Akashita

What it is

Akashita is a yōkai, one of the creatures that fill Japanese folk tales and painted scrolls. It is known from Edo-period picture scrolls, where it is drawn as a beast with clawed hands and a face covered in hair and dark cloud, the rest of the body left out of the picture. A large tongue fills its open mouth. In Toriyama Sekien's scroll Gazu Hyakki Yagyō it stands on top of a sluice, the gate that controls water flowing into fields. Accounts differ: some call it an omen of misfortune, others a guardian spirit. It also goes by the name akaguchi.

Where it comes from

The creature appears in a number of Edo-period scrolls. Sekien included it in Gazu Hyakki Yagyō but left no note explaining it, and researchers trace the figure back to an older creature called akaguchi, found in scrolls such as Bakemono no e. Akaguchi also appears in the Hyakkai Zukan by Sawaki Suushi (1737), the Bakemonozukushi, the Bakemono Emaki held by the Kawasaki City Museum, Oda Gōchō's Hyakki Yagyō Emaki of 1832 and the board game Jikkai Sugoroku. Atsunobu Inada and others connect the name to the red-tongued god shakuzetsujin and to shakuzetsunichi, a day of misfortune in onmyōdō.

How it is done

No rite is attached to the creature in the scrolls; what is described is its look and its reported behaviour. It is drawn inside a black cloud, hands clawed, face hairy, mouth open around a broad red tongue. In Sekien's picture the sluice beneath it is the only setting. Later tellings say it appears near a floodgate where farmers share out irrigation water, and that it swallows anyone who takes more than the allotted amount, scooping the offender up with the tongue.

Tools and materials

Sekien's image gives the creature a sluice gate, a black cloud, clawed hands and a big red tongue. Katsumi Tada and Kenji Murakami read the picture as one of Sekien's visual explanations. In their reading, aka can mean bilge water or filth, a metaphor for dirt, while shita can be taken as "down", here the depths of the mind. They link this to the old saying that the tongue is the gate through which misfortune comes, and suggest the picture warns that an open mouth keeps good fortune away.

What it is for

What the creature is for depends on the account. In one line of tradition it is a protective presence around irrigation channels: farmers who secretly take water beyond their share, a serious offence that could ruin a neighbour's fields, are said to be punished by it when the law does not catch them. Other sources treat akaguchi simply as a sign of bad luck. A caption written by Morihiko Fujisawa in 1929 says the akashita washes away the fields of people who do wrong.

Peoples and places

The creature belongs to Japan and to the scroll-painting culture of the Edo period. Later tradition ties it to farming country and to the Tsugaru region of Aomori Prefecture, where a story collected by Norio Yamada in 1974 has an akaguchi settle a quarrel over water for fields. That story is understood to rest on a local legend of a water dispute that was resolved, with Sekien's creature fitted onto it afterwards.

What people believe

Behind the figure sits a world of calendrical and cosmological ideas. In onmyōdō, the system of divination and ritual that shaped much Edo-period thought, the red-tongued god shakuzetsujin is said to stand at the western gate of Tai Sui, the planet Jupiter, and shakuzetsunichi is a day held to bring bad luck. Water beliefs belong to the same picture: in farming communities the supply was watched closely in dry spells, and a hidden theft of water was thought to carry its own punishment.

When it is done

Two calendars touch the creature. Shakuzetsunichi, a day of misfortune in onmyōdō, and shakkō or shakku, a day in the rokuyō cycle of lucky and unlucky days, have both been proposed as the root of the name akaguchi. The sluice in the picture points to the farming year, when water is shared out and carefully watched, above all in dry seasons.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Researchers have read the figure in different ways. Atsunobu Inada and others tie the name to onmyōdō terms. Katsumi Tada and Kenji Murakami treat the sluice as part of Sekien's own picture explanation. Morihiko Fujisawa's 1929 caption, saying the creature washes away the fields of wrongdoers, is his own interpretation rather than something drawn from Sekien or older writing. Arifumi Satō's reference books of 1973 describe it snatching people from the red evening sky and say their families later prospered, though no older legend supports this. The Tsugaru water-dispute story is traced to a local legend with the scroll creature added.

Compare and confuse

Akashita and akaguchi are used for the same creature, and the two names travel together in reference books. The red-tongued god shakuzetsujin, guardian of Jupiter's western gate, and the day shakuzetsunichi are close in name and are treated as possible relatives.

Today

From the Shōwa period onward the creature has lived mostly in print. Yōkai reference books and themed collections repeat the Tsugaru story of an akaguchi ending a water quarrel, and those retellings all point back to Norio Yamada's Tōhoku Kaidan no Tabi of 1974. Pictorial references by Arifumi Satō carried other explanations into wide circulation. The older scroll images remain the base: Sekien's beast on its sluice, and the akaguchi of earlier Edo painters.

Questions people ask about Akashita

Good reading and sources

• Akashita on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data