A boy stronger than men

First came lightning. On a night that splits the Ashigara mountains from ridge to valley, a woman sleeping on a moss-covered rock receives a son from the heavens. The god of thunder descends to her in the form of a red dragon, amid the roar and the downpour. In time, she gives birth to a boy with skin so flushed it is almost crimson. No one from the village at the foot of the mountains will see him in his first years. He grows up in the thicket, nursed by a mother who is part witch, part deity – and of whom the Japanese to this day cannot say with certainty whether she should be feared or adored.

This is how one of the oldest Japanese stories begins. And yet almost everything we know about it is younger than it seems. The song that every Japanese child knows by heart is little more than a century old and was composed on government commission. The name "Kintarō" in its childish form appears only in 1809. The famous red candy with his face on every cross-section – an invention from the time of Emperor Meiji. And under each of these layers lies an older one: a thirteenth-century collection of court tales, the diary of a regent from the year one thousand, and finally – somewhere at the very bottom – the cult of thunder and the fear of wild, independent femininity. Yamanba – witch, or priestess of a forgotten god of the mountains? A beautiful woman full of maternal tenderness and care, or a cruel demon who devours people?

Who is her little son, Kintarō? A boy whose likeness today hangs above the cradles of Japanese infants, and whose sign appears on red bibs. A red figure with an axe on his shoulder, wrestling a bear, felling trees. Today, too, parents in this way ask fate that their child may grow healthy and strong. "Like Kintarō." But behind that simple figurine stretches a thousand years of tales, into which Japan packed far more than a wish for health. It packed in its fear of the mountains, its attitude toward mothers and women, its idea of what a true man is.

Trunk, bear, axe

Let us start with what every Japanese child can hum. The song about Kintarō is short and brazenly cheerful:

まさかりかついで　きんたろう　くまにまたがり　おうまのけいこ　ハイ シィ ドウ ドウ　ハイ ドウ ドウ　ハイ シィ ドウ ドウ　ハイ ドウ ドウ

あしがらやまの　やまおくで　けだものあつめて　すもうのけいこ　ハッケ ヨイヨイ　ノコッタ　ハッケ ヨイヨイ　ノコッタ

(Masakari katsuide Kintarō

Kuma ni matagari, ouma no keiko

Hai shi dō dō, hai dō dō

Hai shi dō dō, hai dō dō

Ashigara-yama no yama-oku de

Kedamono atsumete sumō no keiko

Hakkeyoi-yoi, nokotta

Hakkeyoi-yoi, nokotta)

"With an axe on his shoulder,

Kintarō, astride a bear,

practises his horseback riding.

Hey, whoa, whoa, hey whoa, whoa!

Hey, whoa, whoa, hey whoa, whoa!

Deep in the Ashigara mountains,

having gathered the animals,

he practises sumo wrestling.

Ready, go! Still in the ring!

Ready, go! Still in the ring!"

This is not an ancient lullaby. It was written in 1900 by Ishihara Wasaburō, with music by Tamura Torazō, and it found its way into the school songbook Yōnen shōka (幼年唱歌, "Songs for the Youngest") in the Meiji era, when the fresh state was building a modern school system and needed a repertoire for it. In other words: the melody we consider timeless is just over a century old and was composed on government commission. This is the first of many surprises in this story. The Kintarō we know is largely a much later product than the legend about him. And someone different…

The figure of the child himself, however, is very old. In the simplest version, the one from picture books, Kintarō lives in the Ashigara mountains, on the border of today's Kanagawa and Shizuoka prefectures. He has superhuman strength. He plays with animals, holds sumo tournaments with them, throws bears, uproots trees and lays them across rushing streams. He wears a red diamond-shaped haragake (腹掛け), a bib-breastplate with a large character 金 (kin, "gold") on his chest, and he wields a masakari (鉞), a broad woodcutter's axe. Right away a small correction to what sometimes appears in loose "interpretations": no she-bear raised him. The bear is his wrestling partner and steed, not his nurse. The nurse, and a very particular one, is… his mother. We shall come back to her shortly, because it is she who carries the full weight of this story in its original, ancient form.

The axe, too, is no accident. It is not a spear (or a sword), the warrior's mark, nor a bow, the aristocrat's mark. It is a work tool, a piece of heavy iron used to chop firewood and clear paths through the forest. Kintarō was not born to write poetry at the imperial court. He was born to work in the mountains, and it is precisely this working, "plebeian" strength that will become the heart of his charm.

It is worth pausing on the wrestling, because it is not merely colourful ornament. Kintarō fights the animals under the rules of sumō, and sumo in old Japan was not a spectacle but a rite. A religious ritual, not a sport. It originates in ceremonies performed at shrines to pray for good harvests; in myth, it is a trial of strength deciding the fate of the gods. The boy who steps into sumo with a bear and wins is not playing a game – he is repeating a primeval gesture in which a bodily contest with wild power is a way of taming it. The cry that the animal-referees shout in the song, hakkeyoi, nokotta (which, for want of better words, I have translated as "Ready, go! Still in the ring!"), are to this day the very words with which the referee urges on wrestlers on the tournament clay. Little Kintarō performs in the forest a rite whose full weight we shall understand only when we see in it the echo of the temple ring.

The content of the most popular version of the legend

It begins at night, high in the Ashigara mountains. Yamanba, the mountain witch – or, as others would have it, the very deity of the mountains in female form – sleeps deep in the forest. A wild, terrible storm rolls over her. In the lightning, a red dragon descends to her and visits her in her sleep. Yamanba wakes pregnant. In time she gives birth to a boy with skin so flushed it is almost crimson. She calls him Kintarō, "the Golden Boy," because the child is her whole treasure.

He grows faster than other children. As a toddler he already wields a masakari (鉞), a woodcutter's axe that an adult could barely lift. The forest is his home, his companions the bear, the deer, the monkey, the hare. With each he wrestles in sumo, each he defeats, and none does he harm. When needed, he helps the animals, using his strength on their behalf. His mother bathes him in the hot springs of Hakone, nurses him at her breast, teaches him the speech of the mountains.

One day, Minamoto no Yorimitsu – one of the most powerful warlords of the Heian era – rides through the Ashigara pass on his way to the capital. His retainer, Usui no Sadamitsu, spots in the forest a boy in the middle of a wrestling match with a bear. Yorimitsu knows at once what he is seeing. He takes him into his service and gives him his adult name: Sakata no Kintoki. So the boy from the mountains arrives in the capital, takes his place among the four most loyal men of his lord – the shitennō – and with them sets out for Mount Ōe to slay by trickery the demonic chieftain Shuten-dōji.

The mother we feared and loved

In the most colourful version of the legend, Kintarō's mother is yamanba (山姥), the mountain witch. And not just any. According to Zentaiheiki (前太平記), a popular pseudo-historical work compiled at the turn of the nineteenth century, yamanba once fell asleep on a mountaintop, and in her dream a red dragon visited her amid thunder and lightning. She woke up pregnant. Thus was conceived the boy with red skin, the son of thunder. For the red dragon is none other than raijin (雷神), the god of thunder, and in iconography he wields precisely an axe. The child's red complexion, his axe, his impossible strength – all of these are traces of the old Japanese cult of thunder, hidden under a layer of a children's tale.

To appreciate just how exceptional his mother was, one must know who yamanba was to the Japanese of old. She is one of the most ambiguous figures in all of folklore. In one tale, Sanmai no ofuda (三枚の御札, "Three Talismans"), yamanba is a man-eating monster who lures into her hut a boy-novice lost in the forest and at night turns from a kindly old woman into a creature ready to devour him; the boy escapes only thanks to three talismans from an old monk, which one after another conjure before her a mountain, a river, and a sea of fire to slow her down. In another – a gentle deity who comes down from the mountains to the marketplace and generously bestows good fortune on a person of pure heart. She nurses at the breast, gives birth on a mountain rock, takes care of others. The same being devours and feeds, terrifies and blesses.

Ethnographers had no doubt this was not inconsistency but a record of something deeper. Yanagita Kunio, the father of Japanese ethnography, saw in yamanba the memory of an ancient female deity of the mountains, capable of both punishing and rewarding. Orikuchi Shinobu went further and called her a priestess serving yama no kami (山の神), the god of the mountains, or even his wife. In a culture that lived off the forest – timber, charcoal, game, mushrooms – the mountain was both sacred and dangerous. There lived woodcutters, charcoal-burners, itinerant craftsmen turning wooden bowls, people on the margins of village life. It was they who told stories of yamanba, because they were the ones who truly "met" her: in the wind, in the mist, in a sudden chill on the ridge. The mountain woman-deity was their way of naming what in the mountains is greater than man.

And now the most interesting part. When such a being becomes the mother of a hero, the story tells us something about how old Japan thought about strength. True power does not come from the court, from the clan, from appointment. It comes from wildness, from the mountains, from what lies outside the order. Kintarō is strong because he is in part non-human, because the milk he drank came from a being who herself was half-divine. This is a vision in which the wild is a source of health, not a threat to it.

The mountain woman also had her dignified, theatrical face. In the nō repertoire there exists a play, Yamanba (山姥), attributed to the tradition of Zeami, in which yamanba is neither a monster nor a mother, but an elusive being wandering endlessly through the mountains, bearing the weight of human deeds. It is she, invisible, who helps the woodcutter carry his logs and the spinning woman turn her wheel – she is the labour of the mountains, which happens of itself, beyond the human eye. So when such a being becomes, in another story, the mother of a strongman, the dignity of nō theatre enters a children's tale: Kintarō's strength has its root in something older and greater than man.

There also exists a "de-mythologised" version, attributed to the Kintoki shrine in the town of Oyama. In it, the mother is named Yaegiri and is an entirely human woman, the daughter of a sculptor. She met in the capital a court official, Sakata no Kurando, became pregnant, returned to her home parts, and there, after the death of her beloved, alone gave birth to and raised her son. This version is poignant and very earthly. It is striking that both – the one with the witch and the one with the lone mother – stress the same thing: the boy is raised by a single woman, far from people, with her own hands. In a society that placed fatherhood and lineage above all, the legend of the greatest strongman begins with a lone mother in the forest. It is no accident that this thread refused for so long to leave Japan alone.

How an official was turned into a demigod

Here begins the part worth telling slowly, because it shows how legend comes into being in the first place. Kintarō did not spring fully formed from anyone's head. He grew in layers over eight centuries, with each epoch adding its own.

At the very bottom there may be someone real. In the diary Midō kanpakuki (御堂関白記, lit. "Diary of the Regent of the Buddha Pavilion") of the mighty regent Fujiwara no Michinaga, there appears a guardsman by the name of Shimotsukeno no Kintoki – a capable zuijin (随身), that is, a personal guard. A century later, the collection of tales Konjaku monogatarishū (今昔物語集) mentions a warrior named Kintoki in the service of the warlord Minamoto no Yorimitsu (also known as Raikō). This is not yet the hero of a tale. This is a name in a chronicle, a small cog in the machinery of the Heian court.

Then comes the Middle Ages and turns this name into something greater. In the collection Kokon chomonjū (古今著聞集 – lit. "Collection of Things Famous and Heard from Times Past and Present") of 1254, and in the otogizōshi tales, especially the famous Shuten-dōji, Sakata no Kintoki becomes one of Yorimitsu's four most loyal men, the shitennō (四天王, "the Four Heavenly Kings"). Together with Watanabe no Tsuna, Usui no Sadamitsu, and Urabe no Suetake, he sets out for Mount Ōe, where the demonic chieftain Shuten-dōji is on the rampage. By trickery they give the monster poisoned sake to drink and then cut off his head in his sleep. It is the story of how a handful of warriors cleanses the world of monsters – and Kintoki is the strongest of them.

The expedition to Mount Ōe deserves a word of its own, because it tells us something about how the Heian understood the order of the world. Shuten-dōji abducts young people from aristocratic homes in the capital – and it is the court, through the diviner onmyōji Abe no Seimei, that determines who is behind it. The warriors set out for the mountains disguised as wandering monks, receive poisoned sake from the gods, and with it, not with the sword, defeat the monster. The "demon" here is half literal, half metaphorical: contemporary readers understood perfectly well that behind the mountain chieftain also lurked very human bandits and brigands, whom the capital had no other way of naming. The mountain is once again that other world from which the threat comes, and to which one must send the strongmen to restore order. And the strongest of them is the boy who himself comes from that mountain. He who grew up amid wildness will know best how to deal with it.

And yet there is still no boy here. There is an adult strongman, companion of the warlord, slayer of the demon. The childhood was added only in the Edo period, when townspeople fell in love with stories about heroes in their earliest years. And it was added with real flourish.

The oldest surviving work about Kintoki's childhood is Genji no yurai (源氏のゆらひ – lit. "The Origin of the Minamoto (Genji) Clan"), an old jōruri (theatre of chanted narration with puppets) from 1659. Then comes a wave of so-called kinpira-jōruri, popular in Edo around the middle of the seventeenth century. Their hero is Sakata no Kinpira, a fictitious son of Kintoki, even stronger than his father, who deals with monsters in a single blow. These performances were loud, exaggerated, full of boasts and uproar – and it was from them that the first actor of the Ichikawa Danjūrō line drew the style of acting called aragoto (荒事, "rough stuff"), with a face painted red and superhuman poses, alive to this day in kabuki theatre. Few remember that this most masculine, most clamorous style of Japanese theatre was born from a story about Kintarō's son.

The playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the greatest author of that epoch, in 1712 wrote Komochi yamanba (嫗山姥, "Yamanba with Child"), reaching for an old nō drama about the mountain witch and weaving it together with the story of the strongman's birth. And the name "Kintarō" itself, in its childish form, appears only in 1809, in a dance performance at the Nakamura theatre. Eight hundred years from the guardsman in Michinaga's diary to the boy with the axe whom everyone today knows. A legend is not a find. It is a construction raised by many generations, each laying its own brick to suit its own needs.

The meeting on the pass and the ending not sung about

Let us return to the story itself, because it has a beautiful middle and a bitter ending. One day Minamoto no Yorimitsu rides with his retinue across the Ashigara pass. One of his men, most often Usui no Sadamitsu, spots in the mountains an extraordinary boy – either as he lays a tree across the river, or as he wins a wrestling match with a bear. The warlord, who is just then travelling the country in search of sturdy warriors, knows at once what he sees. He takes the boy into his service and gives him his adult name: Sakata no Kintoki.

This is the moment that pleased old Japan most. Wild talent is recognised and drawn into service. A boy from the mountains, without lineage, without a name, becomes a warrior at court, because someone saw his worth. In a country of rigid estates this was a strictly rationed dream: not "anyone can do anything," but "exceptional strength can be noticed and rewarded, if it gives itself into the right hands." Kintarō does not rebel against the order. He enters it and finds his place within it. This is a tale of advancement, but advancement through obedience, not through revolt.

And the ending? Of that the song says nothing. According to tradition, Sakata no Kintoki dies in 1012, on his way to Kyūshū, where he was setting out with others to put down a rebellion. A heavy fever struck him down. He stopped along the way near the present-day town of Shōō in Okayama prefecture, and there, despite the care of his companions, he died. Yorimitsu buried him on a hill. A shrine stands there – one of many, for several regions of Japan dispute his body and grave, each proud that it was on their land that the strongest of boys grew up. The strong boy from the tale ends like many real people of that age: not in the glory of battle, but in a roadside fever, far from home, on a journey set by his lord.

Kintarō at home, on the plate, and above the bed

Here it becomes truly colourful, because no other figure of Japanese folklore has grown so deeply into everyday life. Kintarō is not only in picture books. He is in food, in sweets, in infants' clothing, in the very language.

He was also a favourite of the woodblock-print masters, and this shows how fertile the symbol turned out to be. In the late eighteenth century, Kitagawa Utamaro created a whole series of scenes of yamanba with Kintarō – tender, sensual images of nursing and bathing, in which the mountain witch is a beautiful, dishevelled young woman, and the chubby boy clings to her breast. A generation later, Utagawa Kuniyoshi was already painting a different Kintarō: a rascal at play, wrestling a bear, pure childish vigour in motion. And toward the end of old Japan, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, in the series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, placed the adult Sakata no Kintoki under a night sky among phantoms – an epic hero, not a boy from a tale. One figure, and so many different needs: now a pretext for painting the female body in times of censorship, now childish joy and vigour, now masculine sadness and dread. The woodblock-print masters loved the subject of Kintarō, and each of them drew out a different colour from the boy.

Let us begin with the kitchen, because it is the most amusing trace. The adult Kintoki gave his name to the bean kintoki-mame (金時豆) – a large, red variety, which is still cooked sweet to this day. The red of the bean was associated with the strongman's red skin. That is nothing. His fictitious son, Sakata no Kinpira, the one from the rowdy performances, gave his name to the dish kinpira-gobō (金平牛蒡) – fried, hot burdock. The hard, fibrous burdock root and the burning sharpness of the chilli pepper reminded the people of Edo of Kinpira's unyielding strength. "Kinpira" became in common speech a synonym for something hard and strong: people spoke of kinpira-tabi for particularly hard-wearing socks-shoes, kinpira-nori for strong glue. The whole family of a single strongman turned into a unit of toughness – first in the theatre, then in the pantry.

Now the sweet. Kintarō-ame (金太郎飴) is a candy that – wherever you cut it – shows on its cross-section the very same face of Kintarō. The technique goes back to mid-Edo (in Osaka similar candies were made with the face of the goddess Okame), but it was only the Watanabe family at the turn of Meiji and Taishō, with a shop in Tokyo's Negishi district, that popularised the boy's face and the name. The vendor would pull the hot mass, cut it before the children's eyes, and exclaim: "Kintarō has come out of the candy again!" The magic of repetition, the same little face endlessly, enchanted them.

And it is precisely this sweet that has made a surprising career in the Japanese language, to which we shall return at the end. For "kintarō-ame" today also means something quite different from the joy of the fair.

Lastly, the little garment. The red diamond-shaped breastplate with the great 金 became so inseparably associated with Kintarō that the diamond-shaped bibs in which infants of old Japan were dressed came to be called simply "kintarō." A child in a red haragake was a Kintarō-child. And above his head, in May, they would set a figurine – gogatsu-ningyō (五月人形, "the May doll"). And here we must speak of the whole festival, because without it we shall not understand why this boy in particular.

The day of sons

On the fifth day of the fifth month, Japan celebrates Tango no sekku (端午の節句). Originally it was about driving away illness on the threshold of summer. Sweet-flag leaves, shōbu, were hung up, for they were believed to have purifying power. And here the Japanese love of wordplay came into action. The word shōbu sounds identical to 尚武 – "the honouring of martial matters," "the spirit of valour." From a coincidence of sound a destiny was born: the festival of the plant became the festival of boys and the warrior spirit.

In the Edo period the custom took the form we know today. Warrior houses, on the Day of the Boy, displayed outside the marks of their pride: helmets, suits of armour, banners. Townsmen, for whom it was unbecoming to flaunt military gear, answered in their own way – they invented koinobori (鯉のぼり), cloth carps fluttering in the wind. A carp, because a Chinese tale told of a carp which conquered a waterfall and turned into a dragon. Every carp flown meant: "a son is growing up here, may he break through life as that carp broke through the current."

The outdoor decorations had a second, more practical meaning as well. A helmet displayed before the house cried out to the neighbours: "we have a boy!" In time, however, the ornaments moved indoors. It was not sentiment that decided this, but fires. Edo burned so often that the bakufu restricted anything that increased the risk of fire and crowding on the streets. Large outdoor structures began to give way to smaller figurines set up at home. Thus were born the May dolls, and among them – alongside helmets and effigies of warlords of old – stood the smiling Kintarō.

Why him? Because he was the perfect wish folded into a single figurine. The helmet spoke of courage, but it was cold and adult. Kintarō spoke of strength, but he was a child, like the one for whom the figurine was set up. He was strong and at the same time good, he broke trees, but in order to help weaker animals cross. He combined what parents truly wished for their son: a body healthy as a wild animal's, and a heart that would not turn that strength against the weak. In a single round, red figurine, old Japan packed its whole ideal of boyhood.

Behind this wish for strength stood a hard reality. In old Japan, a child died easily. It used to be said that until the age of seven, a child "still belongs to the gods," for it returned to them too often prematurely, to fever, to smallpox, to dysentery. From this fear grew all these rituals: the celebrations of successive months and years, the talismans, the displayed figurines. The wish "may he grow strong like Kintarō" was not the empty phrase of a proud father. It was a prayer spoken over a being of whom no one knew whether it would live to see the next spring. The red of an infant's breastplate is also from here: red had long been considered a colour that drives away illness and evil forces. By dressing the child in red "kintarō," the parents both arrayed it in the image of the strongman and protected it with the colour of an amulet.

What this boy reveals of old Japan

If we gather all these threads and look through them as through a window, we shall see a great deal of how old Japan thought. Kintarō is a colourful tale, but beneath the paint lies a map of values.

Firstly, the attitude towards the mountains and the wild. To agrarian, lowland Japan, the mountain was another world: dangerous, but life-giving. From the mountains came the water for the rice fields, from the mountains came timber and charcoal, in the mountains lived people outside the village order. Kintarō, the child of the mountains and of the mountain woman-deity, carries within himself all this ambivalent reverence. His strength is not the strength of civilisation. It is the strength of what is wild, and yet capable of serving the good. Old Japan did not dream of a boy polished by the city. It dreamt of a boy as healthy as the forest.

Secondly, the mother. Notice that in this whole story the father is practically absent. There is thunder, there is a deceased official, there is absence. He is raised by a lone woman in the forest, and her milk gives him strength. This is striking in a culture so "fatherly." The legend seems to admit under its breath what the official order did not wish to say aloud: that it is mothers, not lineages, who make men out of boys. The tender images of yamanba nursing Kintarō, which Kitagawa Utamaro painted in great numbers at the end of the eighteenth century, are precisely about this. Utamaro turned to this subject partly because the severe reforms of the Kansei era made it difficult to paint courtesans, while "mother with child" passed through the censorship. But under that pretext something more came into being: a gallery of paintings about a strength that flows from maternal closeness and tenderness, not from command. Utamaro himself grew up in rather obscure family circumstances, and some see in these images his own longing.

Thirdly, advancement and its price. The meeting on the pass is the Japanese version of the American dream, only reversed. For the strongman from the mountains, happiness is not freedom but service. The best thing that can happen to a brilliantly gifted child is to be noticed by a man of power and drawn into his order. Talent does not overturn the table; talent is given a seat at it. This is a very Japanese conception of ability: not as a force breaking down the hierarchy (as it might perhaps be in our native European legend), but as a gift the hierarchy can absorb and reward. Beautiful, if perhaps a little limiting at the same time.

Fourthly, strength as good rather than menacing. Kintarō never uses his power to lord it over the weaker. He wrestles the bear as an equal, helps the animals, breaks a tree to build a bridge. This is the Japanese ideal of strength: not aggression, but a surplus of health placed at the service of the community. That is why an image of Kintarō could hang above an infant's cradle. No one will hang an image of a brute over a child. One hangs an image of someone who is strong in order to be good.

Fifthly, the very attitude to the body. Kintarō is bodily to the marrow: ruddy, plump, his bare skin touching the frost and the bear's fur. In a culture that from childhood taught restraint, the concealment of emotion, mastery of the self, this image of an unconstrained, wild body acted as a vent. It allowed people to dream of health without shame, of a strength that need not explain itself. It is telling that this one time, over a son's cradle, stiff Japan allowed itself to wish for the child not politeness, not obedience, but a wild, animal vigour. As if it knew that the rest – discipline, self-control, roles – life would add only too plentifully.

The last face on the cross-section

And now the promised closing, because at the very heart of this warm story lies a tart paradox, and it is precisely this that makes the story so mature. Let us return to the candy. Kintarō-ame, that stick with the indestructible little face on every cross-section, has become in the Japanese language a metaphor. People say today: "this year's new recruits are kintarō-ame," "a kintarō-ame style of subsidy policy." It means: all identical, interchangeable, without a face of their own. Whatever you cut, the inside is the same. Disposable, because there is always more. Each century added something of its own to this legend. This is what the twenty-first century has added.

Think of the journey. A figure who began as the embodiment of a wild, unrepeatable, sylvan strength has given the language a word for colourless uniformity. The boy whose entire power came from his being different, wild, half-divine, impossible to contain in the human order, has ended as a figure of mass identity – the same little face replicated without end.

This is, in a single sweet, the drama of modern Japan (and not only it). A culture that created a beautiful image of an individual, wild strength has also built the most efficient machine in the world for producing people similar to one another. The same nation packed into a single figure both the dream of a wild son and the fear that all its sons will turn out alike.

The Kintarō figurine still has the power to move. Because Kintarō was himself – unique, ruddy, half-divine, impossible to replicate. The parents who set him up in May are, at bottom, asking for two things at once: may my son be healthy as that boy of the forest, and may he, despite everything, remain someone – not just another face on the cross-section.

An axe on his shoulder, a bear before him, the sign of gold on his chest. How many wishes fit into a single small figurine.

SOURCES

1. 前太平記 – 享和3年 (Zentaiheiki, 1803) – a popular pseudo-historical work with an account of Kintoki's birth.

2. 鳥居フミ子 – 『金太郎の謎』みやび出版, 2016 (Torii Fumiko, "The Riddle of Kintarō").

西川照子 – 『金太郎の母を探ねて』講談社, 2016 (Nishikawa Teruko, "In Search of Kintarō's Mother").

3. Yanagita Kunio (柳田國男) – studies on yamanba and the deities of the mountains (yama no kami) – a classic of Japanese ethnography.

4. Reider, Noriko T. – Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present, 2010 – among others, Shuten-dōji and Yorimitsu's shitennō.

5. 勝央町 – 金太郎・坂田金時 伝承と金時神社 (the town of Shōō, Okayama prefecture, traditions on Kintoki's death).

6. 石原和三郎 / 田村虎蔵 – 童謡「金太郎」, 『幼年唱歌』 1900 (the school song "Kintarō").

"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

of the page

    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

___________________

inari.smart

Would you like to share your thoughts or feedback about our website or app? Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you quickly. We value your perspective!