Ubasute

There's a dark idea attached to Japanese folklore that turns up constantly, and it needs the finding stated first.

Ubasute — carrying an aged parent up a mountain and leaving them there to die.

It is one of the most cited facts about pre-modern Japan. It underpins the darkest theory about the mountain-witch. And it appears in a Palme d'Or-winning film that a great many people took as history.

The scholarly assessment:

Ubasute "is the subject of legend, but does not seem ever to have been a common custom."

The abandonment was a story Japan told, not a thing Japan routinely did.

And Yanagita himself traced the tale-type back to Indian Buddhist mythology — transmission, not practice. The story arrived. It didn't grow out of anything anyone here was doing.

And the central tale is about the opposite of abandonment

This is what makes the misreading so strange, because the most famous version completely inverts the premise.

A son carries his old mother up the mountain.

And all the way up, she is breaking twigs.

He notices. He asks why.

And she tells him: *so you can find your way home.*

She is being carried to her death by her son, and what she is doing with her hands is marking his route back.

The endings people don't quote

In the standard continuations, he can't go through with it.

He carries her back down and hides her in the house.

And later — when the province's lord sets an impossible riddle, or a neighbouring power demands the answer to some unanswerable question, and the village faces ruin for failing — it is her knowledge that solves it.

The old woman's wisdom saves everyone, and the practice is abolished by the lord who learns where the answer came from.

That is the tale-type. Not an abandonment story. A story about why you don't abandon people — argued by demonstration, with a riddle.

The mountain is real, though

Ubasute-yama — Mount Kamuriki, in Chikuma, Nagano.

The legend's geographic anchor. It's famous for moon-viewing, and there's a long poetic tradition attached to watching the moon from there, tangled up with the story.

And the modern layer did the damage

Fukazawa's novel *The Ballad of Narayama (1956), and the 1983 film* that won the Palme d'Or.

Both are extraordinary. Both present the practice as an established village custom, systematically observed.

And that premise — a modern novel's premise — got retro-read as ethnography by audiences worldwide.

It is now, for a great many people outside Japan, simply a thing they know about Japanese history.

Which cuts both ways

The provenance discipline that runs through this whole collection — checking when a claim first appears, and who made it, and whether anything corroborates it — is usually applied to monsters.

It applies to atrocities too.

And here it acquits.

A culture has been widely believed to have systematically abandoned its elderly, on the strength of a folktale of foreign origin whose actual moral is the reverse, plus a twentieth-century novel.

That is worth getting right.

What it means for the mountain-witch

There's a theory that the yamauba — the mountain-crone who takes in travellers and eats them — is the folk memory of abandoned old women.

That theory now carries its audit: she cannot be the memory of a common custom that wasn't one.

She may still be the memory of the story — folklore begetting folklore, an imported tale about mountains and old women generating a mountain woman.

Which is subtler, and I think better, and it's the version that survives checking.