, Preface or Shippei Taro (German spelling: Schippeitaro; or ) is the name of a helper dog in the Japanese fairy tale by the same name.
Etymology Although the name Shippeitaro has been written suggesting a connection to a bamboo hitting stick in Buddhist religion, it has been asserted to be a corruption of meaning "swift wind Tarō", and the same characters can also be read Hayatetarō, thus explaining variant names such as Hayatarō "swift Tarō".
Variant traditions Translations include "Schippeitaro" in Andrew Lang's Violet Fairy Book (1901), taken from a German copy, and Mrs. James's "Schippeitaro" (1888), which share the same plotline: The mountain spirit and its minions (in the guise of cats in this version) demand a yearly human sacrifice of a maiden from the local village. A young warrior overhears the spirits hinting that their would-be bane was "Shippeitaro", which turns out to be a dog. This dog is substituted for the maiden to be placed inside the sacrificial container, and when the spirits arrive, the warrior and dog attack the cats and vanquish them.
The evil spirits appear as monkeys in most instances of the tale, as in the version of "Shippei Taro" given in Keigo Seki's anthology (translated into English 1963). In fact, this folktale is classified as tale type by Japanese folklorists.
Monkey God tales preserved in the medieval anthologies Konjaku Monogatarishū and Uji Shūi Monogatari have been suggested as being the original sources of the orally disseminated versions.
There is also the theory that the story was invented after the historical occasion of the (Mitsuke Tenjin) shrine in Iwata, Shizuoka (Tōtōmi Province) sending volumes of sutras to the Kōzen-ji temple, Nagano Prefecture (Shinano Province) in 1793. The dog is called Hayatarō or Heibōtarō in the versions at the temple and in folktales of the vicinity. But the dog name has been standardized as Shippeitarō in the region of the shrine.
Nomenclature
The term denotes a "bamboo staff" in Zen Buddhism, and is connected with the expression shippegaeshi meaning "repercussion" or "".
However, it has been asserted that the name Shippeitarō―was originally unconnected with religious implement―and was a corruption of , meaning "swift wind Tarō", which as a matter of commonplace knowledge, can also be read , and the same scholar points out that the dog is known by the forms Shippeitarō or Hayatetarō in local (Mitsuke Shrine of Shizuoka) legend.
In variants, the dog may have Suppeitarō, Suppetarō or a variety of other names, for example, "Hayatarō of Kōzenji temple in Shinano".One of the tales collected from Kamiina District, Nagano. Features the dog " vs. a racoon dog. , Table 1, #97., Table #29. , Taisei The dog may not be given any name at all.
The form (of uncertain meaning) has been adopted as standard or official one for the dog of legend attached to the shrine, commonly known as Mitsuke Tenjin.
The name is altered to in kibyōshi fiction by Nansenshō Somahito, where means "to grasp authority" (cf. §Old printed books)
Translations
The version of "Schippeitaro" in Andrew Lang's The Violet Fairy Book (1901) was taken from Japanische Märchen und Sagen collected by Professor (Leipzig, 1885). (Fraktur font); Schippeitaro (in Latin font online at zeno.org).
The story of "Schippeitaro" (1888) as told by Mrs. T. H. James (Kate James), was number 17 in the "Japanese Fairy Tale Series" printed by Hasegawa Takejirō, who issued many such chirimen-bon or "crepe-paper books". Mrs. James's version follows a storyline identical to Lang's version.Cf. the text itself:
The illustrator has been identified as , also cited by based on the colophon of 1889 which names the artist as . Even though this can be read as "Munesaburō", the artist Suzuki Kason (whose address in Tsukiji matches the colophon one) went by the common name , also written .
Synopsis Below is the summary of the Lang/Mrs. James version:,
A young adventure-seeking warrior entered an enchanted forest, and he slept in a shrine (or chapel) there, and was awakened at midnight by the noises of cats yelling and dancing. The cats could be heard saying: "Do not tell Shippeitaro!"
Afterwards, the warrior visited a nearby village, and there he answered a girl's plea for help. It was the village custom to sacrifice a maiden to the mountain spirit, and it was her turn that year. She was placed inside a cage (actually a long chest or rectangular basket, as per illustration. Lang gives "cask") and left at the shrine. The warrior made inquiries to find out about the famous dog Schippeitaro (standard modern romanization: Shippeitarō), owned by the prince's overseer, and obtained permission to borrow the dog. The warrior then replaced the maiden inside the cage with Schippeitaro. The cage was brought to the shrine, and the cats arrived. When the huge black cat opened the cage, Shippeitaro jumped out and killed it. The warrior entered the fray and together they killed several more cats, and the rest of them fled. The warrior returned Schippeitaro to his rightful owner, and the village well-remembered the warrior and the heroic dog long after.
Variants The Lang/Mrs. James version which features cats as the antagonists is actually atypical in folktales. In most Shippeitaro tales, the malevolent spirits appear as monkeys (or baboons). However, cats did feature as the antagonist(s) of Shippeitarō in the gesaku novels of the Edo Period (§Old printed books) as well as in the kabuki and kyōgen performing arts.
The village where the victims are sacrifice occurs may be an anonymous location, as in the English chirimen book version or Seki's version from Monou, but may be specified (Cf. §Kōzen-ji below). Also, it is a common motif that the household chosen to have their daughter sacrificed (by the supernatural beings) has a (white-feather fletched arrow) stuck on the front of their home.
Keigo Seki collected a number of variant tales (of the Sarugami taiji or "Destroying the Monkey Demon" type) from various sources. When Seki published Nihon mukashibanashi taisei (1978), his provisional count reached 67 examples. Later, and co-edited the Nihon mukashibanashi tsūgan (1977–1998) which added numerous examples. Kōichirō Kōbayashi's paper has collated these and other examples in a table with 227 tale specimens (plus one auxiliary specimen). Noriko Nagata went further and analyzed 258 tale examples of the Sarugami taiji type. apud . Note however that these statistics include tales that are not of the "dog helper" type.
Seki's typical example (or at least the one he chose in his anthology for popular audience) was the "Shippei Taro" collected in Monou District, Miyagi, published in Keigo Seki (ed.), Robert J. Adams (tr.), Folktales of Japan (1963). The priest in the story defeated the so-called "ogres" (whose corpses turned out to be dead monkeys). He used the usual tactic of replacing the sacrificial maiden inside the chest with Shippei Taro, a dog brought from the distant city of Nagahama in Ōmi Province. (Cf. § Tale types below)
Inada and Ozawa's description of the "helper dog" subtype of Sarugami taiji (Cf. § Tale types below) names the dog as , and the human as a , a type of itinerant Buddhist ascetic (or hijiri) as combating the monkey monster, indicating these are seen as typical elements. Here, "Suppei" is easily recognized as the Tōhoku dialect pronunciation of "Shippei".
The dog may or may not have a name at all. And the name is not entirely consistent. The dog's name may be only a slight variant of Shippeitaro, such as (, or an alternate reading (Takeberatarō) or altogether different. The dog may be Shippeitarō/Suppe(i)tarō from Ōmi or Tanba or some other province. In several examples, the dog appears as or of temple in Shinano Province.
Shizuoka and Nagano According to one scholar the form tends to occur near Enshū/Tōtomi Province (Shizuoka Prefecture), while is concentrated in Shinano Province (Nagano Prefecture). One etymological hypothesis is that in the Shinano dialect, denoted "wolf cub", which probably gave rise to the name Heibōtarō, and Hayatarō may well be a further corruption of this.
Yanahime-jinja
It has become current-day tradition (for the in Shizuoka Prefecture, formerly Enshū or Tōtōmi Province) that the heroic was dog from Kōzen-ji temple in Shinano Province (Nagano Prefecture).
But in actuality, the name of the dog in the legend attached to the shrine (Yanahime jinja aka Mitsuke Tenjin in Iwata, Shizuoka) varied, and was also known alternately by the similar names or , as already noted (§Nomenclature) In an old document, by dating to Kyowa 3 (1803), the legendary dog of this shrine at Mitsuke-juku was . However, Ichikawa Danjūrō VII in a piece of document entitled (Tenpo 3/1832) wrote that the local tradition called the dog of Tanba Province.
Thus, while Noriko Nagata's study concluded that all the dogs in the Sarugami taiji tales of Shizuoka Prefecture have feature dogs from Shinshū (Shinano Province), this only applies to the folktales gathered in relatively current times,, Table 1, tales collected from Shizuoka Prefecture, #109, 110, 111. , 13: 249, 248, 248. and this generalization fails in the Edo Period literature where the dog is Yazaemon from in Tōtōmi koseki zue, and Danjūrō recorded Shippeitarō as being from Tanba (areas of current-day Kyōto and Hyōgo Prefectures).
Nagata also hypothesizes that "every dog comes from Shinshū(Shinano) in Sarugami taiji tales of Shizukoa, and this can hardly be unconnected with Kōzen-ji ". One can infer that none of the folktales, at least from Shizuoka, explicitly named Kōzen-ji, as can be verified in Kobayashi's study also. Yabe concurs with Nagata more assertive states that in the "present-day tradition", the dog "" comes from Kōzen-ji in Shinano. However, the only attestation he uses to corroborate is not genuine collected folklore in intact form, but rather a retold summary given in a 1984 city folklore research book.
The connection is certainly not unfounded, if documents and tales from Nagano are examined. Already during the Edo Period, one origin tale (engi) regarding the temple, entitled (1794) states that human sacrifices to the Mitsuke Tanjin shrine were ongoing, and the victims were saved, though it was thanks to the holy Buddha medicine, rather than a dog. Another engi of the temple (1793?) also refers to "" requiring villagers be offered inside a coffin.
vaguely suggested that the legend was created at a late period, by which he may have meant the "latter half of kinsei" i.e. 18th century. And Tokiwa Aoshima supposed that the legend was created after the occasions of the Yanahime-jinja shrine sending 600 volumes of sutra to Kōzen-ji in 1793, and the temple holding a kaichō (public display of its sacred objects) in 1794.; apud . Though these hypotheses require further analysis to assay their validity, if the latter were true, then there was always a connection between the shrine legend and Kōzen-ji, though unattested by the Edo period documents found by Yabe.
Kōzen-ji Going back to Nagata's statement, the dog appears to be explicitly mentioned coming from Kōzen-ji temple in several tales among the list compiled by Kobayashi, and unsurprisingly so, since they were all collected (not from Shizuoka) but from the village or the district where the temple lies (Kamiina District, Nagano).Tale collected from , Kamiina District, Nagano. Features against a , Table 1, #97. 's Table 2, #28. , Taisei Another tale from Kamiina District, Nagano. Although the dog is named , the baboons chant . The victims are placed in a .(, Table 1, #99. , Table 2, #30. , Taisei
Location of victims