Sōjōbō

The tengu have a king, and he lives on Mount Kurama, north of Kyoto.

Sōjōbō — "the monk-bishop."

White-maned. Long-nosed. Human in form, with the bird underneath. Chieftain over all the tengu mountains in Japan.

And credited with the strength of a thousand ordinary tengu.

He taught Yoshitsune

This is the story, and it's one of the most beloved in Japan.

After his father's death, the boy Ushiwaka-maru was placed at Kurama's temple — sent up the mountain, to be kept out of the way, in a place where the Taira who had destroyed his family wouldn't think about him.

The monks had him copying sutras.

And he found the mountain's other school.

Sōjōbō trained him in martial arts, swordsmanship, tactics, and magical arts.

The Heiji Monogatari records the result: he could "run and jump beyond the limits of human power."

And you can see the curriculum in the legend

That boy grew up into Minamoto no Yoshitsune — the most famous warrior in Japanese history, and the most tragic.

And every superhuman thing in his legend traces back to that valley.

The bridge duel with Benkei, where the enormous warrior-monk has beaten nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine swordsmen and takes on a slight young man who dances over the railings and cannot be touched, and who wins him as a retainer for life.

The eight-boat leap at Dan-no-ura — springing from vessel to vessel across the water in the middle of the battle that ended the Taira.

Those aren't heroic exaggerations, in the tradition's own accounting. That's Kurama coursework.

Which is the thing worth noticing

The tengu take boys.

There's a whole doctrine about it — tengu-kakushi, "hidden by a tengu." Children who vanish on mountains and are found days later, dazed, unable to explain, or never found at all. Every mountain village in Japan had a case.

That's the tengu's main line of business, and it is not benign.

And once, they graduated one.

Took in a boy nobody wanted, trained him properly for years, and sent him back down — and he broke the Heike and changed the country's history.

The mountain's ambivalence, at maximum stakes. It takes children. It also, on at least one recorded occasion, educated one, and the results were spectacular and did not end well for anybody, including him.

The Noh play stages it tenderly

Kurama Tengu handles the meeting beautifully.

The boy is lonely. The monks ignore him — he's a hostage, effectively, a political inconvenience being warehoused in a temple.

And the tengu king chooses him. Not as prey. Because nobody else was paying attention.

That's a story about a neglected child being taken seriously by the only figure on the mountain who bothered to look at him, and it is not, on the page, frightening at all.

And you can go there

Kurama-dera keeps the tradition physically. There's a giant tengu mask monument at the station — enormous red face, huge nose, impossible to miss.

And the Sōjō-ga-dani valley path is where the training is sited. You can walk it. It's steep, dark, cedar-covered, and immediately convincing.

The teachers

There's a pattern here that deserves its own page, and it's this.

The yamauba — the mountain-witch, who eats travellers — raised Kintarō, the golden boy who wrestled bears and grew up to serve in Raikō's demon-hunting guard.

Sōjōbō — the tengu king — trained Yoshitsune.

Japan's two greatest warrior-legends were educated by yokai.

The mountain does not only take. Sometimes it graduates you — and then you come back down and the capital finds out what the mountain teaches.