Wednesday, February 01, 2006

A Japanese bestiary



The weird and wonderful world of Japanese beasties. My favourite, rather boringly, is the kappa. When I mentioned Japanese monsters, A. immediately reeled off her "favourites": karakasaobake, hitotsumekozou and rokurokubi.

Sandy in Monkey was a kappa. In the Edo period, there was a widespread belief in these water monsters. There were even "kappaology" tracts on their natural history [1,2]. The Yoshitoshi print above shows a basic "kappa control method".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, it provides an excellent excuse - 'sorry about that, just shooing off a kappa'!