Wani

The wani appears in two of the founding scenes of Japanese myth, and nobody can say what animal it is.

Scene one: the hare's fraud

A hare wants to cross from an island to the mainland and has no way over.

So it calls to the wani in the water and proposes a contest: let's count which of us is more numerous — your people or mine. Line up across the strait, it says, and I'll run along your backs and count you.

They line up. The hare runs across, counting, and reaches the far shore — and then, one step from safety, gloats about the trick.

The last wani skins it alive.

(Ōkuninushi finds it, flayed and in agony, and tells it how to heal — which is the kindness that gets him the princess and starts everything else.)

Scene two: the birth hut

Toyotama-hime, the sea-king's daughter, asks her husband not to watch her give birth.

He watches.

And what he sees, in the hut, is "an eight-fathom wani" — crawling serpent-like — because that is her true form.

She leaves and seals the sea behind her, and their grandson is the first emperor.

So which animal is it?

Two positions, both serious, both with evidence.

Shark. The modern consensus.

Japan has no native crocodiles. Regional dialects call sharks "wani." The Izumo Fudoki lists wani among marine products — i.e. as something caught and eaten. And Izumo Taisha and Kanda Shrine identify it as a shark today.

Crocodile. Which is not a fringe view.

The texts describe the creature crawling, serpent-like — which reads reptilian, and is a strange way to describe a shark in a hut.

And the tale-type has Southeast Asian crocodile ancestors. The counting-trick story, with a small animal crossing water on the backs of lined-up crocodiles, is widespread through island Southeast Asia.

Matsumoto's 1942 argument: the myth travelled north with the animal still in it.

And the margins are extraordinary

Crocodile fossils exist in Japan. Machikanewani — four hundred thousand years old, excavated in Osaka.

And there are Edo-period records of crocodilians washing ashore at Amami and Toyama.

So the animal has been in these waters, at various points, in various senses — just not recently enough or often enough to settle it.

(Osaka named its fossil crocodile after the myth, incidentally. Which is circular in the best way: a legendary creature of disputed species, lending its name to the physical evidence that might have explained it.)

The dispute is the entry

Because notice what both theories agree on.

The myth is about a real animal. Neither side thinks this is an invented monster. They disagree only about which coastline remembered it.

The shark theory keeps the story Japanese — Izumo fishermen, counting the dangerous backs in the water between islands.

The crocodile theory makes the story an immigrant — a Southeast Asian tale that came north and kept its crocodile, the way other imports kept details from countries nobody here had seen.

And the tale survived the ambiguity for thirteen centuries because the trick works either way. The hare's fraud needs a line of countable, dangerous backs, and the species is negotiable.

For the birth hut, though, the stakes are different

Because there the wani isn't a plot device. It's what a goddess actually is.

And whether the husband saw a shark or a crocodile, what he was looking at was the sea itself, in labour — and he was told not to, and he did, and the consequence is the shape of the Japanese royal line.

If you illustrate the hare crossing, draw the backs ambiguous.

The honesty is the style.