Sōjōbō

What it is

Sōjōbō belongs to Japanese folklore and mythology, where he is named as the tengu's king and their god. Tengu are mountain and forest creatures, counted among the yōkai, the wide class of supernatural beings. Inside that group he is a daitengu: the human-shaped, long-nosed sort rather than the bird-shaped kotengu. He is pictured as a yamabushi, a mountain ascetic, and holds a fan of seven feathers as a token of rank. Legend credits him with the strength of a thousand ordinary tengu and puts him above every tengu in Japan.

Where it comes from

The tengu's shape shifted over the centuries. Old descriptions give them a bird's body; later ones a human body with a bird's head; at last the beak stretches into a nose, a change that both Basil Hall Chamberlain and de Visser trace. Noses of that length reach Japanese tales only after the second half of the fourteenth century. Sōjōbō's own name is later still, coming from a text called Tengu Meigikō, put together in the middle of the Edo period, and taken from the valley on Mount Kurama where the legendary training happened.

Tools and materials

Tengu are drawn with the gear of the yamabushi, the mountain ascetics of Shugendō, and Sōjōbō is drawn the same way. Among the ascetic's equipment is the tokin, a small cap like a black box that came into common use from the start of the Edo period. Sōjōbō also carries a seven-feather fan, a sign of his place at the head of tengu society. Yves Bonnefoy reads that fan as a leftover of the tengu's bird origin. Frederick Hadland Davis makes a like point: once the creature turned more human, almost nothing bird-like was left but the fan.

Who does it

The human figure behind Sōjōbō's appearance is the yamabushi, an ascetic of Shugendō, a path whose name means the way of cultivating supernatural power and which takes in elements of several traditions, Buddhism among them. These men worked in the mountains in pursuit of such powers. Folk belief gave them flight and invisibility. Since both they and the tengu were thought to keep to high ground, Yves Bonnefoy suggests people came to see the two as the same, or at least as closely tied.

Peoples and places

Sōjōbō belongs to Japan, and most of his stories gather on one mountain. Mount Kurama lies north of Kyōto, and Kuramadera, a shrine and temple there, reaches back to 770. On that slope the tengu king is said to hold court, with retainers shaped like karasu tengu. He also passes through Japanese letters and drama: the war epic Heiji monogatari, the Gikeiki life of Yoshitsune, the Miraiki or Chronicle of the Future, and the Noh play Kurama-Tengu, which calls him Great Tengu of Mount Kurama.

What people believe

In the old tales tengu sit inside a Buddhist frame. The Miraiki has subordinate tengu explain that pride kept them from becoming Buddhas and made them tengu instead, yet pity still moves them to help the boy Ushiwaka. Before that, for a long stretch, tengu were cast as opponents of Buddhism. Afterwards they were shown wanting to throw the whole world into disorder. De Visser reads Sōjōbō's tutoring of Yoshitsune in that light: the tengu teaches a warrior in order to start a war.

How scholars and sceptics see it

De Visser follows the tengu's form from bird to bird-headed human to the long-nosed daitengu, dating the nose to after the mid-fourteenth century, and Chamberlain notes the same shift from beak to human nose. Michael Foster reads the Yoshitsune legend as fitting the pattern of kamikakushi, the taking of a child by a supernatural being, and quotes the Miraiki to show tengu turning helpful. Ronald Knutsen, Catherina Blomberg and James de Benneville record the titles applied to Sōjōbō, among them Tengu-san and goblin-king.

Compare and confuse

Tengu fall into two main sorts. Kotengu, also called karasu tengu or shōtengu, keep a bird's body; daitengu, the long-nosed ones, are mostly human and outrank them, shown with kotengu as their lieutenants. Sōjōbō is one of the eight great daitengu and among the three best known. Titles serve as his names: Kurama tengu after his mountain, Tengu Sama, Great Tengu, and, in one English rendering, goblin-king.

Today

Mount Kurama is still the place tied to him. Kuramadera remains a site people visit, and the mountain has gathered other associations since: it is connected to the histories of reiki and aikido and is described as a new-age power spot. The long-nosed daitengu, not the older bird form, is the tengu most often met in present-day Japanese culture, so the human-shaped image of Sōjōbō has outlasted the beak it grew from.

Questions people ask about Sōjōbō

Good reading and sources

• Digitised manuscripts and archivesBritish Library, Article

• Sōjōbō on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data