Folk Legends of Japan (32 page)

The villagers cherished the virtue of the. princess so much that they later deified her in the Shisha Shrine of Wakamiya Hachiman-gu. It still remains at Suwa-no-wakeguchi.

Every year when the season comes, the village people make it a rule to offer the first catch of saurel to the shrine. It is said that the deified princess was fond of saurel in her lifetime.

A MYSTERY AT MOTOMACHI BRIDGE

Here is the modem form of the foundation sacrifice, in which death occurs to a workman accidentally, rather than as a deliberate deed. Hearn gives an up-to-date version of the Gensuke Bridge legend, in which it was held that the first man crossing the bridge wearing
hakama
(divided skirts) without a
machi
(cardboard stiffener above the tie strings at the back) must be sacrificed. When the bridge was rebuilt, hundreds of aged men cut off their queues. Then a rumor circulated that police would seize the thousandth man to cross, and the town was empty on market day. (V, ch. 1, "The Chief City of the Province of the Gods," pp. 171-74.)

Text from
Hyuga Minwa Shu,
pp. 157-60.

I
N
A
UGUST
of the second year of Showa [1927], a typhoon hit the city of Miyazaki. It kept raining heavily and the waters of the Oyodo River rose steadily day by day. The Tachibana Bridge across the river was built of wood; on the second day of the typhoon, it was broken in the middle and half of it floated away. Thus the city traffic was completely cut in two by the yellowish, swollen Oyodo, which flowed through the middle of the city. As an emergency, they used sailing boats to cross the river, but these served only for transporting people, not horses and wagons.

The leading men of the city and the prefecture came together to discuss this. They decided to rebuild the Tachibana Bridge strong and permanently and, since this would take some time, they decided also to rebuild as temporary substitute the Motomachi Bridge, another wooden structure connecting Moto-machi in Miyazaki City with Zaimoku-machi in Oyodo on the opposite bank. Although this bridge was always only a simple, makeshift affair, it had served the citizens well from the beginning of the Taisho era until only a year earlier, when it had been swept away in a flood. (After being rebuilt, it would again serve them until the end of World War II, a total of twenty years.) It was urgent to rebuild it as soon as possible, pending the completion of a concrete Tachibana Bridge.

It would have taken too long if the rebuilding of Motomachi Bridge had been left in the hands of private contractors. The president of the Miyazaki Reservists Association at the time was Mr. Rokichi Mieno. Through his good offices and in order to speed the work, the city authorities asked the headquarters of the Sixth Division in Kumamoto to send army engineers to rebuild the bridge. And the Division immediately assigned ten engineering units to rebuild the bridge as a practice maneuver.

The construction was so urgent that the soldiers worked night and day, hastening the task by floating barges on the wide surface of the river. During this time the soldiers were quartered in houses around Moto-machi and Kawahara-machi. With the help of about a hundred reservists living in Miyazaki, they were able to finish the work in three weeks.

But two soldiers were sacrificed before the bridge was finished. It was on a day toward the end of the job, and the soldiers were working near the Motomachi bank. Suddenly the scaffold collapsed. In an instant, three soldiers had fallen into the water, which was still at a high level. One soldier was rescued, but the other two never reappeared on the surface. A great commotion ensued, and the other soldiers began searching by boat all over the river, but they found no traces of their two comrades. Thinking the bodies might have been caught on the bottom, they searched the bottom from the point of work to the mouth of the river, but the bodies were never found.

After the bridge was built there were some who proposed changing its name to Engineer Bridge in honor of the soldiers who had worked so hard and the two who had been drowned. But nothing ever came of this proposal, and the bridge continued to be called Motomachi.

Some time later a rumor spread through the town that if one crossed the bridge late at night he could hear the marching song "Far, Far Away from Our Motherland" and the sound of marching feet going across the bridge, but without being able to tell where the sounds came from. Because of this frightening rumor, no woman or child dared cross the bridge at night.

Some of the townspeople discussed this, and the following year they built a shrine at the northern end of the bridge, dedicating it to the God of Water. There they erected a memorial tablet to the spirits of the two sacrificed soldiers. Toward the end of the war this bridge was again swept away by a flood, and the memorial tablet was destroyed by the war. Today nothing is left except a lonesome fragment of the broken tablet in the underbrush of the wasteland.

A HUMAN SACRIFICE AT KONO STRAND

In this personal recollection of a foundation-sacrifice legend by Kayoko Saito's grandmother appears the buried-alive theme (Motif S261). William H. Erskine comments (pp. 88-90): "The burial of the living in the erection of buildings and bridges is a distinct effort to get the spirits on the side of the community.... In the rebuilding of dikes or the building of bridges which, because of the swift current of the stream or heavy rains were always falling down, living people were buried to give strength to the bridge or dike. In the
Japanese Encyclopedia
the article on burial says that this practice was kept up until the opening of the country to foreign trade in 1868. Only eighty years ago a man was buried in the pier of the famous Temma bridge in Osaka." Erskine then gives four legends of immolation.

Hearn tells of a dancing maiden interred in the walls of a castle (V, pp. 189-90). Murai, pp. 94-98, gives the striking legend of "Kumeji-bashi Bridge." A peasant is buried alive under a bridge pier when his daughter unwittingly reveals he has stolen red beans for her supper. She remains dumb the rest of her life, save once when she sees a pheasant reveal itself to a hunter with its cry. Hence the proverb: "If the pheasant cries not, it will not be shot."

Text from Mrs. Hitoshi Kawashima Saito, told to Kayoko Saito in Tokyo, June 1, 1957.

F
IVE MILES AWAY
from my native house in Aza-mura, there was a cape called Kono-no-iso. It was a rocky place, bordered by a river and the sea. Many pine trees on the shore rustled in the air when the wind blew. The scenery there was very, very beautiful. When I was in primary school, I often went there on school excursions and played with my friends, picking up pebbles here and there.

There was something like a pond or a harbor there, which was surrounded by a ruined stone works. Beside the harbor was an old stone monument. Concerning this stone monument, I heard a story many times from my great-grandmother and my grandparents. The story is as follows:

A long, long time ago, the people tried to make a harbor for fishing boats at Kono Strand. However, the western wind blew so hard and the waves raged so high that they could not complete the task. They got together to consult how to overcome the difficulty and decided to make a human sacrifice.

Now, there came an old pilgrim who had been traveling on foot from shrine to shrine, ringing a bell in his hand. He happened to hear the rumor that a human sacrifice was to be offered and volunteered himself.

In keen appreciation and sorrow, the people dug a hole deep in the ground. The pilgrim sat in it and recited surras, ringing his bell. The people covered the hole with a board, thrusting a bamboo pipe through the board so that the pilgrim might breathe the outside air.

For three days and nights, the people heard the pilgrim reciting sutras and ringing his bell, but after that, they heard nothing more out of the hole. Realizing that the pilgrim was dead, they filled the hole with earth and built a stone monument on it in honor of the pilgrim. This is the stone that still stands at Kono Strand.

THE BRIDGE WHERE BRIDES ARE TAKEN AWAY

This legend begins like the popular story, drama, and serpent dance of Hidaka-gawa: "... a woman pursuing her fleeing lover becomes a large serpent as she crosses over a stream, and then coils around and melts a bronze bell in which the unfaithful lover has concealed himself" (Anesaki,p. 331). Instead of the bell episode, however, it turns to Motif G424, "Bridal party will not pass over bridge for fear of water-demon." Miss Ishiwara tells me that even in Tokyo, near Shinjuku, there is a bridge brides cannot cross; a
choja's
daughter once threw herself into the water there.

Text from
Yamato no Densetsu,
pp. 57-58. Collected in Hirahata-mura, Ikoma-gun, Nara-ken.

Note: Narihira, an ancient courtier and poet renowned for his beauty.

I
N ANCIENT TIMES
there was a teahouse in Tsutsui-mura. A daughter, aged eighteen, whose name was Kimano Uved there. She loved a young messenger who passed this place almost every day on his way to Osaka. He was as handsome a young man as Narihira. One day the messenger passed there late in the evening. The girl advised him to stay at her house that night, telling him the difficulties of his way. At midnight the girl stole into his room with a strange appearance. The surprised messenger fled from the room. To help his parents recover from illness, he had sworn an oath that he would not love a woman for three years. He was afraid to break his word and ran away. The girl ran after him. When the man came to a big pool, he climbed up a pine tree. The girl running behind lost sight of him but found his
geta.
She was startled and looked toward the pool. By the moonlight she could see a man's form in the water. She thought it was the messenger in the water and threw herself in after him. Then she was changed into a big serpent. After that, whenever the serpent saw a girl it caught and killed her, for fear that she might take her lover away.

Once when a bride in a sedan chair passed by, a sudden rain fell and the porter went away to borrow a rain cloth, putting the chair under a tree. When he came back, he couldn't find the bride anywhere. She had been taken away by the big serpent, who had caused the sudden rain. Thereafter the bridge over the stream before the pool was called Yometori-bashi [Bridge Where Brides Are Taken Away].

And still nowadays brides are forbidden to cross this bridge.

GOJO BRIDGE IN KYOTO

This wandering legend has fastened onto many bridges. Examples are cited under Motif N531.1. "Dream of treasure on the bridge," and Type 1645, "The Treasure at Home." Ikeda mentions five Japanese versions, p. 298. In Ireland I heard the legend attached to the Bald Bridge of Limerick
(Journal of American Folklore,
LXVI, 1953, pp. 33-34). G. L. Gomme discusses the legend at length in connection
with London Bridge
(Folklore as an Historical Science,
London, 1908, pp.
13-33).

Text from
Nishi Sanuki Mukashi-banashi Shu,
p. 35.

A
POOR FARMER
named Kasaku dreamed a dream that if he should go to the Gojo Bridge in Kyoto, he would become rich. Immediately he started out for Kyoto and at length arrived there. While he was waiting at the bridge, a man came by and asked him what he was doing. So he told him about his dream. Then the other said that five days earlier he too had a dream, and in the dream he was told that in the yard of the farmer called Kasaku there was an oak tree, and at the foot of that tree money was buried. But he said he did not believe in such a foolish dream, and he advised Kasaku to return to his home without believing in his dreams. Kasaku hastily returned home and dug a hole at the foot of the oak tree. He found an old bottle there, filled with many gold coins, enough to make Kasaku a very rich man.