. 50–52.

2. http://kudos910.web.fc2.com/oldstory/zenkoji2.pdf

3. http://en.nagano-cvb.or.jp/modules/sightseeing/page/5

4. https://zenkozi.com/about/cow.html

5. https://web.archive.org/web/20130715042319/http://www.geocities.jp/kakezukuri/kake09.html

6. https://on-the-trip.net/indices/9194?locale=en

7. https://on-the-trip.net/indices/9201?locale=en

8. http://hukumusume.com/douwa/pc/minwa/02/16a.htm

9. https://善光寺-御朱印.jinja-tera-gosyuin-meguri.com/category/%E7%89%9B%EF%BC%81/%E9%95%B7%E9%87%8E%E3%83%BB%E5%96%84%E5%85%89%E5%AF%BA%E3%81%A8%E7%89%9B%E3%81%AE%E7%94%B1%E6%9D%A5%EF%BC%81%E3%80%8C%E7%89%9B%E3%81%AB%E5%BC%95%E3%81%8B%E3%82%8C%E3%81%A6%E5%96%84%E5%85%89%E5%AF%BA

In the Ginza district of Tokyo, there’s a popular coffee shop called Café Paulista. John Lennon and Yoko Ono visited it in 1978. Before this particular shop was opened in 1970, Café Paulista was a chain of coffee houses visited by some famous people, including Albert Einstein.

You can already tell by the name that it has an interesting history. Paulista is a term for someone from São Paulo, Brazil, yet the whole coffee chain was started in 1911 (probably) by a Japanese man. What did a Japanese guy from the early 1900s have to do with Brazil? A lot.

The last story was about a failed coffeeshop owner. Hopefully this time things go well.

Japan runs out of jobs

By the 1880s, twenty years of “Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces” (富国強兵, fukoku kyōhei) had left the Japanese economy with all the enrichment of a packet of ramen. Rice prices fell, leaving farmers unable to pay their taxes.

With the government’s push for industrialization many of these farmers moved to cities to look for work, which they succeeded in doing. They successfully looked for work, however, they were not very successful in finding it. Things only got worse when, in 1895 and 1905, soldiers returned home from fighting China and Russia, with medals on their chests but no employers on their doorsteps.

The government’s clever solution was to send people outside the country. In 1885 the first group of emigrants left for Hawaiʻi to work on the sugar plantations. Japanese immigrants to Hawaiʻi and California replaced the Chinese laborers that had been expelled by the US’s 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. But after a while the US realized there was a bit too much inclusion in the country, and negotiated with Japan the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, a name so polite it stabbed you in the back. The result: Japanese immigration to the US halted.

Japan redirected its emigration policy to South America, so let’s see what’s been going on over there...

Brazil picks coffee

Coffee arrived in Brazil in 1727 by way of the Dutch and French. The first workers on coffee plantations were indigenous slaves, but that didn’t work too well because the slaves managed to escape their lives of exploitative, backbreaking labor by dying to European diseases. The plantation owners’ warmhearted response was to grumble about lost profits and ship over slaves from Africa.

Everything was fine until the 1880s, when progressive rabble-rousers started talking about human rights and other such inconveniences. To keep their fertile profits, plantation owners imported poor immigrants from Europe.

Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1887 the Brazilian government started sponsoring immigration, paying for people’s travel and promising them jobs. It was like the world’s first timeshare vacation home scam: “Come enjoy a year of profitable work on our wonderfully relaxing plantations before returning home a rich (wo)man!” Except for the rich part. Or the relaxing part. Or the returning home part.

Finally in 1888 the Golden Law (Lei Áurea) abolished slavery completely, and all workers were supposedly salaried and free. Free to toil under slavery-like conditions.

Many of the new immigrants came from Italy, but when news of the working conditions made it back to Rome, people there were molto displeased. Sponsored immigration was outlawed through the 1902 Prinetti decree. Uh-oh. Now where do we get our sla...contract workers?

Japan enters the chat

Actually, Japan had tried to enter the chat in 1894 and 1901, but had been kicked out by overly protective mods. Brazilian politicians shared enlightened rhetoric which can be kindly paraphrased as “Japanese are a backwards and inferior race and we don’t want them to mingle with us.”

By 1906, even the hardcore xenophobic nationalists were starting to sweat, though. Brazil had brewed itself into an awkward blend: coffee was by far its biggest export, but prices were threatening to plummet due to overproduction. They needed new overseas markets, but at the same time they needed more labor to keep up the overproduction! The wheels of coffee capitalism were threatening to grind everything into dust—or very fine grounds.

With the 1906 Taubaté Agreement, the governments of several Brazilian states agreed to bail out the pitiably rich plantation owners by guaranteeing to buy any leftover beans from growers. Having a ton of useless beans on their hands, the government now really, REALLY wanted to solve this whole coffee situation.

That same year, Japanese businessman Mizuno Ryo 水野龍 came across the Andes. Depending on the source, and on your level of romanticism, he came on foot or riding a mule. I rather like mules. He muled across the Andes. In any case, it was quite the trek. Mizuno managed to hammer out some agreements and set up an immigration service for migrant farmers from Japan to São Paulo. For the Brazilians, this meant both people to work their fields, and a potential new market in Japan.

Back in Japan, Mizuno recruited younger brothers from rural families (who wouldn’t inherit the land, and were thus “free labor”). Plantation owners wanted stability, so contracts required families of three to ten people, ages 12 to 45. Some Japanese, being already familiar with origami, formed “paper” families, just faking it to get the jobs.

In 1908 the ship Kasato Maru delivered the first 781 immigrants from Japan. Apparently on inspection of the ship, the Brazilians were surprised by how clean this “inferior race” had left the kitchen, bunkrooms, and bathrooms. Meanwhile, the Japanese were less impressed by the conditions on the plantations.

Mizuno’s beans

Aside from his payments, Mizuno was given a bunch of coffee beans. This sounds like Dumbo being paid in peanuts, but in fact, he received a hilariously huge amount of coffee: nearly a quarter of all the coffee entering Japan between 1915 and 1923 were Mizuno’s beans! Only one thing to do now. He opened Café Paulista in Ginza, probably in 1911.

The shop had mirrored walls, glittering chandeliers, gilded furniture, a piano, young male waiters in Brazilian naval uniforms, and the amazingly bad-ass slogan:

鬼の如く黒く、恋の如く甘く、地獄の如く熱きコーヒー
Coffee as black as an oni, as sweet as love, as hot as hell

The slogan was a paraphrase of French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord’s claim about the ideal cup of coffee:

Noir comme le diable, chaud comme l’enfer, pur comme un ange, doux comme l’amour
Black as the Devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love

A cup of coffee cost just 5 sen (5 hundredths of a yen), a sixth the price of a cup at other cafés. A Brazilian doughnut (malasada) cost another 5 sen. One of Paulista’s innovations was to offer sugar for free, making the bitter bean juice more palatable.

Just like at Kahiichakan, customers could linger as long as they wished. However, unlike Kahiichakan, Café Paulista received its beans for free, and didn’t offer newspapers, tobacco, or baths to its customers. So while Tei-kei’s business failed, Mizuno’s became wildly successful, though filled with grimier guests.

More than 2,000 customers a day visited the Ginza store and soon there were more than twenty Café Paulistas in Kantō and Kansai. It was possibly the first coffee chain in the world.

The café could be rented for events like weddings, and sometimes even showed movies. Like coffee houses everywhere, it was popular with writers. It was featured in literary and critical texts and hosted publication parties and poetry readings.

In the early 1920s the Ginza location was sometimes called the “hangout for bums.” Usually by people who didn’t like poetry readings or fun.

The original shop was destroyed in the 1923 Kantō earthquake. The company started focusing on importing and exporting coffee, and closed its other stores one by one until none were left. Only decades later in 1970 did they open a new Ginza shop. There’s a plaque by the booth where John Lennon and Yoko Ono sat.

We’re not done with coffee yet. Next time we’ll explore the first cat cafes 😻.

References

1. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. University of California Press, 2012.

2. Seidensticker, Edward. Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake. Penguin, 1985.

3. Seidensticker, Edward. Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake. Harvard UP, 1991.

4. Sakai, Motoshi (坂井 素思). “Consumption of Coffee and Japanese Taste.” (“コーヒー消費と日本人の嗜好趣味”) Journal of the Open University of Japan, No. 25, 2007, pp. 33-40. (In Japanese.)

5. Whelan, Christal. Kansai Cool. Tuttle, 2014, pp. 100–104.

6. Uehara, Alexandre Ratsuo. “Nikkei Presence in Brazil: Integration and Assimilation” in Cultural exchange between Brazil and Japan : immigration, history, and language, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, 2009, pp. 141–154. https://doi.org/10.15055/00001405

7. Yamawaki, Keizo. “Foreign workers in Japan: a historical perspective” in Japan and Global Migration: Foreign workers and the advent of a multicultural society, edited by Mike Douglas & Glenda S. Roberts, Routledge, 2000, pp. 124–126.

This is the true story of a man who chased his dreams, and found it was a nightmare.

Last time we ended with Hokodo in Kobe, which calls itself the oldest coffee shop in Japan. However, in Ueno 上野, Tokyo another shop claims that title. The Hokodo shop was more of a tea shop which started selling some coffee on the side. This one was pure coffee from the start, and as a bonus has a way more insane backstory.

Tei Ei-kei was born Nishimura Tsurukichi in 1859. His father was a Japanese man named Tomosuke, but as a child Nishimura was adopted by a Taiwanese diplomat named Ei Ei-nei...who was Tomosuke’s foster son. Their family dinners were complicated.

By the time he was a teenager, Tei Ei-kei knew Japanese, Chinese, French, and English. His adoptive father sent him off to Yale to learn about all this new Western modernity stuff that was becoming all the rage.

Rather than waste time studying economics and engineering in New Haven, Tei Ei-kei focused his efforts on studying the coffee houses of New York. He returned to Japan in 1879 with no degree, but with caffeine in his heart. He even stopped by London on the way, to experience its famous cafés.

His life turns into even more of a soap opera upon his return: he married a woman who died of tuberculosis within a few years, then his house burned down, then he married his deceased wife’s sister. In 1888, after years of coffeehouse obsession, Tei Ei-kei finally did it. He opened a fancy, two-story, European-style coffee house in Ueno called Kahiichakan 可否茶館! Kahii was the older Japanese pronunciation of coffee, and chakan a slightly formal suffix for tea houses.

What a nice story about how you should follow your dreams. Thanks for reading today’s article—wait. Oh no.

Tei’s second wife died in 1890, also of tuberculosis. Well, at least his business is super popular...

Tei adored the London coffee houses he had visited, with their gentlemen’s club amenities, so Kahiichakan offered men a place to hang out all day, conduct business, and relax. It provided newspapers and tobacco, and even baths and nap rooms—all for the price of a single cup of coffee. Seems like a fun place to visit.

His business was a labor of love. But not of money. By all accounts Kahiichakan was wildly popular, but perhaps Tei should have taken a few more economics classes at Yale. All that for the price of a cup of coffee seems too good to be true, and his bank account agreed. By 1893 he had to declare bankruptcy.

The failure and financial troubles drove Tei to attempt suicide. Luckily, a friend saved him and paid for him to move to Seattle. Tei opened a dry goods and coffee shop there (this was pre-mermaid Seattle, so it was quite the novel idea), but apparently the city wasn’t ready yet and he ended his life as a dishwasher. He died in Seattle in 1895.

Tei was buried under his birth name Nishimura Tsurukichi in Seattle’s Lakeview Cemetery. One enthusiastic historian notes that his gravestone is “visited by Japanese coffee aficionados and Japanese coffee industry leaders.” Meanwhile, in Ueno, there is a memorial to Tei Ei-kei and the coffee shop of his dreams, Kahiichakan.

Sad for Tei, but you can wash that sad taste from your mouth with some successful coffeeshop owners here:

References

1. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. University of California Press, 2012.

2. Seidensticker, Edward. Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake. Penguin, 1985.

3. Seidensticker, Edward. Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake. Harvard UP, 1991.

4. Sakai, Motoshi (坂井 素思). “Consumption of Coffee and Japanese Taste.” (“コーヒー消費と日本人の嗜好趣味”) Journal of the Open University of Japan, No. 25, 2007, pp. 33-40. (In Japanese.)

5. Whelan, Christal. Kansai Cool. Tuttle, 2014, pp. 100–104.

I’m sure many here are fairly familiar with “oni.” You know, those big, lumbering, ogre-like creatures with horns, sharpened teeth, typically colored red or blue and often carrying around the big kanabo metal clubs. But what if I told you that the o.g. oni from nigh 1000 years ago were actually quite different from their big, burly counterparts.

There’s a collection of folktales from the Heian Period, the Konjaku Monogatari Shu, with a good number of stories about “oni,” and you might be surprised to find that they were only ever vaguely understood and, as a result, ending up being quite a diverse class of monsters.

Most of them were only briefly glimpsed in the dark if seen at all (there’s even one story where the oni is completely invisible). Quite often the only evidence of an oni’s existence is the absolute human mess they leave after they devour someone, as in the case of the story of Ariwara no Nariha losing his lover to an oni in an abandoned shed, or the government official who is killed in the Daijokan in the palace, or most disturbingly, the woman who is snatched away and found folded over a clothes pole with all of her blood and insides seemingly sucked out of her.

Then there are the shapeshifting oni such as the the one who turns into a very handsome man that disappears with an unsuspecting young woman in an open space in the imperial palace complex, or the oni that takes on the form of an old lady in an abandoned house in the mountains of Kitayamashina.

There are also the oni who turn into inanimate objects such as the flying plank of wood that kills a sleeping, unarmed man or the oni that turns into a small, ceramic vase and brings a death curse to an unnamed house. But perhaps my favorite oni story is the one that haunted Agi Bridge. In that story, the oni first takes on the appearance of a beautiful lady to lure in her prey but transforms into a 9 foot tall monster with a red face, blueish-gray skin, dagger like claws and a single amber eye in the middle of its head; the only good description we get for what an oni’s true form is. No mention of horns, funnily enough.

While most oni are only concerned with devouring a whole smorgasbord of human beings, not all of them have the same motivations. There’s the oni of an unnamed, abandoned temple in the capital that takes on the form of a woman and simply wants the lovers who intruded on her turf to just leave. Unfortunately for the lady intruder, she doesn’t vacate the premises fast enough and is rendered comatose by some kind of curse only to die shortly after, but never actually eaten.

There’s an instance of an oni at Kawara no In that just wants to steal the contents of a bag full of snacks, and then there’s the aforementioned invisible oni in the imperial palace that seemed to only want to pull a practical joke on the emperor by repeatedly moving a standing lamp from its designated place into the adjacent building and leaving it middle of the floor. It eventually runs away after getting kicked by a brave courtier and hiding in a closet for a night.

So while we can all appreciate the modern depictions of oni as hulking, horned beasts or as is increasingly becoming common, as cute anime girls, just remember that the oldest descriptions of oni were far more vague and, subsequently, diverse. Do with that information what you will just don’t get too carried away, ok?

This is a guest post from Tales of Dawn and Dusk! Check out his video on the ancient Japanese horror story of the Demon of Agi Bridge here:

It’s a story that seems designed to go viral: a cat, a valuable work of art, a YouTuber with an anime avatar, and a crowdsourcing campaign.

In 2024, the Tokyo National Museum (TNM) 東京国立博物館 received a call that sounded, at first, like the opening of a Japanese horror movie. It was from a couple who owned a house in Tokyo that was slated for demolition. In the house stood a pair of old byōbu 屏風, Japanese folding screens, that had been in the family a long time. The couple had contacted an art dealer, but had been told the screens were too damaged to sell, so now they wanted to donate them.

The TNM experts didn’t expect much, but spat out their tea when they saw two Edo era (1603–1868) folding screens painted with scenes from the Tale of Genji. Careful examination revealed that they were signed by Tosa Mitsuzane 土佐光孚 (1780–1852), an artist who had once painted for the imperial family. It also revealed that the hinges were broken, insects had eaten away at the wood, and a cat had scratched the screens. (And this is why dogs are better: drool and pee are easily removed with a wet wipe.)

The TNM experts were humming with excitement at this point, but the museum only has limited funds to restore works that aren’t listed as National Treasures 国宝 or Important Cultural Properties 重要文化財. How to save the screens? Luckily, this is the 21st century, and you can crowdfund overhyped video games, overengineered juicers, scammy cannabis investment schemes, and the restoration of priceless Edo era artifacts!

So the TNM started a crowdfunding campaign to save the screens.

Enter Juufuutei Raden 儒烏風亭らでん, a VTuber best known for this maddeningly adorable mushroom dance meme:

Years ago Raden-chan saw a Nō mask at the TNM, and she’s been interested in all forms of art ever since. She frequently visits museums and discusses Japanese and Western art in her videos.

Raden-chan donated a few million yen, and mentioned the crowdfunding campaign a few times:

The internet did what the internet does when a cute anime girl points at a button. The campaign page exploded and has by now reached more than twice the original goal of 30 million yen. Nearly a third of the supportive comments mention Raden-chan, and there are even comments in English from non-Japanese Raden-chan fans. The TNM staff thanked Raden-chan in a very emotional post (“I’m writing this reply while crying and with trembling hands”).

The campaign ended on December 19, 2025 with 70,190,000 yen, or about 445K USD.

It’s a wholesome story. Somewhere, a cat is still unapologetic.

In the 1600s and 1700s, European powers were happily out pillaging the world, treating different-looking humans like cattle, and trading uncouth quantities of gold for strangely pungent plants. Meanwhile in Japan, due to some spoilsport Portuguese Jesuits (long story), trade with the rest of the world was restricted and the country was not yet overrun by 7-Eleven, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks. The Japanese were busy sitting at home playing with shells, putting out a fine blaze every two weeks or so, and perfectly comfortable in their belief that a Frappuccino was a Pokémon.

The only European barbarians still allowed to trade in Japan were the Dutch (whom the slightly colorblind Japanese always described as “red-haired”). In the early Edo period (1603–1868), they started offering a disgusting burnt bean drink for trade. Some adventurous Japanese souls tried the vile concoction.

The best known and most amusing description is from Ōta Nanpo 大田 南畝, an Edo-era poet. In 1804 he took a job with the Nagasaki Magistrate’s office and had a chance to visit the Dutch trading ships. He had this to say about the hospitality of his hosts:

On the Red-Haired Ship, they recommended something called kauhi. It’s made by roasting beans until they’re black, grinding them into powder, and mixing them with white sugar. It has a burnt smell, and the taste is unbearable.

The Dutch reaction to nattō has been lost to time but was probably similar.

Japanese appreciation of coffee didn’t increase tremendously in the next half century. Probably it was mostly used as medicine. In 1853–54, however, an obnoxiously loud and ungentlemanly heavily armed American came knocking and demanded that Japan start trading with the United States. The Shogunate, likely fed up with the disgusting bean water the Dutch kept serving them, was convinced by the polite request made via warships.

Over the next few years, Japan made treaties with other foreign powers, and all sorts of barbarians started coming to the country, trading their wares and bringing their weird burnt-bean-drinking customs. By 1864 there was a café called Victoria Coffee House in the foreign settlement in the port of Yokohama, but coffee was still a strange novelty unknown to most Japanese, the type of thing your cousin who studied abroad wouldn’t shut up about.

In 1867, the politician and businessman Shibusawa Eiichi 渋沢 栄一 was served coffee by some French barbarians. He was a lot less critical than Ōta:

After the meal, they served us coffee, which is water made from boiled beans. I mixed it with sugar and milk and drank it. It left me feeling extremely refreshed.

Around the same time, there was a tea shop and export firm in Kobe called Hokodo. They brought back some coffee beans and started selling coffee. It seems by this time, coffee had gained some traction. The shop still exists today and calls itself the oldest coffee shop in Japan.

But is it?! Tune in next time to find out.

References

1. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. University of California Press, 2012.

2. Seidensticker, Edward. Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake. Penguin, 1985.

3. Seidensticker, Edward. Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake. Harvard UP, 1991.

4. Sakai, Motoshi (坂井 素思). “Consumption of Coffee and Japanese Taste.” (“コーヒー消費と日本人の嗜好趣味”) Journal of the Open University of Japan, No. 25, 2007, pp. 33-40. (In Japanese.)

5. Whelan, Christal. Kansai Cool. Tuttle, 2014, pp. 100–104.

🚨 Warning, some images are explicit

Everyday you’re bombarded with videos, photos, podcasts — all kinds of media hungry for your attention. People of the past didn’t have this luxury. They had to crawl through the trenches of boredom with nothing but gossip and lines of ink printed on paper with wood. Being in charge of one of the few entertainment mediums, woodblock printers had to get creative.

The innocent image above is a woodblock print by Utagawa Kunifusa called Playing Sugoroku at a Heated Table. Sugoroku was a board game. It looks like friends playing an innocent game together. Yeah, they’re playing together alright, but it’s hardly innocent.

Their heads tilt towards the table and their expressions are a bit weird, like something else is going on. The women even cover their faces a bit. What is it?

In kabuki theatre, actors would quickly change appearance or face masks, putting on a different role immediately. These were called hayagawari 早替り (“quick-change techniques”). Artists thought, “Why let theatres have all the fun?” and made up ways to change their art right before your eyes, letting you see the image in a totally different way.

This type of art was called hayagawari-e 早替り絵 (“quick-change pictures”), or komochi-e 子持絵. These pictures had flaps that you could pull to one side to reveal hidden art. The porn industry of the time would make prints of normal non-sexual scenes, but flip up the flap and it’s pure debauchery.

So here’s the original artwork with the flap pulled to one side to reveal what’s underneath the tablecloth.

Rather than concentrating on the game, they’re playing footsie. More than just footsie, even. What are his toes doing? OH MY GOD.

Sex can seem magical, but in ancient Japan, it was more than magical, it was sacred.

This is a followup post to the video on utagaki (歌垣), an ancient Japanese festival that started with a song party and ended with an orgy. It probably started some time in the Kofun period (250 - 538 AD), but had a huge influence on festivals and religious rituals throughout Japanese history. I’ll talk about some examples.

To recap, the main features of an utagaki were:

1. A courtship song competition to determine who you could marry or sleep with.

2. Some kind of sexual activity.

When Japan began Westernizing in the Meiji period (1868 - 1912), the government banned these practices. However, up until the early 1900s, many still survived.

In the Usukinu village in Ōita prefecture, they had a festival of a guardian god every August where married and unmarried women had to sleep with three men. Also in Ōita prefecture, in the Hita district, during a village fair, women slept with random men at a shrine.

In October, at a shrine in the Sōma district of Ibaraki prefecture held a festival that ended with men and women making love. It was supposed to enhance fertility.

As mentioned in the video, up until the 1920s, in the Izu islands during the Obon festival, couples brazenly had sex in public. People were just having a good ol’ time coupling on the beach, the street corner, next to people’s front doors—no horizontal surface was safe.

Obon used to be much more adult. If you didn’t know, Obon is a well-known festival still celebrated today to welcome the spirits of the dead who are visiting family members.

In the past, on Awaji, female villagers performed group dances during Obon. They wore folded straw hats that covered their faces.

Afterwards, men in the audience came up to a girl they liked and asked to spend the night with her. Even married people did it. After that night, no one talked about what happened during Obon, even to their spouses.

One person in the Meiji period wrote about his childhood regarding Obon. In his hometown, people loved the Obon dance. Women danced in a circle while men in masks stood in the audience. When a man spotted a woman he liked, he entered the circle to signal his interest.

The author heard one masked man say, “You went to the Atago mountain last night, didn’t you?”

His friend replied, “No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, I know you did.”

A third man said slyly, “If you go there in the morning, you’ll find all sorts of things left on the ground.”

They laughed. The author, who was still a boy, felt a sneaking suspicion the adults were talking about something dirty, and ran home.

And that was how I grew to hate a little boy from the past. Imagine what interesting, juicy information we might have lost because a boy felt icky.

The Yami Matsuri, or Hell Festival, in Fuchū celebrated the god Jizo. It seems really fun. It started off with a parade across town where people carried around an altar with a phallus on it, a parade that left a hundred awkward conversations between parents and young children in its wake. The partygoers drank and sang and generally made a lot of noise.

After a while, someone would cut electricity to the town, covering it in darkness. The paraders then headed to a local shrine. It was said that Jizo (specifically rokujizo, a row of 6 Jizo statues) liked darkness and encouraged people to do crazy things.

People danced and sang at the top of their lungs and made noise until they reached the shrine, at which point they…sang and danced some more. The party eventually escalated to sex and lasted until dawn. The authorities tried to ban this festival multiple times, and finally succeeded in 1953.

These festivals have mostly vanished or they’ve been much toned down these days, like washed out rock bands playing acoustic versions of their old bangers. As Japan industrialized and became more connected, it unfortunately got harder to hide your typical mass orgy from the authorities. You’d be hard-pressed to find one today. Oh well, at least we still have OnlyFans creators.

References

1. Ryang, Sonia (2006). Love in Modern Japan.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ckunitama_Shrine#Kurayami_matsuri

🚨 Some images are explicit, be warned.

This lovely woodblock print has a sequel that your mother will disapprove of.

Made by Suzuki Harunobu 鈴木春信, it shows a couple under a willow tree in a snowy landscape. The artwork is called Shared Umbrella or Crow and Heron in the Snow, because of their black and white clothing.

They’re dressed like the kind of people who sip wine from fancy lacquerware cups while showing concern for the lower class. He wears a sleek black coat while she has a pure white kimono. Rich patterns adorn their clothes. Her unplucked eyebrows and long sleeves tell us she’s a young unmarried woman.

It doesn’t look like it, but they’re doing something inappropriate for a couple in the Edo period (1603 - 1868). They’re strolling side by side, holding an umbrella. In public, ideally, the woman was supposed to walk behind the man, close enough to be related, but far enough to leave room for the patriarchy. Sharing an umbrella intimately like this would have been a public display of affection that got you looks (some envious no doubt).

The couple may be heading towards a double love suicide. Their black and white colors mirror the traditional colors of a bride and groom, turning the image into a kind of doomed wedding portrait.

The wedding colors make their devotion clear, and that devotion becomes a tragedy. A double love suicide usually happened when society condemned the couple’s relationship. Their only escape was to leave the world together.

A followup print was later made, either by Harunobu or another artist named Isoda Koryūsai. We’re not sure who because it was unsigned. It was called Lovers Under a Willow in the Snow.

Unfortunately, I cannot find an image of the colored print online so you’re stuck with this black-and-white photo I took from a book (if any ukiyo-e experts can find a color image, you’d be my hero and I’d write you a haiku).

Update: User lyca found a color image here, my actual hero. As promised, the haiku is at the end of the article.

The follow-up print shows the same couple, no longer so elegant. She leans on that same willow, pulling up her robe for the man about to commit several violations of the Confucian codes of decency. The umbrella lies forgotten. Their dialogue text reveals something funny: they don’t speak in a high-born manner at all.

“Is it all right if I lean on the bend in this tree to do the thing I want?”
“No need to ask.”

It might look like a parody of the first print, but nope. It’s actually part of a common practice where artists riffed on each other’s art. One artist may take an old piece he did or he’d take the work of a different artist and make another version, changing certain parts or continuing the story.

In today’s terms, it’d be like:

• John draws Mario jumping on a Goomba

• Hannah draws both Mario and Princess Peach jumping on a Goomba

• Tom draws Princess Peach leaning on a Goomba with Mario plowing her from behind, while John and Hannah stare in horror. Tom is a maniac.

It may seem like the second print is making fun of the first, but it actually “completes” the story. These were both images meant to titillate. The average viewer of the first image would have been thinking something similar to the second image anyway. Why not give viewers what they want?

For user lyca who found the color image:

Nowadays, poetry is a lost art only practiced by English majors and those who just upset their girlfriends really badly. But if you were a Japanese noble of the Heian period (794 - 1185), it was a weapon in a warzone called the imperial court. It determined whether you lived or died. Socially. Well, I guess indirectly poetry could determine whether you actually died, because it allowed you to make friends and allies, people you could count on to have a slightly lower chance of betraying you.

As a noble, you had to be armed with metaphors and similes, and, because the Heian dating scene was totally debaucherous, double entendres.

A proper gentleman or lady was expected to come up with poems on the spot, whether the person was bantering, flirting, or negotiating an alliance to backstab a brother.

“In spring, the plum blossoms bloom and fall.
Just like my brother, who never calls.”

- Minamoto no Yoritomo probably, I wouldn’t put it past him

Courtship was done through poetry. Heian women could not show their faces in public to strangers, so a nobleman who was interested in a noble lady had little chance to talk to her. Instead, he had to send her a poem, wait for a response poem, then dissect the response like a student doing a literary analysis to figure out whether she was the woman of his dreams, or more likely, to see what he could write next to get under her sheets.

A woman receiving a poem was looking to see if her pursuer was intelligent, funny, and talented. A poem with overdone themes was seen as boring and was likely to be rejected.

Famous court lady and early blogger Sei Shōnagon had no mercy for bad poetry. She wrote that she lost respect for anyone who didn’t incorporate her references into his reply poem.

She also wrote:

It also dampens the spirit when you're leading a heady life in the swim of things and you receive some boring little old-fashioned poem that reeks of the longueurs of the writer…

Once you look up what “longueurs” means, you’ll see that, yeah, people were indeed judged harshly over their poetry.

Now if you're sitting there caressing your Creative Writing degree and thinking, I’m decent enough to survive in the Heian court, put down that Macbook Air for just a minute and step out of the time machine before you embarrass yourself.

You couldn’t just drop a poem you pre-wrote in the middle of a conversation. That would reek of trying too hard. There were rules. Simple rules, but important:

1. Poetry is a two-way street.

2. Prepared poems are different from live poems.

3. Live poems should be spontaneous.

Poetry goes both ways

The first rule, the foundation for most Heian poetry, the rule that would get you the dreaded awkward stare if you broke it, was reciprocity.

If you were talking to a friend and he breaks into a heartfelt poem about his love for his cat, how would you respond? After pushing away the intrusive thought that you have pretty weird friends, you would probably call his poem beautiful or ask him how long it took for him to come up with something this amazingly corny, depending on your friendship. Both of these would have been the wrong reaction.

Heian poems were not just meant to be enjoyed, they demanded a reply poem to complete the thought, answer a question, or take the topic to new heights.

Often, an opening poem was short and incomplete. It’d be like if someone says, “Roses are red, violets are blue” and then just stops. You can tell immediately the poem is dangling, and needs a few good lines to catch it: “I feel awkward, what about you?”

Here’s an exchange from The Gossamer Years (Kagerō Nikki) where the author, Michitsuna no Haha, writes her husband, Fujiwara no Kaneie, a poem:

Because the wild waves
have rolled in to ravage
the beach it once trod,
no longer does the plover
leave its tracks in the sand.

The plover here is her husband Kaneie. He had left a book at her place and sent a person to pick it up. She was unhappy that Kaneie rarely visited, and wrote the letter to say, basically, “Why don’t you come more often, you big meanie?”

He responds with,

You may return the book,
thinking my affections have strayed,
but the beach plover
wishes to leave its tracks
on no other shore than yours.

“Baby, you’re the only one for me.”

She hits him with a snarky reply:

Were I to seek
the place where the beach plover
leaves its tracks these days,
I would doubtless see many shores
as I sought to find the way.

Why? Because Kaneie was a big ol’ shore hopper, visiting different shores as often as I visit boba tea shops.

Poems invited conversation. You had to incorporate the imagery and themes of the initial poem in your reply. Going back and forth using metaphors and wordplay made things fun. Probably why it was perfect for flirting.

Not responding to a poem would be like if someone offered you a fist for a fist bump and you just left him hanging. Not responding to a potential lover’s poem meant a rejection.

Prepared vs live poems

Expectations were different depending on whether you prepared a poem in the comfort of your own home and then sent it out, or you came up with the poem on the spot.

A live poem didn’t have to be one recited verbally, it could be written. Say, you’re at a party and you see a cute guy with nice makeup and even nicer career. You may decide to jot down a poem on a piece of paper and tell a maid to hand it to him.

Now you might expect writing a prepared poem to have been much less stressful—no rush and plenty of time to consult the thesaurus. However, everyone knew this and so had much higher standards for prepared poems than live ones.

Speaking a poem aloud might have been a better idea than writing one. In a dating scene where people mostly communicated by letter, where you didn’t have the benefit of seeing facial expressions and body language, you best believe people turned into L from Death Note reading into every brushstroke and crease for any morsel of information about the author they could find, real or imagined.

Was his calligraphy imperfect? His intelligence must be imperfect. Is there a smudge at the corner? Incompetent. Did he fold the letter one degree off a straight line? He’s a serial killer.

Don’t think too hard

So what about live poetry? You might have the impression that Japanese nobles walked around court like light-skinned Tupacs with PhDs spitting profound and colorful bars, but that actually did not happen.

Most poems created on the spot were just “meh.” People usually treated it like how we would treat tossing out a joke, not like they were performing for a competition. No one expected a lyrical masterpiece. The standards were much lower than written poems. Of course, we’re talking about Heian standards here. Their idea of low standards was closer to your Asian classmate’s idea of low test scores.

The lower standards were okay because of the third rule on our list: spontaneity. You had to treat a live poem like a derivative. Yes, the calculus kind.

A derivative (the red line).

A derivative is the rate of change of a function at one instant in time. To find it, you must look at a single point in time, not one millisecond before or after. A poem must feel like it was born that very moment.

A lady receives a flirt

This scene of a noble attempting to flirt, from The Pillow Book (Makura no Sōshi), demonstrates this idea (and other poetical dynamics).

During a festival, the ladies dress in indigo robes and sit behind their blinds, as usual, enjoying the performances. Lady Kohyōe’s cord comes loose and she asks for help, expecting a friend or a maid to fix it, but a Captain Sanekata walks up to her and boldly ties her cord. A solid first move, Captain.

Then this man who likely remembers people’s birthdays tells her a poem:

A wintry indifference
freezes the mountain well's blue waters
to a knot of ice.
How might I melt that cord
and loosen its icy knot?

Can you guess what that means? If not, fear not, daddy’s here’s to help.

I don’t know what he did before, but Captain Sanekata’s current job is clearly being captain of wordplay. The poem uses the term 山井 (“mountain well,” pronounced yamai). Yamai is also the pronunciation of “mountain indigo,” a plant used to make indigo dye. And what is Lady Kohyōe wearing? Yep, indigo.

The frozen well water in the poem refers to her cold demeanor. “You’re so cold to me,” Sanetaka is saying in the first half of the poem.

Sanekata also uses the character 紐 (“cord,” pronounced himo). It also happens to be the pronunciation of “ice surface.” Saying he wants to melt that cord means he wants to melt her icy surface. There’s also an additional scandalous meaning of wanting to remove the cords holding her clothes together.

So to these clever verses, what does Kohyōe say in response? Nothing. Not a word. Maybe she’s young and unused to being hit on so publicly, or maybe her tongue has strayed into the path of a sudden wave of embarrassment, but she says nothing back.

Now if a person had trouble coming up with a response, it was polite for someone else to compose a poem on the dummy’s behalf. And that does not happen here. Sanekata goes back to his seat.

The minutes slip by, sneaking expectant glances at Kohyōe as they pass before tiptoeing on. Awkwardness hangs about the room. A messenger even skulks over to ask one of the ladies (not Kohyōe, of course) when the reply poem might be ready. He walks around all stressed out like a husband in the hospital waiting room unsure whether his wife is going to give birth safely or she doesn’t exist.

Luckily, our girl Sei Shōnagon is sitting nearby. She wants to respond for the poor girl, but does not know if she can match the poetic firepower of Sanekata. However, she reminds herself of an important truth: it is better to think of a poem in the moment than to create the perfect one. One should not take too long. A good poem comes spontaneously.

She writes one and has another lady deliver it verbally:

The cord's knot is loose
as ice on the water's surface.
It finds itself undone
by the warm sunlight of a garland
of festive fern leaves in the hair.

Shōnagon plays with the ice theme. The cord’s knot is loosening, and so is the ice. The term for “sunlight” is pronounced hikage, but it also means a type of fern. Sanekata and the other men in the ceremony wear garlands with this fern design. Wonderfully improper.

Sadly, it was all for naught because the anxious lady she sends to recite the poem gets so nervous that her words come out like the stapler guy from Office Space. Sanekata keeps asking, “Huh? What? What’d she say?” Fortunately, the woman compensates by reciting it more impressively, which successfully makes her stutter something fierce.

Witnessing this sorry sight, Shōnagon is actually relieved he didn’t hear her poem because she thinks it’s pretty bad. Ma’am, if that’s bad writing, may my YouTube video scripts be as badly written.

You may think the rules of poetry were harsh, but even more strict was the language you had to write in. Click here to see the difference between masculine and feminine writing.

Did you know I have a Patreon? You can find more articles like this, and exclusive videos like this new one debunking a persistent myth about Japan.

Check it out!

References

1. Bowring, Richard (1996). The Diary of Lady Murasaki.

2. McKinney, Meredith (2006). The Pillow Book.

3. McCullough, Helen Craig (1991). Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology.

Setsuwa (説話, loosely translated ‘spoken stories’) are folktales, myths, and anecdotes that were first shared orally and eventually written down. Kokon Chomonjū (古今著聞集, “A Collection of Notable Tales Old and New”) is one of the most famous setsuwa collections. It was completed in 1254, but many of its stories are much older.

Ōiko Gets Tickled

Do you like strong women, sumo wrestling, and onigiri (rice balls)? Well, here’s a cool story from the Kokon Chomonjū about all three.

The wrestler Saeki Ujinaga (氏長 佐伯) was traveling from Echizen province to Kyoto to compete in a sumo tournament, dreaming of fame, fortune, and probably famous Kyoto courtesans. On his way, he saw a delightful young woman carrying a bucket of water on her head.

Recklessly assuming this was your average beautiful, bucket-carrying maiden, he introduced himself by trying to tickle her under her arm. Unfortunately for him, this was no ordinary bucket maiden. The woman laughed at his feeble attempts at sexual harassment and without letting go of her bucket or spilling a single drop, she squeezed her arm to her body like an organic clamp, trapping his hand. No matter how hard Ujinaga tried, he couldn't free his hand. Then the woman just walked home, carrying her bucket and one humbled sumo wrestler hanging from her arm like a kawaii phone charm.

Once home, they introduced themselves more properly. The woman was Takashima Ōiko (高島 大井子), a rice farmer. When Ujinaga admitted he was a wrestler on his way to a sumo tournament in the capital, Ōiko gently bruised his ego: "There are many strong wrestlers in the capital. You’re not a complete weakling, but you're not ready to face them. Perhaps you better stay here a while and let me train you."

Ujinaga realized Ōiko probably was right (and perhaps he was hoping for more tickling), so he stayed with her for three weeks. Every day Ōiko cooked rice for Ujinaga and packed it into onigiri, squeezing them tight.

The first day, Ujinaga was startled by the firmness of the rice, but he dutifully chewed through the onigiri. Ōiko, like a deranged fitness instructor sous-chef, increased the resistance of the rice each day without telling Ujinaga. After three weeks, he still marveled at the density and chewiness of the onigiri, but he had grown much stronger without even noticing, and his jawline probably looked amazing.

“You will have no trouble with the wrestlers in the capital now,” Ōiko said, and she sent him off. History does not record how his fortified chewing muscles helped him in the ring.

Ōiko Deals With Terrible Neighbors

Ōiko was too mighty to be contained by a single tale. There’s a second story about her in the Kokon Chomonjū, where she flexed her negotiation muscles. During a long drought, the farmers in Takashima argued about the distribution of water to their rice paddies. Some of the more foolish ones redirected water away from Ōiko’s rice paddy and into their own. Now Ōiko wasn’t the type to calmly file a formal complaint. She waited for nightfall. She picked up a rock larger than most Tokyo apartments and casually dropped it in the river, redirecting the water back to her paddy.

When morning came, the cheeky farmers got up to survey the results of their ill-gotten hydration, and found their fields dry. They soon discovered the boulder and lamented. They tried to move it, but a hundred people together budged the rock not an inch. When they begged Ōiko to please remove it she kindly agreed, and left it somewhere where it wouldn’t be in the way. Strangely, no one argued about water after that.

Which Version?

The version of the first story I used is from the Watson and Shirane book (see references below). It’s a bit different from the other versions I’ve seen, including this copy of the Kokon Chomonjū online. Watson and Shirane’s book doesn’t say they’ve changed the story so I’m not sure whether they used a different source or decided to change the story a bit.

In the more common version, poor Ujinaga at first cannot even bite into Ōiko’s onigiri because it seems to be hard as a rock. The second week, he is able to take a small bite. By the third week, he’s eating it like a champ.

I like the Watson and Shirane version because an onigiri so hard it can’t be eaten at all makes less sense to me, but who knows, maybe there are types of onigiri that are really hard to eat (especially if I try to make one). Also, these were originally oral stories so there could be many different variations.

Now Ōiko was just your average supernaturally strong woman, not a sumo wrestler. But there were actually official female sumo wrestlers in the past, with glorious names like Big Boobs and Holder of the Balls. Read about them here.

References

1. Dykstra, Yoshiko K. “Notable tales old and new: Tachibana Narisue’s Kokon Chomonjū,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 469–493. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2385331

2. Mayer, Fanny Hagin (trans.) & Yanagita Kunio, “Yanagita Kunio: Japanese folk tales,” Folklore Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1952, pp. i–97.

3. Watson, Burton (trans.), Shirane Haruo (ed.), The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales. Columbia UP, 2011, pp. 126–128.

4. “The legend of Ōiko’s stone“ from https://liftingstones.org/articles/oikos-stone (retrieved 2025-07-25)

In Japan’s Edo period (1603 - 1868), firemen held a special place in people’s hearts. “Fires and fights are the flowers of Edo” was a common saying. When fires broke out in the capital, these tattooed, sake-fueled heroes rushed in, shouting and swinging their hooks.

The city was made of wood, paper, and wishful thinking, so “fighting fire with water” didn’t get you far. Buckets and pumps existed, sure, but by the time you found enough water, the house was already charcoal.

Instead, Edo’s firefighters (hikeshi 火消) often went for the “if it can’t burn, it can’t spread” approach. They used hooks on poles and their bare hands to tear down houses, rip off roofs, and smash walls around the fire’s path. Their coats were thick and their skin thicker. They charged toward danger while everyone else ran screaming in the opposite direction.

This art print from Utagawa Kuniyoshi shows firemen in fish form, holding reeds with hooks. One carries a matoi 纏, a standard that hikeshi used to alert people that there was a fire in the area.

Why fish? Edo artists drew people as animals to get around government censorship laws against artwork of courtesans and actors. Humanoid animals quickly became a popular genre. It’s also kind of funny that fish are fighting fires underwater.

A cute, fluffy white hare once lived on Oki Island, in Inaba Province. He very much wanted to get to mainland Inaba, but the sea was filled with wani (和邇). Literary historians enjoy arguing whether wani should be read “shark,” “crocodile,” “dragon,” or “sea monster,” so I’ll annoy all of them and call them crocosharks.

The adorable white hare was afraid he’d get eaten if he swam across, so he decided to trick the crocosharks. He slyly bragged to a passing crocoshark that his family was bigger than the crocoshark’s. The proud creature took immediate offense and disagreed, to which the cunning bunny replied, “Why don’t you line up your family here between Oki Island and the mainland and let me see?”

Within minutes, the waters were filled with crocosharks all lined up from one shore to the other. The wily white hare oohed and aahed and said “There are so many of you! Let me walk across your backs, so I can count you properly.” The crocosharks were the type to think that a Nigerian Prince had left them a billion Yen and that hot, horny singles were in their area, and so they readily agreed to let the hare hop across their backs.

As soon as he reached the shore of Inaba, the adorable bunny turned into an abominable bully: he taunted the crocosharks like a Bond villain, explaining his exploitative scheme. Unfortunately, although the bunny was wily, he was also bad at judging distances, because the last crocoshark managed to reach out and grab him by the tail and drag him into a whirlpool of angry teeth.

The evidently vegetarian crocosharks then tore all the fur off the white bunny before tossing him back on the beach.

While the formerly white bunbun tried to hide his newly nude buns in the tall grass, he saw the strangest sight: a large group of gods marching along the beach, more than you could count. They were all brothers, on their way to woo Yagamihime (八上比売), the princess of Inaba. When they saw the miserable bunny, they decided to prank him. “Do you want your fur to grow back, little hare? Then all you need to do is bathe in the sea and dry off in the wind!” they said.

The white hare was as gullible as the crocosharks, and immediately jumped in the sea, where the salt stung his sensitive skin. Not only that, when he crawled out and stood on the beach, the wind blew sand into his freshly salted wounds. The brothers laughed at the hare’s plight and moved on.

A short while later, another god arrived, carrying a huge basket. His name was Ōkuninushi (大国主), and he was the youngest of the brothers. He had no intention of wooing the princess, but was forced to come on the trip to carry everybody else’s luggage. Unlike his older brothers, Ōkuninushi was a kind god, and he took pity on the poor hare, asking him what had happened.

When the hare admitted the full story to him, Ōkuninushi pointed out that the hare got his punishment for deceiving the crocosharks, and then told him to bathe in the river and roll around in cattails. After he followed Ōkuninushi’s advice, the hare found to his surprise that his wounds had stopped hurting, and that his fur started growing back immediately.

Being an adorable, fluffy white bunbun again, he thanked Ōkuninushi profusely and turned into a clairvoyant dating coach. He prophesied that Yagamihime would not marry any of the mean older brothers and would instead swipe right on the kindhearted Ōkuninushi.

Ōkuninushi and Yagamihime did indeed get married, and the older brothers gracefully accepted Yagamihime’s decision. (Just kidding, they totally tried to kill Ōkuninushi, but that’s a story for another time.)

References

1. Chamberlain, Basil Hall (transl.). The Kojiki. https://sacred-texts.com/shi/kj/kj028.htm

2. Ozaki, Yei Theodora. Japanese Folktales: Classic Stories from Japan’s Enchanted Past. Tuttle, 2018 (1970), pp. 190–197.