Background: Overview Mythology Yōkai & Bakemono Folklore in Art Content: Mukashibanashi Densetsu Kaidan Kotowaza   Further Reading Resources

Densetsu: travels and legends When we speak of folkloric stories in the West, the terms "legend", "folk tale"and "fairy tale" get tossed around quite a bit. What exactly is the difference, one might well ask. A legend is a story that, unlike fairy tales, are told as truth; that is, according to the person telling the story, it actually happened. Whether or not a story happened historically is irrelevant. As Yanagita Kunio explained it, folktales and legends are like animals and plants, respectively. Plants are rooted to a single place, and the environment in which they grow greatly effects their formation and development. Animals, on the other hand, can show up anywhere, and regardless of where they are more or less look the same. Legends, therefore, are unique to the place where they originated and their nature has been greatly affected by the physical, mental and social atmosphere in which they developed. Naturally, there is a bit of overlap between legends and other types of tales, such as mukashibanashi and kaidan. And indeed some of the legends given here could be called folk tales, while some here might also be put in the ghost story category. One thing that separates densetsu 伝説 ("legends") from folktales is that their location is usually always given, for, as said above, the place of origin of a legend in Japan is important, and thus it is possible that densetsu are the most valuable of Japanese tales in investigating the folk cultures of Japan's many farming villages. Very often in densetsu there is a specific family of the village mentioned, or a specific temple or stone, a river or a mountain, that "proves" the story is real. Densetsu also have played an important role in the history of folklore studies in Japan. It was the legends of Tōno, a farming village in the northeastern Iwate prefecture, that launched the field and established Yanagita Kunio. These legends can be found in his landmark work Tōno monogatari, and in honor of this I have given a good many densetsu from this work below.   In the vicinity of... The Nue The Writing of Kōbō Daishi Tamamo no Mae, the Jewel Maiden Kahei the Hunter The Chōja's Daughter The Stone Grain Mill The Wolves The Birds of Tōno The Kappa The Yaro-ka Flood, and Goshinrō Pond Crab Pool and Princess Yasunaga This section is under construction. More densetsu are to be added in the future. Check by for updates often!