Kappa 河童

The kappa is one of Japan’s most famous yōkai, commonly associated with a child-sized creature with a turtle-like carapace, sharp beak, scaly skin, and webbed appendages. A creature of the water, the kappa is said to reside in bodies of freshwater like rivers, and the name kappa derives from the characters for “river” and “child.” With a dish-like cavity on its head called a sara, the liquid carried inside is considered the source of the kappa’s power and gives it its preternatural strength. Kappa are known both as mischievous, and sometimes murderous, yōkai, often attempting to lure animals and children to the water in bids to drown them, and also as celebrated suijin (“water deities”), possessing secret knowledge, most commonly bone setting techniques. Left powerless or emasculated in their attempts at mischief, the kappa becomes willing to bargain in exchange for its life, and will honor any pledges or oaths it takes. Like many other water spirits, they have an aversion to iron, though the kappa specifically has a love of both sumo and cucumbers, in addition to shirikodama. As scholar Michael Foster muses, the kappa is “simultaneously a deity and demon, depending on the perspective of the human beings with whom it is in contact” (Book of Yōkai 158).

With its penchant for attempting to drown those animals and folks it can lure to the water, the kappa is at once a dangerous yōkai, representing the threatening power of natural forces. Even today, signs of danger around water sources feature kappa imagery, albeit cutesified in spite of the stern content of the message. Similarly, though kappa enjoy melons and, especially, cucumbers, “they have also been known to drown young children and extract their internal organs through their anuses” (Book of Yōkai 157). Here also intertwine beliefs about the kappa’s desire for the shirikodama, a mystical ball said to be at the opening of the anus, and without which one is said to inevitably die. Whether from desire for the shirikodama itself or for the internal organs it precedes, there is a strong belief in the kappa’s motivation to remove it. Furthermore, the kappa’s streak of fancy related to buttocks continues, as Foster relates, “The kappa’s obsession with the shiri (buttocks, hips) is made apparent in legends that describe kappa hiding in the toilet, waiting to stroke or fondle a female victim’s shiri” (“Metamorphosis” 7). Be it in murder or mischief, the kappa indubitably presents a kind of danger to those with whom it runs into contact.

Conversely, the kappa also exhibits elements of an honest, bumbling type of yōkai in many of its encounters, too. For instance, offering the kappa a polite bow will see it reciprocate, often spilling the liquid from its sara and rendering it powerless. Other tales relate the kappa’s possession of secret knowledge, which it offers as recompense for its misdeeds, such as sexually harassing women, or of kappa offering gifts in return for aiding it or sparing its life. Furthermore, these stories give way to what Foster describes as the “dual nature of the kappa as a trickster figure with negative and destructive qualities, and also as a water/agricultural deity with positive regenerative qualities” (“Metamorphosis” 8). Indeed, as a kind of deity, “[n]umerous local rituals and festivals, particularly in agricultural communities that depend on water for irrigation, celebrate kappa” (Book of Yōkai 158) in an act showcasing a belief in the kappa’s additional status as an important agricultural spirit. Even the kappa’s value as a commercial icon was recognized long before modern times, such as “to legitimize the claim to secret powers on the part of a particular medical household,” (“Metamorphosis” 12) having received said knowledge from kappa. Amongst both these threatening and more endearing characteristics, a complex image of the kappa arises which gives testament to its supernatural power, be it used for either to help or harm the humans it comes into contact with.

In conjunction with this plurality of the kappa as both deity and mischief maker, there too exist a number of regional variants in both name and image found throughout Japan. While this plethora of names has been divided by scholars into common categories related to both the kappa’s physical appearance, including its resemblance to both turtles and monkeys, and its behavior, notably komahiki (“horse-puller”), for a time there was also a much different image of the “traditional” kappa in what was called the kawatarō (similarly meaning “river child”). Foster explains, “The shell-bearing, amphibious yōkai [kappa] was generally found in eastern Japan…[while] in western Japan…the creature was called a kawatarō…and was hairy and walked upright and monkeylike” (Book of Yōkai 160). Though the “common” kappa is depicted as a hybrid containing certain monkey-like elements, the kawatarō of western Japan seems to discard those amphibious characteristics in the view of a more monkey-ish yōkai, albeit still a water deity. Further complicating the complexity of the kappa, however, are also beliefs in which “the kappa divides its time equally between the mountains and the river, spending autumn and winter as a [mountain deity]…and the spring and summer growing season as a [water deity]” (“Metamorphosis” 9), moving it from simply a creature of the water, to a powerful deity deeply connected to agriculture. Ultimately, it was not until the late 18^th century that a “unified” depiction of the kappa came about, when “[i]n 1776…Toriyama Sekien created an imaged labeled ‘Kappa, also called kawatarō,’ [and] he neatly, and perhaps consciously, subsumed the name and image of the western kawatarō under the name and image of the eastern kappa” (Book of Yōkai 160). Although this multiplicity in beliefs surrounding the kappa would remain, this period would also see the entrance of the kappa into a more public sphere.

The process of transformation and adaptation of the kappa via folklorism, that is, as Foster relates, the use of folkloric creatures like the kappa in contexts beyond the original paradigm of legend, is a continuous one, wherein a variety of media and commercial products have continued to shape the modern image of the kappa. Beyond Akutagawa’s Kappa or Mizuki Shigeru’s manga, including Sanpei the Kappa, a number of modern works feature kappa both singularly and alongside other yōkai and expand conceptualizations of the kappa as a mythic creature of folklore, as a shared cultural icon of an idealized Japanese past, and as a vehicle for probing human society. Indeed, as these works are as varied in style, tone, and content as they are numerous, here focus is limited to just two examples of a much broader body of work: the contemporary films Onna no Kappa (2011) and Death Kappa (2010).

In Onna no Kappa, translated into English as simply Underwater Love, director Shinji Imaoka presents a pink musical romance, starring a kappa as the romantic hero. Asuka, an aging worker in a lakeside factory, is about to be married to her boss, when she meets a kappa who is a reincarnation of her first love, Aoki, who drowned years ago when she was in high school. Having been “reincarnated” as a kappa, Aoki believes that his purpose is to somehow save Asuka, and when he learns from a Shinigami (“death god”), a kind of Japanese grim reaper-like spirit, it has been determined that she will die, he whisks her away into the mountains in a bid to escape her fate. Ultimately, his attempted rescue proves futile, and Aoki trades his own life in place of Asuka. Stripping away the musical and romantic elements of the film, the image of leading kappa Aoki is yet a another new reimagination of the kappa of folklore. In appearance, Aoki is reminiscent of a more human-like kappa: in a button-down shirt and black slacks, he looks much a man in stature, save for his webbed hands and feet, beak-like mouth, sara prominently on his scalp, and carapace poking out the back of his shirt. He is at once clearly inhuman, but also far from the traditional kappa with its hybridized blend of turtle and monkey. His origins, too, add a new dimension to the kappa, wherein it exists between the earthly and spiritual realms as a possible form that a human might be reborn into, perhaps even part of a greater framework in a cycle of death and rebirth. Simultaneously, we also see familiar elements grasping on to traditional kappa quirks, in Aoki’s penchant for eating cucumbers, in his mischief-making as he gets a job at the factory where Asuka works, and in his possession of secret knowledge as he tries to save Asuka from death. As the pair flees to the mountains to a pod of kappa, there is even a reference to the old “bipartite conception” of the kappa’s comings and goings between the mountains and the water.