Nikujin

April 4th, 1609. Sunpu Castle.

That's the retirement seat of Tokugawa Ieyasu — the man who unified Japan, founded the shogunate that would run the country for two and a half centuries, and was at that point the single most powerful human being in the archipelago.

And something appeared in the grounds.

The description is this: a humanoid lump of meat. Four limbs, but no fingers. Standing upright.

And it was pointing at the sky.

It got reported up the chain

Somebody saw it. Somebody told their superior. It went up through the castle staff, as these things do, until it reached Ieyasu himself.

And Ieyasu — who had spent sixty years out-thinking every rival in Japan, who had won at Sekigahara, who had the entire apparatus of the state at his disposal — issued his ruling.

Get rid of it.

It was chased off the grounds and banished to a distant mountain.

That's the incident. That's all of it.

The most instructive non-event in Japanese folklore

I've come to think this is the strangest entry in the whole collection, and the strangeness is in what didn't happen.

Consider the machinery that existed in Japan in 1609.

There was an entire Bureau of Yin and Yang — a government department for reading omens, dating auspicious events, and identifying supernatural phenomena. There were encyclopedias of strange beasts, imported from China and copied for centuries. There was a whole tradition of image-medicine, where a picture of the right creature hung on your wall wards off plague. And within a couple of generations there would be a roaring specimen trade, where anything unidentifiable got mummified, mounted, and displayed for money.

Every part of that existed already.

None of it engaged.

The most powerful man in Japan met an unidentified being on his own lawn and filed it as a groundskeeping problem.

And then somebody looked it up

Here's the detail that finishes it.

A contemporary heard the story afterwards, and regretted it — because they recognized the description.

It was, they said, a creature called hō, described in the Hakutakuzu — the demon-catalogue attributed to the White Marvel, the beast that supposedly met the Yellow Emperor and dictated the names of every spirit in the world.

And per that book, eating it would have granted tremendous power.

So the reference book was in the country. The identification was available. The tradition had the answer written down.

It just arrived one courier too late, after the guards had already shooed the entry off the property with brooms.

That's the tradition auditing its own miss — the one time the books could have been consulted before the disposal, and weren't.

The inverse of the good omen

There's a beast in the Chinese-derived tradition — the kirin — that appears only during the reign of a truly virtuous ruler. Its arrival is the highest compliment the cosmos can pay a government.

The nikujin is that idea turned inside out.

A marvel appeared, at the seat of the man who had just won Japan, in the founding years of a dynasty that would last two hundred and fifty years.

And it was asked to leave.

Whether that says something about Ieyasu, or about the era, or about nothing at all, the record does not say.

One image, left open

The arms, pointing at the heavens.

Nobody explains it. Not the witnesses, not the courtier with the encyclopedia, not any later commentator I can find.

It stood on the grass at the centre of Japanese power, with no fingers, and pointed up.

And then it was removed, and that is the last anyone heard.

I'd rather leave that unexplained than invent a meaning for it. Some of these close and some of them don't, and the honest ones are usually the ones that don't.