Greetings yokai fans!
Today’s yokai is the last one for March, but I will have the list of April yokai plans very soon. The warm, sunny weather we’ve been having this week goes nicely with this painting, I think. I hope the rest of you are enjoying your early spring weather as well!
I will be moving yokai.com onto a new server soon. I’m going to try to keep the downtime to a minimum, and I don’t expect any problems, but there’s always a chance, so if you try to access it and get an error at some point, don’t be alarmed! That’s the first step in creating a new, smartphone-friendly, optimized theme for the site, which has been on my radar for a long time now. With The Book of the Hakutaku currently in the editing stages, it’s a good time for me to make some progress on that.
Stay tuned for next month’s yokai!
Tearai oni
手洗鬼
てあらいおに
TRANSLATION: hand washing demon
ALTERNATE NAMES: kyojin no ojomo (giant ojomo; a local term for monster)
HABITAT: Shikoku and the Seto Inland Sea
DIET: omnivorous
APPEARANCE: A tearai oni is a colossal giant, large enough to straddle mountains. Its leg span is three ri wide–almost twelve kilometers.
BEHAVIOR: The most well known tearai oni sighting took place in Sanuki Province (present-day Kagawa Prefecture) during the Edo Period. It was seen straddling the mountains between Takamatsu and Marugame Cities and washing its hands in the bay below.
ORIGIN: Tearai oni appears in the Edo Period book Ehon hyakumonogatari, which says that its actual name was unknown to anybody, so witnesses just referred to it as the hand washing demon of Sanuki. Despite its name, it is not actually an oni but is rather a type of daidarabotchi. In this case the word oni is just used as a catch-all term for monsters.
Though the term tearai oni doesn’t turn up outside of Ehon hyakumonogatari, other local legends from Kagawa speak of a giant who used to come down from the mountains, straddle the mountains, and scoop up water from the bay with his hands to drink. Giant footprints have also been found high up in the mountains. Its local nickname was kyojin no ojomo, and it has been speculated that it was the same giant as the tearai oni.