Kappa

A river creature of Japanese folk tales, said to seize people and animals. Old families and temples across Japan keep documents said to be written apologies from captured kappa.

Lafcadio Hearn, writing in 1894, describes a small temple, Kawako-no-miya, at Kawachi-mura, a village on the Kawachi river one and a half miles from Matsue. Among ordinary people in Izumo, he says, the word used is Kawako, the Child of the River, in place of kappa. The temple keeps a document said to bear a kappa's signature. The story behind it is that long ago the kappa of the Kawachi seized and killed many villagers and farm animals.

English Wikipedia says this pattern turns up in folk tales across Japan. A captured kappa buys its freedom by swearing to do no more harm, often handing over a written apology or oath, and old families and temples keep such documents as relics. Yanagita Kunio's Tōno Monogatari (1910), tale 58, tells one version. A kappa tried to pull a family's horse into the Obako pool on the Kogarase river, was dragged back to the stable by the horse instead, and was found under an upturned feed trough. The villagers argued over whether to kill it or let it go. They freed it after it promised never again to bother the village's horses, and the tale says the kappa has left the village and lives in the pool at the Aizawa falls.

Tōno City's tourism site, in a page promoting a kappa capture permit, says Tōno has 14 places where kappa sightings are recorded and that the last was around mid-July 1975. In Akashi, the Kobe Shimbun reported in 2018 on the grave of Tanaka Yōsuke, head of the Akashi branch of the kappa fan group Nihon Kappa-mura. His grave inscription says he collected thousands of kappa. The paper says the group was founded in 1975, drew kappa fans from across the country into its branches, and was an early example of a town using a yōkai to promote itself.